Building the perfect nest?

In my years in education, first as a student, then as a preservice teacher and finally in the classroom, I saw a lot of nest builders. People who sought to build the perfect place for kids to grow. Too often the nest was completed before the chicks arrived..

I remember it like yesterday and it wasn’t one classroom but most of the elementary schools I attended from Texas to Tennessee and Kansas to Maryland. (we moved a lot!) I would get to the new school and there on my desk was my name all spelled out in someone else’s handwriting and laminated to last all year. The desk was a finished work and as I looked around these classrooms, I noticed they were nearly always finished before any student arrived. Some things could change..slightly. The bulletin board would hold 25 prescribed macaroni turkeys for Thanksgiving or Easter essays. I even knew my turkey would roost in the upper right side of the 5’ by 8’ board. There were few surprises and fewer choices in terms of the educational environment. It seemed the environment was something to join for kids, not to shape or change or affect. I was a creative kid but the moment for creativity in the classrooms I inhabited seemed to have been taken long before I got there. Cute was everywhere but not “student created” cute. There was laminated, purchased cute in the form of the anthropomorphized parts of speech and punctuation marks, smiling dimly from their appointed places on the walls. The teacher knew where they went from the tape marks from last year. Who were these people who owned the room and why did they open all the presents of my contribution possibilities before I got there? Nest builders are what I’ve come to call them and though they mean well, I believe they must fight the urge to pre-create the entire learning environment for kids.


That was then though and this is now right? With technology, kids can customize their laptops, choose new desktop pictures, add music and re-create the machines to their liking? They can move into the machine and customize it? Perhaps they have some choices in some places but what I often see is a cart full of beautifully cloned and then locked down machines as protected as the laminated name tag on my former desk. With a world that is telling us that creativity and problem solving and personal expression are emerging talents that are valued, are we allowing kids to help build the nest? When I first read Eric Jensen’s Brain Based Learning as a teacher, I was struck by his idea that learners need some element of control of their education environment to be better engaged in the learning. It is the stake we have in the process, the commitment, our stroke on the canvas.


What I would challenge teachers to do as they take apart their rooms for summer cleaning, is to look for all of the props that go up on the wall and around the room before the learners arrive and that remain a part of the landscape for the entire year. I know that we may need some tools for kids to see and learn or memorize but couldn’t we start with the laminated stuff and replace it with kid made stuff as the year progresses? Could these old tools be replaced with blogs and wikis and other more engaging means of producing and showcasing learning?


When I think of all of the sterile computer labs that some schools still use to corral the technology in a controlled environment, I flash back to the classrooms of the past. Yes the computers can do amazing things...if we let them. What are we having kids build, create and show off? Are we building personal choice into assignments? I hope we’re headed in these directions and I hope that kids are empowered to be creative by technology and that is isn’t totally nailed down before and after they touch it.


In my first ten years in the classroom, I was a nest builder. I set the stage and the kids acted upon it according to my script. In my last two years in the classroom after reading Jensen’s book and others on brain-based learning, I released a lot of control to my students. I turned to PBL in every lesson and tried to mirror much of the world and it’s many variables in my challenges to kids. Control over the environment was theirs, control over the way they attacked the learning was theirs and true engagement was theirs. My first bad administrative evaluation was to come that first year I started doing things differently but I knew I had things right. As I work with schools to design PBL environments and curriculum, I am steadfast in my belief that kids need much more personal choice in their education.


When kids get to school for the first time, they often believe in the impossible, they believe that a fish can have wheels and they have furtive imaginations that are ready to fly. I think that if we nurture these young imaginations and let them know that their contribution is an important part of the process and a crucial skill to maintain, they will go on to be masters of their own learning and artists at finding creative ways to express what they know.