What I learned from Baby George

What does Mike Wesch believe about how students learn? 

How does he act on those beliefs?

Mike Wesch believes that our traditional classrooms (at the college level) were the antithesis of learning and how learning takes place.  He says that we all must somehow agree with this thought as we call everything outside of the classroom the “real world”.  He realized that he needed to look critically at how he was teaching and decide what wasn’t working in order to focus on what he believed teaching and learning should be.  Learning isn’t an act of dumping information into empty vats.  It’s not about thinking about how to “get by”.  It’s not what he called the “vaccination theory” where once you took a class you never had to do it again.  

Wesch believes that learning is a fundamental trait that we all have.  We, as infants and toddlers, begin learning because we are connected to those that love us and we can feel courageous.  We don’t think about failure as a bad thing but rather something fun.  That we will learn something along with the failure.  This reminds me of the acronym for FAIL.

My school started to use this acronym in our teaching to help build the understanding of what learning is.  As a kindergarten teacher it is my responsibility to provide that safe space for learning, stumbling along the way, and embracing the stumbles.  What did we learn when we didn’t do something the way we thought it was supposed to go?  I show my students the Sesame clip with Janelle Monae about The Power of Yet.  We may learn some things quickly but other things take a longer time.  Like Baby George and learning to climb down steps.  George laughed every time he fell.  It was like a game to him.  When do we stop laughing at our falls?  Why does that happen?  How did we learn to believe this?

    I remember learning, years ago, from one of my first grade student’s parents.  She was (and still is) a scientist and professor at URI and came in to do a fun activity/lesson with her son’s class.  Watching her interact and teach my students was a wonderful opportunity. But what stuck with my most, to this day, is when she said that scientists love when they are wrong.  That is when the learning happens.  If they always proved their hypothesis to be correct, then they didn’t actually learn anything new.  I have told this story every year, probably many times within a year.  

Wesch believes that learning comes from the questions you take out of a class.  These questions that we have open the opportunities and connections to new learning.  His quote of “Asking questions, making connections, and taking chances took us down from the trees and took us to the moon” is thought provoking.  It was many years, many questions, many people, but we look at how far we have come!    Wesch believes that we are to live inside the learning. It’s not the grade or the final project.  We are the project.  

Wesch got to this belief system by connecting with his students, current and past.  He leaned into the uncomfortable situations, the disengaged student.  He asked them to lunch.  He wanted to learn about the students and what they brought with them to his class.  What are we all dealing with in the “real world”? Instead of being irritated that the student was falling asleep in his class, he asked why it was happening.  By interviewing and making connections with his students, he modeled and lived his belief system of “asking questions, making connections, and taking chances.”  He was a researcher using something similar to the Engineering Design Process. Isn’t that the best example of an educator?  One who lives and models his belief system.