The Lowe Down

The Sweet Sound of Learning

April 29, 2007

Last Friday as my students were beginning a new project, it occurred to me that the sound of students learning is rarely recorded.  If you would like to hear the sweetest sound in education listen to the podcast to the right, Sound of Student Collaboration.  If you’re expecting to hear a teacher lecturing and students dutifully raising their hands to answer questions, you’ll be disappointed.  What you will hear is four teams, six students on each team as we begin our latest project.  The project is to create an audio book by writing original stories around a theme.  The four themes were, Respect, Honesty, Taking Responsibility for Your Actions, and Taking Ownership of Your Education.  These themes were chosen specifically for their use with younger or future classrooms as teaching tools.  My students will gain from the collaborative thinking and the reinforcement of character issues. 

To get started, the four teams of six students drew for their theme and then began the task of outlining a story.  This is what you will hear on the podcast, the teams collaborating on a story outline, creating characters, etc. as I walked around the room monitoring their discussions and progress.  We are going to use PowerPoint to create our stories, scanning in the student illustrators’ pictures, using our voices and pictures to tell the story and creating audio books.  The excitement was high as their brains were enfused with creativity and sparked by the imaginations of their teammates.  It was a thrilling thing to watch and hear as students were sharing ideas, creating and learning from each other. 

To some educators, this type of learning is messy or considered, “too much work.” To some, letting go of what is safe can be scary.  Usually the educators who have those opinions also have a death-grip on their classroom and find it hard to let go of their control.  These are the same teachers that have trouble letting go of their class when they are assigned a student teacher as well.  Suddenly, the popular saying that begins, “If you love something, let it go…” comes to mind.   When you think about it, people, plants, anything that blooms,  rarely grow or learn when confined in a small box or space.  How frustrating it must be to want to grow or learn only to held back or down by traditional classroom conventions.  Lest, anyone think that you can’t have discipline and allow students to learn in a student-centered room that is faciliated by the teacher, believe me, it can be done.   In my next blog, I will explain how to go about setting up a collaborative classroom atmosphere. 

Entry Filed under: Education. .