If I'm not teaching them something, are they learning?

One of the reasons that I love Twitter is that it exposes me to views and ideas that challenge and grow my own. This Twitter exchange today has inspired a very deep analysis of what I have observed in the last years of teaching as understanding and developing student agency. Here's my provocation:



We, adults, often miss the complexity we experienced through experiential learning as children and by that I mean that we miss the complexity of the experiences of the learners around us, and at the same time, we ourselves miss not having hands-on experiential learning opportunities. Count how many glazed eyes there are at any given PD session that is still presented in a direct teaching model. The most engaged I've seen adults is when they are learning through doing and creating- things or thoughts- rather than passively absorbing content. I do appreciate direct teaching at times for specific purposes but from what I've experienced over the years it can take a toll on learner agency if not designed carefully.

So off I went thinking and thinking: if I were to build a sandcastle, what would I be learning? How would this seemingly simple activity develop any thinking skills at all?  The context itself is a growth area for me as my team-teaching colleague and I are trialing play-based learning in our hub and I have to learn to spot opportunities to extend children's understanding through play-based activities thus sandcastle building is a pretty good context to analyse.

Don't you slap together some sand and build a sandcastle, or do you? Let's see:

Putting on my curriculum teacher hat I can see the use of shape, volume and capacity when choosing containers that might help me achieve the desired effects in form, and the estimating of distance between the beginning of the tunnel and the other side and the effect that the waves might have on the structure. The elements of agile design come into play: getting rid of unnecessary features that I might imagine but decide to eliminate or not use as I create the design. Oh, the joy when that wave finally fills the moat and the inevitable horror when the tide keeps coming in and washes the sandcastle away.

A few years back I learned that driving is infinitely more complex than learning to write, but almost all of us learn to drive in a fraction of the time it takes us to learn write. Why? Nobody knows yet, but I'd bet it's the fact that we are in a type of continuous learning mode using our whole body while actively learning to drive, whereas writing only occupies specific parts of the brain and not much of the body. I once taught a learner who needed to walk to organise ideas before writing, and I still use a lot of body movement when teaching things like full stops, commas and later paragraphs.

This sandcastles building has made me really want to go and build sandcastles with our hub, because I see that through creating there are many direct and indirect opportunities for learning, and I can use this as such a rich opportunity to extend their thinking later on. But most importantly, because through the act of trial and error of building several sandcastles, they will learn to question, make, analyse, test, persist, test again and evaluate their creations instinctively just like we learn to drive. Design thinking and wonder comes alive through experiential learning. It may be that I stand back -because we teachers don't often do that enough-, observe and let them learn intrinsically before I amalgamate any type of direct teaching design that synergistically compliments their original schema.

But how do I do that without killing the magic and the sheer fun it is to build sandcastles with friends? Does all learning have to involve teaching?