Project Based Learning and Gamification are not the future...

Put down your pitchforks and torches. I'll explain after the picture, but I mean it. Neither of these two "active learning" strategies are the future.

Here's a little secret. We aren't actually very good at teaching - or at least we haven't been historically. As mentioned in previous blogs, modern public education has largely been an exercise in producing non-confrontational worker bees. For that purpose it has been relatively successful, but we are in Huxley's Brave New World now and we must confront it with all of the tools at our disposal. Remember, gone are the days of the teacher as the knowledge keeper, Google has taken over that role for us. Instead, it is time to raise up a generation of critical thinkers. How exactly do we do that? Let's see if brain science can give us any answers.

Alright, fine, I'm not a Psychologist, but I do like to play one after a few drinks on the weekend with my friends and their relationship problems. I will, however, use my limited knowledge of what I do know to suggest that the way we have the modern classroom set-up is counter intuitive in almost every possible way. Humans have almost always learned through experimentation and failure, not with some omnipotent power hovering over them whispering that the beautiful little hemlock flower doesn't taste so sweet. Our classrooms, are and have been set-up for years with the expectation that students memorize concepts, ideas, and content as if they were little tablets to be etched into. Spoiler alert - they are not. action, failure, and discovery are the keys to human learning and these three occur far too infrequently in the educational world. Some have put forward an alternative solution - active learning strategies.

These "active learning strategies" are of course just another way of saying "things smart people have been doing for years". But it is a lot harder to pitch your Professional Development seminar with that long of a title. Gamification (which you can find an example of here) is a way of adding in "game like elements" to the classroom to spur student motivation and experimentation in the classroom. This is a beautiful thing, but teachers have been doing it for years. I remember spending bags of rice (bought with good grades) for soldiers to use in a massive Risk game for dominance of Japan and the class way back in 5th grade. I won't claim to be ancient, but I am certainly old enough to know - this isn't the norm. But why isn't it? All gamification really is a recreation of what young humans have been doing for thousands of years - competition, cooperation, and experimentation to see who was "the best". This is nothing new.

In summary, what are these "active learning strategies" really? They are simply properly implemented techniques to recreate natural learning environments. Don't take this as me disparaging them (I know, that is what I usually do in these blogs), quite the contrary. I think this return to more "natural" learning is a good thing and quite necessary. I wish more teachers were doing it, I just wish we could recognize that these ideas aren't simply the future, they are our past and present as well.