One of our founding school design members, aka board members, Kathy Kamo, found this excellent short video that captures the teaching and learning power underlying the Hawaii Athletics and Arts Academy. You can see it at this link and read the transcript below.
Hi, I'm David Perkins. I'm a professor emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, former director of Project Zero, and still pretty active in trying to figure out the challenges of education and how we can do the job better.
Let me share a paradox with you: the paradox about many schools, not all schools but many. It's often the case that the best learning doesn't happen in the mainstream curriculum; it happens around the edges. It happens in athletics, it happens in the arts.
Why should this be? Well, there's a headline reason for it. Typically, when we're doing something in athletics or doing something in the arts, we're playing the whole game. We're doing the whole thing. We're playing a game of baseball or badminton. We're crafting a work of art. We're engaged in the entire activity.
It's easy to miss this, but in many conventional classrooms, this isn't particularly the case for typical studies.
Say I'm in fifth-grade math or something like that, and I'm learning fractions, arithmetic, and decimals, and so forth and so on. But am I learning to think mathematically? Am I doing anything that could reasonably be called mathematical modeling? Maybe not so much.
And if I ask, "Where does this go? What does this mean? What's it gonna do for me?" Well, once in a while, you get the not-very-great answer, "You'll learn about that in high school" or "You'll learn about that in college."
Now, most teachers wouldn't really say that, but you get the spirit. A lot of what we're asked to learn in conventional educational settings is atomistic. It's bits and pieces, and the idea is that the bits and pieces will come together later. But nobody teaches you how to play baseball just with batting practice, and just with throwing practice, and just with catch, and just with running. You put it together in the whole game.
I've thought about that some, and in fact, one can see a kind of set of principles for how to reshape a lot of teaching and learning toward the whole game. One is, of course, play the whole game. And if you ask, "How can we play a whole fancy game?" the trick is to play it in junior versions.
I mean, people learning to play baseball, they don't normally play a nine-inning game. You reduce it, make it tractable. You play a junior version, so play the whole game.
Make the game worth playing, make it engaging. Bring up the excitement, the energy, the curiosity. Work on the hard parts. It's always important. Baseball has its hard parts, art has its art parts, we all have to zoom in on the hard parts to get them under control. Play out of town. You haven't really learned something unless it's mobile, nimble, unless you can use it in different contexts. Play out of town.
Reveal the hidden game. There's always hidden layers to anything you do, to art, ways of thinking about it, ways of arranging things, strategy in sports, and so forth. In a conventional learning context, a lot of times that strategic, layered side of things never gets to. Learn from the team, and the other teams learn from one another. Make it social, make it interactive. That's important, terribly important. And while we're talking about this, let's add “Learn the game of learning,” because you know learning is a bit of a game too.
How to set one's mind to it, how to motivate oneself, how to organize oneself. Looked at this way, we can kind of rethink what it is to learn anything, math, history, the arts, the literary arts. In the spirit of engaging the whole game of one sort or another, one way or another. Sometimes when I share these ideas and I talk about, say, baseball, people from other countries say, "But we don't play baseball. It doesn't make sense to us." You know, it doesn't matter what the game is. Pick anything you've had a chance to learn in a kind of a holistic way. It could be soccer or what the rest of the world calls football, like anything like that, and it's the same idea.
If we want to get traction on learning, let's help the learners play the whole game.
