I traveled to India in the winter of 2010. In my travels, I took video snippets of the awe-inspiring sights that I saw. When I got home, I decided to edit these snippets into one video. Sounds simple, right? Well, the project grew and grew, and suddenly I was doing an interview and weaving in the sights and sounds and text...
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For a seven minute video I poured in about 23 hours of work.
I loved it.
When I finally published that video on YouTube, I was euphoric and also detached. I had done my best. I had learned lightyears about video editing, communication, and my own self. If only two people watched that video, fine. What mattered was that I had learned.
When learning has a purpose, a function, then learning stops being "work" and starts being "inspiration." Madeline Hunter writes in her book Mastery of Teaching that "The human brain learns almost effortlessly when there is a sensible reason to learn" (73). The key word here is "effortlessly." Effortlessness is this sense of ease, lightness, and excitement. There is distinction here that work that is effortless can also be challenging. But when there is a reason to learn, that challenge becomes exciting.
As a teacher, sparking this inspiration in students to learn effortlessly with excitement is my pot of gold. To do this, students need to feel directed in their learning, that the effort put into their work will be applied to something practical in their lives and others' lives.
Here are some examples of "authentic tasks for authentic learning:"
- Learning how to word process and use Adobe Photoshop to create invitations for an event
- Write a children's book about a subject one is studying (the periodic table, figurative language) to be read aloud to children in kindergarten and first grade
- Learn how to apply fractions in baking for a bake sale fundraiser for a school trip
Authentic learning tasks take time and effort to prepare for. Consider your preparation for these tasks a task of authentic learning for yourself. When you plan for these tasks, let yourself get absorbed, lose track of time, let it be effortless and challenging and inspiring. You are preparing to give students a meaningful experience of learning. Your work has purpose.
(P.S. If you'd like to view my India video, check it out here:
Bhakti this an awesome experience and an inspirational post. In college I went abroad to Israel and Egypt and had a similar experience. Although I did not make a video, the whole time I was reading and exploring the world around me with intense interest and detail. I think that too often in the classroom we are tied to a textbook or worksheet rather than real life experiences and skills. Thinking back I remember only a small portion of the content knowledge I acquired, but I remember the skills I was taught and the characteristics of the teachers that inspired me. Now that I'm on my own there are so many skills I feel like they should have taught us in school from balancing a check book to knowing how to act when you are stopped by the police. As a teacher I hope that I can work some more of these real life skills into my content.
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