I spent the last four days at Constructing Modern Knowledge run by Gary Stager in Manchester, NH. It was a truly unique and powerful learning environment. As the photo to the left shows, I got to meet one of my educational heroes, Deborah Meier. (And if you aren’t yet reading Bridging Differences, the blog that is really more of an old-fashioned series of letters between Deborah and Diane Ravitch, then leave this blog right now and go read. Now.) If all CMK was was a chance to listen to, talk to, break bread with people like Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Marvin Minsky and James Loewen, then it would have been an amazing four days. But that really only scratches the surface of the conference.

The whole idea of the conference is that Gary and his team have created a truly luxurious learning environment. I don’t mean that in the physical sense. We were in a hotel conference room for much of the time, but what it did have was time, resources and permission to play and learn. We were encouraged to talk to one another. We were encouraged to read. We were encouraged to listen. And we were encouraged to build. As Gary put it, we didn’t have a schedule, we had appointments.

As the CMK Flickr group suggests, people created movies, they build robots that could draw, they made claymation videos, they learned Scratch. And often times, people set goals, reached them, reset them, and tried again. But people engaged in learning without worrying about what standards they were reaching. Can we do that all the time in our classrooms, probably not, but it felt good to remind ourselves what an unfettered learning environment felt like. To a person, I believe, we all wanted to ensure that our schools and our classrooms had that feeling.

For me, I think I had a number of takeaways. One early one was something that Deborah Meier said at lunch. (Yes, I got to have lunch with Deborah Meier.) We were talking about the goals of the conference, and I remarked that I thought it was funny that at a constructivist, progressive-ed conference, my favorite parts up until that point were the lectures. Deborah said, "Who said lectures can’t be part of a progressive education? Some people are worth listening to. Reading is still good education, too. You are constructing knowledge there too." Now, I know that intellectually, but I felt like I had to apologize for enjoying listening more than doing. There are many ways to learn, and lecture can — and probably should — be a part of a good progressive teacher’s toolkit. The trick is knowing when, what, how long and how you will help students to construct meaning from it.

Another take away was perhaps different than other people’s. At SLA, I see teachers and students work together to create some of the most incredible projects I’ve ever seen. I see SLA students tackle problems that I think most adults would struggle with. But I worry sometimes that we (the adults) underestimate how complex the work we give can be. Complexity is different than – but can be related to – hard and time-consuming. Complexity can be the where kids fall into the "gumption trap" (Thank you, Robert Pirsig.) I experienced it this week. Our group’s idea was to build a bi-pedal robot… and then we quickly evolved that to building a quadraped when we realized we probably weren’t going to solve the balance problem in the time we had. We made early designs, and to be honest, we struggled. And I hit my frustrating point… I didn’t know why I was doing this… I had other work I could be doing… why was I on the floor playing with Legos anyway… in short, I was being a lousy student. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to do the project, but rather because the problems in front of us seemed too frustratingly complex. Sure, it was fun to play around on the floor, but other groups were getting much further than we were, and what was the point, anyway….

Feeling that frustration was very good for me, because it served to remind me of one of the pitfalls of problem-based / project-based learning for kids. When there isn’t a recipe / obvious sequence of events, the roadblocks can feel insurmountable. I worry sometimes that kids get stuck on projects, not because they don’t want to do them, but because they reach stumbling blocks that they cannot solve. It is why teaching "gumption" (to again quote Pirsig,) and teaching process, and teaching problem solving is so important. It is also why, as teachers, patience and understanding and flexibility are necessary traits.

The next, perhaps related takeaway, is the utter need for us to honor / assess / grade process. Not every project gets to the finish line, and teachers (including me when I was in the classroom) can make the mistake of not giving a lot of credit for the unfinished work. My group was very close to not having a walking robot as presentation time crept near. If Brian hadn’t made the last minute adjustments, we would have gone up there with much. Would that have discounted the incredible learning we had done on design, engineering, programming PicoCrickets, collaboration, experimentation, etc? Figuring out how we make sure that we honor the journey of learning in our assessments is essential, I think. And when we play on the 100 point scale that is really a 40 point scale where 59% is the same as a zero, we make it very difficult to do so.

In the end, we did get our robot walking… and we got it to stop and start by responding to noise. More importantly, we took a project through from "Hey, I wonder if we can…" to a neat little robot. We succeeded because we never were so wed to a design that we stopped looking for the best way to get it to work. We succeeded because we actually worked together and had a lot of fun. We succeeded because Brian was smart enough to go talk to other people making robots and learn how they were using gears much more effectively than we were. We succeeded because Jen refused to quit on Wednesday until she figured out why the program wasn’t working. We might have even succeeded because I provided comic relief when necessary. But we also succeeded because we were in an environment where we were encouraged to spend the time to solve the problem. We had the permission, freedom, time and resources to create something.

This week, I was reminded of how powerful — and how frustrating — problem-solving and building can be. I also was reminded that we can work with our hands, we can listen and engage our minds in the world of ideas, and we can speak from our hearts. A great classroom should allow us to do all those things, with teachers who recognize the highs and lows that can come with all the different ways we learn.

Thanks, Gary, for a great week.

(And here’s a quick video where you can see the of the evolution of the robot. Larger versions of the videos of the robot are on my flickr set of the conference…. including me singing "Sweet Georgia Brown.")