Having Fun... A Prerequisite for Learning?

There is no doubt in my mind that learning should be fun*.  I get this overwhelming sense of excitement and a general giddiness when I'm learning something new.  Now, since school is a place of learning, it should be one of the most fun places on the planet, right?  Think about your own school.  Is it a fun place to be?  

This is just a thought that has been rattling around in my head but: is fun a pre-requisite for learning? 

Fun is a simple word and might be easily misconstrued.  I think for me it is synonymous with exciting, joyful, satisfaction and delight. Perhaps most of all, I equate fun with happiness.  I'm worried that school is no longer a fun place to be, or at least it's not as fun as it could be (for both teachers and students).  I read recently in the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher that only 44 percent of teachers surveyed reported being very satisfied with their jobs, compared with 59 percent in 2009.  If teachers are not satisfied with their jobs, it must be harder to create a fun environment, right?  

But, does learning need to be fun to be effective? I really think so.  Naturally, there is more to creating a meaningful learning environment than simply making it fun, but I contend that it is a critical ingredient.  I haven't done any research on this but looking back at my own experiences as a student the school activities I actually remember were all fun: Mrs. Okada's real-world economic activities, Mr. O'Leary's crazy physics experiment, and Mr. Snow's lively class simulations (and even more lively class discussions). I also remember that all of us were having fun... students AND teachers. Without a doubt I believe that fun learning activities are more memorable. Think back to your best learning experiences, did they contain an element of fun? I bet many of them did. 

So, what makes for a fun classroom environment? I brainstormed a few things.

1. Let go of control - Nobody likes a control freak. Involve your students in decisions, let them be in charge sometimes. 
2. Create a risk taking environment - Worrying about failure is stressful (i.e no fun).  Make sure students know that it's ok to make mistakes... as long as they learn from them.
3. Use technology - Technology can unleash creativity... being creative is fun.
4. Be a learner yourself - It provides great perspective and can be invigorating and motivating.  With the Internet you can learn just about anything, take advantage of it.
5. Reflect a lot - How can you improve if you don't?
6. Assess differently - You don't always have to give the kids a quiz or a test to see if they know something.
7. Create some project-based learning activities - Hands-on, minds-on is fun.  Let the kids build & destroy... and everything in between.
8. Make it relevant - Learning something without knowing why it is important is not fun.  
9. Be Creative - Ample opportunities to be creative is fun for students and for you. Create activities that allow students to be creative.  Worksheets, by their very nature, are generally not fun. Always remember that the standards inform what we need to teach but don't dictate your instructional design.
10. Be Empathetic - Put yourself in the shoes of your students... think "if I was a student in my classroom would this be fun?" Alternatively, "would I want to be a student in my class?"
11. Laugh a lot - Fun and laughter go together.  Your classroom should be filled with laughter... yours and theirs.

Well, that's all I've got.  What do you think?

* I don't mean to imply that learning is not serious business.  The stakes are very high but I think it is possible to maintain the importance of what we do and still have fun.  The fun I experience when learning is different that the fun I have at a party or a roller coaster... but it is no less meaningful... or important.

FV #31 - Failure and Learning

Today's visual is from Indexed.  Indexed is a blog by Jessica Hagy where she posts an visual every weekday.  Her visuals are always on index cards.  Here is hers for today:

I'm sure every educator will recognize the importance of failure as a learning aid.  I won't get all political about the whole "failure is not an option" thing.  

Related to the topic of failure, I was reading a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter over on the Letters of Note blog just the other day where Mr. Fitzgerald provided this advice to his (then 11-year old) daughter:

Don't worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault

I like that too.

Two things here for teachers:

1. I've always thought that students should try to create their own "Indexed" visuals related to their studies... could be a great assessment device
2. The Letters of Note blog can be a wealth of resources for Language Arts and Social Studies teachers. 

A Skill set That Never Expires

You've got to hand it to Seth Godin, he often makes you think.  A few days ago he had a post titled "The Map Has Been Replaced By The Compass" where he makes the case that the compass is more important than the map because the usefulness of the compass never changes.

The map keeps getting redrawn, because it's cheaper than ever to go offroad, to develop and innovate and remake what we thought was going to be next. Technology keeps changing the routes we take to get our projects from here to there. It doesn't pay to memorize the route, because it's going to change soon.

The compass, on the other hand, is more important then ever. If you don't know which direction you're going, how will you know when you're off course?

And yet...

And yet we spend most of our time learning (or teaching) the map, yesterday's map, while we're anxious and afraid to spend any time at all calibrating our compass.

To me what he is really talking about is uncertainty.  In an uncertain world, with an uncertain future, you better make sure you are prepared with the right tools and skill set for whatever the future has in store for you.  As educators, our job is to prepare students for success in this uncertain world.

How do we prepare students for a future that we can't predict even a couple of years out? How do we prepare students for jobs that don't yet exist? The answer is simple... we provide them with a skill set that will never expire; we provide them with a compass. What skills are these? Well, the Workplace Readiness Skills for the Commonwealth are a very good starting point. These 21 skills (divided into three broad categories) include such timeless skills as:

• Integrity
• Teamwork
• Creativity and Resourcefulness
• Speaking and listening
• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
• Lifelong Learning
• Time, Task and Resource Management
• Customer Service
• Internet Use and Security

I think the list is really great. I don't mean to imply that having an academic skill set is not important, because it is.  I just think that we emphasize academic skills to the detriment of the applied skills.  We need to do both and we need to do so in a balanced manner.  I hope that as some of the innovation-stifling aspects of NCLB (where declarative knowledge is king) are finally coming to an end that teachers can get back to creating environments where students will be able to acquire some of these applied skills.