Hands on ≠ Minds on

by Grant Wiggins
on November 17, 2014

from today’s Smartbrief:

Student members of the Young Americans for Freedom at a school in Rome, Ga., marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany with a re-enactment at their school. They knocked down a graffiti-covered, 12-foot-long wall made from wood for the dramatization. “It is great to see them internalizing the lessons of history and exhibiting the power of freedom,” said Brad Poston, history department chair.

By that argument, burning down the school would be a rich learning activity in support of “internalizing the lessons of history” of the urban riots of the 60s.
When, oh when, will teachers truly understand the difference between fun activity and experiential well-designed learning?

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15 Responses

  1. Yes, as a history teacher for thirty years, it’s scary what sometimes teach students through hands on activities. I know that classroom of students laying next to each other on the floor now have a deeper understanding of the middle passage.
    We need to provide students with the ability to “try” and comprehend the past. It is a kin to traveling in a foreign land and the skills to think historically are hard to cultivate.

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    • damn close to one, frankly. What kid would not like to destroy something????
      Next time he might make it more realistic by having part 1 where he shoots at them trying to escape over the wall….

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  3. I think it would be fun if we thought of solutions to the problem then. It seems like they thought of a great anticipatory set. What would you do next? I know what I would do…

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  4. Thank you so much for pointing this out! When saw this on my NCSS smartbrief this morning I was very disappointed. History-social studies seems to be desperately grasping for what to have kids DO when what they really need to do is focus on disciplinary literacy and have kids DO history. Not LISTEN to a lecture or a story teller on history,and not REENACT miscellaneous events.

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  5. I LOVE this language. I think its just as important to note that, just as hands-on doesn’t guarantee minds-on, minds-on isn’t always complex and loud.
    Comes down to planning from the student’s desk, yes? What asks them to commit brain engergy rather than complying to the motions and step by step directions?
    Also, my collegue has some thoughts on just this. We would love your thoughts:
    http://www.workonthework.org/wtowblog/2014/7/20/language-re-boot-edition-1

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    • I like what you said about both phrases. I think the phrase teacher-friendly bugs me more than hands-on for just the reasons you cite. Like you, I have seen too often that large numbers of teachers and admins. would rather just be told what to do then be compelled to think things through carefully and reach an informed and ‘owned’ consensus on key decisions (e.g. the meaning of key common core standards, what homework policy should be, etc.). I get that people are busy but it’s a worrisome common occurrence.

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  6. I think the point was missed about the fall of the Berlin Wall. It wasn’t the actual wall being torn down that was important, it was more about the end of an era. Destroying a fake wall misses the whole point. The opening of East Germany, the reunification, and end of the iron curtain way of thinking (or did it really end) should really have played a bigger part of the project.
    It’s hard to give someone negative feedback when they are obviously trying to make learning more interesting. I wonder if this is a case where some gentle feedback would be more appropriate. While I think the project misses the point, at least it’s not read the text, answer questions, and take the test. However, I would agree that the wall activity could easily go places that could get out of hand.
    Maybe people should give feedback as to how to get students doing a more hands-on type of project involving the Wall. Maybe something like a “What if the wall didn’t fall?” scenario and have the students analyze it – maybe write a play, book, newscast, or something else. Maybe something about what life was like with the wall and how people felt…? I could also imagine some sort of compare-contrast scenario between the Berlin Wall and the Mason Dixon Line, the Ghettos, Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China, castle walls, and so on.

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  8. I once had the bright idea to inspire my math students to be great mathematicians by showing the film, “Stand and Deliver.” I was hugely disappointed that nobody the next day wanted to be in transfer from my Intermediate Algebra class to AP Calculus.
    I noticed though that the learning became deeper and more personal when I stopped asking what the answer was and started asking how they got it. I also started letting the discussion be led by the students instead of me.
    Sometimes it is the simple things that can make a difference instead of trying to find a device to make the learning occur.

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  9. Reblogged this on Polytropy and commented:
    I think this “reenactment” of the demolition of the Berlin Wall is just what Collingwood said (in An Autobiography) was not doing history:

    I expressed this new
    conception of history in the phrase: `all history is the history
    of thought.’ You are thinking historically, I meant, when you say
    about anything, `I see what the person who made this (wrote this,
    used this, designed this, \&c.)\ was thinking.’ Until you can say
    that, you may be trying to think historically, but you are not
    succeeding. And there is nothing except thought that can be the
    object of historical knowledge. Political history is the history of
    political thought: not `political theory’, but the thought which
    occupies the mind of a man engaged in political work: the formation
    of a policy, the planning of means to execute it, the attempt to
    carry it into effect, the discovery that others are hostile to it,
    the devising of ways to overcome their hostility, and so forth\dots
    Military history, again, is not a description of weary marches in
    heat or cold, or the thrills and chills of battle or the long agony
    of wounded men. It is a description of plans and counter-plans: of
    thinking about strategy and thinking about tactics, and in the last
    resort of what men in the ranks thought about the battle.
    On what conditions was it possible to know the history of a
    thought? First, the thought must be expressed: either in what we
    call language, or in one of the many other forms of expressive
    activity\dots Secondly, the historian must be able to think over
    again for himself the thought whose expression he is trying to
    interpret\dots If some one, hereinafter called the mathematician,
    has written that twice two is four, and if some one else,
    hereinafter called the historian, wants to know what he was
    thinking when he made those marks on paper, the historian will
    never be able to answer this question unless he is mathematician
    enough to think exactly what the mathematician thought, and
    expressed by writing that twice two are four. When he interprets
    the marks on paper, and says, `by these marks the mathematician
    meant that twice two are four’, he is thinking simultaneously:
    (a) that twice two are four, (b) that the mathematician thought
    this, too; and (c) that he expressed this thought by making these
    marks on paper\dots
    This gave me a second proposition: `historical knowledge is the
    re-enactment in the historian’s mind of the thought whose history
    he is studying.’

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  10. In Tennessee this would be considered fantastic. It would be a great way to get a good score on the TEAM (Tennessee Educator Acceleration Model) evaluation rubric. Which may be an indicator of how effective it is.

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  11. You need to look on the bright side of bad design… The history teacher on my team had a project that failed to teach history but scored in science. She put kids in groups and gave them the task of reconstructing civil war battlefields to illustrate the impact of topography on tactics. Here is where things got fun. The students were given a kiddy pool filled with mud and told to sculpt a model of an assigned battlefield.
    During the presentation students were assigned to review the various battlefields and note how topography influenced the outcome of the battle. The mounds of mud looked pretty much the same from one battle to the next, so the students took to throwing mud balls at each other. During the ensuing mud fight I noticed the kids learned a lot about projectile physics. The evidence of student growth was clear as all the students got covered with mud. It turns out the activity was a rather effective lesson in battlefield artillery, but missed the learning objective by a mile.

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