Classroom Connection: Six A's

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So, here’s my confession… I’ve been so wrapped up in my dissertation studies on project based learning that I’ve missed several opportunities for postings. But the time I’ve spent reading, interviewing students and teachers at High Tech High San Diego, writing and re-writing has given me lots to share in this blog. So let’s start off this week with another entry about the KIPP Summit Academy,San Lorenzo, CA. This school was the recipient of a gift from Autodesk and among the many projects students have worked on this year is the TECH challenge presented by the San Jose Tech museum. In sending me some of her documentation on their entry, KIPP teacher Sylvia Gonzales included this note: “I have found that there are no limitations on what our students can create in Autodesk. They always seem to go beyond the module or lesson to create their own designs. At times, when they come up with an idea and I cannot show them how to do what they want – they experiment and that is where the real learning takes place”. What struck me was her use of the term “real learning”. What was she getting at- how does this learning different than other types of learning? I’ll be relying to her e-mail with a suggestion that she take a look at a book titled “Real Learning- Real Work" by Adria Steinberg. The author suggests that the use of projects as a classroom pedagogy integrates what she coined as the “Six A’s- Authenticity, Academic Rigor, Applied Learning, Active Exploration, Adult Relationships, and Assessment Practices.

If you go to the 2009 Tech challenge on the Web, you’ll get a sense of how the projects that the KIPP students worked on integrate the six A’s. As noted on the site this challenge involved developing a device that can deliver a payload of up to 6 geological instruments (6 ping pong balls) to the top of the volcano in 3 minutes. The volcano will be 10 ft high and you must launch your device 20 ft away from the volcano. Read about the challenge and see where the A’s come into play. In talking and reading about all of the problems inherent in our current educational system I can’t help but think that paying closer attention to how this configuration of A’s might steer us in the right direction for true educational reform.