That Has To Be Enough

I don't make lesson plans, at least not in the traditional sense. I've certainly reflected upon what the kids were doing and talking about yesterday, then made my best guess about where they might want to take it today. Based on these reflections, I might make sure certain materials are available, but even after all these years I still get it wrong more often than not and spend much of my day running back and forth to the storage closet, which is my real lesson planning. That's because there is no way to predict play.

Play makes its own "plan," one that emerges as motivated learners come together to create, invent, and explore. In fact, it's that unpredictability, at least in part, that makes a play-based curriculum such a powerful and motivating way for children to learn. Predictability is one of the the hallmarks of rote and no one is motivated by that. No one is motivated by being told what to learn and by when, which are the hallmarks of a typical lesson plan. No, humans are at their intellectual best when they have the time and space to both individually and collectively pursue their own interests within the context of a community, and it's impossible to know beforehand what discoveries they will make, no matter how much planning the adults have done.

Indeed, even after the fact, even as I take a moment at the end of the day to ponder what we have done together, I've come to recognize that I still have no idea what the kids have learned on any given day. I can tell you what I thought they might learn going in, I can describe their behavior and make a record of their words, I can speculate about what they might now know or not know, I can even directly ask them, "What did you learn?" but at the end of the day, the only ones who can ever know what they have learned are the kids themselves, and more often than not it's so fresh and exciting and still "in process" that they simply aren't capable of put it into words in a way that we can understand.

This is why, in the same way I don't see value in making a lesson plan, I also don't see the point of tests: they don't reveal what a child has learned, but rather what they are able to regurgitate in the form demanded by that particular test. And besides, most of what is learned from any given experience is extracurricular and falls beyond the scope of any test.

Sadly, lesson plans and tests form the backbone of what most teachers do. They are expected to make their plans, complete with learning "goals." They then execute their plan, which may or may not engage the children. If children begin to pursue their own interests, to follow their own light, they must be coaxed or scolded or otherwise guided back to the plan because later, as everyone knows, the children will be tested on a narrow, narrow range of trivia, rather than on the big picture of what they are actually learning. What incredible hubris to think that lesson plans or tests or complicated "frameworks" can allow us to know the unknowable.

The truth is that no one can ever know what another person has learned and no amount of planning or testing or evaluating will change that. In fact, most of us don't even know what we've really learned until much, much later in life, when we look back, perhaps from our therapist's sofa, and realize, "A-ha!"

No, I don't pretend to know what the children I teach are learning on any given day, nor is it any of my business. That I know the children are learning is enough for me, and I know they're learning because they are playing as members of a community where we strive to provide time and space enough for them to ask and answer their own questions. We don't need lesson plans or tests because the children I teach cross our doorstep each morning with their own personally meaningful plans and they engage the world by conducting their own personally meaningful tests. I will never know what they are learning, but I can see them striving, persevering, and experimenting; I can see them figuring out the other people and working with them toward common goals; I can see they are motivated every day because there is nothing rote or compulsory about it. That has to be enough for all of us.

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