Design Experiences, Not Worksheets

A worksheet isn't inherently evil. I've handed out my fair share.

The problem is when the worksheet becomes the experience…in some cases the whole experience. 

When we reduce learning to packets, worksheets, or endless slide decks, we aren't simply choosing a less engaging activity, we're shrinking the range of experiences available to young people.

We're saying that learning lives on paper instead of in conversation, or in doing, or in becoming.

When I sit down to plan a workshop, a lesson, a keynote or even a party there is one question I always ask first: What experience do I want my (participants/students/attendees/guests) to have?

In the context of school, I don’t start with the standards (as slanderous as this might sound) or what chapter I need to cover or what activity will keep my students engaged. I start with “What do I want my students to become in this moment of learning?” 

I truly believe if we design powerful experiences for students, the learning always follows.

One of the biggest shifts in my own teaching happened when I stopped asking,

"What am I going to teach tomorrow?"

and started asking,

"What will my students experience tomorrow?"

The first question centers content. The second centers people.

When you design for experience, entirely different questions emerge.

What will students wonder?

Who will they talk to?

What decisions will they make?

What problem will they wrestle with?

What will surprise them?

Where will they laugh?

Where will they feel proud?

When will they realize they're capable of something they didn't know they could do?

Those are design questions.

The irony is that designing experiences is often more rigorous than designing assignments.

It's easier to create twenty comprehension questions than it is to create a challenge worth thinking about.

It's easier to tell students the answer than to design the conditions where they discover it on their own.

Experiences ask more of us. But they also ask more of the students.

They ask students to think instead of repeat.

To create instead of consume.

To collaborate instead of comply.

To wrestle with ambiguity instead of searching for the single correct answer.

This is where deep learning lives.

The classrooms that changed my life, they weren't perfect, but they invited me into something larger than myself. They asked me to wrestle with ideas worth wrestling with and trusted me with meaningful work before I even thought I was ready.

Whenever I work with schools, I often hear educators say they want students to be more engaged.

I don't think engagement is actually the goal. 

Meaning is.

When learning feels meaningful, engagement tends to follow.

Young people are naturally curious. They're wired to solve problems, tell stories, ask impossible questions, make things, test ideas, and connect with one another.

Students will not remember your worksheets!!! They remember experiences.

They remember the day they argued a Supreme Court case in class and accidentally changed their own mind.

They remember interviewing elders in their community and realizing history lived around their dinner table.

They remember building something that failed spectacularly...and then figuring out why.

They remember presenting work to an audience that wasn't just their teacher.

They remember laughing so hard during a lesson that they forgot they were "doing school."

They remember struggling, creating, arguing, laughing, crying (Yes, I’ve had students and parents cry over the work they’ve done in my classrooms) revising, failing, trying again, and discovering they were capable of more than they imagined.

Our job isn't to manufacture engagement, it's to stop designing it out of the learning process.

Experiential learning is the kind of learning that lasts and is the only kind of learning I want to be a part of. 

Check out the Creative Commons for real examples of what designing for student experience looks like.