Why I Won't Build Without Students

Yesterday while leaving a planning session for my SXSW EDU workshop I ran into two of my former students and their dad. It was a great time catching up with them. We laughed and joked and talked about what was next. The older of the two girls was headed to Stanford and is really crushing it in every way. She's been able to carve out this little life she seems to love. Her younger sister is still in high school but doing the same while not having to follow in the footsteps of her older sibling. While catching up with them I found myself using this really repetitive phrase, "you guys taught me that."

See at this school where we all learned together, partnership between adult and student was necessary. There wasn't one teacher, no. There were many teachers. Sometimes it was me, sometimes it was them.

We all recalled this time where I'd created this workshop that didn't go as planned. This student came up to me afterwards and said "Mike, that just wasn't good enough was it?"

In that moment, the designer and builder I am today was born. Because it was our culture at this school there was no ignoring her feedback. There was no brushing it off or sweeping it under the rug. We had to work this out together. And we did. That day she taught me how to authentically partner with students to build learning experiences.

?? By 2030

At Teach for America we have this very ambitious goal that we're all driving towards and will reach by 2030. We're trying to double the number of students that are on a path towards economic mobility. Here's what's beautiful about this: 1) there are many ways to do this and we're trying a few of them at once and 2) this certainly ain't yo mama's TFA anymore. Part of the reason is because we, The Reinvention Lab exist. We get to tap into this goal with a focus on reinvention. We get to build a new bridge to this destination while our colleagues do so much good work to make sure that the current bridge is still standing and people can safely make the transition to the one we're building.

One such part of this "new bridge" we're working on we're calling The Workshop.

???The Details

The Workshop is a series of micro life skills challenges created to help high school students gain valuable skills and mindsets that will assist them in their transition after high school. The challenges should can take as little as 15 minutes to complete and as long as a full year to complete. The output from the challenges should have the potential to inspire others to try it (aka go viral) and should provide an invisible learning experience meaning that they should not feel like school at all.

Remember that story we opened with? Here's where that comes in.

We've hired 3 high school students to playtest challenges as we built them. Why? Other than this being a deeply held value of the Reinvention Lab, we know that nothing we build will be as cool or as valuable to young people without their hands in the dirt building with us. Aaron, Abigail and Tolu formed a brutally honest, ultra helpful, passionate playtesting group for our first set of micro challenges.

Here's what they're teaching us about this type of learning design.

?Create Friction-free learning out of school

I can’t help but shake the feeling that no one thinks this will work. Educators typically don’t support learning opportunities that are weird and certainly no ones that happen out of school. They’re not crazy or irrational for this either.

Out of school learning is a beast.

When you create a learning experience that happens during school hours or even in the summer at a school you have some protection. Everyone can put on their school hats (whether they realize it or not) and can participate in a certain song and dance we do called a school community. There are clear expectations on both sides of the learning. The person offering the learning knows what to expect and typically doesn’t have to compete for time. The person receiving the learning has typically left most of the things they’d rather do more than learn at home or even in the car.

But when you come for out of school time, you immediately put yourself at a disadvantage. You’re now competing with Fortnite, Netflix, Youtube, Twitch, TikTok, and time with friends. You’ve now entered the wild west. This isn’t easy to overcome.

Fortunately our playtesters told us how to overcome this without us having to explicitly ask.

“This challenge took too long to payoff.”

“I think a lot of students are going to give up on this one unless you ask for less examples that take less time.”

”The time commitment to get this one challenge done is just too much. I don’t see a lot of students finishing this if it’s the first card they pull.”

The lesson was clear for us. When you decide to encroach on time outside of school to engage students in learning experiences, you must create a frictionless experience. This isn’t slight of hand or a trick. They know the deal. They see that this is some sort of learning game or experience. But what was fascinating is how quickly they made the determination as to whether they’d engage or not based on the amount of friction they were met with to get to the end. In this case, the friction was time.

This really isn’t new or novel. In any video game you play level four is progressively more difficult than level one. A game designer would never meet a player with level twelve difficulty or level twelve time commitment in level 1 of the game. Level 1 is normally short enough and easy enough to hook you into playing through pain or more friction later on. This is what our playtesters were telling us here. It’s almost as if they were saying “Too soon for this level of time commitment.” or “Too much friction at this level in the game.”

What was even more amazing is that they gave us a real gem to help students push past friction. And that is joy.

?Learning should spark joy

Over the years I’ve worked in education I’ve learned that there is something powerful about the first time you put something in front of students for feedback. They typically rip it to shreds when they truly feel comfortable with you. And when I say they rip it to shreds I mean it. They don’t hold back. This is always a beautiful moment because you can be sure that when you get back to that drawing board, you’ll be focused in all the right ways to deliver something better and aligned to what students really want.

The first feedback session we had with our fearless playtesters was this moment. There was a set of challenges that we’d come up with that I, personally, thought was going to be a hit. It was like a true crime murder mystery. I’d imagined the young people all running with their own version of this story, making it their own and having a blast. That is not what happened.

“Yeah I’m not going to lie this one felt like school.”

“I skipped this one because it had ‘school project’ written all over it”

“I just wasn’t that interested in this whole set. I found myself rolling my eyes at it.”

Did I mention they don’t pull punches? I meant that. They threw haymakers at this one. But I’m so glad they did because as they continued to metaphorically rear back their fists and swing over and over at this set, a diamond fell out of their clinched fists. One that I snatched up and held tight.

“This one just didn’t spark joy for me like the others did. When I was doing the other challenges I felt a since of real joy because I was learning about myself but this set felt really different. There wasn’t joy in it for me.”

There it was. The big learning we, as a team of adult designers learned was so poignant and powerful.

1) These projects cannot feel like school as much as we can help it but more importantly

2) they must spark joy for the learner.

This set us up on a completely different trajectory to build better, joy-filled challenges.

??We march on

We’ll keep engaging, testing and designing with these bright young folks. We build, they try, they give feedback, we tweak, rinse and repeat until we get the best possible life skills challenges. When we’re done we hope that students everywhere have access to valuable experiences that will help them design a life they love living.

We’ll update you in a month after we’ve had more time, designs and learnings. Thanks to Aaron, Tolu and Abigail for all the work you’re putting into this for students everywhere.

Peace out ???