How to foster a fun, personalized learning environment (or at least, how I plan to).
It’s kind of a loaded statement I’ve been saying: STUDENTS SHOULD HAVE FUN WHILE LEARNING, ESPECIALLY IN THE UPPER GRADES.
It sounds naive, right? A lot of people are probably saying “have you ever met a teenager? Fun in school isn’t really a thing for them.” First of all, true. Second of all, yes I have met hundreds of teenagers in my life as a high school English teacher of 11 years. I get it! They don’t like school. And frankly, I wouldn’t either if I just had to sit in a classroom, do a bunch of work to get some points in a gradebook, and then was handed a diploma with no plan on what to do after I had been sitting in front of a ChromeBook for 4 years.
High school and junior high can and should be different—not just different, but fun. And not just fun with the social activities, but fun in the learning as well.
Let’s get students back to the heart of education: learning through discovery. Those early childhood people have it right! Why can’t we replicate that for high school and junior high!
Now granted— practically speaking, students in 6-12th grade still need to learn algebra, read non fiction texts, write essays, and do a bunch of “classically boring” school things. But here is my suggestion: let’s find a way to make it fun.
This might mean gamifying an assignment, for those competitive students.
It might mean collaborating with someone else, for those extroverted students.
It might mean creating their own discovery project, for those that want to explore this further.
Making learning fun and mean a multitude of things depending on the type of student and what they find engaging! Think of how powerful that would be for students! Think of how much they will actually LEARN and RETAIN if they find a way to meaningfully engage with content!
And you might be thinking, “Elisa. Hold on. Teachers have 30-35 students in a classroom. There’s no way they can personalize, gamify, collaborate, and create projects for every student in every class period.” Nope. They can’t.
Which leads me to my actual point. Yes, there is a point. Even though this kind of just seems like my ADHD brain rambling, there is a point, I promise.
Traditional high school and junior high classrooms, are not set up for that kind of learning. They just aren’t. I know firsthand! Teachers in public schools are doing EXTRAORDINARY things with no resources every day, and I am truly astonished by how hard they word for your students. But I also know that they can’t do all the things they truly want to do for your students and it’s exhausting.
Thus leading to a micorschool environment.
Noema Learning is a microschool DEDICATED to this idea that students can have fun in a personalized learning environment. They student group will stay small (hence the “micro” in “microschool”) in order to have enough freedom to truly be able to experiment with different modes and engaging ways of learning.
I am really excited to start helping students find what makes them engaged in learning. Finding the things they like and how we can help them learn. I know not every minute of every day will be a barrel of monkeys— we will still need to learn content. But the foundation of Noema Learning will remain the same: 6-12th graders learning in a personalized and fun environment.
