In this TEDx Talk, Diana Laufenberg shares 3 surprising things she has learned about teaching — including a key insight about learning from failures.
Diana Laufenberg – TEDx Talk TRANSCRIPT
Good afternoon.
Before I get started, I first have to say, hello, to all of my students who let me be out of school today. They’re staying late at school to watch the stream.
Hello to everybody out there in Philadelphia. I think they definitely deserve a round of applause.
Today, I’m going to tell you a couple of stories. I know I have a bit of a provocative title, I’ll get there, go with me. I have a story to tell you.
I have been teaching for a long time, and in doing so have acquired a body of knowledge about kids and learning that I really wish more people would understand about the potential of students.
In 1931, my grandmother – bottom left for you guys over here – graduated from the eighth grade. She went to school to get the information because that’s where the information lived. It was in the books; it was inside the teacher’s head; and she needed to go there to get the information, because that’s how you learned.
Fast-forward a generation: this is the one-room schoolhouse, Oak Grove, just down the road from where I grew up, where my father went to a one-room schoolhouse. And he again had to travel to the school to get the information from the teacher, stored it in the only portable memory he has, which is inside his own head, and take it with him, because that is how information was being transported from teacher to student and then used in the world.
When I was a kid, we had a set of encyclopedias at my house. It was purchased the year I was born, and it was extraordinary, because I did not have to wait to go to the library to get to the information. The information was inside my house and it was awesome.
This was different than either generation had experienced before, and it changed the way I interacted with information even at just a small level. But the information was closer to me. I could get access to it.
In the time that passes between when I was a kid in high school and when I started teaching, as Steve Case pointed out this morning, we really see the advent of the Internet.
Right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool, I take off from Wisconsin and move to Kansas, small town Kansas, where I had an opportunity to teach in a lovely, small-town, rural Kansas school district, where I was teaching my favorite subject, American government.
My first year – super gung-ho – going to teach American government, loved the political system.
Kids in the 12th grade: not exactly all that enthusiastic about the American government system.
Year two: learned a few things – had to change my tactic. And I put in front of them an authentic experience that allowed them to learn for themselves. I didn’t tell them what to do or how to do it. I posed a problem in front of them, which was to put on an election forum for their own community.
They produced flyers. They called offices. They checked schedules. They were meeting with secretaries. They produced an election forum booklet for the entire town to learn more about their candidates. They invited everyone into the school for an evening of conversation about government and politics and whether or not the streets were done well, and really had this robust experiential learning.
The older teachers – more experienced – looked at me and went, “Oh, there she is. That’s so cute. She’s trying to get that done. She doesn’t know what she’s in for.”
But I knew that the kids would show up, and I believed it, and I told them every week what I expected out of them. And that night, all 90 kids – dressed appropriately, doing their job, owning it. I had to just sit and watch. It was theirs. It was experiential. It was authentic. It meant something to them. And they will step up.