When a teacher suspends reality for the duration of an instructional unit, children have few limits to their learning. Suspension opens possibilities for each child’s thinking and doing that the conditions of instructional normalcy and “same old” can limit. While not quite make-believe, a suspended reality induces creativity and alternative thinking, and invites exploration and risk taking.
Close your eyes and listen.
A classroom is Never-Never Land for children when a teacher learns how to suspend reality. She doesn’t need Tinkerbell’s dust. As mistress of her teaching domain, she says, “Close your eyes and listen” as she walks around the classroom placing things on the tables around which children were seated. “We are now in a place long ago when people just like you were trying to understand how to count their possessions and the things they saw in their world. They knew there was more than one of almost everything, but they did not have any ideas about how number them. When you open your eyes, you will find two piles of things on your table. Your first job is to find a way to tell me how you determined how many things are in each pile. Your second job is to tell me how you can combine the objects in the two piles into one pile without recounting them. And your third job is to tell me how you can remove some of the items in the larger pile so that you have two equal piles with some items left over. When you have completed each job, you will explain your thinking and reasoning to me.” She waits while silently counting to 30. “Oh, there is a slip of paper next to your piles with these three jobs listed. And I expect that each table may have differing yet very appropriate explanations for me.” She waits while silently counting to 15. “Now open your eyes and begin.” If children have questions, she answers the children at their table directly and not the entire class.
Problem-based learning (PBL)
I first encountered suspended realities at teacher workshops in problem-based learning at the Illinois Math and Science Academy in the late 1990s. Our workshop team was so enthused we pursued more training and then organized a district training in PBL so that all teachers, no matter their assignment could add PBL to their instructional toolbox. We were into building instructional toolboxes.
Although our training was only to add a possible teaching tool for each teacher, we still experienced the usual change theory pathway of new programs. Our goal was professional development and pleasingly we experienced many teachers who found value in a new teaching strategy. Interestingly, our secondary teachers adopted PBL more quickly and thoroughly than our elementary teachers. ELA, social studies, and science teachers, some veterans, and some early career teachers, modified selected units for PBL applications. Each teacher embedded initial instruction, modeling, formative assessment, and instructional adjustment in their PBL units, but these came at different places and times in their unit’s progression compared to their usual unit designs.
Twenty-plus years later veterans of our PBL training still display aspects of suspended realities. They have refined their applications, made the teaching tool more their own, and use it wisely to cause children to learn.
Student-centeredness causes learning.
The big Duh! of suspending reality lies in the acceptance of student-centered thinking and outcomes. Teachers assure that key skill sets, content, and concepts are taught and learned during suspended reality. Post-assessments indicate that student learning in PBL or suspended reality units is as strong if not stronger than in traditional directed instruction units of learning. The real differential is in student engagement. When children understand the power that “you explain it me” it allows them to create answers, solutions, and outcomes, opens their willingness to think beyond “usual” and past “this is how I usually act/think in class”, and their level of excitement and “I can do” accelerates.
We can only smile proudly at the conclusion of a suspended lesson or unit and a child demonstrates learning of the academic content and skills, an ability to hold out an individualized product, explain a solution that both makes sense to her and to her teacher, and be independent of other children or groups of children.
Using tools to cause children to learn – isn’t this why we became teachers of children?