The Vulnerability of Taking on the Real-World Learning Challenge

This summer, I sat in the audience as my daughter, Emerson, performed in two plays. Each was the culmination of a weeklong summer theater camp experience. 

In the morning, she and her five- to ten-year old peers had written, produced, and acted in a one-minute scene about farm animals who agreed to dance at a party. I couldn’t really hear what they were saying and the storyline wasn’t linear, but they performed the piece with exuberance.

That afternoon, the children delivered a much more polished scene with a practiced script, blocking using multiple levels, and clearly delineated characters. 

I was delighted with each performance; I also found myself fascinated by the contrast between her two camp experiences. Both were deeply immersive, real-world opportunities exploring similar subjects.

Emerson had been excited to find out which character she would play in the afternoon performance and dutifully rehearsed her lines each evening, knowing she had a responsibility to the cast to execute her role. Guided closely by the teachers, students delivered a complex plot, characterization and staging, reacting appropriately to their peers’ lines and making sure not to upstage featured actors. The production was objectively better than the student one, which lacked any of the same sophistication.

When she got in the car each afternoon, though, it was the morning performance she talked about. In a steady stream of consciousness, she listed the props she planned to bring from home and described the costume she planned to wear–a shirt with Easter eggs and yellow pants to indicate she was a hen. She proudly recited the lines she had contributed to the script, gave a play-by-play of the disagreements she and her friends had over the plot, and described how they decided what gestures to use. 

Weeks later, the first item on her birthday wishlist was a chicken costume. Two months later, she’s still imagining how she could build on that barnyard scene, the one she constructed autonomously with her teammates. When she watches a theatre production, she thinks, “I created one of those,” not “I acted in one of those.”

Sir Ken Robinson compared the art of encouraging growth in students to gardening, pointing out that effective teachers create the conditions necessary for growth, nurturing the environment and setting the stage for a range of opportunities, but, like plants, students do the growing themselves. 

There’s an incredible amount of vulnerability for students who take on ownership of their work; that coveted buy-in results in students standing in front of an audience, saying “This is what I care deeply about,” and “This is the finest product I am able to create,” asking for honest feedback, often from strangers.

The “Real-World Challenges” clips available on the Innovation Playlist from What School Could Be offer a variety of approaches with compelling examples that encourage students to take control of their education. Whether they are making personalized phone calls to invite community partners to participate in an event, or deciding how to present themselves as they enter a business to job shadow or begin an internship, students are doing some of the hardest work we will ask them to do: step out of their comfort zones and into an experience that requires they challenge their understanding of the world and make rapid connections between previously learned material and unfamiliar content.

While that level of stimulation can be invigorating for some, it’s paralyzing for others. A student who is initially excited to try something new can often become overwhelmed and fall back on comforting routines and strategies, avoiding circumstances that force them to stretch.

This phenomenon of transition shock means that educators must be ready to help students navigate stages of change and encourage them to move forward. One student in Job Shadowing Day said, “Something I really appreciate about my advisors is that they didn’t give up. See, I wanted to give up finding a baker…But they refused to just let me give up and do something that I didn’t really wanna do.” 

While some students recover from disappointment or setbacks quickly, others take time. Determining when to help students rebound have been some of the more challenging decisions I’ve made as a teacher. Often, I fear I’ve waited too long, but students regularly choose to move forward just as I convince myself to step in. One student remained at a standstill long enough that I questioned if I should allow her to stay in the program. As we were finalizing the following year’s rosters, she proudly presented her completed project plan, declaring she had a newfound confidence in her ability to follow a challenge through to the end. We hung that plan in a frame together.

Community partners can also help facilitate the process of adapting to real-world learning, watering the seeds of interest. While professionals have much more experience in real-world environments, they may have a sense of vulnerability when asked to engage with students at events such as those in Career Exploration. It can be helpful to group them in panels of similar experiences or pathways, which allows community partners to do a bit of networking along with the students, and conversations flourish.

Multiple models ask educators to hand over the reins to students to varying degrees.

Do Something Cool is an initiative at the African Leadership Academy in South Africa that sets aside a couple of days for students to pursue a meaningful goal, and the campus comes alive as a result. Hatim Eltayeb, the dean of the African Leadership Academy, notes the importance of allowing students to be the experts in the room. Adults show vulnerability as they delight in the experiences students have designed, showing the gaps in their own knowledge and enthusiastically participating in filling them. This can happen on a much smaller scale; I’ve tried to purposefully build learning partnerships with students by listening for subjects they have knowledge about and asking them for tips, following up after I’ve given their recommendations a try. They might snicker when I ask for an introduction to the latest rap artist, but they become invested quickly when they find out I listened.

Eltayeb also pinpoints one of the challenges of a student-driven experience like Do Something Cool: ensuring students are pushing themselves. He says that “the support that’s important is making sure that every student is being stretched and not just sort of sauntering through… [It] ought to be treated with as much seriousness as you would treat the stretch for a student who is coasting through an actual class.” 

Especially when students are engaged in a high-energy activity, catching that gap in learning can be hard, but Rich Hallis, an instructional coach who asks students to make a positive impact on their community in the The $10 Challenge, identifies one strategy that helps teachers gauge where students need to be pushed or supported: using reflections. 

When conferring with students about their goals, teachers are able to provide feedback and direct students towards resources that up their game just as they need it, rather than trying to anticipate their needs in advance. Too many times I’ve flippantly thought a student was being lazy, but when I watched a video reflection or held a conversation with them, I realized they were stumbling over some of the words in the learning target or struggling to find information; they just needed some help bridging a gap in their understanding in order to move forward. 

Other students will churn out products quickly. When we discuss the techniques they’re using, it becomes clear that they’ve developed a useful template but are no longer adding to their toolkit. I’ll usually connect them with a subject matter expert in those cases to help challenge them.

For educators focused on building student voice opportunities in their districts, Make Your School Better may be a comfortable stepping-off point. Beth Blankenship, an English teacher, highlights how many standards can be assessed through students pitching ways to improve educational practices to a panel of district stakeholders. Asking students to synthesize information from a variety of sources, evaluate the veracity of claims, and make connections to their lived experiences in their school community allows audiences, especially those who fear real-world projects lack the rigor of academic coursework, to see the depth of knowledge they require. Additionally, the feedback from those panelists assures students that they are being heard. There is no greater joy than to see a student who felt that school wasn’t serving them build a relationship with a policymaker who continues to seek that student’s feedback on educational decisions long after the initial project ends. The impact doesn’t have to end locally; one group of students who sat on a panel with teachers to talk about ways to implement real-world learning immediately asked if they could do it again. “Those teachers need us,” they said. 

The completely student-run Altruism group in Students Lead the Way illustrates what can happen once students recognize the change they can make. Altruism works independently to use entrepreneurial thinking to develop ways to improve their community. Kapono Ciotti, Executive Director of What School Could Be, recognizes that the best way for adults to support students ready for this kind of autonomous work is to use their institutional knowledge to anticipate barriers and help remove them. It’s always helpful to not just make students aware of existing barriers; instead, whenever possible, we should begin a conversation around which barriers are necessary and which ones expose reservations we may have around student independence.

For instance, at one point I became aware that limits on student travel were a barrier to students meeting with community partners, but it didn’t occur to me to ask for a change. Luckily, another adult questioned the system and students were allowed, with family permission, to travel up to forty miles in their own vehicles, drastically expanding their exposure to and impact on the community. 

When challenging my own role and structures, I’m constantly asking myself, “Why not?” I may have a justification for why I’ve developed a procedure, but it’s usually eye opening to ask what impact changing it might have, especially if it is in response to student voice. The student founder of Altruism, Annish Redi, wisely notes that “Trying is like, you’re not going to get penalized if it doesn’t work out.”

Those words expose one common barrier to implementing real-world learning: it can sometimes be difficult for teachers to try it–to allow students to operate with autonomy.

It might appear that teachers struggle with the need to maintain control; after all, backwards design dictates we develop scaffolded activities as students generate a predetermined product. If we don’t know what the end result will be, how can we ensure that students will understand and develop the course standards?

That’s a question experienced teachers can often answer; they know their students and their content well, and can anticipate the ways students will use skills in their subject matter, developing resources and employing just-in-time learning to respond to students’ needs.

Students generally adapt easily to increased freedom, recognizing the application of the work they are doing and welcoming the challenge as it moves them closer to their personal goals. Some need more guardrails than others, but teachers are accustomed to differentiating for student needs.

What can feel vulnerable to teachers is accepting the freedom to fail.

Early adopters may dive in headfirst, but teachers have labored on the assembly-line model of education and feel the weight of multiple initiatives, data-gathering techniques, and standards-based evaluative systems.Tackling real-world learning, full of uncertain results and hazy data points, can feel scary and burdensome. It seems as if, in some abstract way, we might actually be penalized for trying if it doesn’t work out.

To lighten the load, real-world learning teams should explicitly remove as many tasks as possible in order to empower teachers to be present, resourceful, and responsive–traits that require energy and focus. One technique is to ask teachers to list every task they must accomplish, to determine not only what is at the top of the pile, but what no longer belongs there. 

Once the process has begun, teachers can be hesitant to host a showcase like the one featured in Internship Capstone until experiences are complete and products have been refined. After all, we’re accustomed to initiatives that tie our effectiveness to student outcomes. Nevertheless, showcases can be formative and offered early in the process–such as a poster paired with students offering a quick explanation about what they’ve done and plan to do. As they present, students are surprised at the extent of what they have learned. No matter when I have hosted a showcase event, students ask why we don’t hold them sooner.

Usually, the answer is that I didn’t think we were ready; the truth is, we always are.

The wonder of teaching is being present in the garden to witness the nearly imperceptible milestones that happen as students build confidence, rely less on adult guidance, and pursue their best selves.

What a treasure it is, then, to be able to partner with our students, invite the community in, labor shoulder-to-shoulder, embrace our vulnerability, and marvel at how magnificently we all manage to grow.


Sarah Renfrow is an English and communications teacher who is always willing to give innovative learning practices and grading methods a try. An avid promoter of student and teacher voice in educational design, Sarah teaches at Blue Springs High School and is a consultant for the Kauffman Foundation as the Real World Learning Teacher Network Leader. She lives in Lee’s Summit, Missouri with her husband Jason, daughter Emerson, and a seemingly unstoppable growing collection of pets.

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