From the work of Dr. Gayle Privette (1985), we understand that only
Peak Performance met with Peak Experience yields
the conditions for flow and self-actualization.
K-12 schools certainly demand Peak Performance
from both teachers and students.
When, however, do they take institutional responsibility
for Peak Experience?
What would such a school be like?
Consider the experience of teachers in the US:
40-50% of teachers leave the profession within 5 years
(Ingersoll et al., 2018)
Attrition is twice that of high-performing countries
(Sutcher et al., 2016)
Minority-serving schools suffer the most
(Sutcher et al. 2016)
Districts interested in building an effective and experienced teaching staff may ask:
How do we make the teacher experience more sustainable and fulfilling?
Fix this how?
Community (McCarthy, 1990)
Collaboration (Kanayama et al., 2016)
Mobility (Heller et al., 2020)
Empowerment (McCarthy et al., 2022)
Much of our work is done in silos, which sometimes consist of just one person. Teaching can be incredibly isolating...
We write learning outcomes alone, design activities alone, and teach behind closed doors. We reflect, review assessments, and enter statistics alone.
How can we build communities of practice when our work is often done in isolation?
(Brown & Settoducato, 2019, p. 10)
K-12 schools might consider
re-organizing themselves
physically, spatially, as
Communities of Practice
What is a Community of Practice (CoP)?
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) identified a CoP as:
a. an established group of practitioners
b. sharing access to their knowledge and expertise and
c. offering participation in their practices.
Wenger Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2015) defined a CoP as a group of people:
a. sharing a specific area of interest (a domain)
b. sharing activities directed toward specific goals (a practice)
c. that identify as a group (a community)
In the case of a public K-12 school, this would suggest offering teachers professional workspace together with like-minded peers.
It means abandoning a model of isolating teachers in their own classrooms.
The implications of this are truly breathtaking
Not only are teachers better supported among their peers, but classrooms are freed to radically diversify. They can be redesigned to better support teachers in delivering powerful and engaging learning experiences.
From a monoculture of identical classrooms,
schools may become an ecosystem of
unique and mutually supportive
learning environments.
What kind of learning environments?
spaces for:
immersion
inquiry
inspiration
instruction
interaction
introspection
invention
spaces that are:
itinerant
intersectional
contextual
Learning abilities are developed by access to rich experiences that stimulate the brain. One of the earliest studies on the effect of the environment on brain development was the work of William Greenough and his colleagues (1987), who compared the brains of rats raised in “complex environments” containing toys and obstacles with those housed individually or in small cages without toys. They found that rats raised in complex environments performed better on learning tasks, liked learning to run mazes, and had 20–25% more synapses per neuron in the visual cortex. Many studies since have shown that brain development is experience-dependent.
(Darling-Hammond et al., 2020, p. 112)
Imagine diversifying the learning environments, even in a legacy 20th century school:
This idea is not new to K-12 schools, but it supports the athletic curriculum, not the academic curriculum. Consider the rich selection of athletic venues available in American schools: gymnasiums, baseball fields, soccer fields, field hockey fields, lacrosse fields, football fields and stadiums, tennis courts, basketball courts, handball courts, squash courts, volleyball courts, badminton courts, swimming pools, weight rooms, cross-training rooms, climbing walls, running tracks, and playgrounds in all sorts of configurations.
This list is probably not exhaustive.
Should the academic environment not be
as rich, supportive, and engaging
as the athletic environment?
References