Getting Beyond “Nothing” and “Fine” Around the Dinner Table with Depth and Complexity
By Clint Von Gundy
Merry Back to School to all who celebrate!
After a few years away, wandering in the desert of corporate consulting, I made the decision to return to the public school classroom. I will, for the first time, be teaching elementary G/T pull out, so I have been studying the sacred texts, Kindergarten Cop and Billy Maddison, in an attempt to quell some of my anxiety about this new adventure.
I also recently found out that the district I now work in will, upon request and free of charge, deliver to my new classroom a live rabbit. Not a taxidermied rabbit, or a very nice picture of a rabbit, but an actual, fully alive rabbit. No questions asked. If you want a classroom rabbit, you can have one. By the way, they will not provide food or other accommodation for this rabbit, and they will not take the rabbit back at the end of the year… but the rabbit is free. It is theoretically the job of the teacher to keep the rabbit alive (or not, I guess) and to use the rabbit as a purposeful and relevant source of learning opportunities for their students.
I am not ordering a rabbit (though I was sorely tempted). But this got me thinking about what I want my classroom to mean to the kids and also to their caregivers. I want my class to be the one that gets talked about (in a good way) during the car ride home and around the dinner table. But I also know how kids are. I could order (and eventually, through incompetence, kill) a dozen rabbits and design the most amazing lessons around them, and many of my kids probably wouldn’t utter a word about it at home even if they thought the rabbit stuff was really cool.
Let me back up. Sure, parents are glad that summer is finally over and the kids are going back to doing something ostensibly more productive with their time than staring into the middle distance and sighing about how bored they are, but the flip side of this is that seven or eight hours of their day are now a complete black box. You rightly want to know what your kids are learning, or supposedly learning, all day. And so you ask:
“How was school?”
“Fine,” they answer.
You probe, hoping for some hint of what your tax dollars provide:
“What did you learn?”
“Nothing.”
Not a single mention of an ongoing rabbit catastrophe. Or anything else for that matter.
Look, I promise you your kids are learning more than nothing, and school is likely better than fine. But, as parents, you need to learn to interrogate your kids in a more meaningful way about school. To help you do this, I’ve written some open-ended questions based on the Icons of Depth and Complexity (some of the most powerful thinking tools gifted education has ever invented). They are designed to help you reframe how you and your kids think about discussing school. If you don’t know anything about Depth and Complexity, that’s okay. You can ignore the stuff in bold and go straight to the questions.
Language of the Discipline
What is the most interesting/beautiful/funniest word you learned today? What does it mean? Can you use it in a sentence? What is its opposite (antonym)? What are its synonyms?
Details
What’s one apparently irrelevant thing you learned today that seems like it might actually be really important?
Rules
Did anyone break any rules today? Why do you think they did that? Is the rule they broke a good rule or were they justified in breaking it? What would be a fair consequence?
Patterns
Has school been more or less challenging lately? Why do you think that is? How have you adjusted?
Trends
What’s the “cool new thing” lately? Do you think it’s a good or a bad influence? What’s one cool thing you wish people knew about?
Unanswered Questions
What’s something you really wish you could learn more about in school? What is something you disagree with your teacher/peers/parents about? Why are you right? How do you know you aren’t wrong?
Ethics
Did anything happen today that you knew just wasn’t right? What did you do? How would you change it? How did you stand up for the right thing? Did anybody do something good/kind?
Big Idea
What is the most important or interesting thing you learned today? How did it change how you see the world or yourself? Conversely, what’s the dumbest thing you learned today? Was there any “knowledge for its own sake” that you enjoyed gaining?
Multiple Perpectives
What did you learn today about or from someone who is different from you?
Across the Disciplines
Can you make any connections between what you’re learning in different classes? Between school and “real life”? Is there anything you are dead certain you will absolutely never use outside of a standardized test?
Change Over Time
How was today different/better/worse from yesterday? How will it be tomorrow? What is one thing you want to accomplish tomorrow? Next week? Next month?
I hope this helps. If not, maybe suggest that your child’s teacher procure a rabbit. Or, better yet, purchase one for them and send it along with the hand sanitizer and Kleenex.
Gifted Education Family Network 