School Hackers: Recognizing Educators’ Creativity and Resourcefulness in the Classroom
Did you know there’s an easy way to get your students’ attention with a rhythmic clap that they are sure to know? Ever thought of making a green screen in your classroom to set up faux news broadcasts with your students? These are some of the new hacks that came out of our EdUnderground hackathon our Student Experience Lab recently hosted with the Highlander Institute.
We know that educators don’t always get the funding that they need, and traditional structures within our education system can create barriers to student learning. We also know that educators everywhere are thinking of clever and resourceful ways to help their students learn by hacking their classrooms and schools. Hacks are the low-to-no-cost repurposing of existing resources to solve everyday challenges. A hack is — however large or small, simple or complex — a solution to an everyday problem by creatively combining or tweaking available resources.
Even beyond solving everyday problems, school hacks can be implemented as solutions to some of education’s most persistent challenges: improving classroom management, creating stronger school culture, and providing adequate social emotional support in the classroom. Hacks can also be used to deepen student learning, by creating student leaders who are collaborative problem solvers with a growth mindset, and assessing their learning in meaningful ways. Although the goals of hacking can be grand, the hacks themselves can be as simple as introducing movement into school lessons to help students focus, or painting old tables with whiteboard paint to allow them a place to write down notes collaboratively.
All of us at the hackathon gathered around two long tables and a projector screen as I described our approach and process for creating School Hackers — our crowd-sourced (or rather, teacher-sourced) platform and video series. We watched a couple of short clips from our video series on Edutopia, and then promptly moved into the hackathon.
Although hacks can be developed for just about anything, we want to always be cognizant about how to ensure that our hacks are furthering student learning. To keep students at the center of our hackathon, my coworkers and I created a spinning wheel containing the 8 goals of School Hackers. In the spirit of hacking, we constrained ourselves to only use materials we had in our office, much in the same way we did for our School Hackers animation video. We had our guests spin the wheel landing on prompts to get us thinking about the hacks we are using in our classrooms. We landed on collaboration, school culture, and classroom management. Breaking off into separate groups, we began discussing, sharing, and putting up hacks on schoolhackers.org!
We had some interesting conversation about what spurs school hacks, how and why they are implemented, and why teachers don’t always share these hacks with other educators. Several teachers were unsure whether anything they were doing in their classrooms “counted” as hacks. A veteran teacher felt that she had no hacks to contribute, to which her colleague replied, “Your entire class is a hack!” After circling back with the prompt, we discovered that she had in fact developed a classroom full of hacks!
Our teachers are constantly under resource and time restraints, and for them, hacking is a necessity rather than a luxury. Teachers are hacking their classrooms because otherwise they would not be able to get their students to where they need to be. Because teachers don’t always get the opportunity to work and collaborate with other educators, and because they are so focused on their students’ learning, they often don’t consider all the creative resourceful things they do in the classroom to be worth sharing. For them, it’s just part of being a teacher. One of the teachers present felt that the creative hacks she had developed in her classroom were likely already used by teachers in other classrooms. However, as she began to share more and more hacks, and as more and more teachers in her group expressed their interest and amazement, she realized that her classroom was indeed filled with many sharable hacks. She posted a hack during our discussion and has plans to share out even more!
Despite the fact that a number of teachers are experiencing very similar challenges, each of them has hacked it in different ways. We want to celebrate hacks as not just cool shareable ideas, but also as highlights for how creative teachers are being in their classrooms. Check out all the cool hacks teachers are using to better engage with their students at schoolhackers.org, You can even share some of your own!
School Hackers isn’t just giving teachers a place to share, it is also helping them recognize how creative and unique their solutions are to challenges they face in their classroom. We are excited to empower teachers to recognize their creativity, and share out their school hacks!
Will you join us?
N E X T → Deeper Learning Continued
Making Our Students More Likely to Succeed ← P R E V I O U S
