Lessons Learned from Teaching at East Palo Alto Phoenix Academy (EPAPA)
During our weekly interactions with the EPAPA students, I have been learning just as much from the youth as they may be from our activities. A few takeaways have started shaping the way that I approach lesson planning:
Learner agency matters.
One idea that I have found very powerful is enabling students to have choice and voice in their learning experience. Design thinking activities often do this, because people are able to set their project directions, but I can imagine that a typical science class may not have much time or space to allow for as much student freedom. I was inspired after reading “Travels in Troy with Freire” by Paulo Blikstein, which discussed empowering learners with the freedom to choose, to apply this idea to our lesson planning.
One of our 7th grade students (pictured above) seemed to respond more positively when we took his ideas into account in designing our activities. For example, we tried to create a broad challenge space based on the interests he expressed to us (modeling a fruit city with a farming area, processing area, transport zone, fruit stand to attract customers, etc.). This way, our student could choose to tackle the aspects of the challenge appealed most to him. He ended up being much more motivated than we would have expected, and inspired everyone to work harder in ideating and prototyping to realize our ideas for solving the selected challenge. At the end of this particular session, the students asked if we could resume working on the challenge again the following week.
Authentic tasks matter.
Students seem to be able to tell when an activity (such as a random ice breaker) does not really align with our expressed goals to explore design thinking, STEM, food and health. When the students sense that the purpose of an activity is not as clear and do not see how it relates to their lives, they may check out.
For example, we included a mock interview as part of an initial lesson plan around empathy, but the activity ended up focusing more around specific interview techniques when we actually ran it. Students were losing interest fast and couldn’t really connect what we were doing to the rest of the empathy lesson. We did not sense much energy and enthusiasm from the students again until they started interviewing their peers for a design project, which seemed far more meaningful to them than the interview role play. Since then, we have tried to make sure that our activities each serve a clear purpose and are executed in a way that serves that intended purpose – not just for us to be cohesive in the learning goals we present to students, but also for students to work on activities with real-world relevance.
Having fun matters!
When running activities with middle school students in an afterschool setting, we have to keep reminding ourselves to come back to this. Ultimately, we hope that students can enjoy themselves during this process of learning and working together. Many of our lessons that seemed well received by students and captured their attentions for long enough to get an educational message across, also generated a lot of laughter and team bonding. We have been striving to provide more opportunities for students to have fun playing improv games, generating ideas, building things, and interacting with each other.
We want our activities to be a positive experience, where students can be in the right mindset to try new things, learn, and reflect on what we are making and discussing. Creating a fun environment is important, as we need to be sensitive to how our students have just come from a whole day of school and to plan according to that context. Our students may not want to stay afterschool for another academic class, but they are willing to work hard and learn – as long as we have fun!
