In workshops and presentations on Tapping Student Effort and Learning Styles, I often discuss the power of teachers using Live Events to deepen student motivation and effort. In Live Events, most learning style preferences are naturally present.
Live Events are often project based learning activities where the outcome of the event has a real consequence. A sophisticated simulation can include all the elements of a live event with the exception of real consequence.
Simulation: Students take part in the stock market game. Groups invest a pretend $10,000 and buy and sell across a semester, declaring a winner at the end of the term.
Live Event: Each student in the Freshman Class contributes $25 to a fund that is invested in the stock market after in depth study and consensus decision making. Students track their progress (or loss) during their high school career, cashing out to off set the cost of the senior prom.
Another example of a Live Event was in the January 6th posting, Learning in Live Events, where students at a Wisconsin school did Christmas for poverty stricken children.
The following diagram illustrates the live event elements that positively impact student learning.
A recent article appearing online at Edutopia presents a great live event example.
Philips Sala and Burton Academic High School has an Academy of Finance with its very own Volunteer Income Tax Assistance site. The VITA program, a partnership between the Internal Revenue Service and the nonprofit organization United Way, recruits volunteers to become certified tax preparers as a free service to households earning less than $38,000 a year. Burton’s VITA site is staffed by the high school students themselves.1
Here is how I labeled each element of a Live Event in these students’ experience.
Relevance and Real Environment
"What I love about this process is that it gets kids out of the classroom into a real environment where they can apply what they've learned." "We talk in class about what it means to be professional. We talk about sales tax, interest, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). But to actually be in an office and assist someone they've never met before, someone who is looking to them as professionals to help prepare their taxes -- all of a sudden, it feels much more real for students."
Process Skills
Not only are they staying awake, but they're grappling with the ins and outs of basic tax returns, learning about running a small business, working collaboratively in teams on complex problems, building speaking skills and self-confidence, and honing multiple academic fundamentals -- including math, computer, and literacy skills -- all in a real-world, high-stakes context.
Multi Sensory
"It's great to learn skills, but it's even better to apply them to help out your neighbors and give back to the community," Glancing at a classroom filled with students who have the poise of professionals and who speak with the urgency of those engaged in a very real task, as well as clients who look as though they know they're in capable hands.
Emotion
"It's a little nerve-wracking," "You get kind of tense because you don't want to mess anything up by not giving people enough money or giving them too much."
Real Consequence
"On a test, there's no real difference between a 75 percent and a 95 percent. But if someone's sitting across from you, and you're talking about their taxes, you want to get 100 percent! You don't want to make any mistakes."
For more information on Live Event Learning, go to The National Educator Program to see how they work with Academies and Small Learning Communities.
1 Edutopia, Financial Aides: Teens Become Tax Preparers A high school opens a tax office, and students run the show by Sara Bernard, 2008
Happy New Year to all readers! Here is hoping that all of you are seeing 2008 as a great year of learning for yourself and the educators and students that many of you serve.
During the holidays, an article in the ASCD SmartBrief (This is a daily email with news from the education world. Click the link and choose ASCD Smart Brief under Education for a free subscription.) caught my attention as it mentioned students at Hartford High School in Wisconsin. I have had the pleasure of working with staff there on several occasions exploring their work with mentoring and peer coaching.
The story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal mentioned a project where DECA (a student marketing club) students at Oconomowoc and Hartford high schools planned Christmas for 230 preK-4th grade students at Hopkins Street Elementary School in Milwaukee where 97% of the students are eligible for free or reduced lunch.
In earlier blogs, I explored an expanded definition of student achievement (Nov 11) to include Life Skills and Community Responsibility and I wrote about the power of Live Event Learning (Nov 18). This Christmas Project illustrates how students can be given the opportunity to experience, practice, and internalize the aptitude, attitude, and skills important to fulfilling and productive futures.
My finding is that the key to successful Live Events is to find something that will make an emotional connection with the students.Then, trust that the natural curiosity and critical thinking of the students will push the learning into areas that were not initially planned by the teacher. Here is where teachers need to take some risk, allowing the event to take on a "life of it's own". The teacher is facilitating, teaching needed skills as the need arises (just in time learning), and debriefing or making conscious the learning or insights students are gaining along the way.
As you read through the following quotes from the article, consider where parts of the academic curriculum along with life skills and citizenship responsibility are being practiced .
"One student 'adopted' nine kids because she decided she didn't want anything for herself for Christmas and would use the money that would have been spent on her to buy things for them."
The families of the suburban students also got involved, with parents, many through their businesses, donating money to buy more gifts and snacks for Friday's holiday party at Hopkins, 1503 W. Hopkins St.
Other local businesses got into the spirit of the project and also made donations. The Oconomowoc Student Council donated $1,400.
Even use of the bus that will transport the gifts, food, high school students and one volunteer dad playing Santa to Milwaukee has been donated.
Staff at Hopkins identified seven families of students in particular need this holiday season, and those families have been the focus of special attention by the high school students and their families." 1
Very often, Live Event Learning activities create ongoing learning opportunities. Consider the following statements from Maurice Turner, the principal at Hopkins Street Elementary:
"I'm hoping this will not be the end of it; we would like to continue a relationship with that city. Many of our children have never been outside the boundaries of their neighborhood, much less outside the city limits. But I'd like them to go visit Oconomowoc sometime and see what it's like."
Can you imagine the learning opportunities leading up to that trip, the day of the trip, following the trip? For students and staff at all the schools?
For parents and community members from both schools?
Do you have an example of Live Event Learning you'd like to share here... drop me a note and I'll follow up.1 Bearing Gifts, Teens will traverse afar-Youths living in suburbs will enrich yule at inner-city school
By Amy Rinard, Posted: Dec. 19, 2007, Milwaukee Journal Sentinal Online
