Learning About Learning By Learning Photography

Photography is something that I enjoy immensely, and I am fairly positive I would hate it if I learned photography like we often expect students to learn in school. I spent this evening wandering around my local wildlife refuge with that thought bouncing around in the back of my mind while I waited for the barn owls to come out. (Photos from the past couple of days there.)

As I wandered, I tried to really nail down what has been so different from how I’ve been learning photography versus how we typically approach learning in school. Here’s what I came up with and how we might adjust elements of our classrooms to match it.

Pursuing Passions

First off, yes, I am learning focused on photography, but I’m also focused on and incorporating something that I’m already passionate about with wildlife and nature. If someone told me, “As you learn to take photos, you are only allowed to take photos of cars,” I can all-but-guarantee I would have given up. Instead, I get to go be outside, get into the mountains, observe birds, etc. By getting better at photography, I get to also engage with other things that matter to me, and that just makes me want to do it all the more.

Now, there is a reality that I have to name that school can’t entirely function this way. When you have thirty students in a room, set expectations of what you’re supposed to cover, etc., it makes it difficult. But what photography has taught is that when we can allow space for learners to include something their passionate about and interested in while they are learning, they are so much more likely to push through when things get difficult.

This could just mean letting students in an English class focus on writing an expository piece on a topic they are interested in, or students in a science learn about ecosystems by analyzing a place that matters to them. Maybe it’s a math class where students work on growth rates by thinking about large goals that they have and how they would need to invest to reach them. It doesn’t have to be something huge, but even little bits of passion can have a big impact on how the learning goes.

Room to Be Shitty

Pun intended for this photo…

For every one image that I share, there’s at least another hundred or more that I don’t, and for every good image I produce now, there are thousands in my past that are so much worse.

Can you imagine if I had to post every photo that I took for a critique? Or worse yet, imagine that every photo I posted was scored and then averaged over time, and that average was somehow used to determine how good of a photographer I was now. That would be absolutely ridiculous to do, and really, if my potential was limited by my past mistakes, it would definitely make me feel like it’s not worth investing my time and effort into photography.

…

Wait, this sounds familiar, right? I mean, it should because it’s exactly what happens to nearly every student in every school in the US.

We bring kids into a class (in which they shouldn’t already be good at the things we are going to teach them or else it’s a waste of their time), and then when they aren’t good at things early on, we average those scores with their later scores to determine how “good” they are at whatever discipline the class is focused on.

In this process, we essentially tell kids who struggle the most early on, “You’ll never be able to be successful in this class.” To connect back to the photography analogy, it’s like if a student brought us the most incredibly photo at the end of the term, but we rifled through a folder and pulled out the worst photo they’d ever taken at the beginning of the class, held them both up together and just went, “Meh, overall, not great.”

So what do we do?

Big picture, STOP. AVERAGING. POINTS. ON. ASSIGNMENTS. (I promise that’s all the yelling I will do about this, but holy smokes, I am passionate about that point.)

Realistically, not everyone is ready for that because it does require a larger shift in grading practices. What if we either can’t or aren’t ready to make that shift? What then?

For starters, find ways to drop lower or earlier attempts. Let students make mistakes and move on from them. Wrapped up in this is the possibility for retakes, alternate assessments, or even intentional spiraling so another assessment would cover the same content and could replace earlier scores.

Whatever it looks like, ask yourself this question: “If a student makes a mistake early in my class, what would need to happen for them to fully recover from it?” Take a hard look at your grading practices as you think about this question.

Exemplars Galore

Aside from comments on social media, feedback in some photography groups I’m in, and the occasional critique from a contest I enter, the only way I know how to improve is to go find my favorite photographers and pour over their work.

I don’t have a rubric for photography. I don’t have a learning progression. I don’t even really have a set of standards. I don’t have anything that tells me what I have to do.

Instead, I get to spend time dreaming of what I could do by looking at hundreds and hundreds of exemplars of gorgeous photos that inspire me to be better. I have gotten into the habit of opening Instagram, scrolling to recent photos from my favorite photographers, and then breaking down what it is that I love about their photos. If I love the placement of the subject in the frame, the next time I go out to shoot, I will play with that. If I love the colors in a landscape shot, I’ll have it open next to my Lightroom window as I edit to attempt to emulate the effects.

This process is less about what I’m afraid of, but it’s more about what I aspire to do.

I don’t think we can always say the same for students in the classroom, and there is a reality here (I’m trying to make sure I’m naming the reality instead of just living in a dream world in this post) that what we sometimes have to ask students to do isn’t the most inspirational task in the world. There are times and reasons for leveraging extrinsic motivators to support students in engaging in work they would not prioritize otherwise. That’s not something I want to brush off here.

However, what would it look like if we approached exemplars and mentor texts not as things students need to know and understand to get a good score on their assignment? What if we instead took the approach to exemplars of saying, “What about this did you find inspiring? What do you wish you could do that this author did?”

Purposeful Actions

Now, this section will be closely connected to the passion section, but I want to separate it out because it’s slightly different. To explain why, I need to tell you about the Teanaway Community Forest (my favorite place) and the damn mountain goats.

Before you get the wrong idea, I absolutely love mountain goats. They are one of my most favorite animals to see in the wild because they represent a hardiness and resilience that is inspiring to me (plus, they are super curious creatures and cool-looking).

However, it has been over two years since I’ve seen a goat in the Teanaway. Previously, I had a couple hikes that I could all-but-guarantee to see one on. In the last two years, however, things have changed. The past two summers have been exceptionally warm, and the winters have been fairly mild in the Teanaway with little snow compared to other years.

Watching this pattern and seeing how it has impacted these creatures that I hold so dear has pushed me to become a better photographer and to hike miles and miles in this region because I have a purpose for it. I want people to see what’s happening to these mountain goats. When I’m out there taking photographs, it’s about something much more important than photography or sharing photos on social media. I have a reason to learn. I have a driving force pushing me to get better.

Again, this is tough to capture in a compulsory school environment. I’ll admit that, but I also don’t want to ignore that it is possible for every student to be aware of something that drives them as powerfully as my love of conservation and wanting to make a difference.

But, how do we do this? For starters, give kids opportunities, as mentioned before, to incorporate their passions into their work, but even more important than this, when we can, we need to give students the opportunity to make a difference with what they’re doing. We need to teach them that they have the capacity and the ability to change the world around them. Maybe that just means students practice persuasive writing by crafting a well-designed argument about something that matters to them and then posting it somewhere on social media (to protect students, these could be shared through a school-created account that the teacher manages). Maybe in science, students learn about the impact of changes to an ecosystem and then create a campaign to inform others about local changes impact the environment and ecosystem. In a math class, learning about compounding interest could turn into an informational piece that helps the community members better understand how investing works and why they should contribute to retirement.

The key is in helping students see that what they are doing matters and to give them tangible evidence that they can be agents of change.

Final Thoughts

There are many, many other things that went through my head (and might result in a part 2), but I recognize that so many of you reading this probably had a long day of teaching already. I don’t want to keep writing because (a) I don’t want to keep you from the things you love any longer, and (b) I’m worried adding more will send a message I don’t want to send.

The message I’m worried that this post could be sending is that what you’re doing isn’t enough and that you need to do more.

If you are in a classroom doing your best for kids to the extent that you can, you are doing enough.

However, there is a message that I do hope you receive through this. If you are finding yourself banging your head against a wall because kids just aren’t engaging in learning in ways we would hope, don’t do more – do something different.

I’m hoping this piece gave you a few ideas that you can carry back to your classroom, not to do more, but to do differently.