It’s a simple question, but there is a lot of power in the verb, ‘creating’. I was digging through old Powerpoints last night, and I came across a presentation that I did in Selno, Ontario, in April 2017. There was a slide in that slide deck that looked at what students at Inquiry Hub were ‘doing’:

It’s a bit overwhelming to look at a slide with this many words on it, but then my next slide played with the colour of the font a bit:

The learning verbs we use are very powerful. Are students searching for data, or are they collecting their own data? Are students copying a cookie-cutter assignment where every final result looks almost the same, or are they being led to a final product that fosters creativity and choice by the student? When you think about it, the difference between these pairs of questions are determined completely by the teacher, and the kind of assignments they provide. The former are usually more about content delivery, and the latter are about creating learning experiences. Here’s one more slide to think about:

Teachers across the globe are missing their students, and our students are missing their teachers. It may seem far away still, but when we get students back into our schools and our classrooms, what experiences are we going to give them that they didn’t get during remote learning? How are we going to foster learning verbs that are about students engaging with the learning in a meaningful way?

How can we foster students as creators of content, and not just consumers of it?  

(And there’s no need to wait for students to get back into schools to do this!)