Learning with YouTube Day 4: An Olympic Education #busedu #31daysofPD #personalizedPD @alfiekohn

For Day 4 of my summer #personalizedPD effort, I selected An Olympic Education by Kevin McMahon from TEDxBellarmine College Preparatory.

Years ago, my school implemented an ICU program and a philosophy changed occurred that encouraged teachers to not take "learning grades" but to encourage students to do work that helped them learn without penalty, evaluate what was important to grade, and choose what essential skills to truly assess. So this was a nice speech that went along with that philosophy. I think Alfie Kohn would agree with much of this (it goes along with many of his published philosophies on the matter).

And, as a computer teacher, I found it cool to read in his biography that he is a design instructor and was an Adobe Education Leader for 10 years. :)

Kevin McMahon was an Olympic hammer thrower. He compared education and the system of growth to that of his growth as a hammer thrower; how you start off terrible and eventually end up doing well. And, if you averaged the skills along the way the average would be terrible. He also mentioned how grades used to be A through E, but E was often confused for Excellent, so that's why we end in F. :)

He made four points:

1. Grades are unreasonably permanent. Instead of failure just being part of the evolution, it figured into the grade. In the "grade race" who would even want to get back up early on with an early "F" if they knew the best they could do in the end was average?
2. Grades induce stress. If you "start with an A" to begin, you can only go down. Well, being that you might know nothing at the beginning, you are likely not going to continue perfection. So, you do the tightrope walk. He asked who would be play an unlocked video game where you have everything you need at the beginning and can't work your way up? You'd be bored and you know you would fail with everything at your fingertips. 
3. Grades are counter-motivational. You look for the easiest way to get the best score, not to learn or to grow. Drive (motivation) comes from autonomy, mastery, and purpose. That's why students can excel teaching themselves from YouTube!
4. Grades distract from the goal. He cited a study where students were in three groups--graded, comments only, or grades and comments. The "comments only" group had the most success. 

Takeaway:

He gave four tips for "amping" up education. He encouraged teachers to gamify the classroom (let them level up), encourage mastery (be sure you know something before you move on), flip learning for those who need to focus more on content outside of class, allow do-overs for learning, and link learning to something meaningful.

I wish I could find this guy, but he's not on Twitter to tag! Excellent talk and great points! I would love tips for gamifying my classroom. You hear that term all the time, but I really don't know how to put it into practice.