View Content #22217

by Stephanie Knight, CASLS Language Technology Specialist

As The Lego Movie opens, viewers experience life that is decidedly in the box. Lego figurines swarm in unison according to the instructions that they are provided with and happily work the day away while singing that “Everything is Awesome.” While there is a certain bliss to the scene-every figurine seems genuinely pleased with compliance- the fact that each individual is simply a soldier in a regimented army that is largely void of autonomy is clear. In fact, it is only when one of these unwitting soldiers goes off course that the action of the movie begins.

While it is very unlikely that the creators of The Lego Movie developed the work as an allegorical representation of education in the United States, much can be gleaned from the movie’s content regarding our current system as it relates to learner autonomy. In many ways, this system inadvertently produces soldiers for an army of instruction followers; federal mandates become state mandates, state mandates become district mandates, district mandates become administrator mandates, administrator mandates become teacher mandates, and teacher mandates become student mandates. While these mandates are well-intentioned, their top-down nature oftentimes minimizes the potential impact of the learner voice. This reality is particularly troubling because in a world in which low-cost technological tools make broad levels of communication and exploration possible, we have the potential to promote and encourage meaningful learner autonomy at a very high level.

To engage in the promotion of such autonomy, we must first understand what this promotion is. It is not simply scripting a few possible assessment tasks and allowing students to pick one according to their interests. While such an approach is potentially useful for learning autonomy, it is also potentially superficial: Students are still working with the box that we provide them. If we want them to work outside of that box, we must empower them with the skills and strategies that are necessary to prove mastery of learning targets in situations in which we do not script how they must prove that mastery. In this vein, we as educators must recontextualize our role from imparters of content to guides that support the acquisition and application of content.

Engaging in this paradigm shift, however meaningful, is not easy. For one, in order to promote learner autonomy successfully, we must empower our students to be reflective and to engage in personal goal setting (for more information about the power of goal setting and reflection in the world language context, please see Moeller, Thieler, and Wu (2012)). Not only will such an allocation of class time result in learners possibly stepping outside of our own comfort zones when developing their approaches to learning, but such reflective time is difficult to fit in when we are expected to cover a sometimes overwhelming amount of content. Indeed, when we are faced with a regimented set of circumstances in which we are forced to prove our teaching, it can be difficult to not impose a similarly regimented approach on our students’ learning. Still, if my work with educators around the country is any indication, I know that we are well-positioned to resist this temptation. Just as Wiggins’ (1989, 2011) work on authentic assessment suggests, making such shift not only prepares learners for success within our classrooms, but also prepares them to successfully and positively impact the rest of the world.

References

Lord, P., & Miller, C. (2014). The Lego Movie (Motion Picture). United States: Warner Home Video.

Moeller, A.J., Theiler, J. M., & Wu, C.. (2012) Goal Setting and Student Achievement: A Longitudinal Study. The Modern Language Journal, 96 (ii), 153-169.

Wiggins, G. (1989). A true test: Toward more authentic and equitable assessment. The  Phi Delta Kappan, 70(9), 703-713.

Wiggins, G. (2011). Moving to modern assessments. The Phi Delta Kappan, 92(7), 63.