You have never known weird until you have watched a student-made video project.
While teaching To Kill a Mockingbird in 9th grade English, I was about as unenthusiastic as my students for a comprehensive unit-end exam or a dry five-page essay. Instead, I gave them project options, including creating group videos.
The videos were unhinged. Awkward. Chaotic. They were crammed with meme references and TikTok dances. But they were also full of poignant analysis on characterization, story development, historical context, and theme.
Leaning into weird led to learning for everyone—the teacher included.
Those weird and wonderful projects were successful because they offered a vehicle for student personality and creativity that daily assignments generally didn’t. But who says daily assignments need to feel so everyday? Kids are weird, and the more weirdness that can be brought out by everyday learning, the better off schools and kids will be.
Unfortunately, education hasn’t always been known for wild and unbridled creativity and self-expression. Rigid curriculum and mandatory testing requirements only make it harder for schools to offer creative outlets. The processes for assessment, data collection, and standardized testing remain diametrically opposed to all the promising discourse about learning styles, differentiation, and student choice. At the end, this rigidity creates a system of learning focused on taking a test and passing a class, rather than learning to learn.
But even with something like the Common Core State Standards, the requirements are only for the content that students need to learn, not the way in which they learn it.
Why is it hard to believe that students aren’t capable of choosing the avenues in which they can fulfill content-learning requirements? To begin building educational pride in ownership, any part of learning that can be created from a student’s hands should be. Lesson activities, study methods, test prep, assessments—anything.
Not only will giving students agency create an inherent sense of investment in their own learning, it will also provide a deeper understanding of how education itself is constructed.
It’s the same principle as teaching a man to fish: If a kid reads a rubric, they learn to follow your expectations. If the kids write the rubric, they learn to create the expectations on their own.
No matter how weird and wonderful education can get, we will still see some stubborn disengagement. But even though kids are weird, they’re not indecipherable.
On the contrary, kids tend to be very overt about the things that capture their interests—it’s usually the things they’re doing in class instead of classwork. Kids are playing co-op games, playing chess, watching TikToks, drawing marker tattoos, zoning out to music, you name it.
It’s easy to lament the distraction their devices provide, but hyperfocusing on controlling devices means overlooking an alternate viewpoint on the issue: Can those distractions be repackaged as learning?
(A caveat: The same old schoolwork done on a cellphone is still just the same old schoolwork.)
If students have limited agency over their learning, they are going to take their attention elsewhere. Students ultimately want to learn and will learn on their own if they have the right application for the concepts.
Need to teach color theory for art class? Why not explore that through creating makeup palettes or cake decorating?
Want a student to demonstrate proficiency in applied math? Let them redecorate their room!
Let the students and their imaginations go wild. But, you know, with documentation—which is a great segue into familiarizing the students with the inner workings of their school’s learning-management system.
By giving students the freedom to explore their passions and tracking what they choose, teachers can get a true picture of the students’ interests and strengths and where they could take these skills in their futures.
Giving up a portion of educational control to the young people is a big step into the unknown, but full transparency and authenticity paired with multiple avenues for feedback from all sides is the best step forward. Leaning into the weirdness of kids can be scary, but it would be a disservice to let your fear get in their way.
District leaders tend to take on an unwritten expectation to have irreproachable, tried-and-true educational practices happening under their purview. While this is an admirable aspiration, it can also lead to a trickledown of rigidity.
Teachers and leaders, send a straightforward message: “We’re trying a process new to us and new to the students. There will be times when we’re figuring it out together, but there will always be a lesson learned and opportunity for growth.”
Now get out there and get weird.
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