My son Tag is a Lego-maniac.  His pudgy fingers built tall columns of soft, red and blue Legos when he was 2.  At the age of four, his nimble hands foraged through his 5-pound tub of space Legos to recreate the spaceships he had seen in his dreams.  Now, at eight, he faithfully requests Star Wars Lego kits for his birthdays and Christmas, only to build the AT-AT kit from a manual one day, destroy it the next, and from its pieces create a rebel ship that has yet to appear in any Star Wars film.  After stepping on and over numerous creations in various stages of construction and demise, I now keep the door to Tag’s walk-in closet closed. To keep the sharp pieces from getting underfoot.  To contain the mess.

I wonder how many times I attempted to contain the mess of my students’ learning as well.  When they struggled with writing, did I swiftly replace their awkward prose with my own, or did I ask them to scribble more, to make meaning, to trust their own voices?  As they read a difficult text, did I give them a step-by-step manual for reading my way, or did I help them ask questions of the text, create hypotheses and find their flaws, and notice how the beauty of language moves us all?  I hope on most days I guided them through the latter.

Real learning requires students to think, and thinking is a messy business.

In a recent Tedx-Talk, Dr. Derek Cabrera uses Legos as a metaphor for what is happening in education.  He contends that Lego kits inhibit creativity and thought by only asking one person to think creatively: the designer of the kit, not the child putting it together. Cabrera believes we can help our students get more comfortable in the mess of learning by practicing 4 thinking skills throughout their education: Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives (DSRP).  By teaching these skills, educators will put thinking back on the desks of students and stop packaging the right answers for them in neat little kits.

Those kits don’t last very long, anyway.  Just ask Tag.

What does messy learning look like in your classroom?