Spring Break Learning

I am spending a lot of time these days thinking about learning in a different way. Background knowledge, experiences, and seeing new things have always been important parts of learning, but having a five-year old at home who is learning so much these days has shed a whole new light on the importance of interacting with things to learn. We really haven't tapped into this brand of learning the way we should have over the last few decades. Sure there have had field trips and reports about summer vacation, but learning as exploration has truly slipped into the central tenants of my philosophy on learning. It seems so common sense to write, but I look around at all of our structures and traditions, and so many of them involve removing experience and removed the wow and wonder that I saw in the eyes of my daughter at the aquarium during spring break. In order to ignite passion and a desire to make a difference, we really need to get students to get the importance of local, but push and push for global experiences.