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My six-year-old son is an expert engineer. He can build an expansion bridge across our living room using Hot Wheels track and scotch tape. It is truly a marvel of physics and imagination. No one taught him how to do it. We gave him the Hot Wheels tracks, God and nature gave him a vision, and then we got out of his way. His first attempt failed miserably, I’m sure, and likely the second and third as well. He was not deterred, largely because no one told him he failed. No one even really noticed. It’s impossible to fail at vision until one accepts another’s judgment and gives up on the vision. My son built that bridge and because he deemed it a success, it became his bridge. He conceived it and he owned it.

No one who has ever had or taught young children can argue with the fact that learning is intrinsic, exciting, and unavoidable for them. Sadly, we often fail to see that older kids, those in middle or high school, possess the same wonder and capacity as their smaller, younger versions. They too, are learning all the time and what they learn is changing and shaping their world every day. But because they come into our classrooms bored and frustrated with what they’re going to be “forced” to do for the next 45 to 90 minutes, we mistake them for kids who “don’t care about learning” or worse, kids “who get dumber every year.” The fact is that they can’t wait to get out of many of our classrooms so they can get back to learning those things that give them a sense of ownership and power.

The challenge for teachers of older kids is to draw on their natural desire to learn in order to guide them toward skills and capacities they’ll need in the future. One large obstacle is the widely held notion that we are the owners of this knowledge and it is our job to lease it out in small, well-ordered increments to our students who really have no idea what it is or why they’d want to possess it. The solution: let them own it. Give them the Hot Wheels track and the Scotch tape, answer what questions they have, and let them create. Their ownership of the work will lead to engagement in the activity, which in turn places authentic weight on the learning outcome.

Case in point:

In my African American History class, we read a chapter from W.E.B. Dubois’ “The Souls of Black Folks.” The reading was arduous and, in an elective class of widely varying abilities, we plodded through it slowly but surely. The chapter is an essay that reads very much like a short story and possesses all the intensity, humor, and tragedy of a classical Greek or Elizabethan drama. As I was pulling out my well-prepared study-questions and vocabulary activities, one of my students pointed out that the story would make a great play. Another agreed.

“It sure would,” I chimed in, “and maybe some day one of you will write it.”

“Why don’t we write it now?” asked one of my usually less engaged students.

I then nearly made the mistake of assuming that this student was trying to stall, attempting to put me off from the regularly scheduled programming, and he may have been. But several other students were already showing enthusiasm for the idea.

“Wait a second,” said me the wise teacher, “there’s only four weeks of school left. Do you guys know how long it takes to write a play?”

“Four weeks,” came the answer from the kid who is now one of my favorite students (and teachers) ever.

With some reluctance, I put my lesson plans back in the filing cabinet and began working with the 15 students in the class to divide the work into acts, structure the writing process, and find the resources we’d need to write a dramatic adaptation of Dubois in four weeks. The results were staggering.

In the last four weeks of school (usually the hardest time to keep kids engaged), I did not once have to coerce a single student to stay on task. They coerced each other. I didn’t have to ask them twice to show me their progress. They were eager to show me how far they’d gotten, what problems they were running into and what ideas they had to overcome them. All I had to do was gently remind them that this was their idea, that they said they could do it, and that the success or failure of it was on them. That was enough. They owned it, they knew it, and they made it work.

At the end of four weeks, on the last day of school, we ran through our three act play and while it had gaps and flaws and inconsistencies, I was sure of one thing: They knew a lot more about W.E.B. Dubois and how to write a drama then any of my originally planned lessons would have taught them. Where we ended up wasn’t where I’d planned to go, but it we went further and gained more from the journey than even I would have expected. Why? Because they were driving. They owned the work and they wanted to make sure it got done right.

Some would suggest that this was a happy accident, and it was. But the accident bled over into my thinking about how to plan work in the future. Student-constructed rubrics, collaborative syllabi, class websites designed and maintained by the students, project plans that allow students to customize the work to their interests and gifts. All of these ideas are adaptable to most disciplines and all of them, with the right amount of facility and guidance will give students a share in a joint-stock effort. What it requires of the teacher (and perhaps the hardest thing the teacher will ever have to do) is to give up ownership of the knowledge and join the student in the learning process.

The ancillary benefits of such efforts are intangible, but no less valuable. Perhaps the greatest outcome of letting them own it is that they might want to come back tomorrow. They might want to understand the content because it will help them get the work done right. They might even feel pride and accomplishment in what they do in school, and isn’t that the ideal? Isn’t that what we all want for our kids, the ones at home in the living room and the ones sitting in front of us in our classrooms?