Senior Speaks: The Learning Laboratory: Strap on your IMSA Goggles

Our next Senior Speaks comes from our beloved Student Council President, Vinesh Kannan. He sheds light on “IMSA Goggles” and just what they mean for him and for IMSA. 

To me, the term “IMSA Goggles” has a decidedly different role than the metaphor that some use to explain their lowered standards of sexual lust. My IMSA goggles are the required eyewear for when my mind ventures into one of the most prized, and idealistic, concepts in constructivist education: “the Learning Laboratory.”

For some, the words learning laboratory evoke traumatic images of students being injected with dubious chemicals and being put through rigorous testing, all while deranged researchers study their stressors and responses on the oscillating graph of GPA over time.

Instead, I want you to imagine a pioneering workshop where students are being outfitted with cutting edge technology that enhances their learning, whiteboards are strewn with innovative ideas for adapting to the most rigorous and complex challenges in education, and students and adults alike are engaged in spirited discussion about how to change the very rules of traditional schooling structures.

This is what IMSA looked like in the 1990’s, when it launched the Perspectives Program. A team of teachers representing every department worked with students who shared their classes, utilizing our infamous I-Days to discover learning insights, create innovative ways to integrate interdisciplinary curriculum, and host rich real-world educational experiences dreamed up by students.

In my conversations with IMSA’s founding administrators, faculty, and students, all are reluctant to call IMSA a school, preferring the idea of a learning laboratory. They say: “if we called IMSA a school, we’d spend too much time talking about what it isn’t than what it is.” I believe that for the brightest students in the state, my classmates, “school” either bores or stresses them. A learning laboratory has a much more stimulating calling. It’s about time that we started talking about what it is:

A community in which all members experiment with conditions, processes, and radical ideas that strengthen the development of the whole person, utilizing results to produce stronger teachers and students as well as enable a higher level of learning beyond its borders.

This is my definition but right now it doesn’t fit IMSA because our Academy is a hybrid between school and laboratory. This makes it hard to reap the benefits of a laboratory culture and even makes people fearful of it.

The first misconception people have about a learning laboratory is that students are the subjects of experimentation. If that was true, then the laboratory would be looking for a random sampling for its student body. However, a learning laboratory really needs students as experimenters in their own right: it needs students who can learn actively. This is the mark of the best and brightest students. IMSA’s buzzword of choice for this is metacognition: reflection on what makes critical thought happen… or “thinking about thinking,” if you prefer. Metacognition is the process by which experimenters in a learning laboratory seek out positive results. The inspirational moment of identifying a connection between different subjects is an experience in metacognition. So, too, is the frustrating moment of struggling on an assignment because it is irrelevant to your learning goals. In a school, those moments are suppressed. Brilliant interdisciplinary students are told that they are off-task and should focus on a single topic. Mature, motivated students are told that they are lazy and must do the work they are told to.

If you can relate to those moments, then a learning laboratory needs you. In the environment I envision for you, teachers do not fault students for negative outcomes, they want to join forces with students to create a classroom that is more engaging, growth-oriented, and meaningful: even if that means tearing down the conventional idea of a classroom. This is because learning laboratory teachers understand that meaning is created by the student, not dictated by an instructor. These teachers have witnessed students learn the “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” call and how to write a critical essay but not remember complicated formulas or citation styles. Their goal, and the laboratory’s goal, is to make learning “sticky” rather than a chore. So, they encourage their students to reflect on how they learn best, even letting them design innovative lesson plans and instructional tools that reveal the intricate awe behind what they are learning. To a student experimenter, all of the beakers, centrifuges, and gravity simulators of a learning laboratory are available to test and transform what the next generation of education should look like. In this laboratory, no one has a wrong answer: just the keys to making the neural synapses occur the next time around.

But IMSA hasn’t fully embraced students as experimenters and is thus caught in the no man’s land between school and laboratory. The result: shots being fired. Students resent their teachers for putting them through uselessly difficult problems and teachers resent students for slacking off. Under these conditions, it is difficult to create a pipeline for students to lead academic experiments like dreaming up a new classroom format, testing a new learning tool, or changing the content of a course.

If you want to dig IMSA out of this battlefield, your job as a student should be to treat metacognition as more than just a buzzword. Instead of letting shots fire, let neural synapses fire. You don’t need a Ph.D. to do this. Read up on Dr. Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning: those will give you a start. Consider how you can make your learning experiences challenging, but not suffocating. Come up with new ways to make a topic that intrigues you resonate with disinterested classmates. I encourage you to invoke your sense of scientific inquiry by tackling questions like these while you’re doing your homework. That’s a time when the state of your learning is more apparent to you than usual.

I understand that many students feel that they don’t have the time to ponder these issues, even though they are highly relevant to your education. This is another symptom of being caught between a school and laboratory. IMSA should better utilize its evaluation metrics to make metacognition a built-in element of academics. Currently, evaluation surveys tell students that metacognition is a text box to be filled with pithy commentary on a question that asks them about course happenings from four months earlier. A laboratory simply cannot function without strong metrics and one of the most useful qualities of relevant measurement is rapid change. I look to Vanderbilt’s Muddiest Point exercise: at the end of a class session, the instructor distributes a short form to every student asking them to share the content piece that was least clear to them during the day. The class consensus will be the starting point of the next day’s work, in an attempt to firm up students’ understanding. Rapid metrics help students capture insights about learning with the immediate payoff of making their learning deeper the next time around. This is preferable to reflections where the immediate payoff is leaving class early and hoping that something will change for future students.

Rapid measurement is just one example of potent metrics. A true learning laboratory develops other innovative evaluation techniques by experimenting on the measurements used to measure experiments. Sound Meta? It is, and Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire is already doing it. Exeter created METIC: The Midterm Effort To Improve Courses. During METIC, teachers in every course design their own pioneering feedback tools. Some have their students write an essay about the experiences and personal development of a fictional student taking the course a decade in the future, in its much-improved form. Others host conversations about how to refine elements of the course over an enjoyable game of soccer.

Most researchers would frown upon METIC as an overly creative approach to metrics, but that’s because they’re the kind of stuck up, statistics-obsessed curmudgeons that would never work at a learning laboratory in the first place. Quantitative and standardized metrics have their place in the game that is academic experimentation, but not during its artistic and invigorating play time. They come when others want to validate and reproduce the final score. METIC-style tools can fill the gap: they infuse in academics qualitative considerations that assess experimental progress as well as affirm students’ role as experimenters. Moreover, they acknowledge that no single measurement will apply to all cases.

Dispelling the idea of a panacea is also crucial in another domain of the learning laboratory: experimental ethics. Basic experimental ethics requires that researchers predict risks and offer support structures to mitigate them. Right now, IMSA has the challenge of producing results in the first place without planting the seeds of academic apathy or inflicting mental health problems on its students. Unfortunately, prevailing support structures try to be a cure-all. As a major support mechanism at IMSA, Counselor Excused Absences are designed to give students a personalized reprieve from pressure, but have been tainted by students who seek to abuse the system. The result is a stigma among teachers and students that those who utilize “Stress Days” are either weak or cheating.

A learning laboratory must recognize that every kind of experiment needs different kinds of support structures. If you are drawn to the idea of a uniquely challenging education but are worried that the rigor will drain your energy instead of inspire it, I envision for you a learning laboratory that cares about generating new support systems just as much as it does about crafting innovative courses and stronger metrics. I can offer one starting point for anyone interested in diving into impact of learning on mental health and happiness: look up Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow Model. I promise it will be easier to grasp than the pronunciation of his name.

This is my orientation for you to the campus of a learning laboratory. I have introduced you to metacognition, which makes learning more active; metrics, which makes learning more adaptable; and support structures, which makes learning healthier. If IMSA can fulfill these as a community, not only do individuals stand to become stronger learners, but the state, nation, and world stand to gain cutting-edge techniques for enhancing education.

The ideas I espouse have resonated with generations of educators and more importantly, students. Many of them came to IMSA, started new programs at IMSA, and gave back to IMSA as alumni because they wanted to see the dream of a learning laboratory realized. We have not yet reached that point. If these ideas resonate with you, then take action to ensure that you and those who follow you will not have to dream about a learning laboratory and instead, be engaged in building and improving one. There are steps you can take now: talk with a teacher to find out how they are experimenting in your classroom, create an extracurricular group that learns about an intriguing topic in innovative ways, or start prototyping a new educational tool for someone who learns in a different way than you do. The learning laboratory exists in what you and your classmates can create with the power of your minds, so strap on your IMSA goggles and start tinkering.