Technicolor Learning in Six Steps

Note: For readers especially pressed for time, key takeaways and action steps for this post are provided at the end.

National test scores are plummeting. Teachers are quitting. School budgets are shrinking. The bad news keeps rolling in, like waves in an ocean that is really mean and hellbent on discouraging parents.

But reader, this unrelenting bad news is not going to derail us or our kids. There is too much that we can do to help supplement our kids' learning and to coach/coax them toward a better educational experience than we ever had.

It is like the famous scene in The Wizard of Oz when young Dorothy Gale opens the door of her house, which has just plummeted from the sky, and steps from her sepia-colored bedroom into the brilliant Technicolor world of Munchkinland.

That is the level of transformation in the education of our kids that we can facilitate, though admittedly the shift to a more Technicolor educational experience may be a more gradual process. 

We really can do it, though, and this post provides a number of especially practical strategies to try out with your kids, all of which have the potential to help nudge your kids toward enjoying a more vivid educational experience.

In addition to providing these six practices, this essay includes tips for increasing the likelihood that your kids will actually act on these strategies, which in the end is the most important information of all.

1. Enhance classes with outside resources

In elementary school, my kids each took a field trip to an old fashioned one-room schoolhouse. There they spent the day dressed like characters from Little House on the Prairie and used slates to write on and ate from lunch pails.

That was all sweet, but I wish there was also a day when they would pay a visit to a multi-roomed schoolhouse circa the 1970s when I was a youngster. They would dress in corduroys, feather their hair, and head off to school, while their parents would get to smoke cigarettes, have cocktails at lunch, and let the kids wander around without having a very clear understanding of where exactly the kids were or what they were doing. Ah, the ‘70s!

Among the marvels they would experience at the multi-room school would be things like film strips and looking information up via card catalogs and library books. Is there anything more low-tech than the film strip? It was the educational equivalent of the vibrating exercise belt—as effective at imparting information as those jiggling belts were at melting away pounds off the derrieres they worked over. 

Everything has changed now. Our kids have access to all of the information in the world, and the information is often in unbelievably compelling formats. Think learning about nature from David Attenborough or learning about space from Will Smith. It is not just amazing documentaries that can inform kids; there are audio books, podcast episodes, Wikipedia entries, online magazines and newspapers, and countless YouTube videos, many posted by other teachers looking to help kids for free.

In a perfect world, each class your child takes would routinely incorporate the best of additional real-world content in order to supplement the learning in class, but for the 99 percent of the individuals reading this post, that is not currently the case. Inexplicably, it rarely happens.

Which means that we parents need to take matters into our own hands; we can set a new standard for our family, our household, and the standard is this: we consistently supplement the learning provided by our schools.

There are many ways to implement a strategy in support of this standard. Maybe you start with a low, low bar and it is just having your kids pick one supplemental resource for one of their classes every new term. Or maybe it is multiple resources for every class. Maybe they supplement every new unit.

Or possibly you go wild and create an entire addendum to the class syllabus (for an entire post on this later notion, see the previous post Syllabus Makeover Edition).

Regardless of the level at which your family is able to make this a practice, it is essential that we move in this direction. Given the access we have to information and content, it is just too likely that even a modest amount of quality outside content will dramatically raise the level of actual learning your kids experience on a given topic.

The fact is this: my kids are far more often recalling and reminding me of information that they learned from outside resources than they are of in-class content.

2. Share nuggets with your teacher

One of the most hopeful and surprising aspects of my efforts to head down the path of working with my kids to supplement their education is how they have at times been inspired to share their outside learning with their teachers and also how receptive the teachers have been to this sharing.

I didn’t anticipate that, but it is so encouraging. Our teachers are doing heroic work with the circumstances they are faced with and in the midst of those efforts their attitudes about my kids’ sharing from outside learning efforts seems to be: yes, great, bring it on.

As your kids experiment with outside resources along the lines described above, they are going to have these moments of getting excited about something they learn, something that was not assigned in class—hopefully so excited that they too want to share with their teachers. 

Based on our experience, this is something to encourage, possibly even mandate (if encouragement isn’t enough). Sharing outside information with one’s teacher is actually a form of teaching, teaching one’s teacher, and that, not surprisingly, is a welcome boost to your child’s confidence, a boost that may drive still more interest in outside learning.

3. Ask teachers for help

I went through school with an unconscious agenda that I should, as a general rule, stay off the metaphorical radar of all of my teachers. At the time, this seemed wise. Sometimes it was out of fear of looking stupid. Other times it was because I hadn’t done my work. Still others it was because a teacher inspired fear. No matter the reason, it was, in hindsight, so embarrassingly ill-advised.

Please help your kids to not be like me.

Your kids might be great at engaging with teachers, but many are not. Too many are spooked by seeing their teachers dealing with what is all educators’ least favorite part of their jobs, the scolding and remonstrating that is at times necessary for successful classroom management.

Asking teachers for help is a great way to break this spell. Even the seemingly harshest teacher will often come to life when given the chance to do the thing that led them into their career—to actually do some teaching. That is what they get do when asked for specific 1-to-1 assistance.

We need to encourage our kids to make this a regular practice. Even if it takes asking for an explanation of something they mostly understand. Just help your kids avoid following in my clueless footsteps, and they will quickly see the benefit this aspect of the teacher-student relationship.

It is another practice that has taken root in our home. I am repeatedly heartened how quickly my kids now respond to issues by suggesting: I’ll ask my teacher.

And the reality is that this type of help is part of the job description teachers; when our kids fail to take advantage of it, as I too often did, they are inadvertently selecting a lesser version of the already flawed current educational system. To not develop the practice of getting this sort of help is to handicap one’s own education.

And if they can develop this approach now, then, if they go on to college, they are more likely to be one of the students who actually show up to talk with their professors during office hours, which, as many professors note, surprisingly few students consistently take advantage of.

4. Make assignments about something they are honestly interested in

In the holiday classic, A Christmas Story, the kids in Ralphie’s class all write essays about what they want for Christmas (this was a less secular time in American education; such an essay topic now would break the internet through its now divisive nature). 

While all the other kids presumably wrote boringly about predictable wishes, often parroting what their friends were writing about, Ralphie takes a different path, writing what we can only assume was a stunning essay about his desire for an official Red Ryder carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock.

We all have topics that light us up and, while much of school is highly prescriptive, with all students doing similar work, there are the moments in the school year when choice enters the picture. Teachers assign projects that include the option for students to choose the book they are to read, or the topic they are going to research, etc.

Too often our kids don’t fully take advantage of these opportunities. The cage door of education is suddenly thrown open and they balk, staying on their perch, chirping nervously, rather than flying free.

As parents, this is the time to step in and encourage our kids to go big. Help them see that this is the moment to choose their own adventure, a moment that happens too infrequently. And it might even help to keep a list of topics that they have expressed interest in over time, so you are ready with ideas if they suggest, in that moment of choice, that they have none. Kids could even have one go-to passion topic and keep returning to it for school work year after year, going deeper into the topic each time.

For kids who have no shortage of interests and passions, we might encourage them to incorporate their outside interests into assignments that didn’t offer the option of student choice. There are more educators who welcome such deviations to assignments than we would imagine, as one teacher pointed out to me during a recent teacher-parent conference.

Some might object to this recommendation, pointing out the reality that, in the end, Ralphie received an F for his paper. But let’s be honest, a Red Ryder—he would shoot his eye out!

5. Go multimedia 

High on the list of ways that mainstream K-12 is behind the times—to a point that is flat out cringey (to use young people phrasing)—is the continued insistence on a very old school, two-dimensional approach to teaching communication (i.e., reading and writing).

Outside of school, life, as we adults are only too well aware, is very 3D, with audio, photos, video, slides, coding, and short snippets of text all increasingly coming into play. Inside of school, kids are only able to work with these additional communication tools, if at all, for special projects,.

This reality is of course absurd and maddening—both because our kids' future prospects will be enhanced by developing skills with these tools and because using them regularly would make school work more engaging. But in keeping with this approach of supplementing education, there is once more the option to take matters into our own hands.

This can be done by simply encouraging our kids to complete their written projects as assigned, but then to enhance them with other media. Supplement that paper on a trip to the museum with a selfie slide show with your kid next to great works of art, or the report on the Harlem Renaissance with TikTok inspired dance tribute to the Nicolas Brothers, or the review of Lord of the Flies simply with an audio version of their report. 

So, yes, turn in the work the teacher requested, just also get in the habit of providing some bonus features, whether the teacher wants them or not (they likely do).

It is nearly inevitable that an innovative EdTech company is going develop a platform for schools to use that will incorporate modern communication elements from things like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, podcast sites, and TitTok in such a way that kids will learn and demonstrate their learning in a multimedia environment. It just hasn’t happened yet.

For our kids who are in school now, in this period pre-innovation, the time to start incorporating a far wider range of communication tools is now.

6. The holy grail: extra credit for no credit

Finally, the ultimate in learning for learning’s sake: the assignment that isn’t an assignment and is submitted with no expectation of extra credit—a proposition that may seem like the most far-fetched idea of all, but also holds the most promise for inspiring a a quantum leap in your child’s relationship to learning.

In their earlier years, our kids are creation machines, from reenacting mankind’s first cave art as they take their crayons to our walls, to crazily coveting the cardboard core that becomes available the moment the last ply of toilet paper is consumed so they can build something amazing with that tube and all the others they have been hoarding.

This instinct to make a mark, to build, to express may recede as kids age, but it doesn’t totally go away. And anytime it does manifest, we parents should help our kids make the most of the experience by connecting some of those personal projects in some way to school.

Maybe they become obsessed with bedazzling jeans. Or they are suddenly inspired to overhaul the garage into a terrifying haunted house for Halloween. Or they take a great series of photos of abandoned buildings on a family road trip. Or they have a knack for unusually funny play-by-play during Fortnite battles with friends.

A powerful lesson for kids when they do engage in these more spontaneous projects it to encourage them to document their efforts and then share them with a teacher, whether that teacher’s subject area is related to the project, or the educator is simply someone receptive to outside work.

This documenting could be as simple as a quick how-to photo series on bedazzling, a video of the haunted house, a book of the road trip photos, or a recording of the comedic Fortnite play-by-play.

The epic insight that they ideally get a sense for is that, when it comes to their mental development and lifelong learning, it is all one thing, and however formal and separate it might seem, school is just a tool, just part of this continuum of learning about the world, responding to it, engaging with it, and adding our creations to it.

Making these steps actually happen

Sharing advice or best practices, while helpful, is next to meaningless if we aren’t able to implement them—right up there with telling me that I should consume fewer calories than I expend if I am trying to lose weight, as I decide, after finishing my dinner, to down the malt and fries that my kid barely touched (but it would have gone to waste!).

What works best in terms of getting our kids to try things, though, varies so widely. In our house, we have one kid who is the eminently coachable self-starter who just needs the information and to be pointed in the right direction, and off that kid goes.

For the other child, that would be a disastrous approach. Instead, she responds well to the sense that a parent is right there as she tries something new. Give her a parent riding shotgun and she will try just about anything.

Some of you have kids who, if the above list of steps were presented in a checklist form, and a gold star sticker was provided for checking all the boxes, that might be enough to get them going, while other kids would be happy to work through the steps and check the boxes as long as there was a financial incentive at the end.

The variations go on and on, right? From the kid who requires the threat of losing Xbox time and will only try half of these ideas even when Xbox is on the line, to the kid who is going to respond with anger, refuse to try anything new and will only reveal twenty years later that they did try the strategies and belatedly tell us what a huge difference they made.

Given all of that variety, it is probably best to emphasize that these strategies, like everything else in life, are just experiments. The strategy that works is the one that works. We are all continually experimenting, with some things working and others not, but every effort yielding valuable information that helps inform future efforts (which is a long way of saying: remember, there is no such thing as failure).

And we should also remember that these efforts to help bring learning to life, to imbue the educational experience with glorious Oz-like Technicolor, is not the sort of thing that will change as easily as throwing open a single door.

Instead, this shift to a more vivid, engaging education is about steady, day-in-and-day-out, never-give-up, incremental progress—the sort of incremental effort that carved out the Grand Canyon, another Technicolor marvel.

Take-aways, caveats, details, fine print

• We should encourage our kids to take steps and follow practices that can help transform their experience with school into something more in line with the vivid, engaging version of education that we all hope for.

• Step 1 — Commit to regularly complement what teachers are teaching with highly engaging outside resources, including documentaries, podcasts, audiobooks, and YouTube videos.

• Step 2 — Share some of this outside learning with their teachers, which can have a profound effect on our kids as they experience a sense of teaching and even inspiring their teachers.

• Step 3 — Get in the practice of regularly asking teachers for help, which a surprising number of kids avoid at all costs, though this is A form of interaction where many educators are at their best.

• Step 4 — Make sure to take advantage of opportunities to make assignments and projects about topics kids are actually interested in—possibly even hijacking assignments where the option to choose was not part of the teacher’s plan.

• Step 5 — Supplement traditional written assignments with different media, including images, video, sound, coding, even if these have to be presented as separate bonus features.

• Step 6 — Find ways to share outside interests and creations with teachers as a way of closing the loop between school and non-school life, helping kids experience that it is all part of a single process of mental development and lifelong learning.

• Practices like these, and others that we come across, will sometimes hit and sometimes miss, but over time can make a dramatic difference in the degree that school engages our kids and motivates them to lean into learning.