Create a culture of questioning for learner agency and problem solving.
The learner editors and their teacher-advisor stared at a nearly blank bulletin board. “I just think we need to cancel it, gang,” he said, breaking the tentative silence among them.
Somehow or other, the Yearbook Editorial Team was expecting their usual vision-casting or theme-brainstorm session. But instead of pinning index cards to the board, last year’s cards all came down, into the trash.
“I get it . . .” The deflated Grade 12 editor-in-chief began. “This was just the one thing this year that was going to be normal.” COVID-19 had already ravaged their school and swallowed whole, not only opportunities to collaborate, but also, and largely, the chance to find their place in this school, and embrace their role as storytellers and editors. Generations of yearbook team members before would go on into the worlds of graphic design and publishing because of all the learning done by these learners. But without a book there was no purpose, and without purpose what was there to do? Identity and connection, even, seemed to drift away.
“And I get it,” she continued. “If nothing happens, there’s no book. It’s just that . . .” She trailed off, running her fingers through her red ponytail, staring at the board. The wheels were turning.
The teacher sympathized. But he could also see the writing on the wall—or the lack thereof. There was no getting out of this, despite how hard he’d worked to front-load collaborative, creative thinking and learner agency in this group.
Some advisors operate from a top-down structure. The worker bees carrying out the queen’s vision. But this group was different. This teacher worked to present problems to learners that engaged their voice in the solution.
To support this context, he had learners flip through old yearbooks, finding patterns, things they didn’t like, things they wanted to change, and he asked them why—to reason it out and come to a consensus. Let the best answer win, no matter whose it was. This deeper level of inquiry and collaboration, influenced by the Socratic method, was something shared in creative industries the world over. And it was something needed in this classroom. Learners started by sharing ideas with the rule that no idea was a bad one; all ideas built onto the ideas of others. This context supported risk taking and learner voice, and was critical for the work to become their own.
Discovery was a messy process with lots of obstacles, but, he told them, they needed to welcome the mess. In the mess, they’d find their way, and a bit more of themselves.
Four years before, the team saw disorder as the yearbooks jumped from event to team to event to club to team. “Okay, so we need to organize,” he told them. “How do we do that?” He may have had answers, but his weren’t necessarily important. It was their book. Whether it was turning the yearbook into a visual coffee-table book, taking away captions, adding them back in, reorganizing learner mugshots, or enacting a law that decreed that “Teachers shall not appear in the book in photos without learners,” the answers and ideas needed to be theirs.
In time, even the asking of questions became their job: “Does the book always need to look the same?” “Can we change up the order of the chapters?” “Can the book run chronologically?”
But that day, a pandemic-sized problem was bigger than any that the learners had solved before.
The teacher was about to dismiss them when the following occurred:
“What are those?” A Grade 10 learner pointed to the bottom of the nearly blank bulletin board at the cards labelled “Portraits.”
“Wait,” the editor bolted upright in her chair. She jumped up from her seat and went to the bookshelf, grabbed a book, and said, “Look,” fanning the book open, showing her team.
She explained her idea, completely ignoring her teacher’s efforts to regain the reins of the conversation. Now, the others were asking and answering their own questions.
“If this was the yearbook,” piped up the Grade 10 learner, “we’d see everyone. We’re cohorted and don’t even know half the school!”
Quiet you, the teacher communicated through his eyes. Don’t you know how much work that’s going to be? The teacher stifled himself. If the idea was a bad idea, they needed to get there on their own. But if it was a good idea, it needed to win, no matter whose it was. That was the rule.
Someone began to take notes, the editor grabbed a whiteboard marker, and the teacher sat back, watching them find themselves and each other in the process.
In the past, he had laid out the puzzle pieces, turning each over, isolating the edges. “Why not try this one in the corner?” “Does this one fit?” Now, after all that work, even when the box top is lost, the kids can still puzzle something out together, without much questioning or input from him at all.
The 2020/2021 yearbook was published without extracurricular activities, without pictures of school-wide events, and without sports, music, or drama. What was in it, you ask? Portraits. Beautiful full page spread portraits of every learner, taken in a special place at school or home with something or someone that defined them.
Over a year later, mask mandates a bad memory and the yearbook printed, the teacher heard a knock at the door from a substitute teacher from down the hall.
“I used to put the yearbook together at my school, before I retired. Just wanted to say you guys really figured it out! I’ve seen a lot of terrible COVID yearbooks. I’ve never seen anything like this one.” He held their book, titled This Is Us in his hands.
“Well, I wanted to cancel it altogether. But the kids—that was all their idea.”
