Part 1: Authentic Intellectual Work/Authentic Instruction & Assessment
What is Authentic Intellectual Work? “Authentic intellectual work refers to the complex work adults do to make informed decisions and accomplish tasks. It involves original application of knowledge and skills, rather than simply routine use of facts and procedures. Therefore, for students, authentic intellectual work results in a product or presentation that has meaning or value beyond the classroom.” as described straight from Wikipedia.
You are asking yourself, “Well yeah, but we all use what we learned in school on the job, how is this different”? Well, did you actually do anything that actually could have been a job while in school? That is what Authentic Intellectual Work is all about. It is the application of knowledge and skills into assignments or projects that would create an end product that hold value outside of the constrained walls of academia. What does that mean? Let’s say that an english teacher assigns her class a project where they have to create a social media profile for a famous English Author, like Shakespeare. You have to write a bio, mention date of birth, hobbies, interests, make a few posts that would be accurate. You have the same amount of research being done that you would for a long report or essay, however, you are learning how to create engaging social media as well. That is a skill with immeasurable value outside fo the classroom. But let’s drill down a bit more into Authentic Intellectual Work shall we?
There are three main parts top the framework of Authentic Intellectual Works and are as follows:
Construction of Knowledge
The construction of knowledge as I see it is looking into your own past experiences, finding similarities to prior problems and then using your prior knowledge, skills, and insight to come up with a solution for the challenge at hand. I actually use this quite a bit. I have read quite a bit of literature, and some of it was old English gentleman diaries and such, or watching documentaries about things, and some of it has come from the type of games I play, called Role Playing Games. I have applied knowledge I acquired from these things and used them to solve challenges in real life.
Disciplined Inquiry
My interpretation of disciplined inquiry is basically looking for things that match the same problem you are currently facing with things from your past, that are pretty much same-same with minor variations. In my own prior professional life, this was much like the same process in which we would do legal research. Bob sues Linda because she ran him over while he was jogging at night dressed in black from head to toe and wearing noise cancelling headphones with no reflectors on. In this situation, Linda is my client, I would look for precedent with similar variables, someone dressed darkly, getting hit in the middle of night, and wearing something that would not only prevent them from being seen, but be so distracting they could not hear in their environment. If I could find a case with all four of those criteria where the defendant won, I could very well use the same strategy for my client. If I couldn’t find one case that had all four in it, I would have to Frankenstein a few cases together and work from there to develop a good defensive strategy.
Value Beyond School
Students need to present their findings/knowledge in a way that would represent what one would expect in a real world work environment. I gave a great example earlier in regards to creating the social profile for Shakespeare. There are a lot of businesses that have no idea how to work with social media, or don’t have time. You can make yourself very useful to people by being able to do things of that nature for them.
Part 2: 2017 National Education Technology Plan Update
I found the plan used by Maggie Bolado to be my favorite one. Coming up with a plan to get students to design an app to help a visually impaired student to navigate the campus was not only ingenious, but the students who participated learned a real life skill that has value outside of the classroom. According to an article by Brittany Hainzinger from App Developer Magazine, since February 2020 there has been a 198% jump in the number of total apps in Appy Pie. Coding is an extremely useful skill to practice in the classroom because app development is where you are going to see your next nouveau riche boom come from.
Part 3: Triple E Framework
The example regarding the app development from Reimagining the Role of Technology in Education is definitely on the Extension side of the Triple E world. It gave the students ways to connect to the real-world. They were receiving feedback from people submitting feedback and requests in from their developer account. It literally hit all three keys for Extended learning, it allowed students to learn outside of the typical school day, it bridged school learning with everyday life experiences and it allowed the students to build skills (coding, which actually develops logic, so helpful even outside of coding) that they could definitely take to several corporations or decided to live the dream and just work for themselves making apps to sell with a 30% Apple tax.
Citations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_for_authentic_intellectual_work
Hainzinger, B. (2020, May 29). Increase in app development since start of COVID-19. Retrieved September 04, 2020, from https://appdevelopermagazine.com/increase-in-app-development-since-start-of-covid-19/
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology, Reimagining the Role of Technology in Education: 2017 National Education Technology Plan Update, Washington, D.C.,
2017.
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