(This is my twenty-fifth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
The Hechinger Report has some great writers who hit important points as they cover news stories about education. They also have frequent “Opinion” pieces which tend to be guest essays, frequently written by someone with a vested interest in having you buy into the idea(s) they’re selling.
They might be good ideas! However, it’s always a good idea to understand bias exists and look at the work through that lens. (I don’t exempt myself from this. Everything I put on this site has bias, because it’s MY website. We tend to see news sites in a different light, though.)
Take, for example, a recent opinion piece by Lenore Skenazy on letting children play rather than providing guided instruction.
The author has a book on the subject as well as a nonprofit to promote these ideas. The bias is clearly there. This is not a news story so much as an ad read for their ideas.
They aren’t bad ideas.
One of the things I enjoy doing in my K-5 classes is giving students a day to just experience a new tool. Most times I’ll go over some basics “Your brush options are over here on the left, the color picker works like this,” but after that I let them loose.
I never go over everything. First, there’s too much. The only ones who’d get to play with the tool would be the ones who stopped paying attention.
Just as important, though, would be how the students learn after that. Invariably, someone does something they think is cool. They yell to the rest of the class in a way that, for other lessons, would be seen as disruptive.
Suddenly, there’s a crowd of kids around one computer learning how to do a thing from one of their peers. They all go back to their seats, eager to try it out for themselves.
This usually happens several times in the same lesson. On occasion, I learn something new as well.
Later on I’ll come in with a more narrowed scope, where we use that same tool to make a certain kind of artwork. They learn new skills and techniques, then, often ones that translate to a variety of media in an outside of my classroom.
But they remember the joy they got from trying things out. That sticks with them as they incorporate those first day lessons into the new one.
That sticks with them.