Creating Creators

Growing up, I loved my Saturday morning cartoons. I would wake up way too early, run downstairs, and turn on the TV to find out what happened next to the X-Men. This was my entertainment. Characters that were created 20 years before I was born appearing on a show that was created thousands of miles away.

This isn’t quite the case with the students I’m teaching. Sure, there are still shows and movies that they tune into. Maybe of a different style, and maybe delivered over a different medium, but that part is basically the same. What’s different is that this is only a portion of their entertainment diet. They jump on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram to be entertained by their peers. And, more importantly, they create their own content to entertain others.

As a kid my role in entertainment was to be the consumer. Theirs is to be the creator. That’s a sizeable shift, and it’s one that should be mirrored in our schools.

Our kids are demanding to be creators, and we need to provide them the opportunities and forums to do so. We need to be much more considerate of an audience when crafting assignments. If we only ask students to create for us, with the sole reinforcement being a symbolic letter penciled in atop the page, we’re going to lose them. They are engaged when they are able to to share their work with others. We, as educators, can use this to help them attain mastery in our classes.

I think back to my time in the classroom and I cringe at all the missed opportunities I had to present meaningful assignments completed for an authentic audience.

But, just rethinking our assignments is insufficient, we also need to rethink our assessments. In order to do this, it’s essential to shift our goals from work-completion to mastery (the principles of Universal Designs for Learning can help with this). That’s not to say that we need to tear up all our multiple choice tests and abolish the EOGs. Those type of assessments can be beneficial at measuring concrete skills and providing us with quantitative data that we can use to improve our instruction. These traditional methods, however, can’t measure everything, and this is where we can utilize our students’ yearning to become creators to help them become proficient. For example, we can set up digital portfolios to allow students to showcase their work. They have platforms to present their jokes, pictures, thoughts, and everyday happenings; why not set them up with platforms to present their work?

With that said we need to do this carefully and consciously. By tapping into their yearning for fame, we potentially encourage a distorted set of principles. Just as how we don’t want our students to value the symbolic letter grade they receive more than the actual learning, we also don’t want them to value the likes they receive more than the actual learning.

To get a sense of what this looks like, we can turn to Logan Paul, who serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when someone blindly capitalizes on this new market of content creators.

Logan Paul is a remarkably successful entertainer. His YouTube page has over 16 million subscribers and he routinely receives over 30 million views for each of his videos. The ad revenue that stems from those hits earns him over 12 million dollars a year, according to Forbes. He fills arenas with his appearances. Fans flock to airports when he arrives. He has made a living off of being a content creator on social platforms. It is his career and it seemingly his identity. And where does it lead?

Earlier this year, it led to Paul laughing as he looked upon a dead body in Japan, bragging that “you’re never going to see a video like this again.” It led to the backlash teaching him nothing, as he later returned to his channel with more click-baity actions, pretending to eat tide pods and tazing rats. And why not? He gained nearly 100,000 subscribers after these two videos. Clearly this is a man whose principal motivation is fame. Clearly this is a man who we don’t want our students to emulate.

Which brings me to this question: How do we leverage our students need to be creators to help them attain mastery without creating a generation of youths who become driven by fame alone?

If I’m being honest, I don’t have a great answer for this. I started this post hoping that I would write myself into the solution, but I still haven’t found it. I do know one thing though, this is not a question that we can ignore. Our students today face temptations that most of us never did while we were growing up. While we may not agree with all of it, we also can’t run from it. We have to embrace this dilemma and help them to become the best people they can. Not only in the classroom, but also out in the world.