Education is Entertainment! Edutainment!

Celebrities, Reality TV, Youtube stars, and all who entertain people capture the attention of our students. They have a flare for hitting the right chords and keep our students coming back for more. Every word, action, and social media post is followed, noted, and shared. No one has to tell them to keep up with the news, as they are already aware of things as they happen. Why then does being in a classroom, learning something that is supposed to be meaningful, viewed as tedious work or something that must be serious and boring?

I can spend hours watching Myth Busters to learn science, but would not care for the science class lecture about the same idea. I can be transported into history from the History channel documentary or show, but will be falling asleep from the history lesson. I can be entranced by a movie that demonstrates ELA standards, but have a hard time trying to be engaged in an ELA lesson instructed by one teacher to 36 students. The Food Network provides real hands on engaging ways to learn cooking, but the cooking class boils down to kitchen safety, cooking only one thing once a week, and a test. There is a test to cook? Why can't learning and school be entertaining?

Too often, traditions and structures of learning and education are defined to steer students into the mindset that learning cannot be entertaining and fun. There are no rules and regulations that say entertainment must be extracted from all learning. There are no wise strategies that put learning into a lecture, guided practice, independent practice, test format. The teachers students remember are the ones who connect, relate, and make learning fun. They are not the ones who were able to help drill standards and boring.

Entertainment maybe a word that has a negative connotation to some, when related to education, but when we are out watching a movie or at home watching our weekly show, entertainment is a loved word. This should be brought to our schools and education. Edutainment should be the vehicle in which instruction should be delivered. Teachers have the unenviable job of teaching standards to diverse groups of students, but viewed in the lens of edutainment, the job can be more enjoyable. What negative thing can come from a teacher trying to engage students by entertaining them and what student does not want to enjoy what they are learning delivered in a mode that is entertaining? Look through the lens of when one was once a student and consider how more engaged in school one would be learning lessons that were similar to the educational shows that our students love watching on TV. Edutainment is rated E for everyone!