A thorough Jan. 9 KQED article featured new research from professor Henry Jenkins and the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab about ways to develop learning approaches in classrooms.

Jenkins, the Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, is the author of a landmark 2006 white paper: Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, which outlined the challenges facing educators in a new media world filled with students who are engaged participants instead of passive observers. From the article:

In an effort to change how American schools think about teaching, Jenkins’ team developed a strategy called PLAY (Participatory Learning and You) to explain the exploratory and experimental approach to teaching they think students would benefit from. The team worked with teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and recently released a series of studies that describe what they found. “PLAY describes a mode of experimentation, of testing materials, trying out new solutions, exploring new horizons,” Jenkins said. It’s how kids interact with games – throwing themselves in without reading the rules, testing the limits and feeling free to try and fail. But this learning style is hard to achieve in a system ruled by high-stakes testing where there is no room for students to fail. Everything they do goes on their academic record and they have become unaccustomed to experimenting."