Applying value creation pedagogy is as easy as pouring a drip of color into a glass of water. The addition can be done in a rather easy way, but all the water in the glass changes color. Applied to pedagogy, a teacher can keep most of her teaching plans intact, and just add a small assignment that lets students try to apply some of the knowledge and skills from the curriculum to create value to someone else. Preferably it should be someone they can interact with personally, since human interaction boosts motivation. It can be left to the student to decide upon which part of the curriculum to create value with, which type of value to create and whom to interact with and create value for. A question that can start this process is: “For whom could this knowledge be valuable today?”.
For whom are we doing this?
Students create a large number of artifacts when in schools and colleges. Common artifacts are texts, reports, stories, posters, presentations, videos, plays, concerts and magazines. Such artifacts represent a good starting point in value creation pedagogy. Students and teachers could simply ask themselves before they start to produce a new artifact: “For whom are we doing this?”. This simple question starts a creative process of searching for people who might appreciate the artifact they are about to create. It represents a much more engaging alternative to the common question from students: “Why are we doing this?”.
How can we connect to someone else?
A key aspect of value creation pedagogy is students who get to interact with other people. Tweaking the teaching is then much about how to get some minor aspect of external interaction into the current teaching plans. The external person could be someone else in the class, it could be someone in the school, or someone outside the school. The more unknown and remote the person a student interacts with is, the more powerful value creation pedagogy becomes, but also the more scary it becomes. Tweaking often implies to let students start to create value for and interact with people relatively close to them, such as classmates, other students in school and people outside school they already know.
