Homebound Parenting – Two Ingredients for Thriving

What are you reevaluating?

Parents and teachers are struggling right now, all around the world. How do we do THIS? How do we parent and teach, at home, in a crisis? What do we hold on to, and what do we let float away? We’re all reevaluating so many things right now.

What’s working
I’m getting to see the struggles and successes of parents and teachers from all ends of the spectrum right now. I lead one school, support others, and work with parents around the world —and some patterns are emerging around what is helping people not only survive during this time of strain and disruption, but to thrive.

Two key ingredients for thriving:
The first is this: Learn and grow BECAUSE of what is happening right now, not IN SPITE of it. One of the most damaging aspects of school and parenting is that we adults do the job of evaluating what’s important, and then make kids do it. There is such incredible opportunity right now to evaluate, together, what is important—to each of us individually, to our families and communities, for our readiness to reemerge into a new world—and to co-create a plan to get there together. There is no better curriculum in the world for children right now, no better preparation for life.

The second key ingredient is this: Move from “power-over” to “power-with”. I know so many families right now who are struggling with how to manage what we are all juggling, especially when it comes to our kids. How do we help them process this crisis? What about homework? screen time? chores? And what about our needs? The approaches I see NOT working are 1) adults stating what is and must be and enforcing it with our power and might, and 2) the opposite of that, giving up on our needs and our hopes and disengaging from our kids—finding it easier to serve their whims than argue over anything. What I see working is when adults work with kids in partnership—not the normal kind where we invite them to partner with us to meet our needs, but a true partnership, where we approach need from a place of equity and mutual respect. From that rooted, supported space, I see families able to meet the needs of the household, of job, of school, of emotion—with resilience and grace.

Resources
I have two resources to offer you right now that are tailored to this moment.

1) TOOLS FOR THRIVING Free content from my Homebound Parenting class which I offer with Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE) Executive Director Bria Bloom. We are making videos available for free which cover the content we offer in our four-part class on Surviving Homebound Parenting. We talk about the principles of Partnership Parenting and examine them in practice around four key areas that are so real for parents right now: Chores, Homework, Screen Time, and Structure.

2) The Surviving Homebound Parenting live online coaching workshop, where we take that same content and work with attendees’ individual situations to understand what it looks like in practice. Our next class starts May 14th at 10AM PDT.

Closing thoughts
We’re all facing challenges of varying degrees right now, and each person’s trails are real for them—no less or more valid because of how they stand in relation to others. One thing we can all do, which can lessen the load, whatever our situation, is to recognize that we don’t need to pretend everything is okay for our kids. Of course we do not want to overwhelm them with our worries or fears, but we and they both benefit when we let our vulnerability show, and model for them how to not know exactly what to do in each moment and yet to face it with faith that our values and our care for each other will help guide us through.

All my very best from me and my family to you and yours.
Aaron

Building Self-evaluative Mindsets and Tools

I had a teacher recently ask how handle it when students ask if their work is “good”. She wants to help them, but doesn’t want to be seen as the ultimate authority on what is “good”.

Firstly, “authority” and “expertise” are not bad things, and we don’t want to remove that experience and skill from our teams. However, I totally get where she is coming from in terms of not wanting to train students to be constantly reliant on others for evaluation of quality.

When students ask a teacher for guidance on whether their work is “good”, I usually try to do the following:

Let them know anything I share in terms of evaluation is only my opinion, based on my own experience, while appreciating that they view my opinion as valuable
Be open about my desire to help them calibrate their own ability to evaluate product quality
Try to help them be more specific in their language. For instance I might say: “I’m not sure what you mean by “good”. Are you wondering if I think the client will be happy with it? Or if it meets the criteria you are designing towards? Or if I think it demonstrates knowledge of the skill you are trying to develop”? etc.

And finally, I would invite the students to help me evaluate my work at times as well, and each other’s work, so they build that evaluative skill as well as practice the language of inviting and sharing analysis of work.

I hope that’s helpful. I’d love comments on how others approach this subject with care with their students.

Assisted Accountability – The True Flipped Classroom

Eric Mazur introduced the flipped classroom to much interest a couple of decades ago. The idea—and a very good one—is that the time we have together in class is precious, and is being totally underutilized by a one-to-many dissemination of information. In the internet age, Mazur thought, why couldn’t we do the lecture outside of class, when homework would normally be done, and “work” with the concepts together, in class, when we had others around us to work with, not to mention the guidance of the expert teacher? Brilliant, no?

But I think there is an even more important flip that needs to follow. It’s flipped accountability. It’s part of a critical need to transform education by shifting the focus away from information and content (the stuff of 200 years ago) and towards skills and mindsets, to fully support development of human capacity.

Why do we need to shift? Two main reasons:

The focus on information is damaging our children through the opportunity cost of what they are missing (see the work of Peter Gray on the criticality of mixed age, free play to fully develop human capacities) and because of the learning principle of “how we teach teaches more than what we teach” (“Do this math because I say so, or else, and how dare you have your own interests”).
You actually learn content better when you are engaging with it as part of individually meaningful and socially relevant context

Before we move on, let’s dispel the myth that you have to sacrifice content in order to learn skills. It’s a false dichotomy that I’ve called out before. It is possible to “learn” content (or memorize, at least) without learning critical skills, but it is not possible to learn critical skills without learning content, and often much more deeply than through other means.

Value-based Learning: From Bake-sale to Brilliant

Schools all over are trying to figure out how to provide real-world learning for their students and many are beginning to realize how much a regular school schedule gets in the way of curating authentic learning experiences. Part of “real-world” is rethinking how we structure our time. I have previously written about the importance of “concentrated endeavor ” and wanted to share some of my experience creating and supporting off-time-table learning experiences through the lens of value creation. For examples of programs I have created, see iLead+Design (California) and GreenLEAP (Green School Bali).

Value-based Learning

I recently advised on the development of an exciting new program at Chinese International School (CIS). CIS is a day school based in Hong Kong but several years ago they spun up a residential program in Hangzhou, China, which most of their Grade 9 students attend. The aim is to build independence and provide language and cultural immersion by “…taking students away from the remote ‘classroom world’ and immersing them in the real one.”

Redefining Academic Rigor

There are two kinds of academic rigor. The standard kind is measured in number of hours spent; in the amount of predetermined information memorized and regurgitated. It involves running fast to jump through the hoops put before you. It involves being handed problems and showing you can follow prescribed pathways to solve them. It involves following orders. The message to students is: “Put your head down and slog through it. One day it will pay off.” This is not the rigor that leads to a sustainable world. We need so much more.

We need to think of rigor in a different way. Engagement and effort are indeed key indicators of rigor, but what you engage in and how you engage with it are equally important. What about learning to identify on your own what is important? What about being able to identify opportunities no one else has seen? Rigor, yes—but towards the goal of creating advanced learners, not just advanced rememberers; towards fostering advanced creators, not just advanced imitators.

Children are innate learners, and the key is to build on that strength. With them. As partners. Doing real things in the real world. Modeling for them what it means to be an advanced learner, and collaborator, and doer. And helping them engage rigorously with the world around them so that they gain not only the knowledge they need to thrive in it, but the skills, and the habits, and the attitudes that allow them to use that knowledge for the most meaningful impact possible.

Pedagogy vs. Curriculum – The How is the What

The How is the What

What (content) and how (pedagogy) cannot be separated. How we teach also teaches a what.

Example 1: Coercion has no place in education.

If we use coercion to get students to study what we want when we want, we are teaching them that how you get people to do the things in this world is by using a power imbalance. We should be teaching them that respect and empathy are the primary drivers of influence.

Example 2: Students need to define what is important

Telling students what is important to learn teaches them that their own interests are not of value.

It also removes from them the ability to evaluate what is important themselves. An illustration:

“Students: We are studying American History from the Civil War to World War II. Here are the important things to know about this period, and how we will engage with learning them. And the dates we will cover each.”

An alternative how would be: “You have chosen to study this period in history. How about we start by each looking into what might be important to know about form this time period, and we’ll come back together and build that list? If you are able to convince others of the importance of the items you pick, they will more likely make it on the list.” This helps them build the skill of determining what is important and understand why. They learn the “content” while they are learning these important skills (and they learn the content better).

Example 3: Instruction can be powerfully destructive

Concentrated Endeavor

I often get asked about the learning environments that support entrepreneurial learning/21st century skills development. There are many practices that weave together to create proper conditions, informed by guiding principles and paradigms such as:

Education must be real.
Primary focus should be creating advanced learners (see my Teaching Without Knowing post for more on this)
We must scaffold our students towards identifying problems and architecting solutions.
We need to approach education by building on strengths, instead of correcting deficiencies.

One of the most important practices is how we structure our learning experiences in time. I’ve already spoken in my post on The Entrepreneurial Learner about how endeavor relates to learning, how students should not be given an education—they should endeavor to build one (with expert support). But what is concentrated endeavor? I’ll start by illustrating it’s opposite, distributed endeavor.

Noticing and Wondering: Kicking off and supporting enquiry

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jpovey/ — Wonderment

Noticing and Wondering

(Special thanks to colleague Sara Soulier who helped me workshop this at a recent conference)

Could there be any more important skills than the skills to notice and to wonder?

The normal paradigm in school is to train students that what other people notice and wonder about is more important than their own observation and enquiry. Example: “Students, today we are studying American history from the industrial revolution to the present. Here is the syllabus of important topics, and when and how we will engage with them.”

The assumption is that what’s important here is the information and lessons we can learn from this period in history. Those are important things to know. But what about the ability to determine what is important and how to learn it? I would argue that is the more important “lesson” to be learned.

It’s possible to learn information without gaining the skills to determine what’s important and how to learn it. It’s not possible to learn what’s important and how to learn it without actually learning content. Content is a byproduct of learning to learn. The opposite is not necessarily true.

Recent research is showing that overly scheduled children have reduced executive function. We have growing anecdotal evidence from every sector that hiring “A” students from top universities guarantees mostly that you will get people who can follow directions very well, but who often cannot identify problems or architect and implement solutions. What can we change in how we approach education to alter our course?

Focus on learning how to learn as the primary purpose of education with content as a byproduct. But what does that look like?Continue reading “Noticing and Wondering: Kicking off and supporting enquiry”

The Mixed Messages of School

https://www.flickr.com/photos/34517490@N00/

School to students—
“Here’s the problem.
Here’s how you solve it.
Don’t fail.
Do it, or else.”

And now that you are done with school—
“Please identify problems,
Figure out how to solve them,
Learn from your failures.
Oh, and BTW, use influence—not power—to get people to do things.

You’re welcome.”
-School

Why Graduate Profiles Feel Wrong

Let’s face it. Every school’s graduate profile sounds the same these days.

“Lifelong learner”

“Global citizen”

“Able and willing to make a difference”

Etc.

You know the drill. All worthy aspirations for our students, and for what we want to help them become. All schools engage in conversations about these end goals, the programs and pedagogy that will get them there, what measures if any will provide feedback on whether the goals have been met, and how the school is doing over time at producing its product. That’s standard, responsible practice, right?

I’ve been involved in creating graduate profiles several times, and while it feels like a worthy exercise, it always feels like something is missing.Continue reading “Why Graduate Profiles Feel Wrong”