Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try.

There are two underlying philosophies that come into conflict in our education system.

One of them is the Disneyland philosophy - that a good heart is what matters: if you mean well, and wish hard enough on your lucky star, your dreams will come true. The good guys will always win, even against impossible odds. It's not what you do, but how hard you try that counts.

Pinocchio - When you wish upon a star ♫ (original)… - MyVideo

The other is the Yoda philosophy captured in the quote at the top of this post: A pure heart may be a prerequisite, but it is not enough. It's not about how hard you think the task is, whether or not you have to extend yourself to achieve it, or how many reasons you can find for it being an unreasonable expectation: it's whether or not you achieve the result that matters.




We in the education sector have not yet managed to reconcile these perspectives - and we need to.

This  underlying dispute is very evident in today's education headlines - with some saying "We try really hard to make your kids try really hard - so you should be satisfied with that," and others saying "How hard you think you're trying is not the point. Whether you understand and meet my child's needs is the point."

Our education system requires both: to keep trying, and to look past "try" to "do".

As a parent, I don't care if "85% of our students do well." I want to know that my child is getting the professional attention and support he needs to get to achieve at the level he needs to in order to have the best possible quality of life he can. Yes, I care that if you are teaching him, your heart is pure and that you really care about him as a person and that you will not stop trying. But that in itself is not enough. It is no consolation to me if every other child in the class - or the school - is validated, challenged, and experiences success, if mine doesn't.

Where my child's education and future is concerned, I'm with Yoda: "Try" not. Do... or do not. There is no "try".

Reflection: How did I get here?

My mother was a secondary teacher, so one of the things I always promised myself growing up was that I'd never be one myself... which is a shame, because I L-O-V-E teaching, I just couldn't stand be a school teacher (!) I love learning new stuff, finding things out I didn't know before, testing my understanding and my thoughts against what other people know, and I love helping other people to discover the thrill of doing that.

Somehow though, that's not what school-teaching is all about. ECE, postgrad, workplace, anywhere else is fine - but schools and undergraduate university study are generally not. *sigh.*

When I left university with an Honours degree in economics I had had enough of formal study & promised myself I wouldn't ever go back. (It was a mediocre degree, university didn't engage or challenge me any more than school had. I've always regarded it as a double major - in Economics and Nightclubbing. As a consequence, the result didn't do me or the university in question much credit really. )

The thing that drove me back to education was having kids. In New Zealand we have a wonderful co-operative Early Childhood organisation called Playcentre (one word) where parents train to work as ECE 'teachers' learning child development, observation skills the ECE curriculum etc alongside their children. You get a very different perspective learning ECE pedagogy to support your own child and your friends' and neighbours' children from what you might otherwise. It can't help but be learner-centred. (Besides which, working in ECE settings is like herding cats - first of all you have to figure out where they want to go, then you work with that.... otherwise you're sunk!)

Once my kids had both gone to school I worked for about 5 years doing project management of course materials in a distance education institution, and as part of my PD there I began studying online in the University of Southern Queensland's M.Ed programme.

Postgrad rocks! You're allowed to have an opinion again - and to question and challenge and THINK FOR YOURSELF! I don't think it was just that I had learned by then to work to my own satisfaction, rather than anyone else's (although that was part of it), a big part of it I am sure was a difference in attitude on the part of the course leaders from what I had experienced in formal education anywhere before.  I loved it! Haven't finished my M.Ed yet, but I will (one day)...

The feral learning idea grew out of an assignment I did for a paper in Instructional Design. I once heard Marc Prensky quote his game designers as saying "You give an idea to an instructional designer and they'll suck all the fun out of it..." Frankly, I think they have a point - and not just instructional designers, professional educators across the board tend to fall into the same trap. And you know, none of those andragogy, pedagog or other-gogies actually describe how I learn, although Jack Mezirow's transformative learning is close (although he doesn't understand kids), and so is Linda Silverman's visual-spatial model. Why on earth not?

I was very fortunate to find myself participating in a group at CABWEB with Jan Visser of the Learning Development Institute (LDI), who was editing a book, "Learners in a Changing Learning Environment". Jan invited me to submit a chapter on feral learning (which I'd been holding forth on at some length) - so the ideas got formalised and incorporated into the book... which I'm very proud of.

So here I am... in a bit of a hiatus at the moment because Real Life has taken over again for a while - and developing my own PLN through interesting sites like Change the Schools,  Edutopia,  AERO,  Shifting Thinking and the like.

I wonder what's around the next corner?

What's wrong with this picture?

There’s something profoundly ironic about the difficulty professional educators have in accepting the power of an individual’s capacity and desire to learn.  I’ve even been in a seminar recently where the presenter joyfully produced a photo of a sign over a school gate:

“If you’re not here, you can’t learn!”

The teachers in the room loved it.

So, what's wrong with that?
What's wrong with that is that the real question is not if we’re learning, or where we're learning, it’s what we’re learning.

Would we accept a doctor telling us that if we aren’t in hospital we can’t heal, or a lawyer telling us that if we don’t have a defence attorney we’re not safe? I don’t think so.

[Thought: Perhaps everybody who works in education (or wants to) should be handcuffed to a 14-year-old for a fortnight or so to remind them what we're really there for, how hard and complicated life is, and how much our kids need us to help them find the things that will make their lives feel like a gift not a penance...]

Learning is what children do.
They can't help it. They sure as heck don't need us to tell them how to do it. Babies and young children are natural learners, natural scientists. They spend their lives conducting experiments - testing the world around them in order to understand it. Everybody’s first five years are shaped by a series of "scientific" experiments - an ongoing series of situations where you interact with the world around you in a purposeful way in order to refine or expand your understanding of it…Taste… Observation… Manipulation... Interaction…. An ongoing and vitally important process of trial and error. It may lack the level of verbal sophistication you would use now, but it's a robust scientific process none the less.

New Zealand's ECE curriculum by the way is a marvellous document - well worth a look as a model of how a genuinely student-centred curriculum can be created that works at a national level. Our school sector is moving towards a similar model, with the "revised" New Zealand Curriculum. There's a separate and parallel document for Māori medium education (Māori are New Zealand's first people).

If you want to understand learning - watch a kid 
 Back in Playcentre, my working definition of a scientist was "someone who finds out the answers to questions"… Now, doesn't that sound suspiciously like a definition of learning? [And I do mean “me learning”, not “you trying to teach me” which is something different]

So it's no wonder that children love science. It has been their constant companion since before they could talk.

And then they go to school, and we tell them that they can’t learn unless we let them...
 

So, let me ask you again - what's WRONG with this picture?