“This is real school, this is actual learning.”

Every school has the potential for doing this.  Why old school school?

The beautiful legacy of Freire, in another radical educator’s words:

“Teaching in a democracy, teaching among free people who respect and honor the autonomy of all people (including children) is about confronting knowledge in all its forms, including where the power lies in our society, why the privileged are living in privilege, why people increasingly suffer the weight of poverty, and why a free people continue to allow their leaders to say one thing while doing another.”

Paul Thomas 2011

photo by ronniedankelman flickr

“I believe that the individual of the future, like the individual today, faces the lonely task of transforming himself with or without the agreement and understanding of those around him.

He needs only to know transforming himself means coming up against internalized cultural edges (beliefs that are not his in origin). If this is to occur, he will have to disturb the status quo of the world around him as well.”

Arnold Mindell, The Shaman’s Body

Does wishing have power? Is there danger in wishing? Are some wishes more worthy than others? And what about the ancient link between suffering and desire?

Recently we had an education party at my house.  The room was filled with high school students, activists, graduate students, policy makers, academics, deans of education, teachers, writers, and administrators.  At the end of the party we asked folks to make a wish for American education.

Here are some of their wishes, from the bowl of wishes they created…

“I wish that schools will embrace the arts, creativity, and alternative models.”

“My wish is that we leave the punitive/threatening language of a Nation at Risk, NCLB behind and become a Nation Inspired by activist organizations in education.”

“I wish government will organize large-scale conferences to pull together the multiple NPOs to share objectives.”

“Compassion.”

“That students experience joy in school.”

“My wish is for better school systems all over.  There needs to be a change not just in MCAS but in all aspects.”

“I wish for a day where students can feel that their voices are heard and they have an influence. Also that all students have a mentor to support them and encourage them.”

“My wish is that every child in our country experiences the opportunity to think, problem- solve and innovate.”

“I wish that we mend the broken relationships in our communities, in our schools, and in our homes.  That we work to build relationships of care and respect between young people, their parents, and educators.”

“I wish all students would feel valued and connected in school.”

What does it unleash to wish? What does wishing clarify?

What’s your wish?

My son inspires me.

My son Sam and me with DIY signs

children, educators, working people took to the streets of downtown Boston to join in support for Occupy Boston, a peaceful demonstration that says THE PEOPLE ARE TOO BIG TO FAIL.  Income inequality is killing us, corporations are not people, the middle class is dying.  We, the 99% have been much too quiet. We must take action.

I hit the streets with family, friends, students.  Using the human mike, this was the most well-organized, peaceful protest I’ve been a part of recently.  Students from UMass, Tufts, Bard, Harvard and Northeastern explained procedures as we got started.  ”We have a constitutional right to be here.”

“If you need medical attention this is what you do.”  ”There are peacekeepers wearing green t-shirts in the crowd.”  ”We expect this to be a peaceful demonstration.”  ”If someone gets hurt, lock wrists and surround them.” “The police are our friends.”

Beginning slowly and picking up energy as we moved, amidst drums, a corporate 10K going on simultaneously, chantkeepers (“Ask me what democracy looks like/This is what democracy looks like!”), we left the Boston Common and marched through the financial district, our numbers growing audibly to roaring crowds.  We passed few observers who did not seem with the message. (“We are

the 99% You are the 99%!”)  A man working at a parking garage yelled back, “Hell yes I’m the 99%!”

At one point some office workers–folks in their offices on Columbus Day–held up a sign from their second story window. It was of FDR, with a slogan about reinstating the Glass-Steagall act, to huge roars from the crowd.  It was that kind of group–wonky Boston, in part.

Great Protester Signs:  “Things are bad when English teachers use swear words. Shit is Fucked Up.”

“1% cannot stop a new consciousness.”

“I was told there would be cake.”

“Who put the Slitherins in charge?”

Even with 50 Occupy Boston protesters arrested late last night, this is a movement growing all over the country.  We, the 99% are rising up to say we will not be quiet as our government is overtaken by private interests and economic elites.

#Occupyedu is another way to join this movement around education, if protesting outside your door isn’t possible.

Just get in.  Just protest.

Once you’ve stood up, you’ll never sit down.

If you wanted to rethink every assumption about conventional high school–with multi-media technology at the center, and a conviction about adolescents’ desire to do meaningful work–what would it look like? “This is the NYC iSchool, and we’re working on something completely new,” says Executive Director Alisa Berger.

In 2008, the former chancellor of the NYC Schools wanted to create innovative high school models as a way of re-visioning the conventional high school, the high school model that is wasteful and dysfunctional, and poorly adapted to preparing students for the next piece of their lives. Former Chancellor Joel Klein proposed a high school where “live teachers were assets to kids,” and one where kids could “basically work on their own,” using a variety of web-based platforms to augment their learning experiences.  They would be freed up to move out into the world, to engage with each other, and to build learning experiences that had social meaning and real intellectual challenge. It became co-founder Alisa Berger‘s job–along with a talented and opinionated staff–to create and build this vision. The NYC iSchool, now in its fourth year in the SoHo section of New York City, is one of the most in-demand and highly-desired high schools in the all-choice New York City high school system. (1500 applications for 100 spots this past year.)

Built around intensive, nine-week course modules focused on developing students’ understanding of big ideas and global concepts, and then using online course learning and other web-based experiences as foundational content, this past year students at the iSchool worked with the designers of the National September 11th Memorial and Museum to get a more global perspective on the ways teens think about the events leading up to 9-11.  Students interviewed kids in Pakistan and Australia about terrorism and victimization.  They designed a website to develop environmental awareness of fracking called, thinkbeforeyoufrack.  They created cultural ethnographic films about being sixteen all around the world, probing concepts like dating, what being in a relationship means, what you eat says about you culturally and socially.

The underlying vision, in my view, is that the activity we call “learning” is walking away from the institution we call “school.” Schools must transform themselves with new models of instruction that reach out into the world.  They must fashion new understandings of what powerful learning relationships look like between adults and students, and students and the world.  Most important, educational entities must hone and develop skills that help students know when they know. “Knowing when you know something is the 21st century skill,” Alisa Berger says about the school’s instructional model, as teachers wrestle with new visions of rigor and high-level intellectual work.

“It’s not about the technology, it’s about rethinking how learning happens,” Berger noted.  In my view it’s also about justifying the moral claim of compulsory education through work that is meaningful to students.

What does it mean to be a student at the NYC iSchool, from students’ point of view? Kyjah Coryat, a NYC iSchool senior reflected, “Every iSchooler is asked…what does the ‘i’stand for [in iSchool]? We’ve been asked this time and time again…it could stand for ‘imagination’ or ‘inspire’ or ‘innovate.’” Junior Drita Bedzeti thinks of the iSchool, “as an iPod except it’s a school.” Or Celina Flores, another junior concludes, “The I stands for me, since the iSchool is a new school, the students have the ability to voice their opinions of what they want or need.”

As part of a book I am writing on learning entrepreneurship, I recently visited the NYC iSchool, and have been interviewing educational innovators and big-thinking institution smashers and transformers. What are some of the central, provisional “lessons” of my research so far? What observations stand out about schools that are really reframing what it means to be a teacher and student?

1. Educational enterprises (I’m not gonna say “schools”) that embrace technological innovation, not as an add on but as a new vision about how learning occurs in the world, hire teachers and instructors for whom technology use is at the center of their learning lives. You cannot “innovate” around something you do not know and use yourself, and you will fear and diminish students’ experimentalness if you are not also experimenting and learning online yourself. What that means is that you cannot hire instructors who are “committed” to “integrating” technology into instruction, but who don’t have a daily learning practice that involves myriad social media platforms, a whole range of devices and connectivities, lots of interest in learning about new platforms and means of expression, and an intense inclination to be a learner around technology.

As an example I recently met a passionate, dynamic young instructor at the Spring Street International School–a school on a remote island off the coast of Seattle–who was intensely animated about describing the Instructure Canvas platform he was using during the summer to put articles on genocide together for his middle schoolers. We had a great discussion about students’ responsibility for curating materials, as he “walked completely away from textbooks” and a textbook-orientation towards knowledge. This instructor was so eager and excited about the ways in which this platform allowed him to create a collaborative and flexible learning environment to engage his students that he couldn’t get enough time with it! Even as his wife went into labor with their first baby!

You got to live it and feel it, to be good at it. It’s got to be a part of how you learn to help someone else learn this way.  Teaching is modeling, and you can’t model something that feels strange and unfamiliar to you.

2. Schools that are breaking through the old industrial model are passionate about relationships. Yes, I know, every school says it’s about relationships, and most teachers say, “It’s all about the kids.” But Old School models of schooling are founded on an assumption of adult control, the positional power of adults over children, and “custody” of children that often resemble minimum security prison rather than rich, collaborative learning environments. At the NYC iSchool, for instance, Alisa Berger is very, very clear that relationship comes before technology, and that technology is not a “distraction,” from relationship, but a way of creating it. She points to the myriad ways in which technology allows students to connect with other students, field experts, and other teachers around the world, as an example of their priorities. There is no need at the iSchool to ask people to “put down their devices,” and be present, Berger says. Kids and adults want to be there, and want to be in relationship with each other. They hire for that, too.

Schools that are successful using technology to create new models for learning, paradoxically, put love at the center of the learning model. Connectivity between humans is what matters, and technology is an augmentation, an extension of connectivity, a way to continue and build relationships around learning. Love is learning, and learning is love. Technology is only a means, although the means matter and shape us.

3. Successful “learning entrepreneurial” models take students interests very seriously. It is remarkable the degree to which many teachers are simply not curious about what students are interested in, a sad condition of adulthood and the dehumanizing institution of conventional school. At the NYC iSchool, and many other extraordinary educational institutions I am visiting and discovering, there is an assumption that everyone has a stake in their own learning, that learning is deeply pleasurable, if not always fun (doing hard things is not always fun, but worth it), that students are good at deciding for themselves what kinds of remediation they may need and how best to get it (in consultation with an advisor or other students). At the iSchool, to prepare for the New York State Regents exam, students do all the memorization and content-cramming with teacher-created, web-based products so that instructional time does not have to be spent on this.

At these institutions, there is a belief that if learning projects are constellated around things that matter to kids themselves, then with scaffolding and support (the NYC iSchool has a nine-week learning online course for all students), powerful and important engagement is going to happen. Whether it is probing the experience of dating around the world, or how a Pakistani student might regard 9-11 differently from a student in New York City, or why some New York City residents might be opposed to constructing a green roof on their building, students themselves are encouraged to become the modelers of their own learning, to construct their own learning plans and lives, through profound adult interest in what is compelling to them.

4. Great learning environments are passionate about passion. Many of the conventional school environments I’m in are flat, arid, uninteresting places, physically and intellectually. Bulletin boards that date from my own elementary school line classroom walls, with publisher’s slogans about trying harder or doing your best. Adults choose what goes on the walls , and the aesthetics of learning spaces seem almost deliberately ignored. However, as my young colleague teacher from the Spring Street School suggests, when the adults in a school are really fired up learners, passionate about their own quirky projects and deeply interested in their students’ learning, a school tends to be high performing and highly effective. Learning more about how kids learn, learning about their own practices as teachers or administrators, learning about stuff that interests them, are consuming passions of the adults in these schools. That passionate learning culture transfers directly to kids, where students are encouraged to be quirky and strange, to contemplate complexity and the unknowable, to create You Derive Me Crazy around their calculus coursework, to be a part of Girls Write Now, or engage with the meaning of social justice, for themselves.

5. School leaders and teachers model their own excitement about learning. In meetings, in walkthroughs, on Twitter, in their own blogs, in creation of their own professional development, teachers talk openly about what they are learning, how they make mistakes, and what excites them about their work. Through this modeling, learning is regarded as pleasurable–not a chore to be gotten through, a checklist to be completed, or something to be excused from for good behavior. The culture highly values expressions of learning: people are fired up about hearing what someone else is curious about, what they just read online, how they could put this together in a project!

What can we learn about these new “entrepreneurial” learning environments, where technology is central but not at the center? The medium that extends, defines, and mediates learning, but is not the thing? Collaboration is at the center, and people are making “little bets” on changes in school culture which allow them to fail early and adapt as part of establishing these transformative learning cultures.

In the future, as these environments demonstrate, there will be some kind of physical place where students go to do some learning activities, like film-making, and instrument playing and meeting with advisors and other students, and that place may or may not be called “school.” Much of learning will happen during field work, or in collaborative projects, or in college courses or online, or in adventures in the world. In conjunction with this, we will take much more seriously the ways in which human development shapes the projects and challenges of each learning stage, and understand that adults are influenced just as powerfully as students in the act of learning. We will use technology to honor, extend and enhance our connectivity, yet understand that connectivity, and our caring, is fundamentally about each other. It’s one-to-one and one for all.

“We are the future,” says an NYC iSchool student. We’re just figuring out how.

What are the attributes and habits of “great” learners? What do their learning lives look like, and what beliefs do they hold about themselves that they might share with the rest of us? How can learners build personal, individual resilience when they’re in academic programs that sometimes seem intent on focusing on their failures, highlighting what they’re not good at, or making judgments based on previous unsuccessful performances? What if no interventions are available to them, or the available interventions are ineffective or off the mark?

For 10 years, I’ve been listening to people tell their learning stories, and my latest book describes how the institution of school can sometimes hamper our deepest and most profound desires to learn. Virtuoso learning is a lifelong fascination of mine, not so much because I’m interested in high performance as it’s conventionally defined, but because the learning attributes of extremely engaged, muscular, entrepreneurial learners have seeds of wisdom, based in practical experience and a lot of road miles, that would be helpful for everyone.

In my research over the past decade, documenting the learning biographies of hundreds of people ages 11 to 67 — I’ve learned first and perhaps most important, that many great learners — research scientists, national-level marketing directors, social media entrepreneurs, writers, professors, community activists — were not necessarily conventionally successful in school. Many impassioned, creative learners said school actually hampered their desire to learn, and that they did a lot of their really animated learning far from school grounds and away from the probing eyes of teachers. As one said, “I might be reading about astrophysics online at home, but forget to turn in my science homework and fail the course.” This is heartening to many of my struggling students. I often tell them that some of the best learners I know were complete screwups in high school.

 Thinking of yourself as an entity always ripe for more development is a mark of learners who go boldly forward, ready to take on the world and live their own truths.

In the face of setback after setback, how did these great learners keep going in school? In the 1980s and early `90s, we used to believe that resilience (Bernard, 2004) and resilience for learners (Benson, 2006; Levine, 1994) was only for the lucky few, that it was some kind of intangible magic that couldn’t really be defined, and that it was fixed and inborn.

Now, we’re beginning to understand that learning resilience has some very basic, identifiable components and habits of mind. There are ways of thinking about setbacks and failures that tend to power individuals through hard times and keep them interested in themselves as creative thinkers and explorers even when much of the feedback they’re getting about their performance is very negative and globalized.  “Don’t even try to learn math,” one young African American man was told by his math teacher. “You’ll be flipping burgers for the rest of your life.” He’s now a junior in college on a merit scholarship.

Based on my interviews with hundreds of learners over the past decade, we know that great learners tend to have seven traits and characteristics, learning “habits” that keep them interested and engaged in some of the pleasurable aspects of thinking and creating, even as they experience parts of school as grinding and uninteresting. They’ve developed a kind of “visioning,” often unconsciously, that makes them very “gritty” (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007) and persistent while they’re learning new things.

7 critical orientations toward learning

1. Great learners see learning as pleasurable and value and cherish this pleasure.

Although a lot of school learning isn’t intriguing or powerful, resilient learners seem to stubbornly create opportunities to experience the joy of learning, of being in flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008), even when it gets them in trouble. Driven by curiosity or a sense of play, they stubbornly find opportunities to learn (practicing basketball for hours, collecting bootleg recordings of a favorite band, or pursuing their writing), even when it doesn’t accrue to academic performance. One young woman told me, “There was always something mechanical about school, a mold I never fit into, never quite understood. Although I knew inside that my writing was powerful and artistic, I was unwilling to make myself vulnerable to someone else’s critique. The years of frustration and failures had taken a toll on my confidence and I found myself unable to trust my own ability in the classroom.” But this young woman kept writing privately in a journal throughout high school and now is studying to become a teacher of young children in reading and writing. Another person recalled that at age 7, he developed a passionate interest in beavers and beaver dam building, collected books and watched online videos about beavers, and asked his mother to take him to a local stream to see if they could find beavers. Although he wasn’t doing well in school, he was a great learner about beavers. He’s now a graduate student in architecture.

Intensive learning, we know, is different from just messing around, because it involves focused concentration and a sense of challenge (Shernoff, 2002), along with a powerful drive to know. When we’re just messing around, say checking status updates on Facebook, we may be learning something, and it’s pleasurable, but the task isn’t especially challenging. Intensive learning on the other hand — for instance, researching the question of whether social networks on Facebook can, ironically, lead to a sense of isolation and interpersonal social awkwardness in some individuals — means we’re engaged in an ambiguous task that involves challenge, opportunities to fail, an unclear endpoint, and questions we don’t know the answer to, but are deeply interesting to us. This drive to engage in intensive learning, it should be noted, is pleasurable when learners actively choose the activity or question, and are doing something they value.

Simply having the experience of pleasure in learning, and noticing it, is one of the greatest drivers of cognitive engagement, and it’s one that resilient learners tap into to fuel themselves through tough spots, since real learning means taking risks and failing, and often failing BIG. (Every “great” learner I’ve interviewed knows that failure is a huge part of the enterprise.) Great learners’ sense of pleasure in exploration tends to make them ambitious, self-disciplined, and persistent (Duckworth et al., 2007), not because they fear bad grades, a parental talking- to or other consequences, but because the subject speaks to them in some passionate way. Pleasure in learning means you do it more, which builds practice, and practice builds expertise, which leads to more pleasure.

2. Great learners are effort theorists who have learned the hard way that effort is more important than “inborn” ability.

Jonathan Mooney, author of a bestselling book about growing up with learning differences, told me, “In 2nd grade, we all had desks lined up in a row like work stations in a factory. I tried to sit still, but I couldn’t. Five seconds into class, my whole body was moving — hands, feet, arms. I was pointed at, ordered to stop moving, to control myself. Miss C, my teacher yelled, `Jon, what’s wrong with you?’ The rest of the day was spent in the hallway, my spirit evaporating into thin air. I was the bad kid, the stupid one, with the terrible handwriting, spelling, and reading. The feeling ate away at my sense of self like battery acid.” Diagnosed with ADHD, Mooney didn’t learn to read until he was 12 — a common story for some of the outstandingly accomplished individuals I’ve interviewed.

In high school, Mooney self-medicated through drinking. He tried to be conventionally successful and win acclaim through sports, but he couldn’t shake a feeling of self-loathing and shame. He knew he had something, but he couldn’t demonstrate it in school. Mooney won his way into college on his soccer skills, but floundered and dropped out after a year. On a dare, Mooney flew to Brown University in Providence, R.I., and hung out outside the admissions office for a full day until someone finally agreed to see him and interview him. Improbably, Brown admitted him. Although he struggled initially to build the necessary skills to be successful at such a demanding institution, he met another student with ADHD, wrote a book about his learning experiences, ultimately graduated with a 4.0 in English literature (a major he was told was much too hard for him), and founded Project Eye-to-Eye, an international advocacy group for individuals with learning differences. Mooney became convinced that his effort to develop his skills and talents would determine his success, not innate or inborn ability. A world of cognitive literature supports Mooney’s conclusion (Dweck, 2007). Thinking of yourself as an entity always ripe for more development is a mark of learners who go boldly forward, ready to take on the world and live their own truths.

3. Great learners tend to have a strengths-based view of themselves and others, focusing on what they’re good at instead of what they don’t do so well.

This attitude is at the heart of learning resilience. Ned Hallowell, my friend and a psychiatrist who writes about the childhood roots of happiness, satisfaction in marriage, and breakthrough models of business leadership, says in his new book, Shine, “I use a strengths-based model rather than the traditional deficit-based model [still common in school]. When I meet a new client or patient, I immediately start looking for talents, interests, and strengths — qualities the individual him or herself may actually be blind to.” Great learners have figured out, in honest and clear ways, what they excel at, and they practice being satisfied with those traits.

Great learners question the labels the institution gives them and ultimately know they must be the authors of their own lives.

Although her intuitive ability to understand what others were thinking and feeling did not help her be very successful in school, one of my interviewees who is now a gifted social worker told me, “I value and honor the talents I naturally have. I always knew I had insights that were important, and now I use them in my work every day.” The most empowered learners I know look candidly at what they aren’t doing well at that moment (they hear helpful critiques), but they also tend to focus on their strengths. They have a kind, enlarging view of themselves, which helps them see others in the same way.

4. Great learners practice letting go of negative emotions, of flipping the script on what might be regarded as a failure.

After choking on a major test or learning event, being rejected by a friend, or being yelled at unfairly by a coach, one interviewee said, “You can hold on to that, ruminate, fester with it,” which actually reinforces the feeling from a neurobiological point of view (Hanson & Mendius, 2009). Or you can let it go.

We have increasing evidence that if you spend a lot of time brooding about failures and disappointments, you’re actually sculpting your brain to be receptive to those feelings by wiring and rewiring it to easily go into those worn grooves and neurosynaptic pathways. Learning to let go of negative experiences is one of the most powerful lessons resilient learners described. As one said, “I try to take away what’s going to be useful to me, and then actively release the feeling of failure and shame. I have a mental image for this, of releasing my hands of the feeling into a stream and letting the stream carry it away.” Increasingly, there is neurobiological evidence of the validity of this practice.

5. Great learners are unusual problem solvers who know how to ask for help. They excel at reframing their difficulties.

When he dropped out of his first college, Jonathan Mooney could have seen that event as the end of the line, the summation of all his past failure. Instead, he rethought the whole paradigm, wrapped up all those troubles, and crafted them into an opportunity to rethink his way of doing things. He was able to explain his approach clearly enough to a Brown admission officer that he was accepted there and offered a chance to discover himself intellectually.

However, Mooney didn’t become an unusual problem solver on his own. Great learners have friends and supporters, and they value connectedness. He speaks frequently about the individuals who helped him grow into who he is, who believed in him even when he was screwing up, and who aided him in getting book contracts and fellowships and starting a business.

No young adult I’ve studied has been successful without a supporter or a team, a pit crew that helped them reframe seeming insurmountable difficulties, refueled them, and helped give them a strategy to stay in the race. If we have opportunities to support a kid who seems to be screwing up, we could be saving that kid’s life. It’s important to be a member of someone else’s team in addition to having one ourselves.

 6. Great learners don’t let the institution of school define them. Instead, they practice “adaptive distancing,” a capacity to accept the institution’s gifts without being wholly defined by its feedback.

If resilient learners are tracked into a low-challenge class in high school and that tends to become reinforcing, they don’t let this become their identity. They exercise healthy resistance to institutional labeling. For instance, from 5th grade onward, Marie was tracked into low-level math classes, although she enjoyed math puzzles and sudoku at home. She could see that she had math skills that didn’t show up in school. Her guidance counselor encouraged her to speak up for herself and her own learning. Institutions of education can be lazy, mistaken, and trapped in their own narrow views of people. The healthiest and best learners I know take their education very seriously, but they regard themselves as “the authors of their own minds.” They don’t let the institution tell their story as learners, and they develop counter-narratives when things aren’t going well. Great learners question the labels the institution gives them and ultimately know they must be the authors of their own lives.

7. Finally, great learners have passions.

An abundant research literature describes the importance of passion, curiosity, and deep interests in helping to lead us through a welter of life difficulties (Werner & Smith, 1982, 1992). And we know it to be true in our own lives. Passionate antique collectors, bird watchers, bridge players, and Pittsburgh Steelers fans have a passion to learn about a topic that adds zest to their lives in ways little else can.

My youngest son, Sam, who has always been interested in nature, evolution, and Darwinism (at age 5, he said he wanted to be an environmental lawyer so he could take people to court who were hurting the environment), last year was diverted from studying for an AP biology exam because he also discovered a profound passion for acting. What a wealth of passions! As a mom, I’m trying to walk the line I believe, which is that his passions matter more than anything and are ultimately his greatest teachers. So, if he doesn’t score quite as well on his biology exam, but does appear in his own self-authored play at a student-directed drama festival, I say he’s learning. Great learners let their passions lead them, and nurturing and protecting them is a critical job for us as parents and teachers.

Great learners offer a powerful recipe for resilience in learning. They follow their passions and aren’t afraid to be unconventional. In being unconventional, they may have suffered innumerable failures, but they’ve also figured out that failing is deeply and inextricably tied to learning — and that they can’t learn things without messing up. As adults, they live their learning lives with zest and curiosity, “ready to explore the world that’s out there,” as one award-winning physician told me. The social worker with deep intuitions and empathy who learned to appreciate her strengths as a learner late in life describes this best when she said, “I learned to believe in me.” And since we’re coming to understand that learning resilience is ordinary magic that can be strengthened with practice, it’s a kind of gusto that all of us can develop… with a little help from our friends.

by Kirsten Olson

Phi Delta Kappan, September, 2011, V93 N1

Kappan also prepared a downloadable Professional Development Discussion Guide for this article available at kappanmagazine.org.

 References

Benson, P. (2006). All kids are our kids: What communities must do to raise caring and responsible children and adolescents. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Bernard, B. (2004). Resiliency: What we have learned. San Francisco, CA: WestEd.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Ballantine.

Duckworth, A.L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M.D., & Kelly, D.R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 1087-1101.

Hallowell, E. (2011). Shine: Using brain science to get the best from your people. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Hanson, R. & Mendius, R. (2009). Buddha’s brain: The practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom. New York, NY: New Harbinger.

Levine, M. (1994). Educational care: A system for understanding and helping children with learning problems at home and at school. New York, NY: Educators Publishing Service.

Shernoff, D. (2002). Flow states and student engagement in the classroom. Statement to the California State Assembly Education Committee, Feb. 27. www.amersports.org/library/ reports/8.html

Werner, E. & Smith, R. (1982). Vulnerable but invincible: A longitudinal study of resilient children and youth. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Werner, E. & Smith, R. (1992). Overcoming the odds: High- risk children from birth to adulthood. New York, NY: Cornell University Press.

We are at a moment of crisis in public education.  Only a few pieces of evidence: the outpouring of objection and outcry at the recent SOS March, Arne Duncan’s decision this week to cut personal deals with states failing to make AYP because NCLB policy is a “slow motion train wreck,” a decade into one of the most draconian federal education policies around school accountability our country has ever witnessed, new data shows widespread, and nearly universal,crumbing confidence in local public schools, and a resounding failure to achieve any real gains in equity or performance for students, across a battery of measures.

Disappointment with schools are only a symptom. We are in a crisis of confidence around institutions of government in our country generally, and lack the stories we require to understand our fear and suffering, as described in a wonderful piece on the narrative failures of the Obama’s presidency.  As activists in education, holding on to both the hope and promise of our work, and ferocious and well-informed critique, requires a deep seated understanding of, and tolerance for, paradox–the capacity to hold two complex–and conflicting–truths simultaneously.

Here are some of the complex, conflicting truths I hold simultaneously in my work:

PARADOX #1:  SWEEPING AND SMALL

The system of education we have now–an outmoded industrial model based on extremely limited views of human learning and what is valuable to learn–requires radical, sweeping transformation.  The hidden curriculum of schooling instructs in racist, classist, and competitive values, and then naturalizes and normalizes this as our self-willed state.  Transformation, rethinking, wholesale change–school riots– are required.  Language matters, and even talking about “systemic” change, implying that the structures that we have now will be replaced by another system, is inadequate and limiting.

At the same time, in day-to-day practice for teachers working with kids, for principals interacting with staff members, for superintendents reconfiguring accountability systems within their district, for parents homeschooling their own children, small changes make big differences.  Ultimately, human transformation occurs in very slight, nearly imperceptible and somewhat magical shifts between two people trying to understand each other better, to heal each other, and get out of each other’s way.  When a teacher allows a student a bit more choice, when an adult recognizes the innate competence of a child, when a supervisor takes responsibility for his or her own mistakes, transformation happens.  Small changes are at the root of everything.

PARADOX #2:  IT’S ALL ABOUT ADULTS, DEMOCRACY MATTERS FOR KIDS

The institution of school is broken, corrupt, and designed  primarily to serve the interests of adults, not kids.  The greatest barrier to large-scale transformation, in my view, is adult self-interest, not a lack of skills and knowledge about how to educate better.  The system we have now serves adults, provides employment, professional identity and relative security to 2.5 million adults; it offers inadequate and in some cases toxic “service” to children, who have no political voice.  Yet as a whole, the education sector is woefully sloppy and deeply loath to acknowledge the self-interest that is at the heart of many of its activities and structures.

At the same time, our system of schooling is the only remaining democratic institution in our country that most of our children, nearly 45 million, still participate in.  There is profound value in this.  It is an agenda item of the far right to dismantle the public education system, and most of the public sector beyond it, and the people and kids who will be most harmed by this dismantlement, in terms of schools, are those with the least choice, connections and social capital.  In the words of Yvette Jackson,  Chief Executive of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, kids who are “school dependent” require schools that focus on their strengths, and full and free access to them. The current alternatives to public education, for nearly all children, are inadequate, and accessible only to those with means, choice, or luck.  Maybe all three.

PARADOX #3:  SUPPORT PUBLIC, AND EVERYTHING THAT CHALLENGES IT

Within IDEA, a just-hatching educational transformation group of which I am a part, we believe insupporting the institution of public schooling.  We are engaged in many projects, in Vermont and Mississippi and Portland, that directly engage and showcase public schools that are committed to becoming more responsive to their communities, serving children better, and creating equity within the system.

At the same time, we heartily and vigorously support all viable alternative school models, and see much of the real action of transformation and greater justice happening in places that define themselves as “outside” the public school system.   For example, see Nuestra Escuela, a highly successful “alternative” school model founded on an ethic of human caring, love and respect.  Strategically, we have a BOTH/AND strategy for supporting innovation and change, because we think mainstream public school and alternative models, including charter schools, have much to gain from collaborating and learning from each other.

Around the country, as a movement, we need teams of teachers and activists and parents and bloggers and policy thinkers who are strong enough, and big enough, and bold enough to hold all these paradoxes as they do their work in schools everyday, and with their kids.

We need individuals who are wise warriors, well-informed, cosmopolitan about the sector, who know where their work is coming from, and why–and are able to talk about the contradictions of their work without being apologetic.  Through embracing the complexities of our work, and its many shadows, we will be stronger and better and more fleet and powerful in responding to those who critique us, or who want to shut us down.

One of my mentors, Parker Palmer, of the Center for Courage and Renewal, writes knowingly of paradox, and the way in which tension between opposites can feel intolerable, tugging us one way and then the other, making us feel that our actions, beliefs and intentions are indefensible, and cancel each other out.  Yet through his long life of publically wrestling with the paradoxes of his own soul and vocation, Palmer observes, “‘truth is found not by splitting the world into either-ors but by embracing it as both-and.” Developing the capacity to sit in this tension between opposites–and I would add–to become productive in it, will be the mark of our maturing movement.

Becoming an educational activist requires that we develop the capacity to tolerate paradox–the capacity to hold two seemingly conflicting truths simultaneously in mind and heart at the same time.  At this moment in our culture we seem especially intolerant of paradox:  some critics insist that teachers are victims, while others suggest that teacher inadequacy is at the heart of our sector’s dysfunction.  Could both be true?  And if so, how would it empower us to hold both these truths, and to delve into the complexities of both? How might this make us stronger?

While the federal department of education and major education funders continue to insist that their limited agendas for “improvement” and “reform” are the one one and only way, and founded on “real” science and “real” evidence, we must take strong positions against such hostage-taking and agenda setting, while at the same time holding on the very real and human contradictions that lie at the heart of our work.  As leaders–and I’m seeing everyone who is concerned about the state of education in this country as leaders and activists–every single one of us–the stories we tell about our work must be both simple and complex. This requires a tolerance for paradox, and an understanding of the complexities of our work in education. This complexity is something we are only starting to build at IDEA, perhaps among our corps of folks here at the Coop, in myself.
Are we as activists strong enough to embrace the both-ands of our work?

Are you?

“Contradiction, paradox, the tension of opposites: These have always been at the heart of my experience, and I think I am not alone. I am tugged one way and then the other. My beliefs and my actions often seem at odds. My strengths are sometimes cancelled by my weaknesses. My self, and the world around me, seems more a study in dissonance than a harmony of the integrated whole.” -Parker Palmer, 1979