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Tom Vanderbilt's fascination with the process of life-long learning began with his daughter's hobbies: piano, soccer, Tae Kwon Do. He wanted to encourage her new pursuits, and accompanied her to the lessons or tournaments. As she exercised her mind, he would answer emails, play with his phone or stare into space until his daughter had finished.

He soon recognised the hypocrisy of the situation. "I was impressing upon her the importance of having a broad education in all these different skills," he says. "But she might have easily asked me, 'Well, why don't you do all these things then?'"

Starting with chess lessons, he decided to spend a year pursuing a range of new skills himself. He learnt to sing, draw, juggle and surf. At no point did he hope to fully master the abilities or to show off his prowess with an extraordinary feat, such as winning American Idol.

"As adults, we instantly put pressure on ourselves with goals," he says. "We feel like we don't have the luxury to engage in learning for learning's sake." Instead, he wanted to revel in the pleasure of the process.

Vanderbilt details his journey in his January 2021 book Beginners, which combines his own personal revelations with the cutting-edge science of skill acquisition. Keen to find out more, we discussed the myths of adult learning, and the substantial benefits that the "beginner's mindset" can bring to our lives.

How to learn well

Beginning the project in his late 40s, Vanderbilt knew that he would struggle to match the learning abilities of children like his daughter. Children are especially good at picking up patterns implicitly - understanding that certain actions will lead to certain kinds of events, without any explanation or description of what they are doing. After the age of 12, however, we lose some of that capacity to absorb new information.

Young children are wired to learn - but that doesn't mean adults can't (Credit: Alamy)

We shouldn't be too pessimistic about our own abilities, though. While adults may not absorb new skills as readily as a child, we still have " neuroplasticity " - the ability for the brain to rewire itself in response to new challenges. In his year of learning, Vanderbilt met many people, long past middle age, who were still exercising that "superpower".

What's more, Vanderbilt's research revealed some basic principles of good learning that anyone can use to make our learning more effective. The first may seem obvious but is easily forgotten: we need to learn from our mistakes. So, rather than just mindlessly repeating the same actions over and over, we need to be more focused and analytical, thinking about what we did right and what we did wrong. (Psychologists call this " deliberate practice ".) Vanderbilt noted this with chess playing. You could put in the hours with hundreds of online games, but that was not going to be as effective as studying the strategies of professionals or discussing the reasons for your losses with a chess teacher.

A second principle is more counter-intuitive: we need to make sure that our practice is varied. When juggling, for example, it helped to switch the objects, or to change how high you throw them; he tried it sitting down, and while walking. As one scientist told Vanderbilt, this is " repetition without repetition " and it forces the brain's learned patterns to become more flexible, allowing you to cope with the unpredictable difficulties - such as a mistake in one of your earlier movements that could lead you to lose control.

Even more intriguingly, Vanderbilt discovered that we often learn best when we know that we will have to teach others the same skill. It's not clear why this is, but that expectation seems to increase people's interest and curiosity, which primes the brain's attention and helps ensure that it lays down stronger memory traces. (Vanderbilt had lots of opportunities to teach what he had learnt, since he often included his daughter in his projects.) So, whatever you are personally trying to master, consider sharing that skill with someone you know. And while you may find it helpful to observe true experts executing a skill, Vanderbilt found that it can also be useful to watch other novices, since you can more easily analyse what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.

With this knowledge, Vanderbilt made good progress with each of the skills that he set out to learn. Singing, he says, offered one of the biggest hurdles, emotionally. "It was this process of opening oneself up to a stranger in the most raw way," he says. When he had overcome those nerves, however, it also proved to be the most rewarding. "It is the thing I probably took to the most, because it has such an inherent pleasure and makes you feel so good." He eventually became a member of New York's Britpop Choir.

If you are inspired to take up a new pastime yourself, Vanderbilt advises starting out with something that is easy to integrate into your existing lifestyle. You may be surprised by the speed of your progress, he says. "A lot of people get hung up on the idea that this is just a massive time investment - that there's no end of the road - and that's very daunting to them." He found that his drawing, for example, had improved significantly in the time that it would normally take to binge-watch a TV boxset.

The why factor

You may still wonder why you should make the effort, when you could be vegging out on your sofa.

Tom Vanderbilt says improving his drawing required less investment of time than he had imagined (Credit: Tom Vanderbilt)

But Vanderbilt points out that there are many general benefits to embracing any new skill - including some long-term brain changes that could offset some of the mental decline that often comes with ageing. Vanderbilt points to one study of adults - aged 58 to 86 - who pursed a handful of courses in subjects like Spanish, music, composition and painting. After a few months, they had not only made good progress in the individual skills, but also showed a pronounced improvement on more general cognitive tests - matching the performance of adults who were 30 years younger.

Intriguingly, the benefits here seemed to come from trying out multiple skills, rather than focusing exclusively on one particular expertise. As Vanderbilt writes in his book: "Rather than grinding out a marathon, you are putting your brain through a variety of high-intensity interval workouts. Each time you begin to learn that new skill, you're reshaping. You're training your brain again to be more efficient." We tend to see the 'dilettante' as someone who is superficial and lacks dedication. But it seems that the jack of all trades - the perpetual beginner - may have a sharper brain than the master of one single ability.

The lifelong pursuit of many different interests may even increase your creativity. As David Epstein also noted in his book Range, Nobel laureates were many times more likely to have enjoyed artistic pursuits such as music, dance, visual art or creative writing than other scientists.

As you set about learning a new skill, there will be frustrations and moments of failure - but these may in fact be the most important experiences of the whole process. After years of experience in journalism, Vanderbilt says that the new challenges were a welcome change to his "professional complacency". "It sort of opened my mind and brought me back to this sense of not knowing," he says. This was especially true for the skills - such as drawing - that already felt somewhat familiar. "The learning of the thing itself was often different from what I imagined. My expectations were constantly being upset."

Abundant research has shown that intellectual humility - the capacity to recognise the limits of our knowledge - can powerfully improve our thinking and decision making. And that capacity to reconsider our preconceptions and open our minds to new ways of thinking may be increasingly important in today's rapidly changing world. Whether we are learning for pleasure or attempting to boost our professional skills, we could all do well to cultivate that "beginners' mindset", where nothing is certain, and there is everything to learn.
Tom Vanderbilt's book David Robson is the is author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things (Hodder & Stoughton/WW Norton) - out now in paperback. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter. Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning (Atlantic Books/Knopf) was published in January.

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How a 'beginners' mindset' can help you learn anything

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Tom Vanderbilt's fascination with the process of life-long learning began with his daughter's hobbies: piano, soccer, Tae Kwon Do. He wanted to encourage her new pursuits, and accompanied her to the lessons or tournaments. As she exercised her mind, he would answer emails, play with his phone or stare into space until his daughter had finished.

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Flexible Pathways to Graduation: Six Vermont High School Students

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Our world is changing, and so too are Vermont schools, in order to best prepare young people for the world they will enter upon graduation.

These changes are grounded in what we now know about learning and the brain and they make school even more relevant and engaging for all students.

Recent legislation, called Act 77: Flexible Pathways, is behind this shift.  

New and diverse high quality learning opportunities are being made available, and each student is creating their own Personalized Learning Plan to chart their unique route to graduation.  

A student’s choice of his or her mix of pathways in any one semester, will be built on individual goals, learning styles, interests, and abilities.  These will likely change and grow over the course of four years.

The pathway options include:
 
Community- and work-based learning opportunities includes general career, career technical education, internships and learning in the community setting.

Virtual and blended learning is a mix of online and traditional classroom learning to take advantage of technology.

The dual enrollment options allows students to take two college classes in junior and/or senior years, earning high school and college credit at the same time. 

The Early College Program for seniors allows students to earn both a 
high school diploma and complete the first year of college at many Vermont colleges

And of course, school-based classroom learning will continue to be an important pathway option.

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Burlington City & Lake Semester overview

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Harwood Union High School Presents  The Personalization of Learning SD

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What's the deal with Proficiency Based Learning? National Version HD

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The Shift from Engaging Students to Empowering Learners

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Flexible Pathways in Vermont: The Route Changes, but the Destination Stays the Same

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Personalized Learning at Summit Public Schools

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personalized learning in the middle grades: a guide for classroom teachers and school leaders

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education / educational policy & reform / general

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education/teaching methods & materials - general

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individualized instruction - united states

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student-centered learning - united states

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teacher-student relationships - united states

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student-centered learning; teacher-student relationships; personalized learning plans; developmental needs of middle schoolers; individualized instruction; middle school education; middle school teaching

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education / educational policy & reform / general

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education/teaching methods & materials - general

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Personalized Learning in the Middle Grades: A Guide for Classroom Teachers and School Leaders

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Personalized Learning in the Middle Grades: A Guide for Classroom Teachers and School Leaders [Bishop, Penny A., Downes, John M., Farber, Katy] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Personalized Learning in the Middle Grades: A Guide for Classroom Teachers and School Leaders

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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How the Brain Learns [Sousa, David A.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. How the Brain Learns

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Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

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Make It Stick: The Science of Successful LearningBy:Peter C Brown and similar titles with free shipping.

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"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Shakespeare, Hamlet

We can't always control what happens to us, but we do have the power to control how we think, interpret, and respond. Irrational thought patterns and overly hasty emotional reactions are among the leading causes of stress and anxiety.

By making ourselves consciously aware of, identifying, and then correcting distorted and/or anxiety-inducing beliefs, we can think and act more calmly and rationally, and ultimately make ourselves less stressed, more satisfied, and happier as a result.

Though there is some overlap among them, here are five types of negative thinking we are all guilty of at one time or another.
1. Catastrophizing (or Magnifying)
Exaggerating the harmful effects of a negative incident out of all proportion. Unrealistically turning a minor occurrence into something major. Sometimes referred to as "making a mountain out of a molehill," it's acting as if the sky is falling every time something even slightly bad happens.

Examples:

Your boss offers you some negative feedback or minor criticism, so you assume you're going to be fired.

You weren't invited to that important meeting, so you start inventing all kinds of conspiracy theories about how your co-workers are trying to screw you over.

Your significant other is late for dinner, so you - of course - assume they must have gotten involved in some kind of fatal accident - or possibly even kidnapped! - instead of the more realistic probability that they are just stuck in traffic.

2. Personalizing
Seeing yourself (falsely) as the cause of a negative event. Feeling guilty, and thinking "it's all my fault" -- even though it may not be, and probably isn't. In fact, it might not even have anything to do with you.

Examples:

A prospective client decides to go with a competitor, and you completely blame yourself, even though you delivered a great presentation and did everything within your power to win their business.

A friend, colleague, or client has not responded to your email in the past 24 hours, so you assume they must hate you. And, not only that, they're probably talking about you behind your back at this very minute.

You made an error while playing a team sport, so now you feel like you are single-handedly to blame for your team losing the big game.

3. All-or-Nothing Thinking
Reducing complex situations to absolutes. Feeling that if you didn't come in first, you might as well have come in last.

Examples:

You did a great job on that report, except for one minor, barely-noticeable typo, so you feel like the entire report is ruined.

Your company is awarded second place among the top ten companies in your industry, but you feel like you came in last place because you didn't come in first.

Because you weren't offered that "dream job" you interviewed for - or either of the lower-level, back-up positions that you applied for and didn't even want anyway - you feel like a total loser.

4. Overgeneralizing
Unrealistically interpreting one or two unpleasant or negative occurrences as being part of an endless pattern. Making broad, sweeping general statements that may be an out-of-proportion exaggeration and not an accurate reflection of reality.

Examples:

Your assistant comes in late once or twice, and you berate him or her for "always" being late.

You are passed over for that promotion you wanted, so you assume that "everyone" thinks that you are unqualified, and that you will probably "never" be promoted no matter what you do.

Feeling like, because it rained a couple of days, your entire week-long beach vacation was ruined.

5. Mental Filtering
Focusing on the negative while screening out and ignoring the positive. Looking at the dark side of a situation, rather than seeing "the silver lining."

Examples:

Out of 10 sales calls, you dwell on the one sale you lost, rather than celebrating the nine sales you made.

You obsess about the fact that you got a B+ in one class, even though you got straight A's in every other class.

You get a completely unexpected performance bonus, yet instead of being happy about the recognition and the unanticipated windfall, you're disappointed in the amount.

Or ...as this happened to me last semester -- so it's still really fresh in my mind: 14 out of my 15 leadership graduate students gave me a "5 out of 5"...but I can't get past the one bad student who gave me a "1" and wrote on her evaluation: "Worst teacher I ever had in my life!" (*Totally true story!)

So what's the solution? How can we change our thinking to change our reality?

First, we need to be aware of it, and realize -- from a visual thinking perspective -- that we are "looking" at things through a "lens" of negativity. If we're not aware of it, and we're too close to it, we can't change it.

Second we need to step outside ourselves and try to see things objectively, put things in perspective and in proportion, and consciously and proactively decide how we are going to respond.

And thirdly, we can look at the negative or disappointing outcome as a learning experience, and explore how we might think about things differently and react more productively going forward. As Nelson Mandela famously put it: "I never lose. I either win...or I learn."

While it's much easier said than done, if we can be more "emotionally intelligent" and more aware of our own thinking and feelings, we can then consciously change it. By not taking everything so personally, by keeping things in perspective and proportion, by not making yourself the center of everyone's universe, by not acting the victim, and by realizing that we are the master of our thoughts, we can then do a better job of reframing things in a more positive and productive light.

Or we can just choose to continue to go through life like the two elderly women eating lunch at a bad restaurant in this old joke:

Woman #1: "Boy, the food here is really terrible."

Woman #2: "Yeah, I know...and such small portions!"

Published By

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IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD: OVERCOMING THE STRESS AND ANXIETY OF NEGATIVE THINKING

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"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare, Hamlet We can't always control what happens to us, but we do have the power to control how we think, interpret, and respond.

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...My feet hitting the trail led me to an important discovery about learning and growth: You can set your own pace, define your own distance, and determine your own destination.

Running is one of the most important aspects of my life, and one I've continually turned to during the pandemic. When I lace up my shoes, head out the door, and trace miles and miles of peaceful Vermont roads and trails, I always discover calm and clarity (even in times of grief and hardship).

There is a meditative cadence to the wind and rhythmic sound of my feet hitting the ground that transports me to a place where I can freely think. I'm incredibly grateful for these moments of escape, and I believe everyone deserves a similar space where they can be alone with themselves and their thoughts.

I've come to realize, though, that not everyone experiences being alone as a peaceful time. Other young people my age often have the opposite relationship-where the opportunity to self-reflect is a very negative experience. How can things be so different between me and them?

One possibility I've been exploring is the impact of our individual educational experiences. I attend EPIC Academy -a student-driven, project-based learning program at Lamoille Union High School. EPIC provides learners the opportunity to pursue learning outside the constraints of a structured classroom schedule. Through quarter-long passion projects wrapped around our interests and developed in partnership with advisors, EPIC cultivates the individual growth and curiosity of each learner in the context of a supportive learning community of peers exploring their own interests and development .

During my time at EPIC, I've been able to follow interests that feed my imagination and allow me to get to know myself deeply. With support from my advisors, I have built the confidence, leadership, and creativity that comes from an education journey that is designed with the learner at the table.

From Student at a Desk to Partner in Inventing Something New

If I was born five years earlier, none of what I described above would be true. Why? Because EPIC Academy didn't exist. I've been lucky enough to get to see and experience EPIC through its many stages of development-from initial concept on paper to successful implementation.

At the end of my freshman year, I connected with Kim Hoffman and Amber Carbine-March, the Rowland Fellows responsible for bringing EPIC to life. I can still remember that meeting. Pushing through my mental fatigue following the completion of an avalanche of last-minute biology assessments, I eagerly listened as they pitched this new education concept: "Advocacy, communication, and skills the curriculum," they explained.

I was sold, which made it easy to immediately accept what came next-an invitation to sit on the steering committee responsible for guiding the launch of EPIC Academy at Lamoille.

My experience on the committee was life changing. Up to that point, my peers and I were merely learners in conventional classrooms. But on the committee, we were treated as partners. Witnessing the benefit of strong youth-adult and youth-community partnerships transformed my belief of what's possible in education.

EPIC Academy's purpose is to kindle a love for learning and allow learners to explore themselves and seek opportunities to grow. Like the steady cadence of my foot striking the earth, I could (and can still) feel the momentum of this opportunity propelling me forward. Again, I was lucky because this is not the reality for most young learners.

How can we let learners drown in packets when there are problems in the world that are actually relevant, like this global pandemic?

Last spring, when the pandemic forced everyone into online learning, I spoke with a freshman on a peer-to-peer tutoring call who was struggling with the transition. I listened, becoming more and more disturbed as she explained her assignment. Two to three times per week, this student was receiving five-to-ten page long packets of wordy biology questions.

I attempted to help, but I was struggling with a fundamental question: How could I convince this peer that a packet of disconnected facts and multiple choice questions was worth doing? Better yet, should I? How can we let learners drown in when there are problems in the world that are actually relevant, like this global pandemic?

Biology bears incredible relevance to everything from current events to the beautiful, small, colorful pet bird that was perched on her shoulder during the call. Biology (and life) is so much richer than mindless repetition and memorization.

This is when I realized just how much young people were struggling to find any meaning or excitement in their learning. They were feeling increasingly disengaged and overwhelmed by busywork. These were emotions that were so far removed from the tempo of my everyday life.

Each day, I was tracking my runs and having regular check-ins with peers and advisors from EPIC to share our struggles, successes, and learning accomplishments-all while contributing to statewide efforts to promote and amplify personalized learning and youth-adult partnerships. I regularly collaborated with organizations like Big Picture Learning, Vermont Learning for the Future, and Up for Learning to plan and host virtual summits.

I'm thankful that during this pandemic and the abrupt transition to virtual learning, I never experienced a lack of relevance in my work. In fact, the "work" felt more relevant than ever before. I was making a difference, which helped me feel more connected to my education.

This is About So Much More than EPIC Academy

The awe I experienced in the spring and summer months from the familiar sound of my feet hitting the trail led me to an important discovery about learning and growth: You can set your own pace, define your own distance, and determine your own destination.

I am grateful to my EPIC advisors and peer group for supporting me on this unfolding journey and giving me the motivation to ask questions that often go unasked.

As I explore what school could be, I wonder: What if schools didn't prioritize teaching for a test? What if learning, for all young people, happened alongside adults and peers in their community and was centered outside of the classroom? What if all learners were seen as leaders? What if learning was acknowledged to be exploring relevant passions and interests? What if we set up supports for learners to come to deeply know themselves and their community? Like my runs, what if learning was measured by the fullness of the journey, rather than the race toward a predetermined destination? What if we allow learners and adult mentors/advisors to co-create and implement individual learning plans?

There is so much possibility. It's time for us to allow young people to pay more attention to what they enjoy doing when they have the freedom to choose.

I often think of where I would be if I were on a different path; if I wasn't able to get lost for hours in the woods and on dirt roads, hair rising and falling onto my shoulders with every step as I allow the challenges of the day to sink away. Where would I be if I had to move through school working strictly for grades?

Little did I know that when Kim and Amber approached me to be part of EPIC's steering committee, or when this global pandemic hit, that there would be so many opportunities that would change my life. Education is suddenly moving in bursts towards a future that allows students to develop a love for learning, to get up and want to go to school because "school" is not contained by four walls and a compliance-based curriculum.

It is time for us to not waste this crisis but to use it as an opportunity for doing things differently. It is time to actively dismantle the antiquated systems of education and rebuild schools that are grounded in humanity, community, love, and a strong sense of self.

At EPIC Academy, we live and breathe the motto: Know Myself, Grow Myself, Make My Mark, See it Through. Running trails are where I go to find myself. And, EPIC Academy has given me the structure and freedom to make my mark and see my projects through. All young people deserve this type of learning experience. One where they are empowered to find their own path. One where they, too, can know themselves, grow themselves, and make their mark.

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What if Every Learner Was Empowered to Choose Their Own Path? - Education Reimagined

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My feet hitting the trail led me to an important discovery about learning and growth: You can set your own pace, define your own distance, and determine your own destination. Running is one of the most important aspects of my life, and one I've continually turned to during the pandemic.

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The fifteen year old boy slowly hobbled from the parking lot to the school's main office, stopping to adjust his crutches. He was welcomed by the school's Flexible Pathway Coordinator, Ian Dinzeo for their 10 o'clock appointment. They both sat down, masked, at opposite ends of a table in the school cafeteria - which offered more room to spread apart than the coordinator's small office. Mr. Dinzeo listened as the young man described the challenges of navigating a traditional school schedule, physical therapy, and family concerns about COVID.

With an expanding Flexible Pathways Program Flexible Pathways program in place, Mr. Dinzeo was able to offer this student options that kept him in the game of school during an especially challenging time. The 18 different pathways now available at North Country Union High School students didn't just happen overnight.

The program grew strategically from the right combination of leadership, passion, and increased need for more flexible options for students.

Similar to many other schools in the state, North Country Union High School started to research different approaches to Flexible Pathways in response to Act 77 in 2013 . For several years, Flexible Pathways opportunities in the school were coordinated by a guidance counselor and a half time Work Based Learning Coordinator. After the school hired Ian Dinzeo as its full time Coordinator, the Flexible Pathways Program blossomed serving over 1000 instances a year of students taking advantage of more flexible learning opportunities.

As North Country educators immersed themselves into the developing proficiency based graduation requirement, Chris Young, principal, saw the growth of "a widely held belief in our school that we need to provide as many ways as possible for students to meet graduation proficiencies. This set the Flexible Pathways up to be the main vehicle that we use to get to more transferable skills level proficiencies rather than just content level proficiencies."

Listening to Principal Young, it's obvious that he has an innovator's mindset with a bias towards action. He describes himself as a leader that is "comfortable living with some ambiguity and not putting up artificial barriers to implementing some of these program." He is committed to providing the Flexible Pathways program the freedom and support to continue to build opportunities so that students have access to a lot of different ways to get where they want to go".

It is obvious that passion of the school leaders, the staff, and students are key contributors to the growth of the Flexible Pathways program. "Our flexible pathways program would not be successful without the contributions of the majority of teachers and staff within the building," says Dinzeo. "The more the faculty and staff believe these pathways are to educational benefit to our students the better. During my first year we were still targeting a small number of Teacher of Records for our independent studies, that pool has grown over time as more of the staff started to buy in."

"With staff buy in comes student buy in. I strongly believe we have the buy in from the majority of our staff that this is a viable educational option for our students without the loss of academic rigor. If a certain pathway lacks the rigor or something else the staff is not shy about providing feedback. This leads to the overall improvement of said pathway and the betterment of the pathways program as a whole."

Ian's passion for meeting student individual learning needs as well as his leadership skills stand out. His previous experience as the school's athletic director serve him well in this role. He understands that to grow and sustain a program, you need a strong base of participants, visible wins, and community support. He's no stranger to motivating students and teams; he applies the same strategies he used on the athletic fields to academics.

His active listening skills help him identify students' personal interests, which he uses to motivate students to set achievable goals and create a plan to meet those goals. Instead of recruiting coaches, he now recruits teachers and community members to support students in reaching individualized goals through a wealth of flexible options ranging from more structured non-traditional programs to a student's individual pursuit of their passion or interest.

More structured options like North Country Arts and Communication Academy, The STEM Academy, The Kingdom Course, or even the local Career and Technical Education program bring together students with similar interests. Some options (community service and mentoring programs) have been put on hold due to COVID. The school also offers students an opportunity to select either "structured" or 'student designed" independent study options.

Principal Young, also acknowledges that a key area he can provide support in is to build systems where educators's commitment to flexible pathways are sustainable. Ideas for growing a pool of 'teachers of records" for student independent projects range from providing stipends for teachers to tapping into school leaders to supervise independent studies.

COVID and the school response to the pandemic created an even greater need for flexible options for students. With several families choosing remote only options for their student, North Country High School's Flexible Pathway option was in high demand. The program quickly added distance learning pathway offerings from Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative and Fifty eight students are currently engaged in the distant learning pathway.

North Country predicts that COVID will also increase the demand for credit recovery options. High school principal, Chris Young is putting together a team to create multiple credit recovery pathways to meet the upcoming need. The school's well developed Flexible Pathway program will be instrumental in that process.

Ian understands that each pathway has different logistical needs; although some translate from pathway to pathway some needs do not and it still takes time to tweak pathways and have them grow. He'll bring his experience planning, piloting, reflecting with others, and making changes to the process of preparing additional flexible learning opportunities for students as the school prepares for post-COVID learning.

Ian is determined that as the Flexible Pathways program continues to expand, it will always be centered around student voice. Noticing that a teacher voice easily overshadows student voice in the design of a personalized learning plan, Ian has adjusted the process of engaging a teacher to support a student's individualized project plan. "We use to bring in an educator early into the planning process of a individual student project. I now work with the student to design a draft of their plan before we bring in a supporting teacher," explains Ian.

As the options for Flexible Pathways continue to grow, it will be important to start preparing students to use their voice and leverage these options by advocating for their own learning needs. Middle school passion projects or genius hour projects can help create a mindset where students take accountability for communicating what they need and become designers of their learning. "Every single kid ought to be reaching out to their teacher with something - specific question about science problem, an assignment, or a bigger problem like I need to meet graduation proficiencies," explains Principal Young.

"The good news is that during our pandemic response, we got really good at identifying the most important things a student had to learn," he continues. "We now have a tighter more accurate description for the portrait of a graduate. Flexible pathways provide ways for students to develop the transferable skills proficiencies that are part of that portrait."

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North Country Flexible Pathways : Innovative Education in VT

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The fifteen year old boy slowly hobbled from the parking lot to the school's main office, stopping to adjust his crutches. He was welcomed by the school's Flexible Pathway Coordinator, Ian Dinzeo for their 10 o'clock appointment.

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Strengthening Pathways to Postsecondary Success

Peoples Academy VCLN Community Team

If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's ,we rob them of tomorrow .

- John Dewey

Transforming a complex social system is really about transforming the relationships between the people who make up the system.

- Peter Senge

The VCLN is open to all expanded learning providers, businesses, individuals and community organizations that provide community-focused learning experiences for young people.

To learn how you or your organization can become involved, contact Partnerships Manager Claire Tebbs .

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Strengthening Pathways to Postsecondary Success Peoples Academy VCLN Community Team If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's ,we rob them of tomorrow . - John Dewey Transforming a complex social system is really about transforming the relationships between the people who make up the system.

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Since 2018, a group of Burlington High School students in the Burlington City and Lake Semester (BCLS) have used their home community as a laboratory to explore local problems-and developing solutions.

In December the students' engagement with local sustainability issues was recognized by the Global Regional Centers of Excellence (RCE) as an Outstanding 2020 Flagship Project. United Nations University is the parent organization of RCE which is charged with advancing global sustainability education.

The program addresses one of the central UN goals: making cities and towns inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The award is given annually to RCEs that have made outstanding contributions to address local sustainable development challenges in their regions.

According to Walter Poleman, senior lecturer in the Rubenstein School and co-coordinator of the Greater Burlington Sustainability Education Network (Burlington's is one of just 179 RCE's in the world and one of nine in the United States), the lake semester program represents the ideal of helping students "develop deep knowledge about sustainability and appreciation of place."
Origins
The Burlington City and Lake Semester is the brainchild of several local educators committed to the importance of place-based learning, including Andy Barker and Signe Daly '90, both of whom have worked as educators for 25 years, and Burlington High School teachers Peter McConville G '05 and Dov Stucker.

Their individual professional paths sometimes took detours. Barker spent 11 years as part of the Ben & Jerry's Social Mission Team and Daly taught education courses at UVM and Champlain College. But as kindred spirits they remained in the same orbit, dreaming about building a place-based civic engagement program for high school students.

"The main idea was to learn from this place where we all live, and create a path for Burlington students who might not have the opportunity to participate in an immersive program like this," Daly said, noting that many students can't afford traditional experiences like semester abroad programs.

Poleman, who has expertise in place-based landscape analysis and education for sustainability, was recruited to serve on the group's steering committee and helped provide an organizational framework for the BCLS.

With the contributions of community partners including Shelburne Farms and the Burlington School District, BCLS came together. The curriculum was built around broad themes including sense of place, community and identity, civic engagement, social justice, and sustainability. Home base for the group is the O.N.E. Community Center in the North End of Burlington, which also houses the city's Center of Recreation & Education.

"Students are really embedded in a community-spirited location," notes Daly.

BCLS recruited its first cohort at Burlington High School in 2017. The program is by application, and serves 15-20 junior and senior students per semester. Each of the four founding educators teach part-time in the program, but Daly says they often function more as facilitators than instructors. BCL students learn together and learn by doing: in recent semesters they have completed research on microplastic pollution in Lake Champlain, planted native tree species for forest restoration and climate resilience, consulted on the City of Burlington's Equity Report, created a video about racial justice, and collaborated with local artists on public art projects.

"The classroom is the city of Burlington and the teachers are professionals who work here," Daly said. "For instance, when we explore transportation history we bring in Luis Vivanco (UVM professor of anthropology)."

Seth Harte, a junior in the BCLS program, was especially struck by Vivanco's presentation. "After the discussion I was like ' that's what I want to study-cultural anthropology.'"

He appreciates the program's inquiry-based approach, where the group takes a deep dive into different subject areas.

"It's a unique opportunity to do something like this. It's real-world learning you don't always get in high school. I value talking with different people in the city who are passionate about what they do."
Synergy
For Poleman, the award builds on Burlington RCE's growing national and international recognition as a leader in sustainability education.

In September 2019, the RCE hosted the 8th Annual Americas RCE meeting, a three-day gathering attracting participants from 11 RCEs representing five nations across South, Central, and North America. Thirty-five Vermonters, including students in the BCLS program, joined 31 out-of-town delegates to share perspectives and discuss approaches to human health and the environment. Burlington City & Lake Semester students facilitated a robust discussion of U.N. sustainable development goals.

"We've become leaders in this American network-the gathering help put us on the map globally," said Poleman. "This award builds on that track record."

Momentum generated by RCE Burlington is also making a curricular impact on UVM. Drawing on resources from the departments of education, geography, community development and applied economics, and the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, the university recently launched the Place-Based Education (PBE) Certificate program for undergraduates.

The program aligns with UVM's land-grant mission and RCE goals in deepening connections to people and places in the community and environment.

"With COVID-19 there's this new emphasis on using community as a classroom. In that sense, the BLCS program is really pioneering this," said Poleman. "Now the new certification program provides an opportunity for our students to really lean in to the idea of place as a classroom."

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UN Award Honors Innovative Sustainability Education Program

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Since 2018, a group of Burlington High School students in the Burlington City and Lake Semester (BCLS) have used their home community as a laboratory to explore local problems-and developing solutions. In December the students' engagement with local sustainability issues was recognized by the Global Regional Centers of Excellence (RCE) as an Outstanding 2020 Flagship Project.

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Whenever you read about the secrets of success, you'll no doubt come across that well-known quote from Thomas Edison, that "genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration".

While inventing the lightbulb, we are told, he tried 3,000 attempts before finally finding a suitable filament that would glow without immediately burning out. The story is meant to be the inspirational reminder that things like natural creativity are often much less important than dogged determination.

There's no doubt that passion and perseverance are essential to reaching your long-term goals. But it's important to remember the strategic process that Edison went through to reach his goal. He didn't just haphazardly move from one failed design after another, after all, but constantly adapted and refined his ideas. "I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable," he told Harper's magazine in 1890. "Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved." At each step of the journey, he was making intelligent decisions that learnt from the failures and built on the small successes.

You may not be an inventor tinkering with a new device, but a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academic of Sciences, suggests we might all benefit from a similar way of thinking in the pursuit of our goals.

The construct - called the "strategic mindset" - describes the tendency to question and refine your current approach in the face of setbacks and challenges. While others diligently follow the same convoluted path, people with the strategic mindset are constantly looking for a more efficient route forwards. "It helps them figure out how to direct their efforts more effectively," says Patricia Chen at the National University of Singapore. And Chen's new research shows that it may just spell the difference between success or failure.

Thinking about thinking
Chen's findings build on a wealth of research on metacognition - which is our awareness and understanding of our own thought processes (or, more snappily "thinking about thinking".) Useful metacognitive strategies would include monitoring your progress in reaching your goal, recognising your flaws and the areas that need improvement and then setting out steps to overcome those challenges.

Suppose you are an expat learning French. Metacognition would help you to recognise that something like self-testing is a better way of learning new words than simply reading vocabulary lists. You might recognise difficulty in following dialogue and decide to spend more time watching French films to improve your ear for the language (rather than, say, fruitlessly focusing on the grammar). You might also set up increasingly difficult challenges - such as embarking on increasingly complex conversations with locals - to improve the fluency of your conversation.

The use of metacognitive strategies is not just a reflection of someone's raw intelligence. "These strategies explain achievement even after controlling for the effect of IQ," explains Jean-Louis Berger, at the Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training in Lausanne, whose own research has explored different ways of measuring metacognition.

Previous research had demonstrated the importance of metacognition in isolated disciplines - but Chen wondered whether there might be some more general patterns across different domains. Are some people simply more inclined to apply metacognitive strategies in whatever goal they set out to achieve? And if so, could we teach more people to think strategically in that way?

To find out, Chen and her team of researchers put together a questionnaire to test the strategic mindset, and you can try it for yourself below. Simply rate the following statements on a scale of 1 (never) to 5 (all the time):

When you are stuck on something, how often do you ask yourself: "What are things I can do to help myself?"

Whenever you feel like you are not making progress, how often do you ask yourself: "Is there a better way of doing this?"

Whenever you feel frustrated with something, how often do you ask yourself: "How can I do this better?"

In moments when you feel challenged, how often do you ask yourself: "What are things I can do to make myself better at this?"

When you are struggling with something, how often do you ask yourself: "What can I do to help myself?"

Whenever something feels difficult, how often do you ask yourself: "What can I do to get better at this?"

The higher you score, the more likely you are to have a strategic mindset.

In an initial experiment, Chen's team asked a group of 365 students to complete the scale in the middle of the autumn semester. As hypothesised, their score predicted their use of various learning strategies (of the kind described above) over the course of the next term, which, in turn, predicted their grades in various classes.

To check if the strategic mindset influenced goal pursuit across different domains, Chen's team then examined a further group of 356 participants pursuing an educational or professional challenge (such as learning a new computing language) and a health or fitness goal (such as losing weight). Once again, the strategic mindset successfully predicted the participants' use of metacognitive techniques - like regular, systematic progress monitoring - and, as a result, their overall chances of reaching their both types of goals. Some people seem to take more care in adapting and refining their approach to whatever activity they're doing - and it makes a real difference to their overall success in apparently unrelated areas of life.

In their final experiment, the researchers tested whether they could prime people with a strategic mindset - and if that in turn, would change people's behaviour when they faced a new challenge.

The participants first read an article outlining the basic concept of the strategic mindset, which they had to summarise for a potential post on social media. Afterward, they were led to a laboratory filled with a seemingly endless supply of eggs. Their task was the kind of thing that you might learn on the first day of a culinary school: to separate the whites from the yolks as cleanly and efficiently as possible. If any yolk entered the white bin, they were penalised.

While that may sound a slightly eccentric choice, it was chosen precisely because of its surprise value. "We wanted a task that was relatively unfamiliar and challenging for most participants, which had clear performance metrics, and could be accomplished with different methods," Chen explained. There was no clear "right" answer - participants could strain the egg through your fingers or make a small hole in the shell and letting the white drip through, for example - and so they had to find the best technique that worked for them. "People were very creative when it came to figuring out different ways to do this task efficiently," Chen says.

Sure enough, the participants who had read the article about the strategic mindset tackled the exercise in a more inquisitive and reflective - making more of the opportunity to explore the different possible methods and adapting their behaviour accordingly. As a result, they outperformed a control group by a significant margin.

True grit
Besides examining the role of the strategic mindset in goal pursuit, Chen's studies also examined the constructs relation to various other psychological constructs. She compared it to "grit", for instance - an increasingly popular trait defined as "passion and perseverance", which can be measured by rating statements such as "setbacks don't discourage me". Grit is known to be incredibly important for people's various life outcomes, but Chen found that it was largely unrelated to the strategic mindset: each construct appears to contribute separate things to someone's success.

The results have already impressed Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who led the research on grit. "I love this work and have already planned to mention it in my undergraduate course, Grit Lab," she told me. "In my view grit is about orienting oneself to a really, really long-term goal in pursuing it despite setbacks, while strategic mindset is thinking about any goal, short or long term, in ways that constantly look for efficiency." Like Chen, she thinks that the two constructs should complement each other. "You could be gritty but not try new and different ways to achieve your long-term goal - that's not ideal."

This first paper was really a proof of concept, of course, and the benefits of the strategic mindset will need to be replicated in different contexts. "What we know now is that adults seem to naturally vary in their strategic mindset, and that a strategic mindset can be taught," says Chen. The researchers also need to find out how best to teach the strategic mindset, since it may be difficult to lead to long-term change in someone's long-term thinking. Chen suggests that it could be combined with more general education on metacognition or emotion regulation (an approach that Berger also endorses). Chen is also interested in teaching it in schools. "It is possible that starting young could really help people in the long run."

If nothing else, Chen's research should be a useful reminder that our current approach to our challenges isn't necessarily the best one; like Edison's designs for the lightbulb, we need to be on the constant lookout for ways to improve. Genius may be one percent inspiration and 99% perspiration, but with some strategic thinking, we can save ourselves a lot of blood, sweat and tears.
David Robson is the author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things (WW Norton/Hodder & Stoughton) which examines our most common thinking errors and the ways we can all improve our learning and decision making. He is on Twitter.

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The mindset you need to succeed at every goal

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Whenever you read about the secrets of success, you'll no doubt come across that well-known quote from Thomas Edison, that "genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration". While inventing the lightbulb, we are told, he tried 3,000 attempts before finally finding a suitable filament that would glow without immediately burning out.

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Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/.

Thinking about One's Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice

Thinking about One's Thinking

Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one's understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one's thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner.

Initially studied for its development in young children (Baker & Brown, 1984; Flavell, 1985), researchers soon began to look at how experts display metacognitive thinking and how, then, these thought processes can be taught to novices to improve their learning (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986). In How People Learn, the National Academy of Sciences' synthesis of decades of research on the science of learning, one of the three key findings of this work is the effectiveness of a "'metacognitive' approach to instruction" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 18).

Metacognitive practices increase students' abilities to transfer or adapt their learning to new contexts and tasks (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 12; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Scardamalia et al., 1984; Schoenfeld, 1983, 1985, 1991). They do this by gaining a level of awareness above the subject matter: they also think about the tasks and contexts of different learning situations and themselves as learners in these different contexts. When Pintrich (2002) asserts that "Students who know about the different kinds of strategies for learning, thinking, and problem solving will be more likely to use them" (p. 222), notice the students must "know about" these strategies, not just practice them. As Zohar and David (2009) explain, there must be a " conscious meta-strategic level of H[igher] O[rder] T[hinking]" (p. 179).

Metacognitive practices help students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses as learners, writers, readers, test-takers, group members, etc. A key element is recognizing the limit of one's knowledge or ability and then figuring out how to expand that knowledge or extend the ability. Those who know their strengths and weaknesses in these areas will be more likely to "actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tasks and performances" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67).

The absence of metacognition connects to the research by Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, and Kruger on "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence" (2003). They found that "people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence," lacking "insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills." They identified this pattern across domains-from test-taking, writing grammatically, thinking logically, to recognizing humor, to hunters' knowledge about firearms and medical lab technicians' knowledge of medical terminology and problem-solving skills (p. 83-84). In short, "if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else's, are right or wrong" (p. 85). This research suggests that increased metacognitive abilities-to learn specific (and correct) skills, how to recognize them, and how to practice them-is needed in many contexts.

Putting Metacognition into Practice

In " Promoting Student Metacognition," Tanner (2012) offers a handful of specific activities for biology classes, but they can be adapted to any discipline. She first describes four assignments for explicit instruction (p. 116):

Preassessments-Encouraging Students to Examine Their Current Thinking: "What do I already know about this topic that could guide my learning?"

The Muddiest Point-Giving Students Practice in Identifying Confusions: "What was most confusing to me about the material explored in class today?"

Retrospective Postassessments-Pushing Students to Recognize Conceptual Change: "Before this course, I thought evolution was... Now I think that evolution is ...." or "How is my thinking changing (or not changing) over time?"

Reflective Journals-Providing a Forum in Which Students Monitor Their Own Thinking: "What about my exam preparation worked well that I should remember to do next time? What did not work so well that I should not do next time or that I should change?"

Next are recommendations for developing a "classroom culture grounded in metacognition" (p. 116-118):

Giving Students License to Identify Confusions within the Classroom Culture: ask students what they find confusing, acknowledge the difficulties

Integrating Reflection into Credited Course Work: integrate short reflection (oral or written) that ask students what they found challenging or what questions arose during an assignment/exam/project

Metacognitive Modeling by the Instructor for Students: model the thinking processes involved in your field and sought in your course by being explicit about "how you start, how you decide what to do first and then next, how you check your work, how you know when you are done" (p. 118)

To facilitate these activities, she also offers three useful tables:

Questions for students to ask themselves as they plan, monitor, and evaluate their thinking within four learning contexts-in class, assignments, quizzes/exams, and the course as a whole (p. 115)

Prompts for integrating metacognition into discussions of pairs during clicker activities, assignments, and quiz or exam preparation (p. 117)

Questions to help faculty metacognitively assess their own teaching (p. 119)

Weimer's " Deep Learning vs. Surface Learning: Getting Students to Understand the Difference " (2012) offers additional recommendations for developing students' metacognitive awareness and improvement of their study skills:

"[I]t is terribly important that in explicit and concerted ways we make students aware of themselves as learners. We must regularly ask, not only 'What are you learning?' but 'How are you learning?' We must confront them with the effectiveness (more often ineffectiveness) of their approaches. We must offer alternatives and then challenge students to test the efficacy of those approaches." (emphasis added)

She points to a tool developed by Stanger-Hall (2012, p. 297) for her students to identify their study strategies, which she divided into " cognitively passive" ("I previewed the reading before class," "I came to class," "I read the assigned text," "I highlighted the text," et al) and " cognitively active study behaviors" ("I asked myself: 'How does it work?' and 'Why does it work this way?'" "I wrote my own study questions," "I fit all the facts into a bigger picture," "I closed my notes and tested how much I remembered," et al). The specific focus of Stanger-Hall's study is tangential to this discussion, ¹ but imagine giving students lists like hers adapted to your course and then, after a major assignment, having students discuss which ones worked and which types of behaviors led to higher grades. Even further, follow Lovett's advice (2013) by assigning "exam wrappers," which include students reflecting on their previous exam-preparation strategies, assessing those strategies and then looking ahead to the next exam, and writing an action plan for a revised approach to studying. A common assignment in English composition courses is the self-assessment essay in which students apply course criteria to articulate their strengths and weaknesses within single papers or over the course of the semester. These activities can be adapted to assignments other than exams or essays, such as projects, speeches, discussions, and the like.

As these examples illustrate, for students to become more metacognitive, they must be taught the concept and its language explicitly (Pintrich, 2002; Tanner, 2012), though not in a content-delivery model (simply a reading or a lecture) and not in one lesson. Instead, the explicit instruction should be "designed according to a knowledge construction approach," or students need to recognize, assess, and connect new skills to old ones, "and it needs to take place over an extended period of time" (Zohar & David, p. 187). This kind of explicit instruction will help students expand or replace existing learning strategies with new and more effective ones, give students a way to talk about learning and thinking, compare strategies with their classmates' and make more informed choices, and render learning "less opaque to students, rather than being something that happens mysteriously or that some students 'get' and learn and others struggle and don't learn" (Pintrich, 2002, p. 223).

Metacognition instruction should also be embedded with the content and activities about which students are thinking. Why? Metacognition is "not generic" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 19) but instead is most effective when it is adapted to reflect the specific learning contexts of a specific topic, course, or discipline (Zohar & David, 2009). In explicitly connecting a learning context to its relevant processes, learners will be more able to adapt strategies to new contexts, rather than assume that learning is the same everywhere and every time. For instance, students' abilities to read disciplinary texts in discipline-appropriate ways would also benefit from metacognitive practice. A literature professor may read a passage of a novel aloud in class, while also talking about what she's thinking as she reads: how she makes sense of specific words and phrases, what connections she makes, how she approaches difficult passages, etc. This kind of modeling is a good practice in metacognition instruction, as suggested by Tanner above. Concepción's " Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition " (2004) includes his detailed "How to Read Philosophy" handout (pp. 358-367), which includes the following components:

What to Expect (when reading philosophy)

The Ultimate Goal (of reading philosophy)

Basic Good Reading Behaviors

Important Background Information, or discipline- and course-specific reading practices, such as "reading for enlightenment" rather than information, and "problem-based classes" rather than historical or figure-based classes

A Three-Part Reading Process (pre-reading, understanding, and evaluating)

Flagging, or annotating the reading

Linear vs. Dialogical Writing (Philosophical writing is rarely straightforward but instead "a monologue that contains a dialogue" [p. 365].)

What would such a handout look like for your discipline?

Students can even be metacognitively prepared (and then prepare themselves) for the overarching learning experiences expected in specific contexts. Salvatori and Donahue's The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (2004) encourages students to embrace difficult texts (and tasks) as part of deep learning, rather than an obstacle. Their "difficulty paper" assignment helps students reflect on and articulate the nature of the difficulty and work through their responses to it (p. 9). Similarly, in courses with sensitive subject matter, a different kind of learning occurs, one that involves complex emotional responses. In " Learning from Their Own Learning: How Metacognitive and Meta-affective Reflections Enhance Learning in Race-Related Courses" (Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, 2009), students were informed about the common reactions to learning about racial inequality (Helms, 1995; Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; see student handout, Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, p. 23-24) and then regularly wrote about their cognitive and affective responses to specific racialized situations. The students with the most developed metacognitive and meta-affective practices at the end of the semester were able to "clear the obstacles and move away from" oversimplified thinking about race and racism "to places of greater questioning, acknowledging the complexities of identity, and redefining the world in racial terms" (p. 14).

Ultimately, metacognition requires students to "externalize mental events" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67), such as what it means to learn, awareness of one's strengths and weaknesses with specific skills or in a given learning context, plan what's required to accomplish a specific learning goal or activity, identifying and correcting errors, and preparing ahead for learning processes.

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1 Students who were tested with short answer in addition to multiple-choice questions on their exams reported more cognitively active behaviors than those tested with just multiple-choice questions, and these active behaviors led to improved performance on the final exam.
References

Adams, Maurianne, Bell, Lee Ann, and Griffin, Pat. (1997). Teaching for diversity and social justice: A sourcebook. New York: Routledge.

Bransford, John D., Brown Ann L., and Cocking Rodney R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Baker, Linda, and Brown, Ann L. (1984). Metacognitive skills and reading. In Paul David Pearson, Michael L. Kamil, Rebecca Barr, & Peter Mosenthal (Eds.), Handbook of research in reading: Volume III (pp. 353-395). New York: Longman.

Brown, Ann L. (1980). Metacognitive development and reading. In Rand J. Spiro, Bertram C. Bruce, and William F. Brewer, (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and education (pp. 453-482). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Chick, Nancy, Karis, Terri, and Kernahan, Cyndi. (2009). Learning from their own learning: how metacognitive and meta-affective reflections enhance learning in race-related courses . International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 3(1). 1-28.

Flavell, John H. (1985). Cognitive development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Hatano, Giyoo and Inagaki, Kayoko. (1986). Two courses of expertise. In Harold Stevenson, Azuma, Horishi, and Hakuta, Kinji (Eds.), Child development and education in Japan, New York: W.H. Freeman.

Lovett, Marsha C. (2013). Make exams worth more than the grade. In Matthew Kaplan, Naomi Silver, Danielle LaVague-Manty, and Deborah Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi, and Donahue, Patricia. (2004). The Elements (and pleasures) of difficulty. New York: Pearson-Longman.

Schoenfeld, Alan H. (1991). On mathematics as sense making: An informal attack on the fortunate divorce of formal and informal mathematics. In James F. Voss, David N. Perkins, and Judith W. Segal (Eds.), Informal reasoning and education (pp. 311-344). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Weimer, Maryellen. (2012, November 19). Deep learning vs. surface learning: Getting students to understand the difference. Retrieved from the Teaching Professor Blog from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/deep-learning-vs-surface-learning-getting-students-to-understand-the-difference/.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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by Nancy Chick Print Version Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/. Thinking about One's Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice Thinking about One's Thinking Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess...

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Spoiler alert: When we adjust learning conditions to be more in sync with the known laws of brain-based learning, learning improves. Momentum builds.

Trust the science

For 15 years I've been helping Vermont educators and school systems apply what we know about the brain to inform what we do in our schools. And for 15 years, I've watched a variation of the same story unfold.

Initially, there's excitement. Everyone loves learning about the brain, especially educators. Most teaching teams never get the chance to sustain a multi-year conversation about what contemporary science has to say about why and how people learn.

The findings inspire educators to try out strategies more compatible with the way learning works. Early results are positive.

But then, the inevitable rub. As educators take an increasingly science-based approach to learning design, they run afoul of our industrial-aged operating system: great for running factories constructing Model-Ts, but not-so-great for running programs cultivating young minds.

It's a matrix moment. Educators grasp how incompatible our operating system is with the known laws of learning. The journey continues - once you grasp the science of how people learn, it's hard to let it go - but with a checked enthusiasm and diminished expectations.

And so it goes. No exceptions.

But educators aren't the only ones checking their enthusiasm. When asked to review the Schlechty Center on Engagement 's description of the "five different types of involvement" students bring to their school work, the Vermont educators I've surveyed for more than a decade report that the majority of their students display a mix of compliance, avoidance, or rebellion.

How did we get here?

Why do we keep working so hard for such meager results?

And what would working smarter look like?

A Ridiculously Brief Yet Highly Instructive History

For millions of years our earliest ancestors learned by acting in the world and working with the world's feedback. Our brains changed as our understanding grew. Around 200,000 years ago the modern human emerged. The universe's most advanced known learner. Our secret sauce? Socializing to solve pressing problems so we might lead more satisfying lives.

We learned so much, we needed to categorize our understanding into disciplines that specialized in making sense of different dimensions of our experience. And then, just within the last couple thousand years, we created schools. Why put up with the mess of constructing your own learning, when experts can explain the way the world works?

By the late 19th century, the Committee of Ten committed to our traditional model of school, the operating system that bedevils us today.

That operating system - of and for its time - efficiently sorts students according to a narrow view of intelligence to determine who continues with schooling and who heads to work. It also takes a narrow view of teaching and learning, reducing learning to a transaction: teachers give expertise to those students capable of receiving it.

In that time period, Edward Thorndike and John Dewey embodied two vying visions of education.

Thorndike called for a mechanistic, teacher-centered, data-driven system, rejecting Dewey's case for a more organic, student-centered, community-based system. "To understand the problems in education today," writes Ellen Condliffe Lagemann in The Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research, "one must understand that Thorndike won and Dewey lost."

Since then, our faith and belief in measurement has grown.

Never in the history of education has any country required students to take as many standardized tests as has the United States. The results? Abysmal.

But let's give credit to Vermont, home to the vanquished but still influential John Dewey.

For decades Vermont has led national efforts to make schools more compatible with our contemporary understanding of how people learn, and the purpose of school. Vermont's Act 77 and Education Quality Standards testify to our efforts.

Yet, these ongoing initiatives are like so many pieces of sophisticated software. The old hard drive just can't run them; the new fix bogs down an already overwhelmed system.

And educators - accustomed to coverage-based professional development that moves onto the next initiative before getting the current one right - bring a mix compliance, retreatism, and rebellion to the work. A mix that's strikingly similar to that brought by their students.

And then, to bring this speedy history up to date, COVID arrived.

Interestingly, the initial shock of it all caused many schools to drop the pretense of business as usual. Slow down; simplify; relationships first.

In less than a year, we've learned creative ways to connect across distances and differences.

In less than a year, we've developed a profound appreciation for the vitality of in-person connections.

And in less than a year, we've become more aware of and empathic about the pre-existing conditions that have been inflamed by the pandemic.

Many more of us, for example, are now aware of the mental health crisis plaguing so many adolescents, as described so well in the first ten minutes of Princeton Professor Laurie Santos' pre-pandemic presentation to the National Council for Behavioral Health.

After all we've been through, do we really want to return to our pre-pandemic state? Wouldn't we rather apply what we've been learning to design a better way of operating, one that makes the very most of our time together and apart?

Describing the resilience and creativity that early Vermonters brought to the hardships they faced, historian Zadock Thompson wrote, "They were aroused to their highest energies by the difficulties they were compelled to encounter."

And we are doing the same! We are adapting and evolving in ways we can't even recognize or appreciate yet. As bad and scary as it feels and is, we are making remarkable discoveries.

And I sense that all of us - students, educators, and families - are more ready than ever to adopt a contemporary educational operating system. One compatible with the science of why and how people learn. One in sync with what our communities need, and one that adheres to, rather than violates, fundamental laws of learning.

What are these laws of learning? And how would school be different if we operated according to these scientific findings?

Let's take a look at five of them.

1. Humans continuously learn from and adapt to their experience.

This means that we are all learning all the time.

Even when we're sleeping - especially when we're sleeping, it turns out - the process continues. It is relentless. You cannot stop it.

Our nervous system attunes to our ongoing experience, getting and generating a feel for things. These non-verbal sensations stem from the older parts of the brain, which regulate our body systems and generate feelings that impact our states of mind.

These states of mind determine what we do, far more than that slim-but-mighty cortex, the relative newcomer to the brain that enables us to problem-solve. We like to think that it's this rational part of our brain that's driving the bus, but that's not so.

And here's why this is so, so, so important for educators: while it's true that learning is relentless and cannot be stopped, it's also true that learning is hard to direct or control. Learning is wild, and like most wild things, resists being corralled and coerced.

You can bring students to school, but you can't force them to learn what you want. And we as educators are no different. You can require teachers to attend professional development, but you can't control what they learn.

And here's where so much organized learning goes wrong. When you take away learners' sense of agency, you cut them off from their biological inheritance: that insistent and thrilling urge to explore, experiment, and work with others to make sense of their most pressing concerns.

So they adapt to school, learning how to game the system to meet their needs, conserving their highest energies for what matters most to them. This is evolutionary biology at work, not the willfulness of students who just won't pay attention. They are paying attention! Just not always to what we want.

Wise educators design experiences that tack with, rather than tamp down, these biological, gale-force winds.

2. We learn best by performing badly at something we want to get better at.

When did you learn the most about teaching? Was it in the courses leading up to student teaching, during your student teaching, or throughout your first year of teaching?

And when did you learn the most about using technology to facilitate learning? Was it during the last ten years of occasional professional development? Trying it out and having to Google what went wrong?

Or has it been during these months of actually having to use technology to facilitate learning?

We all learn the most by doing the actual thing, or a very close approximation. We want to learn. Learning how to play a new game? Don't spend too much time reading the rules. Jump into a game with people who know how to play. You'll pick it up in no time.

But schools tend to be places where we're taught the directions and information we'll need for playing a game that's years away. And we are bad at this; it is not how we learn. We have a hard time paying attention because, well, we're paying attention to the games we're in right now, the ones that matter most to us.

The most vibrant programs in our schools - those that cultivate the kind of full-throated buy-in that generates the energy enduring learning requires - are those that invite students to prepare for public performances. Just look at the performing arts, and athletics. The more real the performance and the larger the audience, the greater commitment on the part of the learners. Learners conserve and invest their highest energies for these kinds of challenges.

Creating opportunities for students to perform for real audiences generates engagement. Without this purpose, teachers exhaust themselves lugging students up the plodding path of compliance, avoidance, and rebellion.

3. Why and how we measure learning impacts learning.

When and how to shine the light of measurement on learning is a tricky topic. Given how sensitive our nervous systems are, we shouldn't be surprised. When we know we're being observed and measured, we adjust what and how we're acting and thinking.

Since learning is wild, it can be skittish. The bright light of measurement can cause it to recede.

So we should be wary of why, how, and when students see this light headed their way. Too soon, and we'll elicit the self-consciousness reflex, pushing students back inside themselves to study the rules, rather than drawing them out to play.

So why, how, and when should we measure learning? The answer lies in the latin derivation of the word assessment.

When students experience assessment as an ongoing conversation with a trusted and caring community that wants what's best for them, enduring learning thrives.

But when students experience assessment as compensation for doing daily tasks and a system for ranking them according to a GPA, compliance, avoidance, and rebellion take root.

One of the charms of very young learners is their unabashed enthusiasm. Despite continual bumps, bruises, and bellyflops, they persist at falling until they can walk. Relentless and unstoppable, indeed.

But as students get older, their brains change. The curse of self consciousness kicks in, and if we're not careful, this wild thing called learning retreats to its inner den. Sometimes for years. And sometimes while managing an impressive GPA and stellar test scores.

4. Human beings construct their own understanding of the world.

When we listen to another's expertise - especially when the expert is skilled at simplifying complex ideas - we experience the illusion of learning. We think we're learning, but more accurately, we're getting glimpses of someone else's learning, which feels like it will last, but that sensation should be accompanied by a flashing warning sign: temporary access only.

Even if we take good notes and then study for the test, we're practicing short term recall. Until we've integrated ideas into our own schema through experience and application - constructing our own learning - these fleeting insights fade into the dustbin of short-term memory (sometimes within days of acing a test).

One of the drivers of our outdated operating system is a fundamental commitment to schools being teacher centered. Most university and high school classrooms are designed for learners to sit facing and listening to their teachers. The older students get, the more their classrooms look like performance spaces, where their teachers take the stage to do the work.

A contemporary educational operating system would be learner-centered.

Students would come to school to be studied. Three, recurring questions would spiral throughout the k-12 experience:

Of course students would learn from their teachers, but the ongoing focus would be on the learners' evolving stories. Each year students would become better known and better understood, and each year their particular affinities and aptitudes would be nourished and leveraged to work on areas of challenge.

5. Expectations impact performance.

If you're not familiar with the expectation effect - how our expectations and the expectations of others impact behavior - watch this remarkable three minute video.

Educators' expectations get shaped over time not by the wild learner within all of our students but, tragically, by the adaptive behaviors students exhibit within the corralled confines of school. And as educators begin expecting and planning for seemingly inattentive and apathetic students, they begin messaging this expectation, perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophecy that sustains our operating system's failures.

Now what?

If you've never seen the backwards bicycle video, it's a humorous and visceral reminder of how tight a grip our long-practiced habits and beliefs have on us. Even when we are highly motivated to change our operating system, we wobble, stumble, and fall. It's awkward, even embarrassing.

Teaching and learning during the pandemic has made us all novices. It has not gone smoothly. It has not been pretty. And it sure hasn't felt good.

But it has activated our brain's most miraculous feature: its plasticity. The ability to imagine and create better ways of operating, when confronted with difficulties that call on our highest energies.

One reason why so many of us are so wiped out? We've been giving it our all.

Fortunately, our exhausted minds don't need to imagine novel solutions. The jury's been in for a long time now about how to create learning experiences compatible with why and how people learn. Rather than conjure new initiatives or launch another reform effort, what if we looked backwards to promising but poorly implemented ideas and committed to getting them right? What if we got rid of those practices and structures that interfere with what we and our learners need?

We can do this, but we need to resist the siren song of the status quo. We need to trust our secret sauce.

As counter-intuitive as it feels, we need to slow down. We need to simplify. And we need to connect.

In this way, educators and their students can regain their sense of agency and bring their highest energies to the difficulties we'll continue to encounter throughout our lives.

Final Thoughts

Before signing off, I'd be remiss if I didn't share some resources to help you take some doable next steps, regardless of where you are in your education journey. I hope these three collections help you find what you need.

1. Ideas for the Too-Tired-to-Design Educator

2. Annotated Collection of Articles & Videos to Skim and Pick

3. Annotated Book List

It takes courage to trust and apply the findings of cognitive science, which often run counter to how our current schools run. And it takes commitment to confront the generational poverty of pedagogy that we've inherited. That industrial-aged mindset that saps, rather than inspires, learning.

"Until one is committed," Goethe reminds us, "there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness." But when one commits, "...the entire universe conspires to assist you."

Let's commit to bringing an end to the Sisyphean tragedy of teaching in ways incompatible with how learning works.

And finally, let's commit to making school a place that leverages what millions of years of evolution have bestowed in all of us: the relentless urge to work and play together to solve pressing problems so we might lead more satisfying lives. What a difference this would make in our students' lives, our communities, and our world.

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Trust the Science: Using brain-based learning to upgrade our educational OS : Innovative Education in VT

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Spoiler alert: When we adjust learning conditions to be more in sync with the known laws of brain-based learning, learning improves. Momentum builds. Trust the science For 15 years I've been helping Vermont educators and school systems apply what we know about the brain to inform what we do in our schools.

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The fifteen year old boy slowly hobbled from the parking lot to the school's main office, stopping to adjust his crutches. He was welcomed by the school's Flexible Pathway Coordinator, Ian Dinzeo for their 10 o'clock appointment. They both sat down, masked, at opposite ends of a table in the school cafeteria - which offered more room to spread apart than the coordinator's small office. Mr. Dinzeo listened as the young man described the challenges of navigating a traditional school schedule, physical therapy, and family concerns about COVID.

With an expanding Flexible Pathways Program Flexible Pathways program in place, Mr. Dinzeo was able to offer this student options that kept him in the game of school during an especially challenging time. The 18 different pathways now available at North Country Union High School students didn't just happen overnight.

The program grew strategically from the right combination of leadership, passion, and increased need for more flexible options for students.

Similar to many other schools in the state, North Country Union High School started to research different approaches to Flexible Pathways in response to Act 77 in 2013 . For several years, Flexible Pathways opportunities in the school were coordinated by a guidance counselor and a half time Work Based Learning Coordinator. After the school hired Ian Dinzeo as its full time Coordinator, the Flexible Pathways Program blossomed serving over 1000 instances a year of students taking advantage of more flexible learning opportunities.

As North Country educators immersed themselves into the developing proficiency based graduation requirement, Chris Young, principal, saw the growth of "a widely held belief in our school that we need to provide as many ways as possible for students to meet graduation proficiencies. This set the Flexible Pathways up to be the main vehicle that we use to get to more transferable skills level proficiencies rather than just content level proficiencies."

Listening to Principal Young, it's obvious that he has an innovator's mindset with a bias towards action. He describes himself as a leader that is "comfortable living with some ambiguity and not putting up artificial barriers to implementing some of these program." He is committed to providing the Flexible Pathways program the freedom and support to continue to build opportunities so that students have access to a lot of different ways to get where they want to go".

It is obvious that passion of the school leaders, the staff, and students are key contributors to the growth of the Flexible Pathways program. "Our flexible pathways program would not be successful without the contributions of the majority of teachers and staff within the building," says Dinzeo. "The more the faculty and staff believe these pathways are to educational benefit to our students the better. During my first year we were still targeting a small number of Teacher of Records for our independent studies, that pool has grown over time as more of the staff started to buy in."

"With staff buy in comes student buy in. I strongly believe we have the buy in from the majority of our staff that this is a viable educational option for our students without the loss of academic rigor. If a certain pathway lacks the rigor or something else the staff is not shy about providing feedback. This leads to the overall improvement of said pathway and the betterment of the pathways program as a whole."

Ian's passion for meeting student individual learning needs as well as his leadership skills stand out. His previous experience as the school's athletic director serve him well in this role. He understands that to grow and sustain a program, you need a strong base of participants, visible wins, and community support. He's no stranger to motivating students and teams; he applies the same strategies he used on the athletic fields to academics.

His active listening skills help him identify students' personal interests, which he uses to motivate students to set achievable goals and create a plan to meet those goals. Instead of recruiting coaches, he now recruits teachers and community members to support students in reaching individualized goals through a wealth of flexible options ranging from more structured non-traditional programs to a student's individual pursuit of their passion or interest.

More structured options like North Country Arts and Communication Academy, The STEM Academy, The Kingdom Course, or even the local Career and Technical Education program bring together students with similar interests. Some options (community service and mentoring programs) have been put on hold due to COVID. The school also offers students an opportunity to select either "structured" or 'student designed" independent study options.

Principal Young, also acknowledges that a key area he can provide support in is to build systems where educators's commitment to flexible pathways are sustainable. Ideas for growing a pool of 'teachers of records" for student independent projects range from providing stipends for teachers to tapping into school leaders to supervise independent studies.

COVID and the school response to the pandemic created an even greater need for flexible options for students. With several families choosing remote only options for their student, North Country High School's Flexible Pathway option was in high demand. The program quickly added distance learning pathway offerings from Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative and Fifty eight students are currently engaged in the distant learning pathway.

North Country predicts that COVID will also increase the demand for credit recovery options. High school principal, Chris Young is putting together a team to create multiple credit recovery pathways to meet the upcoming need. The school's well developed Flexible Pathway program will be instrumental in that process.

Ian understands that each pathway has different logistical needs; although some translate from pathway to pathway some needs do not and it still takes time to tweak pathways and have them grow. He'll bring his experience planning, piloting, reflecting with others, and making changes to the process of preparing additional flexible learning opportunities for students as the school prepares for post-COVID learning.

Ian is determined that as the Flexible Pathways program continues to expand, it will always be centered around student voice. Noticing that a teacher voice easily overshadows student voice in the design of a personalized learning plan, Ian has adjusted the process of engaging a teacher to support a student's individualized project plan. "We use to bring in an educator early into the planning process of a individual student project. I now work with the student to design a draft of their plan before we bring in a supporting teacher," explains Ian.

As the options for Flexible Pathways continue to grow, it will be important to start preparing students to use their voice and leverage these options by advocating for their own learning needs. Middle school passion projects or genius hour projects can help create a mindset where students take accountability for communicating what they need and become designers of their learning. "Every single kid ought to be reaching out to their teacher with something - specific question about science problem, an assignment, or a bigger problem like I need to meet graduation proficiencies," explains Principal Young.

"The good news is that during our pandemic response, we got really good at identifying the most important things a student had to learn," he continues. "We now have a tighter more accurate description for the portrait of a graduate. Flexible pathways provide ways for students to develop the transferable skills proficiencies that are part of that portrait."

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North Country Flexible Pathways : Innovative Education in VT

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The fifteen year old boy slowly hobbled from the parking lot to the school's main office, stopping to adjust his crutches. He was welcomed by the school's Flexible Pathway Coordinator, Ian Dinzeo for their 10 o'clock appointment.

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Kelly Young is the President of Education Reimagined. Previously, she served as the Interim Chief of the Office of Family and Public Engagement for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). Full profile →

Today, all over the world, we see the power, commitment and wisdom of young people in action. For inspiration, just look at Chris Suggs, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg or the young activists from Parkland. Our world needs many more young leaders like these.

Can U.S. public school systems support the growth and development of thousands of such young leaders? Writ large, their response to the current pandemic tells us The pandemic has exposed the inflexibility, inadequate no, not as currently constructed. vision, and fundamental inequities at the heart of most public schooling in the United States.

Given the pandemic has created a desperate need for more flexible learning options, now is the moment to escape the physical limitations of a traditional school building. Rather than simply hobbling together a temporary response to the crisis, we can get to work to transform education once and for all to serve, include, value, and love each and every child and young person in our country.

Districts and education leaders around the country should be asking themselves many hard questions:

How are we creating time for educators to build supportive, loving relationships with their students?

How can teachers help students make sense of world events and discover their interests, gifts and aspirations?

How do we value and credential the learning happening in kids' lives outside of "schoolwork?"

How are we allowing young people to develop learning plans around their interests and aspirations?

How do we map and leverage community assets to support young people's learning journeys?

For districts where students are able to learn together in person, how do educators make the most of that precious time?

To answer these tough questions, we can look to some forward-thinking, publicly-funded schools for inspiration and guidance.

Big Picture Learning's Met High School, a public school in Providence, Rhode Island, showcases the power of creating and honoring learning both within and outside of school walls, building relationships, and supporting kids to find and pursue their interests. Their proven advisory structure intentionally fosters tight-knit learning communities amongst groups of 15 students and an adult advisor who meet daily and stay together for four years.

Building close and authentic relationships with each student and their family, advisors support students to set learning goals and create learning pathways that are based on their unique interests and aspirations and that leverage the learning opportunities in the local community. There are over 65 Big Picture network schools in the United States.

CommunityShare in Tucson, Arizona, is an online platform that enables a community to become a human library by connecting community members, industry professionals, parents, and organizations with educators who want to create real-world learning opportunities with their students. From partnering with a community food bank to build a community garden to working with a local rap artist to produce student-made raps, teachers are better able to connect young people with real-world experiences in areas that matter to them.

Virtual Learning Academy Charter School is a statewide virtual public school that enables any student in New Hampshire to enroll in anything from a single class to a full course load. Because they are competency-based and allow learning to be demonstrated in many ways, students can gain credit from online courses, pre-designed performance-based tasks, or real-world projects or internships. Whether offered as a complement to a district's offerings or as a fully virtual alternative for a young person, this state-wide model can quickly and dramatically expand the ways young people can gain credit and acquire competencies.

These are only a few of the bright spots we can look to. Among other publicly-funded models are Iowa BIG (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), High School for Recording Arts (St. Paul, Minnesota), City Garden Montessori (St. Louis, Missouri) and Norris School Distric t (Mukwonago, Wisconsin).

Districts may also be able to draw from models developed in the private sector, such as Portfolio School (New York City, New York), Workspace Education (Bethel, Connecticut) and Verdi EcoSchool (Melbourne, Florida).

It's time for a nationwide commitment and investment to invent wholly new systems that enable a learner-centered, socially-just future for education. Leaders at all levels must make it a priority to reinvent how we educate young people and prepare them for a world that is vastly different from the one for which their schools were designed.

This is the moment when we must think bigger than a return to the pre-pandemic normal. This is the moment we can begin building the education system we know we need today, tomorrow and for the future soon to come.

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Everyone Is Talking About 'Reinventing Education.' Here Are 10 Schools Actually Doing It.

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Kelly Young is the President of Education Reimagined. Previously, she served as the Interim Chief of the Office of Family and Public Engagement for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). Full profile → Today, all over the world, we see the power, commitment and wisdom of young people in action.

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A Revolution in Education

Episode 7: Can it happen NOW? And how?

Three educators who have been working in the arena of system change in education for many years will share their insights as to what and HOW the system of education and educators at various levels of the system can effectively pursue new possibilities in agency and opportunity for all youth moving forward, potentially culminating in a much needed and desired revolution in education. In sharp focus here: How might this happen NOW?!

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revolution education teaching learning transformation students schools

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Episode 7: Can it happen NOW? And how? - A Revolution in Education

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Three educators who have been working in the arena of system change in education for many years will share their insights as to what and HOW the system of education and educators at various levels of the system can effectively pursue new possibili...

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On October 8th, five educators published School's Out-an invitation for communities "to explore how profoundly we need to alter our perspective on the meaning, feel, and delivery of learning." To amplify the voices of these learner-centered leaders, we have invited each to author articles that express the context from which they approached the question: What if school did not exist? The fifth and final article in this series comes from Teton Science School's Vice President for Education and Innovation, Nate McClennen, who digs into the nitty gritty of how a society could be organized if school did not exist.
What if there was no "school"? What if the yellow school buses, the apples, the brick buildings with American flags out front, and every other hallmark of the American education system simply vanished? What would we create in its wake?

A crucial starting point to answer this thought experiment is defining "school" versus "learning."

Schools are formal structures where groups of students come together to learn from a teacher. The buildings in which these students gather don't have to fit the cliche of the red brick structure or even be a building at all, but the system would be similar from town to town-a teacher delivers a narrow and pre-selected range of knowledge that is received by a group of students who are likely all the same age. School is rigid in its structure and has a socially accepted entry- and exit-age.

Learning, on the other hand, begins at birth and ends at death. It begins through our senses as we quickly begin to understand the world around us. We are filled with unique, as well as universal, sights, sounds, and smells that inform our individual world-views. All humans learn, but not all humans have the privilege of being able to attend a school. And, not all schools are great places for all students to learn.

The next question to tackle: Is attending "school"-that universal public right American citizens have had since the 1800's-actually working for all students?

If by "working" we mean providing children access to a formal education, certainly the answer is yes. Globally, more students are attending school now than 100 years ago. And, in the United States, access to a free and public education provides over 50 million young people a powerful tool to help support their growth and development each year.

However, measuring the value of schools based on access ignores the challenges around equity. Not every student gets the same quality learning experience in school. Funding is not distributed based on need. Not every student has their specific learning needs met in the way that best meets their specific neural structures. Not every student feels the context of their learning is relevant, that they are safe and not judged, and that they are engaged to not only learn but also love learning. The result: equity gaps in performance based on race, socio-economic, and other factors; dropout rates that are disturbingly high; lack of preparation for the workforce; and many other challenges with which some, but not all, students struggle.

That "some," albeit already too many to consider as minor exceptions to the rule, will grow to "most" if we continue on our traditional path. The world is changing faster than our schools. Automation, globalization, and technology-the pillars of the Fourth Industrial Revolution-are relevant in (almost) every aspect of our lives today. The exception? The majority of our schools. Privileged families are able to fill the gaps outside the classroom, but due to traditional school's monastic structure, many more are left graduating with knowledge and skills that don't match the needs of the modern world.

If we accept the limiting nature of school and the expansive nature of learning, we can use that knowledge to explore what a better functioning learning ecosystem might look like. We can begin to posit a world with no schools. This groundwork was key to what the School's Out team established when we sought to open ourselves to the possibilities of what society would look like without school as the go-to for all educational attainment.

Exploring a World Without Schools

Let's explore one possibility for this world without schools.

To start with, we need to think about what this education would be all about. In other words, based on the needs of the world, the workplace, and a community's culture, a clear set of knowledge, skills, and dispositions would need to be established to answer the question, "What do young people need to know, do, and act like in order to find personal and professional success?"

A sub-set of competencies might be established at a national level to articulate the knowledge and skills that are critical to support a healthy, sustainable, and equitable democracy. This subset would establish pathways of knowledge to support competency in all forms-including mathematical, scientific, language, historical, social-emotional, collaborative, and creative-among others. Both knowledge and skill development would be surrounded by dispositions we see as valuable (e.g. honesty, compassion, and persistence) and that we believe will collectively influence the direction of the next generation. Local and regional needs would complete the full set of requisite competencies.

With this background established and no "school" to go to, young people themselves would associate learning experiences in their lives with this core set of competencies-building a portfolio that would "backpack" with them as they learned. Over time, this backpack would record the learning path of the student, showing strengths, challenges, accelerations, and gaps throughout the learning journey. These learning experiences would be developed by individuals, family, communities, organizations, and companies that help the learner demonstrate proficiency in any of the competencies.

Agency, the ability to guide and choose one's learning path, would be increasingly more evident as the student moved along the competency progression. To develop science literacy, for example, a younger student might explore their surrounding natural areas, building local knowledge of geology, ecology, and biology. As they progress, they would explore topics outside the immediate observable phenomena. Using microscopes and basic chemistry skills, they would submit artifacts to satisfy the desired competencies. Over time, and increased competency, students would run their own experiment under mentorship of adults and peers-contributing to the understanding of the world, rather than passively receiving information about the world. By the time they reached the final milestones as young learners, the students would be independently guiding their own learning along the competency-based pathways with their proficiency certified by community learning coaches. Many of the learning experiences would be connected directly to the needs of the local community. This place-based approach ensures that, from a young age, young people see the power and potential of local communities, which can transfer to future communities they will live in throughout their lives.

What of teachers? School's Out co-author, Tom Rooney dives into where this "no schools" transition may lead professional educators, and we agree that an educator's natural aptitude and talent to work with young people would be easily transferable in this new society. Most notably, as an educator myself, I see professional educators serving the role of Community Learning Coaches-no job loss, just jobs with different responsibilities.

These coaches would help connect young learners with learning opportunities that demonstrate proficiency along their competency pathway. Coaches would not simply include traditional teachers and other school staff. Coaches could be content experts, industry leaders, non-profit employees, athletic coaches, and dance instructors, among many others. How would these coaches get compensated? These coaches would be evaluated by those they are coaching, the progress they help a learner attain, and earn compensation based on a comprehensive talent portfolio designed by the coach. A system of Learning Credits would facilitate the exchange - perhaps in the form of crypto-currency. These Learning Credits could be exchanged for future learning for the coach or cash value (like a typical paycheck). This system simplifies the structure of the learner-coach relationship to what is most beneficial for both: the learner achieves progress and the coach maximizes the personalization for the learner based on a variety of agreed upon feedback.

Over time, as proficiency increases, learners would begin to accumulate "stackable micro-credentials" based on their field of interest. These micro-credentials would have universal connectivity so that a credential from one provider could stack with a credential from another provider. Examples of current micro-credentialing are found in computer science professions, the traditional trades, and other professional certification providers. This process would extend throughout the life of the individual and allow them to pivot based on the needs of a rapidly changing world.

With this model, a seamless cradle-to-grave learning experience emerges, one that is flexible, learner-centered, and based on the current needs of industry and community. While this world without schools better meets the needs of individuals, employers, and communities and would increase engagement and overall academic performance, equity and access still remain a challenge.

Those who live in more affluent communities might have more opportunities for challenging and engaging learning experiences and better access to more qualified coaches. To address this issue, learning coaches must be highly trained, incentivized heavily to work within the most marginalized communities of learners, and/or able to work remotely so as to reach young learners living in areas without access to their particular skill set.

The system must ensure that every student has appropriate connectivity to get the coaching they need to reach proficiency on the core competencies, as well as the support to determine the professional pathway to take next. One way to accomplish this would be to adjust how money moves through the system. For example funding could be allocated directly to student accounts and might only be spent on certified learning experiences to avoid the inevitable underground black market of pseudo-learning experiences. The currency of the Learning Credit would facilitate this exchange.

The other success of the traditional school model that needs to be replicated are learner experiences that bring people of different backgrounds together to understand and develop the critical skills of teamwork, collaboration, social cognition, and leadership. Virtual communities, as well as regional and national organizations, that facilitate collaborative experiences and educational travel may be involved in the support ecosystem.

Fully manifested, this model would exemplify the learner-centered paradigm articulated by Education Reimagined: open-walled, socially-embedded, competency-based, personalized, relevant, and contextualized, with high levels of learner agency.

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School's Out: How a "No School" Society is One of Many Learner-Centered Possibilities - Education Reimagined

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On October 8th, five educators published School's Out-an invitation for communities "to explore how profoundly we need to alter our perspective on the meaning, feel, and delivery of learning." To amplify the voices of these learner-centered leaders, we have invited each to author articles that express the context from which they approached the question: What if school did not exist?

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Monday night I sat on my back patio staring up into a rare, starry Chicago night. I squinted and made out each point of The Big Dipper and then turned to see what I decided was Mars, twinkling in the distance. My partner and I sat in city silence, wrapped in a perfect, nearly unrecognizable temperature-and-breeze blanket. For an hour or so we reveled in this brief peace bubble and I gave myself permission to dream:

"What if?" I thought. What if we did something different, on purpose? What if we refused to return to normal? Every week seems to introduce a new biblical plague and unsurprisingly, the nation is turning to schools to band-aid the situation and create a sense of "normalcy"-the same normalcy that has failed BIPOC communities for decades.

In her memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, Patrisse Khan-Cullors states that "our nation [is] one big damn Survivor reality nightmare". It always has been. America's criminal navigation of the COVID-19 pandemic further highlights the ways we devalue the lives of the most vulnerable. We all deserve better than Survivor and I don't want to help sustain this nightmare. I want to be a part of something better.

What If We Designed a School Year for Recovery?

"What if?" I thought. What if Chicago Public Schools (CPS) did something radical with this school year? What if this fastest-improving urban district courageously liberated itself from narrow and rigid quantitative measures of intelligence that have colonized the education space for generations, and instead blazed a trail for reimagining what qualifies as valuable knowledge?

What if we put our money, time and energy into what we say matters most? What if this school year celebrated imagination? In We Got This, Cornelius Minor reminds us that "education should function to change outcomes for whole communities." What if we designed a school year that sought to radically shift how communities imagine, problem solve, heal, and connect?

What if this messy school year prioritized hard truths and accountability? What if social emotional instruction wasn't optional or reduced to one cute poster? What if we focused on district wide capacity-building for, and facilitation of, restorative justice practices?

What if the CPS Office of Social Emotional Learning (OSEL) had more than about 15 restorative practice coaches to serve over 600 schools? What if we let students name conflicts and give them the space, tools, and support to address and resolve them? What if restorative justice was a central part of this year's curricula?

What If We Really Listened?

What if we made space to acknowledge the fear, anxiety, frustration and confusion students, staff, and families are feeling? What if we listened? What if we made space to acknowledge the anger and demands of students? What if our priority was healing? Individual and collective. What if we respected and honored the work of healers and invested in healing justice?

What if our rising 8th-graders and seniors prepared for high school and post-secondary experiences by centering their humanity and the humanity of others? What if healthy, holistic, interconnected citizenship was a learning objective? What if we tracked executive functioning skills and habits of mind? What if for "homework" families had healing conversations?

What If We Made Life the Curriculum?

What if we recognized that life-our day-to-day circumstances and our response to them-is curricula? It's the curricula students need, especially now as our country reckons with its identity. What if we remembered that reading, writing, social studies, mathematics, and science are built into our understanding of and response to events every day?

Here are some examples in the humanities. Reading: comprehension and analysis of the perspectives put forth about the twin pandemics (COVID-19 and, as Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III has come to call it, COVID-1619). Writing: thoughtful and supported arguments for equitable allocation of federal and local resources. Social studies: design and execution of public actions that educate and empower communities.

We can do this in math and science, too. Mathematics: calculation of distribution options for COVID stimulus checks. Science: inquiry about virus transmission and the role of vaccines... the possibilities are endless.

When we structure students learning around their lived experiences and present needs, they not only develop content knowledge and skills but they grow to care about and for one another. They are equipped to collaboratively face the world they are inheriting.

This work is happening in pockets around the city. But this moment invites us to expand the degree to and frequency with which social emotional knowledge and skills, restorative practices, and culturally and socially responsive curricula are implemented.

Let's Stop Policing Our Imaginations

While reading Charlene Carruthers' Unapologetic a few weeks ago, I highlighted the lines: "Anti-Blackness works 24/7 to kill the Black imagination... The destructiveness is ongoing, chronic, but it is manifested acutely. It tells our children to dream of a better future instead of a better now, in the communities where they live."

Lately, I am acutely aware of how intentionally I have to work in order to renew my own lost imagination. How much have we snuffed out the what-if imaginations of our students with policies that police their bodies and minds, inequitably and unimaginatively distribute funding to schools, and tolerate out-of-date, counter-revolutionary curricula?

The removal of police from schools, after all, does not eliminate all forms of policing. What if we didn't police the imaginations of students?

What if enough is enough? No one is coming to the rescue. We can rescue ourselves. We must. As the fifth core assumption/belief of restorative justice states: Everything we need to make positive change is already here. We just have to let our students, families, neighbors, and friends tell us what they need. And we show up. And we learn together.

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What If We Radically Reimagined the New School Year?

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Monday night I sat on my back patio staring up into a rare, starry Chicago night. I squinted and made out each point of The Big Dipper and then turned to see what I decided was Mars, twinkling in the distance. My partner and I sat in city silence, wrapped in a perfect, nearly unrecognizable temperature-and-breeze blanket.

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In the history of public schooling, we have never encountered a moment like this-a moment where the normal daily routines have been interrupted for everyone at once. Amidst all the challenges this moment has thrown at us, we're also presented with an incredible opportunity: we can step back and reimagine what the school experience be and what we it to be. We won't be the first to reimagine school, but we can be the first to do it on a national scale.

This kind of reimagining-aimed at opening the door for real systemic change-depends on whether we're asking the right questions.

Why Asking the "Right Questions" is Important: Lessons from a Space Race Fable

Have you heard about the race to create a space pen?

The story goes that in the 1960s, NASA was facing a challenge: traditional pens wouldn't work in a zero-gravity environment, but astronauts needed to write. The NASA engineers asked, "How can we design a pen that writes in space?" They jump started their brilliant minds and got to work. Months went by, tens of millions of dollars were spent, and voila: a beautifully designed space pen was invented and produced for American astronauts.

Meanwhile, the Russians asked a different question, "How might astronauts write in space?" Hours went by, a few dollars were spent, and voila: they had all the space-approved their astronauts would need.

Although the story is the lesson is very real: asking the right questions is the most important part of problem solving.

Yet in education, we have a history of rushing to solutions-we are busily "innovating" in getting the problem right without asking if we are addressing the right problem.

What's the right design problem for schooling?

During the pandemic, states and schools have put considerable focus on questions like:

1. How do we make sure students continue

2. How do we make sure students don't fall behind academically?

3. How do we ensure equity of access to the curriculum?

Each question assumes the problem to be solved by school is acquisition of content knowledge by individual learners. Yet, content knowledge acquisition is not the primary design problem to be solved by schooling.

At we've found it useful to think about the four different purposes or lenses of schooling that are commonly used to frame research, practice, and policy. There are individual and collective purposes for schooling, and instrumental (efficiency) and intrinsic (possibility) purposes, that can be mapped on to a 2×2 as shown.

What do we want for children we care about?

Implicity, we know school is about more than acquiring content knowledge, yet we rarely bring it into our discussions about outcomes or practice. At REENVISION ED, we have spoken with hundreds of students, parents, educators, and education leaders about their hopes, dreams, and fears for children they care about. We ask them about what it means to live a "good life." Molly Wertz, then Executive Director of Tandem: Partners in Early Learning, spoke about her granddaughter and answered in a way that captured many elements expressed by other participants:

" School should help her know herself. It should help her know her power. It should help her find her sense of responsibility and community. It should offer her access to inspirational guides. It should offer her skills to be able to fully embrace and utilize the information that exists in the world, and it should offer her access to great thinkers and great teachers, and the intersection of ideas."

Broadly, when participants talked about kids they cared about, they did not speak just of content knowledge. Participants spoke of activating an Aristotelian sense of flourishing as agency: the ability to make informed choices about the options available to us in a way that's aligned with our own unique constellation of values, strengths, and preferences.

This is aligned with the notion of flourishing found in both philosophy and social psychology: we flourish when our core needs are met, we have the freedom to make choices about our lives, and we find our choices to be meaningful and fulfilling.

Everyone interviewed wants the children they care about to flourish, now and as adults.

The conventional K-12 system has learners spend about 14,000 hours in school. If our future selves are created out of who we practice being today, as both Aristotle and modern neuroscience tell us, then the habits and ways of being they practice in school will last a lifetime. These include habits of how students relate to themselves, their learning, and the world; and, habits of how they relate to others, co-create, and participate in communities.

So, what might we create if we ask ourselves: What are the capacities, character, and beliefs most needed for flourishing? Who are learners practicing being while in school? How might we the schooling experience so that they practice-daily-the kinds of capacities, character, and beliefs we hope will lead them to flourish as adults and citizens?

What kind of society do we want to create through schooling?

We want children we care about to flourish. And, we need to remind ourselves that flourishing is not an individual act. We flourish (or don't) within our communities and larger society. Aristotle appends his ideas of flourishing as personal agency by noting that for flourishing to be possible a person needs to live in a society in which they have both the freedom to make choices and their basic needs are met. Otherwise, all of our choices are oriented towards meeting basic needs, which is not true agency.

This idea that schools help create society writ large was actually part of common schooling's original purpose. While reformers often speak to schooling having arisen in the manufacturing era, common schooling actually predates the industrial revolution. The original purpose of school in the U.S. (and the world) was not to create workers, it was to create citizens: to socialize children into a larger shared identity.

Thus, school is where we send our children to develop their individual potential, and where we create our society by establishing social norms, culture, and perspectives on the world and by socializing individuals into a larger collective.

This has implications for the structure, funding, and practice of schooling. Current reform efforts focus on designing for individual learning, or even individual potential, but too often ignore the opportunity to talk about our goals and vision for creating community.

When we forget about community and only focus on individual outcomes, we undermine our ability to thoughtfully design for the kind of community we want to be and become. I don't think it's a coincidence that this framing for the purpose of school went out of fashion in public conversation around the 1970s, and a generation later we're facing a moment of dire threat to the function of, and faith in, our democratic institutions.

So, what might we create if we ask ourselves: What does it mean to be a thriving democracy? What implications does creating schooling for a thriving democracy have for we fund, manages, and we locate schools or education more broadly? Within our school communities, what does it mean to practice justice, to practice fairness, to practice collaboration, to practice democratic deliberation, to practice collective liberation?

In a democracy, creating a shared vision requires asking beautiful questions and inviting people from different walks of life to participate in a reflective process. In other words, it takes engaging directly in the practice of deliberative democracy. It requires a process, not a one-and-done solution or program. And, it needs to happen at every level-from the local to the national.

What might it look to powerfully engage in these kinds of questions as a school community?
"There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about." -Margaret Wheatley A Process to Consider
At the classroom, school, and community level, REENVISION ED has been piloting a learner-centered re-visioning process that takes on these challenging and important questions in multiple states across the country that we'd like to offer to the broader community.

The basic process is that learners interview peers and adults in their lives (educators, parents, community members) and, instead of asking limited questions like, "What would you change about school?", they ask each other big, brave, reflective questions about their full "theory of change" for school and society at-large.

They ask about what makes a good life, what kind of society they hope to live in, what the role of school is in helping create those lives and society, how well their own school achieves/achieved these goals, and their most empowering learning experiences.

Then, learners collaboratively code and analyze their data, make sense of the stories, and develop a shared vision for their school community that they can use to discuss changes with educators, administrators, the school board, and beyond.
The Process in Practice
While the high-level process remains consistent, its implementation is designed to be flexible and adaptable to whatever time and resources are available to the community. The process might involve one classroom or the whole school-a few interviews or 1,000. A group of learners might spend one day or a full school year engaging in this process. The recommended timeline and who is involved depends on the goals a community has for the process (REENVISION ED would be happy to be a thought partner in the design!).

As one example, in Palo Alto, California, a high school used an entire semester to engage in the process. First, journalism students learned the ins-and-outs of conducting a good interview and applied their knowledge by interviewing students, teachers, and other adults. Then, statistics students learned how to analyze qualitative data as part of their course. Deanna, the stats teacher, remarked:
This...work in partnership with REENVISION ED was honestly one of the most rewarding activities of my career. The students were interested and engaged, both in the process and in the content. They asked thoughtful questions because they saw themselves in these interviews. The work was personal, it was community-building, and it mattered to them. On a curricular note, I would also add how special it was for statistics students in high school to engage in qualitative coding. This is just not typically part of high school curriculum, and all the students benefited from the exposure to this data analysis tool."
Students were surprised to find that many of the interviewees shared a similar skepticism about the way "success" was framed in a school environment-excelling in as many advanced courses as possible and getting into the best college.

While they had originally felt alone in how they wished school could be, they discovered many of their peers also questioned the dominant narrative. One of the students remarked, after they wrote to the principal about the process, their findings, and their recommendations:

" This research is highly important for us to find out what students think about success and how we can potentially use their input to better our school. By having open discussions with administration about the results of the interviews we conducted, we will be able to create an environment at [our school] that is positive for all students."

Personally, working with young people and educators around these questions has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. These discussions bring tears, laughter, moments of pause, and deep insights. And, they help us reframe how we think about what we aim to do together in and through schools.

Final Thought: The Art of Asking Beautiful Questions

As we consider what to do with the potential of this unexpected, difficult moment, I hope we'll begin asking the kinds of beautiful questions of ourselves and our communities that will help us create real, positive, systemic change for our learners and for our society.

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What might it look like to powerfully engage a school community around beautiful questions? A process to consider

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In the history of public schooling, we have never encountered a moment like this-a moment where the normal daily routines have been interrupted for everyone at once. Amidst all the challenges this moment has thrown at us, we're also presented with an incredible opportunity: we can step back and reimagine what the school experience be and what we it to be.

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Several major studies, books and reports confirmed the obvious, that high schools were an arcane endeavor rewarding mostly a chosen few at the top. Ted Sizer's CES shop at Brown, in particular, was out in front, funded by major investments from leading corporations who knew its importance.

Nationally and in virtually every region, business leaders stepped up, asking for different approaches and funding experimentation. They knew then that there was too much to fix in the old arrangements, and that it would be a waste of time to try the heavy lift --improving on a model that would likely resist all attempts at a major make-over.

Redesign, Not Tinkering

Many business leaders advocated a "skunk works" approach, similar to the shops that built the smart phone, the laptop, and supersonic aircraft, among others. Those "inventions" were created by specifically working differently --and apart-- from host companies' established routines and norms, with the realization that pioneers couldn't be expected to innovate while dragging along practices, beliefs, and ideas from predecessor institutions that had proven unequal to the task.

The thinking about school redesign was often informed by Sizer's "brown bag luncheons", informal, open-to-all discussions. Business leaders from IBM, Citibank, Hewlett, Bell, Nabisco, and others provided their thinking and dollars. Luncheon guests included James Comer, Paul Hill, Howard Gardner, and Deborah Meier, while weighing in from their respective domains were Ron Wolk, Jerome Bruner, Linda Darling-Hammond, Hank Levin, the Annenberg family, and others. Those ongoing connections identified a critical number of problem areas that constrained deeper learning. Reformers suggested several action steps and innovations, things we've known we could do differently and better for kids, for learning.
And now that work could be informed by new learning science and human development principles. The time had arrived!
We never made the moves.

Serious redesign never proceeded. No one wanted to be accused of "experimenting on kids". Scores of high-profile sieges failed to penetrate what Sizer called "an impenetrable thicket" of laws, statutes, contracts, agreements, and traditions, wearing down most would-be reformers. As Sal Khan wrote, human nature being what it is, those who prosper under a given system become supporters of that system, thus decision-makers have a bias toward the status quo.

A frustrated corporate community instead got behind standards and testing, foreclosing on the redesign they themselves had supported. We've spent twenty years now trying to tinker our way out of a problem that requires bolder thinking, new mental models, and frankly, a whole more courage than we've seen from leaders across our related fields. But....

Maybe COVID-19 has given people more curiosity to wonder, what else schools could look like? Schools are a pivotal element of racial and economic justice. Could this be our time to recover the lost innovations?

Drawing on ideas from Sizer's shop, and informed by three subsequent decades of deep work in schools, ERC is posing elements of a new prototype. No easy answers, just ideas that we think can take root with your help. And we're looking for serious partners to take it on, to TREK with us.

We're suggesting a "New Architecture" for learning - one that foments deeper and more naturalistic intellectual engagement, provides flexible yet durable structures, proven inquiry practices with a "tool kit" for student and teacher success, and a vision of personalization that is far more than "blended learning" or the pursuit of "competencies".

Our design ideas do include essential elements that were abandoned, and we take aim at three specific contemporary issues :

the spike in student disinterest in classroom learning

ongoing flat achievement - by all measures - despite huge expenditures, and

the looming question of what now ? what will come after the let-down of the standards movement?

- Larry Myatt - Wayne Ogden

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Reimagining School - Education Resources Consortium

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Several major studies, books and reports confirmed the obvious, that high schools were an arcane endeavor rewarding mostly a chosen few at the top. Ted Sizer's CES shop at Brown, in particular, was out in front, funded by major investments from leading corporations who knew its importance.

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Indicators of Educational Equity | Great Schools Partnership

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The following is a list of actions, attitudes, and strategies (or indicators) that school communities might take when fighting inequity.

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For example, the guidebook features the hypothetical systems thinking journey of a fictional group of educators, students, parents and community members who are working to address their school's disproportionate suspension of Black students. After much discussion and applying the tools of systems thinking to understand the wide variety of experiences and beliefs related to the problem, the group members find themselves asking, "What is the purpose of the behavioral expectations we hold for students? Why do we have this set of rules, and do they support or detract from a just and equitable school culture?" The group questions not only the procedures and features of their system, but also the foundational assumptions and beliefs that inform the ways their school operates. In so doing, they are trying out new stencils. The result could be a system that works in entirely new ways.

Once we recognize that we all have mental models and that they affect our beliefs, our actions and ultimately the ways our systems operate, we can no longer allow those mental models to remain hidden. Systems thinking offers tools for making mental models explicit, and simple conversation can also uncover the ways in which different people see reality. We must reflect on our own mental models, share them, seek to understand others' and, where possible, align our collective mental models with the future we hope to see.

Extraordinary circumstances are rightly leading more and more people to scrutinize the social systems that determine how young people experience education. Now is the time to consider:

How willing are we to allow those circumstances to shift our mental models?

How willing are we to let go of our sense of certainty about how the world works and examine our opportunities, challenges and solutions through a new set of filters?

Our collective answer to those questions will determine whether our education systems can transform to be just, joyful and life-affirming or whether they will end up as a slightly different version of what they have always been.

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Mental Models and Transformation | KnowledgeWorks

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For example, the guidebook features the hypothetical systems thinking journey of a fictional group of educators, students, parents and community members who are working to address their school's disproportionate suspension of Black students.

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There's a lot of talk these days about shifting our schooling system (including by me here and here).
But here's the thing - the first step toward shifting a system is knowing what it's meant to do.
Systems change requires a clear understanding of both our purposes for schooling (why we have schooling), as well as our aims (our goals and vision)[i]. Yet current debates have largely lost their connection with both.

We're asking, "how can we reimagine school?" without asking, "why do we have school?".

We mix together many different purposes and don't make our assumptions explicit, which leads to a lot of confusion and poorly designed solutions.

As an example, recent education newsletters included the following headlines:

1) "Interventions can boost success of first generation and minority students in college";

2) "Cultivating a growth mindset in mathematics";

3) "Learning to assimilate: benefits of dual immersion programs";

4) "Examination of education as a popular - but inadequate - tool for addressing racial inequality in America".

Each headline assumes different aims for school, and thus a different problem for research, policy, and teachers to solve. These four above include implicit assumptions about the aims of school being: 1) academic achievement, social mobility; 2) character/mindset development, math learning; 3) social cohesion, and; 4) social equality.

Which are the correct purposes for schools to tackle - which can they achieve? All of them? None of them? How do we know? How can we compare them? How can we put them in conversation?

In other words, Why School? At a time when the answer to almost any question is literally at our fingertips 24/7, why do we even have schools?

There are actually four distinct purposes for schooling [ii]. They are:

· Individual Possibility - classic "education": shaping the learning and development of individual students. (How do children develop deep content knowledge and the ability to apply it? How do I make sure my child develops a sense of empathy or wonder?)

· Social Possibility - socialization processes: shaping collective culture and social norms at the micro and macro - i.e. the community, national, and global levels. (How do we create a local community or national sense of identity? Or, How can we develop democratic values?)

· Social Efficiency - classic human capital perspective: sustain current social, economic, and political institutions. (How do we ensure there are enough STEM workers in our economy? How do we make sure our national economic growth can compete with China's?)

· Individual Efficiency - to serve an individual's own ability to navigate the education or socio-economic systems (this is often "social mobility" in a capitalist system). (How do we make sure every child graduates from high school or college? How do we make sure poor students or girl students have the opportunity to get high paying jobs? How do I make sure my child gets into Stanford?)

These purposes can be mapped on two-main dimensions: individual-collective and intrinsic-instrumental as shown below.

Individual purposes take the perspective and needs of the individual, while Collective purposes are reasons a society would invest in schooling beyond what individuals could be expected to invest.

Intrinsic purposes of schooling relate to the actual experience - the process and practice of schooling itself. It's how we structure, manage, teach, and learn in schools. By intrinsic I mean "happens within or through". Intrinsic aims are achieved through the lived experience of schooling - the pedagogy (approach to teaching) and the community. They happen regardless of whether we are intentional about them just by the fact that students and teachers spend so much time together in schools over many years.

Intrinsic outcomes are variable depending on what actually happens (this is why they're called "possibility"). For example, rote memorization vs. inquiry-based learning approaches will have different outcomes; or, if you're in a school that feels unsafe physically or psychologically, you'll develop different beliefs about the world than if it's a safe, secure place.

Instrumental purposes are the ways schooling as an institution is used to try to achieve other socio-economic outcomes. These are not achieved through the experience of schooling - they are extrinsic to the practice of school, though schooling may help to achieve them. Instrumental aims are related to efficiently maintaining or navigating the economic and political institutions that currently exist in a society.

Instrumenal outcomes are constant and pre-defined because they are based on what is assumed society needs now or in the future. For instance, we talk today about needing STEM workers, or computer engineers to feed our economic system today; or, we talk about wanting to make sure all students go to college.

Okay, so, there are four core purposes - reasons why we establish and maintain common schooling. These are the same four purposes for every society that maintains a schooling system - whether it's Plato's Republic or modern day China.

However, it's clear that the kinds of societies they're trying to create will be different. This is where aims come in.
Aims are the vision and goals of a schooling system - they are highly reflective of culture, norms, power structures, and institutions. The aims provide direction for the kind of societies and the kinds of individuals that will be fostered.
For example, every nation state may justify the existence of schooling by saying it wants to socialize its citizens into a national identity (social possibility purpose), but the desired national identity of the United States and the national identity of Ukraine might differ (social possibility aims). Every nation might want to ensure all jobs are filled in its economic system (social efficiency purpose), but the kinds of jobs in WWII France and 2018 Silicon Valley are different (social efficiency aim).

Importantly, aims that fall within instrumental purposes have specific ENDS in mind, based on the ways the current socio-economic system functions, while aims arising from intrinsic purposes lead to MEANS, methods or approaches to be used within schools and, though there is hopefully a vision, the ends are not pre-determined.

All four of the purposes for schooling are valid - they are simply justifications made for schooling as an organized institution and thus are not mutually exclusive. We want to achieve all of them - they are why we have established common schooling.

The aims within different quadrants are not necessarily mutually exclusive either: in fact, many of the instrumental goals seem to assume that human development and learning occur through schooling. For instance, to make the connection between economic growth (social efficiency aim) and increased levels of schooling, we must assume that some kind of knowledge or skills get developed (individual possibility aim).

That said, the aims can become mutually exclusive when instrumental aims are used to design schools or dictate education policy. This is because instrumental aims are not achieved through the actual practice of schooling - schools cannot "do" instrumental aims - and trying to organize school practices to maximize the achievement of these instrumental aims can undermine schools' ability to achieve any of the aims[iii].

For instance, aiming to maximize literacy test scores can end up undermining the actual literacy capabilities students develop, as Nicole Hensel talks about in her blog post this month.

High stakes tests that measure limited outcomes (i.e. content knowledge) exacerbate the issue - as Goodhart's Law states [iv]: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a reliable measure.

Instrumental aims set measures of performance outside of the process of schooling - we want "X% of students to graduate from high school" or "1 million STEM workers" - but these aren't things educators can teach on a daily basis. They give no guidance about how to design the kinds of environments and experiences in high school that are likely to cultivate the capacities, character, and mindsets or beliefs we hope students will develop. They ignore the fact that:

it's the experience of students and educators that matters for achieving any bigger picture outcome we care about.

Instrumental aims will ignore this fact and let the ends justify the means in an effort to maximize extrinsic metrics like test scores and graduation rates[v].

Today we largely frame the purpose and aims of schooling as individual efficiency. Even when we talk about social emotional learning or character development, the underlying question is often implicitly, "How do we make sure poor children can compete with wealthy children for a limited number of jobs at the top?" (e.g. "Race to the Top" or "No Child Left Behind") or "How can we make sure students absorb content knowledge most efficiently so they can pass the SAT/college entrance tests?"

Our obsession with efficiency aims in schooling has serious implications individually and collectively. It undermines the experience of students and educators in schools; it endangers the long-term health of our society; and, it jeopardizes the survival of our democracy.[vi]
We need to shift out of the efficiency frames and into possibility frames when we design school practice or policies.
Instead of asking, "How do we make sure students pass the SAT?" or, "How do we make sure every child goes to college?", we should be asking,

"How do we design environments in which students' core needs are met so they are able to learn and grow?"

and,

"How do we create experiences that give children opportunities to practice the capabilities, mindsets, and character they need to be agentive citizens who are able to work with others to make a better world?".

Questions about the practice of schooling must be answered using possibility aims because they are how we "do" school - and it's how we experience school that shapes who we are and who we become, as individuals and as a society.

Think of the 10,000 hours of practice rule Malcolm Gladwell popularized from Ericsson's research [vii] : What we practice in school - who we practice being and how we practice being together - makes us experts in that way of being over the course of 14,000+ hours.

The questions then become:

Are we practicing being the people and communities we want to be? Who do we want to become, and what community do we want to create together?

Answering these questions requires a shared vision about the kinds of communities, country, and world we want to create - it's this vision that become our possibility aims and will shape the ways we teach and socialize in schools.
In other words, the second step to shifting a system is knowing where you want to go.
As Dewey asserts [viii],:"The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind."

After defining the purposes and aims of the system, the second step is thus creating a shared vision for our society.

To develop the shared vision for today's world, my team and I at REENVISIONED are working with educators, schools, community organizations, and individual Catalysts, to facilitate 10,000 conversations and interviews with students, parents, educators, and education leaders across the country.

I'm excited to share what we're discovering from our first couple hundred interviews in next month's big shift thought piece, "From Critique to Vision."

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ENDNOTES I draw on This piece draws directly from my Stanford Ph.D. research " The belief that organizing the practices of schools for instrumental aims will create adverse consequences is theoretically justified: how to organize what happens in school is a logically separate question from why we might have or sustain schooling as an institution. Drawing on Rawls' "Two Concepts of Rules" ( The original language is: "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" - or, in other words, (Goodhart, 1975) in ( I am not saying instrumental aims are unimportant - rather, I'm arguing we need to be careful about the kinds of evidence or vision we accept as applicable when trying to change school practice. When the question at hand is one of utility and related to maintenance of the system, for instance, "Should education be provided by the state?", or "Does common schooling result in better citizens or increased economic growth?" then it is logical and valid to use instrumental aims to guide research and analysis . However, when the questions at hand are, "What is the best way to structure teaching and learning?" or "How should the school experience be designed?", then the efficiency frames are NOT relevant and in fact are very harmful precisely because they define metrics without defining means. We've adopted the language of "efficiency" from economics and, especially, from manufacturing - but it's not useful in the same sense in education for a variety of reasons I will write more on soon. Hence the title of this piece. Truly, forget efficiency in education - it will only lead you astray. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (I used the Simon & Brown, 2011 version). Chrystal & Mizen, 2003, p. 4). ), Allen () discusses the need to distinguish between three logically separate justifications for schooling: 1) how we justify establishing an institution as a state; 2) how we justify sponsoring or maintaining the institution or practice over time; and, 3) the kinds of practices that need to happen within it to make it successful. These three levels are logically separate: any overlap or similarity is "merely accidental." Why School?," which in itself is "standing on the shoulders of giants," as they say - thinkers, philosophers, and practitioners have been asking about the purpose of schooling since Aristotle . Forgive me as this thought piece is a bit more academic and in-depth than most of my pieces will be - I'm trying to condense many millennia of thought into 2000 words. and Luisi & Capra's work in different aspects of systems theory (Senge looks at organizations, Luisi & Capra look at the natural sciences).

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There's a lot of talk these days about shifting our schooling system (including by me here and here). But here's the thing - the first step toward shifting a system is knowing what it's meant to do. Systems change requires a clear understanding of both our purposes for schooling (why we have schooling), as well as our aims (our goals and vision)[i].