Three Ways to Incite a Learning Revolution

Step #1: Undermine Learners and Educators: In this thing we call the education system, the two most important parties are those doing the learning and those doing the teaching. (Often, mind you, these are the same people.) However, if you're going to incite learners and educators toward revolution, it's important to take away their power to do good work.

Force students to take standardized tests so often that class time is never just about learning; it's always about beating those tests. And hold a carrot in front of educators so that their attention is more on getting paid or keeping their jobs than on fostering learning. 

Step #2: Kill Morale: Once everyone is distracted trying to pass arbitrary tests and keep their paychecks intact, the next step is to lay off teachers and strip schools of extracurricular activities.

A good friend and fellow educator was handed his pink slip last spring because his district couldn't afford to keep another English teacher. An English teacher! (I'm a little biased because I happen to be an English teacher, too, but when did reading, writing, and critical thinking skills become expendable?) I should note that this teacher is a graduate of Stanford and of Harvard's School of Education. He's taught in an inner city New York experimental school and a more rural school in Oregon for almost a decade. In other words, he's a well educated, experienced teacher, and he's passionate about mentoring students. This isn't the kind of guy you'd lay off in any kind of sane world.

This is the kind of guy you'd want to start his own school. And luckily, in the wake of his layoff, he's doing just that. A few months ago, he learned of a place in Massachusetts called North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens, and he's working to replicate that model here in Portland, Oregon, along with a ragtag team of educators who've had enough. 

The crowdfunding platform designed for educators, by educators

Step #3: Empower Educators to Work Outside the System: As you've probably noticed, steps 1 and 2 really help to instigate the learning revolution by breeding discontent. The final step moves toward the positive by giving educators the tools to do the good work they're so desperately trying to do.

What are educators often missing when they want to implement creative solutions in their classrooms, homeschooling cooperatives, nonprofit organizations, after-school programs...and the list goes on? Funds! They have the ideas, the passion, the drive. But in a system that's drowning in debt and bureaucracy, educators often don't have access to the money necessary to bring their innovations to life. Until now. 

Introducing IncitEd: Grassroots Educational Innovations, the brain child of my business partner and fellow educator, Kevilina Burbank, and me. We want to give education back to educators, broadly defined. Maybe an educator looks like someone keeping kids safe and in school in Syria or keeping them off the streets in Portland. Maybe an educator works at a homeschooling cooperative, providing kids and families a place to learn together. Or maybe it's someone who teaches kids to fly, literally. Whoever educators are, and however they're defined, they deserve a chance to make the difference most of them have been working fervently for their entire careers.

IncitEd is just getting started. Right now we're testing our idea among friends, family, and other teachers via our IncitEd crowdfunding campaign. We'll be doing our alpha test in three weeks with two projects (to fund P:ear and my friend who's starting a North Star replication). Our beta test will follow shortly after with a dozen or more projects. We're asking for two things to help us incite this learning revolution:

1. Go to our Facebook page, "Like" us, and tell your friends about us.
2. Visit our Incited campaign to learn more about what we're up to, and let others know about it if you think IncitEd is worth promoting.

If we democratize change, helping it catch fire from the ground up, innovation will spread faster and be more connected to the people who need it most. That's our hypothesis anyway. What do you think?            

Achievement as a Side Effect of Happiness

Robertson Davies said this about that elusive emotion we all seem to be grasping for: “Happiness is always a byproduct. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.”

This quote hangs on the wall of my office at home, perpetually reminding me to appreciate the glimpses of joy and satisfaction that waft in and out of my life. The semester I student-taught, I stood before a room of seventh graders on my last day and told them that the greatest gift they could give the rest of the world would be to find their own happiness. My thinking was, and still is, that as long as we don’t sacrifice the happiness of others to attain our own, experiencing regular bouts of bliss can act as an antidote to evil, tipping the scales toward the side of good.

I know, this is the worst kind of optimism, simply unfounded, except this might not be so unfounded after all. According to a study conducted by Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego, happiness spreads like a virus among friends and family and can even be contagious between you and your friends’ friends’ friends (that’s three degrees of separation). In other words, our happiness truly can be a gift to others just as an epiphany, that moment when the world shifts on its paradigmatic axis, can feel like the educational equivalent of a miracle.

However, some would have us believe that the core of education has nothing to do with self-actualization, that it is about fitting pegs into holes (or some other mechanistic metaphor), that it’s an economic imperative. To that I say, show me a happy person, and I’ll show you someone who is more productive than ten automatons.

Davies says that happiness is a byproduct, and so it is, one of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. We want to feel free, as if we have choices, even if they are limited. We want to challenge ourselves, to work toward expertise in at least one dimension of our lives. And yes, we want to feel like the grueling work to which we submit ourselves has a purpose, connects us, perhaps, to the larger world. And when we experience this trifecta, a certain inalienable delight is had.    

Here’s the good news for those worried that students might miss out on the most vital aspects of learning if they happily get to make decisions about their educations: the side effect of happiness is achievement. Of course we want students to perform well as measured by all the possible definitions of performance, and of course we want them to contribute to society in useful ways. We want them to pick up after themselves and treat their neighbors kindly and keep all of our systems ticking along.

We want them to achieve. And they will. Studies confirm it. If only we would take our eye off the goal long enough to wonder what would happen if, lo and behold, their happiness bore more weight than money or promotions or the GDP…

-- Jaime R. Wood