Welcome to Boldschoolers! Today, I’m going to circle back to the beginning. I’m getting requests to back it up and start building a foundation for learning outside of school. It seems a good time to do that, as the school year will be beginning before we know it. Let’s do it! So…Nearly thirty years ago, my dissertation focused upon a type of engagement called peak performance or flow. Flow has also been referred to as the zone or optimal learning, along with many other names people make up to describe their experience. I have a friend that simply calls it clickin’. Flow is an optimal state of mind, body, emotion, and spirit where we feel our best and perform our best. Many of us have experiences of flow doing activities that we enjoy doing. You might engage all night on a project or chat for hours with a friend, feeling as if only minutes have passed. You might feel a deep connection to nature as you ski down a mountain or lose your sense of time and space while lost in a good story. Perhaps the words to your writing flow beautifully together or maybe you’ve played a musical instrument better than you thought possible. These experiences don’t have to be random, and they don’t have to only be experienced by the very lucky. While I still believe my 30-year old proposition that Meaningfulness + Playfulness = Learning, I would like to integrate that idea into our current understanding about how the brain learns, how creativity is expressed and how we can more reliably experience this state called flow. I believe learning should be fun, exploratory, and child-centered, and I also understand that children get the most out of learning when experts partner with them and help them form vast knowledge frameworks in their minds.
I collided with learning outside of school when my eldest child was in second grade. His private Waldorf teacher suddenly vacated her job, and he was left without a teacher. Additionally, the campus was moving locations and there was a gap in time where the students had no physical school. Amidst the turmoil, I pulled him out to school him at home. I recruited my mother to help with reading a couple of days a week and I piece-mealed the rest together using an online curriculum through a charter school that I would later end up teaching for.
There were successes and failures during that year at home and I learned a great deal—not only about my child, but about general needs that kids have for creativity, personal ownership, interaction with friends and time outside in nature. I also saw my son kindle the first flashes of entrepreneurship as he used his knitting and crocheting skills to start a hat-making business, selling his creations to locals for a hefty profit. My son ended up going back to a public charter school after the year at home, but for me, my focus on homeschooling continued and this would be the first step in my journey to understand the needs and opportunities of learning outside of school.
Fast forward a few years and my middle son, a special needs fifth grader, was struggling in his third school. In search of an option that would provide needed supports and a compassionate community, I put him into yet another school, a public charter that offered a hybrid program. He would attend school twice a week, attend a half a day of vendor-based electives once a week and learn at home for the remaining days. At the time, I considered this three-year middle school experiment a failure, but we stuck it out because it was the only way to ensure him a spot in the school’s full-time, project-based high school, which I was convinced would be a good fit, and likely the only positive option within striking distance.
This highly competent boy with Asperger’s refused to do much of anything during those middle school “at home” days, except a series of short (2-3 minute) computer videos he enjoyed via an online program. He participated well during his “at school” days and his elective day, but the “heads down” time at home was hugely disappointing in my traditionally focused mind. Yet, we stayed with it and he transitioned into the high school and later the charter’s college program, both of which were by-and-large successful and positive experiences for him.
My daughter, nine years younger than my eldest, enjoyed her Waldorf charter school even though she struggled with attentional challenges along the way. As I learned more and more about learning outside of school, I encouraged her to think about leaving the brick-and-mortar school and had even taken her out of middle school for a week to experience an alternative self-directed learning environment. She enjoyed it, but ultimately, she self-directed herself right back into choosing to continue schooling with her friends.
During Covid, my daughter schooled at home for a year, along with many of the world’s children. For the most part, it was a dismal and depressing experience for her. In contrast, I noticed that the homeschoolers that I worked with had little disruption and limited upheaval when compared to the children attempting Zoom school. For those familiar with learning outside of school, learning was largely uninterrupted.
For much of my own children’s schooling, I had three kids in three different school districts as I attempted to individualize their learning and find the best, “perfect” fit. We used a mix of traditional public schooling, alternative schooling, and homeschooling during their years in school. I found that navigating within the different school systems, and negotiating with teachers and service providers, was often challenging, especially when working within larger school districts. Add a special needs child into the mix and it was even more complicated and frustrating. If I had known then what I know now, I would have done many things differently.
School works for some children, but many children are sitting in classrooms (or at home in front of computer screens) bored, frustrated, disconnected, or simply not enjoying or finding value in their learning. The cries to get out of the experience of learning deeply bother me; crush me, in fact, because I know it doesn’t have to be this way. School is considered dull, but necessary, by some; soul-sucking by others.
Negative school experiences are not natural, inevitable, or out of our control. We are blind to this problem simply because we’ve normalized it. We understand much more about how the brain learns and how skills are effectively developed than we did when the idea of school began.
In some ways, it’s much easier to meet individual needs when learning outside of school because there are so many more options and opportunities, as well as the support of a community of families making similar choices. There are vendors, skilled educators, and communities of like minded individuals wanting to be helpful. There’s also science to help us understand how we learn and an abundance of resources to support a myriad of educational choices. What I haven’t seen, though, is a guide to help parents understand how motivation and learning work, such that they can feel comfortable in individualizing education outside of school.
We are at the very beginning stages of democratizing and decentralizing education, and we need a pathway through that is user-friendly. You don’t need to be a trained teacher to provide your child with a high-quality education, one that exceeds traditional options, but you do need to understand enough about learning to help your child find their own optimal experience. When you tune in here, I will offer you a framework to educate your children to be competent in an ability to focus deeply, acquire skills successfully, perform optimally and motivate themselves towards whatever goals they choose in their lives. Throughout our time together, I will share with you the real voices and challenges experienced by my own three children, hundreds of my students, as well as the parents and teachers that I’ve coached along the way. I imagine a future in which children wake up inspired and feel fulfilled in a day spent learning—following curiosities, developing passions and bringing about positive change in the world through meaningful purpose. For today, I’d like to leave you with a question about questions. Are you asking the right questions when you think about your child’s learning? Are you focused on the whats…and what I mean by that is…are you focused on the curriculum, the vendor classes, the lessons…or are you focused on the more powerful questions...the how…the why…and the when…How might your child learn best? How might your child learn to learn? And that includes understanding how to motivate herself, engage in learning, understand how her brain learns, so she can optimally use her brain and what to do when she gets stuck. There will always be gaps in our learning. We simply can’t learn everything there is to learn in this big, beautiful world. My thinking is that if our kids know how to learn, they can fill those gaps whenever they choose. And if they truly have that skill, to learn whatever they want, whenever they want… they become unstoppable. If you could learn anything and be successful at it, what would you learn?
