My Lesson From KID NATION (a letter to the editor)
December 13, 2007
I’ll be sending this around to see if any newspapers want to print it.
In the mean time, here it is…
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My Lesson from “Kid Nation”
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After watching the Dec 12 finale episode of CBS’s “Kid Nation,”
a show I felt mixed about, I was surprised to clarify the key lesson
– a lesson that bears underscoring.
I’ve spent the last 6 years researching alternative education models
in which kids are fully involved in their communities — schools like
Sudbury Valley in Framingham, MA. These “Information Age” schools
give students the power to vote on the budget, hire and fire teachers,
and even to decide how they spend their days:
studying, playing, and/or dealing with core school politics.
This research fueled my independent feature film called “Schooled,”
slated for it’s DVD release on Dec 17th. When I first heard about
“Kid Nation” I felt both intrigued and somewhat threatened.
Intrigued because the subject matter related to my project,
and was being given the mainstream treatment. And threatened
because I was sure there was no way the show could be true to
the principals of children’s empowerment that I had come to value
through my research. Network TV shows have to grab the attention
of millions of viewers so contrived contests and
two-handed heartstring tugging are a must.
Despite my skepticism, and feeling embarrassed that they even
caught me wiping away tears, I’m thrilled with the ultimate message
that came through loud and clear: kids handle responsibility far better
than most people think they can. In a culture where the biggest
challenge facing most high school class presidents is deciding on
a prom venue, we must bring democracy more directly
into mainstream education.
Perhaps greater community involvement in children’s formative years
will pay off most when these kids grow up and lead us in facing
overwhelming global issues. Challenges such as ferocious poverty
which can cripple us or global warming which could even kill us.
On the other hand, maybe choosing that cool local inn for prom night
really is still the best way to prepare our future leaders.
Brooks Elms
Writer-Director
“Schooled”
www.SchooledTheFilm.com
December 13, 2007 at 2:50 pm
I’ve been interested in writing about how business and corporate models of training are so different than traditional school or curriculum models.
In a good business model, we’re most interested in the fastest and most cost-effective way to build skills and improve performance.
If you were to apply a lot of what we know about process and quality improvement as well as change management to public education, you’ll find a lot of immediate improvements that would make a significant difference. However, because of the decision making process, it’s not likely to happen.
Here’s an example. One of the key principles of quality improvement is trying to reduce variability. If everything is done differently all the time, it leads to very wide range of results and very uneven quality. If you take something like teaching 5 grade history, it’s probably taught 10,000 different ways. It’s not even the same within the same school. Result, high variabilty, low quality.
A second principle is to try and reduce the time it takes to get a desired outcome. In a school system, you have a preset amount of time K-12 and then you try to fill up the time. The oppositve of that is the teach from start to finish and when you’re done, you’re done. Over time, you try to make this amount of time shorter and shorter. (There really is no advantage to slow learning.) Think about what happens when K-12 becomes K-11.5. Frees up a lot resources and money.
My blog is http://www.learningatlightspeed.wordpress.com
December 13, 2007 at 3:15 pm
I think you’re right that learning methods could be faster, although I’m not so sure we need the lessons of childhood to move any faster.
One of the points of “Schooled” is to seriously question what the “lessons of childhood” actually are. And who should decide.
Your book sounds interesting, although when people love something, they tend learn very fast anyway. No?
December 13, 2007 at 4:26 pm
What happens when people start to learn anything is that they start out enthusiastic for the most part. Then they reach a make or break point where they tend to lose confidence because it’s harder and more complex then they thought. They also have some early failure. A good teacher or coach can help them past this point so they won’t quit.
People who get good learn quickly because they spend the time with hours and hours of practice. But even at that they could go faster if they didn’t have to make all the same mistakes.
Think about how you learned to be a film maker. I would bet if you did again there are some missteps that you could have avoided or experiences you could have had sooner. Sink or swim or trail and error may eventually work but it is the slow way.
Finally, the easiest way to speed things up in a positive way is just to eliminate all the stuff you won’t ever use or won’t remember. Take a look at the show “Are you smarter than a 5th Grader” What I take away from this show is that if you got all these knowledge questions that college graduates can’t answer, and I even saw a grade school history teacher miss a history question, why is it so important for a 5th grader to remember.
If you want a big laugh that illustrates this point, check out this short video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8×8eoU3L4
December 15, 2007 at 10:19 pm
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
December 16, 2007 at 7:21 am
What do you disagree with? Please state your case.
December 19, 2007 at 7:32 am
What I disagree with about your theories, Steve:
Making mistakes is an essential part of the learning process. Since each person has to do their own learning in their own mind, how can anyone as an observer say what misteps could be avoided or what experiences should be had at what strategic moment? Hindsight is 20/20, but how can we know in advance?
That is not to say that helping a person with their learning is not a good thing, as long as that help comes with no strings attached, no hidden or any agenda other than helping the learner, at hir consent and by hir lights.
I’m not sure that ‘learning fast’ is a goal worthy of pursuit, in general. Approaching learning as the lifelong 24/7 activity it is, the concept of ‘learn fast’ as a goal in itself loses meaning. When a person is ready and willing to learn something, it often does happen fast, and is often embedded in the midst of other complex learning that is going on at the same time.
The learning support I advocate for is outside the regimen of existing ideas about learning that is mainstream and school-oriented. I think it is important to really understand how learning happens, and to support that process (which includes access to experience and mentors and labs, whatever it takes); that takes setting aside authority and focusing on the learner.
December 19, 2007 at 7:47 am
Some mistakes you learn from and others simply waste your time or lead you in the wrong direction. Trail and error learning only works if you eventually find the right solution. Otherwise what happens is that people get frustrated and give up.
There are very simple ways to speed up learning that in fact make learning more enjoyable becasue you’re able to build success and confidence quickly.
There are lots of situations were learning quickly is a tremendous benefit. For example, if I gave you the choice of learning to drive is 6 weeks or 2 years which would you choose? Would you like to learn by crashing a lot or would you like to know the secrets of how not to crash?
Would you like to be a world class musician in 2 years or 20 years? You could learn by making all the mistakes or maybe other world class muscians can shorten your learning time.
There are also lots of things in that are counter-intuitive so many people never learn them on their own. Picking up learning speed isn’t some mysterious technique, it means putting a lot of discpline and rigor into the process and taking advantage of what experts already know.
December 20, 2007 at 4:59 am
Trial and error learning might bring new insight that can take a person beyond what the experts already know. I wouldn’t close my mind to it, for that reason, though I agree that having lots of good help is important in learning (when help is wanted).
Some mistakes can end learning and life at the same time, those are better avoided, which help hopefully will do. A person is going to make mistakes in the course of learning, though not ‘all’ the mistakes possible, only the ones that are in their own particular course of learning, and good help might help to mitigate problems from that.
Learning quickly can have advantages for a person who is motivated in that direction. Sometimes though learning is slower. I don’t know any way to gain the wisdom of age 50 by age 20, for instance.
December 20, 2007 at 5:30 am
I think it would be great to have the wisdom of age 50 by age 20. However, what I’m talking about is whether you would like to learn exactly the same thing is 6 weeks rather than 18 weeks. And what if you could make that change by simply eliminating everything you wouldn’t remember anyway and changing how you were taught to match your learning style. In otherwords, do you want to learn slow because of inappropriate or poor teaching or faster because it’s higher quality.
When you substitute structured practice and experience for trail and error learning, you don’t eliminate personal discoveries. Instead, you help to make sure they happen when they will be most valuable. If you don’t believe in learning from the mistakes of others and have to learn everything for yourself, you will take the longest time possible to learn. In this case, you may need to spend time on teaching someone how to learn or to better understand their own learning style.
I’ve shortened up the learning curve for about 30,000 people. Not one person said, I wish I could have learned exactly the same thing in a few more months. The only people who resisted were the trainers who felt shortening up the formal training was a threat to their job.
December 20, 2007 at 6:38 am
I think I agree with you, Steve, in the case of people wanting to learn something in particular and entering into that project consentually.
I wonder about how you know ahead of time ‘everything you wouldn’t remember anyway’, and if by cutting certain lines of inquiry by that rubric some valuable knowledge creation could be missed. That might not be a concern if the scope of a 6 week course is very narrow, but in the case of life-long learning is crucial imo.
I am thinking about this from the point of view of learning outside of the schooling system, setting up learning as the focus (rather than the teaching)- more of a mentoring, instead. I think that the freedom to learn what one wants to learn is important. It’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel; we can learn from others’ mistakes and still go on to make our own in the process of learning.
I don’t know any other way of learning than to learn for one’s self, interacting with information in one’s own mind, making conjectures and refutations – whether that is about other people’s mistakes or one’s own.
When it comes to specific skills, there is a value in having a good teacher to help guide one’s learning. Not having to spend time or energy on boring stuff is bound to help people learn quicker. That’s exactly what we advocate for, with autonomous learning – cut out the stuff you’re not interested in, and learn in your own time, in your own way.
We learn horseback riding (for example) much quicker when getting on a horse daily rather than weekly. But forcing children to read at ever younger ages and labeling it failure when they do not is counterproductive and not something that can be speeded up. Such coercion can block a kid from ever learning to read well. Many children, when not forced, don’t read until much later than mainstream schools deem optimal, but think of all the learning they are doing in the meantime! when not forced to spend their time on stuff they are not remembering (or understanding, yet) anyway, and learning in their own style.
So I guess I’m agreeing with Brooks when he questions, above, the value of moving the lessons of childhood along any faster.
December 20, 2007 at 10:10 am
I want to give you an example of what happens when kids are left to learn on their own. It’s a golf example because I know what happens really well.
If you give a kid a golf club and a ball, here’s what happens naturally. The place their dominant hand on the top of the grip and if they decide that it’s a two handed rather than a one handed game, they place there other hand just below that. Now they are holding the club cross handed which makes it almost impossible to play the game. They also try to either hit the ball like an axe going into a log or they try to lift the ball. Both these approaches lead to a lifetime of frustration.
Now if they practice these methods of a while, it will take them years if ever to undo these bad habits. The problem is that the physics of a golf swing make almost everything counter-intuitive. How do you make the ball go up? You hit down. How do you make the ball go right? You swing left. How do you hit the ball far? You swing easy.
This is way today more than 90% of all golfers never break 100.
Those people I know who became good golfers, shooting in the low 70s, did so in a very short period of time. They got good early instruction and then spent about 2 years hitting 300 to 500 practice balls per day.
Interestingly, the best golfers get the most instruction and coaching and the worst golfers get none or learn from their friends who know even less. Why would you want to learn from Tiger Woods? He might stiffle your creativity? His coach travels with him and works with him a couple hours each day. Obviously, he could have been much better without it.
December 23, 2007 at 6:47 am
Is anyone making kids learn golf? heh That is where the help comes in. Any kid who wants to pursue better golfing or reading or making a bundt cake is likely to be glad for the chance to have lessons, exposure to lots of their interest, and then they learn fast. Same for adults.
Seeking out knowledge, people and circumstances to help that learning is what (empowered) learners do, be they young or old (smiling, thinking of some older life-long golfers I know who have taken some very pointed lessons to correct/improve thier golf swing). We have a particular responsibility to children, in helping with this, to do so without coercion which can block learning. Children do not have access to resources and need trusted helpers and advisors to find good lessons or classes or experiences to further thier interests.
I’m not advocating leaving a child to rot with a golf club and golf ball, to figure it out for hirself. I am questioning how the couple of prinicples you laid out in your first post on this comment thread would benefit children’s learning. I question the ‘reducing variability’ way of teaching; in my experience and opinion, people learn in highly individual ways as varied as there are people, so the more variety available the better. I question the principle of ‘desired outcome’; teaching to the test is imo the single biggest diversion of effort from actual learning to producing a product. Children are not products. I question the theories about learning that are the underpinnings of the foundation of institutional schooling. I think we’d do much better with non-compulsory community learning centers available to all ages, staffed with mentors, with people of all ages pursuing their interests rather than a set agenda. That does not preclude lots of help in figuring out the best way to pursue an interest, and guidance in the pursuing.
December 23, 2007 at 8:13 am
Let me just talk about variability because I think you’re confusing it with a single rigid way of doing things.
In the current system, every teacher does things differently. The standards if they apply are very loose and uniform. So the result is that you get a normal distribution of really good teaching, mediocre teaching and poor teaching.
The goal of reducing variability is to find out what works the best and to get everyone on the same page. So if you think you’re approach works the best, it seems that you’d want others to move in that direction. That’s what reducing variability is about.
Working on quality is a rigorous discipline that requires good measurement. However, this opens teachers up to scrutiny and holds them responsible which is contrary to the union mentality.
Finally, quality enables mass customization. What this means is that you can tailor your approach to each student in a way that maintains the same high quality level.
You decide which way you prefer:
Traditional approach – Every teacher decides what to do and no one is held to any meaningful standard.
Quality approach – You find out what works the best, set it at a standard and work continuously to make it better.
December 23, 2007 at 8:48 am
What works best is for the learner to follow hir interest with help from trusted advisors. Set that standard and work continously to make it better, but it will still mean that people decide for their own selves what their goals are, adjust them continuously. How are you going to hold learning to a meaningful standard? is my question, I guess. I’m questioning the ’same page’ standard, that everyone needs to know the same things at the same time in the same way.
December 23, 2007 at 9:32 am
So let’s assume the standard is to help each learner might his or her goals. Now the teachers goal is to achieve that standard in the most effective way.
In today’s approach, the teachers will do this in 20,000 to 30,000 days. Some will help the student reach this goal quickly and others will take years. Same student, same goal, different results.
So for example, let’s say the student would like to be able to read a book like Harry Potter. One teacher works with the student and the student can read that book in 6 months. Another teacher works the same student and the student can read that book in 5 years. Which teacher did a better job given the standard is to to help each learner might his or her goals.
The first student is on to reading more books and learning more interesting things will the first student is stuck on the same goal.
So what did the first teacher now that the second teacher didn’t? Wouldn’t it be better to have teacher do it that way than making something up on their own?
Maybe you have a suggestion for how to address this issue. Start with an average 8 year old. This student can only be interested in what he or she has been exposed to which is very limited. Part of finding your interests happens when you are exposed to things you’re not interested in. Also, somethings you’re not interested in because you’re not good at it. As you get better you’re interest goes up. I was not interested in writing as a kid, but now I’m a professional writer. Along the way I was exposed to a lot of books and languages that weren’t that interesting but their useful now.
December 23, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Re: the scenario of child wishing to read Harry Potter. Say, an adult and child read Harry Potter together. Maybe child is following along on the page. Maybe s/he is listening without looking at the page. Maybe child will be reading the pages by the time they are done. Maybe not. Does it matter? did the child want the information in the book, and that is why s/he wants to read that book? Or is it the skill of reading and comprehending so that s/he can read on her own that the child wants? Could listen to the book on tape and watch the movie to get the experience of Harry Potter stories, while learning to read by doing video games or reading comic books, developing skills that will eventually transfer to reading Harry Potter books and beyond.
To me, it’s what the learner wants and how s/he wants to go at it that needs more emphasis, not the methods of the proposed teacher(s) though having a trusted helper/mentor to ask questions of (or to orchestrate the learning if that is waht the learner wants) is likely to come in handy.
There is so much information available to children on video and computer that reading a book is no longer the most important thing they can do to learn. A non-reader can listen to books on tape. Non-readers are not stuck in some kind of dull lackluster world before they can read; they explore the world with other skills and senses. learning all the time. When they do learn to read, they interact with the world differently to extract information. It’s not necessarily a better way, but different; something is lost when a person goes from non-reading to reading, as well as something gained. I suspect there is an optimal time for each individual to start to read, but I doubt that it is the same instant as anyone else.
I think that in the course of following interests, people are exposed to myriad things, some of which they will want to know more about, all of which contributes to a rich life now which is the basis for a rich life later. Life’s too short to waste being exposed to things you are not interested in. Maybe later I’ll want to get good at golf, but for now I want to bake a cake and work on my World of Warcraft game. Maybe later I’ll take a horseback ride and have a fascinating conversation with the neighbor who is a veteran Marine and conceive a new interest in engine repair.
What’s the urgency to learn any particular thing right now, as soon as possible?
December 23, 2007 at 4:02 pm
I thought for a mintue about what might be a point of clarification in our discussion. I really don’t disagree with what you want to do one on one.
What I’m really talking about is what happens when you look across thousand and thousands of students. That’s really what I do in a business setting. The goal should be to lift all of them up by applying consistent best practices and working continuous improvement.
One of the key elements of working on quality is the concept of setting up experiments and testing new approaches. So if a teaching method works better, you have solid evidence that it does and it’s more likely adopted. If it doesn’t make things better, you also know and you can discard it and try something else. This adds a level of innovation that you won’t find in most schools today.
December 24, 2007 at 7:47 am
I am with you on conjecture and refutation as the way people learn! The emphasis on compulsory is a large part of the problem with institutional education imo: the attempted application of a mold (curriculum) to guarantee a certain pre-determined set of knowledge.
We can only benefit from a bright and curious and educated populace of all ages, continuing to learn life-long. Some of the best learning doesn’t happen institutions. I don’t think that even most learning happens in institutions. By narrowing the definition of ‘education’ to only what happends in institutional settings with a cleraly defined teacher and student, we miss a lot of information that can help us learn about how to learn best.
Here’s an experiment in best practices and working towards continuous improvement of their methods: http://www.driversedge.org
We recently attended one of their sessions with our oldest. Their goal is to help young drivers (ages 16-21) learn what to do in certain fairly common problem driving situations, and to make explicit what problems most frequently lead to accidents and how to avoid them. Not with scare tactics, but with knowledge about the physics of what is going on with the vehicle and hands-on experience in a car with a professional driver on a track.
The kids do a pretest, and they ask parents to fill out a questionaire and evaluation of existing driver’s ed programs in schools. The kids do the same test at the end of the 4 1/2 hour program, and driversedge follows up over the next few years, building their database to track how well their teaching methods are working.
I am extremely impressed with their program. They are respectful of everyone, no condescending to the kids in any way, it was fun, everyone was there by choice, everyone learned something about what they were teaching. There was the occasional kid who did not want to get in the car and do the skid; the drivers were respectful and encouraging and took the extra time to talk with the kid to address their concerns until the kid was ready to do it. No forcing; rather, working together, respecting autonomy, encouragment.
Innovation has to be light on its feet, and evaluation brief and almost besides the point, imo, or the evaluation becomes the point, rather than the learning, and innovation gets bogged down within rigid limits that block true innovation (for instance, the higher goal of protecting the existing school system structure and teachers’ unions blocks a true change in the philosophy of education they operate on that includes compulsion as the central methodology)
Perhaps this is the difference between private sector innovation and the behemoth of publicly funded institutions.