Starting From Scratch

Starting from Scratch

When the goal is to provide an entirely fresh experience of learning, with the ambition of unleashing learner curiosity, facilitating stronger learner agency and enabling discovery, then the challenge is to effectively start from scratch again.

Learnlife has tackled this challenge in a variety of ways – and sharing those now might help others look differently at their own context. During its journey toward growing resilient lifelong learning capabilities in learners, the team has considered different ways of approaching curriculum, content and experiences, in order to maximise the wider goals. Those goals also include an outcome where people flourish and thrive into the future, while creating a noticeably positive impact upon their communities and perhaps even in a more global context.

The Paradigm Shift

There is a wider vision driving all thinking connected to creating new ways of viewing schedules and cycles. Inspired by the concepts of heutagogy, the personal learning mindset has helped direct all planning. Every learner will be at different stages on a journey toward growing strong self-determined learning capacity – essential for becoming proficient lifelong learners. Every learner is also likely to be at different stages of self-direction based on their strengths in different areas of learning and their own experiences.

Figure 1 – the wider paradigm

Figure 1 captures this flow from being recipients of content to becoming capable self-determined learners. Terms such as personalised learning are commonly used in relation to learning programmes becoming more student-centred. Learnlife views this as a great step in the right direction, but recognises that personalised learning typically involves a teacher or computer programme selecting the learning experiences for the learner. A personal learning mindset, as a wider goal, aims to enable stronger learner agency and self-awareness as learners, and the ability to generate their own learning pathway, now and into their future.  

Risk and Vision – perfect pairing

The risk is to approach new ways of experiencing learning that are sufficiently removed from traditional or industrial modes of thinking, so as to minimise reversionary tendencies. It is all too easy to simply shuffle the deckchairs rather than take a more iterative future-focused and fresh approach.

To do this, the vision for what might be needs to be bold, loud and accessible. The process of collective envisioning needs to produce a guiding statement, itself instantly understandable and owned by the community. These statements will become the north star guiding actions and choices moving forward. A team approach that ultimately involves learners as the co-creators of their experiences can spark fresh thinking and ideas that were perhaps never first imagined. The process creates a life of its own with continual iterations and improvements moving forward. It is a living vision.

What did we do at Learnlife?  

Initial thinking commenced for younger adolescents participating in the Urban programme in central Barcelona.

Figure 2 Starting Points

The starting point was to consider what did we want to include in a weekly programme. Core to our thinking was the need to grow a community which was very clearly founded on a shared positive experience of relationships. Maslow before Bloom thinking. So, CONNECT became part of every day and week – the first foundational building block. Connecting with self, connecting with others, Connecting with our own bodies.

The Urban programme is set up as a studio-based learning programme. CREATE came next. We wanted the learners to spend a major part of every day in different studios as a way of expanding their horizons and allowing passion to drive them forward.

Blessed with a thriving, creative and energetic urban environment right at the doorstep, DISCOVER became another initial piece of the puzzle. We visioned learning experiences occurring anywhere, everywhere throughout the accessible and surrounding communities, museums, workplaces and start up studios. As a starting point, one day a week was set aside for this. This engagement with the wider Barcelona communities, culture - and challenges, provided an authentic, organic pathway into transdisciplinary thinking.

The first learner-imagined component arose as part of the DISCOVER building block. As learners grew their love of learning, they started to suggest short term workshops that they might lead. Workshops such as those to learn basic Russian, to better understand the physics of skateboarding or the nuances of Catalan cuisine, emerged from the learners themselves. Learner-led discovery. Exactly what we had hoped for – but arising from an evident new joy in learning.

Mindful that there is an existing body of knowledge that can provide a launch pad for applied thinking, EXTEND became part of the weekly schedules. Learners displayed a wide range of understanding and competence with regard to their literacy and numeracy skills, so the Core Concepts Lab (CCLs) workshops were added into the equation. Mindful that the wider vision was for highly personal learning programmes, these CCLs were tailored to the variety of presenting needs. In time, thinking scientifically was included as a further building block.

Learners presented with a number of different language experiences. Most learners could confidently speak two or three different languages. The concept of ‘heart language’ developed. Learners could output in the language that best expressed their emotions. Further EXTEND workshops were created for those who wanted to learn or strengthen a different language.

The final component of the initial model for scheduling learning experiences each week involved learning arising from the reflection process. REFLECT became an essential component of all learning. It also formed a specific way to conclude a cycle of learning. Learners reflected on all their learning in a 360 meeting. These meetings involve a learner finding creative ways of presenting their learning from the current cycle to a selected audience, typically including some peers, a Learning Guide and a parent or guardian. A 360 assessment ends with the small audience providing tips and tops. Tips for further directions in their learning, tops as a way of celebrating the learning.

We’ve Only Just Begun

This post has attempted to capture the starting point of thinking for the learning schedules and wider cycles of the Learnlife Urban programme in Barcelona. With every new week, every new learner and every new Learning Guide, the process is continually enriched with fresh thinking and constant improvements. The team – and indeed the whole community – has embraced a fail forward  mindset, one that views all experiences as being highly valid in growth as lifelong learners. As so often happens on an adventure, it is the unexpected pathways and spontaneous side-tracks that have led to some of the best learning experiences – and the gradual development of a learning ecosystem that no longer thinks of itself as a school with students – rather learners constantly seeking to grow themselves, their community and make a positive impact on the wider world.

Remote and online learning

In a mobile world, learning is no longer confined to a static time and place. Face-to-face and online learning, or a blend of the two, are now equally suitable choices. The goal should be for quality learning in either contexts. The focus needs to be to create a unique online learning environment that suits the needs of the learners, not an online replica of face-to-face school. There are a couple of key challenges. The first is to ensure that any online and blended pedagogy is potentially stronger than a real time learning experience. The second is to ensure that online learning occurs in highly relational, collaborative contexts. No learner should ever feel alone in cyberspace.

Learnlife Learning Paradigm - Element 13: Online and Blended Learning Experiences

Executive Summary

Full Element

In a post pandemic world...

… are we imagining that kids who have experienced more independence and freedom in their learning are really going to want to go back into any school that seeks to reinstate a traditional model.

We have an opportunity to deeply rethink what will best prepare them for a world of constant ‘unprecedented’ change. Let’s take it!

Online schooling or remote learning?

A challenging question.

What should be the goal? Replicating the traditional model where the school day is brought online with the existing timetable kept largely the same, or…

…enabling a remote learning community where creativity and interpersonal connection are prioritised over other work?

Online learning

Online learning has been around for 20 years. Zoom for a decade. But people are still inexperienced.

Let’s not let online learning simply be an online version of school-as-it-was-before-crisis. We know times have changed.

Time to think deeply about how we create active, positive learning experiences in a remote context. Even better, co-create with the kids!

The ingredients?

• communication

• connection

• community

• creativity

• curiosity

• collaboration

• challenge

Vision as a catalyst for educational change

“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.” Joel A. Baker

Vision – or more specifically, a shared visioning process, is recognised by many organisational change theorists, to be the key to igniting and sustaining deep change. Educational change has been written about for decades, however is still regarded as an elusive goal. Vision as it directly connects with education as a catalyst for change, has received very little attention. My PhD research, Vision as a catalyst for educational change, looks into that gap. 

The thesis is available for access via the UTS thesis repository.

The research draws from the example of three internationally diverse schools (one each from Australia, New Zealand and Spain), where a shared, co-created vision for collaborative learning environments has been the catalyst for deep pedagogic, cultural and professional change within each community, all the while working from within the legislated curriculum frameworks. 

The research involves an examination of the schools’ journeys of change through close observation of the communities over a few years and drawing from a range of empirical data. This includes an analysis of multiple semi-structured interviews with the teachers and leaders who were closely involved in the process of visioning and change in each school. These are then drawn together in a cross-case analysis and the research synthesises the findings from these three case studies, drawing a range of implications for future practice. If the vision has sufficient strength, clarity and ownership among the community, then it will provide the momentum to see sustained and embedded change.