Making the educational unconscious, conscious

Each of us is a composite of our influences and backgrounds encoded by society, media, and our home lives. It’s no different in education. Each of us has inherited an educational atmosphere that exists as part of our unconscious worldview. These systemic and embedded messages are hard to see because everyone is enmeshed in the same thing. We take the messages around us for granted and as our truth. It’s Plato’s idea of “Doxa,” opinions so saturated in our culture that we can’t recognize them for what they are.

Consider the practices in your school experience as a whole; what were the dominant messages you received about learning?

Did you pick up on the message that learning (especially at school) was something to be endured or that it was an adventure you got to be on? 

Was the animating energy of your school experience one of scarcity or abundance? 

Was it free and expansive, or closed and limited? 

Was it animated by questions and curiosity or by knowing the correct answer? 

Was the message you received risk-averse or that all learning happens as a result of risking not knowing? 

I grew up with conflicting messages. In school and the culture at large, I picked up on the message that school was the place where learning happened. Learning got directed by an expert (also known as the teacher) and was something to be endured. I routinely got the message that by surviving school now, my life would be successful and more fulfilled someday. Everything I learned was supposed to prepare me for my imagined someday future. While in school, my job was to endure the disconnected facts, worksheets, busy work, homework, and tests. My worth as a student got tied to how much I could achieve, accomplish, produce, and comply. I had glimmers in school that learning could be about more, but primarily, outside of 1st, 3rd, and 5th grade, my experience was small. Risk-averse. Narrow. About someone that I was not today. Movies and TV shows reinforced this message, bringing to mind Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Saved by the Bell, or Boy Meets World as examples.

At home, I got the opposite message. Learning wasn’t for the far-off future; it was to solve an immediate problem, indulge curiosity, and do something expansive and discovery-driven. My parents were endlessly fascinated by the geeky nuance of learning just for its sake. In my family, we would talk about wood grain, words, space, design, places, and crazy big ideas. At home, learning was something we got to do, an adventure and journey we were always on for today and someday. 

Most of what I see in education policy, curriculum, instruction design, and school design is preserving the current system default. It isn’t innovative because the design exists within the same atmosphere of unconscious bias about what school must be. 

How do we make what is unconscious become conscious? How do we become aware of our default conditioning and stop seeing today’s educational experience as the norm? 

I think a starting point might be identifying what is in each of our educational atmospheres. I designed this short quiz to make what is invisible visible. Take it here before you read on to discover your own unconscious messages.

What was in the atmosphere that was your school experience?

What was the animating energy?

Do you still think about education in these ways?

When you think about school, are these still the images or words that come to mind? Or, maybe you’ve experienced a “culture of encounter.” Neuroscientist Dave Eagleman says, “Each time we have an experience, we alter the circuitry of our brains.” Have you had an encounter that offers a glimpse that there might be more than what is in your current atmosphere? Several in my life gave me enough distance to see that maybe the way we’ve done school isn’t THE way to do school and learning. I had conflicting encounters with learning that provided epiphanies of insight and destabilized the atmosphere I took for granted.

I’ve noticed to dominant messages about school and learning through my destabilization process:

Message 1:

In school and the culture at large, the dominant message was that learning in school was something to be endured. The animating energy of school was that of scarcity and lack. 

School was a place where learning happened to us. Teachers directed it, and classwork, busywork, homework, and tests (“learning”) were something to be survived. A bank of knowledge was the most important; that is what got taught in school. Someday in the future, the learning would have a payoff; we could be successful as a result.

Within this dominant message, we learned compliance at the expense of self. Your worth came from what you achieved/accomplished/produced. Success was measured by the same, often in a zero-sum game of winners and losers. Only some will reach the top; “good” colleges have a few spots available. School is about safety and security in the future. Failure is unacceptable; perfectionism is the aim. 

Some of the unconscious messages you may have about systems of education:

*Assessment is about winners/losers, compliance, perfection, based on a bank of fixed knowledge, guess what the teacher is thinking.

*Grades/Scores are about competition, scarcity, lack, risk-averse, fear, anxiety, based on averages, worth and success based on accomplishment.

*Classwork/homework/subjects are supposed to be tedious, a slog, one correct answer, conformity, rigor, grind, obligation, narrow/shallow understanding, facts to be memorized, teacher giving learning importance, grind, duty, a sole-pursuit.

*Detention/demerits are about compliance, fear-based, disempowerment.

Message 2:

The animating energy of school and learning was largely abundant. An adventure that you got to be on. Learning was expansive and ever unfolding. Learning was a journey based on curiosity and discovery. 

You likely enjoyed ownership and freedom in your learning journey and had plenty of opportunities for creativity, community, and belonging. Learning was not something you endured for a payout in the future; learning had relevance for you in the present and future. 

Rather than being limited to one body of knowledge and one set of answers, you experienced learning with richness and depth. You found the whole experience endlessly fascinating. 

Your learning environment was one of freedom and trust. It was relational and connected; you know the beauty of collective intelligence in a discussion. You often found yourself in a state of flow in learning.

The message you received was that school and learning are joyful. It let you know that your worth as a human is inherent and evolving, not based on your achievements or success. 

Your unconscious messages are rooted in learning as life, something you get to do and love to do, as something ever unfolding. You are rooted in curiosity, creativity, and connection. 

You likely find yourself questioning the way most schools approach learning. For you, the traditional school system doesn’t match what you know about learning. You experienced cognitive dissonance between how the mass culture depicted learning and how you experienced learning. 

What might change in education if more of our atmosphere was animated by the second message? Could we dream different dreams for school and learning?

Inviting more playful moments

I love a good game. Unfortunately, I don’t have a family or spouse who shares this affinity. It takes some convincing (and a holiday) to get them to join in. Perhaps, this is why so much of the professional development I create is centered around games and play, why I exclusively choose to play games with the kids in my mentorship group, and why games often sneak their way into my everyday principaling and suggestions to others.

My favorite games are those with some versatility. The included rules for Play are adaptable enough for us to riff on the rules and create new games. The Disney Meme game is a prime example. Yes, it can be entertaining to play as is, matching select Disney scenes with a funny prompt card (“when the printer is jammed, and you back away slowly”). But, more often than not, this is a game I pull out and riff on regularly. Last week, a group of our jr. high kids was learning about body changes and puberty. As expected, they were quiet; there was a lot of groaning, embarrassed eye covering, and plenty of blushing. We gave each of the kids a few Disney scene cards and made up our own prompt: “That feeling you get when you think about puberty.” Not only did this help break some of the tension the kids were feeling, but it also revealed to us how they were experiencing the topic. The cards provided a safe way for them to connect with classmates, showed them that they weren’t alone in their feelings of discomfort, and gave them a way to laugh and share. There were a lot of exclamations of, “oh, that one is perfect!” as they revealed their cards to the group.

The feelings about puberty in Disney Meme form

I’ve used the Disney Meme scene cards when a student comes to me with their lid completely flipped and unable to talk through what has happened. In the moments while they sit and take some deep breaths, I pull out the game, sit next to them, and flip through the cards. Usually, this leads to them telling me which movies they’ve seen and asking about scenes they haven’t. As they begin to regulate, I ask them to choose some cards that show how they felt when the incident happened. Then, we make our own meme prompts: “That feeling when your friend embarrasses you in front of the whole class.” Or, “That feeling when someone takes your hat and plays keep away.” Not only do the cards help give kids language, but they also become a safe way to tell their story to me. I gain greater insight into what happened to better help restore from the root of the problem rather than focusing solely on the external behavior that followed.

I love how these kinds of cards help kids connect to emotions build language and understanding of emotions. In all our classes, our students regularly add words to the class moodmeter (based on Marc Brackett’s work). We discuss where we might place a character scene and defend our reasoning for placement based on the feelings we observe. The Disney scene cards help provide a visual language for emotions. They can also be great for thinking about how a literary character might feel as they read a book; they can match cards to the passage.

The Disney Meme game is also a fun one to use with staff to get a pulse on how they are experiencing something, give a safe way to be vulnerable, invite everyone to participate and interact, and an opportunity to laugh and exclaim “me too!” together. This is another instance where I like to make up my own prompts: “That feeling when you remember that parent-teacher conferences fall on the same week as a full moon.” As Brene Brown brilliantly points out in The Gifts of Imperfection, “Play helps us foster empathy, helps us navigate complex social groups, and is at the core of creativity and innovation. Play is an important part of living a wholehearted life.”

I’ve developed some games that we play regularly as a staff. One of them I lovingly call Cards for Humanity. Each card has a word or phrase that is absurd in the school setting (ex: “Fight Club” or “Pillow Fort” or “Mario Kart” or “Graffiti”). I pass out 8-10 cards to each teacher, and we look at the next inquiry block. The goal is to develop a theme, project, or idea to connect the absurdity on one of the cards in their hand to the inquiry block topic. This gives us a safe way to think WAY outside the box, experiment, imagine, be silly, build camaraderie, be curious, and (often) stumble on something genius.

A recent selection of Cards For Humanity teacher ideas to combine with our How the World Works inquiry block; their ideas were brilliant!

Games lead to the flexibility of mind, persistence, questioning, imagining, innovating, meaningful risk, and they are just fun! As Bernard Suits says, “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” Why wouldn’t we want more of this in our schools?

How do you invite playful moments into your day? Any games that are open-ended enough to riff on that we should add to our collection?

Building Student Agency with Card Games and Detox Week

Ten years ago, I was a computer teacher and a technology integration specialist. I taught 475 students every week, worked closely with teachers to ingegrate technology meaningully into their classrooms, and worked closely with the curriculum so that I knew how to integrate it meaningfully.

It was in this moment of time that I discovered a catastrophic problem that would change the course of my life: The curriculum didn’t know the students it was designed for. It couldn’t possibly know who they were and what their stories were. As teachers, we knew these stories, and yet we were being held back from fully embracing the identity and genius of the students in our classrooms because we were teaching from a curriculum that didn’t know them. Worse still, testing was dictating what the learning interaction would look like.

I felt a deep sense of urgency to change this…NOW! Because these 475 kids I was teaching every week? They didn’t have the luxury of time for education policymakers to get it right, they (unhelpfully) kept growing up.

I’ve dedicated the last nine years to learning how to honor identity by giving students agency over their learning through personalization. What started as an idea for a piece of technology has turned into a school, which has become a movement of good.

Our goal at Anastasis is to create a high-purpose environment where every student knows who they are, where every student is valued as a member of a team, where feedback is real-time and valuable, where we have the shared goal of becoming the very best version of ourselves.

At Anastasis we begin by connecting. We get to know a student on a deep level, and before the school year even begins, students receive a sense of belonging. Our first weeks of school are all about signaling: you are valuable, you are worth knowing, you are worthy of one-on-one time, you belong here. How do we do this? Through Learner Profile Days and Detox Week.

Learner Profile days are predicated on the belief that every one of our students is standing in a spot in this world that they alone inhabit. Wholely unique in the course of history. They are a collection of their history, experiences, gifts, hopes, their fears and insecurities. We believe that every one of our students holds a place in this world that’s valuable and important. The world needs us to honor these individuals. To see them as individuals and help them grown in their gifts. Our goal can never be to make them close approximations of “perfect student” in a one-size-fits-all system. The complex problems of our world won’t respond to one-size-fits-all solutions. We NEED people with different points of view who can communicate, collaborate, and who can appreciate other points-of-view and gifts as equally valuable, not as competition.

Our first two days of school are designed so that our teachers can have one-on-one time (an hour) with every one of their students. During this hour, they use the Learning Genome Card Sets to help students tell their stories. More than a boiled down version of what categories students trend in as learners, the cards are meant to activate narrative. The cards act as a launching point for students to add details and tell stories about who they are. They help teachers get answers to questions we may not have known to ask. Inevitably we also gain great information about how they like to learn. The real magic is in the stories. In that hour-long one-on-one, students have a safe place to share, they have a captive audience, and teachers get to know them on a deeper level. The kind that usually takes a full year to develop. From this card game, we develop the Learner Profile. This is a document where we record what a student’s learning preferences are. The document is helpful, but it isn’t really the point. The point is connection. The start of relationship and community.

The Learner Profile becomes a place where we help students discover and flourish as individuals who know who they are and why they are here, who know what they are passionate about, who explore the world and make connections with who they are, and to see that each one of them has the capacity to change our world using their gifts. The Learner Profile gives them a starting point to understand what their hearts beat for. What they were uniquely put on this earth to do (and that it’s a never-ending journey!)

Detox Week is a week where we help kids “detox” from the false messages they’ve learned about themselves, community, and learning. We break down the message that they lack in some way, that they may not be “enough.” We work to help kids see that community is more excellent than competition in a learning environment. We want them to understand that real learning is a journey that will include risk, and trials, and setbacks, and failure, and iteration, and success.

During Detox week, kids fail spectacularly. Our goal is ultimately to help them see that Anastasis is a safe place to fail, that it’s okay to be vulnerable, to ask for help, and to iterate on ideas. During Detox Week kids also start to learn that honest, kind, critical feedback will be our norm. We give real feedback because we have high expectations and know that each of them can reach those expectations. Over and over again in this first week of school, we’ve designed the experiences to send the message: You are inherently valuable and worthy. You belong to Anastasis today and in the future. We believe in each of you. It’s okay to keep iterating, in fact, that is learning!
We let kids know that their learning this year won’t be about a grade, it will be about learning. Anastasis will be a safe place to give effort and iterate (by the way, I do the same thing with professional development for teachers: Exhibit A, Exhibit B). During Detox Week we send the message that learning is bigger than school, learning is life. We send the message that there is a gift in the struggle, an art that plays out in the journey toward mastery.

Detox Week is meant to inspire laughter and provoke small moments of crisis where they will be frustrated. As it turns out, this is one of life’s greatest bonding experiences. Detox Week becomes a moment in time where our students share experiences that we can refer to, and learn from, all year long.

Detox Week helps us establish a school culture for the year. It helps students see who they are and that they belong here, in this community. When they get to know themselves as individuals, they can start to appreciate the gifts that others bring. They can begin to see how they are connected and that their contribution matters. They begin to see that they are safe to be themselves, safe to make mistakes. So often I see educators elevate failure as a good thing…champion it even, but without laying the foundation for that kind of vulnerability, the lip service does students no good. Let’s be real; learning is an act of vulnerability because it comes with failure. To not provide genuinely safe conditions is to hinder students in their learning.

So, what does Detox Week look like practically? We start by helping our students see and appreciate their own identity. Through the books we read together, with a look at their learner profile, through metaphor, and quotes. We talk about how rainforests have a symbiotic diversity nature, and that the diversity of a rainforest is actually what makes the whole thing healthier. If you plant just one kind of plant, the rainforest would be weaker. This is the same in our classroom, and indeed life. Where there is diversity, there is life. Having a diversity of gifts and vantage points makes our classroom, school, and world healthier. We can work together. We talk about the idea of collective intelligence. We are smarter, stronger, wiser together.

Next, we put our students in teams and situations where they will be challenged. They will fail spectacularly. Then we let them take a step back, talk with their team, and iterate. They tackle it again, and again, and again. There have been tears. There have been shouts of frustration. There is always some laughter. In the end, bonds form. Kids learn that it is okay to be vulnerable. That they can succeed when they work together and listen to each other when they appreciate each other’s gifts. (You can check out other activities/ideas/inspiration we’ve had around Detox Week on Pinterest.)

The oldest two classes (6-8th grade) go on a three-night camping trip together where all of these lessons get reinforced.

We end Detox Week with Identity Day. We edu-lifted this idea from George Couros years ago! Identity Day is a day where every student prepares an exhibit that shares something about who they are. We invite everyone in: parents, teachers, students, grandparents, friends. We celebrate that each of us is unique and the part we play in our community.

When you ask Anastasis students what three things they love about our school we get the same three answers over and again:
1. You know me.
2. I have the freedom to learn here.
3. This community feels like family.

That life-changing moment has led to a school where kids are known. We start here.

If we do nothing else right, let’s make this our priority

Without fail, every kindergarten student at Anastasis has answered this question the exact same way, “If you could change one thing about yourself, what would you change?”

Answer: “Nothing.”

Nothing.

Without fail!

In fact as we build our Learner Profile, when we reach this question, our youngest tend to tilt their heads to the side in confusion. It’s that same look that a puppy gives you when they are trying to work out what you are saying. They are totally puzzled as to why we would ask them such an absurd question.

What would they change?

Nothing.

Young students believe that who they are is exactly who they should be.

They carry no embarrassment or shame about it. They are proud of who they are. They like who they are.

We’ve found that students who started their schooling at Anastasis (in other words, they’ve never attended any other school) still answer this way regardless of how old they are. Change? Why would I change?

They answer, “Nothing.”

They answer, “I like myself!”

When students enter Anastasis later in their schooling, they answer differently. Somewhere around 8 years old the answer changes. They want to be taller. They want to change their “color.” They want to be better at reading. Better at math. They want to be faster. Different from the way that they currently are. You begin to hear the heartbreak of comparison that they carry.

As schools, if we did nothing else right, helping students see the value in who they are is a win. To believe that who they are is okay, and beautiful, and right.

How do we keep that?

How do we make our schools and classrooms a place where students can be proud of who they are? How do we create a culture that cultivates this sense of rightness from within?

This sense of identity impacts every other part of what we do as educators.

Without this, all of our talk about making school a ‘safe place’ is superficial. We start in the wrong place. We don’t often get to the root of what makes a place safe. When students don’t feel secure in who they are, there really isn’t any place that feels safe. Students are living in the insecurity of comparison, of wishing they were something different, of wishing that their reality was different. They feel judged by others because they judge themselves harshly.

When students are secure with themselves, they can be vulnerable. They can be silly and take risks in front of others. This is a universal truth. When students feels comfortable doing their own thing, they aren’t worried that they look different, or act different, or like different things. They can be secure in who they are and with who others are. They can take risks knowing that if they do fail, it doesn’t define them.

They can do the scary things.

How do we help students maintain the sense of self and identity? At Anastasis, it all starts with knowing the individual, with honoring the humanity. At the beginning of each year, we spend our first two days of school getting to know every individual at Anastasis. Each student signs up for an hour long one-on-one meeting with their teacher. During this meeting, we ask a lot of questions (one of them being “If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?”), we identify strengths, interests, and passions. Then we play three card ‘games’ with students. These help us to identify learning style preferences, multiple intelligence strengths and brain dominance. We build a learner profile to help us understand who our students are. We follow these two days with ‘detox week,’ identity day, and a “Who we are” inquiry block. Throughout detox week, identity day, and the “Who we are” inquiry block we are helping students appreciate who they are. We celebrate it. As students  value themselves as individuals, we work to build community by helping students see the value that others have in their uniqueness.

This process of building a Learner Profile was initially tech based as the beginning portion of the Learning Genome Project. After starting Anastasis, I began to realize that this process of building the profile should never be tech based. By making this process a one-on-one between teacher and student, we’ve begun by building relationship. By making it a card game that students interact with, we’re able to build a richer profile. As students interact with the cards and the teacher, they begin to tell stories and we get incredible nuance that would be impossible to capture with technology alone. This interaction of teacher and student is the first building block of community, of getting to know each other, of relationship, and vulnerability. It is from this place that we begin each year.

*If you are interested in building a profile the way that we do at Anastasis, you can now purchase the Learning Genome Project Learner Profile card sets. They’ll help you identify a student’s learning style preferences, multiple intelligence strengths, and brain dominance. It is from this profile that we are able to truly individualize the learning at Anastasis.

If we get nothing else right, let’s make this our priority: valuing the individual. The student-with-a-name. To maintain the rightness within, the beauty that makes us individuals.