Time to Find Your Way
Agile Concepts
- Self-regulation
- Experimentation
- Trust
Peak Learning Practices
- Trust
- Value
Learning & Teaching
A hallmark, if you can call it that, of academic programs developed by LAS Educational Research is built-in, unstructured time, during which students are allowed to self-direct … or not. As Peter Gray put it, “we are putting more responsibility on our children or you could say we’re giving our children more freedom, but those things are two sides of the same coin. Freedom requires responsibility” (Gray, 2020).
In other words, without freedom, how are students going to practice responsibility?
We’ve experimented, as we’ve worked with the agile mindset, in two related programs - related in that the first program, the progressive middle school, was an early iteration of the second program, called LAS edge.
Middle School (grades 7 and 8). While we tried to release responsibility (and therefore give freedom) in general, two areas stand out, Homeroom (see Homeroom elsewhere in this publication and Project Innovate.
Project Innovate was a 5-week class during which students chose a focus and worked on it. Though we initially tried to write a curriculum with more detail than that, in the end the curriculum was, more or less, “do stuff!” With that freedom came responsibility, or the opportunity to learn responsibility, which some students did of course better than others. We teachers often said to each other that we had to trust that what we were doing was good for the children - even if not terribly visible at the moment.
LAS edge (grades 8, 9 and 10). Building on the middle school experience - both its successes and its return over time to a much more traditional school philosophy, we built a new curriculum for older students in several disciplines (e.g entrepreneurship, STEAM, the arts) which focused on skills first and content second. Another way to express this is that the content of the disciplines was necessary in order to practice skills of self-regulation. We trained with agile games, encouraged pull systems, autonomy, and pursuing individual interests. Student feedback during the second semester consistently mentioned feeling lost at first, struggling with the notion that “the teacher wasn’t going to help you” and that “the teacher lets you do anything.” While both sentiments are expressed in stark teenage terms, this is basically correct. For one of their eight class obligations, at least, students had to learn how to identify an interest and pursue it. In this way LAS edge is similar to Project Innovate in the earlier grades.
Source
From programs created by LAS Educational Research, Leysin American School, staring in 2016 Questions: Paul Magnuson, [email protected], Twitter: @zebmagnuson
Further Resources
- Gray, P. (2020). On Being Free to Learn During COVID0-19, Podcast: Modern Learners (April 1).
- Unschooling