Hello, and welcome to On Learning, a newsletter of explorations and wonderings, sometimes whimsical and other times rigorous, about what it takes for learning matter.
It’s nice to have you here.
Today, a look back at what’s happened in April, a heads up for the coming Winter Season which kicks off next week, some things that have caught my attention lately, and a musing on what’s been on my mind: mistakes.
Let’s get into it.
Looking back
I threw a couple of stones in April, didn’t I!
The first real salvo was about data and ethics.
The point of having data is to use it. It’s information that should help us focus on what is important about learning and learners so we can do something in response. In fact, I think if you get data about someone you are ethically bound to use it for their benefit.
And then I followed it up with a piece about the nature of learners.
For if you believe it’s Option A, a behaviourist approach is required: operant conditioning with carrots and sticks. Go dust off your education textbook and get down with Skinner and his cronies.
But if it’s Option B, a behaviourist approach won’t cut it. Instead, we’re in the world of relationships and trust, intrinsic motivation and flow.
Maybe there’s been something in the air, because the last post in March was about the literacy crisis, which I see is back in the headlines this week.
The decline in literacy, maths and science accelerated in 2009, the same time as we introduced National Standards, which led to the massive narrowing of our kids’ educational experience.
But I haven’t been all bolshy and antagonistic. There have also been grains of positivity amongst the litter of angst.
First, there was cricket and the power of as if worlds.
Then, the start of an emerging framework for thinking about how aspiration can be coupled with an inclusive approach to education.
Lastly, a walk on the beach inspired this post about the power of unrushed moments.
Some wild swings there, granted. Perhaps that’s a reflection of the brain fog I’ve been experiencing. Nevertheless, I hope in amongst it all you found something that piqued your interest and opened up an avenue of thought that was fruitful.
Coming up: the Winter Season of On Learning
We have had a lot of stunning sunsets lately. Do they create a sense of awe for you too? Do you stop and focus in, sensitive to the change? Do they make you alert to detail, aware of majesty?
It’s curious isn’t it, how something like a sunset can draw us in, yet also be removed from us - we can feel both a part of and apart from.
Quite a magic trick. But maybe that’s how the best of contexts help us: by including us in something bigger but not divorcing us from ourselves. In doing so we are able to focus on and learn from the things that matter to us as we build our sense of mastery.
I think there are some threads here worth exploring, and that’s what I’ll do over the next 10 weeks in the Winter Season. Here’s what you can look forward to.
+ Some deep-dive posts, exploring
Flow: what it is and the conditions required for it to happen, with links to theory and research.
Mastery: how we’re driven towards it and the importance of others in this process, with links to theory and research.
Focus: the means through which we can attain it and what it does for us, with links to theory and research.
+ Some posts intended to provoke you, maybe to thought, maybe to action.
+ Some personal reflective pieces, musing on those thematic threads.
+ Some opportunities for discussion.
There will be some fluidity over the 10 weeks, but the general premise and our ‘north star’ will be how those words associated with winter - flow, mastery, focus, majesty, awe - can open up paths for us to think about learning in interesting, and perhaps new, ways.
It’s my hope you’ll find something you can take with you into your practice. And that means I’ll be conscious of making a link or two from the ethereal to the real :)
The bulk of the posts in the Winter Season will be available to paid subscribers only. Everyone else will get a small glimpse of some of them and full access to one or two.
Some things that caught my eye this month
Education related
David Ball, Tim Gill and Bernard Spiegal, Managing Risk in Play Provision READ ME
Tammy Gardiner, Is Aromatawai Assessment? READ ME
NYT, The Fight Over ‘Maus’ Is Part of a Bigger Cultural Battle in Tennessee READ ME
Jenae Cohn and Remi Kalir, Why we need a socially responsible approach to ‘social reading’ READ ME
Substack reading
On my mind
If they’ve made a mistake, correct them gently and show them where they went wrong. If you can’t do that, then the blame lies with you. Or no one.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 10.4
Mistakes. What kids can’t do. Everything kids get wrong. These are a few of the things education, and the narrative that surrounds it, is obsessed with.
Of course, it’s dressed in care, presented as ‘Here’s how you can get better’ but the message is plain as day.
Plus, there’s so much focus on mistakes that it’s almost like we’re scared of recognising what the kids are good at.
Because remember, even when they make mistakes there is also a good portion of what they’ve done that’s mistake-free. Why do we gloss over that?
Now, you might say, ‘Sure Bevan, it’s very nice all this warm fluffy stuff, but what about getting better and pursuing excellence? How are kids supposed to do that if we don’t make them aware of where they’re going wrong?’
True, but I don’t like the either-or thinking that underlies this: we’re either nice to kids or we help them improve. We must be cognisant of quantity, and we must also be careful with how we correct.
In fact, I wonder if we even have to jump on mistakes to the extent that we do. Should we not instead be looking for patterns?
Daniel Kahneman’s work around mistakes and regression to the mean is worth reading and is better explained in this article than I could do.
— Ed Smith, ‘He knew he was wrong — DanielKahneman interview’ READ ME —
I had a Year 13 student gift me a lovely way to describe the impact of the constant focus on mistakes that kids experience at school: The closed-off learner. This is someone who has been told so often how they can get better that they have come to see what they do as never good enough. And so they close themselves off from learning.
Can you put faces to that description?
There’s no way those kids have experienced a process anchored in care if that is the result.
If they’re closed-off, who’s to blame?
So, I’m thinking that there’s merit in letting things go a bit. But that doesn’t mean absenting oneself from the process, not paying attention to them. It’s a pattern of mistakes that is a problem, not the existence of a mistake. You need to notice.
Taking time to notice that is the gentler approach. It helps you understand if the mistake is an outlier or an indicator of something not learned.
Even Kane Williamson makes mistakes. But it’s the pattern of mistakes that he identifies and works on, not the one-offs.