Lifelong Learning is Lifelong Thrival

Lifelong learning is commonly thrown into the purpose statements of schools and educational institutions of all kinds. Lifelong learning is a buzz word for something important, but what?

The following is an excerpt from my book Attitude First: A Leadership Strategy For Educational Success(Trafford, 2004) talking about the role of attitude in engaging students starting from the idea of lifelong learing:

Lifelong Learning Reconsidered

The most important challenge for schools today is the pervasive disengagement of students from the learning process. 

It has become commonplace for schools to set lifelong learning as a key goal in response to patterns of student disengagement. 

The problem is identifying success. 

What is lifelong learning? Unless you define it, you cannot tell if the goal has been met. 

Therein lies a difficulty with the term itself; “lifelong” clearly implies that your result can only be assessed after the life-span has ended. 

Improving schools to achieve a system that supports thrival for everyone requires that we each take personal responsibility for how we are each “being” school. 

We have to strive for thrival. 

Achieving thrival does not require anyone else to change; your attitude is what counts. 

The improvement of schools is too important to leave to those in positions of power, authority, and expertise. 

It is up to you and me. 

If we lead, then the leaders will follow, they won’t have any choice. 

So let’s reconsider lifelong learning. 

Given this thrival theory, how will we be best able to assess the potential for lifelong learning amongst students? 

As John Dewey wrote in 1938, “We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything.” 

Thrival begets thrival. 

If we teach children to thrive, then they will learn exactly the skills they need to thrive in the future. 

The lessons of thrival are learned through the investment of attention, navigating by values and actively collaborating on the creation of your life stories. 

Meaningful assessments will have to reflect the six states of mind that compose our subjective experiences and our ability to attend. 

Of course, assessing states of mind is a tricky business under the best of circumstances, so this is a substantial challenge. 

However, we don’t need to wait for the official systemic assessment tools of the testing industry because most humans have a pretty good, though not perfect, ability to assess the state of mind of others. 

We refer to our holistic sense about states of mind by the term “attitude”. 

To revise Dewey’s statement, I would suggest, “if we can achieve a good attitude in the present moment, then that is the best preparation for achieving good attitudes in every subsequent moment. Discovering how to achieve a good attitude is the only preparation that amounts to anything in the long run.” 

Engagement is the first prerequisite for attaining the goal of lifelong learning. 

I understand disengagement as the choice not to actively influence your own course on the river of life. 

Disengaged people choose to passively go with the flow rather than take an active part in navigating toward a more favorable outcome. 

If you've ever floated in an inner tube on a river, then you know how it feels to have limited influence on your own course and the sensitivity of your attitude, which way you are facing, to your ability to exercise that limited influence. 

I remember riding down one of the three rivers in Three Rivers, California, when I was a kid. 

There was a particular section that was great fun for riding down in our inner tubes; so my two older brothers and I would go down that section, pull out, and walk back up to do it again. 

This was a rapid section in three parts, and in between the second and third parts, you had to paddle yourself from one side of the river to the other in order to catch the last good section. 

Well, the inner tubes we were using were quite large and I was much smaller than my brothers, so I could barely reach the water in order to paddle since—in the sitting position—only my forearms hung down toward the water. 

The first few times I tried the run, I would get over the first two sections fairly well except that at the bottom of the second rapid, I would inevitably brush against some rocks and start spinning (an uncontrollable attitude). 

By the time I got back under control, it was too late to catch the good part and I’d wash up on the shallows just below. 

Well, I finally figured out that riding on my belly gave me better paddling control since my whole arm hung over both sides, and I was able to get my attitude under control in time to cross the moving river to get in good position for the final fall. 

It was a triumph of ingenuity for me because not only did it get me over the final obstacle, but my brothers, seeing the advantages in maneuverability and the extra thrill of facing down the rapid, quickly copied my technique. 

Soon, we all became accomplished experts at maintaining attitudinal control even as we were swept along by the immense forces of nature. 

(Disclaimer: The face-down position is of limited application since you also run the risk of having your face smashed into the rocks. My brothers and I were lucky enough not to have more than minor injuries throughout these white-water adventures.)

Now consider using the metaphor of floating down the river to talk about what actually happens in learning/teaching/schooling and education. 

We are immersed in learning all the time. 

We can navigate through it. 

We can observe its movement, as well as our own movement within it. 

I do not know where it comes from nor where it is going to, but I am quite sure that those of us in it are not its true source. 

Even as we are flowing within it, it can also flow through us. We can stay on the surface or we can dive into its depths. 

The experiences available to each of us in this flow is determined partly by the position and surroundings in which we find ourselves and also the quality, quantity and nature of what we allow to flow into and out of ourselves. 

Every moment that flows in and out of ourselves, in turn, influences our position and surroundings. 

Our on-going dynamic interactions with each other and the world within this larger flow create our moment-to-moment experiences. 

At any given moment you have a whole set of relationships with “the current”, other individuals in proximity to you, and with yourself: an attitude.

The only tools you have are the four channels of attention: physical energy, emotional connection, mental focus, and spiritual alignment. 

Along those channels you can go in eight directions—protect, create, participate, be idle, identify, understand, be free or affect. 

Disengagement means you sit back in your inner tube and accept whatever fate the river has in store for you. 

Engagement on the other hand means that you are going to paddle and kick to get to the good parts. 

Full engagement means you won’t just sit back and paddle casually, you’ll get down on your belly and face the river to make sure you get all the good rides you’re capable of catching. 

So what can we do with these four channels? 

How do we use these tools to get belly down and paddle? 

Loehr & Schwartz {in the book The Power of Full Engagement} recommend developing personal rituals that you establish and refine in order to more effectively expend and recover your energy in each of the four channels. 

A more general description of the process of increasing your investments of attention are to first, play around with techniques that seem promising. 

If you find that playing around seems to be effective at making improvements, the second step is to dive into the mainstream of the community that teaches that technique and work at gaining mastery. 

Finally, you need to develop a strategy for training yourself for the long haul and actively seeking sustainable balance. 

The signs of success in all three steps are basically the same, enthusiasm for continuing to engage, joyful personal discoveries, and an increasing sense of overall satisfaction and fulfillment.

The lifelong learning process is one that is best learned by example. 

If you insist on using the term lifelong learning, then it is important to know what you mean by it and also put it into practice.

Lifelong learning is not actually optional, the real question is whether your lifelong learning is actually serving to create well-being. 

(Click here to see how my definition of learning inherently implies lifelong learning.) 

Lifelong learning that hones the skills of human and ecological exploitation, fuels the fires of hatred, and indiscriminately spreads chaos, disease and destruction is wrong. 

This was a excerpt from my book, Attitude First.

The rest of this site is concerned with how to change the context of teaching by shifting education policytowards supporting teachers better.

Breaking My Classroom Habit

The classroom habit is a set of assumptions about what is most elemental, thus also most elementary, to education. 

The following are excerpts from my book Attitude First: A Leadership Strategy For Educational Success(Trafford, 2004) talking about three of the breakthroughs that have shaped my thinking about education.

I have shifted the focus of my work towards unpacking the concept of the hidden curriculum with reference to primary human needs. 

The insights I describe below are still valid but my more recent ways of describing them are more grounded in the findings of the cognitive sciences.

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Part 1 of 2

I grew up in the public school system, so did most Americans. 

Then, when I discovered I had a talent for working with children and a passion for working with elementary-age kids, I rejected the classroom approach to education that I grew up with. 

Most Americans, when they become parents or teachers, don’t. 

Despite this rejection, I eventually realized that since classroom-based schooling continues to serve the majority of the American people, I could not in good conscience simply reject it entirely. 

Thus, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma; if I don’t believe that approach is correct, how do I honor the teachers who remain committed to it? 

I have wrestled with this dilemma for years, and I believe I finally have a reasonable answer. 

Honoring the Participants in the Classroom Drama

My part in the drama of this wrestling match has been defined by a series of three crucial breakthroughs that have changed my understanding of the problem. 

My first major breakthrough came when I realized that the people in schools are not the problem. 

Therefore, I could honor the participants in the classroom drama, because I know that whatever tragedies occur are generally a result of the set and/or script, not the students, teachers, administrators, or any other actors in the play. 

Whatever may be wrong with schools, it doesn’t help to put down the students, teachers, administrators, or anyone else, for being personally involved in the system. 

This first breakthrough meant that I was immediately challenged to clearly articulate exactly what does not work. 

I have read a lot of criticism of schools and classrooms, and found that I generally agree with all of them to some extent, but I was aiming for a particular mark that they all missed. 

I eventually re-discovered John Dewey’s books from 1916 and 1938. 

Democracy and Education, from 1916, was an amazingly thorough critique of the industrial concept of the classroom. 

This seminal work kicked off the progressive school movement, a nationwide effort to create models of non-industrial schools. 

Dewey inspired legions of parents and teachers to throw out conventional wisdom and try teaching in the classroom in totally different ways. 

Then, in 1938, Dewey threw in the towel in a series of lectures that became the book Experience and Education. 

After more than 20 years of well-organized effort, Dewey realized that he had failed to communicate what it was that did work, even though he was extremely clear about what did not work. 

He attributed his failure to the lack of a theory of experience. 

A theory of experience would enable him to distinguish why the same experience can be educational for one person but not another, or why one person can be receptive to instruction at one time and not another. 

I realized that what Dewey overlooked is that the classroom is inherently designed as a place for instructing, not learning. 

The classroom as we know it today was designed by and/or for instructors. 

The script of this play is written to portray the heroic struggles of instructors overcoming the challenges of recalcitrant or otherwise educationally impoverished students. 

The reason Dewey failed is because he was still pursuing the same agenda that created the classroom in the first place. 

He assumed that what was industrial was the management and methods used there rather than the idea of the classroom itself. 

As Einstein is reputed to have said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it in the first place.” 

Teacher-centric Classrooms

The six key assumptions of teacher-centric classroom consciousness are:

1. Don’t give students any meaningful control over their own activities.
2. Ensure that the teacher is made to feel totally responsible for the behavior of the students.
3. Segregate the students into developmentally homogenous groups (e.g., Kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, etc.).
4. Segregate the students from the community.
5. Subject students to formalized, instructional environments as young as possible (starting in infancy, if you can get them into child-care).
6. Set the student-to-teacher ratio by non-educational standards (private schools mostly use market acceptance, while public schools mostly use economies of scale; both maximize student density but neither make meaningful reference to the actual needs of students nor the talents of teachers).

Upon acceptance of any school-related job or enrollment in a school the above factors are assumed, even if you personally don’t agree with them. 

Even Dewey assumed the classroom itself was necessary. 

So now my dilemma was even more acute. 

These are not things that can be altered without major revolutionary changes, so how can I possibly help those who are fully vested in this system without alienating them?

First of all, the classroom is not bad in and of itself. 

The challenge is to use the classroom in developmentally appropriate ways. 

If we understand the developmental challenge of the elementary years (ages 6-12) as one of constructing a social world, then what kind of social world do we expect children to construct within this kind of environment? 

How often do we as adults gather in socially isolated, developmentally homogenous groups, give one person (by virtue of their advanced maturity) autocratic authority over our every behavior, and ensure that we don’t have much control over our own activities? 

That doesn’t sound like an environment that has much to offer, unless you are being groomed for a monastic or highly institutionalized lifestyle. 

It doesn’t sound like a recipe for the kind of healthy social development necessary to handle the freedom and responsibility of living in today’s complex world. 

The very core of Dewey’s analysis was his concept of the continuity of experience. 

His primary criticism of the industrial classroom was that it broke that continuity by introducing experiences that were inconsistent with how human beings actually experience the world. 

As children human beings are not designed to handle large, age-segregated, autocratically managed, academically oriented, physically immobile, and socially isolated groups. 

Therefore, because of their developmental immaturity, children aren’t capable of taking advantage of the opportunities available in that kind of environment.

In my estimation, the classroom would be O.K. for children, in small voluntary doses, since most of the qualities of the classroom, individually (not all at once), are in some contexts basically normal in adult society today. 

But it is not a desirable place for children to be forced to spend the vast majority of their waking hours, during the critical developmental phase of their life, when they are constructing the foundations of their concepts of social reality. 

It is the script that is the problem with this play, not the set and not the players. 

We are designed to build concepts of social reality within a relatively simple network of relationships (i.e., a family or tribe) in which each player in the social network has real influence and regular meaningful contact with every other member of the network. 

This is how families and tribes are organized. 

A democratic society is, essentially, meant to be a scaled up version of that same dynamic.

The classroom is probably an appropriate setting for teaching many teenagers and adults because they are presumably refining their constructions of social reality, not laying the foundations. 

Healthy teenagers and adults are capable of understanding, and effectively putting up with, the social limitations of classroom consciousness because healthy teens and adults, unlike children, are capable, to a greater degree, of managing their own attention. 

We have inherited a cast of millions of caring and committed teachers and a set with an incredible elementary school infrastructure. 

The challenge is to write a new script that portrays the heroism of learning (like the movie October Skies, based on the real-life story of how the son of a coal miner took responsibility for his education and became a rocket scientist.)

2nd Breakthrough

My second major breakthrough came when I realized that identifying classroom consciousness does not meet the standard for saying what does work, it only identifies a matrix of assumptions that do not work when simultaneously applied to children. 

In fact, I fully realize that this matrix of assumptions can’t all be rejected at the same time, because then we would probably cease to have a coherent system. 

As I contemplated schools, I noticed how much the non-industrial alternative education movement had generally alienated the mainstream school system and also remained a thoroughly marginal segment within the education industry. 

Home schooling is clearly the most widespread alternative and it only accounts for, at most, 4 or 5% of the K-12 students in the U.S. 

All other alternatives account for maybe 2%, to be generous, and, in my opinion, 7% of the market is not a substantial subversion of the dominant paradigm when that 7% represents a fractious and largely disparate set of groups. 

Whatever the alternative and home school groups are doing to increase their market impact isn’t working, or if it is working, it is moving glacially slow. 

Most alternative schools that have survived more than five years appear to be doing good things educationally with their students, but they simply aren’t reaching enough of them to be significant in the industry. 

So, I’m not going to open yet another alternative school anytime soon, but I hope I can help good alternative schools make a bigger impact. 

The second part talks about the third breakthrough and begins to put together the foundations of an alternative way of thinking about education.

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Part 2 of 2

A few years ago I was about to make a big transition in my life and called together a group of people for a potluck, where I was going to make a big presentation about my ideas for education. 

At that time, I had not yet figured out all the concrete details, therefore my presentation was heavily abstract and too heady for most people. 

After the first section of my presentation, detecting that my audience’s interest might be waning, I asked whether they wanted me to launch into the second half, as planned, or eat first. 

They jumped at the option to eat. 

So, realizing that my presentation was effectively over, I opened the floor to questions before adjourning to the feeding frenzy. 

After some clarifying questions about what I presented, one good friend and former boss of mine said, “I can’t say that I understand what you were talking about, but I get that you are enthusiastic and therefore I want to know what it is you really want? 

What do you really want to do with all these supposedly great ideas of yours?”

I had to stop and think about this for a bit because it was a fair and direct question for which I did not have a pat answer. 

After a little consideration, it came to me like a lightning bolt, I replied, “I want to teach the teachers!” 

Now, this woman is not one to mince words, which I greatly appreciate, so she shot back, “But you don’t have any qualifications.”

Of course, she had me dead to rights. 

I don’t have any qualifications to teach teachers, if we are talking about the normal classroom. 

Therein lies the rub, and the third breakthrough. 

It was months or maybe years after she nailed me with the truth before I realized that she was wrong, not because of my qualifications (I still don’t have any of the traditional badges of accomplishment), but because of what she assumed were the parameters of being a teacher. 

She was naturally assuming I meant to teach classroom teachers, but I don’t. 

I intend to teach true teachers, and a true teacher is any catalyst for the learning process. 

I want to empower teaching starting at the level of the learner who needs or wants help to achieve their personal goals, not just at the level of a government-certified manager of imprisoned academic herds. 

While there are no badges for being a true teacher, I have over 15 years of experience in educational leadership with both children and adults and have made extraordinary investments of my attention in understanding education.

What we have available now to evolve the system, that Dewey did not, is more than 50 years of psychological research and the development of the cognitive sciences. 

Based on synthesizing concepts from research into optimal experience, intrinsic motivation, and happiness (see Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [pronounced Me-high Chick-sent-me-high] and Intrinsic Motivation At Work by Kenneth W. Thomas, for instance), I propose that what works in learning and teaching, and also re-defines education itself, is the development of these six qualities of mind:

1. Cognitive Order
2. Cognitive Complexity
3. Purpose
4. Optimism
5. Agency
6. Cooperation

Improvement at the three key levels of schooling, from this new understanding of education, means learners must be supported to pursue full engagement. 

Teachers can use the New 3R’s to support learners, and principals should consider convening Thrival Councils to facilitate a community-wide dialogue for aligning the diverse stakeholders within their schools. 

Full Engagement means having a strategy for investing attention, a balanced approach to long-term spending, and recovery of physical energy, emotional connection, mental focus, and spiritual alignment. 

(I recommend Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s book, The Power of Full Engagement, as an introduction to managing your attention.)

The New 3R’s—respect, responsibility, and resourcefulness—are each composed of a pair of the qualities of mind that define education; therefore, appropriate practice of these three virtues inherently leads to an educational outcome. 

Respect is complex cooperation, responsibility is purposeful optimism, and resourcefulness is ordered agency. 

Thrival Councils are a method of convening community conversations to explore the issues of achieving holographic thrival. 

One of the remarkable properties of a hologram is that even when it is broken into pieces, each piece still contains the whole picture. 

Holographic thrival can be defined as the process of supporting agents to become fully engaged, supporting catalysts in practicing the New 3R’s and integrating the whole, such that the organization effectively facilitates all its stakeholders to thrive. 

A principal is responsible for ensuring that the school community is supported in order to create the kind of relationships in which both the student’s and teacher’s goals are honored in ways that take into account the long-term viability of the whole community. 

There are three crucial components to any system of social consciousness, including an educational system: the agents, the catalysts, and the catalyst supports, a.k.a. the learners/students, the teachers, and the schools. 

The proper relationships between these components will result in a healthy and vital education system, whereas improper relationships between these components will result in an unhealthy and stagnant educational system. 

Conventional wisdom has it that our system is unhealthy and has stagnated, but it also says that the problems are with the components of the system, not the relationships between those components. 

That’s like saying that either the car or the gas must be flawed if my car fails to go. 

And that would normally be true, except if the car has just been built and the gas is still in the gas can and not in my car’s gas tank. 

Even if every one of the components is perfect, the car will not work in the context of this set of relationships. 

Once I realized what the components of the system were, and the particular relationships between those components, then it became clear what was needed to improve the health of the system. 

It’s not that better teachers, better schools, or even better students are needed, but appropriate relationships between all three. 

The components of our educational system are not in functional relationships with each other. 

It is time we worked on the relationships between the parts of the system. 

In a play, it is neither the set nor the cast that creates the relationships, it is the script. 

The cast is responsible for making those relationships believable, but they don’t create them. 

The set is probably the least important part of the play, since the best plays can be performed effectively without sets, but a poor set can distract and detract from otherwise good performances. 

Currently, we have a good cast and the potential for a great set, but the script is outdated and inadequate. 

It’s time to write a new script for our school play.

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The classroom habit is one that needs to be reined in, rather than broken completely. 

Classrooms are valueable ways of organizing learning when the classroom students have made an active choice to utilize the classroom as the best tool for the job. 

The key to classroom success is the student's decision that the classroom is the best way to accomplish their goals. 

The student's decision provides the foundation for having the right motivation to constructively forgo some of their autonomy to the authority of the teacher.

Over the years since I wrote the book, Attitude First, my fundamental insights have not changed, though I have developed different ways of expressing them

What’s A Teacher To Do?

(Excerpt from Attitude First: A Leadership Strategy For Educational Success)

The traditional concept of teaching is framed as the delivery of knowledge, skills and information. 

There are occasional flourishes added by those seeking to be alternative or more holistic, but the core remains the same. 

Teachers are thought of as the machine stamping a world-view into the raw material, the construction foreman coordinating the assembly of a world-view, the writer composing a world-view on a blank slate, or the gardener cultivating the growth of a world-view. 

What they all have in common is the active role of the teacher in the student's developing world-view. 

The student is, at best, thought of as a plant that needs to be nourished, while the teacher is the gardener. 

Consider a new possibility (skipping the obvious step of equating students with herd animals, such as goats), see the students as people. 

Not like people, but as humans with the same needs, wants and desires as every other human on the planet. 

If the model of narrative needs is correct {as presented in the book Attitude First}, then these are needs that exist from birth, or soon thereafter. 

If the school environment is fundamentally a way of conveying shared narratives, then the job of any teacher is helping every student learn to thrive. 

All knowledge, skills, and information should be subservient to this goal. 

The essential task of the teacher is helping the student gain proficiency within the narrative contexts in which the student currently exists. 

The teacher-centric perspective of education concerns itself with the objective world shared by teacher and student, and succeeds through the measurable transference of knowledge, skills, and information. 

A truly learner-centric perspective shifts concern to how the student experiences the world and succeeds through the development of a variety of robust and accessible attitudes. 

The units of self that are involved in this process (teachers and students) are not simply objects to be manipulated. 

They are living systems participating in the flow of life itself and they have gathered together in order to achieve a qualitative change in how those playing the role of the student interact with that flow. 

The teacher is responsible for creating certain conditions (safety, openness, and trust) in which the student can successfully reorient him- or herself to the larger flow. 

If the teacher fails to establish these conditions, then they have failed professionally and most likely the student will fail in achieving their desired outcome. 

However, even if the teacher succeeds in creating these conditions, there is still no guarantee that the student will succeed. 

In this second case where the student is not succeeding, the teacher has met her professional obligations, and failure, if it occurs, lies in one of a large number of other possible places. 

The Good Versus The Great Teacher

The distinction between a good teacher and a great teacher is in how they respond to failures in the second case. 

Great teachers will go well beyond their own concepts of teaching and (within their professional responsibilities) discover some way to relate to the individual student so that the outcome is definitely available to the student. 

Of course, the student may still choose to reject that outcome, but that is an inherent risk in teaching. 

The only attitude that the teacher can change is her own, but she can attempt to catalyze a change in her student's attitude by providing a special harbor within the river in which the student can discover and experiment with different attitudes or ways to influence their own attitude. 

The primary tools available to the teacher are respect, responsibility, and resourcefulness. 

She knows the student is wielding the tools of physical energy, emotional connection, mental focus, and spiritual alignment. 

Together, teacher and student simply work on the student's ability to navigate on purpose, instead of on accident, within the on-going flow of life itself.

Teachers of specific subjects are charged with helping students develop an experience of the world that is shaped by the collective reality that defines the field of study under consideration. 

A biology teacher is charged with a responsibility to assist students to filter out the information that is not relevant to the biology community—like who's dating whom within the department—and with opening up their filters to include information that is relevant—like whose mating with whom in an animal study. 

The expert in a field of study is one who has an extremely well-developed view of the world from the perspective of that community. 

The expert sees the world through the filters of the discipline and knows “instinctively” what is relevant and what is not. 

Good teachers in a field of study are those who are highly effective at helping others join in and make meaningful contributions to that community's narrative world. 

As we all know, the experts are not always good teachers and good teachers are not always experts. 

Elementary school teachers don't have the benefit of a specific disciplinary community and narrative world that they are charged with participating in and helping students to join. 

Actually, they are currently charged with perpetuating the institutionalization of children according to the dictates of the industrial classroom, but that is not an explicit goal, merely a pervasive implicit one. 

And therein lies the crux of the school problem.

(Excerpt from Attitude First: A Leadership Strategy For Educational Success)

The rest of this site is concerned with how to change the context of teaching by shifting education policytowards supporting teachers better.

Breaking Out of My School-Box Thinking, Part 2

This post has been adapted to become a page on my web site:

Breaking The Classroom Habit
The classroom is an educational habit and it's a habit that is sometimes bad for children. Here's the story of how I broke my classroom habit.

Breaking Out of My School-Box Thinking, Part 1

This post has been adapted to become a page on my web site:

Breaking The Classroom Habit
The classroom is an educational habit and it's a habit that is sometimes bad for children. Here's the story of how I broke my classroom habit.

What’s A Teacher To Do?

This post has been converted to a page on my site:

What’s A Teacher To Do?
A teacher who disagrees with the status quo has a big challenge, but by s/he staying focused on the 3R's of respect, responsibility and resourcefulness, sanity is possible.

Honoring Teachers

(Excerpt from Attitude First)

My life is devoted to education. My path in this field was defined by my rejection of the way I was schooled but with a constant fix on my sense that the people who schooled me were honest, hard-working people doing the best they knew how. Even though I chose a different way of teaching, I am determined to honor those who taught me and insist that our system discover how to honor them, too. We do not honor our teachers by forcing them to kowtow to standardized testing. We do not honor our teachers by packing ever more students into their classrooms. We do not honor our teachers by forcing them to be dictators in a democratic society. And, we do not honor our teachers by making them behavioral managers instead of social leaders.

The first thing we can do to honor teachers is acknowledge the learner as the core around which education is organized, not the teacher. True teachers understand perfectly well that they owe their job to the fact that a learner wants their help in achieving a personal goal. And true teachers are not exclusively professional, they are parents, neighbors, friends and every caring human being who helps someone else learn. An education system organized around learning has to listen to its learners and discover their goals. From within the context of those personal goals, our society is perfectly positioned as a collaborator that can respectfully temper personal ambition in the fires of collective reality and still support every individual to thrive with whatever unique talents and challenges those individuals offer.

The second thing we can do to honor teachers is to put their relationship to students first. In schools there is nothing more important than protecting the trust a student puts in his or her teacher.

Finally, we can most immediately honor teachers by opening a democratic dialogue with schools to re-establish proper relationships throughout the school community. Empowering citizens to participate in celebrating the highest democratic ideals that this country was founded on, and for which so many people are fighting and giving their lives and loves, this is how I want to honor my teachers.

Excerpt from Attitude First

I Have a Dream…

(Excerpt from Attitude First)

I have a dream where passionate teachers teach enthusiastic students in joyful schools. Schools where the intense energy of full engagement meets the drive of curiosity, and transforms the construction paper with crayon colors covering the cubicle classroom under a fluorescent buzz into a soaring cathedral crafted from wide-eyed wonder and devoted discipline. Where teachers share their passion for engaging with the world, and students enthusiastically choose the challenge of daily discovery. Where one and all explore reality in search of opportunities to help, exchanging the coin of their special realm—a joyful appreciation for discovering themselves in service to the Other.

Their special realm is the state of thrival. It is a land that is forever on the horizon. Every single day contains the potential for new adventures as intrepid travelers gather together to continue the ultimate journey through life itself. Their daily tools are simple: students wield the power of physical energy, emotional connection, mental focus, and spiritual alignment, while teachers direct that power through respect, responsibility, and resourcefulness. In my dream, the roles of teacher and student are not assigned since the roles change constantly because everyone can be either teacher or student according to the needs of the moment.

The only thing preventing the realization of this dream is attitude, mine and yours. I can’t change your attitude, only mine. But I am asking for your help. I promise to work on my attitude, and simply ask for you to do the same. My journey will take me to different places than yours, but if we both choose to navigate by the twin beacons of education and thrival, then our paths will eventually cross. I would be honored to share the company of fellow travelers along this path to a better world.

(Excerpt from Attitude First)

Life-Long Thrival

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Lifelong Learning is Lifelong Thrival
Lifelong learning is a buzz word for something that everyone wants to achieve, but does it really mean something important?