Each Child a Genius: A Survey of Self-Directed Learning
By Dr. Caleb Collier
At the Institute for Self-Directed Learning, we envision a future where every young person is a self-directed, independent learner. As we continue our work of advocating for learner-led education, we often receive the question: do you really believe that every child can direct their own learning? Our answer has remained the same: absolutely.
There’s a stubborn idea that has long been embedded in our education system. The idea is simple: some children have what it takes to succeed in school, others don’t. This idea, over the decades, has led to some pretty complex ways of approaching education. Schools are seen as factories, with many moving conveyor belts. Some children wind up on one conveyor belt, a “pathway” that might include advanced placement courses, gifted programs, and access to greater educational opportunities. Other children are placed on a different path, one that might include remedial courses and little opportunity for those learners to engage in productive struggle. What if, instead of seeing school as a sorting mechanism that deemed which kids were worthy of which opportunities, we instead started with a different belief: that all children are geniuses and are capable of changing the world.
The idea that some kids have what it takes to be successful and some don’t is deeply entrenched in systematic racism and classism. Schools that open up freedom, choice, and opportunity to all learners are well positioned to disrupt the status quo and become equity enablers in their communities. What if we, as parents and educators, truly believed that our children are capable? What sort of society might that lead to?
Our recent research has shown that there is a clear path to becoming a self-directed learner. There are four distinct phases on this path. The first is desire. Before a person can truly direct their learning, they must want to do it. You can’t force another person to learn. They must make that decision for themselves. An educator’s role is to help each learner identify their interests, passions, and motivations so that they can learn whatever they want to learn. (That’s a key reason we call our educators guides instead of teachers). The second phase is resourcefulness. Once a person decides they want to learn something, they go about gathering all the tools and resources they need to accomplish their goals. The next phase is initiative, when a person takes the first step into directing their own learning journey. The final phase is persistence, the collection of skills and mindsets a person needs to keep going, even when they encounter obstacles.
Once we identified this pathway, our next research aim was to provide learners at our lab school (The Forest School) the ability to reflect on where they were along this journey. Were they somewhere in phase one, still trying to kindle their own desire to learn? Or perhaps in phase two, trying to figure out how to learn what they wanted to learn? Did they have everything they needed, but were struggling to take the first step? Or, maybe they could get started, but were having a hard time seeing a project through to the end?
To gain insight into the inner journeys of our learners, we built a simple twenty question survey, asking them to self-assess their own self-directedness. We surveyed learners ages 9 to 18. The Forest School is diverse by design, with roughly 150 learners, (50% learners of color, 30% on scholarship, and 15% with a psych eval or IEP). Here are our major takeaways from the results:
Lack of Self-Evaluation Skills
Nearly 60% of learners indicated that they didn’t know how to evaluate their own growth.
Implications for Educators:
For us, this meant that we as Guides needed to explicitly give learners strategies to use to pause, reflect, and assess the progress they were making on their own learning goals. We created this list of strategies that we could pass on to learners. We also noticed a pattern in our Studios of learners working to “complete” a task (for example, clicking through their e-learning platform) instead of learning for mastery. We made the decision to move all of our Studios to practicals, which are already in use in our High School. This ensures that learners have to demonstrate mastery of skills and concepts to move on to the next level.
Implications for Parents:
We encourage parents to ask their child about their goals at the beginning and end of every week. In addition to these questions, which usually relate to progress toward completion of a task, we’re also encouraging parents to ask metacognitive questions that prompt learners to think more deeply about what they are learning, why they are learning it, and the progress they are making in their learning. Here are some examples:
What stood out to you today? What made you wonder?
What did you learn today that connected to something you already knew?
Did you learn anything that was completely new to you?
Did you encounter any important ideas today?
What are you super excited about right now? How can you explore that at school?
Did you learn anything that made you change your mind about something?
What are the themes you are seeing in the things you are learning?
What do you feel really stumped or confused about?
For younger learners, you may ask:
What was hard/easy for you?
Can you tell me a story about something you learned?
What is something else you’d like to learn about that?
What could you teach a friend about that you learned today? How would you do that?
Clear Desire, Resourcefulness, and Initiative
Over 85% of learners expressed a desire to learn new things. 75% indicated that they could identify the resources they needed to get started. 82% said that they could get started once they had the resources in hand. For us, this shows a clear link between desire, resourcefulness, and initiative.
Implications for Educators
This data showed that learners at The Forest School indicated a high-likelihood of being open to a new idea, finding resources to learn, and getting started on a learning project. One implication for our Guides is to keep that culture alive! How do we continue to keep learners open-minded and ready to take on new challenges? A few strategies for educators:
Share stories of learners taking on new challenges and celebrate them publicly and widely when it happens.
Have customizable learning pathways that encourage and enable learners to gain “credit” for learning what they want to learn (for us, we call these Badge Plans).
Having freedom to learn anything can be overwhelming, so help learners overcome the “dizziness of freedom” by curating resources they can use to get started (for example, a list of relevant and vetted articles, videos, or texts).
Encourage learners to reflect on and explore things that really interest them, including passions they have, their natural giftings, and injustices that matter to them.
Support learners that seem “disinterested” by partnering them with highly-driven peers, offering them a diverse set of topics to learn and challenges to take on, and celebrating their efforts.
Implications for Parents
Parents can encourage their learners to take risks, try new challenges, and learn new things. Along the way, ask them what they need to get started, what obstacles are holding them back, and what supports they might need.
Lack of Routine and Strategies
Only 50% of learners indicated that they had a system or routine in place to support them in learning something new.
Implications for Educators:
Each person has their own system (internal and external) for accomplishing a long-term goal. A key learning for our team is that there are a lot of learners at The Forest School across all age groups that indicate they have a system and routine in place. We want to learn more from them! So, at the beginning of the school year, we will conduct interviews with those learners to glean from them what their routines and structures are and then we’ll share that learning widely with their peers and parents!
Implications for Parents:
What routines and strategies have you learned over the years that support you in taking on a new challenge, staying on task, and seeing it through to completion? Share those tips and techniques with your learners!
So What?
Every child enters the world as a curious, independent learner. Sadly, years of traditional schooling often crush that curiosity and independence instead of cultivating it. What if schools were different, where we started with the natural curiosity of children and supported it along the way? Our research has highlighted a clear pathway toward self-direction: desire leads to resourcefulness which leads to initiative which leads to persistence. Our role as educators is to trust learners with their own journey, prompt them to pause and reflect on where they are along the pathway, and be responsive with encouragement and support along the way.
If you are a school leader or educator looking to increase curiosity, independence, and agency for your learners, we’d love to hear from you! Email me at caleb@selfdirect.school to connect.
Dr. Caleb Collier is Director of The Institute for Self-Directed Learning and Co-Founder of The Forest School. The Institute focuses on research, capacity building (through consultation and workshops), and curriculum development.
