Learning for Long-term Success

In November of last year, I shared a list of seven principles that our spaces for learning and development need to address in order to create young people (and ultimately a society) with strong civic capabilities.

This is the first in a series of blog posts that will explore each principle within the context of my work at JFF’s Student-Centered Learning Research Collaborative.  My ultimate goal is to integrate my thinking around civic capabilities and student-centered learning. Clearly, this is an effort to rationalize my day to day work more fully.

PRINCIPLE ONE

Organizations and individuals should be able to develop capacities to sustain and grow themselves for long-term success. 

 All good learning environments should “grow” leaners for “long-term success.” But what does long-term success mean and what should one grow? 

One marker of long-term success is meaningful work. This suggests learning environments should allow individuals to develop skills and knowledge that lend themselves to practical application in work-oriented pursuits.  To this end, competency-based learning (one of the four student-centered learning tenants) and by extension, learning that can happen anytime and anywhere (another student-centered learning tenant) are well aligned with building work skill mastery. In other words, learning should be experiential a la John Dewey.  

Experiential learning is well suited for the skills needed for successful work, what are often referred to as deeper learning competencies, soft skills or 21st century skills.  So what does growth for long-term success in the work life have to do with civic capabilities?  It is not hard to draw links between the skills developed for work-oriented pursuits (e.g. communication, collaboration, creative and critical thinking) and their applicability to civic-oriented realms such as grassroots organizing, volunteering, or issue advocacy.  Civic work is work.  It is a type of social production with different sorts of goods resulting, civic goods (e.g. collective action to improve the environment, increased understanding of important issues, stronger bonds between neighbors).

At the same time the idea of learners sustaining and growing “themselves” suggests that there is an individual value to learning.  This leads easily into the idea that learning is lifelong and never ending.  Therefore, long-term success could be found in any learning endeavor that is personally fulfilling.  Here, personalization and ownership of learning, or learner agency, are key student-centered learning ideas at play. Personalized in that every person will have a unique set of learning motivations and goals they will want to pursue.  Owned, because the motivation to engage comes from the individual who is driven in pursuit of their learning own goals and objectives.

With this frame, one would want to “grow” the ability of individuals to understand what interests them and how to choose the correct action to take to maximize that interest.  A constant assessment of whether or not one is actually achieved one’s end goals in their learning pursuit would be critical.  So here, skills like critical thinking, reflection, metacognition, problem-solving, decision-making, and host of other executive order skills are demanded.

What does this framing of long-term success have to do with civic capabilities?  To know one’s self and to act on one’s own interests is agentic.  To have agency or to act in an agentic manner, is core to civic action. But what is really important about the idea of learners sustaining and growing “themselves” is the idea that learners “should be able to develop” themselves.  It is the idea of having the ability that enforces the concept that learners have agency.  It is not that “individuals must develop” (which is prescriptive) or we “must develop individuals” (which is paternalistic). Rather, individuals “should be able to develop”, if they so choose. They are not being forced to sustain and grow, they are simply being afforded the opportunity to do so. And assumed in this principle is that ALL learners should be afforded this opportunity.