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Starting a School: Have a Good Idea?
Over the years, many people have inquired about the mechanics of starting a school that emphasizes self-directed learning. I launch programs but have never started a school.
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New Section: Personal Development
I write these to help you to live better--to be happier, to relate better to others, and to accomplish more. I want you to be successful and to feel successful. Let’s get going and let’s make it so...
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How Do I Develop Willpower?
April 15, 12The Importance of Self-Control... by: Maurice Gibbons Maurice Gibbons is the sole owner of this article and all rights to it and its use. Copyright 2012. Personal Power Press International. Success in SDL depends on your ability to do what you want to do. If you want to manage your learning and your life, you have to have self-control so you can decide and then act. In their current book, Willpower, Roy Baumeister and John Teirney, describe the seminal marshmallow research study conducted by Walter Mischel. In this study a group of four-year olds are each given a marshmallow and told if they keep their marshmallows uneaten for fifteen minutes, they will get another marshmallow. You can likely guess what happened: some kids couldn’t wait and ate their prize right away; others held out for a while and then gave in and devoured theirs; and a few waited patiently for their second marshmallow, which they received. Much later, accidental good-fortune struck. Mischel’s children attended the same school as the subjects of the study and he noticed that those who ate right away were getting into a lot of trouble. He decided to conduct a follow-up study to see what the subjects’ marshmallow behavior revealed. It revealed a lot, especially in follow-up studies of the benefits of self-control that Beaumeister conducted and summarized in his book Losing Control. It turns out that low self-control leads to lower SAT scores (by more than 200 points), poorer grades, lower salaries, poorer health, and a higher rate of imprisonment. The researchers concluded that “Self-regulation failure is the major social-pathology of our time.” Conversely, that self-control is the only trait that predicts success in education and in life, and therefore, “Self-control is a vital strength and key to our success.” These studies make it easy for us to see why their authors say that improving our willpower is the best way to pursue a better life. How Much Self-Control Do You Have? What is your marshmallow? Most of us watch a lot of TV or play computer games, so let’s use one of those as our temptation. Substitute something else if that doesn’t work for you. Imagine that you were offered an hour of TV or gaming today, but if you didn’t watch or play today, you could have two hours at it tomorrow. How do you think you would do at denying yourself this pleasure on the promise that you can have more of it later? Be honest with yourself. Look at your recent experience. How good are you at denying yourself something, or putting out great effort for a pleasure or valuable result that is far off in the future? Do you take courses or programs that will increase your skills (hard work now for success later)? Do you avoid impetuous buying to save for future needs (go without now to achieve goals ahead)? Do you exercise, eat well, get a good night’s sleep, and go without smoking or drinking more than a social glass (manage yourself now for health in the years ahead)? Do you have a criminal record or have you done things that you are ashamed of (acted recklessly without consideration of the effects on others or the consequences for yourself)? Give yourself a self-control rating from one to ten with ten being very capable of applying willpower to achieve valuable results, and zero being incapable of any self-discipline even to achieve what you want to achieve. The first step to greater personal control is recognizing its value, and the second step is acknowledging that you need to develop it more. What do you think about your capacity for applying willpower when you need it? Could you be stronger? (Careful now: are you going to rush on and avoid this self-examination, or stop and do the preparation necessary for moving forward? This self-regulation is live right now. This would also be a great place to stop and write in your journal about your own self-control. (I like this: exerting self-control in the examination of your own self-control). Developing Willpower If you recognize the importance of willpower, want it for yourself, and decide to develop it, what can you do to be successful? Practice exerting willpower. Research shows that by controlling small patterns of behavior you are exercising your control and your overall willpower will improve. If you decide, for example, to drink a glass of water every morning (great for the brain and the body), or to exercise for ten minutes every morning when you get up, and do so, you will find that your willpower is stronger when you apply it to other tasks. So choose a small new activity that will improve your life and get started right now. And you will have begun your story as a self-directed person. You can build on that story right away by finding a touchstone in your past, an experience in which you exerted self-control to achieve a result that was important to you or to others? I remember working in a logging camp when I was a young man to earn the money to go to university. Both the camp and the university were hard work for a distant goal, but I completed both. What is your touchstone? Go over it in your mind and remember the effort and the feelings involved, especially the pleasure of achieving the vision you had. You can take this further by remembering a number of incidents and stringing them together as your story of self-control, yourself as a person with willpower. Apparently will power is a limited resource. We start the morning with a full tank, but use it up with every application of it we make, so choose carefully what you decide to spend your powers on. Be sure also that you maintain a full tank by eating well, getting a good night’s sleep, and staying healthy. Taking the Offensive Baumeister and Tierney urge us all to take the offensive; to be determined to develop willpower. The strongest offence is developing what I call project plans. It begins with having values, thinking positively about yourself and your future, and thinking of moving forward with yourself and your life. If those thoughts are supported by religious beliefs they will be even more effective. From such a context we can begin to set goals that matter. The goals we set should be worthwhile but achievable, and they should be few in number so that our willpower is not diluted. Focus is important. I have goals set within goals: I want to maintain my two websites, and to do that I am setting goals about productivity, mainly writing, and about developing, such as doing research for new articles, and making videos to introduce each section of at least one site. Once we formulate our goals we have to get started. Procrastination immobilizes a lot of us. We have to fight it with grim determination, especially men. One method the authors of Willpower recommend is pre-commitment. When, for example, you go into the candy store--whatever that candy may be--leave your credit card at home. I like to underline my commitments by writing them down so they can never be denied. The next step in the offensive for success is to keep track. If you are going to give up desserts, for instance, keep a record of each day. Mark it on a calendar where it can be seen. By following this practice you not only record your success, you reinforce it, too, with the growing number of marks. When you see that, reward yourself. Reward yourself regularly with many little prizes and occasional big ones. Choose real treats that you normally wouldn’t have. Just Do It! The engine that drives willpower is determination. In the end you have to suck it up, get moving, and keep moving until the goal you seek has been achieved. The only temptation that Oscar Wilde could not resist was temptation itself. That was Oscar. We can do a lot better than that. Maurice Gibbons is the sole owner of this article and all rights to it and its use. Copyright 2012. Personal Power Press International.
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Technology to Empower Self-Directed Learning from the Web
January 18, 12Technology to Empower SDL from the Web Kirill Kireyev, PhD The Promise The Web has revolutionized almost every aspect of our lives, but the one that is underappreciated is learning. Thanks to the Web, access to educational content is more instantaneous and less expensive than ever before. Even within a traditional school model, many scholars recognize the Web’s tremendous potential to disrupt one-size-fits-all education towards a more flexible, personalized model. As Milton Chen points out in his book “Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in our Schools” (Chen, 2010): “[…] the lecture, like the textbook, is not a very student-friendly way of delivering information. They are one person’s - albeit an expert’s - version of knowledge. Thanks to Google, Bing, and other search engines, students now know there are multiple versions of knowledge about a topic, with various length, depths, points of view and media.” Even more significant is the Web’s potential to empower lifelong, self-directed learning beyond the traditional classroom. This is particularly important in the today’s knowledge-based economy, where most jobs have extensive, and constantly evolving knowledge prerequisites. Furthermore, on-demand, self-directed learning is in itself a critical 21st century skill. As professor Michael Eisenberg points out in his column in Seattle Times: “[in order to] go after the high-skill, high-wage jobs of the future […,] we need to add a new "R" — research — to the traditional three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic. We must also dedicate resources to make this kind of education occur. Students across the country need 21st-century research skills that include abilities to navigate large quantities of information and multiple technologies that deliver it.” The Challenge Paradoxically, the large volume of information on the Web made self-directed learning harder, not easier! This is one of the findings of Project Information Literacy, a project that Eisenberg heads up, which studies the challenges that real users face when conducting both school-related and “everyday life” research. Based on examining research habits of thousands of students, Eisenberg and colleagues were able to distill several prominent components (or “contexts”) that learners consistently find laborious when conducting independent research or learning. For example, the “big picture” context involves selecting and defining a topic, understanding multiple sides of an argument, figuring out how the topic might best fit into the course curriculum. This includes understanding what is important to know about a particular topic in the first place, what are the important questions to ask, and where to begin. Another group of researchers (Butcher & Sumner, 2011) refer to this challenge as the "sensemaking paradox": Self-directed learners face a sensemaking paradox: they must employ deep-level thinking skills in order to process information sources meaningfully, but they often lack the requisite domain knowledge needed to deeply analyze information sources and to successfully integrate incoming information with their own existing knowledge. A different challenge is the vocabulary or language context, which involves: “[…] becoming more comfortable with the language, terms, and discourse of a topic area. […] Without a context for the vocabulary and terminology of a topic—what things are called and what they mean— students could not proceed with any confidence and reported that they usually did so with little success.” (Project Information Literacy report 2009). Or, as Butcher (2006) puts it in a different article “subtle differences between concepts can make it difficult for learners without domain expertise to generate relevant search terms.” The Solution instaGrok is an intelligent educational search engine, that is designed to empower self-directed learning from the Web for anyone. It not only finds quality educational information about any topic, but helps the user make sense of it. This is made possible by a number of technical innovations. First, instaGrok automatically filters out non-educational websites that constitute a large part of typical search results from a general-purpose search engine. For example, a search on “gravity” in Google yields among the top results “Gravity Skateboards”, lyrics for a song called “Gravity” as well as several business homepages. These are clearly irrelevant when one’s aim is to learn about the concept of “gravity”. In addition, instaGrok automatically analyzes and annotates the (educational) results, and displays important information such as difficulty level (“school” vs “college”), a table of contents, as well as a word cloud corresponding to important concepts covered in each material. Even more important is the instaGrok’s ability to help the user navigate and make sense of the potentially vast amount of educational information about a topic. On the “Overview” section of the results, instaGrok displays important sub-topics, sentences, and questions, allowing the user to quickly get a taste for the relevant themes (helping with the “big picture” problem). The list of terminology (each of which can be clicked to get a definition) helps the user quickly assess the important vocabulary (aiding with the “vocabulary” problem). In addition, the automatically generated concept graph allows the user to interactively visualize relationships between important concepts. Another important innovation that instaGrok offers is auto-generated multiple-choice quizzes based on the topic of user’s inquiry. These can be used either for preliminary self-assessment or as a way to review and practice what one has learned. This last point is important – a recent study shows that having an active recall practice as part of learning (such as quizzes or flashcards) significantly improves retention compared to simply passive learning: “Learning is not about studying or getting knowledge ‘in memory’. Learning is about retrieving. So it is important to make retrieval practice an integral part of the learning process.” (Karpicke et al., Science, 2011) The alpha version of instaGrok is available for free at http://instaGrok.com. We are very interested in connecting with students, teachers and self-directed learners and hearing their feedback as to how we can improve the technology to help their learning and teaching needs. About the author: Kirill has a joint PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of Colorado. His graduate research focused on cognitive modeling and building technology for personalized adaptive learning, focusing on vocabulary instruction and motivated by his work at Pearson Education. Kirill is the founder of instaGrok.com, a project that he has been passionately building for the past year and a half. ----
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The Alice Report: An Indian Revelation
January 12, 12The Alice Report: An Indian Revelation Maurice Gibbons What a surprise! My wife, Leslie, and I were on the last day of our trip to India that took us from Varanasi on the Ganges River to Sarnath where Buddha gave his first sermon to his disciples. The agenda in Sarnath called for a temple visit, but we asked our guide to take us to the village instead. We were templed-out and wanted to get a feeling for the day-to-day life of village people. As we walked through the narrow streets, we suddenly saw a sign that said, “The Alice Project: Universal Education.” Following the arrows, we came upon the school and were soon welcomed into a vibrant classroom of children in light blue uniforms. A few minutes later we were joined by the school’s Italian co-founder, Luigina de Biasi. Everywhere we looked there were large posters with statements that said in effect, “Your mind creates the reality you experience. Know your mind and direct your life.” It was clearly, in my mind, an SDL school. And that is the surprise: how could we, on our last day, seemingly by pure accident, stumble upon a school with so much to teach us about my major commitment in education? As we talked to Luigina, that wonder grew.We had many questions and little time, but here are the highlights of what we found out. The school is one of three schools established in India by Valentino Giacomin, an innovative Italian educator who was challenged by the Dalai Lama to become involved. The school has 900 students from kindergarten to grade twelve. Students follow a unique program designed to develop their inner awareness and self-management until they reach grade nine, when they switch to regular courses in preparation for state board exams, which Giacomin calls “a necessary compromise”. The name, the Alice Project, refers to Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor for the inner journey of self-understanding and direction that the school guides its students through. Giacomin says “We all need to do what Alice did, but in a protected way; we need to know ourselves.” They had few materials for teaching this program, so Giacomin wrote them or had them written, books and teaching materials that they could use to “cultivate their wisdom and kindness.” Their approach is spiritual, they say, but not religious. They teach thinking about yourself, your feelings, and your actions. They do it through such practices as stories to discuss, meditation, and yoga; and what they call integrated universal learning which includes dance, drama, mythology, ethics, farming and philosophy. I worried about the idea of spirituality, but Luigina said,”We use whatever methods work for us, but as you look at our pupils you will see Sikh sitting next to Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Christian.” Learning to live at peace with yourself is the key to peace, understanding and tolerance in the world.” As we were preparing to leave, Luigina said, “It’s too bad you can’t come to our daily assembly tomorrow. Sitting in the courtyard with 900 students meditating is an overwhelming experience.” We may have to go back for that. You can learn more about this program at their website www.aliceproject.org. This site offers two scholarships of 5000 rupees each to students of this school.
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Activity 21 - Wrapping Up & Moving On
December 06, 11Wrapping Up - Moving on...Activity 21Maurice Gibbons (c) 2008 Personal Power Press International Summary 1.Prepare for the final push you will need to complete your project. 2. Share what you have done with people who matter to you. 3. Acknowledge and celebrate what you have accomplished. 4. Keep a record of your achievement in a portfolio. 5. Identify the steps forward you will take. 6. Move forward in the expanding upward spiral of your development. Note: These are all suggestions about what you can do if it suits you and helps with what you want to achieve. You can be successful without any of them, but any of them—all of them--could be just what you need. Finish. Finishing your project can be as difficult as getting started. Such situations challenge us to be powerful in our lives. Do not falter. If you developed a vision of your completed project as part of your planning, recall it now. See the job finished. Feel proud of your work. If you have not used visualization so far, do it now. See the product of your project completed and before you. Make a renewed commitment to getting there. One of the self-motivating techniques used in this program is called “Hire the hall and send out the brochure,” which means, put yourself in the position that you have to finish or face a hall full of very disappointed and likely angry people, perhaps including many family and friends. Everything else that follows in this activity is designed to help you finish. Commit yourself to showing someone—or some people--important to you what you have done. Anticipate celebrating your success. Plan to start a portfolio in which the product of this activity will be the first entry. And always feel the shape of the activity that you will pursue next rising in your mind. Finish. Demonstrate what you have done Plan early on in the history of your project to show the results to somebody important to you. Your audience could be friends, family or members of your support team. You can make it very informal or an event with time, place, and invitations. Anticipating the display sharpens your thinking about the work. Our friend, Peter, records his projects with his digital camera, edits the photographs on his computer and adds music. Then he connects the computer to a TV and turns on the slideshow. A great demonstration of the process he used as well as the product he created. The demo can be as simple or as sophisticated as you like. One plan is to let the magnitude of the project be your guide: modest work, modest demonstration: major work, mega display. Unless it’s business, make it fun. Sometimes this is as simple as sitting over a tea or a beer and telling a friend stories about your efforts and final success. You decide. Celebrate your success. Stop to savour the successful completion of your project. Do what suits you and pleases you. Some people like to share the celebration with others—especially others who have been involved--and many like to include it with the demonstration. Honour your achievement and any others who helped you along the way. Do what you enjoy the most. Sometimes the celebration is built in. When Franz had a show of his paintings in a gallery, the exhibition began with an opening night. Invitations were sent out, many people came, and wine and hors d’oeures were served. He even sold several paintings and had another reason to celebrate. A cup of coffee with a friend can make a fine celebration, too. Savouring allows us to enjoy what we have done, marks our achievement and gives us a break between projects. During the break we can reflect on what we have done and what we may do next. Archive your work in a portfolio Artists, architects, designers, and photographers—among others-- keep portfolios of their best work to show clients or organizations when they are seeking employment. You can benefit from keeping a portfolio of your work, too. The portfolio is a carefully prepared collection of your best results or products. When we offer this program for credit, the proof of accomplishment will not be test results but a portfolio of the candidate’s work, which will be judged on its merit. The portfolio is important as evidence of accomplishment, and it is also important as an instrument of self-motivation. Knowing you are going to present your work in your portfolio as evidence of what you have done and can do, you are likely to make sure that you choose challenging work and finish it as skillfully as you can. Begin with an index of the portfolio’s content. Present the results of your best projects as effectively as you can. Sometimes you can include samples—of writing, for instance; often photographs are an effective way to present your work. Sometimes the results—of a campaign or a business start-up, for example--are less visible and require an explanation or story, including your goals and plans. If you want your portfolio to be taken seriously, always assume responsibility for proof that you have done the work you claim. Show grade sheets for courses or certificates for programs you have completed. Ask officials involved in your projects to write letters about your work. Be creative about documenting what you have done. Make the portfolio another project, and make it a great representation of you and your work. Move onward and upward This brings us to the end of the Explorer Program. But, it is also another beginning. What you have done in this program is the first turn of a cycle. Remember the basic outline of it: The earth does not just run through the seasons in a year, it goes through the seasons every year. Similarly, the self-directed person does not just follow the steps we have outlined in twenty activities once, but follows the steps repeatedly in ever more skillful cycles. The activities describe patterns that you can use for the rest of your life. The object is to get better and better with each cycle, and to use the basic pattern as a foundation on which to build by adding new skills. So we add the recurring feature like this: But this recurring loop is unique. Reflection reveals possibilities for development in the process you are using, and development in yourself and your performance. By challenging yourself to go beyond what you have already done, the course ahead is not just a cycle, it is a spiral of success that reaches outward in range and upward in achievement. So think about how you will build on what you have done. Think how you will increase your skill in all that you have accomplished in these activities. Decide on the challenge that will push you into achieving what you want to achieve. One key issue is whether your challenge will be in the same field or a new one. And once that is decided, the next question is, “How far beyond what I have just done can I go next time?” Far. Make it out far and in deep. We wish you great success. Maurice Gibbons (c) 2009 Personal Power Press International
Read more...WHAT IS SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING?
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Welcome! This site supports teaching self-directed learning (SDL) and becoming a self-directed person. It supports home-schooling, experiential education, open schooling and life-long learning. Keeping a journal, setting goals, planning and taking action are key tools. Self-improvement, personal development and the development of character are central themes of SDL. In self-directed learning (SDL), the individual takes the initiative and the responsibility for what occurs. Individuals select, manage, and assess their own learning activities, which can be pursued at any time, in any place, through any means, at any age. In schools, teachers can work toward SDL a stage at a time. Teaching emphasizes SDL skills, processes, and systems rather than content coverage and tests. For the individual, SDL involves initiating personal challenge activities and developing the personal qualities to pursue them successfully. This website is devoted to illuminating these principals as they apply to schooling and to life. |
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