The Learner Driven Approach: How and Why It Works
A learner driven approach inspires, equips and connects young people who embrace a Hero’s Journey to make principled decisions towards a more satisfying and fulfilling life because:
The energy behind learning — and especially transformational learning — comes from the curiosity and drive of an individual learner, supported in community. The freedom to choose, supercharged by archetypal stories is the rocket fuel of learning.
The Hero’s Journey story of an individual hero, facing difficult challenges, on a quest, in community, in search of a worthy grail that changes the hero in the process, is the time tested tale of human development that has shaped civilization through the ages.
The responsibility for setting the contracts and covenants that will form a community, along with choosing recipes, processes and examples to solve real world and governance problems develops complex problem solving skills and a sense of due process and justice in action.
Socratic discussions develop listening skills, logic, perspective and judgment for both the facilitator and participants that lead to powerful critical thinking.
Multi-age studios mean learning can be shared peer to peer and within squads, through critiques and joint projects, in a way that shares and accelerates learning in an exponential way – and includes high levels of fun and engagement.
Offering self paced work, in an environment where many types of gifts are celebrated, in an environment that praises improvement rather than artificial adult standards, leads to an appreciation of excellence from within, with multiple ways to win. Using trial and error experimentation includes experiencing the joys and fallouts of the process of learning.
Continual improvement happens when learners try something and feel the consequences of that trial.
Over time, through self-management and self-governance, learners shift from “me and now” to setting goals for the day, week, session and year – lengthening time horizons; and to Running Partners, squads, studios and campus, in a way that expands and deepens relationships.
Character development comes from making courageous choices in the face of real ethical dilemmas, etching habits in the soul.
All of the learning above requires permission to fail early, cheaply and often to learn from mistakes. Young heroes have experience in non-learner driven contexts of being ordered about by bigger, stronger adults, sometimes for their own good but more often with adult dysfunction mixed in that seems more like tyranny. This unconstrained power on the part of adults must be limited by contracts, or learning shuts down as young heroes lose the freedom and responsibility to choose, a freedom and responsibility that is at the core of free will.
Learn to learn by internalizing recipes, processes and mental models as habits;
Learn to do in a way that delivers real world skills; and
Learn to be by etching moral habits and ancient archetypal lessons deep in the soul.
All of this leads to a next great adventure in life, that eventually blossoms into a calling that changes the world.