TEACHING
Your education belongs to you.
“Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.” — John Holt
Snap the Whip. Winslow Homer. 1872*
Technically, I’m a high-school dropout, despite having taken more than a few college-level courses. I never bothered to stop long enough to collect any formal certification. And I have certainly never stopped learning.
I was lucky enough to be born white, male, and middle-class into a generation that was literally handed permission to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” I grew up assuming that the education I needed was available to me. If I wanted to know something, I could find someone who knew it, read a book, take a class, try something, make a mistake, ask a question, or simply follow my curiosity until it led somewhere interesting.
I still learn that way. In fact, I suspect most of us do. Which is why I’ve long wondered whether we have teaching a little backwards. We spend an enormous amount of time deciding what students need to know, teaching it to them, and then testing to see whether they learned it. What if we spent more of that time creating the conditions that make people want to learn in the first place?
What if the real work of teaching is helping someone become curious enough, confident enough, and free enough to learn for themselves?
Watch a young child and it’s obvious. They touch things. Take things apart. Ask endless questions. Imitate people. Invent games. Fall down. Try again. Nobody has to teach a toddler how to be curious.
Maybe the teacher’s job, then, is something different: to notice what catches someone’s interest and help them follow it. That might mean introducing a possibility, providing a tool, asking a good question, offering encouragement, or creating a challenge. Sometimes it means simply getting out of the way.
This doesn’t make teachers less important. It makes their work more interesting. Instead of asking, How do I get someone to learn what I want to teach? we can ask, What makes someone want to learn?
Curiosity does. Purpose does. A problem worth solving does. Making something does. Discovering that you can do something today that you couldn’t do yesterday does.
And agency does. I know that some of my own sense of agency comes from privilege. I grew up assuming the world was open to me, that my questions were worth pursuing, and that if I wanted to learn something, I could find a way. Not everyone grows up with that assumption.
But I don’t think the answer to privilege is shame or embarrassment. It is recognizing what that privilege gave me and wanting everyone to experience the same sense of possibility.
Maybe that is one of the greatest things a teacher can give us: the confidence that our questions matter, that we are capable of pursuing them, and that the world is ours to explore.
Maybe part of the answer to our “education crisis” is helping more people understand that their education belongs to them. Agency and belief in our own capacity don’t require another curriculum or another program.
They begin by helping people discover that they are capable of learning, and that their education never has to end.
TEACHING, LEARNER AGENCY
Start with questions, not answers.
Karen Brennan and Sarah Blum-Smith studied teachers who gave students meaningful control over their learning. They found that the teachers didn’t step aside. They were intensely involved—asking genuine questions, offering expertise, providing structure, and helping students pursue their ideas. Student agency didn’t diminish the teacher’s role. It transformed it.
BOOK: Start with Questions: The Classroom as Design Studio
TEACHING, LEARNER AGENCY
Teens: take responsibility for your own education
Grace Llewellyn had taught middle school before deciding that, for some young people, school itself was getting in the way of learning. So she wrote The Teenage Liberation Handbook directly to teenagers, treating them as capable of making consequential choices. Her radical proposition: you can take responsibility for your own education.
BOOK: The Teenage Liberation Handbook – 30th Anniversary Edition!
TEACHING, PLAY
Play is how children practice being human.
Peter Gray began studying how children learn after his own son struggled in school. He and his wife found a school that gave children extraordinary freedom. He noticed how much time they spent playing. Free to Learn explores his discovery: when children invent and direct their own play, they are learning remarkably consequential things.
BOOK: Free To Learn
TEACHING, SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING
Given curiosity, access, and one another, learners can create knowledge together.
In 1999, Sugata Mitra gave children in a poor New Delhi neighborhood access to an internet-connected computer, with no teacher or instructions. He wasn’t surprised to see that they learned to use it by experimenting and teaching one another. He repeated the experiment and kept seeing the same thing: given powerful tools, children can learn remarkably well together.
TED TALK: Kids Can Teach Themselves
One liners
ARTICLE: Preschoolers can learn language, math, and social-emotional skills by investigating the things that already make them curious.
ARTICLE: Teachers need agency, too: self-directed classrooms work better when teachers have the freedom to design them.
ARTICLE: Giving students meaningful choices about what and how they learn can increase both motivation and self-regulation.
ARTICLE: Researchers studying nearly 9,000 definitions of “learner agency” found that education tends to overlook one of its essential dimensions: learning to act with other people.
ARTICLE: Young children engage more deeply when they can touch, move, build, explore, and talk together than when learning is mediated by screens.
*About the painting
Winslow Homer painted Snap the Whip in 1872, just seven years after the Civil War. It shows barefoot boys playing what we would now call crack-the-whip before a small red country schoolhouse. Homer made two closely related oil versions; the smaller is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Painted so soon after the war, the image can be read as a vision of the country’s future. The game depends on cooperation and coordination: each child must respond to the movements of everyone else. As the Met observes, those qualities might have been understood as virtues essential to reunifying the nation. Yet the broken chain also suggests how difficult it can be to sustain that connection.
There is another reading available here—one that doesn’t need to be presented as Homer’s intention. The schoolhouse sits in the background; the learning takes place in the foreground.
These boys are not seated at desks, receiving instruction. They are organizing themselves, testing their bodies, cooperating, discovering cause and effect, and taking risks. Some keep their footing; others tumble into the grass. Then, presumably, they get up and try again.
"Progress is people flourishing."
-Ted Gioia
Civic Engagement
The deepest purpose of education is to help people become free and responsible human beings.
Danielle Allen describes herself as “a Harvard prof and democracy advocate working on democracy renovation 24-7.” We’ve talked before about her conviction that democracy’s promises of freedom and equality can only be fulfilled if ordinary people show up as engaged citizens willing to participate in public life rather than retreat from it.
ARTICLE: Education and Its Public Purposes
The Arts
Thinking is a practice that can be cultivated, and the arts are one of the most powerful ways we learn how to do it.
Nelson Goodman, an American philosopher, saw the arts as a way of knowing—not decoration, but a fundamental way we understand the world. In the 1960s, he noted that despite their influence, we knew almost nothing—“zero”—about how people learn through the arts. No one had studied artistic learning with the rigor given to other fields. With this in mind, in 1967 he founded Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
WEBSITE: Project Zero
Social Imagination
Books
The purpose of education is not to prepare students for the world as it is, but to awaken in them the capacity to imagine the world as it could be.
Maxine Greene began her career in the forties, when philosophy of education was an all-male domain. Initially barred because of her gender, she entered her field at Teachers College, Columbia University through the English Department. She went on to become a fierce and articulate advocate for the idea that the purpose of education is not to prepare students for the world as it is, but to awaken in them the capacity to imagine the world as it could be.
BOOK: Releasing the Imagination. Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change
Futures Literacy
Building futures literacy in the transition from study to working life.
If we assume the future is something we must consciously design together—not a fate to endure—then we need futures literacy. When students learn how they “use the future” in their thinking, they can surface fears, hopes, and hidden assumptions, reducing paralysis and futures-related anxiety.
PDF BOOK: Futures Lab Playbook
Reinvention
“What happens in classrooms today is what will happen in society tomorrow.”
Aylon Samouha is an education innovator and the cofounder and CEO of Transcend, a school design organization that partners with communities to design and scale new school models focused on “extraordinary learning” for all students. In this TED Talk, he explains why schools must be redesigned—not merely improved—to prepare young people for a rapidly changing world.
VIDEO: Schools Urgently Need a Redesign. Here's How
Schools
Free education classes that equip people with the tools to actively engage in movements for justice and peace
The Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership is named after Sojourner Truth to honor her work as an activist for justice, freedom, and honesty.The school launched in Northampton, Mass. in 2017, sparked by the waves of grassroots activism that followed Donald Trump’s first election
WEBSITE: The Sojourner Truth School For Social Change Leadership
Advocacy
"A remarkable story of self-possession under the most dehumanizing circumstances"
Before Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, and Maggie Kuhn, there was Sojourner Truth. Today she’d be called a badass with brass balls. In her own time she was known as a “fiery abolitionist” and a “riveting preacher” with a straight-talking, unsentimental style.
ARTICLE: The Remarkable Untold Story of Sojourner Truth
Curriculum
“Learning how to learn is the ultimate skill.”
Jerome Bruner wrote this book in 1960, when teaching largely relied on rote memorization, rigid curricula, and the passive transfer of facts from teacher to student. He was among the first to suggest that education’s highest purpose is to cultivate the ability to actively construct knowledge, not simply store information.
BOOK: The Process of Education
Joy
"Joy should be the ultimate goal of teaching and learning."
Gholdy Muhammad sees a pressing need for joy in school environments. She notes that teachers often tell her they feel overwhelmed and stressed, and the mental health of students is in serious decline.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Gholdy Muhammad Champions ‘Unearthing Joy’ in Her New Book
Teal
Books
Reimagining school leadership as a collaborative structure that empowers individuals at every level of the system.
As a student of Teal Management principles popularized by Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations, I was interested to read Dr. Lindsay Whorton’s ideas on rethinking leadership structures in schools.
BOOK: A New School Leadership Architecture: A Four-Level Framework for Reimagining Roles
Nature
Outdoor time for students relieves stress and sets the stage for better memory, mood, and classroom behavior.
Outdoor time—often called “green time”—offers powerful benefits for student well-being and learning. Schools, especially those serving under-resourced communities, can play a crucial role in providing equitable access to nature, even with limited budgets and tight schedules.
ARTICLE: From Screen Time to ‘Green Time’: Going Outside to Support Student Well-Being
