How Successful Learning is Like a Successful Marriage

My wife and I have been married 36 years. As the old George Jones song says, “There’s been good days, and bad days…” But after those days, and years, I’m a lucky guy to say I’ve been part of a successful marriage with a fabulous partner and friend – my best friend.

Awhile back, I started thinking about why some marriages are successful and last while others struggle and don’t. I came up with three reasons. Oddly, these same three reasons can explain why learning occurs and when they’re absent, why it doesn’t.

Don’t Look Back

Or, in other words, keep moving forward.

In marriage, early on I had a tendency to want to bring up the past, thinking it would help clarify the present and plan for the future.

I was wrong.

Usually, bringing up the past only brought up bad memories of experiences gone wrong.

In marriage, it’s better to keep moving forward. Hopefulness happens when you move forward. Hopelessness happens when you look back too often.

Keeping learners looking forward is a good idea too. The traditional system has a habit of projecting failure on learners based on summative data. In other words, the traditional system labels learners as failures early on and therefore doesn’t give those learners hope moving forward.

Part of an adult learning leader’s job is to keep their young learners hopeful, even though they have experienced struggle in their immediate past.

Don’t Have Too High of Expectations

“Expectations are like fine pottery. The harder you hold them, the more likely they are to crack.”

• Brandon Sanderson, Author

When you’re with someone for six, 16, 26, or 36 years, you must get ready for them to disappoint you. But, if you can keep your expectations in check a bit, then that disappointment might not be as impactful than when you set expectations too high.

Now I’m not saying not to have any expectations, or to have continually low expectations. That’s not a good thing either.

The key to a good marriage is to practice reasonable expectations. And the way you arrive at reasonable expectations in a good marriage is through solid communication.

The same advice can be applied to learning.

Learning leaders with too high of expectations are setting themselves up for disappointment when their young learners don’t meet those goals.

Reasonable expectations in learning happen when the adult learning leader and their young learner communicate by defining, planning, executing, and evaluating learning goals contained within a learning plan.

Finally, don’t allow your expectations to get too high as an adult learning leader. Learning, like marriage, is a process, and not a destination.

Wait Time

I think it was Madeline Hunter, a professor of educational administration and teacher education at UCLA, who termed “wait time” back in the 1970’s. Hunter’s use of “wait time” was defined as the time between when a teacher asked a question, and a student offered an answer.

When thinking about marriage and learning, the term “wait time” has a different meaning to me than Hunter’s.

In marriage, “wait time” could mean what my mother advised me as a child whenever I would get upset, “Scott, just count to ten and then things will be better.” Just like my mother’s advice, “waiting” during a marriage often times allows something considered to be in the problem category to shift to the “it’s not that big of a deal” category.

In learning, showing “wait time” means that, unlike how traditional schools operate with their scopes and sequences and pacing guides, learners need time to exhibit their learning. Sometimes it comes incrementally, but usually it comes more as a breakthrough.

My own kids snicker when I tell them that “A good marriage is like a video and not a snapshot.” But I’ve found it to be true.

And, just like marriage, learning is more like a video than a snapshot. To be a learning leader, you must be ready for the long haul, investing in a relationship built on communication, goal setting, reflection, intervention, perseverance, and celebration.

The traditional system relies too much on the snapshot. Deep learning relies on the video.

Til tomorrow. SVB