The Challenges to Being Learner-Centered

Recently, Kelly Young, Founder and President of Education Reimagined, wrote an article asking what is, in my opinion, an essential question:

Why is learner-centered education not spreading?

Based on the sometimes pathetic performance of our current public school system, I’ve thought about this question a lot. I was interested in what Young had to say.

According to Young,

“You can ask this question of any learner-centered leader, and the list of challenges they face in even keeping their program, model, or network up and running are immense. To name a few, there are policy obstacles, funding challenges, and regulations that keep the constructs of the current system in place. But, what these all have in common is that there is a fundamental lack of public infrastructure that enables and supports learner-centered education.”

“In the last two years, recognizing this gap, Education Reimagined has increasingly turned our focus here — to the question of what would it take to invent, demonstrate, and spread the kinds of systems, structures, policies, supports, and processes that would enable thriving learner-centered, community-based ecosystems.”

“A core question immediately emerges: Who are the people to invent this infrastructure? And what mindset, skills, and expertise does it take? It is a question I’ve been pondering and a recent conversation with an unlikely source gave me new insight into who we might be missing. I want to share that conversation and the resulting insight with you today.”

“Recently, I was asking my son what chemistry is for. I wanted to see if his chemistry class was contextualizing what they were learning and providing examples of real-world applications, of which there are many. Realizing he couldn’t quite describe what chemistry is used for, I suggested we call my dad, who was a chemical engineer for the entirety of his career, to tell us about the applications of chemistry.”

“Before getting to what chemistry is for, my dad started off by describing the difference between a chemist and a chemical engineer — a distinction I had never heard before. He shared that a chemist is a person in the lab that invents new substances, chemical combinations, or applications.  A chemical engineer is the one that creates the conditions to make those new things at scale.”

“The key point is that there are different skill sets to take something to scale. In our case, these learning engineers would share the learner-centered mindset, just as chemists and chemical engineers share the language and knowledge of chemistry.”

“Let’s take, for example, the invention of nylon. Nylon gets invented in the lab by a chemist, and then a chemical engineer builds the capacity to produce it at scale. There is a lot to be invented beyond the creation of a small quantity of a new material if you want to produce millions of yards of it.” 

“While my son got clear on the many applications of chemistry from medicine to textiles, I had an unexpected epiphany about what’s needed to make learner-centered education available at scale.”

“Taking this new insight as an analogy to the roles in the learner-centered movement, I started considering the idea that the chemists are the practitioners — those inventing learner-centered education at a single site. They are discovering what it truly takes to serve each unique child, the best practices of a learner-centered approach, and the essential aspects of the learning experience that make the biggest impact. To take that to scale, perhaps we need “learning engineers” the people working to create the infrastructure to make learner-centered education available at “scale” to anyone who wants it.”

“Who, and where, are the learning engineers? At first, I thought they would be from the learner-centered sites. And, for some, that is the case, but for others, they are interested in making the chemical reactions happen, not grappling with how to make it happen at scale. Just like chemists and chemical engineers, they have essential overlapping knowledge and skills, but they also have distinct competencies. They must partner together closely to answer tough questions, test out hypotheses, and explore new possibilities.”

I like where Young is headed. After 30 years working in and with the traditional public school system, and 10 years working to create a learner-centered alternative, most of the time there is a difference between creators and scalers.

Creators, or the chemists in Young’s example, should be the ones who offer young learners and their families new, different, and exciting opportunities to build learning plans that individually address needs and interests.

But we need something more than creators, or the learner-centered movement will become nothing more than what most charter programs have become – boutique operations that serve small numbers of learners. Some of those programs serve their learners well.

Scalers, or what Young sees as the chemical engineers, should be the ones who take on the bigger challenges (not that getting a young learner to succeed with their individual learning plan isn’t a big challenge!).

What are those challenges?

I have 4:

1. Funding. The biggest reason learner-centered creators can’t scale is because the traditional system holds a large part of the money assigned by this country to be used for public education. Unless this logjam is broken, the chance to scale learner-centered creations is slim.
2. Talent. Currently, we can’t find a place to train adult learning leaders, focused on learner-centered outcomes. When we ran a personalized learning lab school in Houston, we were lucky to find two learning leaders who possessed the right stuff to help young learners become successful with their own individual learning plans. But when we tried to scale, finding others like those two became an exercise in locating a unicorn.
3. Family education. Most moms and dads don’t know what they don’t know. Even though many are unhappy with what they saw coming home from their public schools during 2020, when most public-school students were home because of the pandemic, when push came to shove, those parents sent their kids back to their neighborhood public school when those schools reopened. It’s what parents knew to do. To change that behavior, families, especially those who are black, brown, and poor, would benefit from seeing other learner-centered opportunities that could compete with their neighborhood school (their sometimes under-performing neighborhood school). In addition, families might become friendlier to learner-centered models if they better understood the strategies and potential outcomes associated with such enterprises.
4. Courage. It’s going to take courage for families to walk away from their traditional public school, but that doesn’t mean they are walking away from public schooling. Just like charters over the past 50 years attempted to change the definition of what public schooling meant in this country, so too can the learner-centered movement. But in the end, if the first three of these challenges are met, it will be #4 that determines whether the scaler, chemical engineer, or whatever you want to call them, is successful in building capacity while helping young learners develop their own ability to define, plan, execute, and evaluate their learning.

And here’s the deal. The current public school system will try to kill this movement, no matter how good it is for kids and families – especially those trapped in really bad schools right now.

It’s what bureaucracies do, and our traditional public school system is one massive bureaucracy.

The News Roundup is coming tomorrow. SVB