The last topic I thought I would write about for A Better Path to Learning was beavers. That’s right, the cute little animal with buck teeth. But as I read a recent article about our furry friend, and the impact it’s making within the city of London, England, I started to think about a connection to leadership and learning.
The article, posted by Reasons to be Cheerful, begins with,
“The clues are unmistakable. A muddy embankment is covered in webbed, triangular footprints. A tree’s bark has been gnawed on one side, exposing the pale innards of its trunk. But the real giveaway is the think dam made of branches that’s blockading a stream.”
“This site may be in London, a bustling metropolis of nine million people dominated by concrete high-rises and traffic-filled main roads, but it is now under the management of a new, or at least returning, critter on the block: Castro fiber, or Eurasian beaver.”
“’The beavers absolutely love it here,‘ says Nadya Mirochnitchenko, an ecologist and coordinator for Ealing Wildlife Group, a volunteer-run community organization that is leading a scheme to reintroduce them. ‘In fact, they are getting kinda chubby.’”
“Beavers were hunted to extinction in England during the Elizabethan times, in the 16th century. But last October, these stout, furry rodents were reintroduced into London for the first time in 400 years as part of an effort to rewild the city.”
“The family of five beavers – a breeding pair and three offspring – were transported from Scotland by the Beaver Trust, a UK-based nonprofit, and released in Paradise Fields, a leafy, eight-hectare public park in West London, at an event attended by the mayor of London.”
“’Beavers are a keystone species,’ adds Mirochnitchenko. ‘That means they have a disproportionately large impact on ecosystems. They alleviate flooding, they boost biodiversity, they keep everything in check. They’re like ecosystem engineers.’”
“Ecologists say that beavers help biodiversity thrive because they instinctively build dams, dig canals and create deadwood to feel safe, which creates diverse habitats for other wildlife, such as water voles, dragonflies, amphibians, birds, reptiles, and fish.”
“Few animals can modify and shape their surrounding environments to this extent.”
“But beavers bring a host of other benefits too: Their dams filter water, their instinctive maintenance of trees and shrubbery prevents them from overgrowing, and their reintroduction is a low-cost way of restoring wetland habitats – which store carbon, offer green space for locals, cool the environment and mitigate the increasing risk of flooding as the planet rapidly heats.”
What public schooling in this country needs today is our own brand of beaver. Someone who is a keystone species that helps young learners define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning – to make them smarter and stronger. Adult learning leaders who have a disproportionately large impact on the learning ecosystem. Adults who are learning engineers. Adult learning leaders who can modify and shape their surrounding environment.
In our personalized learning lab school, we called these people “learning coaches.” They were expected to teach their young learners how to read, write, and problem-solve at high levels. They were expected to teacher their young learners science, social studies, foreign language, and anything that young learner wanted to be part of their individualized learning plan. Most importantly, those learning coaches were expected to help their young learners how to define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning. In other words, creating learners who knew how to learn.
We aren’t creating these types of learning leaders these days, and our young learners are suffering because of it.
We would be wise to learn a lesson from the beaver.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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