An education manifesto

I’ve been involved in home school learning and education for over 5 years, enough time to start to make sense of my values and principles – what I stand for when guiding the learning of others.

So I’ve created a first draft education manifesto. I hope this will start a conversation about how we educators go about our work and how we support people on their learning journey.

Why a manifesto?

By writing down our values and principles we can reflect on why we are doing what we are doing, explain to others what we are up to, and enable others to challenge our approach. This should lead to greater awareness and an improved approach, or at least an interesting conversation.

(Format and ideas inspired by the Agile Manfesto http://agilemanifesto.org/)

Education Manifesto

We are uncovering better ways to lead learning by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

  • Learner led over leader led
  • Working on the learning environment over working on the learner
  • Intrinsic satisfaction over token rewards
  • Right pace over race to results
  • Deep understanding over memorisation
  • Working through struggle and mistakes over showing off perfection
  • Coaching and mentoring over micro-management
  • Questions from the learner over questions from the leader

Principles:

Create an ideal environment for learning. Think about productive environments and the activity they encourage, e.g. library, workshop, artists studio, music practice room.

Recognise energy now and choose task appropriately. If energy remains low, respect this and try something else.

Regular feedback to leader and learner to drive improvement. Respect learner’s readiness for feedback and seek permission periodically (not continuously).

Deliberate practice builds mastery.

Connected learning to learner’s needs + desires. “What does this mean for me?” is a great question.

Theory:

Some articles, books and notes about learning theory:

I’d love to hear what you think about this, email me at eric@bn7.net