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self-governance
Are You Ready to Fail?
Thursday, September 14, 2023 Savannah, GA, USA
A recipe for growth is to fail early, cheaply and often. How comfortable are you with seeing your child fail?
For some parents, it's as natural as breathing. They don't even see the struggle as struggle, they just see growth.
For some parents, it takes a lot of work, but they want to give their child the gift of struggle, so they accept that they (as parents) will have some struggle in the process, too.
For some parents, it is too uncomfortable. It is not where they want to be.
The reality is you cannot remove all failure and struggle from your child's life. Life will test them for the skills of independence and resilience at some point, even if you won't. It's coming.
Adapting to new skills and experiences is easier when you are younger (early). The stakes are lower when you are younger (cheaply). Failure is guaranteed with some frequency if you participate in an environment that asks for independence, mastery and excellence (often).
Are you ready to fail?
When We Say Goodbye
Monday, May 3, 2021 Savannah, GA, USA
People move. Rarely does anyone live in one city for their whole life. And even if you stay in one place for a lifetime, there will still be coming and going around you. It creates an indisputable fact: you'll meet a changing cast of fellow travelers on your journey.
At our studio, when one of our learner's Hero's Journey takes them somewhere new, it's different from a classmate who moves away at a traditional school. Here, we don't only say goodbye to a friend we enjoy playing with, we also say goodbye to one of our guides who has been teaching and helping us on our own journey, to a studio mate who has helped us build our culture, to a leader that has helped us create our governing rules and who helps hold us accountable to the standards we strive to live up to daily.
In a self-governing studio, it's hard to express just how vital each hero is. After all, they run the place. When we say goodbye to one of our young heroes, we say goodbye to much more than a friend.
All we can do is hold the present moment lightly, knowing the only constant we can count on is change. Enjoy the parade of personalities. Soak up as many lessons as we are fortunate enough to be exposed to. Be grateful for every twist and turn, as around every corner is an opportunity. And most of all, keep taking the steps to further our Hero's Journey.
<3
Empowering Warm Hearts
Monday, April 12, 2021 Savannah, GA
A self-governing studio sounds very foreign to those of us who spent K-12 being told how things were going to work. We assume young people won't be able to make tough calls, identify problems and fix them. But they are actually very, very good at this. Better than most adults, actually. They have a natural sense of justice and what is fair.
Why wouldn't you want to nurture this natural skill from the get-go instead of suppressing it?
Here's a story from this year:
Learner One is very slow getting his shoes on and out the door for free time. Learners Two and Three are much faster; they put their shoes on and run out for free time. Learner One cries out; no one waits for him! Two and Three don't do anything about it. They tell him to be faster with his shoes. (Tough love from those guys.) A new Learner shows up, Learner Four.
Learner Four has a lot of kindness and patience. He is very warmhearted. When free time starts, Learner One laments that no one waits for him and expresses that it makes him sad. Learner Four has a big heart and says, I'll wait for you, and he does.
But after a couple of days, he also starts to feel left out from the other two, who have already started enjoying their free time. At this point in traditional school, self-sacrifice would be his only option if he wanted to keep Learner One from feeling sad, mad and upset with the other two learners. A.k.a., being the one to try and keep everyone happy by foregoing your own needs.
In our studio, though, he calls a town meeting. He is six years old. He proposes a new rule to try: We wait and all go outside together as a group. It gets a majority vote. So, everyone is now going out as a group as we test this new rule.
But Learner Four starts to notice that Learner One isn't even out in the hallway tying his shoes. Learner One is doing other things, playing with toys, drawing... with the knowledge and power that everyone HAS to wait on him. Learner Three, who has little patience, points out this is precisely why he doesn't ever want to wait on Learner One to get his shoes on. Learner One is taking his sweet time and in a way, taking advantage of the warm heart of Learner Four.
Learner Four proposes to amend his rule to be that we wait for everyone who is actively working on getting their shoes tied to go outside. If you are doing other things and not tying your shoes, no one has to wait for you. Now we have the right combination of warmhearted/toughminded to be kind toward Learner One, but not to be self-sacrificing or being taken advantage of.
This big-hearted child had the tools to change and improve everyone's environment instead of having to choose between watching someone go into emotional distress or self-sacrifice. How horrible to be stuck between only those two options?
There's nothing I could have done better as an adult to have handled the situation from a problem-solving standpoint. And even better, the learner was the one to be empowered. He is one step closer to seeing the studio as his studio.
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