What if success was defined by how well we advanced the learning of others?

This small story illuminates for me the extent to which the pedagogical environment we cultivate greatly determines, not just the learners we are, but the citizens we become.

Individual or Collective. What if we didn’t frame learning as a personal quest, with each learner simply being out for him or herself? What if students’ alternatively had each others’ backs by working together to scaffold learning?

Let me start by saying I’m going with the idea that being the straw man in this story is the surest way to call out that we get the behavior we reward.
Why else would I tell the story of my self-absorbed twenty-something self?

Cut to 1991, Aotearoa New Zealand. It’s a Friday afternoon at the end of the first week of a total immersion Maori language course. I am sitting in a group circle with 30+ Maori peers and this is our first chance to speak English since the course began. This is our only chance to share why we are here and how the week has gone for us. My privileged self is cocky about my reason for doing the course and I’m anxious yet grateful to introduce my Maori self given all week I had been seen as the only Pakeha (white person) in the room. This feeling won’t last. In about 30 minutes I will realize how I have read everything wrong.

As I sit waiting to introduce myself, I am excited to share with my peers how I want to learn Maori for interviews in a book I am working on. But as the conversation moves closer to me I tune in to what my peers are saying. They are here because their children are coming home from Kohanga Reo (Maori Language Kindergarten) assuming they can korero (talk) with their parents in the te reo, the language, of their ancestors. They are here because the elders who speak Maori in their communities deserve the assurance that the language won’t die with them. Suddenly, my book on the appropriation of Maori motifs sounds so academic.

Still, not a total schmuck. Not yet anyway.

I share. I am moved enough by the grounded, authentic reasons this community has come together to know I should resist sounding like the budding academic I was to become. At least no one laughs at me.

We continue to move around the circle. The last person to speak is a guy in my learning team. He is the slowest learner I have ever been around. This is a challenge for me (embarrassingly) because the pedagogical approach of the course believes in moving at the speed of the slowest learner. I am young, naive and a product of a meritocratic university system that has me believing that I am wasting hours of my day waiting for this guy to get in 2 hours concepts I grasped in 20 minutes. As I wait for him I am bored, impatient and disengaged. I am convinced that the solution is to let me move up to the next group up. Cue the argument for self-paced learning and ability groups right?

Not so quick. It is now the guy’s turn to talk. Let’s call him Tama. He is self-conscious as he stammers through the reason he found himself here. He has been out of Aotearoa New Zealand for more than a decade and in that time things have really changed. When he left, the fact he couldn’t speak any Maori was okay, normal even. But things are different now. Tama is telling us that before he returns to turangawaewae (his spiritual home) on the East Cape, he wants to learn how to respectfully greet his people in Maori. Everyone nods — because we get it. On some level, Tama’s reason is why we are all here.

Tama moves on to talk about his experience in my group. I listen to him describe how he dropped out of school the day he turned 15. He shares what it feels like, for the first time in his life, to be in a learning environment that is not leaving him behind. His voice cracks as he tells us how he can see that some people in his group are frustrated by how slow he is. Then tears of gratitude come as he expresses what it means to him that we are not running ahead without him.

This all happened 25 years ago yet still I have a felt memory of the intensity of the shame I experienced in that very moment.

Of course, there was the personal shame I felt for the self-absorbed, competitive narrative that had run through my head while Tama was simply striving to do his best. But there was also my institutional shame at an education system that accepts failing the Tama’s of this world to feel good about producing the likes of me. A system that privileged individual success over collective thriving. Looking back I wonder if when Tama was choking up did I think (just for a split second) “you’ve got to be kidding me?” But I don’t think so.

I think I knew — immediately, instinctively — that I had until that very moment got it totally wrong.

Time’s Up or Got it. How might we transition from a time-based instruction model to a culture of learning that drives understanding? What if we disrupted the practices that determine how we program and reward learning?

I have told and retold this story countless times in my life. And yet…it feels more embarrassing to publish these words. For when I ‘perform’ this story face-to-face it is easier to get you to recognize yourself in me. In this telling, I let you off the hook by taking on the role of the fall guy. In the spoken version of this, I can usually get the listener to be complicit in agreeing that it is crazy-to-sit-around-waiting-for-the-slow-learner-to-get-it-when-I-could-be-racing-ahead.

You’ve already guessed that my point isn’t what you think of my attitude, my bias or a pitch for self-paced learning technologies. The real story here is what happened next.

I chose not to double down on what 15 years of institutionalized education had taught me. I let myself be inspired by the purpose-driven, authentic and intrinsic motivations of the indigenous learning community around me. I made a conscious decision to unlearn the idea that my personal trajectory should be my primary motivation. I dived into the cooperative learning culture of the course.

Come Monday our small group was back. We dived in together. As people grasped the concept being taught we partnered with our learning coach to teach the others. In no time Tama had a team of peers dedicated to making him shine and predictably he came to only need 30 minutes to grasp new concepts. Now you see where I am going with this.

Efficiency or Expertise What if we discussed the dimensions of learning beyond depth and breadth? What if we acknowledged the increased under-standing and engagement that comes from advancing the learning of others?

Predictably, my language acquisition was improved greatly by teaching others instead of passively waiting for my peers. Yet what stays with me is that it took this experience, a month after I graduated from university, to glimpse the promise of deep learning.

I went on to grad school, got a PhD and have been an educator in higher education for nearly 20 years. And yet. I choose not to forget that my humble transformative epiphany happened in a small town continuing ed class. The disruption here did not come about from EdTech, smart classrooms or even exceptional teaching. Sure the material-based learning through making pictures with rods suited the designer in me. However, it was the play-based, community-grounded pedagogy that supported taking risks and called out its commitment to whole-self learning. In valuing community resilience over individual success a platform for Tama to share was created.

Today I collaborate with learning scientists to design research interventions that seek to advance student success and collective thriving. Yet I like to remind myself that Tama’s honesty and integrity were simply the 5-minute micro-intervention I needed to forever shift my value system. This is not an intervention I know how to scale but I still choose to believe in a world where every learner gets to experience the social and intellectual reward of investing in what it might mean to truly acknowledge that we are all in this together.