Worth a Listen, Look or Read #17 — Nurturing the "Beginner's Mind"

Jeff Ikler here for Kirsten Richert with our weekly “Getting Unstuck” mini feature: Here in about five minutes, we extend the idea of this week’s podcast with some related content that we feel is definitely “Worth a Listen, Look or Read.”

The idea

This week I talked with Connie Liu and Jordan Mareno of “Project Invent,” an organization that brings innovation, design thinking, problem solving, and community involvement into the classroom. Or perhaps a another way to say that is “Project Invent” helps to reinvent the classroom by having student changemakers focus on solving a problem in their local community. https://bit.ly/3nwqewq

Taking the idea deeper

“Project Invent” bases its work on the premise that children and young adults are neurologically primed to explore, to learn, to change. They’re naturally inquisitive and flexible. And one way children engage in exploration is through play. Often, children experience a certain happiness and joy when they’re playing, reinforcing the idea that learning can be fun. If you’re thinking “school recess,” you’re with me. Recess isn’t time away from learning, it’s tending the soil where learning can take root. (See “Also Worth a Listen, Look, or Read” below.

As we grow into adulthood, though, we evolve differently says psychologist Alison Gopnik in an interview on the “New York Times,” Ezra Klein podcast.

“Adults are designed to exploit . . . to go out, find resources, make plans, make things happen, including finding resources for that wild, crazy explorer that they have in their nursery. They are are tuned to exploit their knowledge.

Adults have the capacity to some extent to go back and forth between those two states. But I think that babies and young children are in that explore state all the time. That’s really what they’re designed to do. They’re like a different kind of creature than the adult.”

Neurologically, the child’s and adult’s brains are different. The child’s brain in terms of its ability to grow and nurture neuro-connections metaphorically resembles “My Secret Garden” — an ever-growing collection of interconnected neuro-knowledge pathways. It’s neuro-plasticity on steroids. The adult’s brain, on the other hand, resembles a carefully tended English garden. Connections that are no long useful simply whither and are trimmed. While we can periodically return to child’s world of discovery and grow more neuro-pathways, according to Gopnik, we adults tend to maintain only the information we need to exploit.

The child’s state of being is often likened to the ZEN concept of the “beginning’s mind,” which mindfulness expert Michael Bunting describes as

“viewing the world and our experiences with an innocent mind devoid of preconceptions, expectations, judgements and prejudices. It is to explore and observe things with a deep sense of openness, much as a child explores the world with curiosity.” (The Mindful Leader, p. 89)

This definition is important for two reasons:

> As Bunting explains, today’s organizations operating in a V.U.C.A. environment — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity — increasingly demand flexible and innovative thinking from their leaders.

“The art of discovery is the heart of great leadership. The best leaders are those who constantly push us to find new and better ways to do things, to explore and discover, to conquer limitations.”

> Today’s K-12 schools, most of which still operate under the 100+ year old industrial model, don’t typically require that type of thinking by their students. Instead, education continues to be largely defined by age-old “inputs” and “outputs.” Inputs predominantly reflect teacher-led instruction where students are positioned as receptacles of information. Students’ “outputs” have been largely defined by traditional assessments, homework, in-school projects, and class participation. 

“Project Invent” is helping schools to change their inputs and outputs so as to nurture students’ ”beginner’s mind” into adulthood. Inputs can reflect agency where students identify a problem of their interest to be solved. Outputs reflect reasoning, adaptability, collaboration, and multiple solutions thinking — all behaviors that today’s organizations want on the part of their employees.

Putting the idea to work

Where does your school or teaching fall on the following continuum?

Also Worth a Listen, Look, or Read

Here’s the interview we did with Michael Bunting in May 2019.

And two of my favorite educators talking about the imperative to protect children’s time for play – and why entertainment, especially technology entertainment, is not the same thing!