Let Your Students Go Surfing!

Cohort21 for instance is without a doubt the gold standard of a supporting culture and the outcomes as measured through the amazing initiative of hundreds of empowered educators speak for themselves.

I read this memoir by Yvon Chouinard – he’s the guy who started Patagonia – over the summer, and it offered such a powerful recalibration of so many of my life’s choices and outlooks as a global citizen, husband and father and (yes) educator, that I’ve been meaning to organize and connect my thinking through some form of reflective piece. It only makes sense that on the eve of another Cohort21 season/adventure, I try to make sense of it all here, in the context of teaching and learning and the potential power of community at large.

It was the title that drew me in: Let My People Go Surfing. Yes please! It’s a beautiful metaphor worthy of extension into the daily flow that is too often characterized by a looming sense of urgency (and how often is that urgency unnecessarily fabricated – by us, the educator, or the environments we interact with?). Surfers don’t get to decide when the surf is up. In fact the very sport runs counter to conventional routine. So what happens when the surf is up before quitting time? Bummer dude. But more importantly, what are the possible outcomes if the surfer feels freedom to seize the moment and hang 10?

I was recently revisiting Maggie Cox’s plea for a “mentoring culture” in Walking the Tightrope and I was struck by this description of culture: “Business people, even in an initial meeting, (are) much more open to sharing ideas with me than teachers I have known and worked with over the years. After all of my years in education, I am still puzzled by the reluctance of educators to share and work together.” Crazy! I’ve been doing a bit of a deep dive lately into what it means to be a culture of  “mentoring” as opposed to “judging”, asking these very questions that Cox is provoking: why are teachers so quick to close their doors? Is there something inherent, perhaps in an industrialized approach, that places judgement (evaluation!) ahead of support and empowerment? Of course, the implications of all of this runs counter to, well, EVERYTHING we advocate for – in our students, in our learning cultures – in a 21st Century teaching and learning context. Cohort21 for instance is without a doubt the gold standard of a supporting culture and the outcomes as measured through the amazing initiative of hundreds of empowered educators speak for themselves. Now, this could easily turn into a long diatribe against standardized tests or grades or any system of ranking that inevitably diminishes spirit; however, an essential concept we keep at the forefront of our Cohort21 action plans is the ‘sphere of influence’: clearly understanding who we’re capable of affecting and to what extent. We can’t literally allow all educators to go surfing whenever they choose (at least, I don’t yield that power), but the essence is within our grasp – perhaps simply by opening, sharing, inquiring, supporting and celebrating.

This is a bit of an aside, but at Rosseau Lake College, we begin each day with a whole-school circle (“the small-school advantage!” as my friend, colleague and predecessor @edaigle used to say ) in which we acknowledge our place and give thanks. This simple gesture/routine, emphasizing the very symbol of a circle, holds many deep implications that collectively grounds our thinking through an entire day or approach. Of course, in a circle no one stands above and we are all connected; we are witnesses to the cyclical nature of community – however large or small – and better understand our impact. It’s pretty powerful to have the beauty of Lake Rosseau, so visible in these moments, as our backdrop, and so we can imagine ourselves as part of a much larger circle or series of circles. From the perspective of teaching and learning, there is an absurdity to then entering traditional classrooms and closing our doors and standing in front of a group that is sitting. Indeed, Chouinard prefers to describe Patagonia “as an ecosystem” with its many users as an “integral part of the system” in which a “problem anywhere affects the whole, and this gives everyone an overriding responsibility to the health of the whole organism”. This is a pretty eloquent way to consider empowerment isn’t it? What if this was how our students always felt in the learning environments we create? I really hate being presumptuous, but shouldn’t we all be at least a little bit terrified of any action or convention that removes us from the role of advocate, placing us in the role of judger?

Chouinard creates even deeper context for this belief when describing his own path as an entrepreneur. He is sure to reinforce an approach that is at the essence of any amount of success or excitement or fulfillment in his life: “the entrepreneurial way is to immediately take a forward step and if that feels good, take another, if not step back. Learn by doing.” Pretty cool right?

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And now I’m taking a moment to advocate for writing or maybe just ‘mindfulness” in general: stopping, stepping back, noticing, reflecting, connecting; understanding the symmetry (the circles!) between all things. Example: throughout this morning, as I’ve been writing this, my three year old son has been busy in his own world. He has flipped through Babar’s Yoga book practicing poses; he has sat down with a notebook and a marker copying letters from that same book; he has stared deep into the wood-stove quietly studying the motion of fire; he has brought wood – one log at a time – in from the outside stack; he has put on wings, transformed into “Fairy Boy” and defended our cabin and his family from evil goblins. Quite a morning filled with adventure, reflection, discovery and learning. All, perhaps, because I stayed out of his way. I let him go surfing! And because the world is cooperating and staying just enough out of my way at a moment of inspiration (I too am surfing!), I’m left with an epiphany. Circles!

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In education, and perhaps especially at Cohort21, we have begun to talk a lot about the entrepreneurial mindset: dispelling the myth of failure, creating excitement for getting messy, embracing challenges that seem just beyond our grasp, taking the moonshot. But really, aren’t we  just working to reconnect our students (and ourselves!) with a past spirit, the child they’ve been distanced from? Most infuriating, we’re trying to undo what’s been done. It’s easy to acknowledge the tension present in converging philosophies. Chouinard, for instance, is also careful to describe the other side of the dichotomy: “if you take the conservative scientific route, you study the problem in your head or on paper until you are sure there is no chance of failure.” The real challenge that I confront all the time is that we’re living in a blurred world. It’s easy to feel undermined by certain conventions that still prevail. The students themselves – “outcomes’ focused by the time they get to us – can be resistant; they believe they’re looking down a straight path – convention it seems works in lines not circles. So what do we do?

Chouinard implies that he got a little lucky; he was terrible at school and a bit of a loner. He did not excel in conventional ways or forums, but his isolation allowed him to cultivate his own pathways: “I learned at an early age that it’s better to invent your own game; then you can always be a winner. I found my games in the ocean, creeks, and hillsides surrounding Los Angeles.” His is a good story, but how many of the isolated are so fortunate? Perhaps we do for our students or communities what cohort21 does for us: we let them go surfing. Sadly, however, they (and we) are not kids anymore. Too infrequently do they just race towards the surf with board in arms. We have to help them see the wave, to understand it’’s potential and excitement. Sometimes we even have to push them out to sea. And maybe, we have to keep doing that until finally they feel free again.

Finally, how about this piece of gold from Bell Hooks’ Heart to Heart as a way to end: “The mind motivated by compassion reaches out to know as the heart reaches out to love. Here, the act of knowing is an act of love, the act of entering and embracing the reality of the other, of allowing the other to enter and embrace our own. In such knowing we know and are known as members of one community . . .” (p. 132).