I found myself audibly speaking as I watched these videos. “Yes!” “That’s right!” “EXACTLY!” My teenage son came by my room and said, “Who are you talking to?!”.
I told him about what the videos were saying, and he agreed. He is in 11th grade and since he began speaking has been highly curious about everything. He spent his toddler and elementary school years driving me crazy with his questions. Well, I should say until this day he still does this. At times it was bothersome, but it is something that I absolutely love about him. I tell him to never stop being curious. I have tried my best not to squelch the desire he has to know more, but I know that I have not done the absolute best with it at all times.
The perfect example I have in regard to Ken Robinson (2010) saying that, “Every day and everywhere out there children spread their dreams beneath our feet and we should tread softly” is one with my son. I made the following post on Facebook in 2015. He was 9yrs old. It was a huge lesson for me and a moment in my life where I learned children had something special to give this world if we would only let them develop in their own way and give them the space to do so.
I love that I can look back on experiences in my life and see they were moments of realization and growth of how I was creating change within myself to allow for growth in others. Allowing my son to make his own decisions, and not making him conform to my way of thinking, or telling him how he should think, was a moment where I chose to change from a fixed to a growth mindset. It is wonderful to look back and see that I was developing my learning philosophy in those moments.
The person that I learned the most from in my children’s education was my son’s first-grade teacher, Mrs. Birch. I always joke with her that she opened his mind to new things and caused him to incessantly ask questions and enjoy things that I never knew he loved. She had a way of treating her 1st-grade students like adults. She expected them to regulate their own behavior. She allowed them to choose simple things like how they kept their things in class, and where and how they sat in class also. I subbed for her at times and I remember thinking this is the strangest classroom. It was so flexible, but she was one of the toughest teachers in parents' minds also with very high expectations of her students. I can look back now and see she was doing it perfectly. She made her classroom a safe place for the students to figure out who they were. She respected them and knew them all so well.
My son developed a love of non-fiction books that year. He would come home at 6-7yrs old with books about things I never knew he loved or would even have any interest in. He would experiment at home and ask to explore different learning with me. She made a huge difference in his life as a learner. He still to this day does things, and I will reach out to her and say this is all you! I have thanked her many times over the years.
In our coursework in ADL, I am now able to understand there was a method to her madness and a beautiful one at that. Such simple changes allowed children to take ownership at such a young age, and it was even changing us as parents without our knowledge. My goal is to do the same, make small changes that continue to cascade down in ways that I am never aware creating change for years to come to make our world a better place.
To quote Stephen Lewis (our classmate) from his response to my last DB post in this class:
"We may not change the world, but we can certainly leave a memorable mark that keeps progress moving forward."
References TED. (2010). Bring on the learning revolution! | Sir Ken Robinson. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LelXa3U_I
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