Several people have asked me what’s going on, and it’s been far too long since my last update. Let’s catch you up!
1) Are you still doing your piano experiment?
Yes! I’m currently trying to build my ability to play songs by ear. I discovered that my goal for the piano is to basically be the guy who plays at the dueling piano bar, so my learning plan has that goal in mind.
I was seeing some diminishing returns from the piano experiment in terms of informing how I coach kids through deliberate practice. So I made the decision to cut back on my practice time (from 5 hours/week to 2 hours/week) so that I could spend more time on developing the school.
2) So where has all this newfound time been invested?
I’m taking part in the 4.0 Schools Essentials Fellowship. We barely squeezed in our bootcamp in March before the pandemic shut everything down. The program has a lot of “lean startup” in it, with launching a pop-up to test your school program as the primary outcome.
The pandemic shifted my focus a bit - since I had my kids at home, I’ve been running them through a prototype of the program.
Here’s the model I’m building towards, with some notes on the difficulties I’ve seen so far.
My daughter’s learning goal
Start by letting the kids explore a variety of topics to discover what they might be interested in learning more about. They’ve done drawing, music, cooking, learning about wolves, and making slime classes through Outschool. In the future I’d love to setup little demos to pique curiosity (ideally with people in the community - e.g. a chef shows kids what she can do).
The kids pick something they want to learn. For example, my son chose to build a Rube Goldberg machine, my other son wanted to learn Fortnite dances, and my daughter wanted to bake and decorate an elaborate cake. The DIY site has been the best resource I’ve found to support this. It provided a great jumping off point for projects, but the specific projects my kids wanted to do went outside their catalog. For example, while they had material on cooking, they didn’t have say something on elaborate frosting techniques.
I assist in building a learning plan for them by choosing online resources. I help to show them how to break things down into little steps and how to structure their work so they don’t always need an adult. For example, here’s my daughter’s project plan and then the breakdown of step #3. We have these posters on the wall where I document their progress by taking pictures of their intermediate steps.
Then they go through their learning plan, spending 30-60 minutes per day.
They “demo” their learning to the community (so far this would be just family, but in the future a larger group).
So far, we’re on step 4.
The Good and the Bad
The kids have been excited to learn (at times). They jump into learning and are eager to do it. It’s been interesting to see where they go – I literally had no idea my daughter wanted to bake cakes or my middle son wanted to dance.
However, they’ve all had their interest wane over time and then I wonder how much to push them or not. On the one hand, I want them to see the benefit of their work by sticking with their practice long enough. On the other hand, I don’t want to force it too much.
My hope was that they’d sustain their interest a bit longer once they started seeing progress, but so far, I haven’t seen that. Just like anything, there are parts of the projects that are a bit of a grind and, so far, they’re not pushing through.
Part of what I’m trying to teach them is the habits and work ethic required to reach their goals but mandating practice times feels at odds with this idea of letting them drive their learning. Right now I’m requiring that they work on their projects (just Mon-Fri) before they’re allowed to play on their gadgets. Extremely unsure if this is the correct approach!
Related to above, I’m playing the role of coach but don’t always have experience in the skills they’re interested in. Trying to give guidance to my son on his Fornite dance moves has been a stretch of my skillset! So I’m thinking about supplementing my role as “motivator/learning plan coach” with a skill expert coach.
One major hurdle has been structuring their learning so that it doesn’t require too much time from myself or my wife - we both work full-time so we can’t spend hours helping them along. My daughter’s baking project has been the most difficult in that regard - she needs to use the oven and some steps can’t easily be broken into a daily 30-60 minute chunk (e.g. she needs to bake and decorate a cake all in one day).
There are so many great resources online. I’ve been surprised in the quality I’ve found on so many different topics. For example, Cakeflix is a educational platform focused on elaborate cake decoration. Who knew! YouTube, DIY, Udemy, and Skillshare have all been incorporated into my kid’s learning plans.
What’s worked best is me helping them find interests and build their learning plans. What’s worked least well is keeping motivation up and having enough of my time and energy to keep the momentum going day-to-day.
My plan is to keep doing this and eventually add some other neighborhood kids to form a little club of sorts (my pop-up will focus on this). My hope is that building a bit more of a community structure can juice up the motivation/energy a bit. I’m also considering using scheduled “community demos” as a deadline to drive some focus. Then we’ll see how that goes and build from there.
Any ideas on how I should address the motivation issues above? Or other thoughts on how to structure this program?
Background on My School Project
This post is part of a series on developing a new type of school. Click to see the other posts on this school project. If this is new to you, I’d suggest starting with the vision for the school. If you’d like to get notified of new posts, sign up below.