Hi friends,

First off, I'm SO motivated by the conversations and revelations you have been having through this content so far. It's been great for me switching to a mostly email/text format, since writing my thoughts out tends to be the best way I can share them (and gives you the ability to consume whenever it suits). So getting your replies and seeing your thoughts shared in our Bridge Academy community deeper discussions has been so amazing.

We spent our first week together doing some pretty deep deschooling. Forcing you to redefine things like learning, school, motivation, information, success, etc. I hope this has already been eye-opening for you as you begin or continue this journey to deconstruct what you've been made to believe about learning and education.

But now we're going to pivot and spend some time over the next looking at how learning actually happens. You already know the basic formula (Motivation + Information = Learning).... but where do we go from there? How do we actually structure a learning experience to be meaningful for our kids? How do we know what their motivations are? How do we know that learning is truly taking place if we aren't worried about performance? Let's get started here with a story....

One of the things that completely changed the way I think about education happened while I was teaching fifth grade.

At that point I had already spent several years in higher education. I had my Bachelor's degree in Elementary Education, a Master's degree in Reading Development, and was working on my second Master's degree. I'd spent years studying how to teach. But I'd also spent years studying something that, ironically, we barely talked about in teacher school...the psychology and science of learning itself.

Funny side story: The only reason I knew so much about psychology and science of the brain and learning process was because in order to survive financially as an independent college student and then young teacher, I would take a double course load of classes to be able to get extra financial aid that I could live on. 😵‍💫 Only ONE class that I took in the Education department actually talked about the brain's work in learning. ONE.

Anyway... Those two worlds were beginning to collide for me.

I remember sitting with a veteran fifth-grade teacher as we were preparing for the year ahead, looking through the new math curriculum the district had just purchased. As I flipped through it, something immediately felt off. We would introduce a concept, spend a few days on it, take a test, and move on. Then we'd introduce another concept, spend a few days on it, take a test, and move on again. Like a whirlwind with zero depth.

I finally looked at her and asked, "What the heck is this? Where's the mastery?"

Her answer has stayed with me for almost twenty years.

She told me that wasn't the goal.

The goal, she explained, was to teach the curriculum "a mile wide and an inch deep like a spiral." Essentially the idea was to expose children to as many concepts as possible so that later, when they encountered them again, they'd have some kind of foundation.

I remember thinking... WhAt?!!?!

No they won't! Because they were never given enough time to actually understand what they were learning in the first place.

That conversation was one of the first moments I realized that we had confused exposure with learning.

Those two things aren't the same.

A huge misconception about education is that learning is either happening or it isn't. But that's not actually what the science tells us. Learning happens on a spectrum. There are different levels of learning, and the deeper we go, the more likely we are to truly understand, retain, and apply what we've learned. (I'll go into these details tomorrow!)

At the lowest levels, learning is mostly passive. Someone talks, we listen. Someone assigns a chapter, we read it. Someone gives us notes, we copy them down. Maybe later we're asked to recall that information on a quiz or a worksheet. We memorize just enough to perform, and then, for many of us, that information slowly fades away because it never became meaningful and just felt like a required performance.

Sound familiar? 🫣

I think that's why so many adults can still tell you that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but couldn't tell you what that actually means. We remember that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, but many of us couldn't explain why it was written, what led to it, or why it mattered. We learned thousands of facts throughout school, but very few of them became part of us.

That's because being able to recall information isn't the same thing as deeply understanding it.

As we move into higher levels of learning, something begins to change. Instead of simply receiving information, we begin discussing it. Then we begin applying it. We start experimenting, solving problems, creating, building, questioning, making connections, and eventually directing our own learning. Little by little, the control shifts away from the teacher and toward the learner.

And something fascinating happens when that shift occurs.

The deeper the ownership becomes, the deeper the learning becomes.

Eventually, learning stops being something you did - it becomes part of who you are.

Think about someone who loves to garden. Or someone who's passionate about cooking, or history, or music, etc. They don't sound like people who memorized information for a test. They sound like people whose learning has become part of their identity. They don't have to force themselves to keep learning because they no longer think of themselves as someone who is learning about gardening. They're a gardener.

That's the highest level of learning.

Not because they know the most facts. Because the learning became part of who they are.

When I look back at our educational system now, decades into this work, I don't think the biggest problem is that children aren't learning or caring. I think the biggest problem is that we've built a system that spends the majority of its time in the lowest levels of learning while believing we've accomplished mastery.

And that's exactly why so many children leave school believing they don't like learning or leave with all sorts of invisible labels attached to them that they'll carry their whole lives ("I'm bad at math."), when in reality they were rarely given the opportunity to experience learning at its deepest levels.

So today, I want you to think about your own child.

When do you see them most alive? When are they creating instead of consuming? When are they asking questions that nobody posed first? Where do they lose track of time because they're completely immersed in something they care about?

Pay attention to those moments. That's usually a key to their deepest learning moments.

Tomorrow we're gonna go deep in a topic I looooove talking about. Make sure you bring a notebook!

🫶🏽 Leah