(Featured image from here)
Anyone who knows me well has heard me talk about self-directed education, and how great it is and how many of the world’s problems it would solve. Most people aren’t convinced. If they were, fewer kids would be going to traditional schools. How will kids be motivated to do anything?
I don’t think self-directed education means completely hands-off education. It doesn’t mean leaving the kids in your life to their whims and offering no input, support or connections. Especially when they start getting older. I’ve never met a kid that didn’t have something they would love to try or accomplish, but weren’t. Sometimes they didn’t know they could, or didn’t know how to go about it, or the prospect of even trying was overwhelming. Motivation to accomplish goals is hard for adults. Why wouldn’t it be hard for kids and teens?
I have two brothers that are teenagers. They do pretty relaxed homeschooling, but there has been a pretty common struggle with getting schoolwork done and also attempting to do the things they want to, and actually getting those things done when they do have the time. The transition from childhood to adulthood is scary, especially if you’re not used to thinking about your future and what you might want to fill it with. I distinctly remember stressing out about my future when I was 14, and then all through high school and up until now.
So, I’ve started working with my brothers to identify what exactly they want to do and to move in those directions. We just started recently, and different things will be better for different people, but I thought I’d share what we’re trying right now. They really boil down to two things: defining some goals, and taking the steps to accomplishing them.
Have a Talk
This had to be honest and nonthreatening. I think if they thought I was trying to make them do things they didn’t want to do, it wouldn’t have gone as well, especially with my 15-year-old brother.
He doesn’t like doing schoolwork, so we talked about why exactly he’s doing it. Some people are motivated by the prospect of expanding their horizons, but he isn’t. So we talked instead about high school diplomas, and jobs, and how the two work together, and how getting the second is much more difficult without the first. So is making the money to support yourself. I told him there were other options (getting a GED and being done with high school early, starting a profitable business and working for yourself, learning a skill and getting to the point where you can do enough freelance work to support yourself), but they all require hard work and have to be his initiative.
I also want to say that, if you’re having a talk like this with a kid or a teen, you probably shouldn’t assume they know any particular thing unless you’ve discussed it before. I’ve had to explain how higher education works to three of my brothers now. Of course they knew those things existed, but they didn’t know about the different kinds of degrees, or the difference between university and community college/trade school.
After that we wrote down some goals, if you can call them that. They weren’t as precise and measurable as people say goals should be. My brothers are still young and they’re still exploring areas of interest. So we wrote down things they’d like to do and try, then we wrote down what they felt was stopping them from doing those things.
This was pretty interesting. One of my brothers said he would like to leave the house more often and go places on his own time, but he didn’t feel like he knew his surroundings or how to get places well enough to do that independently. One said he’d like to make a comic or a video game, but he didn’t think he could draw well enough to do so and that making games is hard. One said he had a hard time remembering to do the things he wanted to do and using his time wisely.
That last one, I think, is a big one. He recognized he had a problem, but he didn’t know how to fix it and either hadn’t thought to or didn’t know how to ask for help. I live with my brothers, but I learned things about them I didn’t know just by asking open-ended questions and giving them time to answer.
Once we had the problems, we could work on solutions. We divided a page into sections, one for each goal, and brainstormed solutions to each problem. They said they wanted to practice drawing, to find better video editing software, and learn the route to walk to and from nearby malls. For a couple of the more concrete goals, we wrote down steps that would take them from where they were then to where they wanted to be, so that they could see what to do now and what would be next. Now they have these papers they can look at in the future to recenter and think about what they can do each day to move forward.
Getting it Done
The second part is actually doing the things we came up with. It’s easy to say you’re going to do something, but actually doing it is something else entirely, especially if the only person you’re really letting down if you don’t is yourself.
I really like my bullet journal. I co-taught a bullet journal workshop, once, and convinced some moms to use it and to get their kids to use it. I think my brothers could benefit from using theirs more, but they aren’t really into it. I think maybe it isn’t visual enough, or it’s too easy to just not open the thing up. We’re trying a couple of other things instead.
- Kanban Boards
I made them a couple of big kanban boards to put on their wall, using big sheets of paper and sticky notes. There are three sections: Want to Do, Doing, and Done. We put sticky notes listing the easy first steps we’d come up with together in the Want to Do section. When they start undertaking these small projects, they can move the sticky notes over, and then put them in Done when it’s complete.
These will take some time to get into the habit of using, I think. I like them because they’re big and visual and very simple. It’s really nice to be able to see so clearly what you’ve done and what you’re currently doing. But I don’t think my brothers are going to just spontaneously use them on their own with no outside inquiry just yet.
- Talking About the Day
In Agile Learning Centers, they have short meetings at the beginning and end of the day to discuss what everyone wants to spend the day doing. I love this concept a lot. I can’t use it exactly like that at home. I have work, and most of the time I don’t get home until at least 11pm.
But, when I see my brothers, I’ve started casually discussing their plans with them. They’ve been doing a lot of preparation this week for World Scholars Cup, which they leave for tomorrow, but they still have plenty of time for working on their own things. They just need a little prodding to see that.
Actually, I think me being gone helps. Before I leave for work I can tell them I’m going to be away for 9-10 hours, and then we talk about how long it’s going to take them to do all the things they have to do, and how many hours they have left over for their things. I don’t expect them to be working every minute of those hours, but I do want them to have something in mind for how they’re going to further their goals that day.
- Stay In Touch
They and I all use Discord, a chat program and app commonly used by gamers and nerds. I set up a server ages ago for the three of us to talk about whatever (mostly it’s just us sending us youtube links, or me telling them to read the Transformers fanfic I’m writing).
Now, though, I’ve made a channel for each of us to report in on throughout the day and have encouraged them to keep me posted on how they’re doing while I’m at work. When they put an accomplishment in their channel, I’ll pin it to the top so that they and I can see what they’ve done. This is pretty much another kanban board, but with more discussion. But, it probably would not work if they weren’t already using discord.
I also have a channel for myself, where I’ll talk about what I’m doing. I don’t have as many goals, because most of my time is taken up with work or writing, but I’m going to try to start using it more. I don’t know if they would agree, but I think it helps that it’s not just me telling them to do things and that I’m also sharing my goals. I would encourage anyone who interacts with kids to be more transparent about these types of things. Let them know what you’re working on and struggling with! You might just be having similar problems.
Profit (???)
Like I said, we only started this recently, so it might all fall apart. It seems to be going alright so far, though. Pretty much every kid has great things to share with the world, if they can just figure out how to. I think we owe it to them and everyone else to help them work that part out.
Daisy M. Hall 