If Genius Hour and 20% Time, Passion projects, and other similar project-based engagement activities are so helpful in promoting learning why don’t we spend more time on these activities and not limit them to an hour a week or 20% of our learner’s precious time? Why don’t we flip Genius hour and 20% time with the time we spend on test preparation. Perhaps if we move our learners away from the time-wasters of rereading and highlighting and get them engaged in the effective study skills of self-testing, distributed practice, elaborate interrogation, self-explanation, and interleaved practice we could flip the time we spend on test prep to 20% and spend 80 of our learner’s time engaged in Genius Hour type activities. The research is clear and the Scientific America article on study skills What Works, What Doesn’t – https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273626957_What_Works_What_Doesn’t confirms what study skill yields the best results and also points to a large body of research on this topic.
While flipping Genius Hour and improving our learner’s study skills may be a great first step it isn’t enough. Trying to apply a simple solution like flipping Genius Hour to the more complex problem of deeper learning within our current educational system will not work unless we address all the other key factors of this complex problem. We need to help change our educator’s and learner’s thinking about learning, their approach to learning, and we need to change the learning environment. I am not alone in calling into question the use of Genius Hour and 20% Time as a treatment without addressing all the other factors.
In a recent post The Research Behind PBL, Genius Hour, and Choice In The Classroom – https://www.ajjuliani.com/blog/research/ A.J. Juliani argues for the benefits of project-based activities that promote choice and give learner’s the opportunity to engage in learning activities that are important to them. Juliani is an advocate of these useful learning activities and in his post, he points to some research and larger body anecdotal or experiential support for these types of activities. He also deals with some of the objections to challenges to these activities and points to Ewan McIntosh’s 2013 post 20% Time and Schools: not the best of bedfellows – https://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2013/08/20-time-and-schools-not-the-best-of-bedfellows.html where McIntosh points to the problem with our system of education that limits the effectiveness of these types activities in this statement:
The problem is, that students given this open stretch of time often don’t know what to do, or beyond their initial couple of passions they run out of steam. Their end-products are largely under par of their capacity. Sure, there are moments of genius, just as in Google, 3M or any other corporation that introduces 20% time. But, just like them, they are by a small proportion of students, with the vast majority of ideas failing to hit the mark.
McIntosh is pointing out that many, perhaps even most, of our learners are not prepared for this type of deeper learning. He suggests that that experimenting with these individual activities is a start it would be better to include more student autonomy in everything one does. This is not the first time we have heard an educator point to the sobering reality that too many of our students are not prepared to learn. In his book Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education Justin Reich points out that pandemic inspired move to online learning hasn’t worked well because most students are not able to learn online because they are not self-directed and are not able to learn independently. Reich does a good job pointing out the complex problem but doesn’t offer a solution. Fortunately, in the post We Need More Autodidacts we offer a solution to this complex problem.
As you should have heard in the Learner’s Mindset Discussion video above we agree with McIntosh about student autonomy, but once again we go a fair bit further and address all the aspects of this complex problem. Incorporating more student autonomy is a good start and so is Genius Hour. But if these activities are used as treatments or stand-alone activities we argue that they won’t work because the problem that we need to address is much more complex and requires a much broader focus. Unless we adopt a Learners Mindset where you change your thinking and your learner’s thinking about learning, change the approach to learning, and create a significant learning environment in which you give your learner’s choice ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities you run the risk of running an interesting learning activity that will have minimal long term impact.
I have been exploring how to bring about effective organizational change for many years. A quick search for the word “change” on my blog will reveal many posts. My analysis and evaluation started back in 2010, when I was still advocating for Kotter’s Eight-Stage Process of Creating Change but I was starting to see that there were some significant challenges to this process. By 2012 I was starting to explore broader ideas and looking for more of a synthesis to leading change as the post Recommended Readings on Leading Change In Education will reveal. I was recognizing that if you really wanted to bring about effective change you had to Practice Change by Living It and you had to acknowledge that The Head Won’t Go Where the Heart Hasn’t Been.
My synthesis of thinking about change started to come together after some significant failures in a few change strategies I had undertaken in 2011-2012. I had religiously used Kotter’s Eight-Stage process and I even focused on creating a sense of urgency but there was something missing. Without going to significant details on the situations my evaluation of what had happened and my analysis of what could be doing better revealed that there were many other factors that all had to come together. The following is an excerpt from a 2014 post I made in reaction to Seth Godin’s post – People Who Like This Stuff. This post is where the synthesis of effective organization change that is outlined in the Learner’s Mindset Discussion had its formation. Most of my thinking is still the same but in the last six years, I have added a Crucial Conversations component to the self-differentiated leader’s section because of the challenges everyone is facing today in trying to have conversations about even the smallest things.
One of the advantages of working through authentic projects is that they force one to continually evaluate what is working and what can be done better. If one hopes to change their own world and the world for their learners one must remain in the higher-order thinking of evaluation, analysis, synthesis, and creation which is also a key aspect of the Learner’s Mindset.
Why is change in education so slow and so difficult? I think Seth Godin offers one of the most simple and elegant explanations…
“People who like this stuff…like this stuff”
Godin goes onto explain that:
“…for those that are already in it, you can’t push too far, because they like the genre. That’s why they’re here.”
Those who have walked away probably aren’t just waiting around for you to fix it. Those who have never been, don’t think the genre has a problem they need solved.”
If we apply this elegant thinking to the challenges we face in improving education, then most educators who like this stuff [traditional learning environments}… like this stuff. Most people who don’t, have walked away as we can see by homeschooling, unschooling, and uncollege movements. Perhaps more importantly, for those (students, parents, and politicians) who have never been behind the scenes of our traditional educational system, there is no problem. Or the problems that they can see are simply ones that appeal to emotions like class size or special needs. These issues become hot buttons for political sound bites and the 6:00 news but sound research by people like John Hattie reveals that student achievement is not impacted significantly by class size but by many other factors that just aren’t as newsworthy.
How then do we get people who like this stuff (traditional education) to like new stuff (digital learning environments)? While innovating the learning environment has been a significant challenge for the past century (John Dewey was calling for a change to progressive education almost 100 years ago) it is possible and involves the following four steps.
1 Start with Why – In his popular TED talk Simon Sinek makes the argument that “people won’t buy what you do they buy why you do it”, so rather than telling traditional educators what they should or need to be doing to improve learning you need to provide a reason why they would want to add to or improve the current system. This has to be an emotional appeal. Sinek provides a fully developed argument for starting with why and how to use the Golden Circle in his book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.
2. Identify and enlist key influencers – There are key social leaders within all organizations that have the influence to bring about the small activities that can start the behavioral change that leads to organizational change. Once you can identify one or two key activities and give these influencers the reason why they should be making these changes you can start the process of implementing digital learning to enhance the traditional learning environment. Once these influencers like the new stuff they will give others reason to like the new stuff as well. The book Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, Second Edition provides an exceptional explanation of how to start behavioral change.
3. Install an effective execution strategy – You can’t change everything within an organization at once. You still have the whirlwind of the day-to-day activities that will consume 80-90% of your efforts. However, the key activities that your influencers are willing to change can become the one or two wildly important goals (WIG) that make up the foundation of The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals (4DX) change process that has proven to be an effective strategy in executing organizational change. Once one or two aspects of the traditional environment are changed you can then move on to the next one or two activities and so on. The key is to have an effective strategy and to execute.
4. Enlist and empower self-differentiated leaders – Edwin Friedman in the book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix posits that having the conviction to keep on moving forward when everyone in your organization is screaming for the status quo is a key ability of the self-differentiated leader. These people do not need validation from the group but are able to see beyond the challenges to the broader goals of serving learners in new and productive ways. These people practice change by living it and have the ability to lead by example and can show people why they like the “new stuff” and why liking the new stuff is better for our learners and for our society as a whole.
This is not an easy process but we owe it to our children and to the young men and women who are going to our universities and colleges with dreams of building a better world.
While I appreciate the message in the video and agree that we need to empower our learners to become more self-directed the author doesn’t really provide any suggestion on how to do this. This is where the Learner’s Mindset and the CSLE+COVA approaches come in. Don’t just talk about empowering your learners, take the steps to make this happen.
What is the learner’s mindset? Where does it come from or how is it developed? What is its relationship with the growth mindset and the innovator’s mindset? Can it be quenched and if so how do you get it back? What support is there for these ideas?
Operational Definitions
Mindset – The view and/or state of being you adopt for yourself that profoundly affects the way you lead your life (Dweck, 2006).
Learner’s Mindset – a state of being where people act on their intrinsic capacity to learn and respond to their inquisitive nature that leads to viewing all interactions with the world as learning opportunities. This state enables one to interact with and influence the learning environment as a perpetual learner who has the capacity to use change and challenges as opportunities for growth.
How is this different from the Growth and Innovator’s Mindset?
Growth Mindset – Dweck (2006, 2015a, 2016b, 2016c) posits that with a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. Since these students believe they have a fixed amount of talent and intelligence they strive to look smart all the time and will even embrace ignorance to avoid looking dumb. In contrast, Dweck posits that with a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good instruction, and persistence. You learn to adopt a growth mindset by learning to listen to your fixed mindset voice that says, “I can’t” and you simply add the term “yet”.
Innovator’s Mindset – Couros’ (2015) innovator’s mindset builds on the growth mindset in that he argues that abilities, intelligence, and talents are developed leading to the creation of new and better ideas. He posits that we must create a culture where teachers are reflective, observant, empathetic, problem finders, and risk-takers who embody the innovator’s mindset as they model creativity and resilience.
We suggest that the growth mindset and the innovator’s mindset are simply part of the learner’s mindset. These aforementioned mindsets provide beneficial pathways to restoring or reinvigorating aspects of the learner’s mindset that have been quenched.
The learner’s mindset also addresses some of the most significant limitations and criticism of the growth mindset. Research has shown that simply adopting a new way of thinking, belief, attitude, or mindset without addressing other factors like changing the learning environments has no impact on improving learning or achievement (Sisk., Burgoyne, Sun, Butler, & Macnamara, 2018). Dweck (2016b, 2016c) has also acknowledged that just espousing the growth mindset or promoting students’ potential without enabling them to realize that potential through some form of systemic change results in an empty promise or a false growth mindset. When the improvement doesn’t happen, those espousing the false growth mindset will blame that holder of the mindset. These sorts of empty promises along with just praising effort and simply promoting a positive attitude are key reasons why the growth mindset alone will not bring about improvement.
Since the innovator’s mindset is an extension or built upon the growth mindset it faces some of the same challenges due to its emphasis on a change in belief or attitude. While Couros does stress the attitude shift toward empathy, creativity, and resilience he moves beyond the growth mindset in the sense that he advocates that teachers become problem finders and risk-takers. This emphasis on action or behavior is a good start toward the change of behavior that is required to bring about effects change.
The learner’s mindset addresses the limitations of the growth mindset and innovator’s mindset by acknowledging the change in thinking about learning must be accompanied by a change in the approach to learning how to learn that is embedded in the creation of a significant learning environment in which learners are given choice, ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities. When you factor in the need for this change in mindset, change in approach to learning, and the change in the learning environment needs to happen cumulatively and in close proximity, the learner’s mindset offers a more robust way to prepare learners for life.
The Synthesis of the Learner’s Mindset
The Learner’s Mindset is a synthesis of some of the best ideas from constructivist thought leaders like John Dewey (1916, 1938), Jerome Bruner (1960, 1966), Jean Piaget (1964), Seymour Papert (1993), David Jonassen (1994), John Carroll (1990), and many more. Back in the early 1990s, I began exploring how to walk that constructivist walk and started to research how to build the most effective constructivist learning environment. I knew how important the learning environment was but also realized that it was only one part of a bigger puzzle. In the mid-1990’s I started to explore how one’s thinking about learning and how different approaches to learning would factor into the learning environment in my doctoral research. By the time I had published my research on a web-based approach to instruction called, Inquisitivism: The HHHMMM??? What does this button do to approach web-based instruction (Harapnuik, 2004), I had confirmed that restoring the natural or intrinsic capacity we all have for learning was one more key piece to the learning puzzle.
From the early 2000s to 2014 I had worked on, or contributed to, the development of hundreds of constructivist courses and dozens of programs in a wide variety of educational settings. I had also been engaged in using technology to enhance learning and contributed to the development of many online, blended, and mobile learning initiatives at several institutions. While I believe all the work I had done in a variety of capacities at numerous organizations had been important, I knew we were not addressing the bigger picture and were missing the opportunity to maximize the learning. When I look back at these experiences, I see in some we overemphasized the platform or learning management system (LMS); in some, we focused too much on the technology or the device; in others, we focused too much on the professional development, and in others, we ignored the implicit power of the culture.
When I began co-developing the Digital Learning and Leading (DLL) Masters at Lamar University in 2014, I promised myself that this initiative was going to be different and needed to address all the key components that research revealed needed to be in a true constructivist learning environment. My co-developers and I agreed to create a significant learning environment (CSLE) in which we gave our learners choice, ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities. While we were building the DLL program we also began to formalize the terminology of the COVA learning approach which we now refer to CSLE+COVA. We have confirmed through our research that in order for COVA to work you need all four components to function within a purposefully designed significant learning environment (Harapnuik, Thibodeaux, & Cummings, 2017; Thibodeaux, Harapnuik, & Cummings, 2017). With the CSLE+COVA approach to learning and the creation of a significant learning environment we had factored in two key pieces of the learning puzzle, but we still needed to address how to help our students change their thinking about learning. This part of the puzzle had always been there but we just didn’t see it. It wasn’t until we stepped back far enough and changed our focus like one would do with a stereographic image, that we recognized the learner’s mindset that my colleague and I lived and embraced was the missing piece our students also needed to embrace.
The notion of the learner’s mindset has always been part of my thinking about learning. Back in the 90’s when I was researching and confirming the importance of the inquisitive nature and arguing that we had to restore this natural or intrinsic capacity as a way to help adult learners overcome their fear of technology I had colloquially referred to Inquisitivism as a way of restoring the learner’s mindset. When I was exploring early childhood learning and the Project Approach as a way to help prepare my boys for life I knew I had to help them embrace a learner’s mindset so that they could turn life’s challenges into opportunities for growth and development. When my colleague and I were looking for a way to help our graduate students in the DLL program get over their fixation on grades, their difficulty in accepting constructive criticism, and their fear of failure or not knowing the right answer we looked for a way to help them restore their learner’s mindset and turned to Carol Dweck’s growth mindset. By having our students explore and develop a growth mindset plan in one of their first courses we found that they became much more receptive to feedforward and started to see challenges as opportunities for growth. The growth mindset is a wonderful way to start overcoming the fixed mindset thinking that is, unfortunately, a systemic problem in our system of education. It is also a useful starting point in helping students move toward the learner’s mindset.
Learner’s mindset thinking has not only been part of my thinking about learning it is often something that my colleague and I take for granted. Her website subtitle is “Learner’s Mindset”. My website title is “It’s About the Learning”. If you are in the learner’s mindset then everything is about the learning. Being in the learner’s mindset can be likened to Csíkszentmihályi’s (1990) state of flow which is where a person is performing some activity fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus. This notion of not being aware of something that is basic to everything is not a new notion according to the philosopher Alan Watts:
As the fish doesn’t know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything (Sreechinth, 2017, p. 56).
This is why we argue that the learner’s mindset is a state of being where people act on their intrinsic capacity to learn and respond to their inquisitive nature which leads to viewing all interactions with the world as learning opportunities. When you are in the learner’s mindset you are like a fish in water. You don’t think about it because it is basic to everything that you do. Moving into or adopting this state of being requires that one change their thinking about learning, their approach to helping themselves and their learners learn how to learn, and by changing the learning environment.
Presupposition – Learner’s Mindset is Intrinsic
Before we go on to further explore the impact of the learner’s mindset and how it can be preserved or reinvigorated if it has been quenched, we need to establish the presupposition that the learner’s mindset is a natural or intrinsic capacity that we all have and that children manifest in their early years. The prolific educational researcher Jean Piaget who is one of the foremost authorities on development and learning argues that the capacity for learning is intrinsic and needs to be nurtured:
One need only watch an infant for a short period of time to know that they are curious, interested in the world around them, and eager to learn. It is quite evident, too, that these are characteristics of older children as well. If left to themselves the normal child does not remain immobile; they are eager to learn. Consequently, it is quite safe to permit the child to structure their own learning. The danger arises precisely when the schools attempt to perform the task for them. To understand this point consider the absurd situations that would result if traditional schools were entrusted with teaching the infant what they spontaneously learn during the first few years. The schools would develop organized curricula, in secondary curricular reactions; they would develop lesson plans for object permanence; they would construct audio-visual aids on causality; they would reinforce “correct” speech, and they would set “goals” for the child to reach each week. One can speculate as to the outcome of such a program for early training. What the student needs then is not formal teaching, but an opportunity to learn. They need to be given a rich environment, containing many things potentially of interest. They need a teacher who is sensitive to their needs, who can judge what materials will challenge them at a given point in time, who can help when they need help, and who has faith in their capacity to learn (Ginsburg & Opper, 1969 p. 224-225).
It is important to acknowledge that Piaget viewed his research as empirical support for Dewey’s theory of learning and also as a continuation of the research that Dewey has started decades earlier. Seymour Papert, who was a modern-day educational reformer comparable to Piaget and Dewey, also argued that the system of education squelched children’s natural ability to explore, experiment, evaluate, create, and learn. In an interview with Dan Schwartz in 1999 Papert stated:
Children, of course, come into the world as very powerful, highly competent learners, and the learning they do in the first few years of life is actually awesome. A child exploring the immediate world does that pretty thoroughly in an experiential, self-directed way. But when you see something in your immediate world that really represents something very far away — a picture of an elephant, for example — you wonder how elephants eat. You can’t answer that by direct exploration. So you have to gradually shift over from experiential learning to verbal learning — from independent learning to dependence on other people, culminating in school, where you’re totally dependent, and somebody is deciding what you learn.
So that shift is an unfortunate reflection of the technological level that society has been at up to now. And I see the major role of technology in the learning of young children as making that shift less abrupt because it is a very traumatic shift. It’s not a good way of preserving the kid’s natural strengths as a learner.
Rather than reactively pursuing to restore what has been taken away, we recommend that we proactively maintain the learner’s mindset in which our children are born. We should strive to reinforce the natural passion to explore, to discover, to ask questions, and to learn which are part of the learner’s mindset. Unfortunately, as we have seen from Dweck’s (2006) research there is a tendency to quench our children’s inquisitive nature through the promotion and use of fixed mindset thinking and other systemically limiting factors. As a result, the growth and innovator’s mindsets that are a part of the learner’s mindset need to be restored or reinvigorated.
Reinvigorating the Learner’s Mindset
Moving to or adopting a learner’s mindset requires that one change their thinking about learning, their approach to helping themselves and their learners learn how to learn, and by changing the learning environment. One of the most significant challenges to adopting and living the learner’s mindset is that these changes in behavior need to happen cumulatively and in close proximity but not necessarily at the same time.
If you want to reinvigorate or adopt the Learner’s Mindset please sign up for the COVA eBook as a starting point. This will also get your name on our mailing list. We also have a Free or Open Educational Resource (OER) course called Revitalise Your Learner’s Mindset which we have made available through Learnersmindset.com.
References
Bruner, J. S. (1960). The process of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Carroll, J. M. (1990). The Nurnberg funnel: designing minimalist instruction for practical computer skill. Cambridge, MA: MIT press
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Finding flow: The psychology of engagement with everyday life. Harper & Row.
Couros, G. (2015). The innovator’s mindset: Empower learning, unleash talent, and lead a culture of creativity. Dave Burgess Consulting Inc.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to philosophy of education. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Macmillan.
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Penguin Random House.
Dweck, C. (2015a, September 23). Carol Dweck revisits the “growth mindset.” Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/09/23/carol-dweck-revisits-the-growth-mindset.html
Dweck, C. (2016b, January 11). Recognizing and overcoming false growth mindset. Edutopia. http://www.edutopia.org/blog/recognizing-overcoming-false-growth-mindset-carol-dweck
Dweck, C. (2016c, January 13). What having a “growth mindset” actually Means. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actually-means
Fuller, R. B. (2010). Education automation: Comprehensive learning for emergent humanity. Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.
Ginsburg, H., & Opper, S. (1969). Piaget’s theology of intellectual development: An introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Harapnuik, D. (2004). Development and evaluation of inquisitivism as a foundational approach for web-based instruction (Doctoral dissertation). University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.
Harapnuik, D. K., Thibodeaux, T. N., & Cummings, C. D. (2017). Using the COVA learning approach to create active and significant learning environments. In Keengwe, J. S. (Eds.), Handbook of research on digital content, mobile learning, and technology integration models in teacher education. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Jonassen, D. H. (1994). Thinking technology: Toward a constructivist design model. Educational Technology, 34(4), 34–37.
Papert, S. (1993). The children’s machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York, NY: Basic books.
Piaget, J. (1964). Development and learning. In R.E. Ripple & V.N. Rockcastle (Eds.), Piaget Rediscovered: A Report on the Conference of Cognitive Studies and Curriculum Development (pp. 7–20). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
Sreechinth, C. (2017). Extracted wisdom of Alan Watts: 450+ lessons from a Theologist. UB Tech. https://books.google.ca/books?id=xruxDwAAQBAJ
Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses.
Thibodeaux, T. N., Harapnuik, D. K, & Cummings, C. D. (2017). Graduate student perceptions of the impact of the COVA learning approach on authentic projects and ePortfolios. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Thibodeaux, T. N., Harapnuik, D. K., & Cummings, C. D. (2017, May). Learners as critical thinkers for the workplace of the future: Introducing the COVA learning approach. Texas Computer Education Association TCEA Techedge, 2(2), 13. Retrieved from http://www.tcea.org/about/publications/
Psychological Science, 29(4), 549–571. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617739704
Schwartz, D. (1999). Ghost In the machine: Seymour Papert on how computers fundamentally change the way kids learn [ZineZone.com]. http://www.papert.org/articles/GhostInTheMachine.html
Back in February of 2018 I posted Reading, Watching, & Listening where I finally completed a list of what I am reading, watching, and listening to in response to the questions I get from many of my students, friends, and colleagues about where I find my ideas. I promised to update this list on a regular basis and I am finally getting around to that promise. As part of that promise I am moving the contents of the 2018 blog post to my Reading, Watching, & Listening page which, I will continue to make this a permanent part of the Learning section of my website. I will keep the 2018 blog post up to serve as an archive and to see how my selection of resources has changed over time.
.
provides an exceptional explanation of how to start behavioral change.
(4DX) change process that has proven to be an effective strategy in executing organizational change. Once one or two aspects of the traditional environment are changed you can then move on to the next one or two activities and so on. The key is to have an effective strategy and to execute.
posits that having the conviction to keep on moving forward when everyone in your organization is screaming for the status quo is a key ability of the self-differentiated leader. These people do not need validation from the group but are able to see beyond the challenges to the broader goals of serving learners in new and productive ways. These people 
