Self-Directed Learning

Years ago, while I was still teaching, I read a post from a mother of a middle schooler who was furious that her son’s math teacher had stopped teaching. For a few units the teacher was pointing the kids at videos and expecting them to learn the concepts on their own, and the comments filled up fast with other parents who hated it too: the teacher was being paid to teach and was just facilitating, the year had been a waste for that subject, kids were floundering without structure, and anyway they were already on screens too much. One mother said the theory behind independent learning was lovely but we’d swung too far.

I remember reading that thread with my stomach in a knot, because every parent in it was right about what they were seeing, and every one of them was wrong about why.

What self-directed learning actually is

A baby dropping a spoon off the high chair forty times is doing self-directed learning. So is the toddler who asked “why” every time you opened your mouth, and the four-year-old lining up every colored pencil in the house by shade, and the nine-year-old who read every shark book in the library. Nobody taught your baby to crawl or walk or talk. She noticed something, wanted it, and went after it with whatever was in reach, and the going-after is the learning. Curiosity isn’t a personality trait some kids have and some don’t, it’s the engine every kid comes with, and the only real question in this lane is what we do to it.

And what we mostly do to it, with love and good intentions, is interrupt it. We hand the baby a toy that does the thing for her. We tidy the pencils. We tell the nine-year-old sharks are great but it’s time for the reading log. Then around fifth grade a teacher says the kids “lack intrinsic motivation,” as if it got lost on the bus, when actually the thing was there and it was TRAINED out in a thousand small corrections that each looked completely reasonable at the time.

Why kids who were born doing this now refuse to

Here’s what I watched happen across eleven years and more than two thousand students. Kids came to me asking what to do when the directions were spelled out on the page in front of them (and most of the time they hadn’t read them). Hand a room of ninth graders an assignment with no rubric and no model and the hands went up before I’d finished the sentence. What do I do? Where are the directions? How can I do this if you haven’t given me an example? These were not struggling kids, a lot of them were honors kids, and they were not being difficult. They looked to me for every step, to make sure they were doing it “right,” because they were terrified of getting it wrong, and by fifteen the ability to really learn something had been swapped out for the ability to learn something for a grade.

That’s the part the parents in that thread couldn’t see from where they were standing. Their kids weren’t balking at the videos. They were balking at being asked, for the first time in nine years, to drive. Once a child starts formal schooling, the love of learning for its own sake starts to go, and what replaces it is wanting to BE taught… to have the information handed over, the questions answered, the grade secured, by somebody else doing the heavy lifting. So of course a twelve-year-old who has been a passive passenger since kindergarten flounders when the teacher steps back. He isn’t failing at independent learning, he’s doing exactly what school trained him to do for nine years, and doing it well, and then we turned around and called him unmotivated about it.

Why school can’t fix this from the inside (even when it wants to)

I’m pro public education as an institution, and the teachers I worked with were not the problem. The teacher in that thread almost certainly wasn’t either; she was probably trying to cover a curriculum that had been revamped again, with a tool that was built on the right idea. Khan Academy and every program like it rests on the premise that children have a natural drive to learn at their own pace, which is true, and which is exactly why those tools work beautifully for a kid whose drive is intact and land with a thud in a room full of kids whose drive was spent years ago.

Because a classroom of twenty-five or thirty on a bell schedule cannot follow thirty separate questions. It has to replace the child’s question with the teacher’s, and it has to attach a grade to make the replacement stick, and the bell has to cut the learning off right when it’s about to take hold. Public school was designed to deliver content to a mass of children at once, rows of desks, set readings, right answers rewarded and wrong ones penalized, and you cannot bolt self-direction onto that design in seventh grade and expect it to take. Peter Gray, who’s written more carefully about this than anyone (I agree with him on play and disagree with him hard on screens, and both are in the essays below), makes the point that children in every culture that’s ever been studied educate themselves through play and exploration when adults get out of the way. That matches what I saw. The kids who still had the engine running at fifteen were almost always the ones whose afternoons had been left alone.

What it looks like in my house

Academic work in our homeschool takes about two hours a day, sometimes less, and I know how that sounds to a parent whose kid is in a building for seven. The reason it works is not that my kids are special. It’s that the other five hours aren’t empty, they’re the part where the actual learning happens, because that’s when somebody wants to know something and nobody’s standing between her and finding out. My job in those hours is mostly to find the book, the class or the materials when a kid asks, and then to not do the thing for her. That second part is harder than it sounds, and I get it wrong plenty.

Where to start, depending on what brought you here

If you’re here because you searched the term, read Child-Led Learning: What It Is and What It Looks Like in My House first, because it’s the same idea from the inside of a real week, and then Your Child’s Interests, which is about why so many kids can’t name one by fifth grade and what to do about it.

If you’ve got a baby or a toddler and you want to understand what she’s doing when she does the same strange thing for an hour, that’s Play Schemas, Why Babies Throw Things on the Floor (filed under Rhythm, but it belongs here too), Piaget’s Stages of Play and Music and Movement for Babies and Toddlers.

If your kid is older and you’ve been told play is over, read Big Kids Need Play Too and Mixed-Age Play, then Risky Play for the climbing and Uninterrupted Play for the part where you leave the room.

If you want the materials, there’s Loose Parts Play (the list is already in your recycling) and The Best Soil for Mud Play. And if your kid has stopped reading, When Your Child Refuses to Read is the one I’d hand you, because it’s where this lane and school collide hardest.

One thing to try this week

For one week, when your kid asks you a question you could answer, don’t. Say “huh, I don’t know, how could we find out?” and then actually wait, and do it as a habit rather than a technique, because kids can smell a technique. The first few times she’ll look at you like my ninth graders did, because she’s waiting for the directions… and then, if you can hold out, she’ll go find out. That’s the engine turning over. It was always there.

Maria Montessori said the greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say the children are now working as if she did not exist. That is the whole goal, in a classroom or a kitchen, and it is available to you starting this week.

If your kids are in school and you’ve been feeling this for a while, Breaking Default is where I walk through how a family decides what childhood is actually for before the system decides for them. If you’re already homeschooling, start here instead and I’ll send you to the right place.