project-based homeschooling

Outtakes from PBH found in my writing journal:

If you get hung up on the superficial, you can’t make progress on what’s deep and meaningful.

Let go of your ego about what your child’s progress/results/products look like to others. It stands in the way of true understanding.

If YOU really understand what your child is doing/what they have accomplished, you will be able to show it to others and help them understand — and hopefully it will lessen your need for their approval.

You want your child to be self-confident and be discerning about whose opinion they respect. Embody that value in your own life.

Let your children have their own ideas, recognize their own possibilities, find their own way, measure their own progress. If they don’t learn these skills now, when will they learn them?

Last week we sat down to watch the first episode of season 5 of “Merlin,” a BBC TV show we discovered last year. We watched the first four seasons on DVD and really enjoyed it. In fact, our Christmas card was an homage to the show — the photo above is of the stamp I carved from my older son’s drawing of Camelot for the front of the card; my younger son’s drawing of a knight decorated the inside (see below).

The first episode of the new season was a disappointment — not because the show itself had lost something, but because the experience of watching it was markedly less enjoyable. Commercials constantly interrupt the action (usually at the most exciting part of the story). Scenes that might be related by theme or meaning are so chopped up and separated, any nuance is lost. The scenes become disconnected from one another. You can’t fall into the story world. You stay on the outside of the experience peering in, feeling a bit frustrated.

There is so much more detail and complexity when you see the story as a whole: emotional arcs, symbolism, deeper meaning, relationships. You aren’t having the full experience when it’s chopped into bits (episodes seen days apart) and then minced (interrupted every few minutes by commercials).

The original story loses half its meaning and enjoyment when it’s chopped up for consumption on television — much as interesting topics of study lose their flavor and engaging qualities when they’re chopped up for consumption in learning.

Authentic learning and understanding require immersive experiences. The same material learned in a classroom or delivered in a unit cannot have the same impact, even if the subject is the same. The sad truth is, no matter how hard we may work to make topics of study interesting or relevant, the delivery method can kill their potential.

For a learning experience to be immersive, you must have

- all the time you need

- freedom to explore connections

- as few interruptions or transitions as possible

- the opportunity to think deeply about complex things

- time to build the skills you need to produce the work you envision

and so on. The key is time — and freedom to use that time to connect to the material in your own way.

Have you ever done a project for school that was frustrating because you knew it could have been fun — and you could have really learned something — if only you’d had adequate time to spend on it and do it the right way? I had that experience all the time in college, never mind grade school or high school.

For an immersive experience, you need time — lots of it. Weeks, months, even years. You need freedom — to make choices, to pursue side trails, to acquire skills, to have ideas, to find ways to share what you know, to find cohorts and mentors. You need the ability to concentrate and lose yourself in your work — to be in the flow.

Because we think children need to learn a little about a lot of different things, we structure learning in chopped-up little bits and constantly interrupt them with transitions as we hop from one subject to another. We don’t have time to dig down deep into one idea, so children never move beyond a surface acquaintance with any one subject.

Unfortunately, they come to believe that’s what learning is. They don’t get the opportunity to experience the power of an immersive learning experience.

Somewhere in the hours our children spend “learning,” they need time to relax, brainstorm, plan, try, fail. They need time to collaborate with friends, identify and solve problems, try again with a new idea. They need to learn and compare different tools and materials. They need to acquire skills to do something real — a task they’ve set for themselves. They need to talk to experts and find mentors, to master what they think they know so they can share it with others.

If we aren’t giving children immersive learning experiences, we’re cheating them. We’re only putting them on a nodding acquaintance with what real learning is.

Books and curricula and smartboards and iPads — they’re great. But we have to invest in our children’s education the two things that matter most — time and the freedom to learn to use it to do something meaningful.

“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people,” Bezos told Wired in 2011. “But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that." — The Jeff Bezos School of Long-Term Thinking @ 99U

Part of the problem with how we think about children and learning is our focus on very short periods of time.

If you prioritize a “well-rounded education,” you have to preplan everything, label it, chop it up into smallish chunks, and then distribute it across the time you’ve allotted — usually a nine-month school year.

If you have to fragment your learning goals and pour them into your schedule first, then you will have a difficult time fitting in a self-directed, long-term project.

If self-directed learning is a goal, you have to fit that big rock in first. Set aside the idea of a nine-month “school year” and forget about artificially separating out subject areas (history, literature, science). Prioritize slow learning. Focus on holistic learning. Instead of requiring X amount of a certain subject area each week/month/year, measure it over a more generous period of time — say, two or three years. Look at your child’s long-term project work (no planning ahead) and make your authentic assessment then:

What was read?

What was written?

What experiments were planned?

What knowledge was gathered?

What was built/created?

What was shared?

What habits were formed?

What learning was accomplished?

You may find your child is getting a balanced educational diet and requires very little adult-directed supplementation. But you won’t know unless you try. And it requires a leap of faith: a belief that child-directed learning is complex, multilayered, and inherently multidisciplinary.

Investing in your child’s education and taking a long view — giving them time to grow and develop interests, ideas, and plans over months and even years — allows your child to achieve something most schoolchildren never experience: deep, authentic engagement.

There are three levels of learning in project-based homeschooling:

- learning about our topic (primary)

- acquiring the skills we need to meet short-term goals (secondary), and

- developing the habits of mind that help us solve problems, communicate, think flexibly, and so on (tertiary).

One way we can help our children get to those deeper levels is by developing a long-term mindset toward meeting authentic learning goals.

The short-term, preplanned, fragmented form of education was created to fit a particular schedule. Once you break free from that schedule, you can hack that method of learning as well. Living a learning life means you have the freedom and time to fill it with something more meaningful.

The best way to increase the odds that your child will live a certain way is to live that way yourself. The best way to raise readers is to read. The best way to raise doers is to do.

The best way to raise active, engaged learners is to be an active, engaged learner. — Project-Based Homeschooling: Mentoring Self-Directed Learners

Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting. In terms of teaching our children to dare greatly in the “never enough” culture, the question isn’t so much “Are you parenting the right way?” as it is: “Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?” — Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

Are you nurturing the traits within yourself that you want your children to have?

Come check out part 1 of an interview Christina did with me about project-based homeschooling on her site, Interest-Led Learning.

Project-based homeschooling is about learning how to help children stay with one idea longer. They have their own interests, their own questions, their own fascinations. We just have to pay attention to those interests and help them find answers to their questions and make their ideas happen.

Children can keep having a lot of different interests — we don’t try to keep them from getting excited about new ideas. We simply focus on supporting one strong interest so they can dig a little deeper and stay with it a little longer. We create a learning life that allows them to return to that interest again and again, over weeks and even months, until they are satisfied.

In essence, we encourage them to keep having a rich variety of interests while using projects to show them how much you can do with an interest.

Come read the rest!

Critique can be a valuable experience that even very young children can participate in (although we may not call it critique). When my school’s preschool students (age 3 and 4) shared their work with their classmates (a daily occurrence), they would explain what they had made, then they would ask for “questions, comments, or suggestions.”

The other students would then raise their hands, and the presenter would call on them. They could ask questions about the work. “Why did you put that part on?” They could make comments. “I like how you made the ladder.” They could make suggestions. “I think you should make that part yellow instead.”

The presenter would then respond to them. “I put that there because…” “Thank you.” “I might do that” or “No, thank you.” It was up to them whether they wanted to consider taking someone’s suggestion; if they didn’t want to, they needed to politely say, “no, thank you.” If the child said she did want to make some addition or change to her work, the teacher would note that on a post-it so it would be remembered the next day.

Critique is not only for sharing and talking about works of art — it can be used for sharing any kind of project work.

Sharing your work with others is a crucial part of project-based homeschooling. We really know something when we can explain it or teach it to someone else. And it’s important to make a contribution to the community. When we are working on our projects, we draw on community resources (museums, universities, libraries) and other people (experts, community members, librarians, etc.). When we produce work and share it with others, we are making our own contribution. We give as well as take; we’re part of the big conversation.

We started doing critiques with older children when we had a summer photography class. Much like the preschool class, the students would stand up in front of the group and show their work (first choosing the pieces they wanted to share — narrowing down their work was the first step), talk about it, and answer questions.

Parts of critique that are very useful for a child to learn/experience:

- sharing your work with others — beginning to think about the person who is seeing/hearing/experiencing your work

- beginning to anticipate your audience’s reaction while you are creating

- thinking about someone else’s point of view

- thinking about why you made the choices you did

- thinking about your own process: putting it into words

- thinking about accidental discoveries as well as deliberate choices

- articulating what you think and feel about someone else’s work

- learning to say something helpful — not necessarily about what you prefer, but to help the other person achieve his goal — learning to make good suggestions

- asking good, meaningful questions; making relevant observations

You can lead a critique like this with any group, maybe even siblings — but it is a learned skill. Children have to learn to make useful, meaningful comments, and they have to learn how to respond calmly and politely to the suggestions of others. Commit to doing it on a regular basis, and you give them the chance to develop those skills.

Tips:

- let the child control the process — speaking first, calling on people

- start by having them share their work, their intentions, their plans

- prompting “comments, questions, or suggestions” reminds them of what is useful to share

- don’t allow negative comments

We start laying the groundwork for critique when we talk to children meaningfully about their work. This can start when your children are very small.

Ask questions like

- What did you make/do?

- Why did you want to make/do this?

- What do you like about it?

- Did you have any problems?

- Is there anything more you want to do with this?

- Is there anything you want to add?

- Is there anything you want to change?

- Why did you decide to do X here? (Encourage them to explain their choices.)

When you talk to your child about his work, you encourage him to think about it more deeply.

You don’t need to save critique for when a work is finished. Sharing what they’ve made, talking about their work and plans, listening to what their peers have to say — all of things are helpful to a child who is in the midst of a work-in-progress. They firm up their own ideas and can decide whether to incorporate the suggestions of others. They pause while making to consider their plans, which may help make their plans more complex.

In this kind of active learning community, children learn to share ideas, think about their choices, help others with their projects, and seek out other opinions when they get stuck.

They learn to collaborate to solve problems, brainstorm possibilities, and look more deeply into their own decisions and the decisions of others.

Yes, the art teacher is the teacher, but a creative studio art teacher is confident enough to NOT make suggestions. Teachers model empathic critique expressing affirmative curiosity. They phrase open questions that focus thinking and allow a diversity of student responses. Students learn to learn to be their own decider in art. The creative teacher coaches students to experiment and find out for themselves what works by empathically asking each other what they see, why it produces the effect, what they think it means, and what purpose they see for the work. The creative coach encourages teamwork and student ownership by deferring to students for their input. The teacher develops student participation by affirming the phrasing of good open questions. …

We increase our learning when the questions build awareness and call attention to discoveries. Creative work always includes unintended outcomes and consequences. We find them. We use them. We build knowledge. We become artistic. Empathic critique is a commonly used skill for a successful artist and a successful life. — Marvin Bartel

Two nice follow-ups on “Why Skills Don’t Trump Passion” —

[Students] come to me and say, “Well, we’re getting out of college and we haven’t the faintest idea of what we want to do.

So I always ask the question, “What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?”

Well, it’s so amazing — as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say, “Well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as everyone knows, you can’t earn any money that way.” …

When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, “Well, you do that — and forget the money, because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is, to go on doing things you don’t like doing — which is stupid!”

Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.

And after all, if you do really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is — you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something … and then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much — somebody’s interested in everything. And anything you’re interested in, you’ll find others.

But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on spending time doing things you don’t like and to teach your children to follow in the same track.

See, what we’re doing is, we’re bringing up children, educating them, to live the same sort of lives that we’re living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same things…

And so therefore it’s so important to consider this question — what do I desire?

— Alan Watts

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. …

School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work. …

By the time they reach an age to think about what they’d like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking “I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world.” …

The most dangerous liars can be the kids’ own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. …

The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it — even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves? …

With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.

It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think — because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it — finding work you love does usually require discipline. …

Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it.

 

If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.

 

— Paul Graham, How to Do What You Love

I recently finished reading Cal Newport’s new book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love.

There is a kick-back against “finding your passion” and if you want to understand it, read this book. 

Many years ago, my husband and I watched a 60 Minutes segment about an automobile plant closing in Michigan and the effect on its workers, who had previously been making very nice salaries as union autoworkers.

They focused on a few workers and their post-layoff plans, and one woman they interviewed had settled on her new plan: to open a hot-dog restaurant. Selling only hot dogs — no burgers. They followed her around and asked her questions and the subtext was, “Brace yourself for the train wreck to come.”

Ever since then, our family code for an ill-thought-out plan is “hot-dog restaurant.”

In Newport’s book, the people who chase their passions are all would-be hot-dog restauranteurs. Meanwhile, his advice is to forget about passion and just settle down to acquire serious skills.  Stay where you are; keep doing what you’re doing right now. Be “so good they can’t ignore you.” You’ll build career capital and eventually earn more freedom and autonomy. That is where true career happiness lies, he says.

The problem is, by the end of the book, the examples given all blur together and people’s choices seem terribly similar except for how they are sorted: losers who failed were passion-chasers and winners who succeeded were craftsmen. The only thing that really separates them is the language Newport uses to describe their choices.

Lisa moved from an advertising career to start a yoga studio.

When Feuer left her advertising career to start a yoga studio, not only did she discard her career capital acquired over many years in the marketing industry, but she transitioned into an unrelated field where she had almost no capital. Given yoga’s popularity, a one-month training program places Feuer pretty near the bottom of the skill hierarchy of yoga practitioners, making her a long way from being so good she can’t be ignored. According to career capital theory, she therefore has very little leverage in her yoga-working life. It’s unlikely, therefore, that things will go well for Feuer — which, unfortunately, is exactly what ended up happening.

Giles moved from a successful programming career to pursue “a longstanding interest in filmmaking.”

“It’s not that the money was great … but just that it sounded like a lot of fun — one of Giles’ most important criteria for his working life. … Not long after I met Giles, after he had successfully scratched his Hollywood itch, he once again moved on. A publisher had asked him to write a book, and he had agreed — and why not? It seemed like an interesting thing to do.

“I talked to the recruiter about finding something I liked better, and he said I should be thrilled to have a job.” Giles being Giles, however, he ignored the recruiter, quit his job, and moved back to Santa Fe.

On the surface, both Lisa and Giles chased an interest — but whereas Lisa was described as “enthralled” and her choice as “ill-fated,” Giles’ choices were described as “remarkable” as he searched for his “mission” in life. Newport also made the point that Giles made use of his career capital — he incorporated computer programming into various jobs as he hopped around looking for something “interesting” to do. Lisa, on the other hand, was seen as losing all her career capital by moving from marketing to owning her own business — even though it seems like marketing skills would be an excellent base for a competitive small business. If her yoga business had been a success, that’s how her story would have been interpreted. If you fail, you were chasing passion; if you succeed, you just wanted to keep things interesting and be remarkable. A reviewer on Goodreads taught me the term for this type of convenient reasoning: retrospective coherence.

What does all this have to do with project-based homeschooling?

When educators take full control of curricula and leave kids entirely out of it — no self-directed learning, no long-term projects, no choice — they are building learning around 100% skills.

There are educators who say that project-based learning — or “child-led,” “interest-led,” or “passion-driven” learning — is too heavy on hot-dog restaurant emotion and weak on skills. This is the same argument Newport makes in his book: it’s not that skills trump passion (his subtitle!) but that skills are everything and passion should be entirely discarded.

The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous. Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

Keep in mind, it’s okay to do things that seem interesting to you (see Giles above) — just don’t go crazy and feel passionate about it.

Can you teach kids skills without tapping into their interests (or passions)? Sure. That’s how it’s usually done. Does it work well? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

What happens when we couple deep interests (cough — passions — cough) and learning? Are skills thrown out the window? “Skills — who needs skills when I have passion?!” This is how a lot of people view this kind of learning: they think that when you let kids direct their own learning, they’ll be lazy. They won’t challenge themselves. They’ll stop acquiring and practicing real skills.

This is, of course, completely false. In order to do anything you want to do, you need skills. And children who have some say in what they learn are self-motivated; they want skills because they want to meet their own goals.

I heard an educator say the problem with allowing kids to learn through projects is that they won’t acquire any knowledge. “What happens to content coverage? These kids aren’t going to know anything!” As if you could spend months digging deeply into a topic and not acquire knowledge. Or skills. When they hear “interest,” educators like these imagine Newport’s version of passion: a fantasy that floats above your head in a pink dream bubble.

To really learn something, you need both knowledge and skills. You have to gather the knowledge and then you have to work with it. To discard passion (or authentic interest) is to drain the life force from the learner and therefore from the work. Am I going to bring my best efforts to something that holds no interest for me? Am I going to achieve flow? Am I going to strive to challenge myself?

The real issue, in the end, is interests. Teaching works best when you teach students who agree that they really want to learn whatever it is you have to teach. This means making sure that students are preparing to do things they want to do and actually will do. That makes teaching much easier for all involved. The one-size-fits-all curriculum doesn’t work because one size doesn’t fit all. Let detail-oriented people learn detailed kinds of things. Let artistic people learn artistic kinds of things. Let logical people learn logical kinds of things. Everyone would be much happier and all would enjoy learning a lot more if we simply let people be themselves.” — Roger Schank, Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools

Project-based homeschooling combines interests (or passions) with long-term, deep, complex learning. Learning means knowledge and skills. Doing interesting work that is meaningful to you motivates you to bring your best effort. The difference between kids who manage and direct their own learning and kids doing work that, and I’m quoting something I saw on Pinterest the other day, “doesn’t even require your kids to have ideas” is, to borrow Newport’s word, remarkable.

Newport wanted to write a manifesto (he says so in the book), so he strayed away from the simple message that passion must be coupled with real skills. That is project-based homeschooling. They aren’t pipe dreams if you have the skills to turn them into reality. You aren’t a fool if you know how to fuse what you enjoy doing with what the world needs.

Here’s my takeaway after reading this book: Career advice tomes like this are not written for project-based homeschoolers — or for other homeschoolers/unschoolers who have already had years to deeply explore their interests.

Newport’s book has some good advice for 18-25-year-olds who have been pushed toward achievement their whole lives and who have a non-reality-based, pipe-dreamy idea of what they’d really like to do, which they call their “passion.”

It’s advice for people whose interests have never been connected with their work in any meaningful way.

This advice doesn’t work for kids who are experienced at coupling their interests with real-world experience, knowledge, and skills. These kids have already deeply explored their interests. They already know what it means to get beyond the honeymoon period to the place where real, challenging work is required. They have experienced the deep pleasure of having real skills and doing meaningful work.

These kids have shared what they know with others. They’ve connected with their community. Their experiences have firmly planted them in reality. Their interests aren’t pipe dreams and fantasies — they are gateways to the nexus of “what I like to do,” “what I have to give,” and “what people will pay for.”

Most career advice is for kids who came up through the regular system. It won’t help kids who were educated via an alternate path. These books are aimed at kids who haven’t initiated their own projects, haven’t explored their interests deeply, and haven’t learned how to find their place in the world. A project-based homeschooler is already way ahead of the game. They don’t need to be told to dump their passions and buckle down to sharpen their skills at whatever job they find themselves in after graduation. They already know how to combine interests, knowledge, skills, and hard work to build something the world needs. They’ve already moved on to asking deeper questions about their purpose. They have experience finding their place in the world and figuring out what they can contribute.

Skills don’t trump passion. Skills are what you know how to do. Passion is where you start finding out who you are, what you’re good at, and what the world needs.

People who are in touch with their soul know what they’re supposed to be doing in the world and what their way of contributing to life is, in the same way that people know what music they love and food they enjoy — not just life-sustaining food, but food that has flavor, that makes you feel nourished, even inspired. — Michael Meade

Everyone needs some help learning who they already are. That’s the root of genuine education and the task of real culture. — Michael Meade

Penelope Trunk wrote about my book this week and she said this:

I am very achievement oriented, so I see no point in a project that does not come with a big achievement at the end. Pickert's book is more small-scale and reasonable — like doing art projects…

Penelope got it wrong in a few ways. One, projects are not “small-scale and reasonable,” even when done by three- and four-year-olds. A group of preschool-age children at my private school did a year-long project during which they wrote books, created posters, wrote and performed skits, made a roomful of models, built props, painted a mural, painted some large canvases, identified and labeled and organized seashells and deep-sea life, built a child-size boat with authentic details, created a ocean habitat that filled a stage, took multiple field trips, and on and on and on. That’s not small scale. And those were very young children.

Two, project work is all about achievement — but the achievement is defined by the one doing the work. The work is owned by the child, controlled and directed by the child, and assessed by the child. It’s not judged from the outside; the child develops the ability to assess his own work. A young child who sets himself to a task and meets his own self-set goals feels authentic achievement. There is a world of difference between receiving approval from someone else and feeling confidence and satisfaction from within. Project-based homeschooling focuses on the latter.

Finally, you cannot dismiss the importance of becoming fluent in authentic art as “art projects.”

Authentic art is of crucial importance for young children. They are not yet able to read or write fluently. Authentic art enables children to work actively with knowledge and build thinking, learning, and communication skills.

They learn while they create two- and three-dimensional representations. The act of creating, say, a physical model of a Mars rover allows them to examine photos, listen to books and news articles being read aloud, incorporate details they understand, compare their work to the work of their friends, and add new details as they understand them, as well as mastering the art medium itself: learning how to build a construction, how to make the wheels really turn, how to choose the best material for each detail, how to apply paint and glue, how to fix their mistakes and solve problems, and so on.

They express what they know. What they make reveals their understandings, their questions, their ideas. Talking to a young child, you can get an idea of what they know and understand; watching them create two- and three-dimensional art reveals much, much more. Art is an additional way for them to communicate; this is why Reggio treats each different art medium as a language.

They figure out what they don’t understand. As they draw, paint, model in clay, and build constructions out of cardboard and wire and papier-maché, they come across details that elicit questions. They find out what they don’t know. As they share their work with others, their peers’ and family members’ questions and comments reveal their knowledge and the holes in that knowledge. This process continually moves them to deepen their understanding until they become experts.

As children get older, they can add writing to their list of ways to communicate what they know. They can write stories and books, they can blog and podcast, they can create websites and wikis and films. This is, again, not “small-scale and reasonable” — this is real, authentic work done by someone who wants to know and understand and communicate with other people.

Education should be a ramp that takes a child from age 3 to adulthood. To respect that a small child is full of ideas that deserve to be shared means allowing them a multitude of ways to express themselves — authentic art and dramatic play included. As the child grows in ability and skills, he will fold in reading, writing, and technology. It should be a smooth transition, layering skills upon skills so that a child who is 13 is expressing his ideas and questions and opinions in the same way he was at age 3, but with new tools. The work he did at 3 helps him do the work he is capable of at 13.

Instead of crafts, children need to become fluent at expressing their ideas through authentic art. They will acquire real skills and abilities — not just how to paint, but how to express an idea clearly; not just how to sculpt, but how to make a plan and execute it. Compare this to the typical crafts that are offered to children — “cute” activities that keep kids occupied and produce an expected outcome. “Here’s what it’s supposed to look like” does not inspire the kind of creative expression and pride in accomplishment that authentic art offers. “Here’s how you do it” does not lead to meaningful planning or problem-solving. We need to spend less time preparing children’s activities and more time building up their abilities.

Many adults have a dismissive attitude toward the work children do. They can’t tell the difference between a piece of authentic, creative work that expresses an idea and a handprint turkey. To understand this requires getting on the child’s level and endeavoring to understand his thought processes, his questions, his ideas. It requires giving up your own ideas about what he should do and asking him what he wants to do. If you don’t believe children are capable of deep thought and hard work, it’s doubtful you’ll make the effort to see what they can do when allowed to make their own decisions, let alone what they can do when they are mentored and supported.

We have to commit to learning what our children can do. We can set them to a series of tasks or we can help them forge their own path. We can keep them busy with activities or we can help them build up their abilities. We can keep thinking of them as pre-adults or we can learn to respect them as strong and capable of building their own knowledge. It’s our choice. Our children will fit themselves to our expectations. They will see themselves the way we see them. So we should look as closely at possible — at them and at ourselves.

In my book, I write about the importance of teaching your kids how to finish.

Many adults, let alone children, stall in the information-gathering stage of a project. They keep collecting inspiration and ideas without ever moving forward to the point of making something of their own. Forget about finishing — they can’t start.

Finishing is a key skill. The beginning part of a project is the least difficult and often the most fun. There are materials to buy and inspirational photos to look at. The middle is when things get harder. And sometimes we never make it past the middle. Everything gets shoved into a bag and then into the back of a closet, and we move on to another fun beginning.

Perseverance and grit are key traits for successful people. But prioritizing learning how to finish doesn’t mean you never, ever quit anything. An equally important skill is figuring out when it’s okay to not finish.

If we determine to never, ever quit anything, ever, then we will spend a lot of our time just gritting our teeth and stumping to the end of something we wish we’d never started in the first place. There’s probably not a lot of useful learning there. You can’t get where you want to go if you spend months trudging in the wrong direction after you figured out long ago you turned left when you should have turned right.

Good quitting requires

- being able to admit you made a mistake.

- recognizing when the path you’re on isn’t taking you where you want to go.

- being able to let go of the time and effort you’ve put in.

- accepting new information that changes your old plan.

- acknowledging you aren’t getting the results you were after.

- realizing you have better options.

So how do we balance the importance of finishing with knowing when to quit?

Persistence and fulfilling your commitments are character traits that are very important to most parents. We want our kids to go the distance. We want them to stick it out when the going gets tough. We want them to be determined, and we want them to meet their commitments. These are all good traits to have, but they don’t exist in a vacuum. What if our kids are in a bad relationship? What if their coach is destroying their love for a sport?

Do we want our kids to learn that if they start something, we will always make them stick with it — so maybe it’s better not to start, so you don’t end up doing something for months that you don’t enjoy? With all due respect to Tiger Mom, you’re not teaching kids persistence forcing them to complete something *you* want them to do. Perseverance and grit are traits that come from the inside. If someone else is making you persist, then you’re not developing persistence any more than a person being dragged by a rope is learning to walk. 

We need to learn to find our way — through exploring, through experience — to the richest areas for potential growth. This may require adjusting your sails, reworking your plan, replanning your route. We need the freedom and flexibility to shift to a path that’s going to give us a better outcome. This is a learned skill and an equally valuable trait: learning when to cut your losses, being able to recognize a better opportunity.

There is good and bad persistence. Good persistence allows you to forge ahead through difficulties to accomplish what you set out to do. Bad persistence keeps you on a nonproductive course because you can’t bring yourself to admit you made a mistake. You don’t want to lose the time and money you’ve already invested, so you end up losing more. It’s important to learn the difference between the two. It’s important to learn how to examine what’s happening and determine whether it’s in your best interest to stick with what you’re doing … or quit. And if quitting is the best course, then it takes just as much strength of character to make that call as to stick with a path that’s taking you in a direction you don’t really want to go.