Empowerment through education and bucking the damn system

Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Learning by John Spencer and A.J. Juliani is a guide for teachers and school administrators hungry to shift their students from compliant boredom to passionate learning. Students spend 14,000 hours in classrooms following an education path laid out over 100 years ago. And it’s just not working.

Empower offers some pretty compelling ideas for educators who are ready to buck the system and, perhaps, already are but need some inspiration. This is a book for teachers and lovers of learning that are sold on the importance of developing activated, engaged learners and aren’t afraid to speak out and try something new:

• Student empowerment is where it’s at. Period. While the education system isn’t going to change overnight, there are opportunities for teachers to have an impact by connecting skill building with problem-solving that makes learning something relevant and alive in students’ real lives. Gives kids choices however you are able to. Let them own their project work and uncover new skillsets that even the most seasoned educator wouldn’t have thought to pair them with. Student empowerment, while messy and a little scary at times, shifts every facet of the classroom experience for the better.
• We must recognize our current education system as a place where students are expected to follow rules and wait to be told what to do – but school doesn’t have to look like this, just as we don’t want the world to look like this.
• Every student is a maker and makers are better equipped for life. Empowering students to do, build and create with what they are learning grows a future generation of innovators that understand how to think, experiment, fail and iterate. These abilities are what will drive these students in their future careers – curing cancer, finally get us flying cars and – basically – changing the face of our planet as we know it. It starts today in the classroom and is a million times more important than acing a standardized test.
• Our learning system must include failing (not failure, there’s a difference).  Failure is permanent. Failing is all about the process – it’s a stop on the way to success that builds the “grit, resiliency and the can-do attitude that make learning contagious.” In a culture obsessed with winners, we have to teach students that those very winners are probably the people who fail the most. They just don’t.ever.stop.

This book spoke to me both as a parent of a 7th grader currently riding the ups and downs of public school life and as a returning current college student myself. It took me decades to truly fall in love with learning. While my formative school years did present some pretty incredible teachers and classes that resonated with me, in retrospect it feels like much of my student life was spent just trying to ‘play the school game’ and get the A.

It wasn’t until I was an adult and began to choose to learn subjects that mattered to me and applied them directly to my life that things really clicked. Engagement, the feeling of empowerment and choice in my education were the missing ingredients. While I still had to take a statistics class in college (not really my subject matter first choice, per se), I did so in a learning environment that was heavy on practical application and allowed me to have more control over project work and classroom interaction. Suddenly Stats class was something I looked forward to!

With Empower‘s encouragement and ideas, teachers can begin to experiment in shifting their students from a compliance to engagement mentality even within the rigid confines of a prescribed and one-size-fits-all system – one ‘Genius Hour’ and maker project at a time.