This post is longer than usual, and I am hoping the coming weekend gives you the opportunity to sit with it.

Kirsten Olson of our Ho‘ohana Community shared a wonderful essay with us at Joyful Jubilant Learning, asking that we self-professed lifelong learners offer our thoughts and suggestions and collaborate with her.

Titled New Learners for the New Economy, her essay instantly resonated with me as a workplace culture coach, because it addresses the qualities and attributes which are most important for employee learners – information that is essential basic understanding for any who are managers in today’s workplaces.

As I wrote for her in my first comment there (yes, I continued to write more than one!)

“Number 12 on your list is what resonates most strongly with me, and as an underlying premise for everything else:

12. See learning as pleasure. It is! There is almost nothing more exciting than the adventure of a new learning project. Live this adventure. This alone will make you a vital, energetic, standout employee.

I have seen the results of learning joy (or the absence of it) play out so predictably throughout my lengthy career stint as a manager —and I’ve felt it acutely as a mother. Learning is the great enabler; a means to some end, and when learning is joyful we thrill to that process instead of feeling it laboriously.

When I speak to those in education, I am doing so wearing the hat of a businesswoman and prospective employer for their students, and my goal IS to impress upon them that the adult economy is inheriting the generation they get to mentor first. The subject matter is largely irrelevant (including MWA which I have been invited to present to them); it’s laboratory work for the true deliverable – people who love learning. Students will need to do it for themselves once their teachers disappear from the rhythm of daily life.

I impress upon employers that they must now step in for those teachers who have disappeared from daily view, but there is no guarantee that will happen. Teachers choose their career so they can teach: Unfortunately, managers choose their careers for a whole host of other reasons. Our guarantee of a productive, creative and adaptive society is the lifelong learner him/herself, and what a magnificent bonus when the fringe benefit is an atmosphere of constant joy.”

This term, will your students be “wounded by school?”

Kirsten brought us her essay as principal of Old Sow Consulting and author of Wounded By School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up To Old School Culture.

As described on her website:

“This controversial new book says that the way we educate millions of American children alienates students from a fundamental pleasure in learning, and that pleasure in learning is essential to real engagement, creativity, intellectual entrepreneurship, and a well lived life.”

Here is a short-form list of what Kirsten calls “twelve critical ‘habitudes’ of learners in the new economy. These habits and attitudes are crucial to adapting to our new information-overload economy, thriving amidst constant change, and allowing you to enjoy your work more.”

I encourage you to visit New Learners for the New Economy at Joyful Jubilant Learning for their full descriptions, and also for the thoughtful conversation which continues in the comments there: I only tease you with these on purpose: Click over and read the original essay. As a bonus you will see how Kirsten continues the discussion with an adult audience of very passionate tertiary learners!

Even better, jump into the conversation there and meet Kirsten yourself.

1.  Be highly adaptive.
2.  Ask great questions.
3.  Be curious about everything.
4.  Have a broad knowledge base that you are always expanding.
5.  Be good at seeing patterns.
6.  Be team players who share what they know willingly and generously.
7.  Be a glass-half-full resource managers.
8.  Understand that every contact matters.
9.  Know that hierarchy doesn’t matter.
10.  Be choiceful about how you socialize.
11.  Own mistakes and be an error alchemist.
12.  See learning as pleasure.

Please: Make this Our New Reality

There are two primary ways I see this listing being of the utmost relevance to you who teach, and no matter who your students might be, for we are all living in this “new economy” of which Kirsten speaks:

1. Apply them for you and for a growth shift in your personal learning attitudes.

I will be direct: I am a verbal evangelist about the pressing need for ‘academics’ in education to become true learners once again, for as I see it, tenure and administrative seniority has created way too many know-it-alls who stopped learning a long, long time ago. Not everyone: I do not mean to stereotype all teachers, however the presence of non-learners in faculty ranks remains oppressively prevalent. If you stop learning, how dare you teach! You have zero learner’s empathy.

I challenge all who teach – and all who manage – to adapt Kirsten’s list over the next year in a self-coaching program, working on one of them each and every month.

That’s exactly what I will be doing.

2. Apply them for your students as a coach and mentor would: Activate and facilitate.

Apply them no matter how old your students may be, from K-12 through adult tertiary learning in continuing education, our workplaces and communities. Get them to participate, and co-author this shift in learning attitude as an underlying supplementary curriculum framed within the coming term, however long that might be for you. Stifle your natural impulse to teach and instruct, replacing it with the new learning involved in being a coach, mentor (as Dean has been urging us) activator and facilitator.

Ask your students to prioritize the list in the way they see it being most sequential and consequential to their learning development:

—From Managing with Aloha (page 136):
You are sure to feed your body each day, aren’t you? Well, new knowledge is the food for mind, heart and soul. Without it, you are not providing nourishment for your overall well-being. We grow as we learn.

To a business, knowledge is the asset of intellectual capital. Great managers have intellectual capital in good supply, and they work at refreshing it and keeping it well-stocked.

I stand firm and unmoving in my belief that someone who calls themselves a manager of people must be a learner, and they must dedicate themselves to non-stop, sequential and consequential learning. Sequential in that it builds upon previous lessons learned, and it takes you through a process where you question instruction and do not always accept what you are taught at face value; you polish it like a gem in your mind until something about it rings true for you. Consequential in that it is worthwhile stuff; it makes a difference for you, and you aren’t simply collecting lessons on some scorecard. There’s some personal take-away in it for you. Now that you know it, you’re going to use it.

There is a bonus 3rd application. Values-Based Learning.

Values-Based Learning is what Teaching with Aloha stands for; it is the way that we seek to serve you.  To repeat the last line of that quote above: “Now that you know it, you’re going to use it.”

As you work on the two adaptations I suggest above, listen carefully.

With number 1 (a self-coaching attitude shift) listen to your self-talk, and the values you find are driving you, struggling to be heard as your own expression of learning joy.

With number 2 (facilitating an attitude shift in your students) listen to their feedback and resist your own urges to control the shaping of a program which results, so that you can hear the values which drive them, struggling to be heard as their expressions of learning joy.

As you might imagine, I was ready to do a quick match game here for you, for a Managing with Aloha value quickly jumps out at me in connection to Kirsten’s list. But if I did that it would be a disservice to you: My answers would quiet the voice of your values.

I had told you we would take a different approach here; and it is a learning approach.

I encourage you to use the MWA listing we have provided for you here at Teaching with Aloha, so you can get the twofer of learning our Language of Intention. However you do the match game.

Your learning for our new economy depends on it, and I know you are fully capable of setting the best possible example for your students to follow.

If you would like to talk about this more, please let me know: It is vitally important, and I will make the time.

We Ho‘ohana together, Kākou.
With much aloha,
Rosa

Workplace Aloha Coach and Author Rosa Say

We have a monthly learning practice at our sister site, Joyful Jubilant Learning, which I strongly recommend you adopt and adapt in some way, weaving it into this gift of a brand new school year: The practice is called Rapid Fire Learning.

The exercise is a simple one: On the 25th of each and every month, we write a short list of 5 things we felt we have learned within the month todate.

If you click over there right now – you are invited to try it, and add your learnings to the conversation! – you will instantly see why RFL frames my favorite week at that site. When I have the time online, I will pop back frequently to see what has been added, and by who.

The intention within the RFL exercise is to value our learning, and isn’t that something you would love to see grow in the intentions of your school year as well?

Can you imagine how gaining learning energy like now being shared there at JJL, would light you up each month and invigorate you when it was shared with you from your students?

There is a complete write up of RFL on this page, however let’s think about how we could adapt it and make it our own:

1. Imagine RFL as a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise you start the classroom morning with on the last day of each month. You could devote just 10 minutes at most: A minute to frame a question, such as “Write 5 things you feel you have learned this month about [our course of study]” with 8 minutes to respond, and the last minute to collect the papers which will help you chart the class progress. Did they learn what you had so fervently hoped they would?

2. Imagine RFL as a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise you do each month with your fellow teachers over coffee in the faculty lounge. Now the prompting could be, “Let’s compare notes: Write down 5 things you feel you have learned from your class this month, for as we all know, our students teach us too.”

3. The questions can change as your learning intention shifts from a month to month basis. “Write down 5 things you have learned from another person here on faculty since the school year started. Write their names down too, and before the day is over let them know, and say thank you.”

How else could RFL help you value your learning in a personal way as a teacher?

From Managing with Aloha:
‘Ike loa is the value of learning.
Seek knowledge, for new knowledge is the food for mind, heart and soul.
Learning inspires us,
and with ‘Ike loa we constantly give birth to new creative possibilities.