ARCHIVED—Building passion for learning
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- The importance of mentors
- What do you want?
- What do you have?
- What do you need?
- Where are you going to get it?
- What will you do with it?
Richard Ford
Creative Inquiry Centre
William Lyon Mackenzie Collegiate Institute
North York, Ontario
Richard Ford believes that his role as a teacher is to create interest and desire for learning — what he calls passion — in students, and invokes this through group mentoring. He puts the students in charge of their own learning, teaches them to consider unconventional sources and solutions, and leads them to success.
With passion, students can do and learn anything they want. In the Creative Inquiry Centre at William Lyon Mackenzie Collegiate Institute (an interdisciplinary resource space of computers and other equipment), students find innumerable opportunities to pursue their passion while he ensures that they meet and exceed curriculum outcomes and expectations.
Mr. Ford is currently on a leave of absence from the North York school board in Ontario. He is a co-founder of KidsNRG Inc., a problem-solving company specializing in youth development.
The importance of mentors
All the successful people I have ever known have had a mentor at some point in their life, someone who taught them and encouraged them to take risks with new experiences. I owe a great deal to the mentors in my life. So, instead of simply teaching information, I concentrate on being a mentor to my students, and training them to be mentors to each other, creating what I call mentor groups. I use just one basic principle: I never do anything for the students that they could do for themselves. I cannot give them passion, and I do not give them any answers. They must find passion and answers themselves.
A KidsNRG (the company I co-founded) team, whose members were already mentoring each other, was once asked to create a mission statement for the school of the future, in two days. At first, they had no idea how to approach the problem. Did the client want them to foresee the future, or say what they wished the future would bring? After hours of discussion, the group decided that they could not answer with a closed-ended mission statement. Instead, their presentation took the form of five questions.
- What do you want?
- What do you have?
- What do you need?
- Where are you going to get it?
- What will you do with it?
I find this list of questions to be both profound and applicable to many other projects. I now use these questions as a guide when creating a mentor group.
What do you want?
What someone wants is a good indicator of who they are as an individual. We work to get what we want. Where we work, what we study in order to do that work, who we work with, and what we think about, all create and change our personality.
This is where creating passion comes in. It is the passion to get what you want, and to learn and create that motivates people. This is my expertise. In the Creative Inquiry Centre I help the students figure out what they want badly enough to work hard for it. I ask big, open-ended questions such as, What project are you interested in? What do you want to do with it? What do you want to learn? I give them permission to talk about themselves, and I really listen.
By finding out what the students want to do, and then supporting them in every way possible, I facilitate their own learning process. I ask questions to help them find out what they want to do. I encourage them to explore for themselves ways to get what they want. I help them figure out what they want to learn. As I see it, a teacher should transfer responsibility for what has to be learned to the students, because when the students take on the responsibility, they will go beyond what anyone expects.
Some of what they want may not seem important, but every goal works towards developing passion in learning. Do you want to do it on time? Do you want to be more organized? Do you want to learn something in particular?
What do you have?
In order to be mentors to each other, group members need to develop trust and a common pool of knowledge. An initial discussion about what they want, and what they like doing helps everyone get to know their group mates, and to know each other's strengths and skills. Then they can begin to determine what they have within the group itself and work together.
On the first day of an Emerging Technologies Program class — a computer class for students with little previous exposure to computers who are unlikely to pursue higher education — I explained to the students that the first project was for each of them to design a web page by the end of the week. One girl asked, "What's a web page?" and I shrugged and said, "I don't know." (I really do not make anything easy for them.) Then I asked the class, "Who knows anything about web pages?" and six students put up their hand. I suggested that the rest of the class remember those faces, because for this project they were the experts. I turned to leave the room. "Oh, by the way, one last thing," I said. "If everyone doesn't present a web page with text, a graphic and a link, then everyone gets zero."
By the second day, some of the students were going around asking others if they needed help. They had to learn to cooperate because there were only 15 computers for 30 students. They also had to learn to communicate and solve problems because there were 15 different mother tongues in the class. They had to take responsibility for their own learning and for the success of the entire group.
What do you need?
An important step in any project is determining the gap between the resources and information you already have and those that you need to complete the project. In the case of the Emerging Technologies Program students, when they had exhausted every resource they had and still could not find a solution to a problem, I allowed them to come to me for assistance. By the end of the week, they had all found what they needed to create a web page (with very little help from me).
The next step was to present their web pages to the class. One boy from Sri Lanka who spoke very little English hid at the back because he was too shy to go in front of the class. I coaxed him to the front, and he mustered up the courage to say, "My web page… first time… graphics… see link. Thank you." All the other students applauded. Everyone knew what an accomplishment it was for this boy to speak in front of everyone else. Later, he told me, "I am proud."
By developing mentor groups I can accommodate different learning styles and abilities. The self-directed learners take off at their own pace, once I have given them a start. The ones that need a little or a lot of coaching get what they need because I have time to give it. I just move from group to group as the students work, judging the emotional tone and giving encouragement or guidance as it is required.
Where are you going to get it?
The key to a mentor group is that everyone helps to complete a project, whether it's designing a web page or hosting a large conference. Often, the information is there in the group. By asking and learning from each other, the students develop trust and confidence in the group and in themselves that is invaluable. With this confidence, they find it easier to admit that they don't know all the answers, and easier to approach other sources outside the group for help. This gives them great self-assurance and leads them to try an even bigger project next time. Every time they take on a new challenge, they learn something about the world and about themselves.
Elementary and high school courses have guidelines. These guidelines, or curriculum objectives, are broken down into problems, which are then presented to the students as a way of teaching them the curriculum. Sometimes, students are interested in solving the problem the way it is presented. Other times they are not, and that's when they become bored. My job as a facilitator is to find the problem that the students want to solve. It will still satisfy the curriculum objectives, but the students will be interested and passionate about it; they will want to work on it and they will learn.
Project management, organization, graphic design, scheduling, deadlines, information and technical support — these are all things that the students need at one point or another. As I see it, when they know what they need, they will find the answers. This is why I call myself a facilitator rather than a teacher, because I do not think I need to "teach" anything. When the students want to know, they'll teach themselves. If anything, I encourage them to want to know.
What will you do with it?
After the first week in the Emerging Technologies Program, when they designed their first web page, the students launched into Web design for real clients. They learned about this new media — the Internet — on the job. They developed language and presentation skills, they learned how to interact with clients and meet deadlines, but most important they learned how to share expertise and how to find what they needed. They learned to be mentors and find mentors.
One group built the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's movie website. IBM hired a group to create a KidsCD-ROM about a student-created conference called Minds Meeting Media that brought together 1990 kids from across Toronto to present animation and multimedia projects.
Every time the students met a client or made a presentation of a completed project, they were performing. Performance changes you. It is one of the milestones of life that I think everyone should experience. Practice is fine, but actually getting up and demonstrating what you have learned, be it a piano concerto or your own first website, is a life-changing experience. The more performance opportunities we create for the students, the more we help them find what they want, the more they will change, grow and take responsibility for their own lives.