Culture is the foundation of any learner-centered ecosystem. The big blue outer circle, illustrated in Learner-Centered Collaborative’s Ecosystem model, is representative of a big blue body of water we are all swimming in—in our classrooms, schools, and districts. Culture is something we always feel but might not always recognize while we’re in it. We become accustomed to a way of doing things and a way of being that aligns with the subtle and less subtle elements of culture, often without much thought and whether or not we agree.

When we consider the transition to a learner-centered approach from a school-centered one, we’re undertaking a paradigm shift that places us in an entirely new body of water. One that reorients the system away from hierarchy, compliance, and standardization to one that redefines success through the development of whole-learner outcomes that cultivate learners’ interests, strengths, needs, skills, habits, knowledge, and goals.

In this new body of water, certainly, there are things we do the same in a learner-centered paradigm but the key to change is how we be. Buses will run. Lunch will be served. New teachers will be hired. We will work with families. Budgets will be made. New programs will be implemented. How we choose to engage in all those things, our underlying mindsets, however, are different. How we do something changes what people experience and feel and therefore how they act and what they do.

Read More: Why Mindset Matters in Cultivating Learner-Centered Change

Behaviors (Doing) and Mindsets (Being)

When we focus on behavior, a program, or a new practice we’re only addressing the tip of the iceberg and not where meaningful and long-lasting change really happens. If we truly embodied the belief that educators are trained professionals who can be trusted and respected, how would that shift the way we behave? If the system really honored the belief that each learner has unique strengths and passions that shape how they learn, how different would our learning environments look and feel?

Image Source: Alex Carabi 

The underlying assumptions of our industrial era model of schooling lead to conditions and structures that disempower educators and learners, which frustrate many of us who hold learner-centered beliefs. When we focus on the things we do without awareness of our mindsets, it’s easy to be drawn back to what we’re used to, even when it’s something we want to change. Shifting toward a learner-centered approach requires us to check if what we’re doing is sending the message of how we wish learning to be.

How do we get at mindsets?

If mindset is a key to a learner-centered paradigm, how do we recognize and shift it? Helping people see the water they are swimming in is hard from the inside. Creating experiences outside our day-to-day can be a powerful way to reveal the beliefs and assumptions we may not be aware of in our culture. Getting outside of your context can include visiting other classrooms within your school, visiting other schools entirely, or even getting out of school completely through analogous experiences.

School Visits

When we visit other schools, we often focus on what they are doing well that we’re interested in bringing to our students, like portfolios or different schedules. We often focus on the program and structures that enable the practices we observe, hoping to understand what to do when we get home.

However, structures like portfolios can exist in a lot of different contexts–including school-centered ones. Knowing that doing a practice isn’t where meaningful change comes from, it’s important to pay attention to the mindsets at play (which are made up of underlying assumptions and beliefs that drive the practice). Without a mindset shift, that new practice or new structure could continue to live in a school-centered paradigm where a mindset of compliance over engagement persists.

With mindset as your grounding, you’ll expand your visit experience beyond what you see–beyond a structure or process to replicate. Pay attention to what feels different to you. It might feel really good, easy, light, like a breath of fresh air. But, it might also feel uncomfortable (if it’s really different from your experience).

This might look like learners having a lot of freedom of movement in the space, which might represent a mindset of trust over fear. Or learners having choice in their experiences, which might represent a mindset of empowering over controlling. The opportunity of the visit is to identify the underlying mindset and then explore how they designed practices to create that experience.

Analogous Experiences

In the design thinking world, analogous experiences are often used to shake up stuck thinking by looking at how people in other fields address related questions or challenges. Immersing ourselves in other fields, just like visiting other schools, allows us to get out of our bodies of water. When we’re in someone else’s context and culture we can feel the difference from our own. Recognizing that difference is what helps us actually see and feel our culture.

There are a lot of resources out there to support the design of analogous experiences (here, here, and here are places to start). This could take on a variety of forms. The box below describes a day-long experience but any of the pieces of that day could be an experience itself. It’s a matter of looking for where else in the world the mindset you are interested in cultivating exists.

How This Looks in Practice

Coming out of the COVID shutdown while I was the Director of Embark Education, we were cohorted and learner movement was limited. With these constraints, we still wanted to foster the organic flow of people and learning in our spaces.

Unpacking the idea of flow, we wanted to shift our mindset away from control, which felt necessary and important in the COVID moment. To embrace flow from different angles, we created an analogous experience as a back-to-school professional learning day to dive deep into questions of how people connect to and move with each other, how academic disciplines are connected to each other in their application in the real world, and how people are connected to and move within physical spaces and with new ideas. 

The day consisted of a variety of thematic activities. A flood management expert spoke to us about a major flooding incident our community experienced earlier that year. We visited our Amtrak station where we observed how people flowed through or were constrained by a physical space. We got there and back using Lime Scooters–moving through traffic and parks and playing with speed on the way there. To close the day, we had a personal experience with flow (and for fun team building) by tubing on a local creek.

Throughout the day, we reflected on our experiences and the implications for our work. For example, at the whitewater park where we went tubing, they designed rapids to practice, on a manageable scale, the rapids you would find on a bigger river. This led us to develop a common weekly structure for students to practice the skills necessary to complete more extended, complex projects.

The day also influenced our reactions to learners’ less productive use of different spaces. Rather than put up barriers that were unlikely to hold back the flood of usual habits, we worked with learners to examine their choices and supported them in making and reinforcing new ones–giving learners a chance to choose another path. We also brought different activities to those spaces—holding small group lessons or 1:1 meetings—creating subtle shifts in their habits, like a boulder might shift the flow of a river.

These practices themselves are not revolutionary, which is important to note. As educators, we already had answers for what to do. What changed was our focus on a way of being rather than the practice. As a result, the experiences of learners and educators felt very different. Because we were intentionally leaning away from control and leaning into flow, our work with learners felt much more collaborative and supportive instead of one-sided and directive. Sometimes it takes seeing things from a different perspective to recognize the subtle shifts that can have a big impact on culture.

Give it a Try!

As we work to create learner-centered environments, examining our own water is key to cultivating the mindset shifts needed to change the water we’re swimming in. If you want to create an experience that shakes up your perspective on what is possible, check out our Mindset Reflection tool. This tool will help ensure your experience uncovers the underlying assumptions, beliefs, and mindsets necessary for the new practice to meaningfully change how your learners experience learning. 

Shift your mindset through school visits and analogous experiences and meaningfully reflect on what you observed with the support of our Mindsets Reflection tool. Download the tool here.