Hello everyone and welcome to Make It Mindful, the podcast where we explore how to keep schools relevant by looking through the lens of mindfulness and asking the question, what's really worth paying attention to here? I'm your host, Seth Fleishauer. In each episode, I interview educational change makers striving to understand what they do, why it works, and how it can lead to practical transformative solutions for teaching. And this week, my guest is James Anderson. James, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.
James Anderson (00:26.827)
It's an absolute pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to a conversation.
Seth Fleischauer (00:30.523)
As am I, you sent me your book Learnership after we talked the first time and I think it's a pretty fascinating read, very, very detailed, thorough thought out. I'd love to jump into that with the time that we have here today. I imagine it is impossible for me to satisfy all of my curiosity around it because it's a lot. It's a complete framework.
but I am excited for you to be here today and to, at least scrape the surface of what you do and why it works. I'm going to read a little bit, here, about the book and maybe you can, let me know if this is a good kind of summary. but learnership by James Anderson explores how educators can cultivate a mindset of continuous learning and growth in students. introduces the concept of learnership, a blend of learning and craftsmanship.
which encourages students to take charge of their own learning journeys. The book emphasizes the importance of a growth mindset focusing on strategies that empower students to overcome obstacles, set and pursue meaningful goals, and develop resilience and perseverance. Would you say that that is a good summary?
James Anderson (01:38.946)
Yeah, it is a good summary. I'd add to it that it also tries to set students up to succeed in school, which is obviously important, but also sets those long-term goals so they can thrive in life after school as well. And that's what the skill of learnership tries to do. It tries to future-proof students against that unknowable future that they're confronting.
Seth Fleischauer (02:01.088)
I love that idea of future proofing students. It seems that the only constant is change and it's getting harder and harder to anticipate what the future is going to look like. And so that set of skills that students will need in order to be able to achieve in a world, in any world, right? Like that seems to be the big point of education at the moment. And not all that many people have caught on to that idea quite yet.
Can you you back up a little bit and just give us a little bit of your background and maybe how you arrived at this place? How did you arrive at Learnership?
James Anderson (02:37.862)
wow, all right, 20 year, 30 year history of education, of my education background in the 30 seconds. I was a teacher by training. I thought I was going to be a senior biology teacher. That was where my passion was. I landed in a middle school, discovered I loved the learning a lot more than I loved the teaching. And I loved being with the kids and watching them actually learn. And so I started getting interested. I got engaged in what was called the thinking curriculum here in Australia for a while.
And I found Art Costa and Bena Kalik's Habits of Mind, these dispositions that drive learning. And that took me to a state national research, action research project that I was involved in. And that connected me with Carol Dweck's work and that connected me with Anders Erikson's work. And all along this journey was this idea of what does it take to develop skills, talents, abilities. And Learnership is the culmination of that journey that
trying to understand the way the learner engages in the learning process because, you know, I was saying to you before the interview, I was standing on stage recently with John Hattie and John Hattie's visible learning work is all about how we teach and it's great work and, know, and we've spent 10, 15 years focusing on the skill of teaching, the skill of teaching, the skill of teaching. And while that's been happening, students have been sort of sitting back and waiting to be taught.
rather than waiting to learn or engaging in learning. So this work around Learnership is about how learning and teaching partner together, that we can have great teachers. And we do have great teachers in our classroom, but great teachers, as John Holt told us, learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners. And Learnership describes how we skillfully engage in that process of learning.
Seth Fleischauer (04:36.064)
Yeah, that was actually one of the quotes that I wrote down here. Learning is not the product of teaching. It is the product of the activity of learners. Let's unpack that a little bit. know, another thing that you said was that, you know, we have an understanding of what quality teaching looks like. We don't really have an understanding of quality learning. You mentioned a couple of thinkers, though, that you were exposed to. Is, is learnership a
an amalgamation of research that you've done mixed with practice over the years? Is it something new and different? Is this new fertile ground for how learners actually operate? Or have you just pulled a bunch of stuff together in a way that is more actionable for teachers?
James Anderson (05:21.562)
A little bit of both. I think the concept of learnership, the idea that we clarify the role of the learner and we think about learning not just as an act that we do, but rather an act we do skillfully and we can actually improve the way we learn, not just what we are learning, but how we engage in the learning process. A lot of teachers, lot of school leaders that I work with find that idea really refreshing that we sort of stop talking about learning as a one-dimensional thing.
I think it's also true to say that what I brought together is, yeah, absolutely standing on the shoulders of giants. And the thing I love there, there are four people that I draw on heavily or four bodies of work that are led by four people. Carol Dweck's work around mindset, you know, which is basically the understanding you're capable of growth and change. At Costum Better Calix work, which is the idea that there are a set of dispositions that
drive you forward as you confront problems you don't immediately know the solutions to. The work of Anders Eriksson, who I think is one of the people that is so underrated and under-understood, can I say that? In education, you might have heard his work or your listeners might have heard his work through the 10,000 hour rule. He was the world's expertise expert and he described that journey of stretching and challenging yourself to improve. And the other one is Nicholas Taleb.
and Nicholas de Lerve wrote a book or series of books. One of them was called Anti-Fragile. And the thing that I love about those four authors is that none of them are good ideas. They're all observations of the real world. Carol Dweck didn't make up mindsets. She noticed that some kids think, just can't change much and other kids think, no, effort pays off. And she said, what happens?
Arcos and Benekalek did the same thing. They looked at highly successful people through other people's research and said, what behaviors, what dispositions do they have in common? So it's real. Erickson did the same thing. He said, know, experts, have you always been really good at what you do? And they said, no, we were beginners once. And he said, well, what's the process you went through? And Taleb looked at the world and said, well, what makes systems thrive?
James Anderson (07:44.546)
And he described this concept of being anti-fragile. And what I've tried to do is to bring those four ideas together into a framework that is actionable and meaningful and connects to what teachers and school leaders do on a day-to-day basis and trying to, as I said earlier, set kids up to succeed in school and thrive in life in an educational environment that has been largely focused on teacher practice, in an environment where, you know,
I've spent so long trying to understand what quality teachers do and then basically saying, well, if we know what quality teachers do and kids aren't learning, well, we haven't got very good teachers, have we? And part of my, and then we get that blame and the pressure and we know teachers are leaving the profession in droves because they feel this pressure and all the rest of it. And one of things I say in the book is that we know what quality teaching looks like and we have great teachers.
Seth Fleischauer (08:26.479)
Hehehehehe
James Anderson (08:42.392)
And when we've got great teachers, but we don't have the learning outcomes we're looking for, then we don't have a teaching problem. We've got a learning problem. And Learnerships tries to work out what that learning problem is and offer schools a solution to it.
Seth Fleischauer (08:57.091)
Yeah, I love it. I love it that it's the students fault. And I'm kidding. No, no, and I want to get. What's that?
James Anderson (09:01.274)
That's not what I said. I said it's a partnership. It's worth saying. It's worth saying that it's not a blame shifting exercise. I have a cartoon that I use sometimes and you might have seen it. I should know the original author's name of the cartoon. But I taught my dog to But I don't hear the dog whistling.
Seth Fleischauer (09:14.491)
you
James Anderson (09:29.194)
I yeah, well, I taught him. I didn't say he'd learned anything. And I think every teacher's had this experience. We know from John Hattie's work that the effect size of effective feedback is high, 0.89, some big number that, you know, really important. And teachers have been trained in giving effective feedback. And I think every teacher listening to you today will be saying, look, you know, I know how to good feedback. And they've had a moment like this where they've...
compose some feedback and it's been actionable, it's been timely, it's been specific, it's had all those great qualities and they've just gone, she's a good teacher, look at this feedback. This is exactly what quality feedback looks like. And they sort of handed it to the student on this platter going, watch the magic happen. And the students go, yeah, whatever. And hasn't paid any attention to it. And that's what we're talking about, that we need the quality feedback, the quality action from the teacher.
Seth Fleischauer (10:06.691)
Hehehehehe
James Anderson (10:24.068)
But we also need the student to play their role. And it's a partnership. And when we get that partnership where skillful teaching meets skillful learning, then we maximise growth. And that's what the focus of the book's about. It's not about achieving any particular one goal. It's about maximising growth in students.
Seth Fleischauer (10:26.693)
Yeah.
Seth Fleischauer (10:44.507)
And the book is obviously it's for teachers, right? Or is it for students? Okay, yeah. School leaders. Okay. So when you're going in and you're working as an educational consultant with a school, where is the school starting and where are you looking to take them?
James Anderson (10:48.442)
School leaders. School leaders more than teachers,
James Anderson (11:05.678)
Where the school starts depends on the school. We have a diagnostic we look, sorry, we use, and it looks at the learning behaviours in the school at the moment. And what we typically find, and obviously it varies, is that I define six levels of learnership from the non-learner, which is the kid who doesn't do anything at all, doesn't participate, baseline, there's not a lot of that. They're the beginning learners that see learning as a series of activities.
And when the activity is finished, the learning is finished, it doesn't matter what the results were and they'll go for the easy options, their path of least resistance. The performance learners that do their best, but at the expense of not stretching to do them to do better. Then there's the directed learners who basically do what they're told. Independent learners who can take charge of the learning process and drive, you know, they're the goal setters. And then there's what I call agile learners that are out there
embracing challenges for the opportunity it gives them to grow. And when we run this diagnostic, what we typically find are most of the behaviors that we see in classrooms are to the left. They tend to be associated with non-beginning and performance learners. And there's a big step between the directed learners that have been told, you know, this is what you've got to do and the independent learner.
And that big step is often about students not understanding the nature of challenge, not wanting to feel that discomfort that comes with struggling with something they don't immediately know the answer to. And so where we often start, not always, is we start with mindset, which is the understanding you're capable of growth and that feeling of struggle isn't a sign of deficit. It's actually what you've got to lean into. And then we start with understanding the nature of challenge. And to borrow a term from
Adam Grant, who's just written a fantastic book called Hidden Potential. We try to create the students so they become creatures of discomfort. We all understand what creatures of comfort are, and I think we recognize that many of our students want to stay comfortable. They don't want that stretch and challenge and uncertainty that comes with going into what I call the learning zone. And what we do is we make that learning zone explicit. We talk about
James Anderson (13:30.112)
It should feel uncomfortable. You're not meant to know the answer in this task. Not in every task all day, every day. But for the next hour, while we're going to your learning zone, this is what it should feel like. And you're expected to make mistakes. Some of the schools that I work with to help kids overcome that, you know, I don't want to make mistakes, they introduce mistakes quotas for this period of time. Like when we're learning, not the test.
In the test, no mistakes. Not when you're easy stuff. They're careless mistakes. But in this learning zone, these are the expectations. And we start with that idea of challenge. And as I say that I wish I'd coined the term creatures of discomfort, but it's not. It's Adam's grants. And he did a great job of it.
Seth Fleischauer (14:18.747)
Hmm. I'm, I'm struck by the idea that it is like, I've heard this before. My, my, my, the idea that we should embrace failure, right? Like it's, it's, it's something that, a lot of people like Adam grant or my, actually my, commencement speech when I graduated from Princeton in 2001 was Garrison Keillor. And here's a, a group of, you know, high achieving Princeton students.
And he, his message for us, which I remember to this day was strive for failure, right? Like if you, like you are a bunch of kids who have done nothing but achieve your entire lives and you will get, it is a ticket to a midlife crisis to do anything but strive for failure. Right. And, and that really stuck with me. it strikes me that there is a huge gap between telling someone that directing the learner to that.
and having the learner independently or with agility incorporate that into their approach to learning. And I'm wondering how you bridge that gap.
James Anderson (15:20.09)
Yeah, I wouldn't say strive for failure. I think that misses the point a little bit. And so I might expand on it. I would strive for struggle. I would absolutely strive for struggle. I would lean into that struggle, you know, in the sense of JFK. You know, we do these things not because they're easy, but because they are hard. is no growth without struggle. So I think striving for struggle is what we should be doing.
This whole idea of embracing failure and all the rest of it, I get it. We're not so dissimilar in age. I might have a few years on you, but we're not so dissimilar in age. We might remember that when we were at school, don't make mistakes. You're gonna get things right. And what that did was it stigmatized mistakes and made us fear going into our learning zone, which is where the growth happens and the mistakes happen.
And I get it, like some mistakes are bad. Some failures are serious. You know, can't have a car accident and go, what a great learning opportunity that was. So in my book, one of the things I do, we recognize that we swung the bar too far, the pendulum too far the other way. We used to say mistakes were bad. Now we say they're good. And there was a teacher I worked with,
probably five or six years ago now. And we were talking about this idea of mistakes. And he said, above my board in my classroom, we have a banner that says, we make magnificent mistakes. And I get what he was trying to do, but I really hope that his students don't grow up to be pilots or surgeons. So one of the things I do, I mentioned before these zones, we talk about a comfort zone, which is within our abilities, a performance zone, which is our current
Seth Fleischauer (17:04.035)
Eh.
James Anderson (17:13.85)
peak performance. And then we talk about our learning zone. And our learning zone is where we go beyond our current abilities and it's where growth happens. When we talk about mistakes, we talk about where the mistakes happen. And I define six different types of mistakes. There's careless mistakes, mistakes you make through lack of concentration that don't give you useful information. When a 12 year old forgets to put a full stop on the end of a sentence,
No one's gathering the class around and saying, kids, come on, join in, let's see what we can learn from that. You would already let that, that's not new information for you. We talk about performance mistakes and performance mistakes happen in your performance zone and should be avoided. We should do everything we in our power to avoid that. When I'm running a business, I don't want to run the thing into the ground and say,
great learning opportunity, it wasn't, it was a failure. And a failure isn't a sign of growth. It might be a sign of an opportunity to grow. It might be a sign of a place where you can put your energies and resources to achieve more in the future. But it is a failure at that point in time. What I define as well is then three types of mistakes that instead of being good or bad, I talk about them being helpful or not helpful.
And there are three sorts of mistakes that are helpful. There's stretch mistakes, which are the sort of mistakes that you deliberately go into your learning zone, knowing that you don't know how to do it and expecting that as you fumble your way through, things are going to go wrong. And that's the sort of mistake that I think your commencement lecturer was trying to say that, you know, it's not the failure where you want to embrace. It's the mistakes that you create in that environment where you're trying to move forward.
And the idea is that if you can make better mistakes, then you're going to grow even more. And so that's why the sort of piece to resistance of mistakes, the gold standard of mistakes is what I call a design mistake. And that's when you think like a scientist and you create an environment with low consequences, but high information. We often hear the Edison example, know, Edison had found 999 ways the light globe didn't work.
James Anderson (19:40.322)
Yeah, but he wasn't just going, that one doesn't work, try another one, that one doesn't work, try, he wasn't just randomly going through trying to find one that worked. He thought like this, that's right. And so he controlled the variables and every mistake gave him the most possible information. So to come back to where you started, this idea that, you know, we've got to get used to making mistakes and love mistakes and embrace failure.
Seth Fleischauer (19:47.181)
Well, that was agile development, right? Yeah.
James Anderson (20:09.24)
No, there are times when mistakes are bad. And we need to recognise when those times are and those times that are in performance situation. When we're in a learning situation, when we're deliberately putting ourselves beyond our current abilities, those mistakes can be useful, not good or bad. They can provide us with information that helps us move forward. And when we split that narrative from good and bad mistakes to useful or helpful and unhelpful mistakes,
and recognize that we want information from those mistakes, then it gives us that way of saying, well, actually you're right. You know, when that student comes up to us, go, I don't want to make mistakes. We can say that's a really good attitude when you're performing.
Seth Fleischauer (20:55.237)
I like that. Yeah, because it's a, I luck the updated thinking around it. the, the nuance is important. And I think what you're suggesting is that the nuance is an of itself enough to get over that bridge from thinking that mistakes are like being seeped in a culture where failure is bad. And so you're doing everything that you can to avoid it and therefore manifesting it by being so nervous about it. versus one where, know, you're just Willy nilly.
James Anderson (21:09.188)
Hmm.
Seth Fleischauer (21:24.483)
All mistakes are good. Let me just, you know, crash the plane now. in your experience is awareness of those different types of mistakes, the helpful versus not helpful mistakes. Is that enough to sort of pop the bubble of the culture around failure?
James Anderson (21:42.394)
Yeah, absolutely. I tell you a story. I was sitting right here at this desk at this camera and I sent an email off to one of my partnership schools and it came straight back and they said, James, do you have your computer? Can we zoom in now? Sure, why not? So I jumped onto this call and one of the teachers I worked with was saying, James, I have to tell you this story. I was just in my grade three classroom and one of my students made a mistake and he just went,
It's all right. Everyone makes mistakes, like we've taught them to do. And the teacher just leaned in and said, was that a helpful mistake?
And the teacher's telling the story about it and the student's gone, nah, that was one of those careless mistakes. I shouldn't have made that mistake, should I? And straight away he's realized that it's not just okay to make mistakes. We all make mistakes. Some mistakes help us move forward, some don't. And in this case, that wouldn't help me move forward. He shouldn't have made it. And you use the word nuance. think I would like to think what I bring to learning in in learnership.
is that nuance, that detail, that sophistication around how we learn because we have that in teaching. Like we understand the nuance, the sophistication of what quality teaching looks like. And Learnership is all about building in that sophistication, that nuance, that detail into learning to allow us to be more effective learners, to get better at getting better.
Seth Fleischauer (23:19.448)
I love it. So this seems like a somewhat, I'm always looking for these practical transformative solutions for teaching. This framework of helpful versus not helpful mistakes feels like one of those touch points where someone can listen to this podcast.
James Anderson (23:21.644)
I do too.
Seth Fleischauer (23:44.037)
hold this out as inspiration and affect their impact in the classroom simply based on knowing and understanding that fairly simple idea. I'm wondering what else you've got for us. You have more of those within Learnership?
James Anderson (23:58.702)
Yeah look, how long we got?
James Anderson (24:05.06)
Look, there's a whole range of things we talk about. think when I talk about learnership, I talk before briefly about those six levels. And I think, well, I know that when teachers recognise those six levels of learnership, they can quickly recognise which level the students are at. And that gives them insight into why they're learning a particular way, how they're responding, what they need to do to move to the next level. And I talk about how to move students to the next level.
I think one the other things I do with Carol Dweck's work that's been really powerful in schools is most of the way Carol Dweck's work is talked about in education is fixed and growth. And the mistake we've made is to teach kids about it rather than teaching for the mindset. And so what we've done in schools is sort of said, yeah, fixed is terrible, growth is great. Have one of those growth ones, please. Away you go. And we put up the posters and the slogans and all the rest of it.
One of the models I've done is I've described the continuum between fixed and growth and to recognise we're not fixed, we're not growth. There's a continuum in between. And what we need to do is not to instil or install or adopt a growth mindset, but rather we need to nudge and nourish and nurture an increasingly growth orientated mindset. So I provide tools and strategies and what I call nudges to change the messaging we give to kids.
So they become more growth orientated and understand themselves as learners. So the mindset's the foundation. The stuff I talked about before about the zones is really powerful. I've got a early primary teacher teaching five and six year olds that I was talking to just a couple of weeks ago. And she routinely now talks about when kids are in their comfort zone, performance zone, learning zone, or even their aspirational zone, which is
way beyond their current abilities and the different expectations in each. When they're in their comfort zone, it should feel easy, it should be straightforward, they should feel like just ticking it off, getting through it, not making mistakes. When they're in their performance zone, they're meant to concentrate, meant to minimise mistakes and produce their current best performance. But when they're in their learning zone, that's when mistakes can be helpful.
James Anderson (26:27.384)
That's when they're not meant to know the answer immediately. So Melissa, put your hand down if you know it straight away. You're not in your learning zone. And so students are being more targeted around the way they learn. They've got more clarity around how they're to behave and how they're meant to respond in those different zones. And then we can go and we talked about the mistakes. I've got a matrix around the different types of effort.
Most kids think effort is about the amount of time and energy they spend on something. And I think it looks like, and this is not going to work for the people on the podcast, but I think it looks like this. Constipation, like it's just more. And then there's the, yeah, so there's the effort, the mistakes that they have in the of mine, which is not my work, that's Kostrin Bennett, Kaelik's work. But I give that a life that makes it really practical in the classroom.
Seth Fleischauer (27:07.982)
I think they can see that with the sound.
James Anderson (27:25.4)
So I would like to think in answer to your question that, yeah, I've got lots of models, lots of practical tools and strategies to help teachers help kids become better learners. Not for the teachers to be better teachers, but to help the kids be better learners.
Seth Fleischauer (27:42.523)
So when you're engaging with a school, you're going through the principal, getting the principal to sign on to this idea, and then doing a series of workshops with teachers. I'm wondering how someone goes, because there's so much here. It's so rich. You're pulling together multiple frameworks. You've got
You know, all these different types of effort, you've got all these different types of learners, these learning zones, the people are in helpful mistakes versus unhelpful mistakes. You know, as a teacher, I'm almost like, you know, do I need like to take a college course on this in order to be able to like really, you know, implement it in a way that's going to be meaningful? but I'm wondering what you, what you find is like, what's the necessary amount of engagement that a teacher needs to have with your training, with your book?
with the principal who's putting forth your ideas in order to get to the point where they're like, I think I've got this and I can now implement it with confidence in my classroom.
James Anderson (28:50.99)
Yeah, all right. So there's a range of answers there. First off, I've spoken to many teachers who have picked up learning ship, picked up key ideas like the zones or the habits or something else and made a difference with that one part. And I think that's really important to recognize that it's not an all or nothing thing. You can take parts of this and work with it, particularly the mindset stuff is really powerful and relatively easily implemented in your own classroom.
The real power comes when we work at a whole school level. And you're right, what I typically do is I build partnerships with schools. And often that will look like I'll work for a year, running after school workshops or holiday workshops, whatever works, to sort of front load the information. But just like you wouldn't try to teach reading or music or maths in a year, you can't teach kids to be skillful learners in...
a lesson at the start of the year. It's something you've got to build the understandings of. So typically after I sort of taught the concepts, the second year is about implementing them in a scope and sequence and saying, what do we teach the early primary kids? What do we teach the middle school kids? What do we teach the senior kids? Where's our focus there? Because you're right, in one hit, it's a lot for one teacher to do and one teacher will never do it.
Just like one teacher never teaches language. Yeah, we've got someone teaching the basics and we've got building the next steps and the next steps. And so I've got a resource, online resources that sort of works through. If you're at this level, this is the part you focus on. If you're at this level, you focus on this. And the big shift from a school's perspective is to shift from what we've got at the moment in schools is this culture, know, what default way of doing things in schools. That's about
Seth Fleischauer (30:22.587)
Mmm.
James Anderson (30:46.478)
teaching and assessment. It's this culture of performance and culture of teaching. Everything's driven by that. And the shift we try to make is to develop a culture around learning and growth. And there's a whole lot of stuff we do in there.
Seth Fleischauer (31:03.213)
Yeah. Is this to a certain extent like one size fits all? Like is this something that everyone, every learner, every school can benefit from? Or are there types of learners that do well with this and others that don't as much?
James Anderson (31:21.05)
It's not a one size fits all, except to say that every learner can improve the way they go about learning. So for example, I was speaking to a school yesterday and we looked at their diagnostic and they had a very particular diagnostic, which was, you know.
had a big step between the directed learner and independent learner. And that says to me that that's where we needed to start. Another school that I work with in another part of Australia, their diagnostic was hard to the left. Like it was full of non-learning and beginning learning behaviors. And that said, we had to start somewhere else. We had to start with mindset. had to have a lot of these kids were sort of resigned to, I'm just not smart enough. I'm not good at school. And that was all a mindset issue.
Whereas this school I was talking to yesterday was about, they understand they can learn, but they're relying on the teacher to teach them. And so they needed to shift that responsibility. it's funny that you should say, does it suit one type of learner? Well, I would say depending on the current level of learningship of that particular learner changes our starting point, but we're all learners and we can all get better at learning. And I think that's
true of the adults in the school as well. The harder lessons to learn for some teachers is that you can be an expert teacher, really, really good teacher, but that doesn't necessarily make you an expert learner. And as one of my principals put it, the I do, we do, you do model of teaching and learning is limited by the I do part when it comes to teaching the learning process.
Seth Fleischauer (33:05.595)
Thank
James Anderson (33:08.236)
And for some of us as teachers, we actually have to start to understand the learning process in more detail. I'd love to tell you a story. Can I tell you story here that illustrates this? lot of teachers these days think they're responsible for learning. I had a first year teacher come up to me at the end of one of my workshops recently. And he said, and I've been talking the whole day about the role of the learner and how they engage in the learning process and all the rest of it. And this is a first year teacher.
Seth Fleischauer (33:17.499)
Please.
James Anderson (33:38.606)
And he's come up to me said, James, I can't believe what I did yesterday. In light of what you've just said, I've got to tell you this. I said, what did you do? And he said, I had an eight, nine year old girl that didn't want to take a test. I think we can all relate to that. And he said to this eight or nine year old girl, said, you don't have to worry about this test. I just need to give you this test to see if I've taught you properly.
This first year teacher was coming into the system thinking that his impact was the only factor that was a measure of the student's learning, that if the student didn't learn, that was his fault. And so what we're talking about here is what that role of the learner is and what they do.
Seth Fleischauer (34:26.14)
Is there is there like a type of education because you're talking about like, the ultimate learner is an agile learner who can take their learning ability, learning style and apply it to any given situation. That implies a certain type of curriculum. The fact that the you know, the fourth step is
directed learning and that happens to be the like, you know, kind of standard method of teaching. And it's not the, you know, it's not at the top of the ladder, right? So it implies that there are certain pedagogies that align with your framework and others that might align but are not optimal. Would you say that that's good? And in other words,
You you mentioned at the top, like, we know what good teaching is. James Anderson, what is good teaching?
James Anderson (35:25.92)
Yeah. I'd actually flip that question around a little bit. I think we know that to set kids up for a world where they can thrive and to get the really rich outcomes we're looking for, we want to set those rich open-ended tasks, the problem-based learning, the messy stuff, the stuff that Jay McTighe, Grant Wiggins talk about and understanding by design and so many others talk about in that same framework.
The problem is that to set those rich, open-ended, self-directed tasks, the entry price is a particular level of learning. If you come in and say, we know that rich tasks, these are what we want to do. Kids, let's give you a passion project. I think passion projects and the idea of letting kids pursue what they want to pursue and so forth is a good idea. But if you say to, you know, what's your passion project?
to a student who is at the non-level of learning, non-level learning of learnership, they'll say, I don't want to do it. If you say to someone at the beginning level of learnership, they'll say, can I do that really easy thing? If you offer a passion project to someone that's at the performance level of learnership, they'll say, can I do the project I did last year? I did that really well. Can you hear that?
Seth Fleischauer (36:50.171)
We'll cut it out.
James Anderson (36:52.506)
Yeah, the garbage truck going through the background.
Seth Fleischauer (36:55.941)
Yeah.
James Anderson (37:00.708)
When you offer a passion project to someone at the directed level of learnership, they go, I don't know, what do think I should do? And it's not until you get to that level of independent or agile learning where you can offer a student a passion project, an open-ended messy task, and they know what to do with it. So in terms of the approaches you take, I think the issue is not
you know, what's the right approach? It's about getting kids to the level of learningship that allows them to engage in those rich, open-ended problems.
Seth Fleischauer (37:38.491)
I like that. So it's not necessarily that there's one pedagogy that will get you all the way and everyone should follow that pedagogy. It's that within the different levels of learnership, there are different types of approaches that will work based on where the student is within the framework. That makes sense.
James Anderson (37:57.734)
And you try to raise the level of learnership to a point where you can engage in that really rich, open-ended type task, the really challenging tasks that are gonna drive growth.
Seth Fleischauer (38:07.129)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a great, it's a great, sort of litmus test or, checklist of, of a framework for a teacher to think about when they want to do that passion project with their students, right? Like it's like, let me think about where my students actually are. And let me not just like bring my expectations of what I'd love for them to do into this and like, you know, spout some
Progressive educational thing that I read in the textbook and just think that it's gonna work in my classroom When I haven't really thought about where they're at and what they can accomplish quite yet Yeah, I think that's great Your book is available on Amazon and other places It has recently been translated into Romanian. So if there are any listeners in Romania, they can they can find that
James Anderson (39:01.474)
Every author's dream.
Seth Fleischauer (39:03.419)
Is there anywhere else where you would like our listeners to find your you and your work on the internet?
James Anderson (39:11.32)
Yeah, absolutely. My website, jamesanderson.com.au. You can get the audio book, obviously, from any good audio book supplier as well. And it's available as an ebook from Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all those sorts of places as well. So, love to reach out and chat to anybody who's interested in taking the work further, but grab the book. There's a free link to the diagnostic. You can run the diagnostic with your school, with your class and...
Look at the level of learningship of your kids and just ask yourself the question, how much easier would your life be and how much better would your students results be if you could teach them how to be better learners?
Seth Fleischauer (39:52.621)
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for being here. think we did sufficiently scratch the surface and maybe a couple layers underneath that. I, I, I really appreciate the, the amount of work you've done in, in not only researching, but, being really reflective and mindful of your own experience as a teacher and as a learner and pulled all that together into a framework that, that teachers can use that leaders can use.
to make sure that we are not just teaching but also facilitating learning in a way that can optimize our student success in a world that is constantly changing. I think it's really important work. So thank you for being here. Any last words of inspiration for our listeners?
James Anderson (40:39.13)
I think what we're trying to do here is raise the status of learning in our schools from an act to an art. And when we do that, we set students up to not just succeed in school, but thrive in life. And Seth, I want to thank you for sharing my work, but the work of so many others with such a wide community in the educational space and the work you do is fantastic. Thank you.
Deirdre Marlowe (40:48.143)
you
Seth Fleischauer (41:03.79)
Awesome. Thank you. Well, we have a ton of links in the, in the show notes. You mentioned, I think 10 different thinkers. So we'll try to gather as many of those links as we can. In addition to the links to your work. thank you as always to our editor, Lucas Salazar and, to my advisor, Deirdre Marlowe. And, remember that if you would like to bring positive change to education, we must first make it mindful. See you next time.
James Anderson (41:11.0)
Yeah.
Seth Fleischauer (00:01.199)
Okay. So one more question is, and we talked about this a little bit, in our time when we weren't recording is, these different levels of learnership. My understanding is that we need different types of teachers at the different levels of learnership. Right. So can you kind of take me through that hierarchy from the bottom all the way up to the top? What's the, what's the role of the teacher in getting them from, from, from each, each rung of the ladder to the next one.
James Anderson (00:30.86)
Yeah, I think when you recognize the level of learningship you've got in a particular group of students, and it will vary obviously, you've got to adopt a particular style to move them to the next rung. And so if you've got lots of kids that are non-learners, the kids that are opting out doing nothing, then to get them from non-learner to beginning learner, you need to be like a benevolent dictator. You someone who says, get off your lazy and get to work. And some teachers do that really well.
If you're at the beginning learner stage and you want to get students to performance learners, you need someone who acts a bit more like a supervisor. And a supervisor is saying, well, you're doing stuff, but you've got to do it well. Here's the standard. And they make sure you meet a standard. To get kids from that performance learner level to directed learner, you need a traditional teacher. Someone to say, these are the instructions. Follow my instructions. This is what you do. But once you got kids at that directed learner level,
To get them from that directed learner to the independent learner level, you need someone who acts more like a coach. And a coach is someone who's really interested in the process. For example, when I wrote Learnership, I had to get a coach to help me with my book. And he didn't care about the content. Like he said, you know your content, James. But what he was interested in was the process I was going through to write a really good book. And hopefully that's what he's helped me do.
But when you've got somebody who understands themselves as a learner that can engage in the learning process effectively, you don't need a coach anymore. To get from that independent learner to agile learner, what you need is someone that acts more like a mentor. And what a mentor does is points out and provides the opportunity for challenge that's going to drive that growth. And I want to be quick to add here that I'm not suggesting that teachers should go out and all strive to be like mentors.
because what you need to do is to match the level of learnership that your students are at. You can imagine that the teacher that's like the mentor that's providing these rich challenges and go and try that in a room full of kids that are beginner and non learner levels. they'll come in and go, come on kids, what do you want to do today? And all the kids will go, nothing, thanks sir. And it won't go anywhere. And by the same thing, I don't want to make it sound like the teacher that's the benevolent dictator isn't.
James Anderson (02:56.648)
good teacher. You need to be, if you've got kids that aren't doing anything, you need to do something to get them to the next level. But the important thing is that you learn to shift gears and as you go you lift students up to that next level of learnership.
Seth Fleischauer (03:07.099)
Mm-hmm.
Seth Fleischauer (03:12.357)
I, what I love about that, James is it feels like an answer to a debate I've been having like in every episode of this podcast ever, which is around like, you know, we have these ideas of progressive education and they really, they, they really do kind of speak to that mentor level, right? Like we want to turn students into independent learners, into agile learners, people who are in charge of their own stuff, their own path, their own learning experience. But how do we get them there?
And you've got an answer for that. And it doesn't involve being that super progressive educator from the start. You have to kind of build up some of those more traditional skills. mean, you you started with an authoritarian skill, right? The benevolent dictator, you know, and it's, yeah, I think that, that, the ability to switch between those modes is what's going to make a fantastic teacher.
James Anderson (03:59.096)
Okay.
Seth Fleischauer (04:12.417)
And unfortunately with the degree of variability within any given classroom, you might have to be all six of those things on any given day. Right? So it's, it's a tough task, but if you can identify that that's what you're doing, I mean, that's the first step towards doing it. Right.
James Anderson (04:28.928)
Absolutely. I think we were enormous prize to say I've answered the question you've had with every speaker that's on every podcast.
Deirdre Marlowe (04:36.352)
It's like, said, James, that you thought you'd be a senior teacher, but then you wound up in middle school. So I would say that those levels of teaching are what's expected every day of anybody who teaches middle school. Otherwise you go batty.
James Anderson (04:52.676)
It was a really formative thing that I didn't choose that challenge, but I landed in a seven to 10 campus, 13 to 16 year olds. And I found I loved the learning more than the teaching or the biology of the subject. And it was all about the kids.
I should add, and we may not be reporting anymore, when I say benevolent dictator, I, in my sort of personality, I was like, you get off your lazy butt and do this, do this. I see primary school teachers in particular that are benevolent dictators by going, I love it when you do that, can you do more of that for me? Like you can do it in a loving way. It's not a, Yeah, yeah, I wanted to make sure the benevolent part got through.
Seth Fleischauer (05:15.559)
You
Seth Fleischauer (05:35.259)
Yeah, that's the benevolent part. Awesome. Well, thank you. I'm going to stop recording again.
James Anderson (05:44.984)
to help you.