Another Failure, Another Lesson Learned

I keep telling you a lot about how important it is to fail and I keep applying this principle myself, discovering how much I learn from failure.

Yesterday I led a launch about heuristics. The launch was part of our new quest: the first week is devoted to studying the subject of probability in order to understand how it fits into the world of games.

Heuristics is undoubtedly a complex subject to understand, even for adults and certainly for 6, 8 or even 12 year old Eagles. The launch included a TED video about heuristics and then a discussion about whether they would prefer to live only a heuristic-based life or a life based on rationally directed decisions.

I began by showing the video to the Eagles and stopped in the middle to see if anyone understood anything. In general, none of them understood anything. So I progressed much slower than I had planned, I stopped the video two more times and at every point I made sure they understood what it was about. During the discussion, we explained together what heuristics are. The Eagles gave their own examples of heuristics, we understood why our brain has this feature of unwise decision making and in the end we also talked a bit about how it is better for them to make decisions: Based on past experiences and intuition or based on rational analysis of all options.

Sounds quite successful in general, right?

In fact, it wasn’t. Alden gave me feedback at the end of the circle, explaining that in his opinion, there were two problems with how I had led the circle: The first problem was that it was very important to me that they would understand everything. My unambiguous goal was to pass on the knowledge and to make sure that they received it. The second problem, which was related to the first problem, was that I did not trust them at all; I did not trust them to understand without me explaining and of course they felt it right away and accordingly made every effort to get to where I wanted them to be.

Then Alden and I had a fascinating conversation about the essence of learning at Acton and how dramatically different it is from the essence of learning elsewhere: The idea is not to pass on knowledge to the Eagles. Knowledge is a by-product, which every Eagle absorbs according to the place he is in and the level he is at.
Teaching knowledge is never a goal in itself. The goal is always to expose. Each Eagle processes the given materials in her personal way that is appropriate for her. A situation, in which I show a TED video and four Eagles understood 10% and two understood 15% is fine. In fact, a situation in which all six understood 0% is also fine. When I “force” them to understand, they may feel overwhelmed and register the topic as something to avoid in the future. If however they listen and afterwards are only able to repeat a small part of the material, this does not mean that a lot of the material is not in some form stored in their memory and will be reactivated when they get re-exposed to the same material at a later stage on their learning path. At that point they will feel familiar with the material and be open to truly going deep rather than remembering that this was the complicated stuff they had to learn previously and could not really make heads and tails of. In real life this could look like this: during the video or the discussion, the six-year-old Eagle appeared to not understand anything. However, three months later, when she plays a new board game with her father at home, she would suddenly remember something we talked about. It will ring a bell and she will understand something about the game she did not understand before. Learning from this point of view is like dripping: the important thing is the continuation rather than the size of the drop or the amount of them. As long as the dripping is going, there is stimulation, there is exposure, and there is action. Each Eagle takes what is right and accurate for him and absorbs it at his unique pace.

So you might say – this sounds nice, but what about the knowledge that the Eagle was supposed to learn at this point and that he was not able to fully digest. Won’t he have a hole in his learning? The answer is no. At Acton, we do not just learn something once and then move on to other things forever. The learning is more like a net that is put down and over time we return to every knot over and over and strengthen the connection. The understanding might start as something very flimsy, but over time the understanding becomes strong and powerful.

I’m not sure I’ve managed to entirely explain it, but to me it’s simply a world changing insight.