Tri Cosain: Learning strand introduction

Tri Cosain learning strand introduction The practice that we call Tri Cosain, from the Irish Gaelic, proposes the weaving together of three strands or three pathways: a sense of personal inspiration; a personal career journey of creativity, service, fulfilment and abundance; and a lifelong journey of learning to bring inspiration to life, expressed among other ways through career. This booklet is an introduction to our thoughts on the learning strand. We hope it will be useful to you, and also that you will adapt its ideas to your own needs and experience. We intend here to address learning in a broad sense: not only the acquisition of domain knowledge, which is certainly important, but of knowledge and wisdom regarding the full range of capacities, capabilities and skills required to live a fulfilling and abundant life. The learning strand of Tri Cosain is intimately connected to the other two strands: our learning ambitions, we suggest, should in general arise from our sense of personal inspiration and should feed, develop and enhance our careers, spoken of in the broadest and most inspired sense. We will invite you, and ourselves, to adopt an aware, intentional and lifelong approach to learning, but also one that is continually growing and evolving. We invite ourselves and you to create and follow an “Agile” personal learning plan, as described more fully below. The intended outcome of this work is that each participant ● will have access to and will have put to work a number of practices for effecting a lifelong, dynamic learning journey ● Will have at least a first version of a personal learning vision ● Will have at least the seed of a personal learning taxonomy ● Will have at least the seed of a personal Agile learning plan, including ○ some big longer term objectives ○ some more specific goals for the next quarter (or so) and ○ some even more specific goals over the next two-four weeks

Motivations for Learning and Personal Learning Vision In our travels, we have experienced motivations for learning to fall into four main categories. ● Learning for love - learning things we just love to know about or practice, purely for the love of it. ● Learning for “citizenship” - learning that helps us take up our roles in relationships, communities, societies and ecosystems in more effective and healthy ways ● Learning for credentials - learning focused on meeting the requirements of a diploma, degree or certification. ● Learning for career - learning that helps us do our Work more effectively - helping us to be more creative, more in service, and more abundant for the benefit of ourselves, our loved ones and society as a whole. We invite our clients and participants to create a personal learning vision in a form that suits each of us and that reflects our ambitions in each of these four broad areas (or others if we have different lenses on the broad subject of learning). We encourage creativity and uniqueness in personal learning visions. Some people will wish to write their vision in the form of a few words, sentences or paragraphs. Some may want to capture it as an image or a drawing on a work of art or performance. Others might see it captured in a special physical object, found or created, or in a scene from fiction or theatre or film or video. In any case, we invite everyone to discover a vision, with one or several themes - to save it in a protected and honoured, though accessible, place. We invite people to revisit, develop and adapt their visions over time, and to refer to them often as a means of shaping their learning plans and journeys. We note that our learning vision may be closely linked to a sense of personal inspiration, another of the three strands of Tri Cosain (see other source in our Tri Cosain series). A personal learning taxonomy We have found it useful to create a personal map of the potential areas of learning (a taxonomy to use a somewhat technical term). There are a number of taxonomies, expressed or implied, that have been created by students of learning (university prospecti and catalogues would be relevant examples). We invite our participants to create their own taxonomies. As this can seem a daunting task if it arrives as a fresh challenge or invitation, we offer a prototype version from our own experience.

We have found it useful to divide our taxonomies into three large areas: ● Skills and capacities that can be applied across a wide range of inquiries and endeavours, which we have come to call Foundational Capacities ● Basic skills, particularly in reading, writing, listening, speaking, functional mathematics and basic technological fluency. ● Domain knowledge - detailed acquisition of knowledge principally relevant to one particular discipline, area of inquiry or “domain” Communication skills (and its subdivisions) might be an example of a Foundational Capacity, while detailed knowledge of Shakespeare or the structure of organic molecules might be examples of domain knowledge. Basic functional skills in the use of language, mathematics and technology speak for themselves. We find that traditional educational institutions tend to focus their teaching primarily on domain knowledge. They tend to assert that they are teaching skills and capacities along the way, but in our experience these skills, if they emerge, emerge as a secondary result of the inquiry into the domain. We would suggest that this observation might be seen as a major challenge to traditional patterns of education.

A prototype learning taxonomy 1. Foundational capacities 1. Relationships, dialogue and teams a. Being great at personal relationships b. Being great at working in teams c. Being great at fostering dialogue and conversation 2. Communications skills - stances, relationships a. Listening b. “Critical” reading c. Speaking d. Writing e. Visual expression f. Embodied expression 3. Self-advocacy - the “sales” part of communication 4. Being a maker 5. Research and discovery skills - skills of learning to learn - independently 6. Skills at designing and conducting experiments 7. Skills to deliver a project or program 8. Skills in organising work 9. Problem solving (problem finding) 10. Decision making 11. Stances and States a. Sense of agency and personal responsibility i. Bias for action ii. Bias for experimentation b. “Critical” thinking c. Curiosity, opennness, vulnerability, stance as a learner rather than a knower d. Growth mindset e. Risk taking f. Confidence and humility in balance g. Self awareness, self reflection i. Cognitive ii. Emotional iii. Intuitive iv. Embodied h. Systemic awareness i. Welcoming of diversity and difference j. Welcoming of complexity

2. Core practical skills 1. Basic reading, writing, speaking, listening 2. Basic math 3. Basic technology 3. Domain knowledge 1. Physical sciences 2. Biological sciences 3. Social sciences 4. Humanities - art, music, literature… 5. Languages 6. Engineering (design and technology?) 7. Information technology 8. Design 9. Civics” - political, social, ecological

Agile planning for the learning strand At some point we may have a sense of a vision of the future we want to create – in which case the next question can be: “How do I make this vision come alive.” The answer we are looking for might be some kind of strategy or plan. If the vision is a long-range one, planning for it can seem daunting on one hand, and potentially time-consuming on the other. We might ask ourselves how to plot out a long-term future in great detail. One inspiration to help with this challenge, drawing on the Agile approach to software development (or to any other kind of product or creative development) is as follows. Agile thinking’s precursors began recognising a few decades ago that planning large projects in excruciating detail for execution over several years was an ineffective way of working. Agile planning works by writing stories about the future, and then working in short bursts of activity iteratively and incrementally to bring small, usable, valuable parts of that future to life. We can then try these incremental “releases” out in the real world. Each time part of the future is “made”, we have a chance to try it out and learn from our experience. As we learn, we create more and more of our future reality ... and ... each time we move forward, we incorporate our growing knowledge and wisdom gained from using our prototypes in practice. Our learning includes learning from mistakes and failures as well as successes. Our planning and execution are dynamic and adaptive. Agile planning can be readily applied to our learning plans Accordingly, one way to create strategies and plans on the basis of visions of the future is to write the vision as a kind of story about the future, and then to create “slices” of that future vision - smaller bits of the story - to bring to life early on, day by day, week by week, month by month. As we bring these parts of the future vision to life, we can put them into practice and see how they perform. We can use our daily learning to make new decisions about how the story of the future evolves, and to make new decisions about which parts of the future vision to build next. If some ideas appear as failures, we learn this quickly and welcome the learning. We fail fast, and inexpensively, in order to shape a more robust future. If your exploration of your ambitions for learning provides you with a glimpse, or more than a glimpse, of a vision of the future, we invite you to write your learning vision as a story. It can be very short and sketchy at first. As much as possible, write the story in the present tense.. Write the story down and put it where you can see it and refer to it. Think of this “big vision” story as Level 1 of your Agile learning plan. The story may have parts and subparts, for example different themes of your learning vision taken from your learning taxonomy. You may want to create “swimlanes” or sections – think of these as Level 2 of your Agile plan – on a large piece of paper or electronic document for each of the parts of your “big picture” as reflected in your story. You can hang the paper on the wall or lay it out on the floor or keep it electronically. Write major elements of the story on large post-its or index cards (paper or electronic) and place them in the swimlanes in their

“right place”, reflecting what needs to be done chronologically, but also in the right spatial order to reflect importance. Notice any relationships that suggest themselves to you between key elements in the different swimlanes. You may want to group activities in large buckets of time: this year, next year, or whatever is an appropriate scale for you. Don’t do this with a sense of rigid commitment, but rather in a spirit of play, experimentation and discovery. We encourage you to keep the “big picture” planning map you have created with your Level 1 “big vision” story and Level 2 swimlanes somewhere where you can go back to it, see it, develop it, play with it, change it. Don’t think of your future story as fixed: think of it as emerging and evolving, informed by what you are learning every day. For your near-term planning, choose some elements from the “big picture” (including from each swimlane as appropriate) that you think you can complete in an iteration cycle of a few weeks or a few days, perhaps one week to one month, whatever seems like the right interval for you. The Agile world has developed a bias for shorter planning cycles, to facilitate rapid learning and adaptation. Whatever you choose for your own iteration cycle, be clear with yourself on its length. Break each item down into actions or tasks you can do in a day or a few days, even ideally in one sitting. Create a small card or a sticky note for each story item you have created in this way. Focus on delivering small but internally complete, valuable and usable parts of your long term plan, or prototypes that allow you to test parts of it in action, in each short-term planning period (sometimes called Sprints in the Agile world). Think of these small units of value created as Level 3 of your Agile plan. Make a near-term planning sheet (separate from the “big picture”) with three columns: To do, In Progress, Done. Place your Level 3 cards all in the To Do column to start. As you start work on items, move their cards to the In Progress column. Try to work on only one (or a very few) In-Progress item at a time. As your items are completed, move them into the Done column. Your near-term planning board can be physical or digital. [We offer examples and illustrations of the Agile Planning process separately as instructional videos and other media].

Working with teachers, advisers, coaches and mentors on your personal learning plan We encourage our participants to be in active conversation with people, especially teachers, who can help us shape our learning plans. Your school, as represented by your teachers, will no doubt have a system of proposed learning objectives for you as you pass through its curriculum. These will likely be designed in significant part to help you successfully complete requirements for graduation. Creative conversations with your teachers about how the school curriculum and standard learning objectives connect to your personal learning plan are likely to be of immense value. Similarly for conversations with your academic advisers. If you have other people in your life who you admire and who can help shape your thinking, perhaps family, friends, colleagues, fellow students or mentors, we invite you to show them your personal learning plan, listen to their insights, engage in dialogue with them, and reflect your learnings in your personal learning plan.

Periodic reviews and cadence We invite our clients and participants to review and revise their learning plans on a regular cadence, possibly annually, quarterly and monthly or biweekly. At an annual review, we suggest thinking “big picture” - adding one or more big Level 1 goals and refining or removing existing ones using your long term planning board as described above. What are the major subdivisions of each big goal that might give rise to quarterly objectives? What do you think of your learning planning process? What have you achieved - please celebrate! What would you like to improve? At the quarterly review, select a challenging but achievable set of Level 2 objectives for the coming quarter, each objective directly linked to one of the big goals, again building on your previously created long to medium term planning board. You might ask the same reflective questions as you do annually, but perhaps more lightly and from a medium-term perspective. We invite our participants to select a short iteration cycle, most likely two to four weeks, during each quarterly period. At the start of each short cycle, select small chunks of work that can be completed in a few hours or days, but certainly within the short iteration. Use these to populate the short term planning board described under Agile Planning above. Source each small chunk from one of your quarterly goals. Make sure that you think the sum of your short-cycle goals can be completed within the short cycle. Check in with yourself frequently, possibly daily, to select new short cycle tasks as each completes and to review your progress. At the end of the short cycle, review your progress on that cycle, select goals for the next and repeat the process.

Learning about learning - a lifelong journey We hope this introduction is useful to our students, participants, friends and colleagues. Please adapt it freely to your needs. We love this quotation from Myron Rogers: “Start anywhere and follow it everywhere.” We also encourage people to take what serves them from this introduction and leave the rest. In any case, we hope to ourselves always be members of the community of lifelong learners - and to meet many of you in that ovely, large circle of circles, and as fellow travellers along the road. Please be invited to share your learnings with us and those close to you as your journey unfolds. We promise to do the same.