Control

A few days ago, one of my friends posted the following quote: "True freedom starts with self-reliance."

And, Justin's post yesterday, especially Debbie's comment, addressed the issue of Control and Community.

Debbie wrote:

"When I first started reading your post I envisioned a work environment with adults...they chat, they joke, they take breaks, they refocus, and in the end they get the job done. Isn't this how most of us work? There are some who want to jump in, do the task and then socialize. There are some who want to socialize and then get to task. We are all different and somehow we make it work. That "somehow" is just another skill that we can teach our students.

And then I read about the giving up and then community falls into place. Perhaps it is the "trying"to control it that prevents it from happening. Perhaps it is when we provide the "somehow" skills and then empower the community members to explore it and prefect it in their own way that things finally fall into place. It is another example of the Fire of Truth, except in this case it isn't about sharing different perspectives but about BEING different perspectives."

Getting "control" over a disparate group of people with different learning styles and different levels of self-reliance is impossible.  Even if you think you have it, you are deluding yourself.

I once had an administrator ask me how I dealt with such a "noisy" classroom.  I explained that my students were collaborating.  Like actually working together.  This, I explained, requires talking.  All the groups work in their own style, but each group has the work done by the time it is due!

Imposing what you believe is "control" over a group of students, or any other group, is destructive to community.  I am not talking about something that is a matter of public safety, like what happened in Boston last week.  I'm talking about a learning community.  If you try to "control" them, you lose and they lose.

At the beginning of this year, I spent a lot of time teaching my classes routines and self-reliance.  Need a pencil?  Well, they're in the bin labeled "pencils."  Help yourself.  What does that word mean, anyway?  Try a dictionary, or one of the awesome e-resources I posted for you on Edmodo.  Or, you could even look it up on that fantastic App I asked you to download.  Yes, you can use your phone for education!

And what happened?  Freedom.  Once the students learned that they had all the tools to learn the material, and that I wasn't the only person who held them, they worked with a vengeance.  Community bloomed, since the students learned that they could help each other.  They began finding new resources--things I had never seen before and sharing them.  It was amazing.

So, how do we teach that self-reliance?  How do we build a that Freedom?