I am excited to announce The 6Teens Project, an ever-expanding trove of short, thematic videos in which teens discuss with candor the people and learning environments they find most helpful. Each video is designed to be a patch of a larger quilt which taken as a whole can help us better understand adolescents and how to serve them. The 6Teens Project is an opportunity for teens to help shape a conversation about what adults can do to better understand and connect with them. I trust you will find their responses as fascinating and inspiring as I do.

It’s simple and free to access The 6Teens Project videos:

1. Watch – Videos are available on The 6Teens Project Channel. You can also watch the videos on YouTube.

2. Subscribe – Receive new episodes as we post them. (Just click Subscribe on Vimeo or YouTube.)

3. Participate – Share this resource with others and let me know how it has informed your work.

In response to The 6Teens Project I have enhanced my training workshops to incorporate not only cutting-edge brain development research but also insights from teens themselves into how to build meaningful, lasting connections with them, as expressed in 6Teens discussions.  If you are interested in learning more about these workshops send me an email.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!

But there’s more to being an authority than knowing a lot about something. People who have this kind of authority have a particular kind of knowledge. Their ideas, though shaped by others, are not an amalgamation of others’ ideas. These people are the author of their own ideas by virtue of spending a great deal of time interacting with a subject. They want to know it for themselves and are dissatisfied with others telling them about it.

And here’s the kicker: The job of an authority is never done. He continues to interact and explore his subject’s farthest reaches. An authority is not primarily interested in defending his knowledge. He is not fearful of confusion and counter-evidence. Quite the contrary, he views these as gifts along the way to a deeper understanding.

Extensive knowledge does not make one an authority—not if he prefers being right to knowing what is true. Such a person’s knowledge is not personal. It is not part of him. Knowledge in this sense is utilitarian. It has purchasing power. More knowledge translates into power, influence, and prestige.

Becoming an authority is hard work, especially when it pertains to life. But it is a worthy project to adopt. We need to ask hard questions and enter into confusion and investigate evidences that appear to contradict what we believe to be true. We grow by facing into life honestly, equipped with a battery of questions. It is by this appetite for truth, persistent inspection, and willingness to get it all wrong that we grow, gain understanding, and become an Author-ity. As the author we can then offer our own ideas, instead of handing out repackaged ideas that do not belong to us.

Lest we forget, a life committed to being engaged is a life that values the care of one’s self. When we are spiritually, emotionally and physically balanced we are far better equipped to engage with life and others. We’re able to give the most when our own well is full. This means we need to find time each day, week, month, and season to immerse ourselves in those activities that restore our sense of wellbeing. Consider this thought experiment: If you had fifteen obligation-free minutes right now what would you do? Power nap? Read? Take a short walk? Think of what you might do for an hour, an entire day, or weekend, if you could release yourself from commitments and obligations. These pastimes don’t need to be extravagant. A “stay-cation,” in which you stay home, can be incredibly restorative—if you protect your time.

Taking time to fill our personal wells is a discipline in that it requires us to be proactive. It’s like making an appointment to see a doctor, only we’re making an appointment with ourselves. In some cases you may find it restorative to have others join you in your appointments. This isn’t a problem, so long as the time is rejuvenating. Some people, including me, require small and large chunks of alone-time for optimal wellbeing. I go on a fishing trip with some friends for a few days each year. This brief retreat offers the perfect combination of solitude and togetherness. I come home fresh, more grounded, and ready to engage with life’s many commitments.

For a host of reasons we often neglect to make such appointments. We think we’re undeserving and just too busy care for ourselves. Or we may think that doing something for ourselves, such as reading a book for an hour with a cup of tea, is selfish. But we must not confuse self-care with being selfish. Self-care is what we do to be more fully human and alive. In this state we resemble more closely who we were made to be. Selfishness, in contrast, is insatiable and interested only in what will better my welfare. In the end, self-care is a gift to ourselves and to those we care about.

Confronted with this reality we may be inclined to despair and opt out of the relationship. Or we may remain physically present, but emotionally disengaged. We may wonder why we should bother making an effort if we can’t know if any good will result. So we don’t bother. If we do bother, we may resort to the use of techniques that promise a guaranteed outcome. Think “Perfect Abs in One Week” and other tabloid ads. These promise certain outcomes if we follow the prescribed technique. They give us the illusion of control and the hope of a desirable outcome. If I do X, Y will happen.

All relationships are no-guarantee relationships. The most humane response to this truth is to muster the courage to engage; to neither opt out nor heed the seduction of techniques. We must risk—and when we do we will experience both rewards and grief. These are guarantees. The joys and sorrows we experience from such courage are evidence that we are alive. I prefer this to a life of emotional and spiritual atrophy. Commit to living with this courage and you will model The Engaged Life. This may, after all, be the most potent means by which we contribute to others’ lives.

Though I am not a card carrying lifehacker, I’ve seen tremendous growth in my productivity and creativity. Mann says warding off our tendency to multitask is an important quality if we are to see such growth. To be productive we must do one thing at a time, not many. This assumes, of course, that the one thing we’re doing is what we should be doing in that moment. Allen, Mann, and other productivity types seem to agree on this point. I’ve noticed this works well and is essential to my professional life.

But when it comes to my home and family, multitasking is not an elective–it’s a requisite. In fact, when I carry into this context my professional blinders-on kind of work ethic, I find I’m quickly frustrated and disappointed in how I relate with my family. Last Saturday I decided to paint our mailbox post. The project began as I had planned. I stirred and set out the paint and brush. Put down a drop cloth and began to prep the post by scraping and sanding. Everything was still on track. Then two helpers appeared in the form of my four- and seven-year-old daughters. Their lack of previous post painting experience did not temper their eagerness to help. My productivity quotient immediately dropped, and continued to drop for the remainder of the afternoon. After four hours we completed the project that would have taken me a quarter that time on my own. We took frequent breaks to climb trees, ride bikes on the sidewalk, and dig in the dirt.

Something is starting to dawn on me: I complete house projects while attending to more important activities. I’d like to say I do this without being infected with the task-oriented, get out of my way and let me get this done, virus. I can’t. I don’t do this perfectly. I’m not sure I even do it well. But I see how I would like it to be for my kids: that they would know they, not my projects, are my priority.

The gurus are right: multi-tasking is not productive. But when it comes to family and other life-anchoring relationships, who needs productivity?

We all have pre-existing beliefs. Many of these assumptions are tacit, hidden in the recesses of our mind. Relationships, conflict, and myriad life experiences can flush these beliefs from hiding. Released into the open, they then provide us with the opportunity to refine them, change them—even kill them if they prove insufficient. Beliefs are like pieces of pottery placed in a kiln. The heat destroys those pieces containing air pockets and cracks. Pieces that are structurally sound survive.

I was in a group conversation not long ago in which we were discussing some weighty issues. I held fast to one perspective on the topic. Many in the group held a different opinion. I dug in and defended my ground. Fortunately, the others were patient with me. They asked good, difficult questions, tried to understand me, and elucidated their viewpoint. A dim light within me grew brighter, and I began to see how they understood the issue. I began to see fissures in my own ideas. I had to choose whether to cling to my existing fractured idea, or seriously consider killing it in favor of an idea that cohered. Our natural tendency is to do the former. In this instance I chose the latter. I wish I could say this is always the case.

Our ideas and beliefs help us make sense of the world. They possess tremendous governing authority, informing our choices. If their veracity is threatened, even for a moment, we can feel as though the ground upon which we stand has become unstable. So we’re prone to protect them, at times with breathtaking ferocity—even if they lack integrity. But this stance fosters a climate resistant to learning and growth. If we are to help others learn, we must first cultivate within ourselves a commitment to honest inquiry and intellectual integrity, and be willing to follow where this commitment leads.

Wouldn’t you think that our children, when asked to recount our visit, would at least mention the artwork, the unique structures, or the craftsmanship? How could they not? It was all around us. Yet when telling others about our visit to the gallery, their account begins and ends with the snakes. 

Does this mean my children did not learn anything? Was the outing lost on them? We can mistakenly believe that, because others may not highlight details we deem essential to a subject, they have not learned anything. Many of the groups I work with confront this phenomenon on a routine basis. They are bringing a message of health and wellbeing they dearly want youth to embrace. In the process they include potent facts and data—and may be disheartened when students do not with absolute clarity reflect back this valuable information. On surveys and in focus groups it is common for students to highlight aspects most of us would consider footnotes. We take seriously what students report, and use their feedback to strengthen future efforts. But we ought not be distraught and assume students have learned little when they don’t say what we hoped they would say.

Every one of us is able to articulate only a fraction of what exists in our subconscious. Learning experiences, be they field trips or classroom activities, help create a larger context within the unseen, ineffable crannies of our minds. This context serves a critical purpose, like the background of a painting. A painter typically paints a background first, moving in subsequent layers toward the details contained in the foreground. Diverse and stimulating learning experiences construct a background upon which we can add details through ensuing life encounters. That we cannot articulate in detail the existence and the nature of this background does not mean it isn’t there, or relevant. 

Particulars are important to learning, but they will be most powerful in a context wherein they gain meaning. Imagine how the image of American Gothic would change if skyscrapers replaced a southern Iowa cottage as the background of Grant Wood’s masterpiece. The background gives the two figures in the foreground a particular significance. Our tendency is to invert this relationship, emphasizing the so-called facts that compose the foreground. Though kids may be able to recount such facts with remarkable accuracy, they remain suspended—segregated from a context necessary to provide meaning. 

As a parent and educator I have to be patient as my children and students build their background layers and prepare to add details. Had my wife and I gone into our DeGrazia tour with the strong conviction that “Our children will learn about Ettore DeGrazia and gain an appreciation for his art!” we would have been frustrated and disappointed. Yet, because of the critical role I believe background plays, I’m confident they did learn something valuable upon which they can add detail. Appreciating this larger perspective can help us focus on bringing life and richness to the larger context within which effective learning takes place. 

The teacher seemed to perceive the boy’s behavior as an impediment to the learning process. This is a perspective most of us absorbed growing up: a model of education in which the teacher is like a computer server and students are computers in need of software updates. What the teacher wants most is for the student to be passive while he or she updates the student’s software. Anything else is like disconnecting your computer from the Internet mid-download.

No model could be further from how we actually learn. In the real world we learn a snippet about something. Upon hearing we want to know more. We’re confused. We’re unsatisfied. We’re eager to understand. We learn when we feed this appetite. Ever year tens of thousands of high school graduates move from their hometowns, presumably to learn. Can we blame a kindergarten kid who, in his desire to learn more, rises six inches off of his seat?

But we don’t often see things this way. We can easily see a person’s attempts to better understand as an affront to the learning process. What the teacher saw as an obstacle was, I believe, critical to that young boy’s learning process. In order for him to interact with the material the boy needed to sit up, and he needed to convert the skull into a puppet.

This boils down to a simple question: Are we in fact trying to help people learn? If we are then we ought to encourage others to express their natural learning abilities. We ought to see their attempts to exercise these natural abilities not as obstacles, but as a two-fold opportunity:

1. For students to learn more by learning more naturally

2. For those we teach to in turn teach us

Let’s replay the desert scene with an educator who welcomes such opportunities. The boy sits up in his seat to see better. The teacher works to make sure he and every student can see. The boy, with animal skull in hand, makes a bodacious animal sound. Out of her own curiosity the teacher asks the field guide, “What kind of sound would this animal make?” There is certainly a need to set boundaries for a learning process. But we mustn’t relegate to the outside of those boundaries people’s natural tendencies to ask questions, voice concerns, and even challenge what we say. Such impulses are jet fuel for learning.

A=Egg did not break or crack.

B=Egg had hairline fracture

C=Egg preserved its contents but cracked

D=Egg’s contents broke through but the shell preserved some of its shape

F=Egg shattered

The second option is that my teacher focused 90 percent of his attention on the process leading to our final egg-saving device, reserving the balance of his assessment for whether it actually worked. I’m reminded of Thomas Edison’s famous quote, “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Oh, that a goal of our education would be that each and every student could say this with impunity.

It is conceivable that one of my classmates could have fully devoted his gifts to developing an egg-preservation device that unequivocally failed. Wonderful! A shattered egg is pure information, an immediate, unmistakable feedback loop that can inspire a successful subsequent design. My teacher, seeing the dedication and creativity my classmate applied to his process, would have wisely assigned an A. This grade would match the degree to which the student had availed himself of his natural gifts, not whether he achieved a successful product.

I’m struck by how much this latter description models real life. In real life failure precedes success. A musician must fail dozens of times before she learns to play a song correctly. Software designers develop countless iterations of a product before landing upon one that works. Chefs compose meals that resemble Costco samples before they master exquisite cuisine. The current state of education is at cross-purposes with real life. What if we trained teachers to model and encourage process and failure? What if colleges trained teachers to help students self-assess and improve their own process? Process would trump product. Failure would inspire future successes. Education would resemble reality.

Performance-based learning is just that, a performance. We train students to learn their lines for a single performance. The lines have no real meaning to the students. Students are unable to apply whatever they manage to retain to real life because the scripts are hopelessly out of sync with reality. Process-based education models that which we experience in reality: a superior approach to preparing our young people for life.

Educational models will better serve students by emulating the egg-drop challenge. We should present students with situations for which there are no easy, prepackaged answers. Such situations are opportunities for the inherent genius within each child to surface and perform. Life will present students with myriad challenges. Kids who are now in grade school will someday lock themselves out of their home, try to find a treatment to heal a patient’s body riddled with cancer, design agricultural methods that enhance soil and maximize yield, and parent a child whose behavior no how-to book adequately addresses.

Inherent in each of these scenarios are problems for which there are no easy answers. It is, in fact, the absence of easy answers that ignites our creativity as we seek to confront challenges. Remember how you felt the last time you locked yourself out of your car or home? If you’re like me, your mind wove multiple possibilities for how you might solve the problem before you. Each educational discipline can and should mirror this kind of process: Present a difficult challenge, give students freedom and parameters within which they can address the challenge, assess students—not on the product (Did the egg break?), but rather on the process (To what extent did the student immerse herself and her creativity in the process that preceded the product?).

Educational models like this exist, but are in the minority. Most often, rather than challenging students with processes that at once agitate and nurture their natural learning sensibilities we fetter students’ native curiosity and creativity by first supplying an answer, then testing them on their ability to furnish that precise answer. This educational paradigm is antithetical to the thrill of learning which I and my classmates experienced in our quest to preserve the integrity of an egg. It would have been far easier for my teacher to merely show us how to build “the ultimate egg-dropper” from a design someone else had created. But this would have been akin to thievery on his part to short-circuit our fourth-grade ingenuity. What a gift it was that he didn’t rob us of our creative process.