“What counts is your level of engagement, not your level of accomplishment,” Sheila Hicks, internationally known fiber artist.

This is a counter-cultural statement. Our culture values and rewards accomplishments, not engagement. But engagement is a requisite for great work. We produce little if what we produce does not stem from engagement: engagement in what we are doing, engagement with others, and encouraging others to engage with us and our work.

Engagement is complete immersion and involvement in what we are doing without a view to what we may or may not accomplish. A high level of engagement is accompanied with an equally low level of concern about a final product.

Engagement is obsession with process. When you lose yourself in a conversation or a project you are fully engaged.

Here’s the irony: it’s by losing yourself in the process that you create products of the greatest value.

I’m writing a new book about engagement. I’m completely immersed in the creative process. The book is taking directions I couldn’t have ever predicted and never would have experienced if I had predetermined what this product would become.

What projects are you involved with right now? What’s your level of engagement with these projects? Are you lost in the projects or just trying to accomplish something?

I find it helpful to answer these questions for each of my projects. It helps me leave the shallows of a mind focussed on product and dive into process’ deep-end. It’s there, where I’m fully engaged, that I know I’ll surface with things of value.

After posting last week’s blog about my fourth grade egg-drop exercise (eggs-periment?), I tried without success to recall how our teacher graded us. Two options seem plausible to me. The first is the inane, traditional grading approach we in America seem reluctant to shed. This perspective is fixated on the final product. We see this most clearly in our obsession with testing. We quarantine youth, then give them something akin to the “Hey kid, give me your lunch money” treatment. If they hand over the cash we leave them alone. They’ll go hungry for the day, but they’ll survive. If they don’t produce the cash, we ruin their day. In the same way, our system encourages us to hand out less-than-satisfactory grades to motivate students to show up the next day with an involuntary donation. If my teacher had applied such a system to the egg-drop it would have looked something like this:

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.

I doubt I’ll ever forget the challenge my fourth grade teacher presented to our class: Throw a raw egg off a two-story building without breaking it. Our imaginations were aflame with ways to meet this challenge. We discussed and shared ideas with one another. Each student conceptualized and developed a distinct solution to the singular problem of how to keep the egg intact. Some students used copious amounts of foam and packing material. I employed a parachute. Results varied. Some eggs survived, while others splattered. This experiment was the perfect metaphor for problems I’ve faced since—problems which I cannot resolve with easy answers.

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.