THE LEARNING REBELLION w/Dr. David Preston

We are born learners. We love solving the mystery, fixing the glitch, and coming up with the right answer or a better way. Learning is our superpower. But sometimes, at work and even in school, we find ourselves up against forces and constraints that make it harder for us to learn. Dr. David Preston is here to help you fight the good fight. (Edited for length and clarity.)

It’s a bad idea to start the day on social media.
But there I was, at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, reading the tweet from Matt Reynolds.
For the third time.
  
@prestonlearning—good morning for a flight?
Oh wait, still a little early.

I’d been looking forward to this for months, but now I felt an icy tingle of fear. I replied:

@mattrey17—Yes! How many high school teachers get to tag along while a student flies a plane?
I hope this isn’t my last tweet.

Flying an airplane is a long way from sitting in a typical high school classroom. Riding in the back seat while a teenager flies a plane is a long way from normal.

(Excerpt from the Preface of Dr. Preston’s book ACADEMY OF ONE)

Encouraging a high school student to forget about our English class and pursue his passion to become a pilot made perfect sense to me – Matt was his best self that day eleven years ago, and he now has a successful career in aviation.

The event was only extraordinary because schooling has become such a rigid, transactional, test-driven exercise in compliance that empathy, trust, innovation, creativity, and especially risk have become outlier phenomena.

Hi. I’m David. I’m pulling back the curtain to introduce myself in the first person because I want you to know that what you’re about to read (or hear, because we have those learning choices now) is me talking – not AI.

Sonja was kind enough to invite me to a conversation by asking some thought-provoking questions. What follows is my attempt to answer. Please thank Sonja for the parts you like. You can blame me for the rest.

I’ll start by being honest with you about what I didn’t write in my book about that flight. The whole time, a song was going through my head (all the way down to my very white knuckles) as the tiny plane bounced through the air. I can still hear the lyrics from “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads: And you may ask yourself: Well? How did I get here?

Sonja started our chat by asking me the same thing. I get that a lot.

​In 2004 I took a break from management consulting and teaching at UCLA to teach English at a large public high school in Los Angeles. That “break” turned into 17 years of teaching in six California high schools, two years of launching an interdisciplinary, virtual academy during the pandemic, and recently returning to the consulting world in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors with a philosophy for the Digital Age that has become known as Open-Source Learning.

Every semester that I taught high school, someone asked me what I was doing in the classroom – not in an unfriendly way, just concerned, like maybe I’d gotten lost on my way to a better life. I still remember the first time it happened, at James Monroe High School in Los Angeles. Junior Ruth Pimentel gave me a quizzical look as she walked out of class and dropped a note on my desk: “Dear Dr. Preston,” Ruth wrote, “I don’t mean to mock you, but what is a person with a Ph.D. doing in high school? Don’t you want to be a success?”

Yes Ruth, I do. In fact, I want everyone to be a success.

So first I’ll tell you a little about how I got here. Then I’ll tell you where I think we all need to go.

HOW DID I GET HERE?

Where do I start? The Big Bang? Homo Sapiens outcompeting the other hominids by thinking in abstract symbols to organize in large numbers? Agriculture? My Mom’s ancestors surviving the Plague or the Holocaust to search out a better life somewhere else? My Dad’s Mom ignoring classmate Ray Bradbury’s flirtation at Los Angeles High School 90 years ago and instead hooking up with the guy who’d become my grandfather? My exchange student parents getting ditched on the Metro in Paris by their dates and spending the rest of the evening – and their lives – together? Zolzaya Damdinsuren showing up in my class and inviting me home to Mongolia?

I’m asking all that for a reason. The amazing confluence of nature and nurture, in the form of trillions of variables and circumstances and genes and cultures and families of origin and remembrances, is what makes us US. Any scientist or philosopher worth their salt will tell you that it all matters, somewhere deep in the 11.5 trillion neurons we carry around between our ears.

We connect, reconnect, and prune that neuronal architecture in new ways every second we’re alive. Right now, even as you read this, you are literally changing your mind. That’s what learning is. Every one of us is a learner, and every learner is endlessly fascinating.

Unlike your fingerprint, which is individual but also static, your learning is individual and dynamic – it’s not only unique to you, but it also changes from moment to moment. Everything from the quality of your last night’s sleep to your most recent meal alter your physical composition and your conscious experience of being alive, not to mention your focus, your patience, your memory, and so much more.

But there is no user’s manual for our brain or our body. No one teaches us how to pay attention or navigate social systems. Or how our tools now use us. Our schools and our economy don’t account for the qualities that influence our ability to learn. And we are suffering the consequences.

I’ve been working on this problem since I was five years old, when I got sick and I missed a lot of school. A teacher brought lessons and assignments to my house. When she left, I got to work. I got to read about dinosaurs, construction, time travel… and I fell in love with learning.

The more I learned, the more I realized I had to learn. I mean that last sentence in two ways. First, the things I learned taught me just how much more there was out there to learn. The introduction to something new is always exciting. Then comes the realization that I am just scratching the surface. I see what master practitioners have done and suddenly there are more questions and rabbit hole opportunities to explore everywhere.

The second meaning of “I had to learn” is that learning began to feel imperative. I became hungrier and more motivated to reach for and grasp concepts and details that helped me understand the world around me and my place within it.

​If there is such a thing as a truth-seeking geek equivalent of an apex predator, I’m that.

But going back to the first grade at school was challenging. I had to give up learning the way I did it and accept the authoritarian rules of being taught. Learning is active and engaged. Being taught is “please read silently while I read aloud.” Ugh. Telling children to stop asking questions and keep their eyes on their own paper and raise their hand to speak and go to the bathroom is like raising veal for the rodeo. And it doesn’t end well. Teachers must act like sergeants-at-arms to enforce the rules. Then employers roll their eyes and wonder why recent graduates don’t speak up or take initiative.

You probably guessed it: I got in trouble right away. I whispered to my seatmate, “Why is the teacher pulling those kids’ hair for getting their math problems wrong?” The teacher heard me and sent me to the principal’s office.

That long walk from Room 3 was when I started thinking about learning, education, and schooling as separate concepts.

School became the obstacle I had to overcome so I could keep learning. Mostly I got A’s and flew under the radar, but sometimes you need to swim against the current just to remember who you are. And sometimes you need to stand and be counted so others know who you are. In junior high school, I organized a summit with LAUSD administrators, board members, teachers, parents and students to create a student Bill of Rights. In high school I picked a public fight with a racist principal (she lost). At UCLA, I took classes all over campus until the registrar threatened to kick me out if I didn’t choose a major. I went to law school – for one day.

When I graduated for the last time, I had learned to question assumptions, consider issues from multiple perspectives, and build diverse learning communities of mentors, critics, and peers. (Note: Diversity is the ultimate sustainable competitive advantage – learning with/from people who are different than you makes everything better, most especially you. Here we can learn from nature. If we only have one cultivar of banana, say Cavendish, and that Cavendish is vulnerable to fusarium oxysporum, all it takes is one rogue strain of TR4 and then no more banana splits.

I spent the next eleven years teaching at UCLA and working as a management consultant on the very human business of organizational development. I helped clients align cultures, build cross-functional teams, manage conflict, drive visionary strategic planning, and create learning events and academies to support everything from CE to operations to succession.

My UCLA students were brilliant and my clients were successful. But after 9/11, as the conversations changed and I paid more attention, I realized that these unique and amazing people all had one terrible thing in common. Privately, they told me that they had to recover – heal, even – from their formal schooling just to get along in life, much less to thrive in their professional and creative endeavors.

With that in mind, I reentered the cave of my darkest fears. When we get to know each other better, I’ll tell you how I started teaching at one of the nation’s largest public high schools on a dare from a Los Angeles Unified School District administrator. Or how I set what I’m pretty sure is the world record for longest home visit when I spent time with a student and his family in Mongolia. Right now, what I really want you to know is that we need to take full advantage of our tools and what we know about learning before we lose our way of life altogether.

WHERE WE NEED TO GO

The future is increasingly complicated and uncertain, and we’re going to have to learn our way through it. Traditional school curriculum is obsolete, boring, and generally not worth talking about unless you’re a person who likes to fight about bibles.

On the other hand, every question is an interdisciplinary question that starts a wide-ranging exploration of all the traditional academic subjects and much, much more. So rather than focusing on the updated versions of subjects that were formalized in a culture that no longer exists, I began providing spaces where learners could pursue their own passionate curiosities. Hence the plane ride. Along the way, I created an Open-Source Learning framework of fitnesses to help ensure that no matter what concepts and skills people master, they build their own capacities in the process:

Mental Fitness: focus, memory, navigating our emotions, and learning to learn
Physical Fitness: exercise, nutrition, and rest for optimal energy and health
Civic Fitness: stewarding resources and relationships in social systems
Spiritual Fitness: harnessing the benefits of awe and wonder
Technological Fitness: making the most effective use of tools and strategies

Strengthening ourselves in these ways has so many benefits that they need their own book, which is why I’m currently writing The Sixth Fitness.

The internet is over 50 years old and we’ve never had an awareness campaign around it. Now everyone is talking about AI without understanding the technology behind it or the ethical implications of how it is developed and deployed. Meanwhile, everything is being politicized and teachers are told to stay neutral. The problem, as Paulo Freire and others have noted, is that there is no neutral – failure to speak up against racism, religious fundamentalism, or surveillance abuse reinforces the power of the status quo.

We have proven that we can do better. My learning communities didn’t blink when the coronavirus pandemic shut down our campus. Today my clients build learning events and environments that create opportunities and communities that weren’t possible even just a few years ago.

Open-Source Learning is yours. You don’t need tools or a budget. Ask a Big Question. Start an argument as a search for truth that ends in a hug. Walk around the block. Write in a journal. And answer me this: When are you going to learn? ∎

​Dr. David Preston helps leaders and organizations build high-performing learning communities. Founder of Open-Source Learning, David draws on decades of experience writing for the Los Angeles Times, teaching at UCLA and California high schools, and building a Los Angeles-based management consulting practice. David is also the author of ACADEMY OF ONE (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). He loves being outside, eating good food, and competing in Ironman
triathlons.

To learn more about Open-Source Learning and Dr. David Preston visit:
davidpreston.net

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-preston-learning

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