Looking back 15 years I remember meeting Brent Cameron, the founder of a small, innovative educational learning community called Wondertree, around the green felt of a free billiard table in a friendly ‘Cheers’-like bar in Vancouver, BC – The Press Club. It was a place where journalists and media folk would gather after the days work to share stories and discuss the news of the day, and helped open my mind up to many new ideas and the inner workings of the press. Brent was a good pool player and after months of practice, I was almost able to match his skill and play competitively with him (my reference point for many things at that time). It was that encounter that would influence much of my thinking about business and how I conducted my life.
He spoke to me of a different kind of high school he and Michael Maser, a Vancouver-based journalist, geologist, musician and teacher, had initiated nearby in a 4 story mansion house in the venerated Shaugnessey area of the West Side of Vancouver, British Columbia. In fact, he did not refer to it as a high school at all. Instead, Brent referred to this new kind of school as a learning centre with learning consultants, instead of teachers, where learners were initially engaged in the process of exploring the more important questions we as children and adults alike are rarely asked to consider – questions about what we are inspired by and how we could optimize how we learn through the latest learning technologies like NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and the different modalities of learning we now more commonly understand as the multiple intelligences.
With my interest peaked, I visited and volunteered at Virtual High (the brick and mortar high school age version of SelfDesign), where Brent’s daughter and 35 other students gathered everyday to design their own learning plans, manage budgets, hire learning consultants and mentors to provide coaching and expertise in group topics of interest. They organized cooking for lunch, cleaning and facility upkeep, outreach projects into the community, were hired by public and private corporations to develop software projects, designed sustainable village architectural models for what is now the current site of the Olympic Village for Vancouver 2010. They won several national and local awards for their innovative use and development of software, yet at the heart of it all was an ethic for learning with each other which kept all of them captivated.
Despite the students’ excellence in the use of computers and software development, technology, I discovered, was little more than one of many tools for facilitating what was underlying the pent up enthusiasm for life which each teen brought to Virtual High each day. And why were these students were so jazzed about ’school’ that Brent and Michael were asked by the parents to make agreements with the learners to spend more time at home with their families throughout the week!
The answer, in its shortest form, was about trust and freedom and choice – the trust parents had of their children to be free to choose their own life and learning paths based on their blossoming energy for everything, and then the realization by each student that they could really learn and do anything after being supported to do so and coached in how they might learn faster, more effectively and more creatively than ever before. And they most often did! Through their personal discovery of their own limitless energy and abilities, these students immersed themselves in everything they found an interest in.
In addition, these SelfDesign students also learned about a different way of communicating with each other and how collaborative models of school and business were incredibly effective in creating superior results when practised. Brent mentored and modelled negotiation skills, personal development strategies, interpersonal communication skills techniques for perfecting spelling, opened doorways to inner passions and helped connect all of these into the development a lifelong journey of purpose.
From this sense of purpose, my competitive edge was transformed into an effortless journey toward a mastery of everything I loved doing, hindered only only by my next self-imposed boundary. It is a place where my life became a match between my leisure and my labor, with a congruency in which achieving excellence, appeared not much different than a child’s elegant mastery of rapport with her mother or how all children learn to walk without an instruction guide. I had taken the first steps on my own path back to childhood, to that place we all know, and returned to know it for the very first time.
I had become a SelfDesigner.
Parker Cook
SelfDesign Dad and
Executive Director
