Recently SelfDesign celebrated its 25th anniversary with alumni, staff and families all joining in a festive celebration in Vancouver. The program started as one father working to preserve the integrity of his daughter’s desire to joyfully learn. It has now has grown to over 1,000 learners in British Columbia and has recently expanded globally.

When I first met Brent in 2005, I was so excited to learn about the SelfDesign online learning program. It enables the use of natural learning ability and acknowledges that children learn at different rates and in different ways. I recall having dinner with Brent as he shared the SelfDesign philosophy and spoke of the Village of Conversations. I smiled more and more as he described how each learner has a unique learning plan which is created by the learner, family and Learning Consultant. In this way they are able to share in a collaborative conversation about the learning that is taking place on a day to day level. Another exciting component is how SelfDesign is using technology to connect families in a vibrant online learning community so everyone can share their experiences and learn from each other.

In 2006 the SelfDesign Learning Community received the “Prime Minister’s Award” for education innovation, along with special recognition from the BC Ministry of Education for its contribution to public education.

Educators around the world have recognized this unique program that focuses on developing the natural ability of each individual child to learn and so elegantly utilizes a sophisticated understanding of the neurobiology of learning. It was refreshing to read today that Geoff Olson, a writer for the Vancouver Courier, is also fascinated with this philosophy. He could readily see how it combines the “perennial philosophy” of ancient traditions with the latest thinking on cognition and human development and is applicable to day to day life.

Geoff also refers to Brent’s book, “SelfDesign: Nurturing Genius Through Natural Learning.” He writes that “My copy of SelfDesign is thick with Post-It notes and underlined passages. I’ve been meaning to write about the educator and his work for some time, but there is such an overabundance of radical common sense in his writings, I didn’t know where to start.”

I first read Brent’s book in 2006. Since then, I’ve read it a number of times and each time learn something new. Like Geoff, my copy is also full of Post-It notes and highlights, as I continue my on my life journey as a SelfDesigner.

Next week Geoff plans to write a sequel about how SelfDesign works in the real world. Stay tuned for more… or if you can’t wait, go the website at www.selfdesign.com and learn more right now!

Monica Cochran
Enrollment Counselor & Educational Consultant

Click button to share:

I just climbed out of a salt water bath to write this blog.  I want to be sure I get my thoughts, about this most important subject of being in a learning community, down before I lose them.

I am not feeling well today.  I have a sinus infection.  My daughter is also very sick with bronchitis, poison ivy, and a horrible case of pink eye.

I write this, not to induce pity, but to help you understand my bath tub ponderings, and my overflowing, heartfelt gratitude, for the learning community that I am now a part of.

In the past few years, taking care of my terminally ill mother, I have had to grow up.  Faced with loosing my second parent to cancer, and living 2,000 miles from my closest relative, I have learned a lot about self reliance, and the value of true friendship.

When I ventured to Texas, I had a hard time, finding like minded folks, especially in regard to my views on education.  I have learned in my 15 years here, that you can find community in the most unlikely places, virtually, for example.

When I flew to Vancouver in August, for a SelfDesign weekend workshop, I was astounded at how peaceful the families in attendance, with children ranging from infants to teens, were.  There were no parents barking at their children.  The teens were playing with the toddlers.  I saw one parent head off a child, from another family, who was running towards a river on the property where we were staying.  It was an experience of true community.

While in the tub, just a minute ago, I realized how very important this is for me.  My son’s birthday was the day before Thanksgiving.  He has 3 grandparents now, and not one of them called to wish him a happy birthday, on his actual birthday.  However, he received one video recording, and several cards, from what I now realize is our SelfDesign Family.

This week, my family doesn’t even know that my daughter and I are under the weather.  From our SelfDesign Family,  a coworker and mom, asked Sadie’s symptoms, and sent me a page of suggested homeopathic remedies.  One dad, while on a conference call, went to ask a mom who was visiting his house, and his wife, how to help bronchitis.  After I did what they suggested, my daughter slept through the night, for the first time in days.  

I am flying home to see my family of birth at Christmas, and am so grateful to have the opportunity to share this holiday with them.  However, in being a mom and having had to emotionally grow up, I realize that I get to choose my daily life family, and that for me is wholly SelfDesign.

This learning community, is about so much more.  It is about support, nurturing, sharing, inclusivity.

The man in charge of our business operations wrote something this week, that it takes a learning community, to raise a child.  I believe he is correct.

For me, this learning community has become my family, where I receive support in my daily life, on good days, and bad.  I couldn’t SelfDesign, without them.

I love my family of birth.  I have come home to SelfDesign, my family of choice.

Ariel Miller
who is a SelfDesigner, a SelfDesign mom,
and works with SelfDesign in the capacity
of building relationships and alliances

Click button to share:

8 ways to solve the problems of the past with thinking from the future

 
From the The Obama-Biden Plan -

Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe that our kids and our country can’t afford four more years of neglect and indifference. At this defining moment in our history, America faces few more urgent challenges than preparing our children to compete in a global economy. The decisions our leaders make about education in the coming years will shape our future for generations to come.”  (http://change.gov/agenda/education_agenda/)

Having read through the Obama-Biden Educational Agenda, we should be encouraged by the breadth of initiatives presented – structural, financial, pedagogical and more.  What hasn’t been fully revealed yet are the implementation details for successfully transforming education in America, often the bane of most great plans. Addressing the underlying causes of the symptoms that leading to these educational challenges and moving those to the top of the list should be next on the Obama agenda.

Yet, if Einstein was right – that the problems of today, cannot be solved with the thinking of the past – then perhaps it is time we started reconsidering, in ernest, the way WE THINK about education.  With educational change a national priority, and high on the Obama-Biden administration’s agenda, perhaps now is the time to re-frame the discussion to include a new structure, language, and criteria for delivering educational and learning programs from a modern perspective.

1) Include every student and parent in the creation of their own learning plan - not only those in specialized programs and not a re-packaging of the existing model to students and families.  The old mantra of ‘you have can have any colour Model ‘A’ you want, as long as it is black’ kind of service can be replaced with a personal learning plan & learning portfolio for every child.  If children in special education are provided opportunities for personalizing their own learning plans, let’s give each that same opportunity.

And while we are at it, why should parents be excluded from the fun of designing and creating a learning plan and learning portfolio with their child. Encouraging parents to participate more in their child’s education through more one-on-one time, help with ‘homework’ and discussions about their interests and challenges is, well, almost self-evident in terms of its potential impact.  Supporting parents to feel more comfortable with how to engage their children should be part of the role of every teacher.

2) Maximize enthusiasm and self-confidence - seek from every child a personalized learning plan based on their personal interests and abilities, not one limited to the existing jar of learning outcomes.  Understanding that each learners’ developmental stage is different and at any given time they may not be 100% in-line with the prescribed learning outcomes for that age.  Re-enforcing that 50% of every student thinks they are below average (what we inadvertently create through intense testing) is probably NOT the ideal way to engage and inspire all children at the most critical learning time in their lives.

Offering testing as a personal choice generates meaning around testing and engages learners to view exams and quizes as an opportunity for self-evaluation and improvement, instead of criticism and punishment.  Let’s allow children to move ahead at their own developmental pace, continue to encourage group activities, allow advanced students to mentor less-advanced and develop their own mentoring experience, and engage students in self and group evaluations.

3) Apply more learning resources to artistic subjects and creative projects - Brent Cameron, Founder of SelfDesign maintains that all children are geniuses when given enough room to find out what they are interested in and supported in that learning.  Instead of increasing learning time, increase the value and effectiveness of their learning time by providing relevant tools, inspired mentoring and freedom to learn at their own pace.  When their natural insatiable appetites and abilities to learn are unleashed, excellence in every subject they engage in WILL develop.

Ask corporate headhunters why so many MFAs (Masters in Fine Arts) in contrast to MBAs are being hired into senior management positions.  Research into the value of the arts and creative play is beyond dispute, as Sir Ken Robinson so eloquently communicates (www.ted.com). If entrepreneurs are driving new job growth – the monetization of creative ideas - then let’s help learners master those skills if they so choose.

If artists and design students are being recognized for creative, out of the box thinking, and if corporate powerhouses like Google and 3M place enough value on creativity, that they insist employees focus at least one day per week on creative play, imagination and thinking time, surely we can provide equal space in the current learning week for our children to engage in similar activities.

4) Transform teaching into mentoring, coaching, personal development counselling & learning consulting relationships - There is little dispute regarding the value quality teachers bring to a child’s life.  Yet, teaching does not need to be a one-way relationship, sage on the stage model, especially in a world where learners have equal access to information and often superior knowledge of specific subject areas than their teachers.

If relationships built on respect, equality, human rights, open communication and sharing of ideas are cornerstones of optimal learning and working models, can we not make this part of each child’s learning experience throughout their lives – and not wait until they have graduated from university and expect them to have mastered these critical skills?  They are the learning market of the future, so modelling how we interact with each other, not just the ‘customer’ with a dollar to spend, should be woven into our educational mission.

5) Use technology to significantly improve the delivery of learning media and increase collaboration opportunities - Reform educational delivery to meet learner media channel expectations, and use and support the technology already available and often in the hands of learners.  The new generation sees the laptop as the we see the desktop – certainly not as a portable device (have you ever tried to carry one in your coat pocket?). Let us think of technology, NOT as an elimination of the traditional learning structure as it is so often criticized for, but as a tool for enhancing and extending learning far beyond the time-and-place specific context of the classroom.

Access to books and knowledge are no longer restricted to the single ancient tombs of venerated university libraries and lecture halls, so it is time we unshackled our collective minds from the old paradigm and began to fully embrace the ‘printing presses’ of the future: hardware, software, content interactivity and design.  Where we once used command line code to work with computers, we now have user-friendly graphic interfaces and yet we have only opened the door to the potential of the computer- human interface.

6) Make access to outstanding coaching in soft skills like personal development, emotional intelligence, NLP techniques, communication, presentation, negotiation, entrepreneurial and leadership skills - what sets apart the most successful people in the world from the rest? Rarely has this success been tied to how intelligent they are, yet we still continue to develop curriculum and testing largely centred around rote learning and a narrow band of intelligence metrics, ignoring the the value of most of the other learning modalities.

If our individual learning goals encourage each of us to find our personal strengths and passions and make them our vocation, let us expand our understanding of learning, and support and LEGITIMIZE ALL learners who have different learning needs and abilities – instead of finding increasingly effective ways to filter them out of the system!

7) Embrace learning disabilities and fund up-to-date diagnosis and treatment - Our need to support learning disabilities is equal to our need to solve social inequality. We support physical disabilities in sport through the Para-Olympics and provide medical funding for physical disease.  Let us no longer continue to accept inequality in our support for people with learning disabilities and let us provide world-class assistance for those learners to understand and surpass their learning challenges so they are not limited by the narrow filter we currently apply to academic and employment access.

Research into the impact of early learning disability interventions and improvements in the diagnostic and treatment methods for learners of all abilities, can lead to significant improvements in emotional and academic success.  Funding for applied treatments like Floortime for autism, SOI (structure of intelligence) and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and dozens of others for all learners if made accessible, could greatly reduce long-term social costs and greatly enhance the lives of millions.

8) Facilitate Group Projects and Design Learning Communities - working together in groups, on group projects and for community benefit is critical to the development of skills in a knowledge-based economy, so let’s allow children to develop responsibility and accountability for both the projects they are excited about and to their community as early as can be facilitated. Our communities need our help, the world needs volunteers, and Mr. Obama is asking for them, so let’s give our children access to the wiser generations, apprenticeship opportunities and community connections they need by engaging them in real world projects, while providing relevant learning opportunities through volunteer programs with learners of all ages.

With an entire generation of baby-boomers on the verge of retirement, and senior-citizens often undervalued and under-engaged in terms of their potential contribution to community projects and mentoring opportunities with children, we could be well-served providing children with a greater level of connection with the grandparents generation.

If we ask ourselves why K-12 education appears to be so focused on producing university professors and highly trained academics (some of my best friends , while often under-valuing the contribution of other areas of learning, we come up with a variety of responses usually in its defense. My mother was a high-school English & French teacher and I work in a very progressive learning environment, so I am no stranger to discussion on pedagogy, yet the current discussion on educational change could be well served by applying and implementing some modern ideas and already proven research.

The time has come …

… to value each child’s right to design his or her own learning plan.

… to transform teaching into mentoring relationships & learning consulting.

… to provide every child with technology tools, access and support.

… to leave behind the limitations of ‘No child left behind’.

… to increase our commitment to the arts and creative learning projects.

… to begin modelling communication skills from the age of 5 not 25.

… to stop asking what your child’s school can do for you, and start asking what you can do for your child’s school.

… to embrace the wisdom of our grandparents through learning communities.

… to stop ‘delivering’ education and start ‘inspiring’ learning.

 
If we do, great things will emerge from our children and each other!

Our time has come …
 

Parker Cook
Executive Director
SelfDesign Global

“One learning consultant per child”
www.selfdesign.com

With a 25 year award-winning history, a thriving learning community 1000 learners in British Columbia, Canada, a scaleable implementation model, and learners on several continents, SelfDesign is becoming a catalyst for change in the world.  Parker Cook is a SelfDesign father of two and a 15 year member of the SelfDesign / Wondertree Community.

Click button to share:

As I reflect upon why I chose SelfDesign as the learning program and learning community for my family, I am inspired by a piece that Brent Cameron, founder of SelfDesign, wrote while at the University of British Columbia:

“SelfDesign has been working with children and adults for the past 25 years in an innovative learning community beyond the paradigm of schooling. Our program emerges from the enthusiasm and curiosity of all learners, and we practice consensus and wellness as fundamental aspects of the work. We have grown from a group of twelve to a learning community of over seven hundred. We hope to share the nature of our work with lifelong learners around the world as an offering of peace within…

Peace is not the illusion of something that we will achieve in the future, nor is fulfillment a goal that we can obtain. Peace and fulfillment are the qualities that we bring forth to others from our essential selves in each present moment. SelfDesign is about living from this essence as a spiritual practice within our complex of spirit, mind, heart and body learning.

SelfDesign is a new paradigm of learning, a new way of thinking about learning beyond schooling. It is a modern educational methodology in alignment with ancient insights and perennial truths. It blends together the masculine and the feminine, the east and the west, allowing the infinite wisdom within to play a role in healing our universe. A new world view is possible when each one of us is allowed to be free — free to choose to work within nature and natural systems, and free to live as an expression of our heart. 

SelfDesign is about living in enthusiasm, en theos – the experience of god within.

thanksgiving by alicepopkorn

As my family prepares to celebrate Thanksgiving this week, I place the SelfDesign Learning Community at the top of my gratitude list. I give thanks to Brent Cameron and all the people who have worked tirelessly over the past 25 years to develop and grow the SelfDesign learning model and community. I give thanks to the peace that I feel in my heart as I watch my daughters and myself unfold our natural genius in a community of love and affirmation.

Debra Thorsen
SelfDesign Mom and
Director, Strategic Planning

Click button to share:

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

Click button to share:

Today would have been my father’s sixty sixth birthday.  My heart hurts, when I think of him, and how young he was when he died.

He was a very successful businessman, the top of his field, one of the very best in the world, in his niche.  Yet, before he died, he told me that when he recovered from his battle with cancer, he wanted to do something else, that his career was making him feel empty.  He was thinking about becoming a teacher.

What does it mean, when someone who is considered wealthy in every way, he had status, a loving family, a beautiful home, a company where his employees loved and respected him, isn’t fulfilled in his career?  I have to wonder if he was so good at doing something that wasn’t his life’s passion, what he could have created if his joie de vivre, had danced with his raison d’etre.

My father grew up very poor.  He told me once that people made fun of him, because of this.  One of his life goals was to become rich, which he accomplished.  Yet, I believe he died, knowing that this formula for success had not worked.  A dear friend told me he was at peace at the end of his life, in everything, but his business.

I carry a quote in my day timer, that I tore out of a magazine years ago, and look at everyday for inspiration.  While being interviewed, Bill Clinton said the following, “When I was governor, I read an astonishing study about ten people who’d grown up in impossible circumstances but all made successful lives.  One guy had been abandoned early and had four brothers in jail, yet he was a doctor.  He’d lived with his grandmother and sometimes slept under the steps of the apartment.  Near the entrance to the building, a guy who ran a newspaper stand there would talk to this child every afternoon.  He kept saying, ‘You can do anything; you’re a really smart kid.’  The study concluded that this boy and the other nine people had one thing in common: a caring adult who made the child feel like the most important person in the world.  When I met Hillary, she was working at the Yale Child Study Center, and I began learning through her work about child development issues.  It was the first time I got it:  I am where I am because somebody made me feel I could be anything.”

I wonder what would have happened if my father had had this as a child, a mentor who told him that could be anything he wanted.  How would his life have been different if he had moved towards a passion, rather than away from his childhood circumstances?  Perhaps he would have found a resolution, and peace in his career, before his death.

This, no doubt, is part of what drives me in my own commitment to change the world of education.  I am currently working with SelfDesign Global because I believe every child that is enrolled, has the relationship with their personal Learning Consultant, that President Clinton spoke of.

I consider my father’s story tragic, to have lived a life where he worked so hard, only to wonder at the end, if indeed he had been in the wrong career.  While I believe he gained comfort, knowing that he had provided well for his family, I know he would have traded all of the status, and wealth he had achieved, to live to see his first grandchild born.

Perhaps that is why, for me, a life lived in any other way than being 100% in your passion, is a life half lived, and why I have literally gone to another country, to find a child centered program for my kids.  They are being given the gift, of their education being one in which they are unconditionally valued.  My children are home learning with SelfDesign Global, a Canadian organization that has been pushing the boundaries in education, and winning awards, for the past 25 years.

I find it interesting that at the end of my dad’s life, his desire was to leave the business world, where he knew great success, and go into education.  I believe it was so he could offer to young people what Bill Clinton spoke of, a mentor who knows a person who is aligned with their passion, can be anything.  Would it have healed him, to give what he had never himself received?  I don’t know, but will allow it to heal me, in his stead.

Ariel Miller
SelfDesign Mom,
Enrollment Counselor & Educational Consultant

Click button to share:

It’s a rite of passage in the waning days of summer. The smell of leaves in the crisp, autumn air. New clothes. New school supplies. Packing the first lunch box of the season.

Earlier this month, we took our son for his very first day of school. Janet packed his (surprisingly large) lunch and with some nervousness, we walked him up the sidewalk to the school. He was very excited!

This is a near universal experience for parents. It arouses a range of feelings: excitement, pride, trepidation, anxiety at separating as they take their first steps into the world….

One thing that may be different in our case is that our son is 17 and his first day of school was at university.

You see, our son never attended public or private school. Instead, he learned at home with us and from mentors in our community. As a mother, Janet knew that school wouldn’t be the best place for him by the time he was two years old. It’s not that he couldn’t do attend public or private school, that he had such exceptional learning needs that he couldn’t be accommodated in the school system. It’s that this ‘rite of passage’ seemed unnatural to us and so we began to question it.

It was such a joy to see him learn and explore as a baby. After 5 years, it seemed unnatural to interrupt this passion and obvious success as a learner and turn him over to someone not in our family. We couldn’t bear to send this precious little guy with an insatiable appetite for learning off to an institutional setting that might break something in his spirit. Since the day we decided not to walk him into Kindergarten class, it’s been a joy watching our son SelfDesign- and compose the symphony of his life each day.

Over the years, he has had time to play and explore the world in ways he wouldn’t have the time to do otherwise. He learned to create computer games, not just play them. He has worked as an online computer consultant in a variety of capacities, from programmer to website designer to tech support. Most importantly, he had time to explore his passion- music- in a variety of ways. He has enjoyed lessons and theory from formal classical training to garage bands. He has run his own home-based music studio since he was 13 and has developed some business sense along with the social acumen to relate to his customers, who are of all ages. He has his own recording label and enjoys all the creative aspects that go along with making an album from scratch- lyrics, music, recording, editing, album design, publishing and performing. He has found a passion that will always bring him- and others- joy. And we are proud that he has learned the ideal of community service– he is now returning the gift of music by volunteering his time and energy at fund raisers and benefits. He is a success by many measures. Perhaps the greatest of these is the enthusiasm and passion with which he enjoys learning.

With others as excited as me about sharing a new paradigm for learning, a team of us created SelfDesign Global, to bring the award-winning SelfDesign methodology to the world. Janet and I had our own dreams for our son that are now manifesting themselves in the world in a positive way. In a society that is increasingly mobile, with learning tools that bring the world to our fingertips, in a world that is more than ever a global village–you will have your own reasons for how you invest in the precious hours of your child’s education. What dreams do you hold for your child? What are the values- educational and otherwise- that you want them to hold and carry forth to the world?

We would be thrilled to discuss these dreams with you. And how you can keep them alive. I invite you and your children to explore learning in an engaging and enthusiastic way through SelfDesign with the guidance of a personal Learning Consultant trained in the nuances and joys of natural learning.

Visit SelfDesign.com to begin your exciting journey to a new rite of passage!

Darrell Letourneau
SelfDesign Dad and
Director, SelfDesign Global

Click button to share:

It has been such a pleasure to welcome our new learners into the SelfDesign Global Community over the past month.  Last year I had the opportunity to work with a few teens in SelfDesign’s Learning Community in British Columbia. This year I’m thrilled to be talking with families from all over the world!

When I was in church Sunday, the minister’s sermon was “Do you hear,” about the process through which he responded to his calling to be a minister.  He told some humorous stories about being called and the number of times it occurred before he finally responded. It reminded me of the the process we went through before we chose to home educate.   Like the minister, we heard the call a number of times to step off of the one-size-fits-all education treadmill.

When I initially heard the call that traditional school wasn’t working, I responded with all the reasons it would be hard to change to home learning.  My husband and I were both working full-time.   Would our son be self-directed enough?  Would following his interests and strengths work?  Would he have any friends? Would he be able to graduate and go on to college?  Would we be up to the challenge?   These, of course, are many of the questions from the families that I’ve talked to over the past few weeks, too.

It was only after our youngest son announced in no uncertain terms that “I’m not going back to school” that we answered the call. I guess the ring was finally loud enough for us to hear.  In many ways it was a bit like stepping off a cliff into the unknown. It was a bit lonesome and many friends were skeptical; however, watching our son’s sense of humor return and seeing him engaged and interested in learning again made it all worthwhile.   Some of the families I have talked with over the past few weeks have mentioned that one of their concerns was feeling lonely or isolated.  I assured them there was no need to worry about that when they are part of a learning community as vibrant and welcoming as SelfDesign.

How I wish we would have had a global learning community and routine contact with a learning consultant to help us on the journey!  Back then, we did join a home schooling program. The communication was all done by mail, however, and it was often 4-6 week between contacts.  At the time, I didn’t have any friends who were home learning and the Internet was still in its infancy, so we had few people to share the excitement and ups and downs of those first few months. The good news is that our son did acclimate well and learned to be in charge of his own learning. He had many opportunities to follow his passions and enthusiastically threw himself into many projects.  I can only imagine how much more rewarding it would have been if SelfDesign had been available to him and us.

So do you hear that call to home educate? Check out SelfDesign Global and see if perhaps it is time for you to answer that call. It is our hope that we can share the journey of expanding the successful SelfDesign Global Learning Community with many people worldwide.  And that this journey will include you…

Monica Cochran
Enrollment Counselor & Educational Consultant

Click button to share: