Human development has 5 key principles – here’s why they matter

Our education system is built on what Adichie called a single story, that there is one way through

The standardized system of education incorrectly teach young people that someone else's judgment of your output is what matters and does not capture the richness of the potential that young people are showing

because it doesn't capture the processes that they're engaging with developmentally. What we really need to do is engage in a kind of Copernican shift

where we change what the center of the enterprise is. The center of the educational solar system, so to speak

is the experience of the people in the system thinking. What kinds of thinking happen in this community

What kinds of relationships are built around that thinking? what kinds of agency are afforded young people and their teachers to engage in meaningful thinking and then pulling all this together in a new understanding of the nature of learning and what that would mean for the design of schools

Human beings are ecological systems of life. What we mean there is that we are dynamically adjusting and adapting our system

to stay alive, where we're feeling and we're reacting and we're building a sense of self in real time

Our biological growth and development are shaped by the kinds of social worlds that we've lived in

and the kinds of meaning that we've made and they in turn enable us to engage with the world in particular ways

We are not individuals just independently moving through space and time, learning and bumping into one another

we are actually co-creating each other's social fabric. It's really like a cloth

And by living together in the same space we become each other environments And that powerfully speaks to the deep communal orientation of an effective learning environment

And when we think about human beings' development in that dynamic situated way, it helps us understand in a new way what education is for, what it's meant to enable

And to repair our education systems, to repair our communities, what we need is everyone in the community to come together and contribute as a whole

that functions, that's useful, that actually generates a better society for everyone

When we ask kids to just simply produce what we have given them

what we're basically having them do is isolate the skill, the knowledge from the reason why you need it

from the usefulness it brings to you in the world, and in so doing, you deny the person

that fundamental core sense of agency that is the reason why we come to think hard about things in the first place Our education system punishes that kind of agency

It has no space for young people who bring passion, who bring values, who are driven to ask why

who want to know why else. Those dispositions of mind, when cultivated, become..

the essence of what makes the schooling experience, one that doesn't just lead to learning outcomes

but leverage that learning in the service of something much bigger human development

So what's really about reframing the educational process so that we center the feeling of thinking

and we build our curriculum around that, where teachers and students have the agency

to build out opportunities for themselves, around the content, around the curriculum, and around each other, and the relationships that they're forming