The Future of Education is Self-Directed Learning | Dr. Timothy Stafford, Ph.D. | TEDxEustis

We will never be more motivated to learn or retain more of what we have learned than what we have decided to learn ourselves over the past 30 years. I have dedicated my life to the scholarship and practice of

education

al futurists, like most

education

al futurists. I'm not looking into a crystal ball to try to predict anything in the

future

, but what I'm interested in is determining what we need to focus on so that we know that education will continue to evolve with the way the world works and learns and as part of that trip I have discovered that the plight of most students is that they find it very difficult to connect what they are

learning

with something that interests them and this happens at all levels of education. from kindergarten to professional development and most students have a hard time

self

-determining what is important in

learning

.

I want you to think about elementary school. Remember how for some of you the playground was the best part of everything? day, remember the seesaw? Some of you may have called it a seesaw, but do you remember it correctly? For those of you who don't, it was like a steel bar that had seats on each side and a kid would come around and another kid would come up and then sit on this hinge point called a fulcrum and swing back and forth like this. and I was always bigger than all the other kids, so when I would get on one side and one of my skinny friends would get on the other, he would stand up and then he would dangle his feet and I would be on the bottom right and it would take two or three of my friends to climb on the other side to keep their balance. calculate weight, but then in high school physics we learned something surprising: we learned that that balance point was another opportunity to balance the seesaw, that you didn't have to accumulate the weight on one side, but that all you had to do was to do was move the weight. fulcrum towards the weight and like some kind of scientific magic trick, it would just balance out and the seesaw would work now.

I want you to keep that thought in mind because we are going to apply it to education because you see that education is very similar to a seesaw on one side of the seesaw are all the things that are unknown and need to be known and on the other side are all the things we already know. You can immediately begin to understand well that all things that are unknown and need to be known. I feel heavier or more unbalanced with the things I already know, and for most students, that means we're going to start piling information on the other side to try to balance the seesaw and we don't really have a connection. to why we are doing that other than just achieving this balance that no one can really define what that means or not, but in physics, if we remember our physics lesson, there is a better way, what if the student could understand the gravity of what he is doing? learning and then developing the skill set to be able to move that foothold towards things that they don't know because they found a way to attack it towards something that interests them, now they would be more motivated to make that connection. move that foothold and then start finding value in what they're learning because here's the critical piece that I don't want to be lost and that is that every student needs to find value in what they're learning, it's true for everyone. student and that value is internal it is not external the value cannot be placed on us it has to come from within us I want to do a thought experiment right now this will be fun and there is no quiz so don't worry I want you to think about the answer to this question right now.

I'm going to ask you a question. I just want you to think about the answer. What is your favorite topic to study now? You probably almost immediately came up with an answer to something or you came up with maybe a variety of things that you like to study and that's okay too, why do we come up with an answer to that question so quickly? Because we value what resonates within us, but not just what we do, who we listen to. Over 30 years of being in education and being involved in literally every form of education imaginable in every different industry and growing up in a family full of educators.

I can tell you without a doubt if you asked me that. ask Tim what his favorite topic to study is. I would answer without hesitation: jazz without a doubt, but my love for jazz is not only connected to the music it

self

and the different musical theories that are involved, but Jazz uh Jazz embodies an ideology of improvisation that is best summarized. In the words of the great Miles Davis when he said quoting a note is only incorrect based on the note that follows it in quotes, you see that idea is fundamental to how jazz works and also resonates deeply not only with what I do but with who I am.

You see, because the more I study Jazz, the more reality it is that jazz creates an environment, an intellectual environment of innovation for me, and the more I study it, the more authentic I become. You see, because consider this, you are always looking to learn the things that you are always looking for, learn the things that make you feel like they resonate with who you are, not just what you do, and then you can begin to self-determine the value of what you are. learning. Taking away the pl from most students when they don't feel it's very valuable, so this idea of ​​assigning value or self-determining value in what you're learning has a name, it's called hudig Goji and it's probably the best. answer to how we can create lifelong learners, which is and always has been the ultimate goal of education.

Now there may be some in this room who have heard of the educational term pedagogy, which is a word, an educational term that means how children learn or how children learn. we teach children comes from the same latin word as pediatric pedagogy there is another word that is much less known called andreo which is how adults learn and how we teach adults but hudig GOI is a word that almost no one has heard but, ironically, All of you, including me, use it every day because, in effect, this is how we teach and learn ourselves. Let me give you a couple of examples of HUD tooi in action.

Have you ever gone to the Internet to search for a recipe because you really love to cook? You took a lesson, uh, to improve your golf swing, did it work? Yes, that's what I thought. Have you ever gone to the local hardware store to watch a DIY presentation on how to tile your bathroom or kitchen? Have you ever read a book on how to close sales because you wanted to increase your numbers at work? Those are all strategies implemented by Hudic in which he determined what he needed to know and the value of that knowledge and then looked at how to learn it.

No one had to tell you that there was nothing external to it, it was all internal. Here's an old school one for all you old school students out there. Have you ever read the liner notes of an album to find out more about your favorite artist or band or what? why they made this album and here is one that may surprise you that most medical schools are based on HUD agogical principles. It is true that for most medical students the idea is that they can be self-determined, self-determined, have resources for their own learning. next time you go to the doctor consider this, they are probably telling you something they learned themselves, you will see who the hell works because we are extremely good at determining what we need to know, even when we get to a situation where we know it. a lot already and let's face it, we will always find ourselves in a situation where we will be able to determine what we need to know and then figure out how we are going to resource that for ourselves and so the idea here is that we always want to keep moving forward to make sure that we can continue doing that and continue finding value in what we are learning.

Then, how do we do it? How do we continue to provide value to every student, whatever they are? We are studying even when that study could be mandatory, how do we do it? Good. Hudig Goji provides us with three paths. First. Hudig Goji guides us. A path to autonomy. Students need to feel like they can connect what interests them to what interests them. learning and that is true at any age and can be applied to any type of learning, whether you choose the learning or whether that learning is required, think about a student who has to practice counting to 50 and counts their crayons because they love it coloring and so now it's not about counting at all, now it's about attaching counting to something they love.

Hudig Goji provides us with opportunities for discovery. It is a path to discover. Have you ever been on the Internet and found yourself falling down a rabbit hole? You were looking for something else and suddenly you spend three hours looking at something else and you are completely convinced to buy all kinds of things by looking at it, reading other articles, you crawl to places you never knew you could and then you are talking about it You share it with your friends a day next and you're thinking about it for a week. Discovery is an incredibly powerful way to learn things, and by the way, you will very rarely forget what you learn when you discover it that way.

Hudig Goji provides us with Paths of Resonance now, all of you in this room probably and anyone watching this probably took a bottle with two fires and blew into it, it made a sound and then many of you probably threw some of the liquid or maybe They drank it and then You blew again and it made a deeper sound because as we remove the liquid there is more resonance in the bottle and in the same way the more we open our mind to be able to learn new things the more those ideas resonate within us. So consider that you are seeing the image that allows me to say what I said at the beginning a little differently.

You will never be more motivated to learn or retain more of what you have learned than what you learn through true autonomy. Discovery and resonance. and that is true for any student of any age receiving any type of education, whether compulsory or not, so listen up, as technology continues to change and shape our culture, especially in the various forms of education. I just want you to remember something: there will always be concepts and ideas on one side of the seesaw that are unknown and need to be known and there will always be concepts and ideas on the other side of the seesaw that we already know and know.

Goji will allow you to explore all those things, but now It's not just about balancing the seesaw like we did before, now the focus can be on the student to form that student as a fulum who can balance not only a learning seesaw but everything. a world of learning rockers that can teach us an entire universe. of ideas and concepts that are all interconnected and resonate deeply with who we are and what we do, so remember that you will never be more motivated to learn or retain more of what you learned than what you yourself decided to learn, so I leave you with this that want to learn next