Co-Learning requires Confronting Fear, Taking Risks, Embracing Error, and Encouraging Agency By Howard Rheingold
Photo by
Gustavo Devito
 Co-learning, by my definition, involves, above all, giving learners real agency. That means making room in your preplanned curriculum for what the learners want to do, then encouraging learner agency by telling them to think about projects that THEY want to do, learning activities and texts THEY want to pursue. It also means that the instructor must take a risk before other learners can follow suit -- and for educators, that's where the fear is first confronted. I starkly remember the fear I felt when I first faced rooms full of (in my case, college) students. I was confident in my knowledge of the subject matter. But as a novice instructor with no training, I was afraid of taking the risk of letting the students know how much I didn't know. Agency requires vulnerability -- it's always safer to follow instructions than to invent your own -- and the system of authority embodied in the rows of desks facing the lone standing teacher provides a ready-made script for learning that everyone in the classroom understands: For students,  the script only requires them to sit and listen, take notes, attune themselves to what they might be tested on, replay what they've learned when called upon. In the traditional script, only the boldest student directs questions to the instructor. But unless the instructor models as well as encourages the students to reveal what interests them and to drop their fear of exposing what they don't know, the reward for confronting these fears -- a real sense of agency by learners, accompanied by the enthusiasm that comes from pursuing your own curiosity, will elude the would-be co-learners.
I have never gone this far, but high school teacher David Preston confronts the fear and agency issue by telling his students to decide among themselves what is really important to learn -- then physically leaving the classroom with no further instruction. What kind of courage does it take to throw your learners in the water without telling them exactly how and where to swim? However, after spending hours talking with David and his students and other extraordinary high school teachers such as Don Wettrick and Amy Burvall, and after taking my own attempts to give learning power and responsibility to students, I can say with the authority of a practitioner that an instructor's courage to grant radical agency to learners will often (not always! there's the risk!) pay back spectacularly.
But what if it doesn't work? That insidious question is powerfully and frequently reinforced by our educational institutions' phobia about "failing" (a needlessly pejorative word for the kind of error that is often necessary for trial-and-error learning). In many commercial enterprises, management has to struggle with the conflict between succeeding-by-not-failing and innovating-by-taking-risk. Students of computer programming and electronic circuitry know that code and circuits most often don't work as soon as they are assembled, but require a search for and repair of the error. Often, this involves knowing how to search for specific conversations online, to engage in them, and to call upon networked knowledge. Always, it involves a willingness to look for what you've done wrong. As any programmer or tinkerer can tell you, when code finally runs or a circuit finally does what it was intended to do -- especially after a frustrating debugging process -- the rush of triumph and achievement seals what they've learned far more effectively than fear of failing on a test.
In the classroom, I try to model error-embracing as soon as I can. I have a good tool for doing this. Because social media has been the subject matter of my courses, it only makes sense to use (and reflect upon) social media in our co-learning process. So I try and demonstrate all kinds of new apps and platforms in class, and push the media until something goes wrong. At that point, I remind them of what has become something of a cliche of mine -- "you aren't exploring the edge if you don't fall off from time to time" -- and start systematically thinking aloud about where the problem lies, whether and how it can be fixed, or what workarounds can help accomplish my goal, whether or not the technology error can be repaired. Errors should be seen as the first clues in an inquiry, and that inquiry must include a practiced skill of looking for where the learner made a mistake.Â
I've been told -- and experienced first-hand as a (failed) entrepreneur -- that one reason why Silicon Valley venture capital-fueled innovation has been so successful, and why it has been difficult to duplicate it elsewhere, is that failure is not shameful. The day after the news got out that I had cratered my early dotcom, I started getting calls from potential investors in my next one. There's a good reason for that. You learn a lot when you crater a start-up. But in other parts of the world, failure is shameful. In many cultures, failure is the end of an enterprise -- not a way-station on a learning journey that ends in success.
I asked myself how I could reduce the most useful actions to encourage co-learning to the smallest number of words. I came up with "confront fear, take risks, embrace error, encourage agency." You don't have to dive in head first. Dip your toe in the water. Confront your fears in small pieces. Experiment with small errors, take small risks, give students small amounts of agency. Then when the world doesn't end and some students actually exhibit excitement about their agency, get a little bolder. Co-learning is about learning what works on and with your students through trial-error-revision-reflection every day, every new term, every year.
