The Pathway

From Kapono’s background, the Native Hawaiian saying kulia i ka nu’u, meaning to strive for the highest peak, captures another way to explore the horizon. The current educational paradigm is to set outcomes for all students that are the same, while kulia i ka nu’u means to challenge oneself to the highest personal peak of excellence. This then demands that we set goals that are relevant, attainable, and challenging for each student. Is that fair? Does this mean lowering standards? To understand this saying and all it implies, it’s important to consider the educator who takes pride in the number of students who fail. Many of us have been that teacher at one point in our career, or have at least worked with that teacher, who boasts about how rigorous their class is, bragging that “half of my students don’t make it out with a passing grade!” It wasn’t until Kapono was exposed to the work of the Perception Institute that he truly grasped the potential damage of rigor-as-outcome and how measuring success as progress toward the horizon and toward personal peaks can powerfully transform education.

Whether the image is one of a salt flat or the jagged peak of a mountain, the idea is that each person has not only his, her, or their own path but also his, her, or their own destination. Defining our horizon does not mean lowering standards. It does mean providing both high challenges and high support. It is both the limitless potential of the curved horizon and the striving for the highest peak at the same time. It is allowing for different students to strive for different peaks, and to make room for a jagged profile of our graduates.

The Pathway

There are many paths to success. We know this in our own lives: some of us find success on the sports field, others as musicians or artists, while others navigate the traditional classroom with ease. Educators and philosophers of different generations have made this point, that learners don’t all follow the same path; they move through learning in a myriad of ways. Some have written about different types of intelligences. Others have advocated for differentiated degree programs, splitting vocational education from a university pathway, for example. When we standardize education, we force all students toward the same goals regardless of the broader context they bring into the learning ecosystem. Instead, the pathway refers to how the student makes their way toward the horizon; it is the personalized path that allows them to succeed on the landscape.

The Myth of Standardization

Standardization of education was sparked by movements such as the United States’ federal No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and Race to the Top (USDE,

2009), and the U.K.’s Education Reform Act (1988), in an effort to ensure consistency in educational outcomes across a given district, state or province, or country. As the movement gained traction inside the United States, its influence rippled across the world, bolstered by international accountability systems such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which collects data from eighty-eight countries as of 2022 and offers achievement comparisons across countries. Sir Ken Robinson (2016) points out that social and personal factors motivated standardization, but that most efforts to standardize have hurt education more than they’ve helped. Ironically, the standards movement was intended to improve educational equality by ensuring all students received the same learning and reached their potential, but its impact has been to further highlight the inequities caused by shoving all students of a given age onto the same racetrack.

Unfortunately, the more standardized the curriculum, the less it fits the needs of students as individuals. Even the Race to the Top title elicits the imagery of the racetrack, the very model the authors are trying to deconstruct. While the authors understand the urge to standardize, and the increased efficiency it can create, we do not believe it is a good thing for students as varied, complex human beings with myriad experiences, strengths, and challenges. In fact, we see standardization as dehumanizing. As Robinson (2016) puts it, “. . . people don’t come in standard versions,” and only some areas of education lend themselves to standardization (p. 160). In fact, “Many of the most important developments that schools should be encouraging do not [lend themselves to standardization]” (Robinson, 2016, p. 160). Furthermore, he describes the standards movement as favoring direct instruction and multiple-choice assessment, and as skeptical of portfolios, open-book tests, and other, more authentic demonstrations of learning.

What does it look like for educators and institutions to plan with the landscape in mind, seeking whatever highest level of success is possible with each student? The foundation of our answer lies in the belief that simplifying our planning down to a narrow, standardized pathway is rarely good for students. Yes, it can take more time and work to chart the pathway in a deeply personalized way, and yes, we may need to organize teachers’ time and priorities differently in order to accomplish it, particularly in larger classrooms. But the reality is that educators around the world are already combating the myth of standardization every time they step outside the government curriculum to provide a student with what he, she, or they need as an individual. We can standardize the goals to some degree, but when and how each student reaches said goals and communicates their learning best is anything but standard.

We believe that the key factor for success is to position students as protagonists in their own learning journey. Deep student protagonism is more than students talking for a minute or two about their learning during traditional conferences, or occasionally having teacher-controlled, limited choice; it’s about involving students as central actors in all we do in schools, so that their motivation is intrinsic and their learning is personalized. When we explore the pathway from where students are in the ecosystem to the horizon they’re working toward, student protagonism—and the pedagogies to support it—will be key.

What It Means to Chart the Pathway

How do we plan for students to be the protagonists of their learning so that motivation is intrinsic and learning is personalized? Planning with this in mind allows us to acknowledge reality and for a personal learning journey to take shape, even in the context of a traditional school unit, which allows all students to reach their own highest levels of success. While educators will be centrally involved at every step, and will need to establish personal milestones and checkpoints with students at regular intervals throughout the year, positioning students as protagonists in their own learning means letting them lead their own growth on the pathway from where they are to the horizon they aspire to reach.

Some terms educators should explore here are student choice, voice, and agency. Student choice refers to providing students with some say in their education, allowing the educator to hear from them, and for the students to make key choices in their learning, in many cases like an old-fashioned “choose your own adventure” book. The book is written, the chapters are set, but readers can choose path A or B, determining their own outcome. This metaphor may be a bit simplistic, but it captures the typical implementation of choice, which is generally limited and teacher controlled. Voice is another, slightly more elevated form of student protagonism in which students have a voice in the workings of their classroom and school—but it is still a lesser form of protagonism than agency, as there are far too many examples of tokenistic voice. It is only minimally impactful for a student government, for example, to be allowed to voice their opinion in selecting the theme of prom (albeit important to most teenagers), but for the administrators to ignore them when it comes to more pressing issues of school governance. The following section addresses what we really mean by student agency, which we use intentionally as a synonym for protagonism at its highest form. We will also explore personalized learning and culturally responsive teaching as they apply to students’ pathways across the landscape.

Student Agency

The best implementation of choice and voice looks like genuine student agency, and as such is a core element of the landscape model, what we mean when we use the term student protagonism. When it comes to school culture, true student agency looks more like students as part of a focus group, rewriting a school mission statement. In the classroom, student agency refers to the student acting on the learning with a significant degree of autonomy from the teacher (Taub et al., 2020). Well implemented, strong student agency means units are planned, but the outcome of the unit is not set. The student may emerge from the unit with outcomes that were unexpected in the planning stages, and schools that value student agency would deem this a desirable outcome (horizon)—while schools entrenched in standards-based thinking might consider it a “wrong answer” because it’s not in the textbook.

One excellent example of student agency comes from Jennifer’s experiences as head of school in Colombia. The Gimnasio Los Caobos preparatory school requires students to enroll in two interdisciplinary entrepreneurship projects in high school, in addition to several smaller versions of entrepreneurship projects in elementary and middle school. At each grade level, a slightly different focus is in place: create an enterprise that’s environmentally conscientious or even helps reverse the impacts of climate change; create an enterprise that supports human rights, and so on. While students work within teacher-constructed structures to guide their work and all students experience some of the same learning, such as business economics, graphic design, and purpose orientation activities, the businesses they develop are entirely their own. The student who loves coding creates an app; the student who believes in servant leadership creates a nonprofit; the student who wants to provide safety and dignity for displaced people creates temporary housing. In this way, students consistently go beyond the kind of limited voice and choice described earlier, where the end point—and all pathways to it— are teacher prescribed.

An example of powerful student agency happens at Wai’alae School, where Kapono served as head of school and chief education officer. Each year, the Wai’alae fifth-grade class participates in a unit where students pitch a product for production, use that pitch to secure an investment of twenty dollars from friends or family, and then produce and sell their product. That’s not the agency part yet, though. After the sales event, and after profits and losses are calculated, students spend the next unit researching nonprofits in their region that they feel are making the most difference, and students (not adults) choose where half of the profits go. But the agency continues. Students invest the other half of the

profits annually into a microloan platform where each fifth-grade class manages an ever-growing portfolio of thousands of real dollars that the class then decides how to allocate in microloans in the developing world. The learning happens when the loans are repaid, and even more learning happens when they do not. In this example, student agency—also known as protagonism—is not an afterthought but takes center stage in the learning process.

Ensuring students are protagonists in their own education is about much more than strategies for limited choice; it’s about real student agency, and building students’ skills as problem finders and solvers, for their lives inside school and beyond. If educators own 90 percent of the creativity and control in a more traditional classroom, as author and learning designer Ackers-Clayton suggests, a school guided by student agency has a culture students own and maintain (personal communication, May 12, 2021). Rohit Kumar is the CEO of the Apni Shala Foundation in India, an organization dedicated to better preparing public schools and educators for the work of deep inclusion by improving socialemotional learning approaches. He consistently takes student agency a step further, focusing not just on skills and strategies but on preparing students by actively involving them in changing the broader systems that create inequities to begin with. In the schools the Apni Shala Foundation works with, making the systems themselves increasingly inclusive, safe, and compassionate is a consistent focus (R. Kumar, personal communication, May 4, 2021). Using the example of girls being bullied by boys outside the restroom on one campus, Kumar describes how students identified the problem not just as the boys’ behavior but also the restroom’s location. Once the school moved the restroom to a more visible position on campus, the bullying stopped. According to Kumar, most of his teachers come from homes as impoverished as the students, so their work is a collective process of unlearning and re-envisioning what’s possible, with student agency at the core. He insists that there are no villains in any given scenario—the problem is the problem, and the goal should be preparing students to change the underlying systems that cause it.

Personalized Learning

The term personalized learning may be the closest to capturing the concept of how students move through learning on the pathway. Personalization means starting from the student, knowing what they can do, their strengths and their interests, and facilitating their growth toward their next stage of learning. One mistake people make using this term is interchanging it with the idea of differentiation.

Without legalistic definitions readily available, there is significant disagreement about what these terms mean. Carol Ann Tomlinson (2008, 2017), professor and chair at University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, gives us the most commonly accepted definition of differentiation. She explains it as the modification of five classroom elements: content, process, products, affect, and the learning environment (Tomlinson, 2008, 2017). This differs from how many settings use the term, but for the sake of clarity, we will use Tomlinson’s definition in this book. Differentiation starts with the content and skills the curriculum prescribes, and modifies the experience for the student by providing supports or modifications. It is curriculum centered and student friendly. Differentiation is by no means negative, but it is not personalization—and not what we aspire to on the horizon.

As author Tim Kubik (2018) puts it, “Treating learning as a question of personal relationships still tends to assume that teaching is something that adult learners must do for, or manage for, their young learners” (p. 96). Personal learning, on the other hand, as Kubik (2018) describes, is about student agency; it’s about students making well-informed decisions, with the support of their teachers, about their pathways and goals. It’s about students building a deep sense of personal purpose and managing more of their own learning. While the authors believe that personal learning is what the landscape is best built on, we also recognize that allowing for different ends for different students may feel impossible in many school contexts. As a result, we are choosing to use the term personalized. We agree with Kubik (2018) that educators’ goal should be to ensure as personal a learning experience as possible, albeit with the need to personalize toward prescribed curricular ends in many contexts.

Personalized learning starts with the child and asks what their next stage of development is. No educator would say it is efficient to teach to the middle if there was only one child in the middle. Yet the question lingers as to what a teacher teaches and how the teacher determines this. As Zhao (2012, 2021) proposes, the best learning is built from the ground up by students, with teachers, in an evolving role of coworker in learning. Educational coach Susannah Johnson, an emerging voice in individualized learning, asserts that “When we empower learners to own the learning, and we do have to actively ensure they understand that it is their learning journey, we are moving into human development, not just education” (personal communication, January 18, 2022).

For the sake of clarity, the authors will use the term personalized learning here to capture this realistic yet aspirational goal: learning should start from what the student can do, and the best path forward should involve the student in codesigning the pathway of learning. At this point, educators will likely ask, “Are

you telling me that I need to create a lesson for each student in my class? I have twenty-eight of them, and they are all in different places and like different things. How can I personalize for twenty-eight kids?” The answer is in the landscape. Personalization does not mean creating one unit for John, another for Juanita, and another for Ibrahim. The landscape model of learning asks educators to use their professional judgment and guiding documents such as standards (like Common Core State Standards [CCSS], Next Generation Science Standards [NGSS], and the like) to define the boundaries of the landscape.

For example, a unit created for fifth graders to examine how interdependence occurs among plants, animals, and decomposers in the environment is important for all students to engage in (NGSS, n.d.). Educators, scientists, and policymakers agree that interdependence is a key concept. That unit becomes the edges of the landscape. How students navigate through this landscape and explore interdependence is their personalized pathway. Some students may come to the landscape understanding how a garden works. For example, a rural school in Hawai’i serves a demographic of students who are primarily the children of farmers. Leveraging their prior knowledge would be magical for them because farming is such a central part of their lives, an element of identity and previous learning students already bring into the learning ecosystem. Yet, not everyone at the school has grown a plant. Where does the student who has grown up on a farm start on the landscape? Should everyone start from zero, assuming no knowledge of how plants grow and their interaction with animals and decomposers? Should we assume knowledge from all students? The answer is clearly no to both. This is because we already know that the landscape is the true reality rather than the factory. Mariëtte H. van Loon and colleagues’ (2013) research backs up this claim, by highlighting the power of prior knowledge. These researchers show that prior knowledge has a significant impact on learning achievement, further showing that inaccurate prior knowledge is a significant barrier to future learning (van Loon et al., 2013). It is certainly important to take into consideration a student’s context of prior knowledge to be successful.

When we start from what students already know and are good at, and understand how far we can take them, charting the pathway ultimately takes student agency to a whole other level. As author and educational philosopher Alfie Kohn (2021) explains, “What matters isn’t how well a teacher holds students’ attention; it’s whether a teacher knows enough about how learning happens to stop being the center of attention.” Protagonism is the ultimate evolution of student agency, where the student becomes the main character of their own educational journey.

Student-as-protagonist is not a teacher-free environment. On the contrary. It takes a lot of skill, knowledge, and finesse to guide, nurture, and shepherd learning, as opposed to controlling it. Students-as-protagonists recognize their own agency, and rather than choosing between teacher-presented options A and B, they identify the problem to solve and the potential solution. The protagonist students-as-designers receive training from educators in the tools necessary to ask the right questions, make the right observations, then interpret and infer before framing the right problem, which they then solve. This approach works as well for our earliest learners as for our oldest, with varying degrees of student autonomy according to their age and experience. Whether it is the kindergartener manifesting their own learning journey in student-led conferences, as we discuss in chapter 4 (page 104), or a high school classroom where students are working on a variety of solutions to a core local challenge, pedagogies such as project-based learning and design thinking provide the structures and strategies to allow teachers to scaffold standardized skills and knowledge while still allowing students to walk along different pathways.

Kapono has had the privilege of facilitating in schools embracing design thinking (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, n.d.) as a core strategy for the student-as-protagonist. Design thinking is an iterative problem-solving and solution-creating process that begins with developing empathy, and then leverages a rapid prototyping process to solve complex problems. Stanford University School of Engineering made it popular, and several groups including Lime Design (https://limedesign.ca) and HI FusionED adapted it for education.

At one particular school, a computer science class was learning about 3-D printing and the computer code needed to power the process. Rather than the educator teaching coding or starting by asking all students to print a 3-D bust of their favorite celebrity, the teacher asked students to start with a design-thinking strategy: empathy interviews (Nelsestuen & Smith, 2020). They went out into their school community and talked to people about challenges they faced in their daily lives. Upon returning to the classroom, the students then analyzed these data from the interviews and identified a solvable challenge: one particular staff member had problems getting certain plumbing parts sent to the campus. Delays and backlogs were both financially costly and cost the school time without essential services. The students identified the challenge and went about designing a solution, 3-D printing the parts that the maintenance engineer needed. Students were the drivers, the protagonists of their learning. They still learned the code, they still used the printer, but they did so from a position of intrinsic motivation and heightened agency—and were able to provide a real solution to a real challenge in their community.