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Peer-to-peer Education Principles

To start off our P2P Education Guide, @bart and I drafted a first version of a set of principles. Would love your thoughts.


Principles of Peer-to-peer Education

  1. Define success by what the learner becomes, not by what they can do.
  2. Learners take responsibility of their learning journey. Educators create environments that inspire and allow them to self-direct.
  3. Ownership comes from invoking curiosity, passion, and shifting mindsets.
  4. Educators develop the learner’s mindset, because information on its own has no merit, and knowledge without the attitude to apply it has no value.
  5. Application drives knowledge retention, thus learning is most effective closest to the context where it’s applied.
  6. Design education to detect and respond to learners’ needs and their context.
  7. Create safe spaces so the learner can ask real questions and reveal true challenges.
  8. Create an environment that is conducive to learning, whether that’s comfortable and conversational, or that emulates difficult challenges.
  9. Give control to the learners, and they will fuel their passion. Take it away, and you lose your relevance.
  10. Curate in response to the learner’s current needs. This accelerates their rate of learning.
  11. Systematically create relationships between the learner and the most relevant sources of knowledge. Those may be authorities, or maybe just a few steps ahead.
  12. The most up-to-date education builds conduits to relevant knowledge, rather than siloing it as a discipline or an individual expert.
  13. Learning is social in nature. Build a broad toolset from human history: from apprenticeships, to story-telling, to object curation.
  14. Learning is not necessarily a distinct activity from doing. Get the learner to try & apply, and show, rather than tell.
  15. Education affects people’s paths and livelihoods. It is a big responsibility.