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
- Define success by what the learner becomes, not by what they can do.
- Learners take responsibility of their learning journey. Educators create environments that inspire and allow them to self-direct.
- Ownership comes from invoking curiosity, passion, and shifting mindsets.
- 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.
- Application drives knowledge retention, thus learning is most effective closest to the context where it’s applied.
- Design education to detect and respond to learners’ needs and their context.
- Create safe spaces so the learner can ask real questions and reveal true challenges.
- Create an environment that is conducive to learning, whether that’s comfortable and conversational, or that emulates difficult challenges.
- Give control to the learners, and they will fuel their passion. Take it away, and you lose your relevance.
- Curate in response to the learner’s current needs. This accelerates their rate of learning.
- Systematically create relationships between the learner and the most relevant sources of knowledge. Those may be authorities, or maybe just a few steps ahead.
- The most up-to-date education builds conduits to relevant knowledge, rather than siloing it as a discipline or an individual expert.
- Learning is social in nature. Build a broad toolset from human history: from apprenticeships, to story-telling, to object curation.
- Learning is not necessarily a distinct activity from doing. Get the learner to try & apply, and show, rather than tell.
- Education affects people’s paths and livelihoods. It is a big responsibility.