I constantly reflect on how I describe Do.Think.Learn to prospective parents and the public. Educational trends and ideas constantly bombard parents. It’s hard to keep up sometimes.
In education beyond public, independent, and charter schools parents can unschool, re-school, homeschool, and microschool their child Do.Think.Learn sits in the middle of the rather messy Venn Diagram of all these ideas. Perhaps this is why folks struggle to picture what it is we do at Do.Think.Learn. So let’s change that.
In a recent moment of questionable thinking, I considered referring to our microschool as “artisanal education” with “handcrafted learning.” This, however, seemed disingenuous. Thus, I stopped looking and that’s when I stumbled on a new idea. Sometimes reading articles outside of education sparks ideas about teaching and learning (thank you Patagonia).
Let’s talk about regenerative education. We already have regenerative technologies, agriculture, and medicine, so why not regenerative education? Regenerative education (ReEd) is not something I came up with - turns out other people have had similar thoughts. How people think about and operationalize regenerative education differs slightly, and Do.Think.Learn follows many of these ideas, but with our new school meets old school interpretation of ReEd.
ReEd at Do.Think.Learn means a school that restores, rebuilds, reignites, and reinvigorates learning and school for students.
We call our version of regenerative education - RE-Learn. We share many of the concepts as other regenerative schools. RE-Learning at DTL involves finding what works for each student. This means dismantling the negative experiences students have had at other schools; undoing how they have been trained to do school; and creating a path to success for each student.
Relearning definitely triggers some folks. Many of us have a visceral response when we hear relearn. For some this means the drill and kill monotony of worksheets or endless toil doing something over and over in school. For me, I flashback to a variety of math tests with bad grades in red across the top or my honors English teacher asking me in class if I was stupid. In many schools when they ask students to relearn something, it means that student has a problem. But maybe it’s the school that has the problem.
RE-Learning at Do.Think.Learn reimagines how school works. Many students struggle in school. That struggle takes many forms. Some schools dismantle a student’s confidence or sense of purpose. Of course nontraditional learners struggle in rigid systems and other students get bored waiting for work to challenge them. Some students just need a more flexible and meaningful school experience. We take the time to establish who that student is and what they need in order to succeed in school and beyond. It means removing the meaningless toil and rebuilding each student’s experiences in school.