Amy Cohen:
Thank you for joining us today for our webinar, Homeschool Madness: How to homeschool without doing it yourself and how to make it work for you and your family. My name is Amy Cohen and I am a member of the Class of 1985, and I am also the co-chair of the Brandeis Women's Network, the goal of which is to strengthen relationships and connections between Brandeis alumnae and to facilitate women helping women in all aspects of their lives. If you are Brandeis alumna or a mother of a Brandeis alumna, you can join our Facebook group. Just search BrandeisWomen, one word, and request to join. We'd love to have you.
Amy Cohen:
Before our speaker begins, I have a few quick announcements that I'd like to make. As I hope you know, and I'm sure you know by now, there's a lot of virtual programming going on for Brandeis alumni, family and friends. On September 22nd, Allan Lichtman, who is a professor at American University, will be on a webinar discussing his predictions for the current presidential election. For those of you who don't know, Professor Lichtman has correctly predicted the winner of the presidential elections since 1984, so this one is going to prove to be fascinating and you won't want to miss it. And on September 30th, there's a virtual Faculty in the Field event with Professor Billy Flesch. He will be discussing Philip Roth's Plot Against America, the 2004 novel. And, again, that should prove to be extremely interesting. I encourage you to check your email, alumni website and social media for more information on what's happening and how to join.
Amy Cohen:
I have a couple housekeeping rules that I'd like to go over. Just so everybody knows, the event is being recorded and you may request a copy of the recording after the event. And if you have a question, there'll be time at the end for a Q and A session. And we ask that you use the Q&A function, which you'll find on the right-hand side of your screen. And those are our housekeeping rules. We ask that everybody mute themselves. And so, obviously, you'll need to unmute before you ... Well, I guess you don't need to unmute before you ask a question because you'll be doing it in the Q&A.
Amy Cohen:
So without further ado, I'd like to introduce our speaker tonight, Ali Kaufman. Ali is a member of the Class of 1997 and is the founder and CEO of Space of Mind, a leader in customized home education for over 10 years. Space of Mind, located in Delray Beach, Florida, offers students in grades K through 12 and gap year a full-time innovated alternative to public and private schools. Under Ali's direction, Space of Mind has been leading the homeschool movement for over 10 years, offering a completely customized standards-based curriculum tailored to students individual learning style, level and interest. So without further ado, I'm going to turn the program over to Ali.
Ali Kaufman:
Thanks, Amy. I had to unmute, of course. Thanks. Great to be here. As Amy said, I am a member of the Class of '97 and so I'm really thrilled to be presenting. Let me just actually get my screen shared for you real quick and then we can go from there. So if you are on this Zoom right now, I'm assuming you might look in the mirror and maybe feel a little bit like Sue. This whole moment for education has been pretty intense and very, I think, evolutionary, and we'll talk a little bit about that today. So, hopefully, you'll get off this call and feel a little bit more like yourself and hopefully optimistic about where we can go in this moment. But, obviously, for parents and teachers and students, everybody's feeling a little bit not like themselves right now and wondering what to do for your kids, especially if you're working parents or have kids who learn outside of the box. This can be a really scary and overwhelming moment, so, hopefully, what I share today will help you make it a little less so.
Ali Kaufman:
So today we're going to talk about, first and foremost, the fact that school shouldn't be stressful. Think there's a lot of misconceptions about the fact that if something's not hard, it isn't meaningful. But the reality is in our real lives, we can probably all attest that the things that we enjoy doing are the things that we end up remembering and recalling and referring to later in life. And so having learning be less stressful is really the most important thing right now. There's also a big misconception between homeschooling and distance learning, so we'll talk a little bit about that. How can you make this all work for your family? And then, like I said, I think this moment is offering us a huge evolutionary opportunity to improve education. And I'm happy to take questions. You can put them in the Q and A, in the bottom, and then as I see them, I can stop or we can save them for the end, whatever works for you. But feel free to throw a question in there as we go.
Ali Kaufman:
So I'll tell you a little bit about Space of Mind and how this happened first, so you can have a little context. I actually was a Judaic studies and American studies major at Brandeis. I did not have plans to open a school. I thought I was going to go work in Jewish communal service or have a sleep-away camp and work in youth programming, but I hadn't really had the full vision of where this would all go until much later. But when I left Brandeis, I worked in the restaurant industry, which my parents were really stoked about, and I opened a number of Cheesecake Factories around the country. And in moving up the ladder at that company really was teaching a lot of outside of the box learners. So, I was responsible for performance development for the front of the house employees and I was also at a time in my life where I had been diagnosed myself with ADHD as when I graduated from Brandeis.
Ali Kaufman:
So, this was a really formative moment for me. I was working and teaching non-traditional learners, I was really good at it, so I got promoted really quickly. But I was also working with kids. I had been in the Wolfram Group as one of the leaders when I was on campus, working with the afterschool programs and Sunday school actually. Now I forget the name of the building up on the top of Rabb steps. And had always worked non-traditionally in education, but had had a lot of corporate experience after graduation. And in working with non-traditional learners in the restaurant industry, I really understood the impact of stress on your ability to learn. For those of you who have eaten at The Cheesecake Factory, you know that's about a 25 page menu and the ingredients in a dish could top 20 to 25 ingredients. The food test is four and a half hours long, kind of like the SAT, so there's a lot of pressure in the learning process.
Ali Kaufman:
And while I was teaching adults who hadn't been in a traditional learning environment for a long time, I was able to see a lot of ways that stress was impacting their learning experience and just naturally understood how to combat that with humor and strategies and learning tools that I had had in my education growing up in the Gifted program, which, in time, in public school, in the '80s and early '90s, was a pullout program that was interdisciplinary and collaborative and really stressed creativity as the most important learning tool. In third grade, I learned how to run a think tank and I learned the rules of brainstorming. So that lesson in third grade, I can remember every minute of it and it, hands down, is one of the main reasons I became a CEO of my company because I learned early on how to collaborate and bring out ideas in others and also, follow through on ideas that I had.
Ali Kaufman:
So flash forward, I was in the restaurant world for a long time, but that's a crazy life and I needed normal hours. I had always been a good writer and I had happened to go back to Brandeis in the summer of 2004 and met somebody in one of my classes who handed my resume off to a contact and got a job writing about why software was changing the world. And this was in 2000, at the height of the tech boom and I was living large at a really killer software development company, which, at the time, was the largest software development company in the world and is now part of IBM. But the company, Rational Software, had developed the process by which all software developers universally used to create software. So, I was writing about how software was changing the world and learning about how the user experience and the collaborative coding experience and the collaborative design experience all work together and building on my understanding of stress and learning already. And, at the time, I was still working as a youth group advisor and privately tutoring kids who were dealing with their own school-related stress.
Ali Kaufman:
So, anyway, one day, I was sitting in my office, because cube life didn't work for my ADD, so I was able to finagle an office, and the poster of the software development process that Rational had created was on the wall. And I had been working with a student who had severe test anxiety and who was also living in a very cluttered home. And so I had looked up at the poster one day and I realized that the testing phase of the software development life cycle is the most important part, it takes the longest, and the developers actually want the product to fail so they can figure out what they don't yet know and make improvements. And then once they've made enough improvements, they'll release it, but they'll immediately start working on the next version of the product. So there was no expectation of perfection, and this really stuck with me because I don't remember a single teacher that I knew ever hand back a test and say, "You know what? Before we move on, let's make sure you know this." And so the testing situation in regular school's like make or break, you've got one shot to pass. If you pass it, great. If you fail it, that stays with you. But if you miss things, you're held accountable for what you missed, but you're not given a chance to actually learn what you've missed.
Ali Kaufman:
So as I was spending my 20s and 30s figuring out what I was supposed to ... Or my 20s really, figuring out what I was supposed to do with my 30s and making my parents a little nervous because I hadn't really hit on a career yet, I realized that this set of skills that I had actually had a lot of value in working with people to understand how clutter and inattention and disorganization created anxiety. And so in 2004, I left Boston, I came back to South Florida, right in the middle of hurricanes Frances and Jeanne, so that was great timing. And within a couple of months, I had launched the company, Space of Mind and was working with, initially, hoarders and then a lot of CEOs. And I was flying around the country, coaching CEOs who were really creative and busy brains, but had very type-A administrative assistants and didn't know how to communicate. So, that soon turned into the CEOs asking if I could go work in their homes with their families.
Ali Kaufman:
So over the next six years, I was working a lot with families and other types of clients, but around 2008, I realized that my heart was really with the families and the school-related stress problems. So I knew that that was an area that needed solving and I didn't see a lot of solutions on the horizon. So, I moved away from the other types of clients and gave those to some of the team that was working for me and really dove into working with families. So, you see the three girls on the top left? Those are the first three students that started at Space of Mind schoolhouse, which is the full-time homeschool program that I started in my living room in 2010. These were all girls that were working with me privately. So amazing, so creative and none of them wanted to go to school. All three of them had been bullied and in 2010, school-related stress was bullying, test anxiety, Edline, which is the online home ... Where your homework and grades go. Or there was Myspace back then or the ... I forgot the name of the website where it was anonymous quizzes that people would post about you and could answer.
Ali Kaufman:
So, these girls inspired me to go all across South Florida. I must've toured 25 private schools over the course of a year and I didn't see anything that was really getting the job done. So, using my understanding of youth programming and my rule-breaking nature, I learned how homeschooling worked and founded the schoolhouse with these three girls. Interesting aside, two of the girls came from the same school. When the first one signed up, she had been relentlessly bullied at that school for years and I didn't know whether she knew the second student who signed up or not. But when I got the girls all together the night before we started school for frozen yogurt, that's when I found out that the first student I had signed up, her major bully had been the second student I signed up. So, throughout the course of the next couple of years as these girls were together, they didn't become best friends, but they certainly learned to understand each other and to have tolerance and even compassion for one another. So, it was a beautiful cycle to ... Or end of the cycle to their hard story with the bullying.
Ali Kaufman:
The fourth student in the middle, Emily, joined us in November of 2010 and that's her and I on the right. She's now our first student to become a staff member, and she's a coach in our program down in South Florida. So, that's been super amazing. And you can see in the timeline, we've grown. We now have kindergarten through 12th grade, a gap year program. We have two campuses in South Florida now and we've expanded nationally with our virtual program. We're launching software next week, which I'll touch on in a minute. I've been working for the last two years to get us ready for this national expansion to be franchising and mainstreaming home education because I believe that it's a real benefit to students and families. COVID happened and now everybody seems to be googling how do I homeschool my kid without doing it myself?
Ali Kaufman:
I thought this was hilarious. This guy really figured it out...
Ali Kaufman:
So for some of you who are working at home and also have your kids working at home, you may want to take a page out of this guy's playbook. But what I've found is right now, we've got three types of parents. There are the overachievers who, right out of the gate, by April, were building their at-home classrooms and ordering all the stuff and making it look like they think a classroom's supposed to look and all over Facebook, getting ideas and playing the role of the teacher. Then there's the avoiders. These are the parents that are like, "I give you my iPad, here, go with God and we'll figure this out whenever it's over." And then most of the parents are in the sort of uncertain category, which is, I don't know, the schools haven't figured out what the right thing to do is. I don't know what to do for our family, we're going to try a few things and figure it out.
Ali Kaufman:
And there's no right or wrong place to be, we're in a completely brand new place with education, but it is definitely an evolutionary moment. And I'm trying to hold on to all of the optimism I started with, even as I watch what our county specifically ... Palm Beach County is the 10th largest school district in the country and we are blowing this completely. But the distance learning and the strain that it's putting on kids is really hard to watch. It's also putting a huge strain on parents and teachers.
Ali Kaufman:
So just to give you some context in where I'm coming from with the philosophy on learning, I think learning needs to be fun and school can't be stressful if we want kids to learn. Especially at a time where kids have so many choices about what to do with their time, they are going to choose the option that is the most interesting. And when we have diagnosed these ADD or other overthinking kinds of anxiety diagnoses, we often wonder why can this student pay attention to video games for four hours, but not their math homework? And the reason is interest versus importance. So, what will make school palatable is making it fun and engaging. So if you look at the logo for Space of Mind, it's a burst of exclamation points and each explanation point is coming to a singular point of focus. And the exclamation points represent different areas of passion and different skills that are key to our modern world.
Ali Kaufman:
We have come from a school system that was developed in the '50s, that is meant to produce factory workers and soldiers and farmers. In the '70s, around there, we lost farming from the curriculum for the most part. It's nice to see it come back. But we don't need to push factory workers and soldiers into the world right now, we need problem-solvers and entrepreneurs and peacemakers and engineers, and that comes from a different type of academic curriculum than our schools have been built up on over these last 70 years. And what we're watching right now is a full system breakdown, but we have this moment to reorganize. And coming from my background in working with people and their clutter, I can attest that, you all might agree, you can't reorganize your pantry unless you empty it a bit. So, we've been given this opportunity with COVID to make some changes, if we can, to bring passion and 21st century skills into the classrooms.
Ali Kaufman:
And I'm hopeful that we can use this opportunity wisely to do that, because it is very clear now that it's less important that a student knows the Pythagorean theorem than it is that they know how to be resilient and communicative and passionate. And so the character development that we need to live in this world today is not being taught in schools, and the stress management strategies and the passion and the creativity is being pulled out. So, we have a moment right now to get back to that and to re-engage students in learning. What was the most difficult for me when I was working with the kids privately before I started the schoolhouse was these are really creative, brilliant kids who had, over time, stopped enjoying learning. They had hated school so much that they had convinced themselves that they actually hated learning. And so these aren't kids that were picking up a book in their spare time and they came to be kids who were seeking out learning because we made it so that school wasn't as stressful and then they wanted to be there and then they wanted to engage.
Ali Kaufman:
We've now gone from the school-related stresses of 2010 to we have students who, every day on the first day, are freaking out, please don't make the fire alarms go off. Because, especially in South Florida, with such a close proximity to Douglas, where the shooting happened, there's so much PTSD from just the fire alarm right now. But now we have COVID and kids are legitimately terrified, they don't know if they're going to go to school and get this virus. And the young kids especially don't have a vocabulary to articulate what's stressful for them. So, it's really important for us to ensure that we're paying attention to that.
Ali Kaufman:
And so, over time, I've really come to believe that homeschooling can create so many opportunities that have benefits for the mental, physical, emotional, financial wellbeing of a family. Also, with college admissions, homeschoolers are put in a separate pool of applicants and they have supplemental application materials so they can tell their full story. And colleges love homeschoolers because they traditionally do better because they have learned how to make decisions for themselves by being given autonomy in their learning process. Oh, Tally, I just saw your question. I will get there.
Ali Kaufman:
So, over the years, as I have been talking to people about Space of Mind, it's been an education process because we are homeschooling kids in a social environment and so a lot of parents don't know what that means. But the reason that I've created us as a social homeschool program and not as a school is because there's so many benefits. And so now, as parents are googling and trying to learn about all these options, I think it's important to know that there's so many resources out there that can help navigate the homeschool world and create curriculum for you. You can homeschool your kid without having to do it yourself. But the biggest misconception was that my kid wouldn't have normal social development. And what's interesting is that now with COVID, it's all about small group learning and in our program at Space of Mind, we've been doing small group learning for years. And it's not about the quantity of people that your student is around, it's about the quality of the relationships.
Ali Kaufman:
I grew up going to summer camp, sleep-away camp, every year for 17 years and bunk life teaches you so much about real life because you have to live with someone, maybe, that you don't get along with, similar to college dorms, and we learn how to get through these relationship moments and that's what sets us up for work relationships and romantic relationships because we've had to push through these opportunities to learn about others by learning about ourselves. And in a smaller educational environment, the quality of the relationships are stronger and you're held to a higher standard to push through problems instead of run from them. In a bigger school, a parent might be more inclined to say, "Oh, my kid doesn't get along with this kid. Let's just move their class." And then those students are never forced to solve their problem and resolve their conflict. And so as parents are looking for smaller programs right now because of COVID fears, there are so many benefits to being in a smaller environment that makes learning more comfortable, it helps kids reduce their social anxiety. But once you learn how to be in a relationship with your peer, you can take that into any size crowd and use those skills. And it's easier to learn things that are hard in a small group and then practice them in a big group than the other way around.
Ali Kaufman:
So when I was creating Space of Mind, it was really important to try to change that perception of homeschooling and create a modern schoolhouse, kind of like Little House on the Prairie. We're very family style, where we're innovating and we're making it about the students, that it's driven by their creativity and their interest and their excitement, and that we're engaging them in the community in a way that they're also developing citizenship skills and all the professional skills that they need to succeed in a work life as well.
Ali Kaufman:
So the studies over the summer have shown that about 40% of families around the country are saying that they're looking to homeschool. That's a lot and that's awesome, but there's a lot of information out there that could make it sound daunting and maybe not even realistic. But especially for families where the parents are working remotely, and so many companies right now are realizing that it's cheaper and even more effective to have their employees work remotely, there is no reason anymore for kids to be tied to a school day schedule. And if you look at the benefits of homeschooling and you do have a bigger benefit to get into college, whatever college is going to look like in the next few years, the financial reward is that by homeschooling, you can have more money to travel and take learning on the road and push in different resources and follow different passions that the students have. So, it's a really phenomenal opportunity right now, but also quite overwhelming.
Ali Kaufman:
And COVID has put us in a place where it's all looking different. The picture on the left is our Boca campus, which we just opened, and we're supporting distance learners that are doing Palm Beach County's public school curriculum. And these kids are really struggling. We're watching anxiety disorders come up before our eyes. We have kids ... They're two weeks in, they've started to have ticks, they are crying regularly, most of them are bored or really, really frustrated. And in Google Classroom, there's no way to privately communicate between a student and a teacher, so the kids are starting to get afraid to raise their hand or ask for help because they're being called out in front of everyone and not just other peers, but parents. Parents are watching as well because most kids need someone sitting next to them. So, while our Delray campus, we have our own curriculum, it's all project-based, it's based on collaborative work and integrating all of the academic subjects into project-based learning. In the Boca location, we're watching the impact of the public school system on this moment.
Ali Kaufman:
And Mila in the middle, the little one, I mean, she's in kindergarten and she's figuring out how to navigate school for the first time in this crazy moment as well. But you can see everything we're doing is now looking a little bit different, we're in masks, we're stayed distanced, we're cleaning all day. We were open for camp all summer on our campus and we were very successful. So we learned a lot about how to manage the risk factors and so that we could ensure that we would open full-time in the fall. We've made a lot of changes to our schedule in order to really allow for the maximum value of our time together. And because our curriculum is integrated already, we don't have the same problem that other middle and high school programs have, which is that you're switching classes. And in our program, the kids work in one group and they don't switch. So, that was a huge benefit as well.
Ali Kaufman:
As schools are looking to reopen, I think it's really important to look at where the budget's coming from to pay for all of the sanitation, and the extra staff time that it takes to do what needs to be done, and how is the building laid out to do everything that needs to be done. We've got our kids in five different wings of our campus. Each wing has its own AC unit, it's own entrance and bathroom, so we have a way to contact trace and to keep the kids separate while they're still engaging on campus. But every campus is different and every school system is different and there's so many factors. So as we're looking at larger schools and asking them to solve these problems, it's really important to stay reasonable about what can really be done.
Ali Kaufman:
I loved this quote, I saw it on a meme. I think that right now, it does take a village. We're also retreated into our homes and we've been quarantined and we've been separated from everyone, so it doesn't feel like our village is still there for us. And so as parents are figuring out what homeschooling looks like or distance learning management, because distance learning is not homeschooling. Homeschooling is you have ... You're creating your curriculum, you're creating your schedule around your students' or families' or groups' needs and interests. It's really important to remember that there's no right or wrong way and there are resources and recognizing that you need some help is okay.
Ali Kaufman:
So the biggest challenge that we have right now is that parents are in these roles that they didn't necessarily ask for, and you're also working and managing your households and managing your social relationships and family responsibilities, et cetera. So it's a lot for a parent to become also a teacher, a coach who's cheering them on, and a mentor because your kids are paying attention to how you're managing stress and what you're doing as parents. And so the most important strategy to employ here is what you do on an airplane, right? You put your mask on yourself first and then you help others. And recognizing that parents are not teachers generally. Some are, obviously. But you didn't sign up for this job and so there is no expectation of perfection anywhere. Same as with the software development life cycle, the new version gets worked on as soon as the old one's been released. There's no expectation of perfection. And I think parents are putting a lot of pressure on themselves right now, thinking that the clock is ticking down. But right now, the whole world is in a little bit of a freeze mode and it will all even out. The most important thing to come out of this is that everybody's mental health is intact, obviously their physical health, and we know that most families are worried about financial health as well.
Ali Kaufman:
So with all of those worries, it's really, really key to understand how much anxiety affects the learning process. So when we're feeling, in any way, disorganized, inattentive or anxious, we are in a cycle of failure. And those feelings are where every student is right now, and every teacher and every parent, trying to figure out how do I log in to 12 Google Classrooms? How do I find the reading assignment in this other website? What if my kid is falling behind? There's just so many things to pay attention to and when we're stressed, we can't learn. And so the reason that we can't learn when we're stressed is that our working memory is not there for us. But it's also really important to know what type of learner that we are so that we're not comparing ourselves unnecessarily to others as well.
Ali Kaufman:
So just a quick brain science tidbit. Working memory is our brain's ability to remember to pay attention to what it's paying attention to. So when we're born, we're not, as babies, saying breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, but our working memory is using its sensory memory and we're just breathing. When we learn to walk, we're not consciously, as little toddlers, saying right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. But when we're adults and we're really stressed out, sometimes you trip over your own two feet or you walk into a wall because we're, in that moment, forgetting that we're supposed to be doing this thing that feels like second nature because so many other things are on our mind. It's like when you are running late and you run back into a room to grab this thing and then you can't find it, you're looking everywhere, you leave for your appointment, you come back and it was exactly where you were looking the whole time and you're like, "Oh, my god, how did I not see that?" It's because our brain plays a trick on us when we're stressed and we can actually not see the stuff that's right in front of us.
Ali Kaufman:
And so as I took all of this knowledge that I had and moved it into creating the schoolhouse, I had come to divide life, essentially, into five categories. We have all the stuff that's on our mind and that we're dealing with in our physical body, the relationships we have and the responsibilities to other people in our lives, the things that our time is dedicated to, like work or household responsibilities, and then the space we live in and the stuff we're responsible for keeping track of. And that space extends to cyberspace as well. If our inbox is clogged, it can clog the whole brain. And it's our working memory that's allowing us to keep all those balls in the air throughout the day. But it occurred to me that kids have the same categories as their parents do. And as adults, we kind of just expect that kids walk into school and they're just thinking about school, and, really, that's not the case.
Ali Kaufman:
They're thinking about all these other things the same way adults are and so they're relying on their working memory to manage all of the things that are in the background, what's on their mind, body, relationships, time and space, and they have to take in new information. But if they're stressed in any of these categories, then their working memory isn't going to be available for them. When our working memory goes down, it's when our stress level goes up, so we can't retain the information we're getting when we're in a stressed out state. And that's the most important thing right now that every parent and teacher needs to remember is these kids are all coming back to school right now with some variable of PTSD. We are all stressed. You can read the studies on how vivid everyone's dreams are right now. Maybe we've lost family members, maybe we've been sick, maybe we know people who can't get sick and are terrified to leave home.
Ali Kaufman:
There are so many stressors in the world outside of COVID too, in the economy, in our society, globally. So, it's a stressful time. And kids pick up on energy even if they don't understand the words that are around them. And so right now, it's really important that we all remember that the stress that we manage, our kids are watching how we're managing it. And when we don't manage the stress well, they're watching that too. And so I think it's super important to make sure that we're keeping boundaries so that we're not giving too much to our kids. And that also, like Tally said in your question, it's about coming from a place of motivation and inspiration. Let's turn this into an adventure instead of what a nightmare this is.
Ali Kaufman:
So if you'll allow me to show you this video quickly, it'll illustrate what I'm talking about.
Video:
Psychologists know that there are two systems in our brains, the rational system and the emotional system. Jonathan Haidt, who's a psychologist at NYU, came up with a great analogy for these two systems. He said think of your brain as a human rider on top of an elephant. Rider represents the rational system, that's the part of us that plans and problem-solves. The rider might do some analyzing and decide, "Hey, I want to go that way," but it's the elephant representing the emotional system that provides the power of journey. The rider can try to lean the elephant or drag the elephant, but if these two ever disagree, who would you bet on? The elephant has a six ton weight advantage and it's exactly that power imbalance that makes adopting new behaviors very hard. If you want this duo to head in a direction, you also need to think about the path, which represents the external environment. This duo is more likely to complete a journey if you can shorten the distance and remove any obstacles in their way.
Video:
So, bottom line, if you want to lead change, you've got to do three things. Give direction to the rider, knowledge of how to get to the destination. You've got to motivate the elephant, which means tapping into emotion. Finally, you need to shape the path to allow for easy progress. That's how change happens.
Ali Kaufman:
Whoops.
Ali Kaufman:
I just wanted to pause it. Okay. So this video is a perfect example of the easiest strategy you can employ that costs no money, which is to remember that this, first of all, is a journey and every student in a classroom is on a different version of the same journey. You can start 10 elephants at the starting line of that path, they are not going to follow the same straight line. In fact, some are going to zig, some are going to zag. Some might go right over to the edge and it's up to the relationship that they have with their educator, which, at Space of Mind, we call ... Instead of teachers, we call our educators coaches. The relationship with that educator is what's going to keep someone from going off the cliff. But it's okay if a student goes to the end and their curiosity requires that they see what's there, as long as there's the relationship with the educator and the parent to make sure that they feel safe in the exploration and they don't go over the cliff, right?
Ali Kaufman:
But we don't want to prevent failure entirely either because in order to go from the starting line of that path to the end of the path, you're going to find that that elephant is going to go in the wrong direction a couple times, maybe they'll circle around one or two times, and that's okay because that's how we learn things. If you look at the best athlete ... There's no way that Serena Williams swung her racket the first time she went on a tennis court the way she does now, there were a lot of lost matches and practice sessions to get the form where it needs to be. If you ask anyone successful in business or entertainment or anywhere, they'll say it's the failures that have taught them more. I can attest to that, for sure.
Ali Kaufman:
And so when parents are trying to prevent their children from experiencing what they perceive as a failure, what it's actually doing is preventing a very integral part of the developmental process. And especially now, when problem-solving and resourcefulness is so vital to our survival ... I mean, I hate to sound dramatic, but this world is kind of crazy right now. We want these kids to not be rule-followers, we want them to be explorers. And where Martha Stewart, who kind of changed our world when she hit the scene, saying, "Let's label everything and organize it and put it where it goes," that's all great when you're an adult and you know how you organize and you know how you think. When I walk into a playroom and I see that here's the basket for the red trucks and here's the basket for the dolls and everything's got its category, but the category was decided on by the adults. And so we're taking that decision opportunity away from the child.
Ali Kaufman:
When we feel anxious or out of control in life, the best way to get back on track is to be in a position to make decisions for ourselves. And so in this moment, where nobody knows what's happening ... Everything's going to change. It's going to take two to three years for all this to shake down, I think, in the educational system, but this year is going to be a lot of stops and starts. While we're going through this, it's going to be really important to let the students lead us. Let's listen to them and take our cue from where they are because we can't assume that they have a vocabulary to articulate how they're feeling right now. Most adults can't. And the amount of change that is coming at them so rapidly and the pressure is going to break them if we don't give them the power to control their journey.
Ali Kaufman:
And so the relationship that a student has with the adults that are supporting them on the path they're on, which is not just their curriculum, but the experience of school in general, is key to making them feel safe, loved and celebrated. Which are key to Maslow's approach to not only psychology, but life is that we all need to feel safe, loved and celebrated. And if that elephant feels safe to explore their path and they feel loved and not judged and that they're ... Once they get to the finish line, they'll be celebrating along with those celebrating for them, then that is the greatest gift that we can all achieve together. So, yes, Tally, I do recommend that parents allow their kids to make their own mistakes, because it's like the hot stove theory. We always say you're not going to touch a hot stove twice. Well, some kids might touch it twice, but three times, they wouldn't, right? Sometimes we need to learn the lesson a few times, but when we experience the failure for ourselves, then we can have a new sense memory that can help us make a different decision the next time that similar situation comes up.
Ali Kaufman:
In contrast, if a parent just says, "Don't make this mistake because I made it," that child is hearing you, but isn't actually retaining that into their true working memory because it wasn't an experiential lesson. It was for the adult who told them how to handle it, but it needs to be for the child. It's like we can't tell somebody how to ride a bike just by telling them what to do, you have to put your kid on a bike and, eventually, you let go and they have to do it on their own and they're going to fall. Same with snowboarding or skiing. Somehow, we've come to a conclusion that with school, it should be different. With school, they should just be able to ride the bike, they should just be able to get down the mountain, and we forget that there's this whole practice period.
Ali Kaufman:
As an example, we stopped using letter grades at Space of Mind a few years ago because they were stressing kids out. And they weren't really a great indicator of much because it was still ... You couldn't really tell where the problems were if it was a C. Was the problem that they were just losing their homework, or that they weren't doing it at all? And so we use emerging, practicing, meeting, and advancing instead now. Because when you're just getting information for the first time, you are just emerging as a student with that information. Your learning journey has just begun. But then you go and practice with it, so now you're comfortable because you've gotten the information, you've sat with it for a minute and then you can go and practice. And then once you've practiced enough, well, just like in any sporting event, you practice off the court and then you come on the court and you play your game, and that's where you're measured for how much you've learned. And if you're able to then go coach someone else to play the game as well as you, then that means you're at an advancing level and that's where we issue honors credit and can provide different and more rigorous, even, opportunities for the students.
Ali Kaufman:
So having opportunities for your students to learn how to fail will help them move out of your house when they're an adult. So, that's the other finish line you want to keep in mind is you don't want your kids living in your guest room forever, so they're going to know how to handle problems that maybe they didn't have in front of them before. But if they know that they can feel safe and confident in themselves to figure out the problems while they're on the path and know how to ask for help and trust and build a relationship with the people that are there to help them, then they have a coach along the path and they can be exploring the journey as well as accomplishing the goal at the same time.
Ali Kaufman:
So, as I mentioned, and I'm just keeping my eye on the time, that it's really about relationships. And one of the biggest challenges that we're seeing in a distance learning environment right now is that when we went to distance learning in the spring, there were already established relationships between students and their teachers. And now, most kids are starting back with new relationships. And so it's really important to make sure that, even in a distanced environment, a teacher is really understanding who they're teaching. And without that physical energy exchange or the appropriate amount of time and information to get to know a student or for a student to get to know the teacher and the family dynamic, it's really hard.
Ali Kaufman:
And what's also happened is with distance learning, we've stripped all of the culture and community and social and emotional life skill pieces out of the school day. There's no school spirit, there's no downtime. It's really more like you're logging in, here's the checklist of everything you've got to do, when you've got to be there, et cetera, and there's no filler breaks with making friends and having some playtime or moving around the classroom. And what we're seeing with the distance learners and the learning pods that we've created in our Boca campus is the loss is so huge for the kids to not have that. And so, of course, we're supporting it through our programming, but there is a sadness that, I think, is cast over this back to school period because of that loss right now.
Ali Kaufman:
So, as I said before, your best success tool right now is let your student guide you. Don't be all over the internet comparing what your living room turned classroom or basement turned classroom looks like to all of the overachieving moms and dads out there that are posting their pictures of catalog-ready classrooms in their homes. Actually, the best way to have a student work is to put them in a different environment throughout the day. If they're sitting in the same place all day long, at the same desk, it's going to become too rote, it will be too boring for them. And so having your student be able to be portable, it's why we, as adults, like to work in coffee shops or ... I personally love hotel lobbies. When there's a little bit of action and motion around you, it's actually easier to stay focused. But I'm watching a lot of parents put a lot of money into building these beautiful classrooms in their homes, but the student is isolated or expected to sit at that desk all day for the whole school experience. That's actually really, most likely, for most students, not the best way to go.
Ali Kaufman:
Also, there were lots of problems in our school system before COVID, so let's not just try to recreate the wheel in a new way. Let's use this moment to be evolutionary about it and to maybe make a list of what stressors did your family have before COVID? And if you could create your ideal school experience as a family, how would you combat those stressors? And what would you do if you could do anything you want? Play the big imagination game with your kids because kids generally know exactly what's going to work for them. It's actually the adults in their lives that typically have convinced them that what they know isn't going to work, and that's usually because what the kids suggest is not going to work for the adult they've suggested it to. And so that adult is hearing them through the prism of their own experience.
Ali Kaufman:
But we're born with intuition and our creativity right now is our greatest resource, it's what is the greatest capital resource in the economy right now. Companies are hiring people based on their creativity and their ability to articulate it and their resourcefulness. If you look at what Google's doing for college and where we want, in this culture, to work smarter, not harder, it's the rule-breakers right now who are going to get ahead. And if we're training our kids to fall in line, then we might actually be taking away their greatest resource, which is the ability to follow their intuition and their creativity.
Ali Kaufman:
And I'll leave you with this, that we are actually launching, hopefully next week, a SOM roadmap, which is our assessments that help us understand exactly who a student is. And then help us create a coaching roadmap, which is an individualized education plan for a student and that can be shared with an educator or anyone who works with that child. In absence of doing something formal though, you can do this on your own with your child. Sit down and ask them to describe themselves as a student. What makes them excited to learn? What makes learning hard? How do they approach different scenarios that might help you understand them as a problem-solver, as a leader? Have these open-ended questions and conversations so that you can start to understand what drives your student to learn or what blocks them from learning. Yes, I can definitely share the presentation, for sure.
Ali Kaufman:
The other thing to remember is that the best way to understand what a child knows is to ask them to present it to you. Not quiz them, don't ask them questions, but ask them to teach you something in whatever way makes sense in the context of your conversation. But with homeschooling right now, we have an opportunity to deconstruct the school day and create it in a way that is really fostering 21st century skills. These kids are growing up and they're going to be in the gig economy, they're going to need to create and keep their own jobs, and so that's a different type of skillset than what our traditional school system has been teaching over the last 50 to 70 years. So, this is a really huge moment to get out in the world.
Ali Kaufman:
Everywhere you go is somewhere to learn. And I'll leave you with this thought, that when you have that conversation with your child about what gets you excited? What gets you motivated? Ask them where they would want to go. If you could put your perfect school anywhere, where would it be? Have those kind of big picture conversations. That's where you're going to learn how to help lead your elephant down the path because they're going to give you clues in those conversations. The best learning happens out in the field, not at a desk and definitely not at a computer for kids that are not choosing to learn in that way. Certainly, some kids can learn very well in a virtual environment, but not every student will choose that. And, like I said earlier, it's autonomy that is the key to success right now.
Ali Kaufman:
We can turn on the TV and there's 1700 channels to pick from. Your kids can flick through on TikTok and see 50 videos within a five minute period. There's so much choice in their world and their attention span is only five to seven minutes, so it's about how can you inspire them to want to learn? And then you'll be surprised if this year could be the most exciting and amazing learning experience, for sure, but it also requires you, as parents, to drop that hold on the old paradigm and recognize that the world gave education a Noah's ark moment and if we use it right, this could be awesome. So, I will leave you with that and I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.
Ali Kaufman:
I see that there's questions in that Q and A, but I can't get it to come up. So I don't know if anyone can read them to me. But I'm going to put my email on here. I can't see the questions. Oh, are those the one that ... Okay. "Can you show us that list of learning styles and the questions to discuss?" Yes, I will go back. Oh, "What does clutter have to do with learning?" That's such a good one. So let me go back to the roadmap slide so you can check that out. Tally, thank you so much. I will talk to you super soon.
Ali Kaufman:
Laura, your question, what does clutter have to do with coaching, is awesome. Or with learning rather. So clutter is vital to the creative process because that's where the inspiration happens, and I'll give you a really quick example. When I was working individually with private clients, I had a woman, who was a mixed media collage artist, call me and said, "I can't do my art, I haven't done art in two years and I think it's because my business office is mixed in with my art studio now and everything's a mess. I need you to come over. I know exactly what I want it to look like, and let's do it." So I went there. She had a solid plan, she had thought about this a lot. She really thought that she knew exactly what she needed it to look like to feel organized. And so I listened to her plan and I was like, "Okay. Then we can do this."
Ali Kaufman:
But I saw her biggest issue was paper. Her shredder was on the opposite side of the office and there were paper piles all over her art table and everything. So, I asked her why she had never moved the shredder to her desk, and she looked at me and laughed and she's like, "I really have no idea, but that will probably solve everything." So, she moved the shredder. She then decided she was going to still go through with her plan to organize the office as she had it in her vision. By this time, she had shredded all the paper and was laughing so hard, she's like, "I guess I just never thought of that." And then she organized the mixed media pieces for her collage art into bins, like the puzzle pieces were in one container, the buttons were in another, all the little types of gadgets and doodads that she used to make her art. Everything was divided like on the kitchen line, how a chef would divide their ingredients into a tray or a drawer.
Ali Kaufman:
And she got started right away on this huge collage, it must've been 10 by 12 feet. And I came back a couple weeks later and it looked amazing and she was still doing great and the paper was under control. And then she called me about three months later and she's like, "I don't know what happened. I never finished the collage, I can't finish it." And I was like, "Why?" And she's like, "Because I know how it ends." And so I said, "No problem. I'll be there tomorrow." I went there the next day and to her total dismay, she watched me dump all of the pieces into a mixed bin and then she's been doing her art ever since because the clutter is what inspired the story. And when it was all separated, there was no more creativity driving the story process, she saw the ending before she had finished writing it.
Ali Kaufman:
So, clutter keeps things novel. That doesn't mean that your kids should keep their room full of dirty dishes or anything like that, but I can certainly talk to you offline about some more specifics in that area. So I appreciate so much the opportunity to talk with all of you. And my email, I'll go back to it here so you have it. And I will definitely share the deck and am available for any questions. This is a super confusing time, so hopefully this has helped a little bit.
Nikki Mannathoko:
Amy, you want to go for it?
Amy Cohen:
Sure. On behalf of the Brandeis Women's Network, I want to say thank you, Ali. This was most enlightening. And thank you all for attending. Your participation, your involvement, your contribution, your input has been essential to the growth and continued growth and success of our network. If you have an idea for a program you're interested in hosting or interested in helping organize an event, please message me on Facebook and I'd be happy to talk to you. We're always looking for new and interesting ideas as well as volunteers to host cooking classes online. Those have been very successful also. So, again, if you have any thoughts, any ideas, please feel free to message me. Everybody stay safe and we look forward to seeing you at future events. Thanks again, Ali.
Ali Kaufman:
Thank you so much.