My Review of Kathleen Cushman’s New Book, Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery

What if schools were organized this way?

Fires in the Mind is Kathleen Cushman’s latest in a series of books stemming from collaborations with young people to explore their experiences and their learning. In her new book, Cushman goes deeper than ever before into what is powerful and meaningful for young learners, by exploring the question, “What does it take to get really good at something?” First of all the reader is struck by the seriousness with which her interlocutors take on the challenge to explain to her their own experiences with getting really good at something. This is a testament both to Cushman’s capacity to engage youth in serious discussion about what matters to them and to their own motivation to be able to describe it to an adult. Next, we note how capable they are, as her co-inquirers, of deep reflection and analysis of their experiences. Counter to what many educators will say about young people’s motivation to be analytic and use higher order thinking skills, the teens with whom Cushman collaborated on this project demonstrate a mindful and self-aware persistence both in reflecting on and improving their chosen practices and in working with Cushman collectively to analyze them for their and our understanding. Once these youth have completed this task, they venture out to explore the world of adult expert practice, to see if their analytic framework holds up, and to compare themselves with those a few or more years beyond them on the path to mastery. The students’ own words, and the range of kinds of practice they describe, are so enthralling that we almost don’t notice that Cushman’s text provides a solid background and intriguingly emerging structure to what the students have to say about practice and mastery. So when we do step back to enjoy Cushman’s craft as a writer, her own expert practice, we realize how carefully she has woven these discussions with youth into a text that is both simple and profound. It is writing that gently challenges us to understand and wonder both about the learning experiences of these young people, and how far from the normal experience of school their passionate commitment to becoming experts at a chosen interest is. For very few of the experiences with “sustained practice in pursuit of mastery” that her students describe and analyze happen in traditional schools or classroom settings. So the task that she and her students undertake in the last part of the book is daunting: to help educators and those interested in education rethink how school might work if it were able to encourage and support this level of persistent practice toward mastery. While the first part of the book focuses delightfully on the passions and practices of her students, the second part brilliantly tilts toward this ultimate purpose. And yet therein lies what is frustrating to me about it, because the reader watches as the students, so expansively passionate when describing and analyzing their practice and the practice of adults who are experts, seem to dampen, to need to be shrunk, or compressed, to be made to fit within the confines of school as we know it. However, Cushman does not leave us in the doldrums, stuck in this dilemma; she and her students finish with clarity about what it would take for school to support this depth of practice, examples from some schools that have remade themselves in this mold, and concrete practices that teachers as practitioners could work to master. An ideal ending, mirroring how the book begins.

How are you building learning networks?

Inquiry & Learning for Change presented recently on Harnessing the Power of the Collective: Building Learning Networks Across Organizations and Communities, at the Center for Civic Partnerships’ Organizational Learning and Evaluation Conference in SF. We discussed how paying attention to the social networks your organization is embedded in can help improve your organizational learning. But there are implications that you may not immediately recognize once you do: the networks will ask for a greater role in leadership, they will demand more from your organization, they will ask you to be clearer about the value you offer… in short, they will make you aware of changes that you may need to make in how you are organized.

Questions that emerge might include: How is your organization consciously creating a conversation about what you value, who your community is, & what you want to accomplish? How are you more & more deeply embedding that conversation into community, dissolving unnecessary boundaries, making deeper meaning of your work? How are you finding structures that emerge from & flow back into that conversation in ways that serve your sense of meaning & purpose?