The power of process

Recently, my son posted on our family Whatsapp group a photo of my five-year-old granddaughter, Bethany, that had been sent to them by her teacher. She is enveloped from head to pink wellington-booted toe in a bright (you guessed it) pink rain-suit, and is focusing intently on sawing through a branch clamped in a bench vise.

This is not a particularly unusual activity at Beth’s school – she attends a Forest Kindergarten in Munich, Germany – where the children learn through guided play in nature. Instead of a functional educational space equipped with modern resources, Beth’s school ‘building’ comprises two fairly rustic-looking caravans, a couple of very large umbrellas, and (I have it on excellent authority, as my son was instrumental in digging them) compost loos. What it does offer is direct access to a natural wonderland, where the children can explore and expand their minds, following wherever their curiosity leads them and letting their imaginations roam free.  It’s often wet and muddy. In winter, it snows. There are no plastic toys. Or tech. And Beth loves it.

On returning home from the forest that day, Beth chattered about her woodwork all afternoon. The following day promised yet another wet day in the woods - all that lush green foliage doesn’t just happen - and with the only available shelter being the large umbrellas, she was offered the choice of staying home. She declined on the grounds that she had some unfinished business with her little saw.

Beth is unlikely to become a career lumberjack. But even if she never touches a saw again, she learned some valuable lessons from the hours she devoted to her woodwork project. On a practical level, she had to work out at which point along the branch she needed to tighten the clamp so that the wood would remain horizontal while she sawed through it. Mathematicians or physicists would doubtless be able to express this principle in an elegant equation, but Beth had to work it out by trial and error. Then, she had to master the movement of drawing the blade of the saw back and forth across the branch, smoothly and in the same groove but with enough force to cut through the wood. This takes patience and perseverance, as I discovered during my own childhood forays into my father’s workshop – a valuable lesson that I failed to learn at that stage! Beth, however, stuck with her self-appointed task for the better part of two school days, demonstrating a considerable degree of determination. In the pouring rain.

I don’t know what happened to the offcuts of the branch that Beth sawed through. Maybe they were picked up and used for a craft project. Maybe they formed the walls of a custom-made snail house (one of Beth’s earlier favoured activities). Maybe they were used for kindling on a really cold day. I am sure they will not have been wasted – it is a Forest Kindergarten, after all!  But it was not the product of Beth’s labours that got me thinking; it was the process.

The photo of my little granddaughter in her bright pink rain suit captured her in the process of sawing. She enjoyed the experience of sawing. She was more interested in the act of sawing than in the pile of offcuts that was the product of her woodwork. And she learned from that process.

As educators, I believe we tend to focus too much on the product of learning rather than on the process. This is largely driven by the requirement to assess our students quantitatively, as process – the ‘how’ we do something – is qualitative and far harder to pigeonhole than the result, or product, of that process.  

The thing is, modern education is a mass-production event and, while it is unarguably wonderful that more children than ever before have access to education, the ideal of children learning at their own pace, led by their individual interests and abilities is, well, idealistic. Or very elitist. By the time most young people reach their middle teens, school has become a kind of educational sorting house, where the students are ranked almost exclusively on their results – the product of their performance rather than the process. Those rankings determine the level of tertiary training they can access, direct their career choices, and – sadly – often shape how successful they perceive their lives to be. The fact that the further they progress along the path of tertiary education, the more important process becomes, leaving many students floundering in deep waters, merely serves to underscore the shortcomings of this system.

The (unpopular) truth is that while we all have equal intrinsic value, not everyone is born with the same aptitudes and abilities. And in an educational system that prioritizes worth based on results, too many students give up on the learning process. When their efforts do not rank them among the high achievers, they lose confidence and motivation and abandon the process, missing out on lessons that would benefit them in whatever line of work, or life, they pursue. 

In a world where we are educating children for a future we can only imagine, we should surely be focusing on the process of learning - on encouraging curiosity and creativity, and developing perseverance through failing forward – rather than on accumulating a record of results. I have no idea what the little pink-clad girl in the photo will do when she grows up, but I know that she will do it all the better for having been encouraged to pursue her curiosity and persevere in learning new skills - no matter how inclement the conditions!