Unschooling Outcomes in the 'Real World'

"So, How do you measure outcomes?"

The engineer meant well, when she asked the question and, to be fair, she'd never heard of unschooling. Still, I had to double-clutch several times as the gears in my mind shifted to traditional schooling terminology.

The kids and I were at a small company in San Francisco where they were testing a new game package that was supposed to teach coding. While the kids were testing, another engineer was asking me about the coding work we did at home. I mentioned that the kids had been working through Google's CSFirst for the last several months. This inspired the outcomes question.

I went with the not so elegant, but oh so pragmatic initial response of, "What...?" Buying myself some time while I boggled at what the hell an outcome was... Wait, I had it! That's right, other schooling methodologies measure what's 'taught' by 'testing' what the kid has learned compared to 'the expected outcome.' Oh God.

I half-suppressed a giggle. I grinned. "Uh, yeah... Let's see... How do we measure outcomes?" meanwhile, my mind was racing again. OK, first things first, I need to come up with an expected outcome. Stat! Well, it's nice when the kids don't get mad at each other while doing something, and it's nice when they stay interested.

"Well... I could see they were having fun doing it, and they weren't screaming at each other, so... that was a nice outcome."

And now the very kind, yet increasingly confused engineer is staring at me with a bit of an incredulous look. Nuts, that wasn't the answer!

Then, it finally hit me! "Well, when we're standing near an automatic door with a big blue button you push to open it, the oldest kid will say, 'Look at this. There's probably a microcontroller in there. It has a program running on it with a loop and an if block that says if the button is pushed, send a signal, (probably with a wire), to a motor up there, that opens the door.' Yup, that's how I knew we had a good outcome." In my mind I'm doing air quotes around 'good outcome' since that's not what I mean by that phrase at all.

And, the engineer's smiling again. It's a beleaguered smile, but she's smiling. Finally, I got it right!

Unschooling conversations, for me, are struggles through context. I frequently have to step way back to figure out what we're even talking about since the conversation is typically with people immersed in a completely different model of schooling.

To me, unschooling outcomes are radically different things than the 'outcomes' of traditional schooling. Were the kids happy doing a thing? Do they need something they can't get, (knowledge, equipment, a sounding board), to do the thing? Do they know the big world context for the thing they're learning?

The outcomes of 'did the kid learn?' aren't nearly as much my concern. If the kid actually wanted to know the thing, I'll bet they do. If they don't know the thing yet, I'm sure they will learn the thing when they decide they really need it. The only real outcome to unschooling the way I see it is 'are the kids going to continue learning?' Beyond that, I'm confident they can lead themselves to the outcomes they need.

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Copasetic Flow

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