Invite, Enable, Release

This is the second post in a two-part series which will highlight topics from learning scientist Sasha Barab’s keynote at Quest Alliance’s 2017 Q2L Summit.

In the first post, we discussed Sasha Barab’s idea that we need to position the learner as the innovator in their educational environment. In this post, we will be discussing the specific three-part process that must take place in order to enable students to be innovators in their educational journeys.

Currently in many educational environments we overvalue content. In parallel, we undervalue the anticipation of what the student is going to do with that content, and undervalue supporting them in the hard integration process of doing it. Barab describes how to change this using ‘anticipatory governance’. In Barab’s definition, anticipatory governance involves placing emphasis on the individual leveraging the curriculum, anticipating what they might do with it. The student governs the relationship between the idea as its formed in the textbook or in the technology and the goals they want to bring about.

In order to facilitate this, there is a three part process, which Barab describes as ‘Invite-Enable-Release’. The key of this process is that students need to know exactly why they are learning, want the outcomes of that learning, and engage with it deeply. In designing a learning journey for this process, you need to flip everything on its head and ask: ‘what do you want people to do at the end?’ The content is then designed and created around supporting the student in their release.  
Invite

In order to have an educational environment in which learning is innovation, teaching must be an invitation. When we want to help people we often use the approach of intervention, with an intervention being something that we ‘put into people’. Rather than this, what needs to be done is we to shift to an invitation approach. An invitation is something we ‘invite you to do’. The learner must be invited into thinking right in the beginning about what they are going to do with what they learn. They must feel that they are going to achieve something through this process. One strong way to do this, is to let them connect with other people’s stories – other people’s releases.
Enable

Once the student has been invited in, they are invested in the process and they want to produce the outcome, they can be provided with the curriculum to enable them to have the release they are now invested in. In this process, the emphasis is not placed on simply delivering the curriculum but on how the curriculum can be used by the student to leverage a release.

Release

This is the true focus of this process. The emphasis needs to be on what the student does. The example Barab uses is of a Nike advertisement. In a Nike advertisement you hardly see their product – what you see is people doing the really ‘cool’ things that the product enables them to do. Similarly, in this process, the focus needs to be on what the curriculum and the learning journey enables the student to do.  It is the student who engages with the curriculum because they feel invested, and they release the learnings. 

What Barab ends with is the importance of the structure being learner-centric. The structure of teaching needs to impart knowledge which relates to the child’s passion. The learner must lean forward to embrace the curriculum. If the structure is imposed too quickly it would translate into an ‘act of compliance’, which will have no long term outcome. Instead, working on the ecosystem focused on empowerment and not efficiency will reap valued outcomes. Barab talks about learning as a journey. We are given opportunities, technology and new ways of thinking about unlocking human potential which should be focused on the learner and not the content. Content needs to be re-packaged so that learners are stimulated by achievement and action. Sharing these accomplishments and receiving feedback is one of the most powerful motivators of learning. This is what leads Barab to the approach of education which is ‘Imagine, Grow, Create and Inspire.’