Lately, I have taken on the challenge of teaching myself how to turn wood on a lathe. Woodturning is a skill I have always admired, and so for me, the past few months have been quite a journey. Along the way, I have often paused to reflect on how this learning journey compares to the sort of learning my students engage with and how might I use my experience as a learner to extend my understanding of learning.
For those who might not be familiar with the process of turning timber on a lathe, a brief description might help. The lathe itself is a relatively large piece of machinery. It uses a reasonably powerful electric motor to spin a piece of wood attached by various means to its headstock. The piece of timber spins at between 1000 and 2000 revolutions per minute. As it spins, the timber is shaped into round forms as the ‘turner’ presses special chisels or gouges against its surface. In the hands of a master turner, beautiful forms may be created. Delicate spindles and bowls emerge from the timber as though they had always been there, just waiting to be set free.
For the novice, the initial experience with this craft brings a natural degree of fear and trepidation. There are, as you would imagine, great forces involved and much potential for calamity. As the tool touches the rapidly spinning piece of wood, shavings and dust are thrown in all directions. In most cases, the piece of timber is at first rough, square and out of balance. As it spins, you feel this imbalance and the passing of the out-of-round edges through the tool. Your hands, and suddenly delicate and precious fingers, hold the tool mere centimetres from this spinning madness. Having watched more than a few YouTube videos, I was somewhat aware of what to expect. I was also aware of the very real potential for what is referred to as a ‘catch’, and while I was not sure what this was, I did know it is something you hope to avoid.
It is easy to forget that learning frequently comes with and even out of fear. When we invite our students to engage in new learning, step outside of their comfort zone, and do so in the public and social setting of a classroom, we should remember that we are inviting them to confront fear. Success in such learning will require that they overcome this fear. When our students do not feel safe, supported and cared for, the fear of new learning is likely to overwhelm them. But fear gets a bad rap. Fear can be an emotion that primes us for peak performance. The biological responses that allowed us to survive fear-inducing circumstances in our prehistoric origins remain with us as we confront fear today. When we learn to trust that we can confront and overcome our fears, we can recognise that our physical and psychological responses to it are merely our bodies getting ready for what is to come. This reconception of fear can only occur in environments of trust and emotional safety.
In my learning journey, I have had intrinsic motivation on my side. There is no extrinsic reward for me in learning to turn wood. I will not make riches from it nor become more employable thanks to my new skillset. This is entirely a hobby, a personal challenge and a lot of fun. I can see at work all of the hallmarks of motivation theory and learner agency. Observing these forces at work in my personal learning is helping me understand the part this plays in my students’ learning. Dan Pink (2009), in his book ‘Drive’, identifies three forces that act to motivate us. According to Pink, purpose, mastery and choice rather than traditional (external) rewards motivate us the most. Once base needs are taken care of, we seek opportunities to master skills and concepts, gaining tangible benefits from the feelings of success that come with doing so. We seek choice and autonomy in how we perform our duties and expend our energies. Clarity of purpose allows us to see the value in what we do, and when it is a purpose that connects us with something that matters to ourselves or those we care about, we are more likely to commit time and energy to the task.
“agency”, is the ability to make choices and direct activity based on one’s own resourcefulness and enterprise. This entails thinking about the world not as something that unfolds separate and apart from us but as a field of action that we can potentially direct and influence.” (Ritchhart, 2015 p.77)
For me, woodturning has become an expression of my agency. Amidst a life of responsibilities and competing pressures, the opportunity to engage in a self-selected and self-directed pursuit is a rewarding escape. As educators, we often look for opportunities to give agency to our students. Such efforts are laudable, but sometimes we are so caught up with actions to give agency to students that we ignore that they are already taking it in other aspects of their lives. I recall a student who shared with me that in his time away from school, he was learning piano, playing soccer, studying Armenian, and attending classes in pottery where he was learning to use a potter’s wheel. Hearing of this boy’s self-organised learning was the catalyst for an optional home-learning programme that acknowledged that some of my students didn’t need to be assigned home-busy-work.
Like so many things we may seek to teach ourselves in modern times, learning woodturning has been made possible thanks to the internet. For almost any worthwhile (or otherwise) endeavour, there is a plethora of websites, blogs, discussion groups and videos available. The internet provides the self-organising learner with access to both information and, in many cases, a community of like-minded individuals. I have found a community of wood-turners online, and their willingness to share their knowledge and skill has accelerated my learning journey. Of greatest use to me in this very hands-on endeavour has been the immediate access to videos that illustrate the methods I am attempting to master. Being able to pause a video or rewind and watch a piece over and over again has allowed me to notice the subtle choices that a master turner makes as they shape a piece of wood. In schools, too often, Google and the internet are viewed speculatively by educators. There is a sense that if a method or solution is Googled, a shortcut has been taken and that the subsequent learning is less robust. There is also a fear that what might be found on the internet lacks the academic rigour of other sources for information. In an age of widespread misinformation, there is some truth to this and caution is rightly advised. But, many, if not most, of the people sharing information to the internet are doing so in good faith. Find the right community on the internet and you can connect with great expertise.
This access to relevant learning resources is what makes the challenge achievable. In self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci. 2005), three factors are identified as playing a part in enabling self-directed goal seeking. A sense of autonomy over the path taken as considered above linked to agency is the first. The second is the competence required to achieve the goal. Without access to the rich learning resources available through the internet, I would have little hope of achieving anything near competence. Indeed, I would barely have known where to start. For developing competence with new learning the internet is a game-changer. I have augmented my learning with books and magazines, but when trying to master a new skill, nothing compares with a well-composed video that is available at the moment you need it.
My woodturning adventures have also revealed something special about the nature of feedback within maker centred learning. When practising a technique or implementing a plan, feedback tends to be immediate and direct. You either get it right, or things tend to go wrong, sometimes expensively, with luck and a lot of care, hopefully not dangerously wrong. There is the somewhat subtle, constant feedback that comes from how a tool interacts with a material. There is the unavoidable feedback that comes when something breaks, such as when the timber at the base of a bowl tears away from the chuck holding it in the lathe. In these instances, the feedback is inherent to the task, direct, and leads to new learning. What you are doing either works, or it doesn’t work. When this sort of natural feedback is combined with the motivation to learn and a sense of curiosity, learning can flow. This is not the type of feedback that is common in education systems. The performance and the learning become separated from each other by formal feedback procedures. When the feedback is provided in the form of a mark or grade, the learner is left to wonder how this quantitative measure relates to what they have done.
There is also the more reflective and evaluative feedback that comes when a piece is completed, and you hold it in your hand for the first time. Does it live up to the expectations you had during the design phase? What flaws can be observed? How might it be improved? What might you do differently next time? The questions I find myself asking once a piece is finished become the catalyst for the next piece I attempt. The learning is very much continuous and ongoing. Here again, there is a difference with the patterns of learning we see in schools. Lane Clark notes how students are likely to spend weeks learning about rainforests only to move on to the electricity unit just as their interest is piqued. There is seldom an opportunity to go deeper into a topic, explore alternate perspectives and build expertise.
The nature of my learning journey over the past few months has been, at times, an obsession. I have deepened my understanding of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi means by “Flow”. I would love to unlock the sense of joy that comes with such intrinsically motivating learning for my students; to bring some of this into my classroom on a more routine basis. I am reminded often of my encounters with the work of Sugata Mitra and his exploration of self-organised learning environments. I wonder how such thinking might play more of a part in traditional schooling. I wonder if sometimes, as educators, we take too much of a step back from exploring the act of learning as it exists for the students we teach? Perhaps what I love most about teaching is that there are always questions to explore and new learning to be had, just like with woodturning.
By Nigel Coutts
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2013) Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York; Harper Perennial.
Mitra, S. (2014) The future of schooling: Children and learning at the edge of chaos. Prospects, 44:547-558
Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.
Ritchhart, R. (2015) Creating cultures of thinking: The eight forces we must truly master to transform our schools”, San Francisco, Josey-Bass.
Ryan, R., & Deci, E. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.