Open Window Mindset
The best learning happens when you open the window
A few decades ago, my soon-to-be husband and I took a trip to Amsterdam.
It was early in my career as a researcher, and I was thrilled, equal parts excited and intimidated, to be presenting at a small, niche reading research conference for the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.
It was exactly what it sounds like.
Everyone there, except for me, was deep into eye movement studies, dissecting the way people’s gaze traveled across words on a page and how it affected reading.
Meanwhile, I was more interested in the broader, messier ways people engaged with learning, something I hadn’t yet fully articulated but felt on the cusp of discovering.
Amsterdam, in all its dreamy, fairy-tale charm, became the perfect backdrop for that discovery. We stayed in the Jordaan neighborhood, cobbling our way along its canal paths, past those impossibly tall, impossibly skinny homes, each one a study in design and curiosity.
The floor-to-ceiling windows felt like invitations, not just into the architecture, but into people’s lives.
You couldn’t help but peek in, watching as locals sipped their perfect coffees, reading, thinking, or simply gazing out at the world as families pedaled past on bicycles and barges drifted along the water.
We wandered those canals all day, soaking in (sometimes literally, there was a lot of rain!) all of it.
But it wasn’t just the city’s beauty that stayed with me, it was the people. Everywhere we went, we met locals eager to introduce us to their world.
A bartender who traced the history of Dutch trade over a round of genever. A bookseller who walked us through the evolution of Amsterdam’s literary scene. A stranger at a café who, seeing my conference badge, launched into a discussion about his views on the current state of education and the culture of learning.
We hadn’t just visited Amsterdam; we had learned it through the people who brought it to life.
And in that experience, a realization began to take shape:
Learning isn’t just about what’s on the page or in a lecture. It happens in the messy spaces in between—through people, connection, windows, act of sharing.
This idea, so simple yet profound, would go on to shape everything I believed about learning. It’s messy. It’s complex. And it’s best done with and through others.
And it started here, in a city of open windows
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The Open Window Mindset
Since that trip, I’ve started to think more about how we connect with others to learn, and I believe Amsterdam framed an idea: The Open Windows Mindset.