People Based Learning: A Campaign

We are engaging in a community campaign, a Compaign

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People Based Learning is an emerging concept, but it is not a new idea.

Learning from everyone around me -- from my colleague to a coach to the random person I bumped into in the bake shop this morning -- is something I find energizing, memorable and necessary.

As we collect stories from our community about People Based Learning experiences at School of Thought, we realize others find it just as essential. We have only just begun on conversation collection campaign.

As hearts, minds, and concerns have flared over our divides in politics and the world in the past few years, it feels like an even more important concept to discuss and develop.

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I am so thrilled to have begun a campaign with our first School of Thought intern, high school senior, Olivia Roland, who is beautifully facilitating conversations on the concept this summer. If you might like to learn more or to be a part of a future conversations, be in touch for details.

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The Big Idea

My experiences as a researcher have left me with a lot of lessons. While collecting quantitative data aids in seeing bigger pictures, it was the qualitative stories, learned through and with people, that have touched and stayed with me.

This includes:

• Listening to students talk about the purpose of school across settings.

• Learning through successes and failures of mentors.

• Learning through stories of others reimagining schools about how to make them work.

• Listening to how to be a public speaker by experiencing talks of colleagues.

• Learning how to be an advocate by listening to my children.

I spend a lot of time sitting down, talking with people and learning their stories. I’ve discovered that the way that I learn about the world is by listening to (or reading) how other people experience it.

This is People Based Learning. And we need it right now.

The focus of past learning research has been either exclusively on the learner or (less often) on the teacher. In fact, learning with and through people has rarely been explicitly taken as a variable of interest, despite being the medium through which most durable learning occurs, especially in development, but also in adulthood.¹

School of Thought is doing research a little differently. We are studying and building this concept through conversations supported by an AI platform built by and with partners at Cortico. We are building understandings through voices, stories and perspectives. Our goal is to turn these into usable wisdom for all.

I’m invigorated by how much I’ve already learned. We are going to keep talking and reading and learning. I hope you will, too.

Making Big Ideas Usable

Here are four of my favorite ways to learn through people. These guide our conversation campaign work as we begin. We will be sharing insights from our conversations as we accumulate them.

1. Go early, go deep

Any conversation that you’re going to learn from has to be substantive- so we are starting with deep questions.

At one of the conferences I attended recently, I met some new friends who quickly got into conversation about how we didn’t like small talk. We suggested that instead, we should start with big talk. It’s just much more interesting.

Small Talk – polite conversation about unimportant or uncontroversial matters.

Big talk – deep, meaningful conversation about important issues that also helps you get to know the other person better.

Though I did not know it at the time, this term big talk can be credited to Kalina Silverman. She has been engaging in a Make Big Talk movement, and building on the term big talk. Silverman describes three attributes of a big talk question:

• Universal – Any human being could answer it. It doesn’t matter what external factors define them.

• Open-ended – Elicits more than just a yes/no response. There is an opportunity to hear a story.

• Meaningful – Skips the small talk. By asking the question, you can delve beneath the surface.

To which I would add:

• Timeless, the question would have made as much sense to Socrates as it would to you today.

And while being interested in the person you’re talking to is a valuable technique for getting them to share their experiences and lessons with you, interest also helps you learn.

Here is a School of Thought visual essay on how this concept might be used in schools.

Are We So Connected That We Aren’t Connecting?

2. Conversations > Interviews

My favorite learning sessions are reciprocal. They are two-way conversations.

In so many ways, my research training tells me to keep my mouth closed and maintain a professional, one-way conversation. But when you’re really trying to learn from someone, you have to be able to give something in return.

I remember sitting in my fifth grade classroom and my teacher, Ms. Dwyer, telling us that when we’re talking to someone we should make sure to regularly nod, keep eye contact, say ‘mhmm,’ and jump in with questions when we needed clarification. Those tricks work as well now as they did as a fifth grader.

I’ve also found that it’s helpful to be as prepared for the conversation as possible. So if it’s a conversation that’s been set up in advance, I dig in. I learn as much about the person as I can.

If you want an example of someone who is really good at People Based Learning conversations, listen to the radio show On Being and pay close attention to the host. She’s such a wonderful People Based Learning guide, and I’m constantly using her techniques to guide my own conversations.

3. Ask for experiences

Occasionally you meet people who seem as wise as yoda and who speak in life-lesson soundbites. If you’re trying to learn from their life, then you want to get them to tell you a story.

Studies have shown that the human brain loves a good story. Harvard neuroeconomist Paul Zak discovered that when humans tell each other stories, their brains release a chemical called oxytocin. Oxytocin, he wrote, tells our brains that “it’s safe to approach others” and it motivates cooperation with others.

So if you’re having trouble getting to the story-sharing part of your conversation, try asking more open questions. And then when they give you information, dig into it.

Ask, “How did you learn that? What was your experience? What did you read?”

In my experience, it’s way more powerful to learn how someone else learned a lesson than to have them just flat-out tell you their takeaway.

4. Let there be silence

One thing I notice in our young facilitator, Olivia, is that she is listening intently, and does not jump in to conversation when there is a pause. This technique takes practice, and can feel a little uncomfortable, and has support from research.²

Silence helps:

• you to listen better in the moment instead of thinking of how to respond

• the person you are speaking to go deeper and gather their thoughts

• conversation partners gain confidence when they are given the floor

Silence is used as a tool by many types of professionals. Therapists practice it to help patients to open up, negotiators to gain an advantage, public speakers for emphasis and dramatic effect. User researchers, business analysts and generally conversation campaign facilitators can use it, too.

I love this resource with clips of conversations to demonstrate the power of intentional silence.

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Thank you so much for being here.

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Call to action

So how do you invite People Based Learning into your life?

The People Based Learning Project

We are engaging in small-group dialogue on People Based Learning to give every person a chance to speak and be heard, listen and learn.

1. This begins with a conversation campaign we are conducting on zoom that answers the question:

Can you share a successful learning experience where you significantly benefited from someone else's knowledge or skills?

Follow up questions will be tailored to groups and responses.

1. With the use of Cortico’s AI platform and transcriptions, we are uploading recordings and then creating transcripts of the conversations.

2. We will engage with each other in sensemaking of conversations.

3. From there our goal is to create resources for people to listen, learn and lead with knowledge about people as resources.

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1. I just read an example about Brian Chesky, who, when he was scaling up Airbnb, sought advice from people such as Warren Buffett. “If you find the right source, you don’t have to read everything,” Chesky shares. “I’ve had to learn to seek out the people behind the knowledge. I wanted to learn about safety, so I went to George Tenet, the ex-head of the CIA.”

Of course not everyone has access to Warren Buffet or someone from the CIA. But the idea is that it is people who are the resources - those with knowledge and experience, who have stories and secrets that stick.

2. Social science has found that a lull in a conversation can trigger feelings of rejection in each party of the chat— a 2010 study out of Holland found that just 4 seconds of silence could “elicit primal fears, activating anxiety-provoking feelings of incompatibility and exclusion.” The study’s author, from the University of Groningen, compared it to dancing— when conversational flow continues, everyone feels secure. When it stops, everything feels wrong.