Dr.Tae's Can skateboarding save our schools? is my favorite educational video. I use it to help train our innovation coaches. I use it for advanced entrepreneurial teams. And I also use it to encourage anybody who wants to learn about learning (including teachers, who want to create learning environments instead of teaching environments).
In short, you can learn everything you need to learn about learning, when you understand how skateboarders learn how to skateboard. Let's take a look at Dr. Tae's most important lessons.
Dr. Tae immediately starts with an important message:
On October 31st, 1999, why do I remember this date? Because I learned something that changed my life. What was it? A skateboarding trick called the 360 flip. So, why do I remember this date, why was it so important to me? I had been trying this trick for years and I just could never, ever get it. It was infuriating. It was frustrating. It was discouraging. But, the kooky thing is I never gave up on trying to do the 360 flip. I'm not sure why.
It might be easy to miss the significance of this, since later in the video Dr. Tae specifically highlights several important points that he wants us to remember. I have listened to this video over 100 times and I am always struck by these first words: Dr. Tae does not have a good reason for learning the 360 flip, at least not one he can readily identify. It isn't helping him get a better grade. It isn't helping him get a better job. Deep inside, however, he needed to figure out how to do the the 360 flip, and he had the right conditions for learning: he was allowed to work for years without much progress on something and he wasn't even sure if he was going to succeed.
Failure is normal and expected. You can't learn a skateboarding trick in one try or two tries.
Nobody knows ahead of time how long it takes anyone to learn anything.
The only secret to learning: work your ass off until you figure it out.
Learning is not fun. It is not fun to fail at a skateboarding trick, just like it is not fun to fail at anything. Dr. Tae does provide a hint of the reward: learning is about flow, which can be a source of great satisfaction, even if it is not "fun."
Flow is about setting up learning experiences which are Goldilocks Challenges.
When learning is the ultimate goal, grades (and other measures of success) are less important.
To be successful in learning we need to set up learning experiences where we get real-time meaningful feedback. The skateboarder gets this directly when they fall while attempting a trick.
We may be conditioned to think that learning is what we do in a school, a course, a degree program, or some other formal educational system. Those learning experiences, according to Dr. Tae, offer only a small slice of the entire spectrum of possible learning opportunities. We can see only a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, called visible light. When we devise the right tools, we can "see" a much broader range of frequencies across the electromagnetic spectrum. Dr. Tae urges us to see learning in the same way.
How do we create a broader spectrum of learning experiences? How do we learn to see beyond the narrow range of what is visible? First, we need to have a big goal of what we want to learn, our version of the 360 flip, even if we don't know exactly why. Then, we need to craft goldilocks challenges, challenges that are not too hard and not too easy (Dr. Tae is referencing a story many kids learn when they are young, aboud finding things that are just right). Easy challenges may give us a short-term feeling of success (this is the basis of pleasure built into every game app) but they don't give us the feeling of flow--we aren't really getting better at anything. Challenges that are too hard quickly frustrate us and we give up. Finally, we need to keep doing it over and over until we succeed. If we get all of that right, our long-term goal (it needs to be valuable to us!) combined with the shorter-term flow, will keep us going until we succeed.
In the realm of entrepreneurship and innovation, these concepts are articulated as, Think Big, Start Small, combined with the need for Iteration. They also work at a broader human level for any creative endeavor.
Give it a try. You will realize that you can learn anything, if it is important enough to you, if you break it into small pieces, and if you keep at it until you succeed.