Judging from previous experiences, I knew that motivation takes unstructured learning experiences very far. I had learned before that students with low motivation prefer a predictable environment with a limited curriculum and only the super-motivated are genuinely curious to learn far and beyond. Still, in 2017 we tried to implement too many changes from what would be expectable from a school.

We removed the fixed curriculum and with it any understanding of was actually going to happen in the short term. Students didn’t even know what the hell they were expected to learn.

We also didn’t had a closed calendar of events and activities. Again, students couldn’t measure the time and energy investment they got themselves into or plan their lives around it.

We removed a bunch of other things form the equation too but perhaps the most confusing one was to remove the role of an always present teacher who tells people what to do. Regardless of whether that teacher has a plan or is just improvising, at least then people have someone to follow. Without that role, students felt lost very quickly after the first couple of months.

The agenda was a bit more packed at the start but as soon as they faced a little of down-time in their agenda, everybody was left feeling a bit lost as to what to do next. They had no plan (not even an individual one) and weren’t quite sure how to use that time. A few students were the curious kind and quickly found stuff they were looking forward to read more about, but even that motivation ran out quickly.

Our solution for this problem was to speed up the implementation of the individual learning plans based on our learning framework at the time. After having 1:1s with each student, they then had a plan of what was it they intended to explore during their time at school and could at least focus their free time in self-learning or conversations related to the relevant topics.