Learning is Progress (Not Perfection)

Contents Safety & Quality Guide
Part of Safety & Quality - Part 2: Teaching & Learning
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Learning is not about being perfect. Think about the difference between progress and perfection. Which is more functional? Perfection is static and does not allow you to adapt. Progress, however, defines flexibility and agility.

At its best, learning is about consistent, iterative progress. Good coaches know this: they don’t expect a star athlete to develop from one day of training. As educators it is our role to cultivate diligent progress over a lifetime of learning.

We want people who are fully engaged with their staff and students. We do not want teachers who are hands-off, content to let things just happen. We want teachers who think of learning as a positive collaboration, a brilliant conversation with the Village.

Positive Progress is the only training method that works long-term with wild animals. Why? Wild animals are often smarter than their domesticated counterparts (including humans). They haven’t had complacency bred into them. Instead, they demand relationships founded on trust and respect, not domination. Paying Attention and guiding through positive feedback is how we truly liberate our students and ourselves.

Build Trust

Trust & Comfort

We pride ourselves on pushing our student’s edges, yet we must remember that trust is what makes that pushing possible. You never want to push a student too far—know your and your students’ limits. Shelter, water, food: meeting a student’s basic needs goes a long way towards building trust. Let students know you care by providing for their basic needs. Keep your students well fed. Keep them warm. Keep them hydrated. If they are uncomfortable or worrying about being hungry, cold, or needing to use the restroom, then they aren’t fully engaged in learning. They can’t learn with you until they trust you.

Warm Greeting

Treat students, especially children, like long lost friends. When they arrive at camp, don’t just point them to where they put their gear. Go beyond logistics. Greet them with great warmth. Smile, say their name, give a high five or handshake. Warmth works wonders. With the right greeting, even reluctant students will be willing to join you for any adventure. Important points to remember:

Get to know every student’s name right away and use it often.
Get students to learn each other’s names.
Treat students like old friends you are genuinely excited to see.

Nurture Friendships

Making friends is a skill. Studies have shown that kids don’t return to camp just because it was fun; more often they return because they made friends. Friendships have a dramatic effect on personal happiness. Helping kids form friendships is more important than any skill or experience we can share.

Our jobs become much easier if everyone feels they’re participating with a group of friends, not as individuals or in cliques. Create a sense of camaraderie, compassion, and friendship and your work will be infinitely easier and more enjoyable. The principles of helping students develop friendships are:

Learn & Use Names

Staff and students must learn the names of everyone in the group. Knowing and using students names demonstrates caring and models respect. Names are the starting point for our identity in any group. Having students learn each other’s name sets the expectation of making progress as a team. Use an activity to help everyone learn names and get to know each other a bit. Make names a part of your head count process.

Break into Smaller Teams

When a student learns alone they struggle with the limits of their own perspective. Ask students to work together in teams of two, or (even better) three. In groups, you’ll find they suddenly draw inspiration, perseverance, and creativity from one another. Remind them often that the goal of their team is not to be perfect, but to make progress. To always do better!

Focus on the Team, Not the Individual

Discuss with students that when they’re on a team they can be Truly Helpful by helping others succeed. Catch them encouraging or helping each other and verbalize your appreciation for it.

Set Goals

With the right kind of inspiration, goals help us stay on track. Too often teachers assume students will automatically be interested in what they have to say, or what the standards require. In coaching and training, goals set us on the path to progress.

Activators

A useful way to think about goals is as “activators.” Activators compel us to make choices. They spur us to motion. Progress never happens if our students just sit there. We need to activate them. An activator can be an inspiring story, a clear set of expectations, or even the promise of a warm campfire.

Shift Your Expectations

If you have low expectations, such as “6-year-olds can’t do bow drill,” or “they won’t listen to me,” then you’ll get those results. If you have high expectations, like “a 6-year-old doing bow drill will always improve” or “they will grow safer and more aware while using knives,” then with the trust of your group, you’ll get there. Students can sense our unspoken expectations. Don’t set low expectations just because you are afraid of failure. It’s about progress, not perfection.

Ask the Student

We may have a set of goals for our students but it’s even more powerful when they develop their own. We must expect them to come up with goals for the betterment of themselves and the team. Ask them with your word and role modeling: “What’s a goal that benefits our team, the wilderness around us, and our Village?”

Modify Behavior

Behavior is what you get after compelling a student and their team with goals. Remember, behavior is not meant to be perfect. When a student first tries to build a campfire, they may have no clue what to do. It’s up to us to help them break the task into smaller steps and make progress.

Jump Cornstalks

The way you train to jump cornstalks is by planting a seed in the spring. Then you successfully jump over it. By the time it sprouts, that corn is still easy to jump over. In early summer it may be more challenging, but you’ve practiced it with success every day and every new moment of growth has raised the bar. Thus you’re already fluent at jumping over cornstalks (of a certain height). One day you may not quite make it, one day you might. Again, perfection is not important, only the progress of always leaping higher. That attitude is the only way you’ll ever jump over the cornstalk.

Celebrate Results

Nature is the expert at celebrating results. We get fire, we stay warm. We catch a fish, we eat. We accurately prepare for the weather, we stay dry. Natural consequences are often the best kind of reinforcement. Humans are social animals. Our survival depends on the feedback and support of our Village and team. Educators must give frequent feedback to keep making progress.

Just Enough

Be careful about giving too much information at once. Frequent small bites are a better way to eat a game hen than stuffing the entire bird into your mouth. This metaphor also applies to learning: it’s better to give students smaller bits of information and plenty of time to “chew” on them. Don’t give them direction and then immediately follow it up with new instructions. Instead, provide “just enough” time to practice and internalize the lesson before moving on.

Avoid Tunnel Vision

This is especially helpful with large groups. For instance, when teaching bow drill, a teacher might focus all their time on one struggling student. Meanwhile, other students are not receiving assistance. Better to quickly give that first student quick, positive feedback and one piece of advice to work on (an activator). Then you can move around the entire class, offering small, frequent bites with each student (or team). Remember to Stand and Scan the entire group using your Whiskers. With this wider vision you will see everyone who needs your feedback, encouragement, or guidance.

Ignore the Wrong (whenever possible)

There are behaviors that aren’t useful for learning. Any attention you give, even negative, can reward those behaviors. The more attention you give unwanted behaviors, the more they may plague you. Do your best to ignore the “wrong” behavior when it’s not a safety or program quality issue. Let the little stuff slide. Don’t feed it energy. Instead focus on the positive, using praise to encourage the results you want to see.

Remember Do not confuse ignoring the “wrong” with ignoring your students completely. We don’t want to be entirely handsoff, letting students run wild. As mentors we should always be engaged, curious, and asking questions.

Redirect

Instead of disciplining “wrong” behavior, redirect it into new possibilities. Activate and encourage different choices. The less forced the redirection feels, the better the student will respond. Here are some types of redirection:

Whiskers: Hey look, squirrel! Shifting focus from their task often gets people to think more creatively and pulls them out of our tunnel vision. This broader scope of awareness and action encourages new ways of interacting with the world.
Experimentation: What happens when you hold the match upside down? This is especially useful when students seem stuck in a rut. Remember, our job is not to have them do exactly what we say, but to keep them engaged with experimentation and exploration.
Clarity: Let’s say a student overharvests pitchwood (a firestarter). Say something like, “We try not to harvest pitchwood because it’s not sustainable. If we were in an actual survival situation pitchwood would be useful. But if everyone harvests pitchwood now, then we won’t have any left.” Reviewing potential consequences is not about blame. In fact you can use the opportunity to build trust. Make it a reminder not a scolding.
Share Your Tale: Instead of scolding, try this: “I once harvested all the pitchwood from a stump, destroying it. Another teacher showed me all the chipmunk homes I also destroyed. I felt really bad.”
Share the Blame: Another version is this: “Don’t worry about it, I could have better explained why we don’t harvest pitchwood. You were just more creative than me. I’ll try to do better next time.”

These last two options make you vulnerable. They also let students know that you don’t think they did anything “bad.” Instead you’re helping them reorient towards progress. Some people may worry that Empathizing and Sharing the Blame could be perceived as weakness, yet it’s the opposite. Students will see that you care about the group more than your ego.

Redirection is not always necessary. Sometimes it’s better to let kids explore more possibilities (perhaps even beyond what you think is the correct way) and learn from them. The truly liberated student will do their own assessment of what works and alter their behavior accordingly. After that, your job as a teacher is to accelerate learning by appreciating progress.

Fine Tuning

Fine-tuning your responses to an activity keeps your students on their toes while learning.

Change It Up: Remember, perfection is a boring myth. Change your strategy when expectations are not met. We want our students to be creative, but we should hold ourselves to the same expectation. If something is not working, change it up. Try something new.
Vary the Reward: The same monotone praise will quickly lose its effect. Different kinds of appreciation help students know you’re Paying Attention and not going through the motions. One minute it could be a “job well done,” the next it could be a chance to “move to the next level”. Finally, don’t forget the value of a full-blown celebration! A “jackpot” used sparingly acknowledges we worked really hard that day, season, or year.
Responsibility: Simple praise can be effective but is not enough. One of the most impactful rewards is increased responsibility. If a child takes the time to teach knife safety to their peers, trust them to use their tool with more independence.

Skills of Appreciation

Appreciation for what works well must be clear and immediate. It cements the trust we’ve worked hard to build and encourages students to strive harder. Appreciation is focusing on “what works.” Appreciate every little step closer to the goal. Especially progress you were not expecting. Appreciation is also a celebration of results. Catch people doing a job well done, don’t punish them for a job poorly performed. Here are keys to appreciation:

Praise immediately: This makes students aware of their progress.
Be specific: General praise is suspect, specific praise shows you’re paying attention. For example, “Billy you are awesome!” is meaningless, while “Thank you for sweeping up without me asking,” is rewarding.
Share your enthusiasm: show genuine enthusiasm for your students’ progress.
Encourage them to carry on: Cultivate experimentation. Giving students suggestions or next steps can be a reward for getting that first thing right.

Building Behavior Chains

Your students will not be leaping over cornstalks right away. In fact, coaching is about starting with a bar students can easily jump over. They need to experience the joy of success. Maybe you start off with the bar on the ground and as time goes by, you raise that bar. This can happen in the span of minutes. Take this simple exercise of learning to light a match.

Light a Match – A Chain of Events:

Break students into teams. Give each team a book of matches and tell to take turns lighting them until all but three are gone. You’ll save those three for the five-minute fire exercise. Tell them when someone else on their team is lighting a match they need to point out everything their teammate does right. And it doesn’t matter if they actually manage to light it. Role model this right away by catching students making progress. For example, some students do not hold the match upside down to help the wood catch when it lights. As soon as you see someone hold a match upside-down, immediately say, “That’s great, upside down is exactly how you should hold it to catch the flame.” Suddenly, every student is obsessed with being caught doing this right thing. Now you no longer need to praise holding the match upside down. Instead, you catch them holding it at the end. Then you catch them blocking it from the wind. Then you catch them giving the wood time to light. After all the hands-on experimentation of one matchbook, your students will put the pieces together to become experts at lighting a match.

Remember, the most important part of building Behavior Chains is to make your praise a moving target. Don’t always praise the same thing: once they’ve met a goal, change the target. Don’t encourage static behavior. Remind students they can always do it better. Progress is what you appreciate, not just the completion of a task.

Remember Don’t wait for perfection. It won’t happen and you don’t want it to. You job is to encourage thoughtful experimentation and always focus on progress.

All Models Are Wrong, Some Are Useful

Here are five reasons why Positive Progress may stop working.

Trust degrades or was never there to begin with: Praise means nothing if your student doesn’t believe you. In order to teach with Positive Progress, you have to be sincere. Trust can also degrade by using too much negative reinforcement.

Goals Are Unrealistic: If we set goals or benchmarks we can never meet, than we always feel like failures. This makes people give up. You may think your goals are realistic but once you get more information, feel free to adapt. Discuss with students how to change the goals for the team.
False Perfection is Obtained: Look we’re done because we think we did it right! Remember, goals are about accomplishing progress towards the next chapter. Not an end state. Don’t zap all the adventure out of learning.
Students are Ignored: Positive Progress involves Paying Attention to catch useful behavior. Positive Progress that is not reinforced will degrade rapidly.
Go Beyond “You”: You don’t want students to become dependent on your praise or appreciation. Find out what motivates them to do this work even when you’re not around. Being part of the team and remembering the story the Village is a key to guiding your students to become independent learners.

Your job is to teach them to praise themselves. To always do it better. They’ll learn what to focus on to accomplish the goals of the Village. Ask students what they are motivated about for the day and what they’re really excited about accomplishing long-term. When you’ve finished an activity or the day, debrief how they want to continue learning. This teaches them to come up with their own motivation and appreciation.

Negative Reinforcement

Unfortunately our culture is addicted to negative reinforcement. It’s about catching people doing things wrong. We enact this cycle because that was what happened to many of us, because we don’t have enough time, or because we choose not to care.

Nevertheless, even nature has aspects of negative reinforcement and sometimes, especially for safety, we need to address what isn’t working. But before using negative reinforcement, weigh heavily how it will affect the most important aspect of Positive Progress: Trust.

Saying No

Sometimes “no” or “stop” is vitally important if a student is doing something unsafe. After they stop the concerning behavior, use redirection to reengage them. Don’t waste your “nos.”

The Last Resort

Limit negative reinforcement to serious circumstances, such as a student willfully engaging in unsafe behavior. If you use it, here are some guidelines:

Explain to the student the impact of their actions.
Let them know how you could have done better as a teacher or manager (Share the Blame).
Give them options for progress.
Affirm that you still appreciate them and that they are not “bad,” but their behavior is not benefitting the team and needs to be changed.
Discuss what does work and agree on a plan.

Ecology of Appreciation

Think of positive and negative reinforcement as an ecological system of Trust. One where you build stores of trust through positive reinforcement and withdraw from those stores with negative reinforcement. Retain the balance of a positive focus, with overwhelming positive reinforcement we create constructive cycles versus destructive ones.

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