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Reviewing the Twelve Principles and Quantum Thinking
Suppose you are teaching organic gardening to an avid group of men and women who want to raise vegetables for their own families. How do you know what they need to know? Ask them! Study their experience and their educational profile. Observe them in the garden. How about going to the homes of a small sample of the group to see how they have set up their family vegetable gardens? When you come to mine, you would immediately discover a great deal that I obviously need to know. Designing innovative ways to do the three needs assessment tasks—ask, study, observe—is your constant challenge as an educator using dialogue education. The Appendix offers another set of suggestions for doing needs assessment. Notice how needs assessment connects to immediacy for the learners, their consequent engagement in the learning tasks, and your accountability as an educator. This is quantum thinking: all these elements are related. When you honor one, you honor them all. Safety Establishing an environment of safety in the process and the setting of the learning, for learners and teacher, is both essential and challenging. Let’s look at a National Service program, where young adults come to learn how to offer technical services to a community and work together as a team. How can we ensure they will feel safe enough in this venture to stay with it, do the job well, and be creative and critical in their response to the program? Other principles and practices come into play here: affirming, listening, echoing learners’ words and feelings, having a sequence of learning tasks that is feasible and developmental, respecting learners as subjects of their lives and learning, establishing clear roles, and fostering accountability of leaders to the learners and to the program. Safety can be felt in a learning situation. These are some of the signs: laughter, a certain ease and camaraderie, a flow of questions from the learners, the teacher’s invitation for comments on the process. In a graduate course at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, for example, the graduate students feel the safety I am trying to establish when they are invited to list their expectations of
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