What happens when you place the ability and responsibility for learning and teaching into the hands of the people with the passion to learn?

What happens when you blur the line between teacher and student, until it no longer exists?

What happens when “Those Who Can, Do, and Those Who Can’t, Teach” becomes “Those Who Can Do, Teach, and Those Who Can Teach, Do“?

What on earth does this mean for schools, colleges, universities, the institutional life of education?

If you know me at all, you’ll know I bear little love for the institution of schooling, and the lust for “schoolifying” everything. Formerly, if you wanted to learn something, you found somebody doing it and you apprenticed with them. Now if you want to learn something, you hit your web browser and google up a school.

What happened to us, as a culture? Well, you can read John Taylor Gatto’s the Underground History of American Education for the full story, but in short, we fell asleep, and woke up in school, and stopped questioning where and why it came from.

Once you take authority away from the institution, and put it back in the hands of the doers, where does that leave institutions?

I believe a role does remain for these institutions. For a long time, as the various permutations of fluency games improve and cohere, they’ll need the guiding hand of those with the skills, and with some understanding of the pedagogical challenge at hand. It will take a while to fully transition from a culture of expert pedagogues to a culture of self-teaching play. Because Evan and I have first aimed at language education, I think we will see some rapid culture change there once we get the ball rolling. Everything else will come in its own time.

Perhaps eventually the schools, colleges, and academies will transform into cultural and community centers, places with the space and tools to facilitate experimental and exploratory play in the fluency of different skills. Hotbeds of lighthearded conversation and commensality, perhaps they will have a role for quite some time to come.

In any case, let’s begin. Whatever happens, we know where we started. Right here.

When it comes to culture change and personal growth, I notice folks often (naturally, according to the conditioning of our culture) asking others to “go first”. But why not apply new tools and understandings to ourselves first, until we’ve mastered them? Why not “go first”, ourselves?

For example, take the practice of Nonviolent Communication. When I first started practicing NVC, I “helped” conversation partners out a lot by “correcting” their NVC use. After indulging this kind of arrogant mischief for quite a while, it finally occurred to me that correcting others behavior presented a massive wall to trust, understanding, and peace. In essence, by correcting them (without their request to do so), I spoke “violently” (in the parlance of NVC). From that point on I made it a practice of applying the observation and empathic skills strictly to myself and my own needs, assuming that others would benefit from the clarity such practice produced in me. I discovered the truth in that assumption as my skill improved.

Funny enough (or not so funny, depending on how you look at this) I practiced the same short-sighted abuse of new tools when learning Don Miguel Ruiz’ “Four Agreements”.  You could find me lecturing my girlfriend of the time on how she hadn’t adhered to “Don’t Take Anything Personally”, or one of the other Agreements.

Honestly, I have done this with many of these kinds of personal and communicative tools, over the years.

By the time I began to experiment and practice the Haudensaunee’s three “Peace Principles” as communicated to me by Jake Tekaronianeken Swamp, I think I’d finally hit on it. I accepted these principles as a gift for myself, and they would benefit others to the extent they changed my behavior in more life-affirming ways, rather than how I lectured and corrected others in their use.

American culture elevates the ‘word’, especially the written word, to such a high level, that it commonly eclipses the purpose of the word: to communicate understanding, to change behavior, to have a real impact in the world. Often words talk to words, without any of them sullying each other by affecting the “real world”.

I stand here to say that my life has grown far more satisfying once I lost interest in explaining my philosophy, in favor of benefiting from it.

In fact, could someone come to understand your values, and learn the tools of communication you use, simply by experiencing you using them? Not through your articulation of them, nor purchasing the book that explains them, nor through diagrams on white boards, but simply from observing you as a role model?

This sounds an awful lot like “mentoring”, doesn’t it?

Perhaps you will allow me to challenge you: can you take your top, most dearly held values, or your favorite new tool of growth or communication, and embody them for a month without explaining or articulating them to anyone else, enough so that an observant person could discern these unspoken values, tools, or focus of growth?

A pretty cool idea, I think.

What presuppostitions does “disagreement” hide? Do “agreement” and “disagreement” help (or hinder) conversations, decisions, and understanding?

For a long time now, whenever I hear someone say “I disagree” to me, or someone else, it always sticks in my craw a little bit. I haven’t quite understood why; certainly I want folks I converse with to feel free to tell their own stories and speak about their experiences.

Marshall Rosenberg, developer of Nonviolent Communication, helped me to understand that one can violently appreciate just as easily as condemn. To call me “right”, “perfect”, to grade me with an “A+”, implies that you can also grade with an “F-”, and call me “wrong” and “flawed”. The dark side of positive labels rests uneasily behind the euphoria that such labeling produces.

So how does this apply to agreement or disagreement?

If you say you “disagree” with me, than that indicates you’ve heard me, understood my story, and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t match your own attitudes and opinions well. But what if you don’t understand my story? Only I can say whether or not you’ve heard me; only I can say whether or not I feel that you have gone the distance in understanding me so that I can relax and allow that you have a good grasp of my experience.

In other words, how can you disagree with something you don’t understand yet? You must understand it before you can agree or disagree.

But then, what about when you decide that you agree with me, before you understand me? Has this ever happened to you, where someone responds affirmatively to an opinion of yours, then takes off running, saying all kinds of (in your mind) off-base things, that they think express your opinion too?

So, do agreement or disagreement even matter? They seem so extraneous to the goal of understanding each other. Do we mean anything else by these words, other than the ham-fisted application of judgement and labels?

And what about those conversations where you argue for an hour, and then at the end realize you both “agree”? The waste of energy and emotion over…what?

I’d like to hear about your experiences with agreement and disagreement. When have they helped? Hurt?

I wanted to keep you updated on where learning innovator Evan Gardner and I have lately had a chance to share his viral language fluency game, “Where Are Your Keys?”.

On April 29th, Chris Sims and Elizabeth Hendrickson hosted us at the Agile Learning Games Party; we had a great session of WAYK along with playing some other fun Agile teamwork games.

On May 2nd we played WAYK at Portland’s BarCamp 3, again somewhat of a techie gathering. Another amazing session! I’ve discovered that along with everybody enjoying themselves, a session of WAYK always creates one or two “believers” - folks who see the same possibility in the game that we do. We also discovered a lot of connections between software and domain languages, and ‘normal’ languages (such as French, English, German, Chinese, etc.). WAYK has a far broader application than first glance!

Both Evan and I have committed to finding such opportunities to share WAYK, so folks can get a taste for how the game works. If you have any ideas, please contact me: mythic dot cartographer at gmail dot com. Of course, we prefer local events, but if you can give us a hand, we can hit the road too.

Not Your Grandparent’s Square Dance from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

For those that missed it in my sidebar, a must-see - this guy has some teaching magic!

An excellent start for getting into the Riddler’s Way.

Story Games: How to Play Them and Why, by Mike Sugarbaker from Substance on Vimeo.

If you live in the Pacific Northwest and homeschooling/unschooling interests you, check out this soon-to-arrive event:

LIFE is Good
NW Unschooling Conference
Red Lion Hotel ~ Vancouver, WA
Memorial Day Weekend, May 21-24, 2009

Why would I qualify the timeless, ever-renewing relationship of animism with a modern, calendrical, millennial marker? Why might a person, wanting to create more life in the modern world, use the phrase “21st century animism”?

In my continuing discovery of Christopher Alexander’s work, from his books the Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, published three decades ago, to ones published in the 21st century, the Nature of Order, and Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets, I’ve had a growing sense of the important, even vital, contribution Alexander has made to what I call the Rewilding Renaissance.

For a long time now, I’ve felt dissatisfied by the “sack-cloth and ashes” approach to redeeming ourselves in the community of life, and finding once again a place where we belong. I’ve seen many folks I work with in outdoor education, disappear into clothing of muted earthtones - muddy browns, grays, fading greens and blacks.

This way of dressing says a lot to me now; for now I believe that in order to survive, and thrive, as a human people, we must learn to make beauty. That, in the most real and practical sense imaginable, survival means beauty. I don’t mean ‘pretty’; I mean deep feeling of profound beauty, a ‘rusty beauty’ of the depth of everyday life. Look around you at the forest, at the seashore. Everyone you see has arrived at their beauty - the waves, the wind, the dry grass, the call of birds - because they have survived, because they have fit in and adapted to the natural demand that we all live a beautiful life, or perish.

Some of the folks I worked with would object when I’d bring up the idea of a “renaissance” of Rewilding. To them, it made them think of paintings, sculpture, music, rather than primitive skills and wilderness survival. I would always respond to this by jumping up and shouting “exactly!”.

In this spirit, I have the first of a series of quotes from Christopher Alexander to share, that I think further flesh out what it means to have a Rewilding Renaissance.

From Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets:

I have become convinced that a [woven] carpet [as having reached their pinnacle in early Turkish village carpet weaving], when it is a good one, reverberates with some kind of primitive and archetypal force, that it has in it some kind of being, that it connects with some primitive, almost animistic “soul of the world” — and that the carpet must be judged, in the end, according to the degree to which t does, or it does not, make a connection with this force.

In this sense, it is in its power, very much like the great bronze castings of the Chinese Shang dynasty, which establish an almost magic force, by establishing themselves as beings, in some realm, which connects us to itself, to which we are connected, which is an absolute realm of beings, and whose functioning is almost entirely animal-like, spirit-like, not matter-like, almost conscious — it is as if the thing, the bronze, or the carpet, establishes itself in my own belly, as a voice, speaks with my own voice, exists with my own force, and forces my awareness of an ultimate mother, or an ultimate creature of which I am a part — and which exists in me.

This nearly animistic view of carpets is consistent with the recent discoveries, already mentioned, that have centered around the tradition of prehistoric art in Central Anatolia. The essence of the view which lies behind these discoveries, is that what we naively call beauty, and what we experience as artistic force, lies in the creation of an object which speaks directly with my own inner voice, that there is, at the heart of all things, a single voice of universal blackness and thickness and light, that speaks in all tongues, and that holds all force into itself.

A carpet, when it holds the almost magical force which all carpet lovers recognize, holds this force, because, to some degree, it embodies this original voice, lets us see this original animal force that exists in ourselves. I believe the same is true, of every artifact. As a builder, I am trying, every time I make a building, to reach a connection with this force, and to make a thing, which fills us, with this animal and animistic force. The force, though primitive, and almost alien, is that underbelly of ourselves, which makes us human. Though unrecognizable, and almost taboo, because it is by turns violent, lustful, peaceful, and absurd, is nevertheless that thing which, to the degree it comes to life in us, makes us live innocently as people in the world.

For background and context, read the first three in this series:

The Pedagogy of Play: Bite-Sized Pieces, Part I

The Pedagogy of Play: Bite-Sized Pieces, Part II

The Pedogogy of Play: Bite-sized Pieces, Part III

I went to the Indie Hurrican at Gamestorm 11 this weekend, a game convention. I playtested my fluency strategy (”bite-sized pieces”) for Polaris, and had some great results. This has helped me improve it. Thanks to Zach, Jim, Mark, Jennifer, and Gilbert; I hope that your passion for Polaris inspires you to play it with people you care about! Read on for the changes and clarifications in my method. I’ve left out a lot of details and page number references, as you can find them in previous versions.

GREETING/CONVENING
0. One-paragraph summary of the Polaris setting.
1. Give brief Road Map of how we will acquire fluency in Polaris: Warm-Ups, Character Creation, Scene Framing skills, and the Ritual Phrases.

WARM UPS
1. name story
2. firing line
3. yes, and
4. color, advance
5. counting

CHARACTER CREATION
1. Choose a name, one aspect, write on character sheet (using ben lehman’s polaris name/aspect handouts).

2. Character Circle/”I don’t see it”: semi-collaborative character creation. One person gets 30 seconds (or so) to describe their character; then, randomly (popcorn-style), everyone in the circle gets to add one piece of “what they see”, keeping a hold of the initial description, staying true as possible to it. The formula for adding a piece: “[character name] has [braids/big sword with runes/constant pain from leg wound, etc.]”, “I see [character name] [chasing jehovah’s witness/filing her nails compulsively/painting a masterpiece]”, “[character name] [dislikes/likes/loves/hates]”, etc. You get the idea. The group goes for about 3-5 minutes, then switches, unless someone pops the bubble by saying something that anyone else just can’t see fitting. The poppee must then say to the popper, “I don’t see it!”. They then move to the next player, who in 30 seconds also describes their character,etc. etc.. The goal: don’t pop the bubble, or put it off for as long as possible. Also, to get everyone repeating each other’s character’s names, so that we know them by heart.

SCENE FRAMING
CARD HANDLING: For each of the following categories, I slap down an index card with the ritual phrases on them. Between each card, as facilitator, I have picked out one paragraph or so of setting text for a player to read, rotating the reader of course. For each card, we go around the table giving everyone a chance to practice, resulting in 4 scenes per card (except for the session card and player intros, of course].

1. SESSION CARD: “Long Ago, The People Were Dying at the End of the World…”/”But All That Happened Long Ago, And There Are None Now Who Remember It.”

[SETTING: you might now read “moments frozen in time”, from the beginning of the book]

2. CHARACTER CARD: “But Hope Was Not Yet Lost, for [name] Still Heard the Song of the Stars…”

3. SCENE CARD: /”And So It Was…”/”…And So It Was.”

[SETTING: another paragraph or two, etc. etc. continue to do this between the rest of the cards]

4. NEGOTIATE CARD: “But Only If…”/”…It Was Not Meant To Be”/”…And That Was How It Happened.”

5. MOONS CARD: “…But It Was No Matter.”/”…We Shall See What Comes of It.” (moon vetos I)

6. ESCALATE CARD: “…You Ask Far Too Much!”/”And Furthermore…” (exhausting themes) (moon vetos II)

7. DICE CARD: “…It Shall Not Come to Pass!” (assign ice, light, zeal) (start to check experience)

FARE-THEE-WELL/REFLECTION
However far we got in slowly adding and mastering each ritual phrase in order, when the session ends, we always discuss how it went, talk about high points, look for improvements we can make, etc. I know that most groups will need a “cool down”, just like they had a “warm up”, and I haven’t quite wrapped my head around where I want to go with that yet.

For next session, I recommend starting at the beginning (keep the same characters if you want, of course), and adding in phrases as people demonstrate fluency, building them back up to where you left off. Don’t simply go “ok, we all mastered all those phrases last time”, DOUBLE CHECK, methodically. You’ll have fun reliving the process, and you won’t regret the chance to go over it again, I wager. Don’t think “we already did that prep stuff last time”; think “this counts as part of the game; when you play polaris, you start with this part”. Enjoying the step-by-step nature will become part of the fun of playing Polaris. And when you teach it to new folks, you won’t have to change how you play; just play as you always play, starting at the beginning.

Several Ideas on a String

I twittered some of these things and got a request to bundle them up into a blogpost; I usually use twitter- for my half-formed ideas, but I’ll still give this a go. The amount of background I need for the “roadmap” for Agile team proficiency has grown larger than I expected, so I have had fun working through all the details. Some ideas that seem pretty feasible to me:

Idea #1:  When an Agile team improves proficiency, they must refactor their role to the rest of their company. As in code, so in Life.

Breakdown: Once we have a roadmap of proficiency, I believe we can better work on the implications of improved proficiency. At Novice level, an Agile team will need a certain relationship with the rest of their organization. They need a certain kind of support, and they have certain products they can easily deliver. At Intermediate this changes; their improved skills mean something tangible, that their relationship with the rest of the organization has changed. This continues on as they move through the levels of proficiency.

Idea #2: Agile teams that move through fluency levels, while refactoring their relationship to the organization, will inevitably transform the organization.

Breakdown: This essentially refers to the fractal nature of change; you can see this within a single team. One team member that improves their feedback skills, will begin to shift the work processes of the team. One team member that improves their ability to run Stand-up meetings, will accelerate the learning of the whole team in this manner. I believe that in a WAYK-style fluency paradigm, where skill equals ability to mentor that same skill, this deepens the viral effect of an already observable phenomenon. So extrapolate this to the whole organization; at some inevitable point, a highly proficient team begins to intentionally mentor the organization on how to relate to them. This mentoring will begin to virally change the rest of the organization, not just where it links up with the team. The culture itself will shift.

Idea #3:  No more “forming, storming, norming, performing” (or its ilk); now just try “performing”: “Novice performing, Intermediate performing, Advanced performing, Superior performing…”

Breakdown:  Rather than looking at the lifecycle of the team, or looking at a team as going through a series of development stages (like a fetus) before emerging as a “real team”, think of the team instead as always operating at a particular level of effortless proficiency. What does the team do fluently, right now? This will always speak to what the team needs to work on next to grow, but it will also make clear the nature of what the team can provide. When I explain the roadmap of “Where Are Your Keys?”(keeping in mind that the WAYK language fluency game represents one application of the larger Fluency game paradigm - this thinking applies to all skills and knowledge sets), and say “Novice means Barney conversations, Intermediate means Sesame Street, Advanced means Larry King Live, Superior means Charlie Rose”, each of those proficiency levels contains active, vital, fun, and productive conversations (well…I don’t really consider myself a fan of Barney the dinosaur, but pick your favorite children’s show of that fluency level, and you’ll get my point). The conversations have life, color, and effortless competence at the level of activity appropriate to their proficiency level.

Idea #4: What do children do really well? They play. What do teens do really well? They take risks. What do Adults do really well? They produce. What do Elders do really well? They remind us. All performing, at different fluency levels.

Breakdown: Now looking at “performance level”, rather than “development stage”, we automatically look through the lens of appreciative inquiry. At every stage of human life, we excel at what we do, if given room to do so. Think of Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Superior in this way. Each stage produces a markedly different product, really, really well. In a sense, each stage simply has a different role to contribute to the community. So you never have a malformed, vestigial, or incompletely developed team, if you look at them in terms of their fluencies: what they do effortlessly well.

Idea #5: You can’t remind if you haven’t played, risked, and produced. You can’t produce if you haven’t played and risked. You can’t risk if you haven’t played. Each stage builds on the other.

Breakdown: So now we see the “nested hierarchy” I keep referring to, in action. More foundational fluencies set the stage for the emergence of more finely-grained fluencies. All humans must know how to play;  not all humans need to have the life experience with which to remind us of what has worked in the past. We have Elders for that! The rest of us need to focus on improving our play, risk, and producing.

Conclusion

Can we see teams, family, community, in terms of their fluencies? Can we see everyone as performing at their particular level of fluency? Their level of “performing” tells us more about where to take them next than their ignorance; after all, people know far less than all that they don’t know, correct? We have a much smaller amount of knowledge, than we do have ignorance (probably an infinite commodity). If we keep looking for what a team can’t do or doesn’t know, we could essentially fill in the calendar of the rest of our working lives.

Knowing what someone doesn’t know, doesn’t help me. Knowing the edge of their fluency tells me exactly what to do, pedagogically. We have to ask questions to find that edge, not to find out what they don’t know. We’ll drown in the ocean of what they don’t know, directionless; if we can find the island of what they do know, and walk to its edge, then we can start fishing, make little trips out from shore in our canoe, free-dive for some deep-water adventures; we have a foundation to work from!

I’ve saved the real zinger to kick this off; I haven’t seen anyone mention this, so pardon my ignorance if this has already come up in the dialogue over useful Agile learning models.

But I have to ask: why do I mostly see in Agile culture the two learning models, Dreyfus and Shu-Ha-Ri, that both specifically apply to individual progress?  If we see Agile as a model of team collaboration (for the most part in the environment of software development), then don’t we need to measure the fluency/competency of the team, rather than individuals?

I think one can apply some Agile principles to one’s own track of personal growth, but as a team methodology, I think we must look at Agile as happening, or not happening, on a team level. The team sinks or swims together.

This means that we have to step further back from individual-mastery focus of Dreyfus and Shu Ha Ri.

We also have to separate Agile, as a software development methodology, from the goals it enables the team to accomplish more quickly and efficiently. Think about linguistic fluency; I won’t quiz you on your ability to name and employ all the different pedagogical tools your French teacher used to teach you French (flash cards, conversation partners, worksheets, quizzes, etc.). I’ll quiz you on your ability to speak fluent French. As we have seen, I can differentiate this fluency into different levels of proficiency.

How on Earth do we do that with an Agile team? We need to measure Agile success not in terms of fluency in Agile, but in terms of the work group’s fluency in software development.

I’ve started poking around the internet for how folks measure the success of a software development team. I noticed Scott Downey, a Scrum Master at Myspace, uses the following metrics:

Velocity, Burndown, Work Capacity and Commitment Accuracy.

and

1. They are Hyper-Productive (>240% higher targeted value contribution)
2. They have completed three successful Sprints consecutively

As I understand it (not having used Agile in the software development world, but rather in the outdoor recreation world), a “successful Sprint” means that the stories that the team committed to finishing in that Sprint, have gotten to done/done; finished, tested, integrated, with customer approval. Shippable code.

Also, just as a fundamental skillset, every work group must express some level of skill in their ability to plan their work as a team, to give feedback and improve their work, to run effective meetings; all these things too must act as milestones, in some fashion, on their way to consistently producing shippable software.

So, can we weave all of this into a whole, differentiate it into four (or so) levels of proficiency, with an embedded Appreciative Inquiry tack? We want to know what the team can do fluently, at every level, in addition to what they may struggle with.

What does any software team do competently, at Novice proficiency? What directly observable behaviors? What can we tease out, and say, “yeah…I would call this set of basic fluencies a Novice level”?

What does any software development team do fluently, and competently, at Intermediate? Empirically, what do we see? What seems to fit well here?

At Advanced?

At Superior? How much experience do we have with Superior-level proficiency, in software development teams? We may have too much information on what we expect to see at this level, and too little for the others. So, what do we see at this high-performing level?

The ACTFL proficiency roadmap took quite a bit of development, back in its day. I think we can shake out a good roadmap from basic fluency to high-performing fluency pretty quickly, if we can dig out of our experience those consistent milestones that will help show us the route. Unfortunately, all of us probably have plenty of experience in what the team couldn’t do, but tried anyway, thus masking their level of fluency with the aura of struggle and failure. We don’t necessarily want to know where the team failed; we want to know, at each step, what the team could do competently and effortlessly, so that as Agile coaches we know exactly what to work on next. We have to create that nested hierarchy, so that every level the team has a solid grounding in success and fluency to take them to the next level of proficiency.

Any ideas? Looks like we may need a Part III.

Part I: THE WHYS AND WHEREFORES

A Summary

I’ve done some reading lately on models of learning out there in implementing some of my favorite process tools, and I’d like to put a puzzle together connecting all the pieces. In the Agile software world, the common learning models I see go by the names “Dreyfus Learning Model” and “Shu-Ha-Ri”. In the “Where Are Your Keys?” world we have a similar, but different learning model. This apparently small difference has huge implications in practice, for both speed and depth of learning. I call this fundamentally different experience of skill acquisition Fluency.

Background

Agile Teamwork refers to a culture of collaboration, mostly practiced in the software world (and mostly practiced there by those comfortable with innovation), that embraces the following priorities:

* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
* Working software over comprehensive documentation
* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
* Responding to change over following a plan

I recommend, for further understanding, reading the Twelve Principles of Agile Software. Though I have little experience in the IT world, I have used the Agile priorities and many major tools (Stand-Up Meetings, Iterations, Retrospectives) in the context of outdoor education, with quite satisfying results. It also tickles me that Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language book inspired some of the founding work in Agile; I have gotten a lot out of his work, so it doesn’t surprise me that Agile attracts me so.

Now, “Where Are Your Keys?” refers to one application (that of learning a foreign language) of the general principles in the Learning Fluency Game, created by learning innovator Evan Gardner. Ever since meeting Evan and working with him over the past two years, I’ve had a paradigm shift around learning; I now understand why some of my teaching methods work so well, some don’t, and how to make them work even more deeply, powerfully, and nicest of all, more quickly. “WAYK?” has a unique structure, which can teach us a lot how to take Agile Teamwork adoption to the next level, along with any other skill we want to take to mastery. We have had such tremendous and revolutionary success with building fluency in other languages with “WAYK?” that I almost immediately began to think about other applications.

A Fresh Look

This brings me to learning models and roadmaps. When we first meet a new skill, we need a Roadmap. “WAYK?” uses the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) ‘levels of proficiency’ roadmap, a schema developed in the 1950’s by the US State Department for diplomats and others in foreign service.

Anytime a “WAYK?” instructor runs the game, they first present the roadmap. I usually frame the roadmap thus:

“I want to share our roadmap with you; I call it Travels With Charlie. As we gain fluency in [insert target language here], we will pass through four broad levels of proficiency.

The first, Novice, will sound a lot like an episode of Barney the Dinosaur: ‘We are singing, we are playing, we are laughing…”-type conversations, all in the present moment, about what occurs around us that we can observe. We see a lot of “what”/”who”/”where” questions.

The second, Intermediate, will sound a lot like an episode of Sesame Street: “Where are you going? -I’m going to the store. What are you going to buy? -I’m going to buy candy!”. We begin to see past and future tense involved, along with “when”/”how”/”why” questions added in.

The third level, Advanced, sounds a lot like an episode of Larry King Live: “When you look back on your life, what are your proudest moments?” “How did you feel when that happened? Why do you think that? Would you do it again?”. Lots of personal storytelling.

The fourth level, Superior, sounds a lot like an episode of Charlie Rose: “If you had advice for a new president, what would you give? How do you think presidents should behave? If we didn’t have a president, how would it change the world? Do we need them?”. We have moved beyond the personal, and into the world of society. We no longer tell our own stories, but the stories of society and how we think about economic, social, and political issues.

At any time, I will fish for your current fluency level, and then match our interaction to working on things just past that level. If you try to exceed your fluency level by using tools that lie farther away than ‘just past’, I’ll say ‘Sorry, Charlie!’, and we’ll drop back down to the level that your current fluency can absorb.”

Why do I love the “WAYK?” roadmap so much? Because it tells you exactly what to do, in any moment. It doesn’t abstract the learning process; it gives precise flags of where a language speaker stands and what help they need. Yet it allows for a lot flexibility and tailoring to the particular student/teacher. If I interact with an intermediate-level speaker of English, and ask them a few simple questions (”What’s that?” -”Oh, that’s my pen my mom gave me. I love it! I’m sorry, but you can’t borrow it, it has too much sentimental value; I got it while overseas and homesick.” “Wow! Really? Do you think pens work better than pencils? Would people improve their local economy by using pens?” -”I don’t know. I like pens.”), they will zoom to their level, I will test that indeed we’ve butted up against their fluency limit (a lack of fluency in economic/social/political discourse), and they will affirm it by their response.

Now, the “WAYK?” roadmap has a lot in common with Shu-Ha-Ri and the Dreyfus model. Let’s talk about Shu-Ha-Ri first. I like Alistair Cockburn’s articulation of Japanese traditional culture’s model of learning, which runs thus:

People who are learning and mastering new skills pass through three quite different stages of behavior: following, detaching, and fluent.

Lovely! This really echoes my experience.

When I combine this with my past experience creating fluency with “Where Are Your Keys?”, I realize I would refine the middle step: rather than ‘detaching’, I would call the Ha stage ‘contextualizing/connecting/interweaving’. ‘Context’ actually comes from the Old English root for woven material, “text” (as in “textile”); speakers of Old English loved poetry, riddles, and song, and saw all those activities as “word-weaving”, and so referred to the contents of books as “texts”, or “word-fabric”. Hence why I equate “context” with “interweaving”: connecting concepts to each other and through each other.

I would not call this stage “detaching” or “finding when the rule doesn’t work” or “breaking the rule”, because the ways in which things don’t work far outnumber (by many orders of magnitude, if not actually stretching into infinity) the ways in which they do work. I take a decidedly Appreciative Inquiry tack, as cued by the Fluency game methodology. We could talk all day about how not to do something. The more we focus on the relatively few ways in which you can interweave different concepts successfully, the more efficient our time together. I see this as a speed and efficiency issue. Some folks prefer to find the many exceptions to rules; I prefer to find the few successful application of rules. I will spend far less time practicing and mastering successful application than someone exploring the many unsuccessful applications of a tool. Hammers apply well to nails and a few other things; anything else they damage. How much damage do we need to do before we focus on mastering what a hammer does well (and very few people know how to use a hammer well, letting the weight of the tool do the work)?

I do notice something else about Shu-Ha-Ri; “WAYK?” employs this model at the small-chunk level. When we have Barney conversations, we acquire full fluency in Barney-level proficiency. Each step within Novice/Barney, we work to individual fluency in each particular tool. We pass to Ri (fluency) about a hundred times over in an hour of “WAYK?”, as we master each individual piece of language, first following, then interweaving and contextualizing, and then speaking fluently without hesitation, over and over and over.

Let’s accent those two points. I suggest we’d increase our speed of fluency by terming the Ha, in Shu-Ha-Ri, as contextualizing the successful use of the tool (rather than breaking or finding exceptions). I also propose that Shu-Ha-Ri doesn’t describe a big picture roadmap, like Travels With Charlie, as well as it does the small-chunk acquisition of fluency in specific skill tools.

But that last statement contains 90% of what you need to know about why “WAYK?” works so efficiently. It fractally contains all of its pedagogical philosophy; fluency of skill comes by progression through a nested hierarchy of skills, first more broadly applicable skills, to the finer- and finer-grained level. Think about making a sundae. You have to get the container, then scoop in the icecream, then the sauce, then the whipped cream, and only then the cherry on top (so much for my paleo diet…now I want a sundae!).

Let’s move on to the Dreyfus model. It actually has a lot in common with the Fluency roadmap. It has some of the same language (”Novice”, “Intermediate”, etc.); it may even actually derive from some of the academic understandings that inspired the ACTFL roadmap. I do see a divergence; it seems to also go the Shu-Ha-Ri route. It has more levels, more clearly defined, but it still takes a small-chunk understanding of gaining fluency in specific skills, and generalizes that to a roadmap-sized schema, unproductively, I think.

Though pointing out a useful progression at a small-chunk level, because of its small-chunk use the Dreyfus model actually makes gaining fluency in these sub-skills (aka patterns) look a bit more complicated than it actually works in practice (at least in the context of “WAYK?”). I like Shu-Ha-Ri because it reflects the potential speed of small-chunk fluency with three short, one-syllable steps. Additionally, I don’t think students or teachers need this understanding, necessarily, to efficiently move through these little fluencies. I think, whether they know it or not, they want a big-picture road map, with road signs of physical events and empirical behaviors to mark their progress. The Dreyfus model mostly refers to reflective or internal events within the learner, and to a more abstract picture of their general behavior. But what real, observable, empirical behaviors indicate progress through a roadmap? I’ve given you the road signs for “WAYK?”; actual words used at different levels of fluency, specific grammatical skills, and specific cognitive skills.

So let’s make the leap. As a thought experiment, I will apply the Fluency Game principles to a hypothetical Agile Teamwork adoption and see what happens. I haven’t tried this before today; this marks iteration one! But I think we’ll still see some surprisingly good initial results.

Stay tuned for Part II, An Agile Roadmap: The First Iteration

Our connection to our own Family remains our greatest treasure, and our greatest challenge.

Whether you choose to embrace this modern culture, and follow the values of material success, or you choose to rebel against it, and follow seemingly new values, you will almost certainly enact the same story: fleeing to another city, or even another country, in pursuit of the ghost of these values, abandoning your connection to family and your birthplace.

Why do we all seem in such agreement, that we modern people value Family least of all things? That we consider it an inconvenience, a hindrance to our goals, whether counter-cultural or not? We regard the opinions and attention of Family almost as we would an annoying mosquito.

And yet to this day, we can find people who have a much different opinion of Family, and who would die to protect it. Why?

Family holds all wealth, all health, all wholeness, and all holiness. A connection to a grass-skirted lake as a mothering being, reflects our relationship with our human mother. A connection to a windswept mountain shoulder as a fathering being, reflects our relationship with our human father. While on the hunt, to call a brown-eyed doe your sister, means you must look to your relationship with your human sister for guidance. If we see the life all around us as our relatives, then how did we first experience this, but in the embrace of Family?

And if we have left them far behind, how can we possibly embrace them anew?

Our Family tests our human skills, more than any other environment. Our ability to listen, to empathize, to forgive, to give and receive gifts, we practice these most deeply and truly with those who gave us life and walked beside us as we matured.

The care freely offered by Family comes very expensive when we seek others to provide it. Nurses, storytellers, teachers, mentors, cooks, Family filled all these roles and many more. Now that many of us have abandoned our families, we must find substitutes, often toxic ones. In the end, what can substitute for love and feeling known? Not the finest meal in the best restaurant, nor the most skilled storyteller, nor the most expert teacher. We seek family-for-hire so often it has become a way of life.

Once we begin the work of healing our tattered Family bonds, and see the first fruits of it, only then do we truly discover what it means to live in the vast community of Life, and see the kinship in all things.