Small But Mighty Episode 23: Stephanie Sewell on unschooling, independent learning and owning your life

Stephanie is an independent education consultant who helps both kids and parents take ownership of their education through self-directed learning so they’re engaged, happy and confident in all areas of life, not just school. To learn more about how Stephanie’s programs, and support your family, visit her website or follow her on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Full Episode Transcript

Karen Wilson: Hi there friends. Welcome to Small But Mighty Biz Stories. Today, I'm so excited to welcome Stephanie Sewell, to share her business story with you. Stephanie is an independent education consultant who helps both kids and parents. For children and teens, she helps them take ownership of their education so they're engaged, happy and confident in all areas of life, not just school. And for parents, she helps them see their kids as the owner of their education, so they can fully support their educational journey. So I think that sounds like a win-win. Stephanie, please tell us all about you and your work.

Stephanie Sewell: Thank you, Karen. I love the way you put that. I think I'm going to have to quote you on my website now because of what you said, helping parents to see their kid's possibility of taking that journey. That's such a big part of what I do. So many of us have gone through a conventional school system, and once we're at the end of that, we kind of go into the world with that assumption that school has to be that, education has to be that. It's something that, we just kind of go through a process that is more done to us. And so what I really help people to see is that, it's okay to own that. To feel like you've decided to be a part of that process and to take a year off, if things aren't working out or to adjust the way you're engaging with a particular class, if it's not working out, to talk to the teacher, to remember that you're a person in this journey. And as soon as we can start shifting that way of thinking, the world opens up totally differently. And I see that carry on into people's lives outside of school as well, because it is a different way of thinking.

Karen Wilson: Totally. Totally.

Stephanie Sewell: Yeah.

Karen Wilson: Totally. So as an independent education consultant, first of all, how did you get started with this? What drove you into this direction?

Stephanie Sewell: Yeah, so I have a background as a teacher. I have a Bachelor of Education. And before that, I was always teaching. When I was little, I lined up all my stuffed animals on the bed and I planned lessons for them. And that's how I played. I always knew I was going to be a teacher. I taught piano lessons. I'm also a musician, so I taught piano lessons from even when I was a teenager, I was always engaged in the act of connecting with people to help them learn things. And the teaching that I did in schools was I enjoyed it in many ways. But I was already starting to feel like, ugh, I just, I don't love every aspect of it. And a lot of what I wasn't loving, was the things that I had to do to the kids in the sense of having to teach this topic or this skill. Even if I could see the kids weren't ready for it. There was always, we were always beholden to what the curriculum said.

So I started getting this bit of a like, "Ugh, I'm not really sure," and I wound up leaving the field of teaching which brought me to the next wonderful part of my life, which was my own children being born. And during those early years, by happenstance, I got in touch with the homeschool community and started to learn about homeschooling and to see what this was and what this world was. And when it came time for my eldest to go to kindergarten, I knew that there was a choice. So thinking of my tagline now of own your learning, own your life and that idea of choice, we came to that time in our son's life knowing that we had a choice to make not assuming that he would go.

So we were able to really talk through, "Okay, well, who is he? What's his life like? What are the options for him to potentially stay home and what would that look like? What would it look like if he went to school? What's our, hey, what's the broader picture in our community of all of that?" So going through that process of making that choice was really significant for me in my journey as, for my career, for my work in the field of education. The choice would up being for him to stay home, and I spent the next many years focusing on him being home, being a home learner and his sister also three years younger, she was home until grade four. So we had an amazing time of exploring what it is to learn outside of the school system. And over those years, I just started getting a little bit involved with conversations with people to help them figure out their own homeschooling and I was really fascinated by the process of learning and learning in different contexts, so I started researching more and attending conferences and all of this just started to come together until the stage where my kids were old enough that they no longer need me in the same way

And I started seeing that this is becoming... This is emerging as my next step career-wise. And it's funny, because at the very beginning of thinking of this as being something that I would do, I didn't know what to call myself. Am I a coach? A consultant? A like, what? I don't know. I just kind of know how I can help people and what their benefit will be. So independent education consultant was a phase that I did come up with then that feels very appropriate because I do consult with them in ways and then, often that becomes more of a coaching relationship, when they're engaging on a more longer term journey with me.

Karen Wilson: Right. So many questions come to mind. So you're still teaching. You're teaching people how to take that ownership of their education and teaching them all the different ways that education can happen, I assume.

Stephanie Sewell: I love that you said that because, yes, I'm still teaching. And the difference from the teaching that I did before was that now I teach people who have consented to be taught. So in my alternative to conventional education professional world, we talk a lot about consent. And it's really interesting, because when we talk about consent normally in the world, we're talking about different contexts. Like consent for sexual activity, consent for drug use or whatever. It's that kind of thing. So when you start saying, "Well, what does consent mean in education?" It's kind of like, "Well, I don't know." Like, whoa, that's kind of an out there concept. But if you think about a time that you've taught somebody something because they've asked you, versus a time that you've taught or tried to teach somebody something when they really didn't want to know, then all of a sudden, the notion of consent and educational learning is like, "Oh yeah, I get that."

Karen Wilson: Oh yeah. Definitely. That makes a huge difference.

Stephanie Sewell: Yes. So that's like a pivot point in the work that I do. Once somebody can kind of go, "Oh," then a lot follows from there. Then they can see, "Oh, you know my teenager who despises school because he or she is feeling that they've got other things they'd rather be doing or they hate the control that they feel they're under at school," all of a sudden you can say, "I get that." They haven't consented to be there. All those exams that they're studying for, essays that they're leaving till the last minute or whatever. Yeah. They're 15 years old, 16 years old. They're able to go and drive and work, and they're fully-fledged adults in many ways, but they're still being told that they have to learn something that they haven't consented to. So it's an interesting way of thinking differently. So yes, I do still teach and I love it now in a whole other way because it's a consensual relationship. There's no coercion.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, that makes so much sense. And what's funny that you mention this is that, I have a child who is autistic, and so I've been teaching him a lot of these concepts for a long time. I'm really talking... I'm trying to talk him into going the unschooling route. Because I just see the benefits of it, especially for kids whose brains are wired differently, but it really applies to all children. And one of the things and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this; one of the things that he and I talk about and just did in the last few days, is the different view that we have of children now than when you and I were growing up where children that we're raising are recognized as fully formed human beings. They have their own thoughts and interests and tastes and preferences, we don't necessarily force ours on them, and there's the conscious parenting movement that sort of reinforces these ideas.

And so I tell him stories about things that happened when I was a child, and one example that we talked about this week was just dinner time. And food preferences and a lot of kids have aversions to textures and flavors and things. But when I was growing up, I told him a story about this one meal my mom would prepare and it was so gross. It was so gross. But she really pushed me to eat this meal. And there was one night that she said, "You're going to sit there until you eat at least half what's on your plate." And I sat there for two hours before she realized that it just wasn't going to happen. And I tell my son, I think that's one of the reasons why I don't force you to eat foods you don't like. All I do is I want you to try it, and then we go from there.

Stephanie Sewell: Absolutely.

Karen Wilson: So this idea that children can own their education, that you're teaching is rooted in a lot of the same things. It's like, these are human beings. They're not robots.

Stephanie Sewell: Yes, and our school system, one of the things that's important to understand is that our school system is rooted in a time that is no longer a time that we live in. And so our school system like to use your analogy of food, our school system is constantly putting things on their plates that they have to eat and they have to sit there for longer than two hours. They have to eat it. And that's again, a really interesting actually, analogy that I've never thought of before. And it sounds like I'm saying, "Oh, schools are evil" and I'm not, because schools are filled with incredible human beings who...

Karen Wilson: Totally.

Stephanie Sewell: Went into the career of teaching or administrator because they love kids, and they love being in that kind of nurturing relationship with kids. But I have yet to engage in an extended conversation with a teacher that doesn't end up with the teacher saying, "Yeah, I love my job, but I wish I didn't have to make them do this," or a huge one, really interesting one that I'm thinking more and more about lately, is the idea of judgment. I have a friend who's a teacher, she's retired now. And she told me a story one day that just rocked my world. So she's a pretty alternative teacher in that she's not super curriculum-based, but she's always taught in public schools. And she doesn't put a lot of emphasis on testing or any of that. But the time that she told me about, was that she had a new class, it was September, October, November, report cards went home. It was the first time that her students had any kind of judgment or evaluation or comments about them, put on them by her. It was the first time they'd seen her in that role. And she said they came back to school the next day and the relationship that they had changed from one day to the next. The report card went home, and suddenly they didn't see us as working together. They remembered that I was in a position of authority, of control, of judgment over them, because I had to do this report card and it shifted.

Karen Wilson: Oh, that's sad.

Stephanie Sewell: And it's a really interesting thing. Because in a relationship, again, all these wonderful people who are in schools because they want to be with kids and nurse them and all of that, because the relationship is inherently structured as an authoritarian vertical relationship, that affects it. And what does it look like if it's a horizontal relationship? And now that doesn't mean that it's a free-for-all, but as soon as you start thinking of a true horizontal relationship, then we can recognize that different people have different roles. So if we go to a classroom then a teacher has the responsibility of implementing whatever he or she is being told from on high, but they can do that in ways that the kids understand what's happening and can still have engagement about it. So yeah, just that idea of what does the relationship look like when it's not based in that kind of top down relationship.

Karen Wilson: Yeah. It's one of the things that I used to talk with my son about, because he's always struggled with anxiety in school, and it's all those expectations and the forcing to do things, and one of the things that I used to say is that, school is your opportunity to explore all these different topics and you're going to like some of them and you're not going to like others, but it gets you... It allows you to find what you like. And I realized more recently that, that idea is so not particularly accurate, because it sounds pretty but it's actually possible to do that in a situation where he gets to be in the driver's seat and he can explore and find those things on his own, and he will. That's the thing.

As a I guess it was about four years ago, he was nine years old. He took it upon himself to learn every single president of the United States. What they... Various little tidbits about them. He had a teacher at a school who would just say a number to him, he'd pass him in the hall, say a number, Brandon could say what president it was. And it was just this thing that he did on his own. They weren't learning it in school, that's not part of the Canadian curriculum. But because he's half-American and he had an interest. Politics have been a big thing over the last number of years, and so he just... He went for it and he did it on his own time. And I think we don't give kids enough credit for their ability and interest in doing that.

Stephanie Sewell: And I think one of the reasons that we don't, is that a lot of kids don't do that. Because so much of their headspace and time is taken up by the school version of learning.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: So that's... So when I'm working with a family, one of the first things I do is help parents, take them through the process of, "Okay, when does your child shine? When does your child vibrate with excitement? What is that thing that your child chooses to go and do?" And those things, whether it's like just choose the best makeup brush, something that we wouldn't typically value, but the child is really into it. It's that moment of intrinsic motivation. So those intrinsic motivation moments, that's where the good stuff starts because when you're intrinsically motivated to something, you move forward. Whether it's Lego, learning the presidents of the United States, deciding which nail polish lasts the longest, that's where true learning begins. And that's what we want to be very strong and nurtured and valued in people as they move into the adult world. So that's often what happens when somebody is in school and not feeling good in school, is that intrinsic motivation is getting swallowed up. The student can't find it anymore, the parents are like, "They used to be so interested and now they're not." So it's like, "Okay, so where is it? Let's go hunting. Let's be detectives. Where is that tiny glimmer of anything that's intrinsically motivated."

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: And then don't try to fan the flames of that fire because you'll probably put it out, but just notice it...

Karen Wilson: That's true.

Stephanie Sewell: Value it, and give it space. So, the idea then of taking that to the next level, which is what we talk about with unschooling or self-directed learning, self-directed education, is trusting that spark to grow into the flame that becomes the person's education. And it's a massive, massive trust shift because we're used to trusting the curriculum. I went to school, I learned everything I needed to learn, I went to university, I got a job, and if you don't learn the curriculum, you'll fail, is how we are used to thinking. And so there's many, there's amazing ways to start inviting yourself to think differently about that. I often send people to Sir Ken Robinson's talk which most people have heard of now.

Karen Wilson: Of course you do.

Stephanie Sewell: But that's a great spot to start. There's a boy called Logan LaPlante. If you look up Logan TED Talk, you'll find it. He was about 12 when he gave his TED Talk and he's a self-directed learner, and he talks...

Karen Wilson: I think I've seen that one. Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: There you go. So those are your basic ones. And then you start getting into somebody like Peter Gray, who's a researcher from Boston, I believe. And he is one of the founders of The Self-Directed Education... I'm trying to remember their official name. Anyway, it's like selfdirected.org or something. Peter Gray, self-directed, you'll find it. And so he talks about the conditions of self-directed learning of unschooling, what you want to provide for that flame to continue growing. So then you start looking at somebody like Judy Arnall, who's Canadian. She's in Alberta, and she's written a book called Unschooling To University. So she tracked 30 kids who went through an unschooling approach to life, meaning there was no curriculum imposed on them, they initiated their learning. And looked at what they did, and most of them wound up going to university. My son is 19 now, and he's heading off to university, having self-directed the vast majority, well, he's a self-directed learner. He chose, chose, to go to Grade 12 and took a bunch of Grade 12 classes, got really great marks, and now he's heading off to university in the fall. So when we can see that this happens, we all are very familiar with the school, university, job routes. So part of my mission in life is to normalize and bring, and draw attention to the “no school.”

What I just say, living without school, choosing what you want to do, university being one of those options, living a life that is a satisfying life, a life that fulfils you. I can't remember why we started on that, but so that idea of just unschooling is learning about it to understand that consent-based education can work, and you might well wind up in school for a while, or all of your time. But you're there with a completely different mindset than the student next to you who doesn't know, doesn't feel they have a choice or doesn't even know that choice exists.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, and that's... Even though my son is currently in school, we're already practicing the consent-based approach, because we decided together that he was going to do full virtual this year. I took his lead. He's got the lead for whether he withdraws from the school system. It's all based on what he feels is right for him. And so what I was thinking I would cover off with you is, for kids who don't want to home-school or unschool or whatever version of fully self-directed learning that they do. How would you go about working with them to take ownership of their education within the structures that exist in the school system? Because it is a place of privilege to be able to keep a child home and not every family can do it. So what are some of the things that you do with clients who choose to remain in the school system?

Stephanie Sewell: Yeah, that's a really good question. Because you're right. And often it's not even that the family can't have the child home or the teen home. It's that the child or teen wants to be at school because that's where their friends are.

Karen Wilson: Yes. Exactly.

Stephanie Sewell: And again, with the idea of Own Your Learning Own Your Life, we have to value that, it's... No matter how much the parent thinks, "Oh, unschooling would be so good for you and have a stay-at-home-this and we can do this." If the child wants to be with their friends, that is a value.

Karen Wilson: Absolutely.

Stephanie Sewell: So yes. What are some of the ways that you can modify or play with your way of interacting with school? So it depends on the school. I can tell you everything from an amazing story to a, there's no flexibility at all story. The amazing story comes from a young woman Grace, she's actually just outside of Toronto. And she was at a school that's a little bit alternative, but not... Still within the public school system. Grace had been home-schooled, in-school, home-school, in-school. She decided to go to school for high school because she wanted to. She wanted to be with friends regularly, and she was interested in being at school regularly for a bit. And she was there for a little while, and she finally decided like, "I don't have time to do all the things that are important to me, because I'm spending all this time in school, so I'm going to go back to homeschooling," and she let them know. And the school came to her and said, "We'd like to set up a meeting with you. We'd like to know what we can do to make school work for you."

Karen Wilson: That's amazing.

Stephanie Sewell: Can you imagine the power of that question?

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: And it wasn't offered as... I've been in a conversation or been conversations with school and with families where things have gotten very, very difficult, like the child is really struggling and it's like, from the school, that offer of how can we make it work, is kind of there, but it's in the context of like, you leaving school, which clearly be a disaster for you. So like, "Okay, maybe we can shift a few things." But this was a very open-hearted, "How do we make school work for you?"

Karen Wilson: That sends a powerful message to her because, "Your needs matter to us."

Stephanie Sewell: Yeah. And she was not in a situation, which I see often. She was not struggling with any mental health issues. She was just choosing to leave because it made more sense for her. So they were able to say things like, "Okay, well, if you're signed up for a class, you need to just show up once every 15 days because of the attendance rule." And she's like, "Yeah, I can do that." And there was, I can't remember now what the other... I can send a link to the conversation that I've had with her, that's on YouTube. I can't remember now what some of the other things they said. But it wound up that she decided to stay, and she would go, some weeks she would go three or four days, other weeks she'd just be there for a day, but it worked. She's a wonderful young woman. She's very respectful of... She was respectful of how her engagement with school might affect others. So she was able to make that a similar situation for everybody. And she did what she needed to do.

Karen Wilson: That's really phenomenal.

Stephanie Sewell: And the school worked with her and it was fantastic. Yeah. So that's possible. More often, there might be some flexibility, maybe it'll be things like, "We can let you out of Phys Ed this year or... " Right now, I'm talking more high schools. And some high schools will say... If you're really involved with my daughter's case, she's a horseback rider, so she was able to leave school early regularly in order to go riding if she chose to. That was something that we were able to work out. Other schools would say things like... I'm in Quebec, so there's a lot of kids who are at French schools, but they're actually English kids or Anglophones. So the English class, which is English for Anglophones, is a boring waste of time for them because the English class is focused on teaching the language and they're native speakers of English so they don't need that. So I know some schools will say, "You can go to the library during that time, but then you have to come and write the exam." That's fair. So there's that kind of flexibility that you can sometimes work out. Looking at younger kids, it's difficult obviously to have the, "You can go to the library any time," kind of flexibility because they're needing to know where everybody is, and the safety aspect. So they're the kinds of things that I've seen work, especially within virtual learning.

Are just letting the teacher know, "We won't be signing on for Phys Ed class because we're going to go outside." My child... And just some of that... because there's a difference between... A lot of it has to do with how you approach it. So if you can come and say, "This is what we're seeing, our child is not thriving because of this, this, this and this. We'd like to suggest this. How does that work for you? Is that going to disrupt your class if we are taking our child out?" Because that's a real thing. If you're a teacher and somebody's coming in and out and saying, "I don't have to be here for the test this afternoon," and everybody else has to, that's not a sustainable situation because it's not something that works for everybody. So talking to the teacher and finding out what can work.

Karen Wilson: It really has to be a partnership.

Stephanie Sewell: It does, it does. And many teachers are willing to engage in that partnership, as long as we as parents can remember that it can be extra effort for the teacher who's already swamped, because that's the reality of being a teacher.

Karen Wilson: Absolutely.

Stephanie Sewell: Adding in an extra piece can feel like too much. One of the situations that I see a lot is kids leaving school once a week to go to Forest School.

Karen Wilson: Oh, yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: And that's a wonderful thing for a lot of kids who find sitting still in school really hard, being absent on Wednesdays for Forest School makes all the difference in the world. But I've also consulted recently with a family who was challenged by the school because the one day a week absence meant that their child had exceeded the number of so-called allowable days of absence. So even though the teacher was fine with it, it wasn't disrupting the class, the child was doing well, they were still being told they needed to stop pulling their child out. So that's where... That's the negotiation. And it's understanding that you might have a teacher who can just say, "Yeah, I'm going to... Maybe I'm even going to mark them present, because I know that they're doing something. They're not sitting at home playing video games or whatever." Maybe a teacher is able to create a special situation where they're in attendance, in terms of the fact that they're learning. "Here she is," now of course, noted down that they're not actually in the school building, but sometimes that can be done. I don't have any example of that from Canada, I do from the States. So it really just comes down to what you can work out. But the idea of realizing that you are making choices and that you can engage in, that you can ask those questions.

That it's valid to say, "Five days a week is too much for my child. What can we do about it?"  Because that's the first piece is we have to realize that that's a thing, and it's okay for five days a week to be too much. We don't just, as parents have to say, "Well, you'll get used to it. All your friends are there. It's fine." We can say, "Okay, I get it. Let's see what we can do."

Karen Wilson: Yeah. I think it's so important along with recognizing that kids are... They're human beings with all those tastes and preferences. There are also human beings with the need to have good mental healthcare, and I let my son stay home days where he just couldn't. I've had those days myself, and so why think that, that's not going to happen to a child as well? Or certain activities are happening that are triggers for anxiety, all of those things, and just being open to allowing them space for self-care is so important. Again, obviously there is privilege in that, and not every parent is in a position to be able to accommodate those things, which makes it so much harder for them and their kids.

Stephanie Sewell: For sure.

Karen Wilson: But I love that there are school administrators and teachers who are so willing to do what they can to make accommodations.

Stephanie Sewell:  And I think that, again, this idea of the horizontal communication. So if you want to offer your child the opportunity to have those mental health days or whatever it is, but it's... Maybe your child is too young to stay home alone, there's something that makes it less easy for you to do that. Then sometimes sitting with your child and saying, "Look, I want you to be able to say, I need to stay home today. But I can't leave you alone in the house. So what do you see as some options?" I know for my son, at one point, my daughter was going to The Farm Program. And it was a half-hour drive in each direction. My son was six at the time, and he was not at school, so he had to come with me to drive her there and pick her up. And he hated it. He was like, "It's just too much driving." And so we made an arrangement with our next-door neighbor that he would go there for that hour. And she and her partner did all this sculpture with him, and he had a fantastic time. So he wound up learning art stuff that I didn't have the skills to teach him. But he didn't have to go on the drive. So that was a creative solution, which came out of saying, "Okay, I value that that drive is too much. What are some options that we can come up with together?" And then recognizing that you don't always have to pay someone to look after your child.

That sometimes spending time with your child, which means they're looking after them, but it's the spending time, could actually be a gift for that other adult.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, that's very true.

Stephanie Sewell: Think about people whose grandchildren live far away, and they just love kids. There's often situations where if you said, "Could my kid come and hang out with you for an hour a week?" They'd be like, "Oh my gosh, let's make it two or three. Yes, of course. That would be a privilege for me to have them." So those are some of the, I don't know. I always call that home-school thinking, because once you step aside from the school system and you feel that you own your education or your kids’ education, suddenly you start seeing opportunities and you start seeing relationships differently. And this is something that... Zac Stein is a researcher and writer in the States, and he talks about the world beyond school and the world beyond a lot of what we have now. And he talks about communities where everybody is connected, and so what he says is like, imagine you walk past someone on the street and you don't really know them. But if you stop to have a conversation, maybe you'd find out that you really need someone to hang out with your kid for an hour a day, because you're at breaking point, and they're desperate for company because their grandkids are far away. And your kid loves music and they wish they had someone to talk to about music. And all of a sudden, boom. Because you stopped in the street and had that conversation, everybody's lives have been enriched immeasurably.

So that's his way of looking at society, which I love, and I see that in home-schooling communities where you're like, "Okay, my kid's getting to Grade Seven or Eight math and I really, really didn't like it and I don't want to do it, and my kid wants to do the math. What are we going to do? I don't have enough money to pay a math teacher. Okay, well, what are some other possibilities that might exist?" And I talk about that because I've done it. Yeah, my son, he had an amazing history, a seminar class with this local musician who makes his living as a musician, is an internationally-recognized musician, but this guy loves history. He reads history for fun. He has great tomes of history. And he never has enough people to talk to about history. So I said, "Would you be willing to create something for Oliver and some of his home-schooling friends? Whatever you want, once a week. Whatever makes sense for you." And it was amazing. And it was a paid class, but because we were doing it as a group, nobody was paying a ton, and for him, it meant some more income. But more importantly, he loved having this experience of consenting young people who wanted to engage in history with him, and they did really cool projects together. So that's just an example of ways around that.

And circling back for a minute to the idea of, if you're at school and you need a mental health day, one of the things that I often suggest is to agree with your child how many mental health day kind of tokens they'll have for the year.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: And then they just... So you don't even have to have that conversation of them getting up and going, "Oh, I just don't feel like it." Well, okay, well, it doesn't have to be any of that. They can just say, "Here's the token, I'm staying home today." So they own it.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: And because we can never know what the year is going to look like that might, maybe there's 10 tokens, but guess what, if you get to February and you've used them all up, that's okay. We can talk again.

Karen Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell:  Like, this is just a way of you taking control of it instead of me having to give you permission.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, one of the things that strikes me about a lot of what you're talking about is how this is building upon strengths. And one of those things that has been debated a bit in education is, whether to focus on strengthening weaknesses or building on strengths and making them even stronger. And there is that school of thought that you're going to get so much more out of building up people's strengths than spending time building up weaknesses that may never end up being strong skills or areas of interest. And that's one of the things that I love about self-directed learning, is that it does help children refine those places that they love, they're good at, and they have a genuine interest in exploring. And what can come from that can be just phenomenal.

Stephanie Sewell: Absolutely. And it's interesting, the idea of strength-based or weakness-improving-based. To me, all of that is a top-down kind of way of thinking, right? It's like, what are we doing to children? Are we building their strengths? Are we helping them with their weaknesses? So I would invite people to step back from that and think of it as holding space for children to initiate their own learning and their own processes. And if you think about that as a consenting, independent adult, there are times when you are going to go and work on your weaknesses because you've chosen to or because you realize that that weakness is holding you back from something that you want. But if somebody tried to make you do that because they thought you should not have that weakness, it could have been quite a traumatic experience.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: So to me, that's one thing that's really important with that, is that, when we look at self-directed learning or a more unschooling consent-based kind of mindset, then we're waiting for the person, the child, the team, to initiate that learning be in strengths in an area of strength with them or an area of weakness.

Karen Wilson: That's a great point. Especially when you mention that, sometimes we do go after strengthening those weaknesses and it is, being a conscious choice, it totally changes the outcome. There is one particular subject that I've told all my son's teachers. I'm like, "He's just not good at it. He doesn't enjoy it. It causes anxiety. He'll learn it later in life if he needs it. I'm not worried about it. And it's almost, it seems like a waste of time for him now. So why bother?”

Stephanie Sewell: Yeah. Absolutely, and that's amazing that you can see that and feel comfortable with that kind of flexibility. And that's one of the, in school, the teachers aren't... They might feel that, but it can be harder for them to act on that. So that's one of the beauties of learning outside of school. And it's interesting because in terms of the shoulds, as parents, we often think, "Well, but there are certain things they just have to learn, right?" Like, they have to learn how to read. And yes, if you're in school, reading is something that is done a lot. You have to be able to read a math problem. Reading is a thing. So if you don't read by Grade One or Two, it's a handicap, like it's a barrier to full participation. However, if you're outside of school, you probably don't need to read when you're six or seven. You might be reading and be reading books and signs and whatever. But if you can't read yet, it's okay. It's not creating barriers for you.

So what we see with kids who are learning outside of the school system, is they often learn to read later and they often learn to read very quickly. They'll go from self-defining as not being able to read to reading like Harry Potter in a couple of weeks which, when we think about the typical process of learning to read that I think we're seeing at school, the idea that you would go from not being able to read, to reading Harry Potter in two weeks is unthinkable.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: Yet it's what we see time and time again. And often, these are kids who are 11, 12 years old. So yes, we're used to thinking about learning happening in a particular way or skill acquisition happening in a particular way. But when we just scratch a tiny bit below the surface and look for other types of experiences that people have with some of this basic skills learning, we can see very, very different processes. So again, that's a part of that normalizing choice or normalizing other options so that people feel they have choice.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, it's almost as if there is... Whether there's and I'm sure that that's part of it, but whether there's developmental factors or simple interest, and the timing of when that sort of crops up for different aspects of learning or different skills they're learning, it's almost as if that natural progression accelerates the learning process.

Stephanie Sewell: Yes. When you're ready for it. For sure. And a good way of thinking about it is, if you think about a young child who's learning to walk. So if we said to our one-year-old, "Okay, today you're going to learn to walk. I'm going to start teaching you to walk." Can you imagine? "Okay, stand up. I'm going to pull you. No no, make your legs strong so they... " It's ridiculous, right? It's totally ridiculous. We can all easily grasp the idea that learning to walk is something that happens at different times through different kids. And it happens because the child starts to do it. They pull themselves up there because they know. And so if we say, "Well, what if we looked at reading in the same way?" Then we can play the devil's advocate and go like, "How ridiculous that you're trying to make a kid read letters when they haven't shown an interest in it?" You can apply that same sentence that you would use for the ridiculousness of trying to make somebody walk, to reading.

Obviously, we've got lots of years, as a society, of making people read. So it doesn't... We're comfortable using that sentence in that context. But we can use that idea of making learning to walk, and now I guess to learning to read. We can use that to shift our way of thinking about it and to help us start opening up to the idea that we can trust that kids will learn to read when they need to. And that we'll be there to help them if they need our help. And that why do kids choose to start walking? Well, because everybody around them is walking. They start to realize that walking is a faster way of getting from A to B than crawling is. It's convenient because you can do other stuff with your hands. On some level, all of that's happening in that little 11-month-old brain and body. And the same kind of thing happens with reading.

So suddenly you might be reading a book that you've read with your child a bunch of times and they might go, "What word is that?" And that's... They're pulling themselves up on the table, showing that they're ready to start learning to walk. And again, we have to be careful not to go, "Ah, you're so ready to read. This is so exciting. Okay, we're going to sit down and I'm going to teach you all the different words," because then it's gone. Then you've just killed the flame of that moment. But to just... As we so often do as parents, remember to answer the question that's asked.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: Not the whole. So that's an opportunity there just to say, "Oh, what word is that? That's the word. Day." And then, you're done. Keep on reading and trust that they've filed that away where they need to in their being for their journey.

Karen Wilson: I love all of this. It's so fascinating to see the way we're thinking about education differently, because I saw something sometime in the last year and it made a... It was a post from someone who is an educator, and I don't remember their name. But they made the point that the education system, as we know it really hasn't existed very long relative to the history of the world. And so, to assume that what we have is the be all end all system and that it works the best is it kind of goes against what we know about, just figuring out what the best way to do things is. It's a bit of an experiment still. And so questioning how that is working isn't saying that anyone's up to something bad, that anyone's doing something in bad faith. I think that, as you said earlier, teachers aren't there because they believe in what they're doing. They want to help children grow, and in my experience, the vast majority of teachers are extremely caring and they've been flexible and accommodating, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for the work that they do, and especially given everything that's put on them, and so the questioning of the education system isn't about criticizing any person, it's really, it's looking at the structure and going, "Is this serving the students the way that it should?" And that, I think is such an important conversation that's going on right now.

Stephanie Sewell: Yeah, because with anything, we want to be reflective. It's rare that we're in a situation where we just keep on doing something without thinking about it. And definitely within the education structures, people are reflecting on it, and we hear things like achievement is down and this and that and therefore we're changing our testing or doing more testing or whatever. But I think that what's happening is, as we all know, our society, our world is changing at breakneck speed. And systems do not change at breakneck speed. That's just a thing. So what we have, is a system that's very entrenched in our societies because we all or 90 whatever percent of us participated in it, school. We don't even think of it as a system, we just, it just is for most of us.

So it's really hard to start thinking about it from actually outside of it. We might think we're reflecting on the system and on ways to change it and improve it, but we're still reflecting within it because that's where we... We were schooled to that. So it's interesting in this world of alternative thinkers and education. A frequent debate is, if you're somebody who's wanting to work with kids, but wanting to work with them differently, are you better off in the system doing things differently in your classroom to the extent that you can or are you better off outside of the system doing things differently? And of course I mean, that's a whole letter to type that, right?

Karen Wilson: It's a tough question to answer. Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: Yeah, it's a really interesting one. And so one of the groups that I'm involved with is called Unschooling School, and that's actually a good website to look at for people who are looking for different ways of engaging with school because they have... The concept there is to be a free learner, meaning you go to school, you're registered in school, but you're participating in a way that makes sense for you. And that the free learner would have an FLP, a Free Learner Plan, as opposed to an independent education plan (IEP). But so, one of the things that some of the Unschooling School people are involved with right now, is setting some research going through a grant through a Canadian organization. And this money is available because the granting organization is looking at the fact that our school systems are not producing people that are ready to thrive in this world that we have.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: So they're funding research into this kind of thing. So and when you think about it, kids spend 12 years at school learning to ask permission when they want to go to the bathroom, do what they're told, "learn" what other people are telling them is important, etcetera, all of it's steeped... These curricula, the basic subjects, it's been around for a heck of a long time, way longer than Google and iPhones and all of that.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: And then we're putting them out into the world after university. And they're often quite lost. We're seeing people now, in the States they're talking about extending like tree in free schooling. Lower and higher. Because people are finishing university and not being able to get jobs. So this process of learning isn't preparing people for living in our societies. So we know that. And when we talk to... When employers now are saying what they need in their employees, we're hearing things like creativity and compassion, and the ability to get along with others and the ability to be self-initiating. Google is an interesting example of the idea of the 20% time. So one of my colleagues in the UK, Derry Hannam, he's written about at the very least, let's introduce 20% of free time into schools.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: And this is a great concept. He would have it be 100%. But this is a great concept because it's something that you can wrap your head around. Most schools would be able to say, "Okay, Fridays are free." You do what you choose to work on Fridays. And we see that idea in businesses like Google where they do have that. And from what I understand, some of the things that are basic to our needs, like Gmail came out of an idea that somebody worked on during their 20% time. So we know that this free container surrounded by people, and... It is like the idea of Unschooling School. You're in it, you can be in a setting where there's interesting people to talk to, there's people who have expertise in things, there's equipment to use, so when we can be free in that kind of a context, amazing things happen.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, and what's interesting about that idea is that, like the Google process of giving everybody 20% time, what you see kids come up with in that time as they're collaborating together, because on our kids' report cards in Ontario, collaboration is one of those skills that they get graded on. And that is a challenging skill to develop in a forced learning situation.

Stephanie Sewell: I'm so glad you said that. Yes, because that's...

Karen Wilson: Because who likes group projects? They're torture.

Stephanie Sewell: So, remember back to school when you learned about Venn diagrams?

Karen Wilson: Yes.

Stephanie Sewell: So if you imagine a Venn diagram, there's the circle of school and school-ish ways, and then there's the circle of self-directed and those kinds of ways. And some of the overlap between them for people who are listening, I'm showing that overlap in my hands, which is not helpful because we don't have video but some of that overlap is in words. So we see words like collaboration, self-directed learning, project-based learning, we see that in school systems now. But it doesn't at all play out or mean the same thing in a school context as it does in a self-directed learning context. So it's really tricky, really tricky when you start grading somebody on something like collaboration. Because if it's, as you said, non-consensual, you don't necessarily get to choose your partner, or even if you get to choose your partner, you don't get to choose your topic, or even if you get to choose your topic, it's in a certain really limited framework, or even if it's totally an open topic, there's a rubric that somebody else imposed on you, or maybe you don't even want to be evaluated on it because you haven't consented to be evaluated. You're just exploring.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: So there's a big risk to bringing that true freedom-based or self-motivated experience into a coercive context. Especially one that has evaluations involved.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: It's a big risk

Karen Wilson: It is. It is.

Stephanie Sewell: But those same kids who might get bad marks in collaboration in a school context, watch them play with their friends when they're building a Lego world together, you'll see amazing collaboration.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: If they're chosen to be together, right? So that's a whole other conversation, because there's many conversations that can grow out of these things, but of the whole notion of evaluating, as I said early on, it's as soon as something is going to be evaluated, even if it's self-evaluation, because that's a big thing now. We do self-evaluation on our passion projects. Okay, but what if you actually don't want to evaluate it? You're not ready to evaluate it, because you're still exploring.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: And that kind of invites me to explain the word, which is de-schooling. So de-schooling is when somebody leaves school in order to become a self-directed learner. It takes time to let go of school-ish ways, of waiting to be told what to do, not having a lot of time to explore your own motivation. So it can take you... We often talk about it taking at least a month for every year that you've been in school. And that's just the kids, the parents who are supporting it, takes even longer sometimes.

Stephanie Sewell: So the idea, the way this is relevant here is that, if you have free time to do something and you're giving kids free time in the context of a class, it's going to take them a while to actually figure out how to be free.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: How to work from a place of intrinsically motivated activity, because they're not used to it.

Karen Wilson:  It makes so much sense. You see it in the business world where people are starting a business, and you probably experienced it for yourself, shifting into the work that you're doing, that realization that I'm the boss and I get to decide is it takes some time. I get to be in control, I set the deadlines, I decide what's important and what are the priorities. I think that's a big reason why business coaches are so important.

Stephanie Sewell: Yes, because starting your own business is the quintessential self-directed learning experience.

Karen Wilson: It really is.

Stephanie Sewell: It is, and I'm okay to go for another five minutes or so. 5, 10 minutes, my daughter can just wait, just so you know.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: So self-directed learning, it's exactly what we do as business owners. And it's a great example of how you go out and learn what you need to learn and find the teachers that you need when you need them. So I work with a business coach that you also know, Lara Wellman, and she's amazing. And there's some things that she said to me when I first met her that I wasn't ready to hear.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: And it wasn't that she was trying to teach me something I wasn't ready for, but just ideas that she shared, that I wasn't at a stage where I even knew what that meant. But now it's like, "Oh yeah, you're saying that to me now, and I know you said that to me before. But now I'm ready for it, now I can hear it, now I can work with it and use it." And that's a really great thing to map back onto schools or onto kids' learning. To have confidence that people, no matter how old they are, learn what they need when they need to, and will seek out the support, I.e. The teachers, mentors, peers to do that learning when they need to. With the caveat that, of course, there are times when some children wind up needing speech therapy for different reasons. So it doesn't always all develop smoothly, but it develops smoothly in different rhythms at different rates way, way, way more often than we allow opportunity for in our society.

Karen Wilson: Yeah. Stephanie, this has been such a fun conversation. Tell everyone how they can find you and connect with you and learn more about the work that you're doing.

Stephanie Sewell: Sure. So part of my self-directed learning journey right now around having a business is figuring out social media, and websites and all of that. So I'll invite you to my website on my social media locations with the caveat that they don't yet represent my business in the way that I want them to and that's for people who are looking at self-directed learning as a child or as an adult, that's the thing. You start to identify needs or realize things that you're looking for, and there's a lag between when you see it and when you figure out what the process is going to be to make it happen. And that's the beauty and the torture of self-directed learning. But in school, you don't have to think of that. People just tell you what to do all the time.

Karen Wilson: Yes.

Stephanie Sewell: But you get it within your way, and when it's there, it's there. So, my website is my name dot ca, stephaniesewell.ca. Hopefully, it will soon become Own Your Learning as my website, I'm pretty sure that that's going to become my business name, I've said it here for the first time.

Karen Wilson: Oh, exciting.

Stephanie Sewell: Yeah. And it's interesting, that was an advice that a friend gave me because I thought that when I started my own business, the first thing I had to do was come up with a name, and she said, "No, you're going to evolve so much of what your business is in those first years. Just use your name for now, and that way you don't have to re-brand. You'll just brand when you're ready."

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell:: And it was like, "Oh my goodness, total example of learning when you're ready. You're doing something when you're ready."

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: So yes, stephaniesewell.ca, I'm on Facebook and LinkedIn, that's Stephanie Sewell Education, though I'm not very good at posting very often. What I do post quite often though, is things that I'm involved with. So I was mentioning, I think that I host these bi-weekly conversations through Unschooling School. We have amazing conversations. Last time we talked about trust. What does it mean to trust? And that was great. So yeah, please join in those conversations, and then as far as the more direct work, the ways that I can support your family, I work with people one-on-one and in small group. So some of the main things that I would invite you to consider are I have a group called Teens Thriving. And that's for teens who are pretty much self-directed learners, but might not even know it yet.

So some of the members of that group are in the process of really, I think that school is just not working for them, and they're... It's that leap into the great unknown. But I make that leap not scary, because I can show them what it is, I can show their parents what it is. I'm there to mentor them as they need it, I'm there to normalize the process and to connect them with other people who are further along in that process or in that same process. So Teens Thriving, and then I'm also going to be starting a group for parents in the fall, which is parents of kids who are more unschool leaning, but not again, not necessarily there because we don't start there. It's more like, "Yeah, we're homeschooling, but we're doing all this curriculum and it's not feeling good and…

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Stephanie Sewell: So it's to give support to people like that. And then one-on-one, we often wind up doing some pretty intense work around, what's been going on? Who's your child? What do you want for your child? And how do we then start looking at the education that they're having differently so that it can really begin to meet their needs? And so one of the things I often produce as part of that is an action plan for families that they can use to help them in school or outside of school. So lots of possibilities.

Karen Wilson: Oh, that's all wonderful. Thank you so much for coming and sharing this. This is a topic that I could just dig into for a long, long time, because it is so interesting. All the different ways that we can redefine education and how we approach learning differently now versus, even just 10 years ago. A lot has changed.

Stephanie Sewell: It sure has. It sure has. And I want to thank you as well Karen, because your engagement with the material, clearly you thought about it ahead of time, and you're really... You allowed us to really get into some interesting stuff in this conversation. And I really appreciate that from you as an interviewer or whatever, co-conversationalist. So I've really enjoyed this conversation and really feel like we've had a chance to share some important ideas and topics.

Karen Wilson: Aww, you're so very welcome.