Today was our final workshop in the series on parenting, led by Ms. Seren Davis. Ms. Davis introduced us to the idea of the Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey...
We used the video and the “Who Decides?” slide as a prompt to think about the decisions that we make for our children and how we may be too quick to rescue them from what Jessica describes as “desirable difficulties.” The discussion explored how sometimes we make decisions for our children so that we don’t look bad in public and at other times because it’s just quicker and more efficient. We also explored how we can sometimes want to shield our children from the natural consequences of their decisions, whereas instead we could allow them to experience these so that they learn the impact of their decisions.
Ms. Davis also shared briefly how student autonomy and agency empowers learners and reference the work of Dr. John Spencer and what happens when we empower our children.
Mr. Todd shared an example of giving his own children agency as they organised a trip to London to visit Hamleys toy shop. More details of this trip can be found on this blog post which was inspired by another educator's experiment with agency at home which she blogged about here.
We ended the session by sharing top tips ideas about how we can build agency at home:
If you would like to read the Gift of Failure, by Jessica Lahey, it is available in the library.
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