Module 1.1 – Creating a Lights On Culture

Lights On Learning is all about finding out what it is that switches on our lights and then having the opportunity to immerse ourselves in learning through our strengths, talents and passions.

What would we jump out of bed, every morning, to get up and do? When we discover our passion and start understanding our purpose then everything else makes sense!  

We believe it is never too young to start and actually the younger we are the more in-tune we are with our switch. 

So the first stage, which really determines how and where we head through our 5 Step System, is to Locate the Switch. There are three key steps in this first stage.

Our aim with creating a Lights On Culture is to put our children into the driving seat of their own learning adventure and help them discover their USP (Unique Success Point) so that they can learn through their strengths and start reaching out towards their edges.  

So to create this culture there are some things that are essential. You need to:

A major part of our approach is to develop the emotional intelligence of our learners. This, far more than their academic ability, is what we believe will hold them back from reaching their fullest potential. In my adult team I have seen it time and time again - those that can push through the failure go on to succeed and those that simply can't deal with what failure can feel like - being insecure and annoyed with themselves - they never get to reach their true potential.  

Our approach is designed to push our learners to their edges of their ability so that they are building up resilience, grit and determination because they get experience of failing and they learn to recognise the emotions that come with that. 

What all this means is you and your child will become frustrated or angry, or give up, have a paddy (that includes you as the adult!) and you both might put up a huge amount of resistance!

We've seen some amazingly quick transformations in children when we start to legitimise feeling frustrated or angry as a natural part of learning. They realise that it isn't something to avoid (because they are legitimate emotions) rather they need to get more understanding of how to deal with those feelings and turn the negative associations into positive outcomes.

Here are some immediate tips to get you started:

Videos To Watch

So THE big take away from this lesson is to not ignore the emotions that we normally think of negative. It is not our role to help our children (in a Lights On Learning environment) to avoid being frustrated or angry but rather to empower them to make sense of these emotions and accept them as really important signals for us to look out for. If we feel them chances are we are about to LEARN!  

This is SO important and I can't stress it enough. The motivation to learn HAS to come from our children and not as a result of some external reward. Again this is where you may need to do some 'unlearning' and see your role as a Lights On mentor as being different to that of being mum or dad. You may have been through a whole range of 'reward' schemes to try to encourage sleeping through the night, sitting nicely at the table, or being kind to siblings!  But when it comes to Lights On Learning no gold stars please!

So how do we encourage our children and build up that intrinsic motivation?

We see it time and time again that children give up when the going gets tough. They start to say they are bored. They develop avoidance tactics - they'll do anything to avoid being in the space where they feel, 'Aghhh - I don't know what I am doing!'  So in a Lights On Learning culture as well as reframing failure, and what learning actually is, we also need to build in fun challenges where we are upfront about the fact that we won't know the answers. 

We'll go into all of this in much more detail but hopefully this overview of what a Lights On culture entails will get you thinking in the right direction.