Erika Christakis, the author of the bestselling book The Importance of Being Little argues that when it comes to children and learning, adults have “a profound lack of faith in what young children are capable of.”  

Christakis also points out that “children are wired with the capacity for learning.”  

Let’s start with capacity, then: the depths to which an individual can reach into their superpowers when faced with a challenge to employ them.   

In the UCDSB’s Power Up Program, we work to discover children's superpowers as a means to thriving in school. Alexander Den Heijer’s  words guide us: “When a flower doesn’t bloom you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”  

If you ask Mariah Gallacher she’ll tell you all the stories of the children from her Power Up classroom at Commonwealth PS in Brockville, ON. She’ll tell you where things began. She’ll tell you how the concern of one child became the project of many children. She’ll tell you about the children who found their voices while learning to teach. She’ll tell you - with total humility - how she came to be the documentarian of the journey of a group of children towards learning no one expected – not even her, not even the children entrusted to her care. Where there was hope, eventually the stories came to life. The flowers bloomed.  

In the UCDSB we sometimes remark on hope as data. We view this x-factor, this invisible driver, as essential to student success. Why? It’s back to this idea of capacity.  

When it comes to real-world learning, and children, it turns out that there is a limitless capacity to tap into when the purpose of the learning is tethered to meaningful work that reaches beyond the walls of school.  

Even more so the case for students whose promise is atrophying in the moment. Fix the environment, not the flower. 

In this episode of The Real-World Learning Podcast we discover that an ordinary concern of an observant child can lead to extraordinary things.