A story on the radio this morning caught my attention. It was about a school in the East Midlands adopting a policy of “shoeless learning” to improve grades (read the article here).
Now I’m all for getting my shoes off and feeling relaxed when I work. My shoes come off as soon as I get back in the house and at this time of year I usually don a pair of fluffy slippers to keep my feet warm.
I also think it’s great that the Head Teacher is being proactive in looking for ways to improve her pupils experience and testing new approaches out.
But does wearing slippers really make any difference to my performance or the performance of children in a school?
A quick search on the internet to find the study that demonstrated these benefits led me to lots of articles quoting the study but not the actual data. The nearest I got was to this site. And the data here suggests that there are a number of benefits to shoeless learning, particular on the wear and tear of the environment but there are no statistics on the impact on actual performance. Just anecdotal evidence that children seem to behave better.
So am I saying that it’s a bad idea to allow children to wear slippers at school?
No — but what I am proposing is that we have a tendency to look to external factors to explain behaviour — both good and bad, without seeing the underlying principles in play. And this is why mixed results are frequently seen when adopting a strategy that appeared to work very well elsewhere.
What’s really at play?
Great performance occurs (in both adults and children) when we aren’t caught up in our own thoughts. When this is the case our minds are freer and experience flows through us. We don’t look to outside circumstances for the reason we feel a certain way (be that positive or negative) and we recognise that feelings are a reflection of the conscious and unconscious thoughts we are in from moment to moment. All this is irrespective of what we are wearing on our feet.
So understanding the fundamental principles behind performance, whether that’s in the classroom or the boardroom, is the key to creating lasting transformations.
Action as a result of Insight
I suspect that the original idea to go shoeless came about when a teacher had an insight that children naturally choose the most comfortable way to learn. And when left to their own devices many would choose to kick off their shoes. So it made sense to let the children do this.
But will adopting the same strategy, without understanding the fundamentals behind it, really have the same impact?
It seems more powerful to me to look to the innate design for learning within both children and adults and trust that process. Being shoeless is a bye product rather than the cause of a conducive learning environment. In the same way umbrellas don’t cause rain.
So rather than just kicking off the shoes in the classroom, bringing in dress down Friday to the office or implementing any other external strategy that appears to improve performance, much more value is gained by looking at understanding the true nature of human experience. And from looking in that direction insights abound, that may or may not involve slippers!
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