Apple and Oranges.

Welcome to the The Connection Curriculum newsletter.

In the maze that is the LinkedIn algorithm, I appreciate you taking the time to click and read this first issue.

This newsletter will be published fortnightly, arriving Sunday mornings (GMT+11) so that you can read with your morning coffee (or second/third) digest across the day and take action first thing on Monday. My intention with each issue is to provide you with a kickstart for your thinking, but not the answers directly.

My strong opinion, especially around topics to be covered in this newsletter such as connection, culture and community, is that it must be specific to context. I also strongly believe that all ‘things’ lead to slightly bigger ‘things’. Meaning, your initial thoughts after reading this issue will, whether you agree with them or not, start a chain reaction of change in your practice, and that in my humble opinion, should be the point of a publication like this.

I cannot and will not tell you how to make change in your very specific contextual environment, however, I will put everything I can into providing the inspiration, the tools and the provocations to get you going on the journey.

I hope you find this first issue an enjoyable read.

Where to start?

Here is an interesting opening statement for issue one of this newsletter:

Young people are desperate to connect, we are the one’s holding them back.

Ok. Let’s discuss Apple for a moment. Apple, as you may be aware, is an absolute juggernaut. Their products not only provide an easily accessible and mostly intuitive platform in practice, but they also effectively support a fanatical community that has been built behind them. A huge percentage of this community creation and continuous growth is attributed to younger people. In fact, according to Business Insider, 87% of teens in the US had an iPhone with 88% claiming they expect their next phone to be an iPhone.

Apple clearly know what they are doing and who they are doing it for. Apple is a company for young people not just frequented by young people.

How do they sustain the sense of community so well??

Apple is focused on the feeling their products create. They may not have intended it 100% initially, but they noticed it and they have leveraged it. Other companies are not focused on the feeling, just the products, their tech, their specifications, their price. Does a young person with an iPhone really consider how much it cost once they have it?

Schools are like Apple’s competitors in many ways. They desire community, collaboration and connection, but focus on the practicalities, like policy development rather than creating the feeling of community and the desire to belong that manifests within it.

People will line up for hours upon hours for the launch of a new iPhone, cheering and crying as they leave the store. Can we replicate a version of this desire (perhaps dialling the intensity down a little) for belonging in schools? If education has been essentially limited down to a product, how can we make our product desirable to young people and worth connecting to in the process?

My advice? Ask them:

1. How could a school community be more like the Apple community?
2. What are the differences between the Apple user community and our community at [insert your school here]?

These types of questions, disconnected from the curriculum and the normal classroom or school operation are important because what we typically understand as connection, is only the first landmark on a longer journey. As technology has improved/increased our methods of communicating with people all over the world, we have mistaken this first landmark for a job well done.

We start your journey (and end this first issue) with these types of questions because we do not often ask these questions without prompting. We do not lesson plan for them, or factor them into a task. Student-teacher relationships are powerful, but not enough for sustainable connection.

Ask these questions and take note of the answers. You will learn about your classroom environment (do they answer, do they go into depth, do they avoid?) and the young people will have an opportunity to think differently and genuinely share an idea that is off-curriculum.

Allow them time to unpack and discuss, come back and let me know what the discussion looked/sounded/felt like in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

The last bit...

The misalignment between the education system and efforts to build sustainable connection is preventing school communities from travelling successfully along ‘The Connection Journey’ - a foundational concept in my new book ‘?????? ???????????????????? ????????????????????: ???????????????? ???????????????? ???????????? ???? ?????????????? ?????????????? ?????????????????????? ????????????????????’.

‘?????? ???????????????????? ????????????????????’ is available for pre-order now from the fantastic team at Amba Press using the link below:

https://ambapress.com.au/products/the-connection-curriculum

"Connection is indeed what we all need but it can also be problematic because there are so many different things to connect to and different ways to be connected. Matt has written a book with a strong message, full of content that is very honest and practical." - Yong Zhao