The Iron Rule

The Iron Rule is the core rule of organizing: don't do for others what they can do for themselves . This is already a popular idea among many in the teaching profession. Most of the time, I've found that it's popular among teachers because we want to foster a personal pride in independence. This is fine and good, but what if there are more important reasons to not do for our students what they can do for themselves? And, how do we get students to start to do a little bit for themselves when they might not have been doing too much on their own? When we think about teaching from the perspective of an organizer, we embrace faith in people power—that the everyday person can and should be able to effect change in their lives. This is a basic democratic principle: those closest and most impacted by the issues should have a say in how the issues are solved. In this chapter, we dig into ramp-ways for student self-directed learning as well as concepts that help us explain the rationalization for this kind of learning to our colleagues, the broader educational community and those who may be reluctant to depart from tradition.