When I first started teaching outdoor education, I ran across a concept called "The Process Approach to Problem Solving." It was part of an environmental education program begun by the U.S. Forest Service, who I worked for at the time. Now that I'm a published author, I find myself reawakening to this idea.
The next place I encountered it was with another outdoor education program called Project Learning Tree. Their watchwords were: "Teaching people how to think, not what to think."
Later, when I morphed into a music teacher, I found this same concept of "Process over Product" in teaching, too. Some of the outstanding examples in this field were the Karl Orff Method, the Kodaly Method, Kindermusik, Musikgarten, and others.
As the years have gone by, I've seen how product-oriented our world is. The perfect performance, the winning team, the income from sales (books or other items), even reaching a certain number of "Followers" on the Internet are the things that drive our measures of success.
But I think we've missed the boat. Life is not all a mountaintop experience. It's a learning process. As a writer, I most appreciate when someone helps me work on the process. Because none of us is perfect, and no performance, work of art, book, or symphony is ever perfect. We're all in process.
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