But Wait, There’s More.

Find your passion, they say. 

It’s a phrase that’s thrown around with good intentions. It certainly sounds nice. Inspiring, even. It’s the kind of thing we say to our kids when school is getting serious, and we want to help them find their way through the business end.  
 
But wrapped inside that little nugget of advice is a belief worth rethinking: that passion is something fully formed, neatly packaged and just waiting to be found – as though it's something lost in the back of the cupboard.  

Ooh! Found it!
And if you can’t? Either you’re not looking hard enough, or worse – the cupboard’s empty. No passion for you. 
For those kids looking around at friends and siblings who seem to have found their thing – the one who’s been drawing since they could hold a pencil, the junior maths whiz or the black belt who already knows she’s going to save the dolphins – that sentiment can land heavily. 
But. Where’s mine? 

In 2018, researchers at Stanford University published a study titled Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It? Their findings were not grey.  

No one – and particularly not kids – stumbles across passions fully formed. Interests grow through experience, struggle, effort and frustration, time and relationships. For some, theirs may come sooner, but even so, they are developed, not discovered.  

USC Professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience and friend of Woodleigh School, Dr Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, helps explain why expectations around developing interests and passions matter. Her findings show that we are not wired to think deeply about things we don’t care about. Dr Immordino-Yang says, ‘It is neurobiologically impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts or make meaningful decisions without emotion.’ Asking a child or adolescent to choose a passion before they have had the time and exposure to develop one goes directly against how our brains learn and develop. 

More significantly, the study found that young people who were led to believe that their passion was out there, somewhere, ready and waiting, and they just needed to find it – a fixed growth theory – were less open to new ideas, more likely to disengage when learning became difficult and quicker to ditch newer interests. 

Those who possessed a growth theory of interest, on the other hand, were able to persist more readily. They paid attention to incidental sparks of curiosity and were comfortable with developing interests, genuinely, over time, rather than expecting their life’s passion to pop up fully formed. Effort, plateaus, frustration, care and tangents are all subconsciously accepted as part of the process. 

‘When engaging in a new interest became difficult, interest flagged significantly more for individuals holding a fixed rather than a growth theory of interest.’  (O'Keefe, Dweck, Walton 2018). 'When something didn’t come easily, they assumed it probably wasn’t for them.’ 

Anu P is in Year 5 at Woodleigh’s Minimbah Campus. At the age of ten, she has plenty of energy and ideas, but if you ask her when her interests began, she’ll take you back five or six years – all the way back to a movie about a wolf, White Fang, which she first watched when she was five. ‘I loved it, but it made me cry. I realised how much wolves were in distress; it hurt my feelings, and I had to do something.’ Anu’s something at that time was Howling Hearts – a club she formed, then an invitation from the Minnesota International Wolf Centre, and eventually a trip to Minnesota to meet wolves in person. What were they like, the wolves? ‘Cute, cool and savage.’  
 
But wait, there’s more.  

As parents and educators, we can take heart that at age 10, our children are in an important developmental window. They are still curious; they ask real – sometimes wild – questions. They have ideas, energy, loud voices and opinions that have yet to be streamlined by educational compliance. And they know how to say No. However, it’s also when they are looking ahead to senior school and naturally, becoming aware of comparisons – of who is good at what and where they think they fit. It’s a delicate point of opportunity.   

It might be a highly underestimated period of their development – but not to us. At Woodleigh, Year 5 marks this time with purpose. Their cohort grows from one class to two, taking in an influx of new faces, and together they all move into the Homestead space – a purpose-built vertical learning environment for Years 5 and 6. Their learning is not narrow; it's opened right up for divergent thinking. They step into leadership, investigation, collaboration and agency. They become builders, travellers and thinkers, engaged learners who take risks and let it all hang out within a structured, designed environment, with mentors and space for lifelong learning to continue to take root.  

For Anu, her interests haven’t stopped with wolves. Through her Units of Inquiry, through meeting Jane Goodall at school, through peers and older Minimbah students who inspired her and through her parents, her world has continued to expand. Today, she advocates not just for wolves, but for our planet, for people with fewer opportunities, for anyone who needs a voice. She names Jane Goodall, Frida Kahlo, Joan of Arc and her big sister as her inspirations. And she’s driven to build the new iteration of Howling Hearts – Planet Project – giving a voice to others and a way to create change, all through the lens of her own generation. She wants to nudge kids beyond what they already love. ‘Don’t just stick to your current comfort-passion,’ she said. ‘Jump out of your comfort zone. Truly find a love of something new.’ 

It’s growth theory writ large. 

At the top end of Primary School, when they move into the Homestead and their education expands, Woodleigh kids really have the capacity to connect their learning to global citizenship, empathy and perspective. They are asked to walk in someone else’s shoes, engage with new and novel ideas and concepts, make and create their own, share them, activate them and account for them. Attitudes, behaviours and concepts that open them up to new ideas, experiences and possibilities in their lives going forward. 

Passion will come, because it does. But it comes from the doing. From curiosity and persistence, missteps, surprises, care and time. So, when school becomes serious business, let it not be the business of conformity, small behaviour and neat lines. May the business of wild questions, big ideas, being wrong and the inevitable growth that comes from being wrong, remain.

And the long game? What does this mindset look like when they are gazing out beyond the school gates, and into their own futures? 

Become a neuroscientist, meet a wolf, fly a plane and speak other languages, who knows? Whatever it is, Woodleigh kids are ready and prepared for adventurous lives in every direction imaginable. 

Woodleigh School welcomes Year 5 entry students each year at our Junior Campuses.