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50: The Inventive Design of Learning Spaces feat. Pam Moran, Tim Fawkes, Ryan Hopkins-Wilcox, & Discovery Lab
30 Plays6 years ago
Today's podcast is all about designing spaces for learning. Often, we think of a teacher's role as creator - someone who is making the learning happen within their room. But we can look at this in a more nuanced way. To completely steal Ryan Hopkins-Wilcox's explanation from in this podcast, when we plan an experience, we're already aware of what outcomes will be achieved. We're planning for what's going to happen next and already have each step in mind. In contrast, to design an experience - or space - we're opening possibilities for students to learn in multiple fashions. We have a general idea of where we want to be, but we're side-by-side in that learning experience.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
Dr. Pam Moran, superintendent of the widely acclaimed Albemarle County Public Schools and co-author of Timeless Learning. Pam is an avid proponent of progressive education and designing schools that ignite learning.
Tim Fawkes, a high school music educator set on redesigning the classroom as an equitable, democratic space through embracing student voice, choice, and experiential learning.
Ryan Hopkins-Wilcox, an international educator and current assistant principal at the International School of Uganda, where she focuses on igniting learning through well-designed opportunities for staff and students.
Tosha Woods and Natalia Parker, founders of the Discovery Lab, a self-described “micro school.” Tosha and Natalia started this school as concerned parents and community members to provide an outlet of progressive learning to students.
RESOURCES
- Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools by Pam Moran, Ira Socol, and Chad Ratliff
- HRP Review of Timeless Learning
- Pam Moran’s recent TEDx Talk
- The Application of Critical Pedagogy to Music Teaching and Learning by Dr. Frank Abrahams
- Discovery Lab
- HRP’s 1 Page PD: Curation
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Support
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Season 3, Episode 8 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:17
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
00:00:22
Speaker
Today's podcast is all about designing spaces for learning.
00:00:26
Speaker
Often we think of a teacher's role as creator, someone who is making the learning happen within their room.
00:00:32
Speaker
But we can look at this in a more nuanced way.
00:00:34
Speaker
To completely steal Ryan Hopkins Wilcox's explanation from this podcast, when we plan an experience, we're already aware of what outcomes are going to be achieved.
00:00:45
Speaker
We're planning for what's going to happen next, and we already have each step in mind.
Designing Learning Experiences
00:00:50
Speaker
In contrast, when we design an experience,
00:00:53
Speaker
or design a space.
00:00:55
Speaker
We're opening possibilities for students to learn in a lot of different fashions.
00:00:59
Speaker
We have a general idea where we want to go, but we're side by side in that learning experience.
00:01:06
Speaker
This is such an incredibly powerful message that is core to progressive education.
00:01:11
Speaker
We speak about student voice and choice, but that's not choosing preset options given by the instructor.
00:01:16
Speaker
When we say choice, we're referring to a plethora of possibilities that each student has to meet a learning objective.
00:01:23
Speaker
And we want to make that learning goal as broad as we possibly can to ensure that all students can be engaged.
00:01:29
Speaker
I'm so excited to share the messages of our guests today, but first I want to implore you to visit our Patreon page.
00:01:36
Speaker
There you'll find a place to support this podcast as well as the free resources that we're pumping out every week.
00:01:42
Speaker
For as little as $1 a month, you'll know that you're keeping this endeavor afloat, and plus you'll receive a professional electronic magazine with so many human-centered ideas and education.
00:01:52
Speaker
A few of our patrons who sponsored this podcast are Carolyn Weisereck, Dylan Wentz, and Rachel Lawrence.
00:01:58
Speaker
I'm humbled by your support and can't wait to see the experiences that we create together.
Systemic Barriers in Education
00:02:02
Speaker
You can learn more about our Patreon page as well as find everything about the Human Restoration Project at humanrestorationproject.org and on Twitter at humerespro....the things that have been learned about actually......to me, it's good to have a person who has not been in the world.
00:02:25
Speaker
I think the thing that excites me most about education is the ability to craft learning experiences.
00:02:31
Speaker
My why in education is to find cool ideas, make simple foundations and structures for them to flourish, and pass almost all control over to students to make that happen.
00:02:41
Speaker
Of course, there's a lot of barriers that exist in making the why of our purpose as educators happen.
00:02:47
Speaker
Some of us get caught up in the systemic barriers to learning, whether that be the topics that might seem meaningless or maybe students aren't getting enough support.
00:02:56
Speaker
Maybe we don't have enough free time, we aren't getting enough pay.
00:02:59
Speaker
Or maybe there's just the general way that our classrooms look and feel.
00:03:03
Speaker
I think that many, if not most students, are in this exact same boat.
00:03:08
Speaker
They may be excited from time to time on their why at school.
00:03:12
Speaker
You know, after all, everyone loves to learn about things that they care about, but they're just not getting that when they go to school.
00:03:18
Speaker
If you walk into most school buildings, you'll find a fairly bland and sterile environment.
00:03:23
Speaker
It may even be prison-like.
00:03:25
Speaker
Some of that is lack of funding, but there's also a system of control that manifests itself in having a very comatose environment.
00:03:33
Speaker
If you make everything too crazy and wild, maybe the students will go crazy and wild too.
00:03:37
Speaker
I don't know if that's the idea, but it certainly seems that way.
00:03:40
Speaker
The fact is that for educators, we have the capability to design learning spaces that tear down
00:03:46
Speaker
the barriers as much as we possibly can to allow learning to happen.
00:03:51
Speaker
Sure, there's a lot of things outside of our control, and sometimes we're working against the best interest of our employer, the state, the board, etc.
00:03:58
Speaker
And you know, maybe the state and board have lost their way on what learning is.
00:04:02
Speaker
Maybe they're more concerned about state test scores or upholding the way things were when they were in school.
00:04:07
Speaker
But we, as teachers, can continue to press on and design the most open and interesting environments that we can.
Co-Created Learning Spaces with Pam Moran
00:04:14
Speaker
Those learning environments are both physical, you know, the way things look and feel, as well as conceptual, how our learning itself is designed.
00:04:22
Speaker
We have four guests on today that exemplify these ideas.
00:04:26
Speaker
From a superintendent who designed schools to be honestly incredible, to a music educator who's making his classroom equitable and democratic, to an administrator at an international school who's designing experiences for her students and staff, to two parents and educators who created their own school to do what's best for their children.
00:04:44
Speaker
I can't wait to share these voices with you, so let's go ahead and get started.
00:04:48
Speaker
First, we have Dr. Pam Moran.
00:04:50
Speaker
Pam is the superintendent of the widely acclaimed Albemarle County Public Schools, co-author of Timeless Learning, and an avid proponent of progressive education.
00:04:59
Speaker
We start off our conversation on what it means to design a co-created space between educator and student.
00:05:06
Speaker
I would describe a co-created space as being one where kids have a real sense of ownership for the environment, just as teachers do, that it truly represents teachers and kids able to work together, whether it's at the high school level, the middle school level, or even, you know, five-year-olds in a classroom.
00:05:25
Speaker
So that, you know, if you've got a block center set up that kids know that they can go in and they can build and that they've
00:05:32
Speaker
blocks can spill out into other spaces or that they can move them around and envision that building a castle or towers or spaceships or whatever it is that their imagination is doing with them as learners, that they have control over that environment in the classroom as well as in the outdoors.
00:05:53
Speaker
I mean, one of the things that I've really loved
00:05:55
Speaker
is that a number of schools that I've worked with over the years, both inside and outside, have access to wonderful natural areas.
00:06:03
Speaker
And too often, what we do is to think about the woods, the grasses, the playground areas are only reserved for specific times of the day,
00:06:16
Speaker
not at all, you know, that everything is off limits to kids.
00:06:20
Speaker
And what I've really seen is that when kids get access to be able to design, build, play, make in the outdoor world, they take what they're potentially learning with a teacher from inside the classroom outside.
00:06:34
Speaker
And so, you know, I loved seeing recently
00:06:37
Speaker
a group of girls that had created basically a lodge structure, woods along the edge of their school grounds, and they had built this wonderful, fantastical structure as a lodge.
Student Ownership and Self-Determined Learning
00:06:49
Speaker
And I just think about that when kids are given the opportunity to use materials, to use the furniture in an environment,
00:06:57
Speaker
in ways that really allow them to go to that next place as learners that perhaps a teacher would not have even envisioned, but the kids do.
00:07:07
Speaker
All of a sudden, you have an environment that belongs to the kids, and they see it as part of their world and not as something that's off limits or that is restricted to adults manipulating it.
00:07:19
Speaker
I mean, I think that's one of the things that we as humans do, is that we manipulate the world in which we live.
00:07:25
Speaker
You know, there's a reason why people love to rearrange their homes at times and move things around, you know, to make their world more comfortable or more accessible or more usable.
00:07:37
Speaker
And our kids, when they're in schools that allow that, support that, facilitate that.
00:07:43
Speaker
Start to become self-determined learners versus being kids who are waiting for an adult to let them do something.
00:07:51
Speaker
And so that's what I really love about co-creating environments.
00:07:54
Speaker
And I've seen that in high schools, middle schools and elementary schools.
00:07:59
Speaker
But it does involve shifting power from a teacher.
00:08:03
Speaker
being in control of every aspect of the learning world to really sharing that power, that authority, that opportunity for kids to be a part of the creation of spaces for learning.
Educating Educators and Adapting Programs
00:08:19
Speaker
Now, the idea of co-creating a space for many listening to this podcast is probably something that we're on board with.
00:08:26
Speaker
But there's no denying that many have lost their way, so to speak.
00:08:30
Speaker
and they're not used to the things that you're talking about.
00:08:33
Speaker
How do you go about educating the educator on why we need to design learning this way?
00:08:39
Speaker
You have to start by providing people with opportunities to engage with people that can help to scaffold their learning.
00:08:47
Speaker
We talk about that a lot.
00:08:49
Speaker
Bogotsky, many decades ago, talked about the concept of scaffolding.
00:08:56
Speaker
that you have to start with where people are, whether it's a child or whether it's an adult, and figure out how do they start to build the structures that allow them to go farther up the ladder or up the scaffold in terms of their own learning.
00:09:14
Speaker
And so, you know, one of the things that I think sometimes that we make a mistake in education is that
00:09:19
Speaker
We discover as building level administrators or superintendents in the structures that we have in the United States for leadership that we tend to think of programs that we bring in and we try to replicate that with fidelity in everybody's space.
00:09:38
Speaker
And some people are going to be more ready to take on, quote, a new program and others not.
00:09:44
Speaker
And oftentimes programs fail because the leaders have really neglected to take advantage of our own understanding of the importance of Turore in our lives.
00:09:56
Speaker
You know, I love Deborah Fries and Margaret Wheatley's work in Walk Out, Walk On, where they talk about that if you plant grapes in France and you plant grapes in the Napa Valley, that you get differentiations in wine because of the difference in Turore.
00:10:12
Speaker
But in our school communities, we tend to think of everything through a one-size-fits-all model.
00:10:18
Speaker
And people aren't like that.
00:10:19
Speaker
People are individuals.
00:10:20
Speaker
People are unique.
00:10:22
Speaker
And teachers like kids are at different levels of openness and developmental stages to incorporate change into their world.
00:10:32
Speaker
So I think that one of the things that I've discovered over time is that you have to really think about how do teachers get opportunities to see what it looks like when you...
00:10:45
Speaker
start to release some of the control to kids in a classroom in terms of environment or even their own learning.
00:10:51
Speaker
I noticed that in Twitter that Chad, who's one of our three authors of Timeless Learning, actually has kids writing curriculum right now that they want to teach some of their own classes.
00:11:02
Speaker
And these are middle schoolers.
00:11:03
Speaker
And so they're developing their own curriculum.
00:11:05
Speaker
So you have to be able to provide teachers with opportunities that to get to that place,
00:11:13
Speaker
They've got to see it.
00:11:14
Speaker
They've got to experience it.
00:11:15
Speaker
They've got to be encouraged and supported in taking risk.
00:11:20
Speaker
And when things fail, rather than seeing the failure as something that's so scary because of the fear of the impact that it will have on your evaluation as a teacher,
00:11:32
Speaker
that you've got to be able to say, so yeah, you know, it didn't work out the way that we thought it would.
00:11:37
Speaker
What would you do differently?
00:11:39
Speaker
How would you modify that?
00:11:41
Speaker
And so I think that what I see is in the best of school communities that teachers feel supported to take risks
00:11:49
Speaker
to take steps that in some cases are baby steps, that in some cases people are ready to run, but that the expectation is that we're always trying to deepen engagement of kids.
00:12:01
Speaker
We're trying to have kids to become as self-determined in their learning as possible.
00:12:06
Speaker
And you do that through conversation, through supportive focus, through encouragement, and that when things don't always work out the way that we envisioned,
00:12:18
Speaker
that rather than turning it into that sort of sorting and selecting of who was successful and who failed, that we see life as a series of successes and failures that we all go through.
Relevance of Learning to Students' Lives
00:12:30
Speaker
And as leaders, that's our job is to support that kind of risk taking with teachers.
00:12:35
Speaker
But I think the other thing too, Chris, quite frankly, is that too often teachers don't have access to what I call the why curriculum,
00:12:46
Speaker
Why would we change space in different ways?
00:12:49
Speaker
Why would we really focus on reducing curriculum so that kids have more opportunity for deep learning versus superficial learning?
00:12:59
Speaker
Why would we use place-based environments as teaching tools, teaching spaces?
00:13:07
Speaker
Why do we believe that making spaces
00:13:10
Speaker
is a critical part of who we are as humans.
00:13:12
Speaker
You know, I talk about that.
00:13:14
Speaker
Seldom do I run into a person that doesn't have some passion that involves them using their hands to make something.
00:13:22
Speaker
For some people, that's about cooking.
00:13:24
Speaker
For others, it's about knitting.
00:13:27
Speaker
For others, it's about building something in the shop.
00:13:30
Speaker
For others, it's about painting.
00:13:33
Speaker
I mean, humans, it seems like, are born to be makers of their own learning.
00:13:39
Speaker
And yet you get to school at age five.
00:13:42
Speaker
And what do we do?
00:13:43
Speaker
We take as much of that opportunity for people to engage with their hands and their minds and their hearts as possible.
00:13:51
Speaker
And we've restricted to this very narrow viewpoint of learning that we call the academics.
00:13:57
Speaker
And that is oftentimes measured in ways that are superficial, maybe efficient, but tell us very little about the wealth of what children bring to their experiences in terms of their background knowledges and understandings of the world that we can use to really build towards that deeper learning.
00:14:20
Speaker
And so,
00:14:21
Speaker
You know, I may be rambling a bit here, as I often may find myself doing, but I feel like that the biggest issue that we confront is that we created, over the 20th century, this very compliance-driven learning environment and subtracted out so much of what we consider to be, at least the authors of the timeless learning, what we consider to be the strategies that are the deep
00:14:49
Speaker
sort of deeply embedded ways that humans access learning that seems to almost be a part of our DNA and said, let's put those things over here because the way that we're going to teach and the way that kids are going to learn is going to be in this very limited environment, sterile, as you said, and focused very much on
00:15:13
Speaker
A breadth of trivia pursuit knowledge base that kids forget almost as soon as they finish the multiple choice test that they've had put in front of them.
Challenges in Implementing Change
00:15:25
Speaker
So a personal example for me surrounding these ideas is that when we try to enact change at our school, we tend to get obsessed with some really hard-to-change ideals.
00:15:34
Speaker
For example, we visited High Tech High, and we do a pretty good job at incorporating PBL, but a lot of us look at the other things too, which might not seem like a big deal at first, but we look at things like dress code, for example.
00:15:46
Speaker
There's a dignity and respect issue there when it comes to both student and teacher.
00:15:51
Speaker
Then we come back and say, well, how about we change dress code?
00:15:55
Speaker
And that sparks an argument that basically lasts until nothing else from our trip is ever going to be discussed.
00:16:01
Speaker
So how do we go about talking about designing the change that you're describing without getting too bogged down in one particular field or just exhausting ourselves in general?
00:16:10
Speaker
Well, I think that, you know, every, as I said, every school community and district has its own to roar.
00:16:17
Speaker
And, you know, there are sacred cows that are part of the traditions of education that we've evolved up.
00:16:23
Speaker
You know, if you think about if you were to go back to the early 1900s or late 1800s, I doubt if there was a lot of conversation about dress code.
00:16:32
Speaker
But that became something that, you know, is part of that command and control structure that we kept deepening over the 20th century.
00:16:40
Speaker
And I believe that the more that we selected for compliance in the adults in schools, the more that they came up with new ways to really go after compliance with kids.
00:16:52
Speaker
It was interesting because we had a visitor from Australia a few years ago to Albemarle Schools, and he kept taking pictures in a middle school of kids, and kids had on hats, and they were dressed in a variety of ways.
00:17:06
Speaker
And we said, why are you taking these pictures?
00:17:08
Speaker
He said, because I want to go back and say to my friends in Australia,
00:17:12
Speaker
Those of you who think that the only way that you can control kids' behavior and have a good discipline is through uniforms, here's an example of a school that has kids who really are well-behaved young people, you know, a very caring community, and they're in anything but uniforms.
00:17:31
Speaker
You know, we tend to...
00:17:32
Speaker
rely on outside structures like dress codes.
00:17:36
Speaker
And I call that an outside structure because the reality is we create these outside structures in schools that are very much alien to the way kids live their lives.
00:17:48
Speaker
Our kids, when they get opportunities to have a level of control that brings who they are from the outside into school,
00:18:01
Speaker
And to have the way they dress, the music they love, the games they play, the TV shows they watch, the things that they like to do.
00:18:12
Speaker
That's what really gives, I think, schools the opportunity to capitalize on kids come to us knowing different things.
00:18:22
Speaker
not less than each other, but a kid coming to us from a rural community into a school brings a knowledge of the world that's very different than a kid that's raised in an urban environment.
00:18:34
Speaker
They don't know less than each other, but they do know different.
00:18:38
Speaker
And when you're able to utilize what kids know and experience in their lives, you know, we talk about cultural responsiveness as really a critical part of what we as educators need to be able to do to create communities that are inclusive, inclusive.
00:18:57
Speaker
And an equity based.
00:18:59
Speaker
But the reality is that we oftentimes create structures, outside structures that we bring into school, like dress codes or cell phone bands or.
00:19:12
Speaker
curriculum that we've created around the knowledge that we think kids need to acquire that really put kids outside the learning versus bringing them inside it.
00:19:24
Speaker
You know, and as Ira said that one of his most wonderful experiences, spending a day with a teacher that he always tried to get in and spend time and love to be in middle schools in particular,
00:19:36
Speaker
But he was in a classroom and the kids were doing, they were creating a museum about westward expansion.
00:19:43
Speaker
And they were, you know, creating and making, whether it was digital or whether it was poster or whether it was cardboard, but they were going to create this class museum.
00:19:53
Speaker
And he said that one of the things that he realized is that this teacher had basically abandoned all the rules that tend to pit teachers and kids against each other.
00:20:05
Speaker
And as a result of that, that the kids were so engaged in the learning work that they were doing because there were no fights over how you were sitting or whether you were working on the floor, whether you were standing or whether you were chewing gum or looking at your cell phone, maybe to see, you know, if your mother had texted you or a friend, you know, had texted you, that when kids are given the same sort of, um,
00:20:32
Speaker
parameters that they have in their own homes, to lounge on the floor to read versus, you know, sit in a rigid chair.
00:20:39
Speaker
All of a sudden, when you take away the outside forces that have traditionalized our schools in ways that create boundaries between the teacher and the student,
00:20:53
Speaker
you start to see when you take those things away, what you really start to see is the raw energy of learning that is possible.
00:21:02
Speaker
And that's something that I was very rare for a number of years.
00:21:09
Speaker
But the thing that for me, Chris, right now that is so empowering, and I wish I had 30 more years to spend in education, and maybe I will, my mother's 97, so maybe I'll still be doing education when I'm in my 90s.
00:21:22
Speaker
But
00:21:23
Speaker
I do feel like that there seems to be sparks of innovative thinking about what's possible and taking that which we thought was impossible and making it possible.
00:21:35
Speaker
That's just sparking, not just, you know, in schools in the United States, but it's really all over the world.
00:21:42
Speaker
I think that we're on the cusp of finally getting back to the roots of who we are as learners that can have the potential to empower a kind of learning that we probably haven't seen in, you know, if not decades, even possibly hundreds of years or thousands of years.
00:22:01
Speaker
Right, right.
00:22:02
Speaker
I think what we're talking about here is spot on.
00:22:03
Speaker
And I want to go further on this idea of relevance and how we make the learning that happens in school matter to students.
00:22:10
Speaker
Sometimes I take an issue with educators, even though I don't think this is done maliciously, that they're trying to take what students love, for example, Fortnite, and pair it with traditional standards that they're already using.
00:22:23
Speaker
And these types of connections make no sense because that's not really a part of the student's space.
00:22:28
Speaker
It's not even necessarily useful information.
00:22:31
Speaker
How do we create relevant learning experiences that actually matter to students?
00:22:34
Speaker
The push for relevance, when I started teaching, and I started teaching in an open space school, middle school in 1975.
00:22:42
Speaker
So I've been doing education a long time and was fortunate to start in a very progressive environment that was, you know, inquiry based and hands on and really focused on how do you get kids?
00:22:56
Speaker
I mean, we didn't talk about the word engagement at the time.
00:22:59
Speaker
but it was really about active learning, how you activate kids as learners.
00:23:05
Speaker
But I think about relevance, that relevance back in that day was, you know, you get a textbook and at the end of a chapter, there's a picture of if you're studying,
00:23:16
Speaker
planets at the end of the chapter, there's something on the space program.
00:23:21
Speaker
There's like a little paragraph that you read in the kids, and so that makes it relevant.
00:23:25
Speaker
And then as you moved into the 80s and 90s, relevance kind of became more embedded in the text.
00:23:32
Speaker
so that you would actually maybe read about NASA as you were looking at in Earth science at astronomy themes.
00:23:42
Speaker
Maybe the teacher would bring a telescope out and everybody could like look through the telescope, you know, and you're making it relevant.
00:23:49
Speaker
And now, you know, I think about, you know, and Chad really nails it when he says in the book that what we used to do was to take content and try to put some context into it.
00:24:02
Speaker
But what really will be the power of learning in this century?
00:24:07
Speaker
And kids are doing it outside of school all the time now.
00:24:10
Speaker
And you see some of the more interesting work that goes on in school being kids are creating a context.
00:24:18
Speaker
that's about their lives and what they really find of interest.
00:24:22
Speaker
And then you try to put the content into that context, but it's not taking their love of Fortnite and going, let's make some traditional math problems from it.
00:24:33
Speaker
But it could be that one of the things that teachers start to understand is that gamification is,
00:24:40
Speaker
is a way that humans love to learn.
00:24:43
Speaker
We love games, whether it's board games or computer games or sports games on a field.
00:24:50
Speaker
We like to watch people gaming and we like to participate in games.
00:24:55
Speaker
So what a teacher might do is to take a gaming context
00:25:00
Speaker
that is really a space that kids occupy.
00:25:04
Speaker
They occupy the space of gaming and say, how do I really gamify some of the work that the adults deem important to learn that pulls kids in naturally to it?
00:25:18
Speaker
But what I have found is, and math is the worst case scenario for people trying to make relevant that which is not to kids.
00:25:26
Speaker
So, you know,
00:25:28
Speaker
It's everything from stupid math problems about how many balloons that you would need if you had a party and invited 20 people and you had red balloons and blue balloons and you wanted to equally distribute them and so forth and so on.
00:25:44
Speaker
Kids could care less about that because they know if kids come to a party,
00:25:47
Speaker
What you're going to do is you're going to have a bunch of balloons and people will grab them if they want them or not want them, and you'll end up using them to put water in them and throw at each other and stuff.
00:25:57
Speaker
But they're not interested in doing math problems about balloons.
00:26:00
Speaker
And so that for me is one of the reasons why we fail so badly at math.
00:26:06
Speaker
We haven't really figured out how do you take the context of what's really of interest to kids
00:26:14
Speaker
the ways that people learn and figure out how do you create a synergy that makes sense in math.
00:26:20
Speaker
You know, I was saying, somebody said the other day on Twitter, there was a thing about women, why there's so few women in leadership.
00:26:26
Speaker
And one of the women said that she didn't really pursue leadership because of the fact that she really didn't want to have to deal with fiscal issues that are associated with being a principal or a superintendent.
00:26:38
Speaker
And I came back and I, you know, and it was almost like that
00:26:41
Speaker
that people think of math as being magic and that it's only accessible to a few people and not many.
00:26:49
Speaker
But, you know, for me, one of the things that I always found of most interest is, you know, as a superintendent, basically to do
00:26:57
Speaker
budgeting in a school system, you've got to be able to add, multiply, divide, subtract, do some percentages and decimal places.
00:27:04
Speaker
But it's basically just, you know, it's like your finances in your home.
00:27:08
Speaker
But the most important thing you have to be able to do is to take the pie that you're given and figure out how to have as much of that pie going into direct services as kids as possible.
00:27:19
Speaker
That was always a challenge and always something that you had to think about through an opportunity pathway.
00:27:27
Speaker
in order to do that well and to figure out who else needs to be involved in that process.
00:27:33
Speaker
And so that for me made math very relevant and meaningful.
00:27:37
Speaker
But it's like I was telling Jeremy Williams the story about a kid who became a barber at age 14 in our system, and he figured out how to really finance up
00:27:49
Speaker
Things for his family, for himself, how to be able to expense costs.
00:27:54
Speaker
And it was so real for him.
00:27:56
Speaker
And yet what we do with kids is to make the idea of money, which kids love money and doing things with money.
00:28:07
Speaker
We create all of these relevant, irrelevant activities for them.
00:28:12
Speaker
that make no sense and they could care less about.
00:28:15
Speaker
But if you know your kids and you're able to figure out how to get them involved in co-creating some interesting experiences around that, all of a sudden you'll have kids doing math in ways that you never envisioned.
00:28:28
Speaker
When we built tree houses, which was probably one of my scariest moments as a superintendent, was seeing tree houses being built inside a school cafeteria.
00:28:37
Speaker
I thought the kids were going to build benches
00:28:40
Speaker
they decided they wanted to build tree houses to make their dining experience more interesting.
00:28:46
Speaker
And boy, it did.
00:28:47
Speaker
Math teacher at the school said to me, Pam, in the last two weeks of building these tree houses, kids have learned more about fractions and using fractions than they have probably since they started learning fractions in third grade.
00:29:03
Speaker
These were seventh graders.
00:29:04
Speaker
And he said, it's just intuitive to them.
00:29:07
Speaker
that they've got to understand fractions to be able to do measuring to build the tree houses they want to build.
00:29:13
Speaker
You know, and so that's what I think about is how is it that we create with kids a context for learning that allows us to input content when it's appropriate and when kids signal us, I need to know this in order to be able to do something that's really important to me.
00:29:34
Speaker
I agree.
00:29:34
Speaker
goes a little nuts, Sokol, over the concept of Genius Hour.
00:29:39
Speaker
And we all love Genius Hour, and we all love Google time.
00:29:42
Speaker
You know, how do you get kids involved in, quote, interest or passion projects?
00:29:47
Speaker
But he always says, what if the school week was
00:29:51
Speaker
genius we and what we did was a direct instruction hour he said you know obviously there are times when kids need to be engaged with a teacher in something that feels more direct and explicit but why do we have 80 of the time so focused by the teacher directly
00:30:11
Speaker
and very little indirect learning time where kids are pursuing that which is of interest and value from their perspective as a nine-year-old or a 12-year-old or an 18-year-old.
00:30:22
Speaker
Most of what we do in public schools today in this country is driven by the number of tests we give.
00:30:29
Speaker
And we know teacher after teacher says, oh, that test doesn't really tell you what that kid can do.
00:30:36
Speaker
And yet that's what we continue to do over and over and over again.
00:30:40
Speaker
I'm really proud of the state of Virginia because they've eliminated a number of their state tests and continue to look at how do we have more local control that lets kids show us what they can do through project
00:30:56
Speaker
focus, through performance focus versus through these multiple choice tests.
00:31:01
Speaker
And I see other states are really trying to move towards that.
00:31:04
Speaker
I think that's really the big battle line for education today in this country is that as long as teachers feel like their livelihoods
00:31:15
Speaker
and their kids' livelihoods are so dependent on test scores, it's really hard to step out of that box and try things that are incredibly relevant to what kids need for this century and the 22nd century.
00:31:29
Speaker
We've got a lot of kids alive right now.
00:31:31
Speaker
They'll be alive in the 22nd century.
00:31:33
Speaker
My gosh, what will that be like?
00:31:35
Speaker
Based off your experience in the education system and specifically your engagement and progressive ideas,
00:31:41
Speaker
What hopes do you have for the future of education?
Optimism for Educational Reform
00:31:44
Speaker
Is it dim?
00:31:45
Speaker
Do you think we're finally going to make widespread change happen?
00:31:48
Speaker
You know, the work that we did that's represented in Timeless Learning, and we certainly couldn't represent all of the stories.
00:31:54
Speaker
I tell people I could fill room after room after room after room with teachers and kids who have done amazing work in our former district.
00:32:02
Speaker
You know, Chad is continuing that work there.
00:32:05
Speaker
But the reality is that that work is happening all over the country right now.
00:32:10
Speaker
You're aware of it.
00:32:11
Speaker
You're profiling it.
00:32:13
Speaker
And we need to just keep uplifting those stories and
00:32:16
Speaker
Because our parents realize that what our kids have been getting is really meals that are not healthy meals of learning.
00:32:28
Speaker
And I think our parents yearn for healthy meals, our kids do, and our teachers do.
00:32:32
Speaker
So I think the tide has the potential to turn.
00:32:35
Speaker
We're not there yet.
00:32:37
Speaker
But I think with a lot of work and keeping that flame not just sparking but connecting to build bigger flames, that we have the potential to really set on fire the learning that is possible for our kids.
00:32:53
Speaker
So thank you for being one of those sparks.
00:32:55
Speaker
I really appreciate having the chance to talk with you.
00:32:57
Speaker
If any of these ideas resonated with you, I'd highly encourage you to check out Timeless Learning by Pam Moran, as well as Ira Sokol and Chad Ratliff.
00:33:05
Speaker
I've linked the book in our review in the show notes, and I really think it's worth checking out.
00:33:22
Speaker
My name is Tim Fox, Fox like Guy Fox, who famously tried to blow up Parliament in the early 17th century.
00:33:30
Speaker
My career has been teaching music, mostly instrumental music.
00:33:34
Speaker
I've taught a little bit of elementary, some middle school, a lot of high school, and a little bit of college.
00:33:40
Speaker
Orchestra, band, guitar, piano, a little bit of music theory, a little bit of general music.
00:33:46
Speaker
And the last 10 years, most of my job,
00:33:50
Speaker
has been teaching strings, orchestra, class guitar at a high school 20 miles due west of Chicago in a town called Lombard, Illinois.
00:33:59
Speaker
Tim Fox wants to radically change the music classroom to be equitable for all.
00:34:03
Speaker
This is a personal topic for me.
00:34:05
Speaker
Both of my parents are music teachers, and I grew up in orchestra, choir, playing piano, and I absolutely love music education.
00:34:12
Speaker
So when Tim reached out to me wanting to talk about this stuff, I was super stoked.
00:34:16
Speaker
So starting off, I wanted to figure out what caused him to start rethinking his class.
00:34:21
Speaker
I've taught for close to 20 years now, and I feel like my teaching has gotten so much different as one would hope it would after you've taught for almost 20 years.
00:34:30
Speaker
I used to be really focused almost exclusively on how the students could perform.
00:34:37
Speaker
What was the end point of the performance?
00:34:40
Speaker
And could that performance be as close to mastery as possible?
00:34:45
Speaker
Every year or two, I would have another epiphany that would make me realize that I was making myself unhappy and that my unhappiness was making my students unhappy because my my sole focus was the product product they could produce at the end.
00:35:04
Speaker
I didn't think at all about the process and how I wanted the process to feel.
00:35:08
Speaker
As the world has changed, as my students have changed, as the political environment in the nation and the world has changed, I think it's forced a lot of us to think about, well, gosh, what are we really doing here?
00:35:22
Speaker
And I have had a number of epiphanies that have kind of had to do with what my students feel and what my students think and how making music might be useful to them
00:35:33
Speaker
for reasons that don't have much to do with music, that have to do with their happiness and their agency and their emotional self-regulation and their problem-solving skills and their sense of connectedness to something within their souls and their sense of connectedness to other people.
00:35:49
Speaker
And so that is entirely where I live these days, that it's making music.
00:35:56
Speaker
And I was going to say studying music, but really making music, you know, that every day, every day is the
00:36:04
Speaker
every day is, you know, you're living it all the time.
00:36:06
Speaker
So making music and living in music, you know, what that does in terms of helping all people be happy and self-actualized.
00:36:16
Speaker
Right, right, right.
00:36:16
Speaker
I'm curious what this looks like in practice then.
00:36:18
Speaker
Like, what does it mean to make a more democratic music classroom?
00:36:22
Speaker
Music classrooms, and particularly, there's some difference between ensemble music classrooms.
00:36:28
Speaker
You need your band rehearsal, your choir rehearsal, your orchestra rehearsal, as opposed to something like,
00:36:34
Speaker
class piano in a piano lab where every kid might be doing their own thing.
00:36:38
Speaker
But the ensemble music classroom is a curious thing.
00:36:41
Speaker
You know, on the one hand, we've sort of been doing project-based for over 100 years, but the flip side of it is the instruction is
00:36:50
Speaker
So teacher-centered.
00:36:53
Speaker
At every turn, it's the teacher chooses the music.
00:36:56
Speaker
The teacher chooses the warm-ups.
00:36:57
Speaker
The teacher seats the students in the way that the teacher needs to seat them.
00:37:02
Speaker
The teacher delivers all the instruction.
00:37:05
Speaker
And a lot of the instruction is just the teacher telling students, do this, do this, do this.
00:37:09
Speaker
Don't do this.
00:37:10
Speaker
No, not like that.
00:37:11
Speaker
More like this.
00:37:12
Speaker
Hey, you over there.
00:37:13
Speaker
Be quiet.
00:37:14
Speaker
You know, it's all kind of coming from the teacher in the traditional model.
00:37:18
Speaker
But if we only operate that way, we never teach the students how to, you know, how to exist with each other and how to have a society.
00:37:26
Speaker
And I am becoming more and more interested in, like, gosh, we have to teach people how to have a society.
00:37:33
Speaker
I do a lot of things to connect the students to other students.
00:37:37
Speaker
So,
00:37:38
Speaker
We'll have, you know, we'll have evening events before the start of the year that are purely social in nature.
00:37:44
Speaker
And they might be, hey, all the students in orchestra come and let's play games and have a scavenger hunt at the school.
00:37:51
Speaker
Or let's take a bus into downtown Chicago and see an outdoor concert by a professional orchestra.
00:37:56
Speaker
In class, I try to build in time for students to interact with each other, and sometimes I kind of structure that.
00:38:03
Speaker
For whatever reason, I find as a person who teaches mostly string instruments, I tend to attract a lot of introverted students.
00:38:11
Speaker
Not all, but I think more than in the average classroom.
00:38:15
Speaker
So I have to structure opportunities for them to interact with each other.
00:38:18
Speaker
So sometimes I'll use random group generators to generate groups for them to chat about their weekends in.
00:38:26
Speaker
And in those things, you know, sometimes we'll do, you know, we'll have mock conversations or we'll talk about, you know, before the start of the conversation, hey, if a person says thing X,
00:38:37
Speaker
You know, what what can you do other than just like letting that hang there silently?
00:38:41
Speaker
And so we'll talk about like how to how to answer a follow up, you know, ask a follow up question and how to answer a follow up question and how to keep the conversation going and how to sustain eye contact with a person.
00:38:52
Speaker
We on Fridays, we do we do shout outs.
00:38:54
Speaker
So all week students can fill out a shout out.
00:38:57
Speaker
and put it in the shout-out box.
00:38:59
Speaker
One of the kids in the class reads the shout-outs on Fridays.
00:39:02
Speaker
I try to have the students work in groups as often as possible.
00:39:05
Speaker
In my orchestra classes, the students are assigned stand partners, and I just kind of nurture that stand partner relationship.
00:39:12
Speaker
So we have every year in the spring, we do stand partner appreciation day.
00:39:17
Speaker
And so the kids are welcome to, you know, write a note or buy a small gift for their stand partner.
00:39:23
Speaker
I also bring a bunch of things that they can give to their stand partner.
00:39:26
Speaker
The kids set up and decorated a photo booth so they could take, you know, they could take pictures with their stand partner.
00:39:34
Speaker
I let students post those on the class social media accounts.
00:39:37
Speaker
So a lot of it is just kind of structuring those human interactions.
00:39:41
Speaker
And then it's always that question, Chris, I find of,
00:39:45
Speaker
Okay, what are the things that I'm deciding that they can decide?
00:39:49
Speaker
Can they pick the music?
00:39:50
Speaker
One of my extracurricular groups performed at our state music convention in January, and I set up a schoology group.
00:39:58
Speaker
As soon as I found out we got accepted to do that,
00:40:00
Speaker
And I had the students discuss their repertoire ideas and they really steered most of it.
00:40:06
Speaker
And I, you know, some of their suggestions I just took and we did them.
00:40:09
Speaker
A couple of them, I kind of steered them, you know, slightly, but they can pick the music.
00:40:14
Speaker
Can they diagram what needs to be done in rehearsal to make the music more performance ready?
00:40:21
Speaker
Sometimes in my non-performance classes, my guitar class or my piano class,
00:40:26
Speaker
Sometimes if there's a period where the next kind of unit is not immediately clear, the district-issued curriculum for my Guitar 2 class is the words Guitar 2.
00:40:37
Speaker
So we're always just kind of making it up as we go along.
00:40:41
Speaker
Sometimes it's a matter of just asking the students, well, what do you want to learn about?
00:40:45
Speaker
And I find a lot of students have never been asked that, as I'm sure you do, too.
00:40:50
Speaker
Some of them can't quite articulate a lot of ideas in that way because that that tap hasn't really been turned on for them.
00:40:59
Speaker
But I think even with those students, it's not wasted time because you're you're kind of turning on the tap.
00:41:04
Speaker
And getting them to take more control.
00:41:06
Speaker
And then, you know, some of my students will just tell me, oh, well, we want more of this.
00:41:11
Speaker
We want more of this.
00:41:12
Speaker
We'd love to learn more of this.
00:41:13
Speaker
Do you have any songs like this that we could play?
00:41:16
Speaker
And I'm thrilled about those things.
00:41:18
Speaker
So those are my those are my main types of things that I try to do to build the classroom climate.
00:41:25
Speaker
It's a lot of structuring ways for them to connect to each other, making sure that they have ways to celebrate and compliment each other, you know, making sure they know each other's names, helping them practice those things, and then just giving them as much decision making power as as they can.
00:41:41
Speaker
The infusion of critical pedagogy with the arts is one of the most interesting topics, and I love the idea of flipping the narrative on arts instruction in particular.
00:41:51
Speaker
Considering how much music and art relates to, I suppose, our soul, it's how we see and feel in the world.
00:41:58
Speaker
Giving the opportunity for students to really connect and feel that's really powerful.
00:42:03
Speaker
Do you feel any struggle when giving up or changing from what's usually a traditional stand-in-the-liver model when it comes to music education?
00:42:13
Speaker
instrumental music classes and choir classes to spend a chunk of the year not rehearsing in the big group, but students are split up and they're working on solo work or chamber ensemble work.
00:42:22
Speaker
Really valuable stuff, really valuable stuff.
00:42:25
Speaker
Early in my teaching career, I used to have students in solo and ensemble time who would ask me, hey, we don't want to play this Haydn piece.
00:42:31
Speaker
Can we play something from The Little Mermaid?
00:42:34
Speaker
and i'm old you know like at first those kinds of things annoyed me because i would feel like oh great now i think now i have to find music for you or i have to arrange music i can't believe this but now i totally come around on this whole thing so i don't even call it solo and ensemble i call it p.y.p for pursue your passion and so the students do um
00:42:57
Speaker
Everything from we're going to learn a masterwork of chamber music by Mendelssohn or Brahms to five sophomore violinists are going to learn the melody to their favorite Bruno Mars song and perform it with the original song operating like a karaoke track everywhere in between.
00:43:17
Speaker
I had a couple of seniors who are really into like indie folk rock.
00:43:21
Speaker
So they covered a Lumineers song.
00:43:24
Speaker
I had kids learning theme songs to their, to their favorite TV shows and from like, you know, YouTube things that I'd never heard of.
00:43:32
Speaker
And all of a sudden, you know, it became less of a chore for them to do and less of a chore for me to teach it.
00:43:39
Speaker
You know, attempts by teachers to like make the content relevant to,
00:43:45
Speaker
I mean, great, right?
00:43:46
Speaker
Great.
00:43:48
Speaker
But sometimes we don't know what's relevant to them.
00:43:53
Speaker
And so sometimes if we just, like, I will slave away for weeks on something that I hope will be relevant to them, and then it's not, and then I'm crushed about it.
00:44:03
Speaker
And so I finally learned to not do that and instead just ask them what they want and help them do that.
00:44:10
Speaker
And something that's really stuck out to me about your interest is this idea of equity and what that means.
00:44:16
Speaker
means.
00:44:16
Speaker
I mean, music class does have the opportunity to be very reflective of the population, but there are a lot of racist and sexist stereotypes, a lot within the class itself, as well as the curriculum.
00:44:27
Speaker
How do you go about creating an equitable classroom?
00:44:30
Speaker
It's a big question in the profession.
00:44:33
Speaker
I think that music teachers need to recognize that
00:44:36
Speaker
how white our literature is and has been.
00:44:40
Speaker
And so the question of like, do working class Latinx students want to play Mozart?
00:44:48
Speaker
Well, actually a lot of them totally do, but also one must reckon with the question.
00:44:54
Speaker
It ranges from, gosh, the vendor that might rent instruments.
00:44:59
Speaker
Usually they have people who speak the languages that the families in your community speak at home.
00:45:06
Speaker
You know, if if there are a lot of Spanish speaking families in your community, is there a vendor who who can speak Spanish and drop contracts in Spanish, for instance?
00:45:15
Speaker
We've made a huge effort and secured some grant funds to secure more instruments that are owned by and live at the school so that our low income students can can have them.
00:45:26
Speaker
And that's been really important for us the last number of years.
00:45:31
Speaker
There are genuinely a lot of students who I don't think would have participated otherwise.
00:45:35
Speaker
I find with students who want to be music majors in college, but maybe who don't come from the typical background of those kinds of... You're right.
00:45:45
Speaker
They don't have the background of that type of student.
00:45:48
Speaker
I need to teach them how to kind of play the college admissions game more.
00:45:52
Speaker
The idea of, you know, choosing college audition music and how you schedule a college audition and what that means and the kinds of things you need to be working on.
00:46:02
Speaker
I find more of those things fall to me.
00:46:05
Speaker
Rather than, well, have your parents figure it out, have your private lesson teacher figure it out.
00:46:10
Speaker
And I'm walking side by side with the student on those things, and I love that.
00:46:15
Speaker
There's also the issue of the class material.
00:46:18
Speaker
Our high school started this past year running a hip-hop production course.
00:46:23
Speaker
And we're one of just a few high schools that have a class like that.
00:46:27
Speaker
In our school district, that class is the only majority black enrolled course in the entire school district.
00:46:37
Speaker
So it tells us, oh, gosh, we're reaching students we hadn't been reaching.
00:46:42
Speaker
And the class came out of a deep look at the demographics of our school and then a deep look at the demographics of our music program and realizing that
00:46:52
Speaker
oh gosh, here are the populations of students that aren't really taking our classes.
00:46:56
Speaker
And so, yes, we need to market better.
00:46:58
Speaker
Yes, we need to reach out better.
00:47:00
Speaker
But also, maybe we're just not offering things that some groups of students want.
00:47:05
Speaker
You know, we've tried also to make sure that our class material is a little bit more diverse.
00:47:11
Speaker
I was ashamed a couple of years ago to go back through, you know, eight years of concert programs and realize that
00:47:18
Speaker
almost every piece was composed by a white male.
00:47:23
Speaker
Almost every one.
00:47:24
Speaker
You know, and a lot of that is, you know, orchestras have hundreds of years of repertoire and most of the stuff that is available for us was composed by white men, but no excuses at this point.
00:47:36
Speaker
And we know we have to work harder at those things.
00:47:39
Speaker
And
00:47:39
Speaker
My students and I have had some real deep conversations about those things, about repertoire, about the classical music field.
00:47:48
Speaker
We've talked about what are the barriers to entry for them at the student level.
00:47:52
Speaker
We've looked at similar issues with diversity issues in professional orchestras and talked about what they think some of the issues are there.
00:48:00
Speaker
And then we've been really trying to kind of diversify the repertoire.
00:48:04
Speaker
So like a lot of schools, we do a department-wide concert every December that is centered around seasonal music.
00:48:16
Speaker
And, you know, rather than kind of choosing the typical holiday fair this year, I went to our Latinx students and just asked them,
00:48:28
Speaker
hey, what are the seasonal songs that you and your families listen to at home?
00:48:34
Speaker
And a few of them made playlists for me.
00:48:37
Speaker
It was really interesting to listen to all these carols.
00:48:40
Speaker
I found one that I really liked called Los Paces en el Rio.
00:48:43
Speaker
I happened to find a mariachi
00:48:46
Speaker
Arrangement of it by a group called Mariachi Arena Los Angeles.
00:48:50
Speaker
And so then I transcribed that for the orchestra to play.
00:48:53
Speaker
The students and I did a piece of music by a black woman composer named Florence Price a few months ago.
00:49:02
Speaker
Florence Price was the first woman of color to have her music played by the Chicago Symphony.
00:49:06
Speaker
And interestingly enough, there was a Chicago Public Elementary School named for Florence Price that was closed several years ago in the very large round of Chicago Public School closings.
00:49:19
Speaker
So it had all these ties to current social justice issues and
00:49:25
Speaker
So, you know, with, with diversifying the class material, I'm at the very beginning, but, but we're really trying, you know, and even in, even in my guitar classes, you know, concepts that I used to teach via the Rolling Stones, can I teach that same concept through this XXXTentacion song that is like aesthetically worthwhile?
00:49:45
Speaker
You know, I used to teach the baseline to this,
00:49:50
Speaker
King Floyd song, but instead I'm going to teach the bass line to this MC Light song.
00:49:58
Speaker
It's a slow journey for us.
00:50:00
Speaker
And I think that music teachers have a lot of ground to make up in this realm, but those are some of the things we're doing and we're really trying.
00:50:08
Speaker
For sure.
00:50:09
Speaker
And I think that any effort that's being made to act on these changes is worthwhile.
00:50:13
Speaker
And obviously, any star is a good one.
00:50:15
Speaker
But of course, music has some specific barriers as it's often the bottom of the feud chain when it comes to school funding and cuts.
00:50:23
Speaker
So in Ohio, we have a really archaic way of funding school programs.
00:50:27
Speaker
If voters don't support specific levies, which means increasing or keeping their taxes high, basically all after-school programs, including music programs, are shut down.
00:50:37
Speaker
This used to be really nerve-wracking to our family because, one, I mean, it's distinguishing your whole program.
00:50:42
Speaker
You lose money.
00:50:43
Speaker
years of practice and training from anywhere from jazz bands to show choirs, whatever it might be.
00:50:48
Speaker
And it's not a prime position to be in.
00:50:50
Speaker
So how do you convince the local community that what you're doing is worthwhile and deserves funding and deserves attention?
00:50:57
Speaker
Though we want our students to strive for intrinsic satisfaction rather than external rewards,
00:51:04
Speaker
I do think a lot of music teachers have to justify their existence through some kinds of external accolades.
00:51:14
Speaker
Now, that could mean getting the highest rating at the state assessment.
00:51:21
Speaker
It could mean playing every ribbon cutting in your town and getting a bunch of photos in the paper for it.
00:51:29
Speaker
It could mean being willing to send musicians into the community to play at a local homeless shelter, at the local nursing homes, doing some things that have some PR sizzle, attract the attention of the community that drive people to come to your performances.
00:51:48
Speaker
I think that is a piece of what we do.
00:51:50
Speaker
And really, I think most teachers
00:51:54
Speaker
are in a position now that they're always kind of starting what they're doing.
00:51:59
Speaker
And, you know, we could argue about the pluses or minuses of that, but I think that's just where we are.
00:52:04
Speaker
And then beyond that, you know, I think it's really making sure that every kid feels connected to it.
00:52:15
Speaker
You know, that every kid feels like they're having an experience that
00:52:20
Speaker
They're having an experience every day where they feel loved and cared for and that they're learning and growing about things in which they want to learn and grow and that they feel like they're in a supportive space where others are looking out for that.
00:52:41
Speaker
I think that's the, it sounds corny, but that's the best advertisement for your program that you can possibly have.
00:52:51
Speaker
you
00:53:05
Speaker
I hope you're enjoying the podcast thus far.
00:53:07
Speaker
I sincerely appreciate you listening in.
00:53:09
Speaker
And if you enjoy the work, please head over to humanrestorationproject.org to find our free resources and wealth of writings.
00:53:16
Speaker
And then, if you think we should keep going, take a gander at our Patreon page.
00:53:20
Speaker
For a dollar a month, you'll receive a professional, print-ready electronic magazine of our work every two months.
00:53:26
Speaker
But as always, all of that work is available free online.
Resources for Educators and Community Involvement
00:53:30
Speaker
Specifically, I'd like to encourage you to check out our one-page PD on curation.
00:53:34
Speaker
It's a simple guide to the benefits of putting student work on display and how you create a culture of learning in your physical space.
00:53:42
Speaker
Check it out.
00:53:45
Speaker
I came to Uganda because they wanted to experience something different in education.
00:53:51
Speaker
I also came for the adventure of Uganda.
00:53:53
Speaker
So I'm working here as the assistant principal.
00:53:56
Speaker
I kind of like fell into that role as well.
00:53:58
Speaker
I came as a grade five teacher and the school I thought needed a little bit of some change to do something different.
00:54:06
Speaker
And so I just stepped into the position to hopefully bring about some of that change.
00:54:10
Speaker
This is Ryan Hopkins Wilcox, who has taught in Taiwan, Washington, D.C., Cambodia, currently in Uganda, and soon Kenya.
00:54:19
Speaker
We talk about Ryan's purpose and goals in education.
00:54:22
Speaker
I'm trying to, I guess, design experiences that would spark learning.
00:54:26
Speaker
I'm trying to get away from experiences that are planned and instead look at experiences that are designed.
00:54:34
Speaker
I think the difference is that when you plan something, you have a clear goal in mind and you already know the outcome of what's going to happen.
00:54:40
Speaker
And when you design something, you kind of just have a framework for it, some ideas behind it, and then the design takes life for itself.
00:54:48
Speaker
So we're looking at designing experiences that could take life
00:54:52
Speaker
with the students and allow them to then become co-creators, co-designers in those experiences and really to spark learning.
00:55:01
Speaker
I think too often we also plan for learning with questions that we as teachers already know the answers to.
00:55:07
Speaker
And I'd rather us look at bigger questions that we don't know the answers to that we can explore alongside our students.
00:55:14
Speaker
That terminology that you're using is really powerful, and I really love the way that you've worded that.
00:55:18
Speaker
Could you talk about if it's possible to design learning experiences this way everywhere?
00:55:23
Speaker
I think everything is possible.
00:55:24
Speaker
It only is impossible if we stop trying.
00:55:27
Speaker
And so no matter where we are, I think we need to stick to what our real beliefs are about learning and about education.
00:55:34
Speaker
And yes, I would agree that in some areas it is more difficult, but I think it's just more of a challenge for us to then convince other people to come alongside us.
00:55:45
Speaker
to really solve for themselves the question of what is learning and what do we believe about learning.
00:55:50
Speaker
Too often we kind of gloss over that and we think more about what is school, what is education, what are we supposed to be doing here, what's the objective that we're learning, and we forget just what is that core understanding of learning.
00:56:04
Speaker
And so when we start having other people question that, I think we can help
00:56:08
Speaker
create more change and bring them alongside us.
00:56:11
Speaker
But I would, yeah, I would definitely say that it's only impossible if you stop trying.
00:56:15
Speaker
And how do you go about training staff then to meet those design goals?
00:56:19
Speaker
What I see my role as being is to design experiences that spark learning for everyone, that spark learning for our adult learners as well.
00:56:29
Speaker
And so I kind of see it as my role to provide provocations for people to think about, to help them reconsider what education is, what school is for them.
00:56:38
Speaker
And I think eventually with enough dialogue and discussion
00:56:42
Speaker
we can find some common ground.
00:56:44
Speaker
And with that common ground, we can build from there.
00:56:48
Speaker
I think we're all here for the same love of learning.
00:56:51
Speaker
The parents bring their children here for that reason.
00:56:54
Speaker
The students come here for that reason.
00:56:55
Speaker
Teachers come here.
00:56:56
Speaker
It's just we have to find that common space where we can talk about it together.
00:57:01
Speaker
And I think if we ask enough questions and we provide enough provocations to get people really thinking about what their beliefs are, we can then uncover those core beliefs that connect us
00:57:12
Speaker
I really like that idea of designing learning experiences for the staff.
00:57:17
Speaker
What does that look like in practice?
00:57:19
Speaker
So we usually start in the beginning of the year with a large provocation that will kind of set the pace or the tone of
00:57:27
Speaker
for the learning that we're hoping to explore together that year.
00:57:31
Speaker
For example, one year we were looking at inquiry.
00:57:34
Speaker
And so we bought a book for all the teachers, Kath Murdoch's book, The Power of Inquiry.
00:57:39
Speaker
And we provided that to everyone as kind of the provocation.
00:57:43
Speaker
And then from there, we give back all of our professional learning times kind of to the teachers.
00:57:49
Speaker
Once the provocation is in place, once we're having those similar conversations, once we have those connections, then some teachers want to have, say, a chapter study with that book.
00:57:59
Speaker
And so they'll set up a chapter study club.
00:58:02
Speaker
Other teachers might want to go on, do an online learning session for professional development.
00:58:07
Speaker
And so we've had teachers do that together.
00:58:09
Speaker
We do what we call personal learning journey.
00:58:12
Speaker
And so with kind of this vision in place, then teachers...
00:58:16
Speaker
select what they want to learn about and they use their, it's Wednesdays is our time, they use their Wednesday time to follow their professional learning journey.
00:58:26
Speaker
Within that we sprinkle in sometimes for what we call choice workshops and R&D labs and so that's kind of just a chance for us to kind of open our classroom doors to allow our teachers to become leaders in learning as well and so in a choice workshop the teachers share some of the learning they've been doing in their personal learning journeys
00:58:46
Speaker
or maybe some strategies they've been using in the classroom.
00:58:49
Speaker
It's kind of like an EdCamp unconference idea.
00:58:51
Speaker
And then in R&D labs, they actually bring out the things that they're doing in the classroom and we try it out together.
00:58:58
Speaker
So the music teacher brought out the Legos and had us compose our own song and then play it based on the pattern that the Legos were creating in an arrangement.
00:59:07
Speaker
So it's different things like that, but we really...
00:59:10
Speaker
We design learning together and we're trying to model that for our teachers as much as we want them to model that for their students.
00:59:17
Speaker
So we provide provocations, we provide a common vision, and then we kind of just give the learning back to them and we walk alongside them learning together.
00:59:27
Speaker
You know, individualized PD and using progressive ideas for training staff is a really cool idea, and I wish that that would catch on that adults are learners too.
00:59:36
Speaker
They should be treated in the exact same way that we would expect for students.
00:59:41
Speaker
But there's still a lot of adversity toward these ideas.
00:59:43
Speaker
How would you encourage teachers who feel disparaged in their local area to enact these ideas within their school district?
00:59:50
Speaker
I think you have a lot of control or design and creativity within your classroom.
00:59:57
Speaker
When I thought about switching schools and looking for another job,
01:00:02
Speaker
If I can't find a school that's going to let me be who I am in a leadership position, I'd rather be in the classroom because I can lead change in my classroom.
01:00:09
Speaker
And I don't need a lot of permission to do that.
01:00:12
Speaker
As long as I'm, you know, following the rules, then I have a lot of design and creativity there.
01:00:19
Speaker
So I'd say that teachers in the classroom should kind of embrace that and look at what do they believe about learning in their classroom and how can they design their classroom to support their beliefs.
01:00:31
Speaker
And hopefully do that with their children as well, with the students.
01:00:35
Speaker
What are the barriers that are provided by our classroom and what would better support our learning?
01:00:40
Speaker
How can we design our space?
01:00:41
Speaker
And I think considering space beyond just the physical space.
01:00:46
Speaker
And to change the subject here slightly, I want to focus in on your experience specifically as an international educator.
01:00:52
Speaker
It seems like there's a lot of misconceptions surrounding education in different parts of the world.
01:00:56
Speaker
Could you talk a little more on this?
01:00:58
Speaker
There's a lot of misconceptions about what education is like in Africa.
01:01:02
Speaker
I think some of them are based on, you know, what the media tends to share about what life in Africa might be like and classifying an entire continent as a country.
01:01:14
Speaker
I think it's the same thing, you know, thinking about Taiwan and Asia, that a lot of those areas get lumped together.
01:01:21
Speaker
I think the biggest misconception is what people believe about how different cultures value learning.
01:01:28
Speaker
And I don't think that there is a difference in how cultures value learning.
01:01:32
Speaker
Everyone thinks learning is important.
01:01:35
Speaker
How they approach learning is different.
01:01:38
Speaker
And a lot of that goes back to their culture.
01:01:41
Speaker
I think even how they learn language.
01:01:44
Speaker
And in Taiwan, the script is, you know, character based script.
01:01:48
Speaker
And how you learn to read that script is a very different process.
01:01:52
Speaker
The skill of learning how to learn in that language is a different process than learning, say, English.
01:01:58
Speaker
And so they approach learning differently in Taiwan.
01:02:03
Speaker
But I don't think it's a difference in how they value learning.
01:02:05
Speaker
So how do you go about navigating these different systems of education?
01:02:09
Speaker
I think there's a lot of barriers to education that are put up by the systems and structures that we have to work within.
01:02:16
Speaker
And learning how to navigate that as a student, as a teacher, and as a parent, I think is what really...
01:02:23
Speaker
puts that block to learning for a lot of our students.
01:02:26
Speaker
If you just, I mean, when I moved to Taiwan, I was, you know, an immigrant and I didn't understand how the systems and structures worked there.
01:02:33
Speaker
And so I made a lot of mistakes and I didn't know who to talk to and how to go about it.
01:02:37
Speaker
You can imagine a parent who's moved there with a child wouldn't know how to advocate for their child.
01:02:42
Speaker
And the child themselves wouldn't know how to advocate because you don't understand how that system works.
01:02:48
Speaker
So unfortunately, I think the barriers that we create in education, we create by the systems and structures that we put in place and by not helping to educate everybody who's a part of that learning community about how it works.
01:03:04
Speaker
It's interesting to note the outside structure statement that Ryan makes here.
01:03:09
Speaker
It's basically the same thing that Pam Moran said.
01:03:11
Speaker
We're creating our own problems by just doing what's always been done.
01:03:15
Speaker
The more layers that we put up that impact a student's learning for no reason outside of that's the way that we do things, the worse learning outcomes are going to be all around.
01:03:25
Speaker
It's not just bad for students.
01:03:27
Speaker
I mean, they're the ones being told to obey rules and regulations or learn a certain way that's counterintuitive to them.
01:03:34
Speaker
But it's also bad for teachers.
01:03:35
Speaker
We are expected to follow these rules.
01:03:37
Speaker
and teach in a certain way or else face reprimand.
01:03:40
Speaker
And if we push back against that system in our own way, that's usually quite stressful and it hurts our own social emotional well-being.
01:03:47
Speaker
It's worth contemplating for all of us on what outside structures we are in control of, and as a school, how we can work together to convince all stakeholders that it's no longer worth keeping those things around.
01:03:59
Speaker
These aren't always big things.
01:04:00
Speaker
They're things like bathroom passes, handbook sign-outs,
01:04:04
Speaker
late penalties, how we assign homework, if at all, how we grade, three strike rules, dress codes, essentially a lot of the things that we did when we were in school that might not be the best way of doing things.
01:04:18
Speaker
How does navigating these different systems of education tie in with the difficulties you have adapting then to the culture of these different places as you're moving around from place to place?
01:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think we do have a lot of cultural misunderstandings because of the diversity, especially here in Uganda.
01:04:36
Speaker
We have a very diverse school.
01:04:38
Speaker
And so a lot of our parents are from different cultures that value and believe in different things.
01:04:44
Speaker
And like I said, I think we all value learning, but it's how we approach learning and what parts of learning we think are most valuable for our children.
01:04:54
Speaker
I think the best way we can navigate that is just by listening more.
01:04:58
Speaker
I don't think we take enough time to hear out people and what their why is.
01:05:04
Speaker
We just assume, well, that parent doesn't know what they're doing because they've chosen to say no to this for their child or they want this for their child instead.
01:05:12
Speaker
We've not asked them why.
01:05:13
Speaker
We've not asked them what belief is behind that, how we could help support them.
01:05:18
Speaker
I think it's just really a matter of making those personal connections so that kind of the cultural divide falls away.
01:05:26
Speaker
What hopes do you have surrounding the future of school design and the learners within them?
01:05:31
Speaker
I think there's a little bit of both.
01:05:33
Speaker
I think there's a lot of hope out there in the world as different schools are trying different things and are sharing new ideas.
01:05:41
Speaker
I think the power of the internet and our ability to communicate across cultures and beyond countries is going to be amazing.
01:05:50
Speaker
I think that's where we'll really see a learning revolution start to take place.
01:05:54
Speaker
I think, unfortunately, some governments are maybe putting a little too much control on education and on learning and maybe not consulting the learners themselves that are making decisions mandated on test scores.
01:06:08
Speaker
But I don't think that that's going to be able to survive as other schools develop further as role models for the rest of the world.
01:06:16
Speaker
I really hope that we look at school and we see how little it's changed and start thinking about how much it needs to change and how it should be reflective of the modern experience that people are having in the world today and that we really need to have responsive learning environments that support that kind of experience that we want our children to be prepared for.
01:06:39
Speaker
And finally, one last question.
01:06:41
Speaker
How does international education tie in with both the interconnectedness of learning as you're describing, but also the dark history that surrounds colonialism?
01:06:51
Speaker
I mean, most of the world has a Eurocentric education system, including its curriculum.
01:06:56
Speaker
What does it mean to be a teacher from the West in this environment?
01:07:00
Speaker
I think, unfortunately, the Western culture still dominates in education.
01:07:05
Speaker
I think that we in international schools have this amazing experience to learn from the local cultures and to see how...
01:07:14
Speaker
how education is working for them, but also look at it worldwide.
01:07:18
Speaker
Where is education not working?
01:07:20
Speaker
Why isn't it working?
01:07:22
Speaker
And what can we learn from that?
01:07:23
Speaker
Some of the disconnect that our parents have here are some are Ugandan parents.
01:07:28
Speaker
We have we have a lot of different cultures here, but the Ugandan parents grew up obviously in Uganda and the Ugandan school system.
01:07:35
Speaker
They maybe don't understand how school is changing and what it could look like.
01:07:41
Speaker
And so for them, the experience of their children being in an international school is a very large departure from their own schooling experience.
01:07:51
Speaker
And so just trying to help educate them of what we're trying to do and more importantly, why we're trying to do it has been really key.
01:08:00
Speaker
So we've been taking some of our ideas into the wider community through what we call an ISU lecture series.
01:08:06
Speaker
ISU is the name of our school, the International School of Uganda.
01:08:11
Speaker
And so we've kind of been taking it out into town, offering opportunities for parents, not just from our school, but from any school to come kind of learn with us about what our hopes are for the future of school and the future of designing schools.
01:08:24
Speaker
And through doing that, we've had
01:08:27
Speaker
different professionals join us.
01:08:29
Speaker
And there was this one man at one of them, he was just amazing.
01:08:33
Speaker
He was a Ugandan banker.
01:08:35
Speaker
And he kind of stopped us in the middle of it and told us that what we were talking about is exactly what he thinks Uganda needs.
01:08:42
Speaker
So often he gets recent college graduates that can use Excel spreadsheets and they know all the formulas and they're great accountants, but they're not able to help him innovate and create a better bank and a better banking experience.
01:08:57
Speaker
because they haven't learned the skills of collaboration, creativity, critical thinking.
01:09:02
Speaker
They've just been taught how to calculate and answer questions.
01:09:06
Speaker
And so he was really supportive of the school system.
01:09:09
Speaker
We were trying to think about designing and design in partnership with Uganda, because it's important to have everyone on board and really understanding why you're doing what you're doing.
01:09:21
Speaker
And then I think you can bridge those divides between the experiences
01:09:25
Speaker
we've had, even myself growing up and our parents have had growing up and what school could be.
01:09:44
Speaker
And last on our lineup are Natalia Parker and Tasha Woods.
01:09:47
Speaker
Natalia and Tasha started the Discovery Lab in Ellensburg, Washington, which is a micro school, a small community of learners learning together.
01:09:56
Speaker
Tasha helped start the school and Natalia is continuing to build the program.
01:09:59
Speaker
Here's Natalia.
01:10:01
Speaker
My background was in psychology and child development.
01:10:04
Speaker
So that was always a huge interest for me.
01:10:08
Speaker
But I was definitely more interested in the birth to five population in my college work.
01:10:14
Speaker
When we had kids, we had a five-year-old kiddo and we sent him to kindergarten.
01:10:19
Speaker
And I was always very pro-public school.
01:10:21
Speaker
My parents were teachers.
01:10:23
Speaker
My dad was a superintendent.
01:10:26
Speaker
But we started that year and I spent a lot of time with him in the classroom and just really, really thought lots of things that didn't sit well with me.
01:10:36
Speaker
Like the things that I'm seeing in kindergarten are not developmentally appropriate for kids.
01:10:41
Speaker
for this age, they're being expected to sit in chairs and do seat work for large amounts of time.
01:10:48
Speaker
Our kiddo had his own kind of stuff going on, but he was basically chewing a hole in his lip.
01:10:53
Speaker
He was so stressed out kind of trying to manage and keep it together all day at school.
01:10:58
Speaker
And so we kept trying to go back in and work with the school and say, how's he doing here?
01:11:03
Speaker
How can we support you?
01:11:04
Speaker
How can we support him?
01:11:05
Speaker
And we just really kept getting the answer that he's fine.
01:11:08
Speaker
Everything's fine.
01:11:10
Speaker
there's no need to worry about it.
01:11:12
Speaker
And so I'm a researcher.
01:11:14
Speaker
I like to learn.
01:11:15
Speaker
And I started reading and digging into it.
01:11:17
Speaker
And the more I read, the more I looked at what we know about what works for kids when they're learning and how the models of education have shifted over time, the more convinced I became that we needed to be doing things very, very differently for kids.
01:11:34
Speaker
And Tasha had a fairly similar experience.
01:11:36
Speaker
I come from a long line of educators.
01:11:38
Speaker
I was a secondary teacher.
01:11:40
Speaker
And when my, I have four children.
01:11:42
Speaker
And so when my oldest child started public school, it felt like a disconnect.
01:11:46
Speaker
When I walked through the hallways and through the doors, all of a sudden I didn't feel a part of his life.
01:11:52
Speaker
And I was seeing what I would have said, not best teaching practices in the classroom.
01:11:56
Speaker
And if every conversation I tried to enter into with the, with the staff and administration staff,
01:12:01
Speaker
It was difficult.
01:12:02
Speaker
It was difficult to feel that I was heard or included.
01:12:05
Speaker
I'm friends with Natalia.
01:12:07
Speaker
And so at first it was like I was ashamed of it, though.
01:12:11
Speaker
I didn't want to speak about Outlaw because it must have just been my personal problem, my personal child.
01:12:16
Speaker
And then when I just became so frustrated and I started sharing my feelings with Natalia and she started sharing the same thing, then it became like, OK, we see a problem.
01:12:23
Speaker
We recognize it.
01:12:25
Speaker
We should be solving this.
01:12:26
Speaker
This is really fascinating.
01:12:28
Speaker
And I have a few nuts and bolts questions to figure out what the discovery lab is.
01:12:31
Speaker
First off, what is the current status of the discovery lab?
01:12:35
Speaker
This year, we are operating and we have 25 kids.
01:12:40
Speaker
We have two classrooms.
01:12:41
Speaker
We have a K2 classroom and a third to fifth grade classroom.
01:12:46
Speaker
So this was our first year separating the kiddos into two separate learning spaces.
01:12:52
Speaker
It's
01:12:53
Speaker
One huge, open, flexible classroom, but they're in two separate learning groups.
01:12:57
Speaker
And what space are you working in?
01:12:59
Speaker
We are in a brick building downtown across from a skate park.
01:13:05
Speaker
And we actually are lucky we have an outside play area as well.
01:13:09
Speaker
We've been in lots of locations because we have not had a lot of money to pay rent, if any money at all.
01:13:15
Speaker
And so we've tried different things to find a location that works.
01:13:20
Speaker
We got really lucky with this location because my father-in-law decided to buy the building and he decided to let us
01:13:27
Speaker
use it rent free for a couple of years, partly because he's getting so excited about this model of school as we're moving into our seventh year or having more community members get on board and be supportive.
01:13:40
Speaker
I think the space, though, was one of the first obstacles
01:13:44
Speaker
that we had, right?
01:13:45
Speaker
We were driving around trying to sort things out.
01:13:47
Speaker
And then like our first space, we had to convince people because we were actually behind a pub.
01:13:52
Speaker
We had like the back room and the front room was a pub.
01:13:55
Speaker
So that was fun to explain to everyone that no, this is actually a legitimate school experience, a learning experience.
01:14:01
Speaker
And then we partnered with public school spaces.
01:14:04
Speaker
And then you guys eventually partnered with a religious space.
01:14:08
Speaker
It's always been trying to find a safe environment where learners could grow.
01:14:13
Speaker
Is it a homeschooling program?
01:14:15
Speaker
Is it connected to the public school?
01:14:17
Speaker
Like, how is your school classified?
01:14:19
Speaker
We started out with a half-day program, and our kids would go to public school for a half-day, and then they would enroll as homeschoolers for the other half of the day and come to us.
01:14:29
Speaker
And then last year, we got to the point where we had enough families saying this back and forth between public schools and working for us.
01:14:36
Speaker
We want kids with you all day.
01:14:39
Speaker
So we were finally able to barely financially scale it to a place where we could offer four days a week from nine to three.
01:14:47
Speaker
Kids still enrolled with the district as homeschoolers, but they came to Discovery Lab full time.
01:14:54
Speaker
This year, we did go through an application process with the state and receive approval as a private school.
01:15:01
Speaker
So our board is trying to decide right now if we'll move forward operating as a private school or if we'll remain in the capacity that we're in for the following year.
01:15:10
Speaker
Yeah, God, I can't even imagine how complex and difficult that hall is to operate.
01:15:15
Speaker
I recently applied for a supplemental teaching license, and it took literally hours of phone calls just to figure out how to make that happen.
01:15:22
Speaker
So designing your own school from the ground up has to be exhausting.
01:15:25
Speaker
It was at the beginning.
01:15:26
Speaker
I think we were just really frustrated.
01:15:28
Speaker
And then every time an office would come up, we have to solve this one too.
01:15:32
Speaker
Because when we were reviewing the questions, going back over all of those decision points that we had to make, there were a lot of times where it was like, this is the end.
01:15:40
Speaker
How are we going to solve this?
01:15:41
Speaker
And then something would come along and it would help us.
01:15:44
Speaker
But...
01:15:45
Speaker
When we first started, we couldn't figure out which government agency would oversee us.
01:15:50
Speaker
And so we tried to meet the requirements of all of them because everyone was saying, no, no, there's no laws that are covering you.
01:15:59
Speaker
And I'm like, well, there should be.
01:16:00
Speaker
And so we tried to meet everyone's expectations.
01:16:04
Speaker
I noticed as well that your tuition, as far as private and homeschooling programs go, is relatively low.
01:16:12
Speaker
Our tuition going into next year will be $450 per student per month.
01:16:17
Speaker
The median income in Ellensburg is about $33,000 a year.
01:16:21
Speaker
So this is not a wealthy community.
01:16:25
Speaker
And this has always been, I would say, our greatest obstacle is we want kids here if they want to be here and their parents want them here.
01:16:34
Speaker
But we don't have other funding sources besides a few fundraisers that
01:16:39
Speaker
our very hardworking Discovery Lab parents put on every year.
01:16:42
Speaker
We are very close to a sustainable budget.
01:16:46
Speaker
We're very close to a sustainable budget next year.
01:16:50
Speaker
And we're looking at adding things like after-school programs, which was something we've had in the past, but not the last couple of years, to help fill that gap.
01:17:00
Speaker
But that being said, our teachers do not make a salary that is on par with a public school teacher.
01:17:07
Speaker
What has worked well for us is that we have teachers teaching in the program who have kids who can also attend the program, and they so value this type of education.
01:17:19
Speaker
and want it for their kids that they're willing to come in the door because of that.
01:17:24
Speaker
And then I think often once they get here, the autonomy and support that they have from each other and just getting to really design a learning experience that they can get behind makes them more and more invested and kind of able to work with the salary difference.
01:17:43
Speaker
What has been surprising about working throughout this program?
01:17:46
Speaker
The thing that surprised me the most about this process is that I imagined that being that we would have so much control over it, very quickly, it became a community.
01:17:57
Speaker
And so it wasn't that Natalia or I had control over it, it really became a community of parents and children and teachers.
01:18:04
Speaker
And so a lot of philosophy was discussed and a lot of pedagogy was discussed.
01:18:09
Speaker
We both from education, so we knew John Dewey.
01:18:12
Speaker
I think the other ones that we, other people we read, Alfie Cohn was one of them that we really got excited about.
01:18:18
Speaker
We were looking at Con Lab School, or Con Lab School hadn't started yet.
01:18:21
Speaker
We were looking at Con Academy.
01:18:24
Speaker
And just really trying to be specific in what I would now call a profile of a learner.
01:18:29
Speaker
I didn't know that back then.
01:18:30
Speaker
And what did we want our learners to experience, feel like, and look like?
01:18:35
Speaker
And we wrote down that list of values.
01:18:38
Speaker
And I think Tasha's right.
01:18:40
Speaker
I think like the whole program, the philosophy has evolved over time.
01:18:45
Speaker
When we started, you could go online and type in project-based learning and find a few resources.
01:18:51
Speaker
And now it's exploded.
01:18:53
Speaker
The amount of people talking about
01:18:55
Speaker
different models of learning and thinking about kids and how to best support them.
01:19:00
Speaker
I would say my biggest driver from the beginning was school should be a place that's relationship based.
01:19:07
Speaker
We should know our kids.
01:19:08
Speaker
We should know who they are, what drives them.
01:19:11
Speaker
And we should seek to engage them through the use of that relationship rather than carrots and sticks and grades.
01:19:18
Speaker
So that was a huge driver for me.
01:19:21
Speaker
I would say that Tasha and I complimented each other, but also had some different, what would you say was the biggest driver?
01:19:28
Speaker
Natalia is very strong in being a
01:19:31
Speaker
seeing through the relationship base, right, and making sure that the learner is seen as human and the educator is seen as human and making sure the parent was also involved in that process.
01:19:42
Speaker
And then I also carry that base, like, but we need the data and we need to work with the public schools because we aren't a K-12 program, so these kids are going to have to transition into a more traditional model, and we need to make sure that they're prepared, their families are prepared, and that we are serving them.
01:20:00
Speaker
And so...
01:20:01
Speaker
So we carried both those things easily, and it was a great balancing agent for us.
01:20:05
Speaker
As we've come into this year, we have a phenomenal K-2 teacher that's been with us for a couple years, a phenomenal first-degree fifth grade teacher, and I feel like the program has really started to hit its stride, and I would say the overarching philosophy is
01:20:22
Speaker
the classroom is project-based learning, but we really do have a focus on a humanistic environment where we build relationships and teach kids how to support each other and work together.
01:20:34
Speaker
But we certainly do also pull in elements of direct instruction and things like that to help kids meet concepts, and we're focusing on the individual pathway of every learner.
01:20:46
Speaker
So kids are moving at their own
01:20:49
Speaker
paced regardless of their you know their grade level so those are all kinds of things that sort of drive what we do when we think about how to set ourselves up um for success with the year with our curriculum right right it makes a lot of sense that developing this community uh is going to be a powerful tool could you describe what it looks like for a particular student at your school like what makes this endeavor worth it for you
01:21:13
Speaker
So I had my four children in public school during that time.
01:21:18
Speaker
This year, my second son, a fourth grader,
01:21:23
Speaker
Public school was not working out so great for him.
01:21:26
Speaker
He was exhibiting stress and he was just sort of shutting down.
01:21:30
Speaker
He wasn't engaged and he was forming an opinion about what learning is that didn't really equate with what my feeling was or what I wanted him to walk away with.
01:21:39
Speaker
And so in January, I reached out to Natalia and said, hey, do you have space in your third through fifth grade cohort that Finn might be able to join my second child?
01:21:49
Speaker
And she said yes.
01:21:50
Speaker
And so we made that transition mid-year in January, had him move from his public school fourth grade classroom into this group.
01:21:58
Speaker
And the effect was immediate.
01:22:00
Speaker
It was more profound than I thought it would be.
01:22:03
Speaker
Within two days, like what had been
01:22:07
Speaker
Strong behavior at home when he was at public school.
01:22:09
Speaker
He would come home from public school just exhausted and afraid and mentally not there.
01:22:14
Speaker
And so there was a lot of, he would yell.
01:22:17
Speaker
There was a lot of yelling and he never wanted to go to school in the morning.
01:22:20
Speaker
And in two days being at discovery lab, everything calmed down.
01:22:23
Speaker
It was like he had found his case.
01:22:25
Speaker
When I was picking him up after school, it wasn't me trying to pry information out of him.
01:22:30
Speaker
What did you do in school today?
01:22:31
Speaker
He was offering up, I wonder about this.
01:22:33
Speaker
And I wonder about space project.
01:22:36
Speaker
I wonder about Mars.
01:22:37
Speaker
I wonder about NASA.
01:22:38
Speaker
He was interested and there were provoking questions that he felt like he could grapple with and that his voice mattered.
01:22:44
Speaker
I, of course, believe in the philosophy of Discovery Lab.
01:22:47
Speaker
I've seen this happen to other children.
01:22:49
Speaker
But even when I was in my own space with my own child, I was surprised what a profound effect it did have on him.
01:22:55
Speaker
And for those who are frustrated with what's going on, do you think it's possible for other parents or educators to do what you've done?
01:23:01
Speaker
I think it's completely possible.
01:23:04
Speaker
Lots of people are doing this in some form, it seems like, around our country.
01:23:11
Speaker
When we look back and look at the challenges we've gone through to get here, I always joke with my kids because they always ask me, why are you putting so much time into
Discovery Lab and Parental Involvement
01:23:22
Speaker
that?
01:23:22
Speaker
When two of my kids, they're both middle schoolers now, so they
01:23:26
Speaker
they're not here.
01:23:27
Speaker
And it really grew into itself as they got too old for it.
01:23:30
Speaker
And they always ask me, mom, you're working on that all the time.
01:23:34
Speaker
And I'm like, it's my project.
01:23:35
Speaker
It's my project-based learning.
01:23:37
Speaker
I have, you know, we've gone through the same process that we want you guys to do.
01:23:40
Speaker
I found something I'm super passionate about and I just, I can't stop iterating it and trying to make it
01:23:47
Speaker
what it's possible becoming.
01:23:49
Speaker
With that being said, I think that at this moment in time, we know so much more about how we can tell someone to implement this in a more direct and easy fashion.
01:24:00
Speaker
We learned a lot of things just by fumbling around and trying to figure it out.
01:24:04
Speaker
That would be not as difficult for people now.
01:24:07
Speaker
So yes, I think it's completely possible.
01:24:12
Speaker
and pretty empowering and necessary.
01:24:16
Speaker
As Tasha said, we both work in lots of different capacities to try to push change in our local schools.
01:24:23
Speaker
And I do think it's happening.
01:24:26
Speaker
But it's low and we've seen this be a powerful agent of change in our communities, not just for the kids that show up at the CBR Lab, but showing people that there's another way and another model and having them go back and ask for that in their classrooms.
01:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with Natalia.
01:24:46
Speaker
I believe in this so passionately that I stepped down from Discovery Lab and I ran for our local school board because I believe that this is possible in all classrooms and for all students.
01:24:56
Speaker
And I think it's good for all educators and all students.
01:24:58
Speaker
It's not just a subset of students that will benefit from this.
01:25:03
Speaker
And I also don't think
01:25:04
Speaker
that the onus should be on the parents or caregivers to have to walk away from the public school system.
01:25:09
Speaker
I think the public school system should be providing this, should be doing this.
01:25:14
Speaker
So I get the opportunity to speak about that and kind of advocate for that on a local school board.
01:25:20
Speaker
And then I also, in my professional life, I do professional development, so I get to travel around the nation and visit with schools and classroom educators.
01:25:27
Speaker
I mean, there are pockets of educators that are moving more to this model.
01:25:33
Speaker
It's completely possible.
01:25:34
Speaker
I think that parents need to speak up or caregivers need to talk a little bit more about the experience.
01:25:41
Speaker
I felt ashamed to speak about it at first.
01:25:44
Speaker
Because I thought it was just me, just my family.
01:25:47
Speaker
And then being a public school teacher, I was like, well, I really can't say this.
01:25:51
Speaker
But I was really struggling with it.
01:25:53
Speaker
And I could see my kids struggling with it.
01:25:55
Speaker
And so once I started talking to Natalia and then we started talking to other parents, then we had a community of learners.
01:26:02
Speaker
Then we were hearing from other parents saying, we want to solve this problem, too.
01:26:06
Speaker
So I think that there are many of us out there.
01:26:08
Speaker
I know that some people listening might be bothered by the fact that we're moving away from a public school, but I do think that there is a space that if someone is dissatisfied with what they're doing right now, that they can make these opportunities.
01:26:19
Speaker
And you all are just trying to create something that's fairly equitable.
01:26:22
Speaker
What advice do you have for parents that are going through this, I guess, cognitive dissonance between public education and doing what they know is best for their own children?
01:26:33
Speaker
I think the first thing I would tell people is if they have concerns to
01:26:38
Speaker
to not dismiss them.
01:26:40
Speaker
Listen to yourself.
01:26:41
Speaker
If you have a feeling that your kid's coming home at the end of the day and they're really not okay, don't just say, well, I went through school.
01:26:48
Speaker
I was fine.
01:26:49
Speaker
That's childhood.
01:26:51
Speaker
Pay attention and think critically about your kid's experience and ask them questions and listen to them.
01:26:57
Speaker
So I think that's the first part is just
01:27:01
Speaker
I think Tasha and I both had to fight through that feeling of, well, maybe it's just my kid, maybe it's just me, and really get to the place of honoring that voice that's saying, no, I think we could be doing things in a much healthier way for our kids in our schools.
01:27:16
Speaker
So starting with that,
01:27:18
Speaker
And then the next piece I would say is find a like-minded community.
01:27:22
Speaker
Talk about how you feel and find a few other people who feel the same way.
01:27:27
Speaker
I can't even tell you in my role at Discovery Lab how many parents will contact me just to talk to me and say, my kid's having a hard time.
01:27:36
Speaker
What do you think about this?
01:27:37
Speaker
Even if they're not in a position to move their kids or that's not what they want to do, they just need to reach out and talk to someone and have their experience validated.
01:27:44
Speaker
And there are lots and lots of people, lots of people who want to see different things for their kids.
01:27:50
Speaker
Once you're there, once you realize that it's okay to speak out loud and you've spoken to fellow parents, speak to your local school board.
01:27:57
Speaker
Speak to your administrators.
01:27:59
Speaker
I mean, if you don't feel like you have the right words to use, like maybe you're not an educator, maybe you don't have the vocabulary, your child deserves more than just fine.
01:28:08
Speaker
Like they're just fine today.
01:28:10
Speaker
It's fine at school.
01:28:11
Speaker
Your child deserves more.
01:28:13
Speaker
And usually the school districts want parents to come in there and speak.
01:28:17
Speaker
It doesn't mean that everything's going to change quickly, but if we can start speaking to each other and start exploring the resources that are out there or the potential other possibilities out there, great things can happen.
01:28:28
Speaker
Yes, and the last thing I would add to that is start somewhere even if it's small.
01:28:35
Speaker
Even if you don't want to open a micro school or you don't want to put a whole bunch of energy into one kind of thing, if you really think your kiddo needs something different, they're
01:28:45
Speaker
so many ways to do it.
01:28:47
Speaker
My middle schooler next year is going to take orchestra and woodworking at the middle school.
01:28:52
Speaker
And then he's going to walk over to Discovery Lab and do some ed tech programs and work with a tutor for a couple hours a day.
01:28:59
Speaker
And then he has an internship working at the bike shop because he loves riding bikes and building bikes.
01:29:05
Speaker
And that's kind of a hopeful.
01:29:07
Speaker
He's very interested in turning that into a career pathway.
01:29:09
Speaker
So we don't have a micro school.
01:29:11
Speaker
We don't have any kind of alternative program for middle schoolers here.
01:29:15
Speaker
but we're going to cobble together an alternative and make the best
Small Steps Toward Educational Change
01:29:20
Speaker
of it that we can.
01:29:20
Speaker
So I think just remembering that you do have, sometimes you do have more choices than you think you do.
01:29:27
Speaker
It just requires thinking outside of the box and being creative.
01:29:30
Speaker
And there are ways to make things different for your kids, even if it's not sitting right there in front of you in the form of another school.
01:29:40
Speaker
The thing that has grown the most with me out of this is that I used to sit back and say,
01:29:44
Speaker
oh, well, it's the system or it's this part of the system or public education has to do this.
01:29:48
Speaker
And realizing there is not the system.
01:29:51
Speaker
We are the system.
01:29:53
Speaker
Every adult is making this choice, impacting that is us.
01:29:56
Speaker
And so we're not constrained as much as we think that we are.
01:29:59
Speaker
And if we just take that first tiny step of, well, I'm going to try this different, it's usually, okay, you learn from it.
01:30:06
Speaker
Even if we fall flat on our face sometimes, we still learn
Future of Education and Internet's Role
01:30:10
Speaker
from it.
01:30:10
Speaker
We got back up and tried something different.
01:30:17
Speaker
I speak about this a lot on the podcast, but I think it's always worth reiterating.
01:30:22
Speaker
Every educator I speak with on progressive education is hopeful about the future.
01:30:27
Speaker
And the particular thing they mention is how the internet brings us all together.
01:30:31
Speaker
Because of social media and the platform we have, we can actually connect together.
01:30:36
Speaker
Stakeholders within and outside schools to build a human-centered education.
01:30:41
Speaker
It's so exciting to know that you have backup, that there's a movement here of educators who understand how important designing learning is and why we need to break down barriers between the teacher-centric model that's existed for so long.
Advancing Progressive Education
01:30:54
Speaker
The possibilities of learning that will open are unimaginable, and as Pam Moran said,
01:30:58
Speaker
It's possible that we'll develop learning systems unlike anything we've ever seen before.
01:31:03
Speaker
We mustn't get bogged down in the oppressive nature of school policy, things that have been done in the same way for so long that we might start to question if it's possible to make change.
01:31:14
Speaker
As every guest we've had on has shown, it's possible to make those changes.
01:31:18
Speaker
Sometimes it's within the public school system, and sometimes we have to take things into our own hands.
01:31:23
Speaker
As long as we continue to make partnerships and make outreach to public schools,
01:31:27
Speaker
and try to make progressive education happen for all learners.
01:31:31
Speaker
We have to ensure that everyone benefits from our actions.
01:31:33
Speaker
I think we're doing the right thing.
01:31:35
Speaker
It's up for all of us to restore humanity within our communities and broadcast this message to as many people as possible.
01:31:42
Speaker
I believe almost every educator has student learning in their hearts.
01:31:45
Speaker
They may just need some prodding to reinvigorate that passion for learning, that discovery of progressive ideals, to help design learning experiences that we're talking about here.
01:31:55
Speaker
Oppressive systems tend to oppress those who dwell within it, and those of us who are pushing for change have the awesome opportunity to reignite radical change.
Podcast Success and Listener Engagement
01:32:07
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Things Fall Apart from the Human Restoration Project.
01:32:10
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
01:32:15
Speaker
If you have time, I'd love for you to leave us a review on iTunes, social media, or anywhere that you see fit.
01:32:21
Speaker
I mention iTunes specifically because the more ratings we have there, the higher we rank on the education podcast list.
01:32:27
Speaker
And the more listeners we have, the better we're going to do.
01:32:30
Speaker
We can't do this without you, and I'm humbled by the opportunity to help broadcast this message to as many people as we possibly can.
01:32:36
Speaker
And we've grown so much, our average unique podcast listener number has jumped from maybe 200 to 300 an episode to over 2,000 in the last year.
01:32:45
Speaker
And our website traffic is up 10,000% in the last three months, and our Patreon supporters continue to climb.
01:32:51
Speaker
I can't wait to share all the things that Nick and I are brainstorming in addition to what we're already offering.
01:32:57
Speaker
So let's push forward together and restore humanity.