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135: Telling Powerful Stories of Learning w/ Aaron Schorn (Unrulr)
14 Plays1 year ago
Today we’re joined by Aaron Schorn, Head of Growth and Community at Unrulr. Aaron is an experienced educator who runs an afterschool social entrepreneurship program for young people. And recently, he introduced Unrulr to us at HRP — in short, it’s one of the only edtech tools we’ve ever recommended, and it’s one of the few edtech tools we’d be comfortable sharing on our podcast.
In short, Unrulr is a storytelling tool to showcase learning. It allows young people and educators to take photos or videos of what they’re doing, tag it according to a value, standard, or objective, then share it online privately or publicly. And what really stood out to me was that students can document their journey overtime, creating posts where they group together these moments and showcase a timeline of learning. We see this as a fantastic tool to document learning, share to families and community members, and act as a way to move away from one-and-done grades and toward narrative assessment.
Guests
Aaron Schorn, Head of Growth and Community at Unrulr and Director of the Nalukai Startup Camp, a social entrepreneurship program for young people based in Hawaii
Resources
And provided by teacher Gary Heidt (who shout-out...introduced us to Unrulr!)
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 135 of our podcast.
00:00:14
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm part of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
00:00:20
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Jennifer Mann, David Von Reik, and Lydia McDermott.
00:00:28
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
Meet Aaron Shorn and Unrueler
00:00:30
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram,
00:00:38
Speaker
Today, we're joined by Aaron Shorn, Head of Growth and Community at Unrueler,
00:00:43
Speaker
Aaron is an experienced educator who runs an after-school social entrepreneurship program for young people, and recently he introduced Unruler to us at HRP.
00:00:51
Speaker
In short, it's one of the only ed tech tools we've ever recommended, and it's one of the few ed tech tools that we'd be comfortable sharing on our podcast.
00:00:59
Speaker
Unruler is a storytelling tool to showcase learning.
00:01:01
Speaker
It allows young people and educators to take photos or videos of what they're doing, tag it according to a value standard or objective, then share it online, privately or publicly.
00:01:11
Speaker
And what really stood out to me was that students can document their journey over time, creating posts where they group together these moments and showcase a timeline of learning.
00:01:20
Speaker
We see this as a fantastic tool to document learning, share it with families and community members, and act as a way to move away from one and done grades and toward a more narrative form of assessment.
00:01:29
Speaker
And before we dive too far into it, I did want to mention that HRP is a promotional partner of Unruhler.
00:01:34
Speaker
We do have an incentive for people to mention our name when signing up for the product.
00:01:38
Speaker
But that said, we would happily recommend it even without that endorsement.
Aaron's Educational Journey
00:01:41
Speaker
With all that said, we're happy to welcome Aaron here to the program to talk more about the tool.
00:01:46
Speaker
Welcome to the show, Aaron.
00:01:47
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:01:48
Speaker
I'm honored to be here.
00:01:49
Speaker
For sure.
00:01:50
Speaker
And I just really want to start with, you know, a little bit about who you are, how you got there.
00:01:55
Speaker
Why did you join Unruhler?
00:01:57
Speaker
What's the gist of your involvement?
00:01:59
Speaker
Yeah, I'll start at the beginning.
00:02:01
Speaker
I grew up in Lesotho in Southern Africa in a really communal learning environment where how we learned, where how we communed with each other was really joyful.
00:02:12
Speaker
And then I moved to Massachusetts and was kind of in the opposite of spaces and really grappled with confidence as a learner and human being and felt like my education was exceptionally lonely.
Transforming Teaching with Unrueler
00:02:25
Speaker
And I had the fortune of marrying someone from Hawaii, an amazing return on investment, and moved to Hawaii and had an early career in business development and operations.
00:02:41
Speaker
but really was always a teacher and was always a mentor.
00:02:45
Speaker
And I got exceptionally lucky and had these incredible mentor teachers, many of whom of Native Hawaiian descent, who almost transported me back to those first seven years of my life in the Sutu, where education was about human connection, was about relevant learning and apprenticeship and craftsmanship.
00:03:07
Speaker
And I used the tool as an educator.
00:03:10
Speaker
I used the tool as a K-12 capstone coordinator managing project-based learning capstone courses in fifth, eighth, and twelfth grade.
Unrueler's Development and Influence
00:03:19
Speaker
And it completely revolutionized how I thought about learning.
00:03:22
Speaker
And in many ways, kind of Ron Burgard, if you will, this ability of learners to be teachers of other learners, for that visible learning to be really, you know,
00:03:37
Speaker
potent and powerful.
00:03:38
Speaker
And when I say Ron Burgert, I mean, he talks about artifacts of excellence in his great book, An Ethic of Excellence.
00:03:43
Speaker
And that really influenced how I thought about learners also being teachers.
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:48
Speaker
And it sounds like when you made that move to the States, there's a reflection there in how we assess and how it's connected to society at large, right?
00:03:58
Speaker
America and other westernized countries like it are obsessed with individualized, pick yourself up by the bootstraps, kind of competition by design.
00:04:08
Speaker
Grading mirrors this idea of the goal is to get ahead.
00:04:13
Speaker
We might not say this out loud, but it's at the expense of
00:04:16
Speaker
other people.
00:04:17
Speaker
Not everyone does well, only a certain percentage of people do well.
00:04:21
Speaker
And grades are used as a way to rank, file, and assess.
00:04:25
Speaker
And it sounds like some of the roots of Unruler and why that was developed was a way to move away from that and to be more cooperative, narrative-based, a way to relate and speak with other people and learn together, as opposed as a way to demean and judge as grades often.
00:04:44
Speaker
Yeah, I would totally agree.
00:04:45
Speaker
I mean, you know, it's really beautiful.
00:04:48
Speaker
I'm becoming a teacher.
00:04:51
Speaker
I come from industry.
00:04:52
Speaker
I have immense imposter syndrome.
00:04:55
Speaker
And because I'm not a classic teacher, right?
00:04:58
Speaker
And I'm trying to, you know, disrupt or bring us back to what learning should be, which is rooted in the identity and capacities and interests of youth.
00:05:08
Speaker
in all of the programs that I'm creating in schools and beyond.
00:05:12
Speaker
And I'm dreaming up Unruhler, essentially, on Google Docs,
Unrueler's Educational Philosophy
00:05:15
Speaker
on Napkins.
00:05:15
Speaker
I'm sketching out what this app would look like.
00:05:19
Speaker
And I'm getting my master's on Oahu at the University of Hawaii.
00:05:23
Speaker
And through friends of friends, I meet Will and Fred, the two founders of Unruhler.
00:05:28
Speaker
And I see the tool for the first time on a mobile device and zero exaggeration.
00:05:33
Speaker
I start crying because, you know, it's the fulfillment of sketches of dreams of, of what I needed to be able to switch this narrative, to switch this, this, um,
00:05:51
Speaker
I don't know, switch this way of school from passive to active, right?
00:05:56
Speaker
Like not only for me was Unruhler this living and breathing portfolio for students, it was a social space for them to teach each other through their posts, through the journeys they create, to be able to, you know, inspire each other and to create way more of a collective atmosphere than this individual project-based learning space that I was in
00:06:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:17
Speaker
And to put that into perspective, when you first open up the app, it's ostensibly a social media wall, like an Instagram or Reddit or one of those things where you're seeing other folks within your community, like your classroom or a series of classroom cohorts.
00:06:34
Speaker
And you're checking out what they posted for that day.
00:06:37
Speaker
You can reply to it.
00:06:38
Speaker
You can add, I think they're flowers, kind of like a set of likes, and plant those next to the posts that you enjoy and you appreciate.
00:06:46
Speaker
you really feel the learning come alive by viewing that.
00:06:50
Speaker
Something that I had shared in our initial meeting is, and I don't know if this is the best way to frame this because it kind of comes across as a negative, but it resonated with me, which is it's what Seesaw is meant to be.
00:07:03
Speaker
As someone who was super involved in using Seesaw and collaborating on that and used to recommend teachers that all the time, it fell through because it tries to do too many different things.
00:07:14
Speaker
Unruler is simply a space where you share the things you're doing, you're highlighting whatever objectives, and that could be whatever objectives you want it to be, that it meets.
00:07:25
Speaker
and you're sharing it with other people.
00:07:27
Speaker
That's it.
00:07:28
Speaker
I mean, it's that bog standard, but that's the kind of tool we need to liberate the pedagogical process within schools.
00:07:37
Speaker
So with that kind of being said, what is it that you hope educators are doing with the thing?
Fostering Community and Differentiation with Unrueler
00:07:42
Speaker
What is the goal of the product?
00:07:44
Speaker
I think we have a lot of product
00:07:47
Speaker
facing portfolios.
00:07:49
Speaker
Cool spaces in education technology that do that.
00:07:53
Speaker
For us, we're really interested in being a process and reflection portfolio on top of product, right?
00:07:59
Speaker
And the great Angela Stockman, who's at Damon University, talks a lot about the power of pause, allowing learners to pause and reflect.
00:08:10
Speaker
And the equally great Kwaku Aning, who's in San Diego, talks about the power of space and creativity.
00:08:17
Speaker
how you can't just demand a learner to be creative.
00:08:20
Speaker
You have to give them space and time to do that.
00:08:23
Speaker
And Kwaku, myself, and Mike Yates had a really great podcast episode about Soulquarians and the power of collectives, right?
00:08:30
Speaker
Soulquarians is this amazing collective of musicians in the 90s and 2000s that created albums together.
00:08:35
Speaker
And our thesis was that
00:08:37
Speaker
If we can bring that to our classrooms, we can create space for learners to explore their skills and capacities, then we're going to be way better for it.
00:08:46
Speaker
And so I think what we've seen in learning communities is that Unruhler allows learners to have these awesome exit tickets of experiences, video, audio, photos, writing, that capture their experience, but also...
00:09:00
Speaker
capture things in the moment, right?
00:09:02
Speaker
And the fact that the UX and UI of the tool is native to how they already document their lives, the fact that any learning community can take its portraits of a graduate's competencies, its values, and turn those into badges or tags that learners are kind of self-choosing
00:09:19
Speaker
for their posts, I think that's what's been super transformative, not just for schools and learning communities that are shifting to that ungrading kind of competency-based learning space, but for any learning community that wants to have visible learning, you know, celebrated.
00:09:34
Speaker
Exactly.
00:09:34
Speaker
And I think it provides something tangible for folks that want to try something like this out.
00:09:40
Speaker
I know from working with a variety of different schools that the first thing folks are going to tell you is that I get the theory.
00:09:47
Speaker
I understand what it is that I kind of want to do.
00:09:51
Speaker
And I know things need to change, but I don't know where to start.
00:09:54
Speaker
I don't have the proper repertoire, the proper frameworks, whatever it might be to actually do the thing.
00:10:00
Speaker
And in a sense, if you know you're going to be using an app like this, it almost forces you to change pedagogically because in order to use the tool, you have to put learning in the center of what students are doing because they're the ones that are choosing what it is they're doing.
00:10:14
Speaker
It has you create that space, that communal space without too much of a lift.
00:10:20
Speaker
It doesn't require a ton of preparatory planning.
00:10:23
Speaker
It doesn't require you to have some like, I don't know, like super nuanced contextual, like gray book in place or something like really out there.
00:10:30
Speaker
It's just, Hey, go post what you learned today.
00:10:33
Speaker
Write about it for a little bit.
00:10:34
Speaker
Done.
00:10:35
Speaker
That's it.
00:10:35
Speaker
I mean, that's, that's pretty much the entire process.
00:10:37
Speaker
The setup process is also super short.
00:10:39
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think.
00:10:40
Speaker
Yes, to everything you're saying.
00:10:42
Speaker
I think a word that's overused a lot in education is differentiation.
00:10:47
Speaker
And we think about it in terms of learning styles, but we don't think about it enough in terms of evidence that is authentic to a learner.
00:10:56
Speaker
We don't think about it in terms of the skills and capacities and backgrounds of our learners enough.
00:11:02
Speaker
And I would say that one of the reasons I work for Unruhler, why I was first a teacher who used it and now an employee, is that I've seen differentiation at a whole other level.
00:11:12
Speaker
Where a learner who would have never felt comfortable writing a five-paragraph essay or having ChatGPT write it for them.
00:11:20
Speaker
Or doing an in-person Brene Brown-esque circle sit where they talk about their feelings has no problem capturing identity or what they're working on via video or via audio paired with some great writing, right?
00:11:34
Speaker
Like allowing your learners to be able to, in different points and times of a school year or in an educational program, have agency over which modality they're capturing evidence of identity, of
00:11:48
Speaker
process of skill, I think is completely game changing for learning communities.
00:11:54
Speaker
And we saw, I mean, I saw students of mine say, it's the first time I felt seen and heard.
00:11:58
Speaker
It's the first time I've had choice over how to demonstrate A, B, or C. And that's what I think is revolutionary about the tool.
Human-Centered Assessment and Learning
00:12:06
Speaker
Right.
00:12:06
Speaker
And there's power, too, in just being able for families to see what it is their kids are doing.
00:12:12
Speaker
I mean, sadly, we're at a point where the vast majority of folks, the way that they're obtaining information about what kids are doing in school is a little ding on their phone that they got a 10 out of 10 on an assignment on the LMS.
00:12:25
Speaker
And even if that was an amazingly constructed assignment, like it was something really cool, you're not actually seeing it.
00:12:31
Speaker
You're just kind of seeing the end number, which doesn't necessarily translate to anything of substance.
00:12:37
Speaker
And when you're able to hear from your own kid, hey, this is what I'm doing.
00:12:41
Speaker
Look how cool this is.
00:12:42
Speaker
That's the exact same thing as how like, you know, when you pick your kid up from school, you say, hey, what did you do at school today?
00:12:48
Speaker
And then nine times out of 10, they say, oh, nothing, we didn't do anything.
00:12:51
Speaker
And then you learn what they actually did later on.
00:12:53
Speaker
You're like, that's amazing.
00:12:54
Speaker
Like, why are you not sharing these things with?
00:12:56
Speaker
It restores, I mean, it restores humanity to the space that allows you to think more critically about what is happening in classrooms, what my kids get out of it, why this is important and allows me to potentially as a parent or family member
00:13:10
Speaker
to become involved.
00:13:10
Speaker
Because if I see what they're doing, I might talk to them about it.
00:13:14
Speaker
I might get involved with the school, whatever.
00:13:16
Speaker
I have two quick anecdotes about that.
00:13:18
Speaker
So my first job in schools was as the webmaster, was as the storyteller for a school.
00:13:23
Speaker
And I knew that I couldn't tell the story without students.
00:13:25
Speaker
And so I formed this incredible student team and we built the websites and had these great student videographers and we made all the videos.
00:13:31
Speaker
And I started teaching digital journalism.
00:13:34
Speaker
And at the core of everything was story.
00:13:35
Speaker
At the core of everything was their story and how I could harness that.
00:13:39
Speaker
How I could hijack that, right, to get them interested in learning the technical skills of the course I was teaching.
00:13:44
Speaker
And parents care about story, right?
00:13:48
Speaker
And my role as a storyteller for the school, it was show, not tell.
00:13:51
Speaker
Don't make an empty platitude about diversity.
00:13:54
Speaker
Don't make an empty platitude about, you know, innovation.
00:13:58
Speaker
Show people what DEI looks like in a school.
00:14:01
Speaker
Show people what, you know, youth are able to achieve in the projects they're able to create.
00:14:07
Speaker
And so that totally manifests in evidence of learning for parents.
00:14:11
Speaker
One of my biggest mentors, Bill Wicking, at HPA, Hawaii Preparatory Academy, it's a great school in the Big Island, he and his students were using Unrueler.
00:14:20
Speaker
And in Unrueler, you're in these private communities, right?
00:14:23
Speaker
And only those people in those communities see access to the posts and journeys you're creating.
00:14:28
Speaker
But with the right security settings, a learner can publish one of their posts.
00:14:32
Speaker
and turn it into this shareable link similar to like a published Google Doc people can't edit.
00:14:38
Speaker
And so Bill had his students once a month publish two of their posts and share them with their families and email their families.
00:14:48
Speaker
And this dad, like I'm trying to tear up, like said, this is the first time this is, I think his daughter was a junior.
00:14:55
Speaker
I have ever seen evidence that,
00:14:58
Speaker
of who my child is as a scientist and as a learner, right?
00:15:03
Speaker
That he had waited that long and that we were a conduit, right?
00:15:07
Speaker
Because the evidence, you know, was her displaying these competencies and skills, video and photos and writing that also showcased metacognition, critical thinking and understanding, and a smile at the end as she was sharing it with her family.
00:15:22
Speaker
The other anecdote is we're working with this incredible school in California and eighth graders are using them.
00:15:29
Speaker
And there's one student who's Mexican-American whose mother doesn't speak English and has never had access to what her daughter is doing outside of when the school translates its documentation into Spanish.
00:15:45
Speaker
And so this learner did most of her posts in Unruhler in Spanish, her video posts, recapturing what she's doing, because she knew it was going to be shared with her mom.
00:15:56
Speaker
Right.
00:15:56
Speaker
And the fact that we were able to, you know, amplify that code switching is like why I have this job, you know, that we're, that we are,
00:16:10
Speaker
tackling and dismantling some of these colonized ways of assessment and sharing learning.
Conference to Restore Humanity and Real-World Skills
00:16:16
Speaker
And like you said, really trying to make this human-centered and joyous is what's exciting.
00:16:29
Speaker
Conference to Restore Humanity 2023 is an invitation for K-12 and college educators to break the doom loop and build a platform for hopeful, positive action.
00:16:40
Speaker
Our conference is designed around the accessibility, sustainability, and affordability of virtual learning, while engaging participants in a classroom environment that models the same progressive pedagogy we value with students.
00:16:54
Speaker
Instead of long Zoom presentations with a brief Q&A, keynotes are flipped and attendees will have the opportunity for extended conversation with our speakers.
00:17:03
Speaker
Antonia Darter, with 40 years of insight as a scholar, artist, activist, and author of numerous works, including Culture and Power in the Classroom.
00:17:13
Speaker
Cornelius Minor, community-driven Brooklyn educator, co-founder of The Minor Collective, and author of We Got This.
00:17:20
Speaker
Jose Luis Wilson, New York City educator, co-founder, and executive director of EduColor, and author of This Is Not a Test.
00:17:28
Speaker
and Iowa WTF, a coalition of young people fighting discriminatory legislation through advocacy, activism, and civic engagement.
00:17:37
Speaker
And instead of back-to-back online workshops, we are offering asynchronous learning tracks where you can engage with the content and the community at any time on topics like environmental education for social impact, applying game design to education, and anti-racist universal design for learning.
00:17:55
Speaker
This year, we're also featuring daily events from organizations, educators, and activists to build community and sustain practice.
00:18:03
Speaker
The Conference to Restore Humanity runs July 24th through the 27th.
00:18:08
Speaker
And as of recording, early bird tickets are still available.
00:18:12
Speaker
See our website, humanrestorationproject.org, for more information.
00:18:16
Speaker
And let's restore humanity together.
00:18:22
Speaker
The personal attachment and ability to resonate with
00:18:36
Speaker
is that at the end of the process, when you have this link where you can showcase a whole series of posts, like you could showcase like 10 posts over the course of, let's say, three months, it allows you, let's say, if you have an exposition of learning, if you have some kind of semester end event, whatever it might be, even it's like a newsletter, it allows you to highlight process over product.
00:18:57
Speaker
As someone who was really into design thinking, did a lot of project-based learning, a lot of interdisciplinary stuff, one of the more unfortunate things is,
00:19:05
Speaker
I would always preach process over product.
00:19:07
Speaker
Now, it didn't matter if your final product didn't work because at the end of the day, you learn something along the way.
00:19:13
Speaker
But if you're doing an exposition of learning and you're sitting there with an unfinished product and you're talking about the journey, it kind of sucks because no one actually sees any of that process.
00:19:22
Speaker
They just see the fact that you have nothing to present or it doesn't look too hot.
00:19:26
Speaker
This allows someone to actually visualize, hey, look at everything that went into this.
00:19:31
Speaker
And it also helps mirror the real world more in the sense that you're going to work on a lot of stuff that's not going to work, that's going to fail.
00:19:38
Speaker
That doesn't mean that that entire process doesn't work.
00:19:40
Speaker
While it's just that you learn something along the way.
00:19:43
Speaker
I mean, you, you hit on the most important thing about unruler, which is fighting the perfectionist nature of schools, right?
00:19:51
Speaker
It doesn't matter if you graduate from an elite high school and you have your 4.12 GPA, right?
00:19:58
Speaker
And I guess 5.2 and, and like, you know,
00:20:01
Speaker
And you don't know how to get imperfect work out into the world, right?
00:20:05
Speaker
You have been traumatized to only put out work that is quote unquote an A plus.
00:20:12
Speaker
And that is so antithema to how the working world works.
00:20:15
Speaker
That is so antithema to...
00:20:16
Speaker
how relationships work, right?
00:20:18
Speaker
And I think one of the big parts of Unruhler is celebrating not just failure, which is an overused statement, but celebrating learning and the different journeys that go within it.
00:20:32
Speaker
There's another school in California where a student had a 45-minute presentation.
00:20:37
Speaker
They were using Unruhler.
00:20:38
Speaker
And 20 minutes, the student is done talking.
00:20:43
Speaker
And there's that awkward silence because there's 25 minutes left.
00:20:47
Speaker
And it doesn't really display a quote unquote successful product.
00:20:51
Speaker
The teacher says, hey, go on your computer, share screen, show everyone, this audience, this authentic audience in this public exhibition, what you did, how you learned, how you grew, and went into their Unruler feed, went into the posts, the journeys.
00:21:08
Speaker
and lit up talking about their process and how they grew, right?
00:21:12
Speaker
That flipped that narrative, right?
00:21:14
Speaker
Where now process is enshrined and celebrated just as much as product.
00:21:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:19
Speaker
And there's, I mean, there's a million different examples of that, whether it be portfolio driven or just in the way that we can move away from traditional kind of one and done assignments.
00:21:29
Speaker
I still remember it was like my second or third year teaching.
00:21:32
Speaker
I was still giving traditional multiple choice tests in a history class.
00:21:38
Speaker
pulling the kids out one by one after they had failed an assignment.
00:21:43
Speaker
They got like a five out of 10 or whatever.
00:21:45
Speaker
And I remember I would pull the kids out one by one and say, hey, you know, talk to me more about like question number five.
00:21:49
Speaker
Like here's a little more information about it.
00:21:51
Speaker
And then they would go, oh, I know that.
00:21:53
Speaker
Like I just didn't really understand what the question was asking.
00:21:55
Speaker
And then they would give me the right answer along the way.
00:21:58
Speaker
And every single kid I would pull out, even kids that I thought were maybe a little more disengaged, you didn't really seem like they were doing much.
00:22:06
Speaker
We're able to answer the vast majority of the questions once we turned it into a conversation and once we made it a little bit less formalized.
00:22:13
Speaker
A lot of times just the nature of the assessment itself detracts from what the
00:22:20
Speaker
lot of that narrative in the process.
00:22:23
Speaker
However, I do want to go big picture here for a second.
00:22:26
Speaker
And this is going to go a little bit off the rails.
00:22:28
Speaker
There are going to be folks that say, hey, why would we do this when the real world is unforgiving?
00:22:35
Speaker
And I want to read this quote to you and see how if this resonates with what's going on with Unruly.
00:22:39
Speaker
I was just putting a bunch of quotes together for some professional development that we're doing.
00:22:43
Speaker
And it's from a book called Teacher and Child, which is by Haim Ganaugh.
00:22:48
Speaker
or Gano, however you pronounce it.
00:22:49
Speaker
I'm not sure if you're familiar with him.
00:22:50
Speaker
He was really big in like the 70s, the child psychologist.
00:22:55
Speaker
And he wrote, some teachers say life is hard and full of insult.
00:22:59
Speaker
We must prepare children to cope with it by giving them a taste of insult in school.
00:23:05
Speaker
It is true that modern life is often like a rat race.
00:23:08
Speaker
People struggle to be first in line.
00:23:10
Speaker
They push, wrestle, insult, and lie.
00:23:13
Speaker
Do we want to prepare children for such a life?
00:23:15
Speaker
No, on the contrary, we need to tell children that rat races are not good for people.
00:23:20
Speaker
We want school to be not a replica of, but an alternative to raw reality.
00:23:26
Speaker
Such a school needs teachers with sophisticated sensitivity and effortless empathy.
Trust, Agency, and Privacy in Learning
00:23:31
Speaker
I'm curious, like how you see like that rat race and competitive component and the philosophy slash pedagogy of unruler coming together.
00:23:42
Speaker
Effortless empathy.
00:23:45
Speaker
So the other hat I wear is I run a youth entrepreneurship program in Hawaii called Nalu Kai.
00:23:50
Speaker
Done it for nine years, 10 cohorts.
00:23:54
Speaker
We've taken lean startup methodology, agile project management, and connected it to Hawaiian culture, kind of redefining what entrepreneurship looks like.
00:24:02
Speaker
And in nine years of doing this program, can you guess what the number one technical skill is?
00:24:08
Speaker
Is it empathy?
00:24:09
Speaker
It's human connection.
00:24:11
Speaker
It is the ability to connect with others.
00:24:14
Speaker
It is the ability to form teams, to deal with setbacks.
00:24:18
Speaker
It's all the things that are called soft skills, right?
00:24:21
Speaker
More important than coding language, any other quote-unquote technical skill, when you have that as a starting place, you're able to thrive.
00:24:30
Speaker
And I think when you look at stuff like Lean Startup or the idea of a minimum viable product, a prototype of an idea that gets you data,
00:24:39
Speaker
That all requires iteration, requires bravery in getting an unfinished thing out in the world to get actual feedback and data on.
00:24:48
Speaker
And that has a ton.
00:24:50
Speaker
I mean, that has to be rooted in empathy, kindness, curiosity.
00:24:56
Speaker
That, to me, is the core of what is going to make someone quote unquote successful in their professional career and personal lives.
00:25:03
Speaker
And I think at the same time is a really beautiful counterbalance to chat GPT, AI, the wave of what we're going to be seeing in the next couple of years.
00:25:13
Speaker
And what we're currently seeing too is that ability to utilize those tools, but to connect with others, to showcase evidence that is infectious that people want to celebrate and share.
00:25:27
Speaker
And it also just kind of gets back to how we learn more generally.
00:25:32
Speaker
Learning is all based on human connection.
00:25:35
Speaker
And I've done what little research I have, partially through actually our intern at HRP, who's currently living in Hawaii.
00:25:42
Speaker
I'll need to get you two connected.
00:25:44
Speaker
But Hawaii is very much rooted in values of progressive education.
00:25:49
Speaker
Public schools in Hawaii care a lot about progressive ed, perhaps because they've been isolated from the continental United States.
00:25:56
Speaker
They didn't have the same
00:25:58
Speaker
push toward more standardized, more rote.
00:26:01
Speaker
Although it does exist, it doesn't have the same wherewithal there.
00:26:05
Speaker
And part of that is because of indigenous Hawaiian ways of being, ways of knowing that are rooted in narratives, as really all learning has been before like the modern invention of schooling.
00:26:18
Speaker
And I can't help but notice that there's a serious connection between narrative style ways of learning and human connection.
00:26:27
Speaker
The fact that you're in Hawaii and the fact that Unrueler doesn't really push you at all into making assignments, to giving grades, to telling someone that they didn't do well versus did well.
00:26:41
Speaker
Like there's not really a lot of assessment at all.
00:26:43
Speaker
It's just kind of like, hey, let's talk about stuff.
00:26:46
Speaker
What's the roots of that?
00:26:47
Speaker
Where does that all come from?
00:26:48
Speaker
I mean, it comes from one of our founders, Will Rappoon.
00:26:52
Speaker
Will comes from this family of status quo pokers.
00:26:59
Speaker
The Rappoon family sued the government for water rights for Native Hawaiians, for farming and for agriculture.
00:27:07
Speaker
And Will went to the gilded Punahou, great independent school in Hawaii, and then the gilded Harvard, where he was a computer scientist.
00:27:18
Speaker
And didn't love either of those experiences because who he was as a learner, as a Hawaiian, was not represented.
00:27:25
Speaker
Story was not celebrated.
00:27:28
Speaker
Assessment was not relevant feedback.
00:27:31
Speaker
It was simply a system that he knew how to play.
00:27:34
Speaker
And so he and Fred Delsey, the other founder, initially created UnRuler to allow communities, to allow learners to
00:27:43
Speaker
actually display skills, right?
00:27:47
Speaker
To irrefutably showcase growth and to have their identities and humanity be central to that experience.
00:27:54
Speaker
And just the UX and UI of the tool, right?
00:27:57
Speaker
The reduction of friction to allowing a learner to capture what they're working on or how they're feeling, to me, is the centerpiece of what we're trying to
00:28:08
Speaker
which is just celebrating who we are, celebrating the peaks and valleys, the ups and downs of our learning journey, and then trying to hijack assessment and to make those celebrations really what gets us to the next stage of our lives, jobs and universities.
00:28:29
Speaker
Exactly.
00:28:29
Speaker
I mean, what stood out most to me and the reason why I'm so excited about it is not based around necessarily what it does, but by what it doesn't do.
00:28:40
Speaker
And the exact same way that classrooms, the number one thing to look for is not all the things that they're doing.
00:28:46
Speaker
It's for all the things that they aren't doing.
00:28:49
Speaker
products tend to throw everything at the window.
00:28:54
Speaker
Like they want every single possible thing to be instilled within their product.
00:28:58
Speaker
And when that happens, it tends to become a more and more traditional product.
00:29:04
Speaker
And I say that kind of like in scare quotes in the sense that most ed tech products tend to center surveillance and
00:29:12
Speaker
They tend to take away data privacy of kids.
00:29:17
Speaker
They tend to be focused on some means of tracking or I would argue distrusting kids because they're all rude in the idea of how can we, I guess, standardize and check as many boxes as possible to ensure kids graduate or whatever that the framing might be.
00:29:37
Speaker
But at the end of the day, they're all about, did all the kids turn in the assignment?
00:29:41
Speaker
Yes or no?
00:29:42
Speaker
Why?
00:29:43
Speaker
Okay, let's go on to the next thing.
00:29:45
Speaker
And let's make it as simple as possible and make that thing happen.
00:29:48
Speaker
And even products that might say the right thing and might have a lot of cool uses,
00:29:53
Speaker
Also run into some issues when it comes to like, well, how much are we valuing kids identities, both in terms of like literally, like how much are we bringing their identities into the framework and their student voice, but also in terms of their data identity?
00:30:07
Speaker
Are we selling their data?
00:30:08
Speaker
There's not very many tools that actually trust kids with data use.
00:30:12
Speaker
And here's kind of our.
00:30:13
Speaker
kind of throwing your kids out to the wind in the world of online stuff.
00:30:17
Speaker
Could you speak a little bit to how you're dealing with the fact that you're an online product, how you're designing the product, what that looks like data privacy-wise, kind of all of the above?
00:30:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we're Copa and we're compliant.
00:30:30
Speaker
The beautiful part of becoming a preferred provider for the Hawaii DOE is that it was an insanely arduous process.
00:30:37
Speaker
So that means that all of our policies around data are above board, above best practice.
00:30:43
Speaker
really cool about Unruhler is that a user not only keeps their data, they can keep using the tool after graduation.
00:30:50
Speaker
They can keep building a portfolio or journal of learning.
00:30:53
Speaker
And we're one of the only edtech products that I've heard of that allow a learner to switch their school email to their personal email, giving them access to just their posts and the ability to continue to build upon the learning and documentation that's there.
00:31:09
Speaker
Building off of your beautiful comment,
00:31:14
Speaker
Trust is so vital in learning in school and allows us to give learners freedom when we trust them.
Reflective Practice and Community Building
00:31:23
Speaker
Right.
00:31:24
Speaker
And I remember my use case, building a senior capstone program, brand new at a school.
00:31:29
Speaker
It's beautiful culminating experience, year long project based learning.
00:31:34
Speaker
And I did a really good job with Poulani Lincoln and other teachers and mentors of creating a great structure.
00:31:40
Speaker
And of course, I over-structured.
00:31:41
Speaker
We all do that in PBL because we fetishize rigor and we have imposter syndrome about, is this as rigorous as the AP class that's happening in the building over?
00:31:51
Speaker
Right.
00:31:52
Speaker
And slowly I started removing milestone assignments, too many presentations because I wanted them to be ready for the final presentation of the year.
00:32:00
Speaker
All of these assignments were about us, the teachers.
00:32:02
Speaker
It was our fear of students not doing work over the course of the year.
00:32:06
Speaker
Much of that fear was true.
00:32:09
Speaker
Like if we didn't create structure for students that had no project management experience, not a lot of work is happening.
00:32:16
Speaker
So for me, Unruler was a trust vehicle.
00:32:18
Speaker
It was a transparency vehicle.
00:32:20
Speaker
I would have these micro check-ins like scrums where each week learners would capture via a multitude of media information.
00:32:28
Speaker
what they worked on, what they're thinking about.
00:32:30
Speaker
I would have these reflections that showcase the skill and growth that they were learning and would have these prompts that are really geared towards specific outcomes or milestones.
00:32:39
Speaker
And once that culture of learning was visible, once learners were seeing other learners' journeys, right, I shifted the power balance of this program.
00:32:50
Speaker
where now learners were teachers as much as I was a teacher, where learners were facilitators of each other's knowledge.
00:32:57
Speaker
And as that confidence and sense of belonging grew, we created a collective, right?
00:33:02
Speaker
Tons of pukas, tons of holes that came and emerged.
00:33:06
Speaker
I think back on that program and things I'm proud of, things I'm not.
00:33:11
Speaker
But what I'm super proud of is we shifted learning from passive to active.
00:33:16
Speaker
And we empowered our learners to really take hold of the experience.
00:33:22
Speaker
And when you give learners the opportunity to share those things and you develop that culture and you have that trust, you fight back against the assumption that more active, project-based, problem-based, whatever you want to call it, type learning is somehow less rigorous.
00:33:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:43
Speaker
With again, that word as problematic as it is, if we take it at what it literally means on paper, when it's like intensive learning, challenging, whatever word you might want to replace with it.
00:33:55
Speaker
The fact of the matter is, is that a more progressive style or human centered form of education is more challenging and rigorous.
00:34:02
Speaker
Because when you place kids solving authentic problems in their community where they work with other people and they need to post about it,
00:34:10
Speaker
That is filled with unknown solutions, creative task solving, working with other people.
00:34:17
Speaker
All those things are not only much more college and career ready, but they're also way more challenging than doing a 10 point multiple choice test.
00:34:26
Speaker
or memorizing an answer for like a blue book or some kind of college assessment.
00:34:30
Speaker
It's the reason why folks who tend to do very well academically, like all A students, all like AP kids, et cetera, tend to struggle a lot in the quote unquote real world or even at a college campus, because the more and more you pull back from teacher and control, the more and more you pull back from there's always one right answer.
00:34:50
Speaker
And there's always like a workbook that you work through to get it.
00:34:54
Speaker
moving away from compliance, the more and more you start to think to yourself, well, what the hell do I do?
00:34:59
Speaker
Like, what is the thing that I'm supposed to do now?
00:35:01
Speaker
And that requires all those other skills that you learned along the way.
00:35:06
Speaker
The soft skills or 21st century skills and whatever.
00:35:08
Speaker
And we've been saying this for decades, arguably, like,
00:35:15
Speaker
writing about like the doing Dewey stuff.
00:35:17
Speaker
And I think that's Chicago.
00:35:19
Speaker
We know these things.
00:35:20
Speaker
It's just the will to take these things on and also practical tools like this one that could be a way that you could encourage others to start seeing these things without having them to make it from scratch.
00:35:34
Speaker
What's so exciting about what Unruhler does is that it annotates just like one would annotate when they're reading a book, right?
00:35:44
Speaker
Like you go back, you highlight, you think, you ponder so that when you write that research paper, you're not rereading the book again.
00:35:51
Speaker
In projects, I never had a tool that did that.
00:35:54
Speaker
So all of the magic of learning, right?
00:35:56
Speaker
That big realization a learner makes when their MVP falls flat, right?
00:36:02
Speaker
Or getting over the hump as they're building something physical, right?
00:36:07
Speaker
Whether it's a surfboard or mechanical project.
00:36:11
Speaker
All of that now becomes captured, not just for the big presentation, but for a learner's life.
00:36:17
Speaker
One of my favorite use cases comes out of University of Kentucky, John Nash, who is a brilliant design thinking teacher there, uses Unruler with his undergrads, also with his PhD and MBA students.
00:36:27
Speaker
And John Nash uses it as almost like a muscle memory tool around metacognition and thinking about how we learn.
00:36:36
Speaker
There are these once a week or twice a week video prompts that he has in Unruler for his learners.
00:36:41
Speaker
And they're just like, hey, where are you at in the design thinking cycle?
00:36:44
Speaker
What are you grappling with?
00:36:44
Speaker
What are you thinking about?
00:36:46
Speaker
And every week, his learners are pausing.
00:36:48
Speaker
There's space, right?
00:36:50
Speaker
There's space for them to think.
00:36:51
Speaker
And they're capturing where they're at.
00:36:53
Speaker
And what's so remarkable is that John and a teacher he was co-teaching the class with, an architecture professor, were iterating their course based on those reflections, which is the most human-centered thing to do as a teacher.
00:37:05
Speaker
I'm actually going to see...
00:37:07
Speaker
Where are my learners at?
00:37:08
Speaker
What's resonating with them?
00:37:10
Speaker
What makes sense?
00:37:10
Speaker
What doesn't?
00:37:11
Speaker
I'm actually going to turn my lexicon into something that's visual and understand what's happening in the background.
00:37:18
Speaker
And he iterated his class.
00:37:19
Speaker
He changed his curriculum based on that.
00:37:21
Speaker
To me, that's amazing.
00:37:22
Speaker
To me, that's why we do what we do.
00:37:25
Speaker
For sure.
00:37:26
Speaker
And when you visualize through narrative and through stories and through evidence,
00:37:34
Speaker
often case, which is we tend to visualize student learning through numbers.
00:37:40
Speaker
And when you reduce people to a number, you start to get very comfortable with moving on.
00:37:45
Speaker
I'm very critical of tools like Kahoot.
00:37:48
Speaker
And I'm myself guilty of this.
00:37:49
Speaker
As someone who used Kahoot at many points in the classroom, kids would answer a question, 85% would get the question right.
00:37:56
Speaker
And I put down
00:37:58
Speaker
Doing well, move on.
00:37:59
Speaker
Like we got the 85%.
00:38:01
Speaker
But when you reduce it to a number, that means that 15% of kids who didn't get it, who don't know what's going on, I guess screw them.
00:38:08
Speaker
Like I guess we're just moving on.
00:38:09
Speaker
Like who cares?
00:38:10
Speaker
Because you're missing out on that human connection, which was, did they get it or did they not get it?
00:38:16
Speaker
So with that said, we're running short on time.
00:38:18
Speaker
I do want to ask and make sure that people understand how did they get involved?
00:38:22
Speaker
What are the next things?
00:38:23
Speaker
What is Unruhler thinking about?
00:38:25
Speaker
How do folks get involved with Unruhler?
Engaging with Unrueler and Closing Remarks
00:38:27
Speaker
All that kind of stuff.
00:38:27
Speaker
Well, one, thank you for this joyous conversation.
00:38:30
Speaker
I think they get involved.
00:38:31
Speaker
And two, they get involved by going to unruler.com, scheduling a demo, signing up for a free trial, testing it out, creating a sandbox.
00:38:40
Speaker
They get involved by following us, you know, listening to our...
00:38:44
Speaker
content and providing feedback.
00:38:49
Speaker
They get involved by, you know, talking to other communities that they think this is a great fit in.
00:38:56
Speaker
What's next for us is continuously iterating the product based on its use.
00:39:04
Speaker
What I'm really proud of, and this does not happen really that much at all in ed tech, is that
00:39:11
Speaker
Our features come from what our learners want and need.
00:39:15
Speaker
So the journey feature in Unruhler, it's really cool.
00:39:17
Speaker
Learners take multiple posts that they've created and turn them into a timeline or narrative.
00:39:23
Speaker
And there's cool metacognition critical thinking, but they're creating the story of learning at any point in time in their usage of the tool.
00:39:31
Speaker
That came from a school in Ukiah, California, a big picture learning school.
00:39:34
Speaker
Shout out to big picture learning.
00:39:36
Speaker
And, you know, they eloquently talked about what they needed.
00:39:39
Speaker
We saw a need in other communities.
00:39:42
Speaker
The audio feature in Unrualer, which is similar to other audio features and other tools, not only is a learner now able to capture a reflection or evidence of learning in audio, it annotates and visualizes all that audio too.
00:39:56
Speaker
That came directly from a need in our learning communities.
00:39:59
Speaker
So what's next for us is to continue to grapple with being a tool in a quote unquote innovative space.
00:40:07
Speaker
It's for us to continue to grapple with how do we not be too prescriptive, but how do we help learning communities do reflection sometimes for the first time?
00:40:30
Speaker
Awesome.
00:40:30
Speaker
And I mean, seeing is believing in the sense that we'll link in our show notes, some examples of those journeys and what it looks like and all that kind of stuff, as well as a link to check out the website.
00:40:41
Speaker
If you're not checking out the show notes, do note that Unruler is UN.com.
00:40:45
Speaker
R-U-L-R.
00:40:47
Speaker
There's no E on ruler.
00:40:48
Speaker
So if you're going to Google it, that might be useful to know.
00:40:52
Speaker
As well as the pricing, I think, is fairly affordable.
00:40:54
Speaker
There's individual licenses, site licenses, nonprofit licenses.
00:40:57
Speaker
You can check that out all out on their website.
00:41:00
Speaker
But again, Aaron, thanks for joining us.
00:41:02
Speaker
Appreciate you sharing all this stuff with us and working on the tool.
00:41:05
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:41:06
Speaker
Thanks for the work you do.
00:41:07
Speaker
And your listeners are amazing.
00:41:08
Speaker
We're excited to try to connect with them.
00:41:12
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:41:15
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
00:41:19
Speaker
If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:41:23
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:41:30
Speaker
Thank you.