Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
43: The Good Life feat. Steven Gumbay, REENVISIONED, The Future Project, Anne Connolly, Richard Loeper-Viti, & Gamal Sherif
15 Plays6 years ago
In this podcast, we're talking about "the good life." What is it exactly that we want students to have in their future? Is it a great career, a content lifestyle, a family, solidarity, freedom, respect for one another, a mixture of all of the above? And if we can't agree on that question or at least have somewhat unified goals in getting there, how can education exist to serve that question? In addition, do teachers have and deserve "the good life"?
We've spoken to various educators from across the world, and I hope you enjoy listening to their amazing thoughts and ideas.
Guests, in order of appearance:
Steven Gumbay, who has taught for over 40 years, starting in Denver, CO, then transitioning to Taiwan, Zambia, Kenya, Hong Kong, Myanmar, and Ethiopia. Steven has served as a science department chair and as a consultant building secondary, primary, and preschool programs.
Dr. Erin Raab and Nicole Hensel of REENVISIONED and The Future Project. Erin holds a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University, where her scholarship pertained to the question of how we can transform education systems to foster individual flourishing and thriving democracies. Nicole obtained a dual Masters in Public Policy and Education Leadership from Stanford University. You can find their work below.
Richard Loeper-Viti, whose progressive practices have transformed his English international classroom. Starting in a top-ranked charter school in the United States, he ventured to Chengdu, China after his wife, a US Diplomat, received a new position.
Anne Connolly, a CERT inclusion specialist and special education primary instructor, who has taught for over 20 years. Anne currently uses her progressive practices in an elementary classroom in Ontario.
Gamal Sherif, who has taught over 20 years in middle and high school, served as a fellow for the US Department of Education, and is an ambassador for the UN Sustainable Goals Project. Gamal has a focus on sustainable teaching practices.
Resources
- Dr. Erin Raab’s summarized research on education systems design. (full dissertation)
- REENVISIONED’s website
- The Future Project’s website
- The Future Project’s “Future Camp” sign-up, for students to take hold of their dreams (available across multiple states)
Further Listening
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Philosophy
00:00:11
Speaker
Greetings and welcome to the first episode of season three of Things Fall Apart, our podcast here at the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:18
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt.
00:00:19
Speaker
I'm a high school social studies instructor who believes adamantly in instilling progressive values of education, putting humans at the center rather than ranking, filing and demeaning students.
00:00:29
Speaker
In this podcast, we're talking about the good life.
00:00:32
Speaker
What is it exactly that we want students to have in their future?
00:00:35
Speaker
Is it a great career, a content lifestyle, a family, solidarity, freedom, respect for one another, or maybe a mixture of all the above?
00:00:42
Speaker
And if we can't agree on that question, or at least have somewhat unified goals in getting there, how can education exist to serve it?
00:00:49
Speaker
In addition, we're also going to ask, do teachers have and deserve the good life?
00:00:53
Speaker
We've spoken to various educators from across the world, and I hope you enjoy listening to their amazing thoughts and ideas.
00:00:59
Speaker
But first, our podcast is kept alive by generous patrons on Patreon, two of which are Bill Ryder and Matt Laughlin.
00:01:06
Speaker
Thank you so much for your support.
00:01:07
Speaker
You can find more information about what the Human Restoration Project is and how we're helping promote progressive education through free resources, thoughts, and more on our website at humanrestorationproject.org and on Twitter at humrespro.
Teaching Experiences Across Cultures
00:01:35
Speaker
Which brings us to Stephen Gumbey, a veteran teacher of 40 years.
00:01:39
Speaker
Stephen started off in Denver, Colorado at a private school and then designed his own curriculum for 12 years.
00:01:45
Speaker
Stephen then said, I had a parent say, you should take a group of kids to Kenya and so
00:01:50
Speaker
I was like, wow, you know, I'll do that.
00:01:53
Speaker
And quick story was it all worked out and I just fell in love with rural Kenya.
00:01:58
Speaker
It really shocked me to see like Maasai kids with no electricity take nine courses and do extremely well, you know, and yet walk across the savannah to school.
00:02:10
Speaker
And there was sort of a, I don't know, a discord between that and teaching essentially Rick kids at a private school in Colorado.
00:02:18
Speaker
I just felt the need to put my energies into a place that was different.
00:02:22
Speaker
You know, it's something really called to me.
00:02:24
Speaker
This started a journey that took Stephen across Taiwan, Zambia, Kenya, Hong Kong, Myanmar, and eventually Ethiopia, acting as a science department chair and building secondary, primary and preschool programs.
Global Educational Challenges and Student Engagement
00:02:37
Speaker
He essentially took every opportunity thrown at him, dealing with for-profit organizations, which quickly turned him off, governments who removed all older American expats and full direct government takeovers of schools.
00:02:48
Speaker
And now, back in Ethiopia, he's consulting a large private school on the first steps of a progressive education journey.
00:02:54
Speaker
The detailed experiences in each of these places has just been incredibly rich.
00:03:02
Speaker
And in many ways, it has not been good.
00:03:05
Speaker
I would say in general ways, the people who run schools, whether they're private or they're international schools that are not for profit, there is a lot of incompetency.
00:03:16
Speaker
and mediocrity in the way schools are run in every one of these places.
00:03:21
Speaker
And quite honestly, the only good head of school I've ever worked for was the one back in Colorado in the beginning.
00:03:28
Speaker
And I haven't seen anybody, experienced anybody abroad that was above mediocre.
00:03:33
Speaker
And yet the children have been just fun and good.
00:03:37
Speaker
I mean, kids are kids everywhere.
00:03:39
Speaker
And the learning aspect of it is, you know, being in the classroom and creating things that
00:03:43
Speaker
see kids become excited about learning and turned on to learning.
00:03:47
Speaker
That's been the same everywhere.
00:03:48
Speaker
And that's the real joy of all of that.
00:03:51
Speaker
The business of education has got some immense challenges ahead of it.
Critique of Traditional Teaching Methods
00:03:56
Speaker
And in his latest endeavor, he's found a similar problem that we face in the United States and really everywhere.
00:04:01
Speaker
I think the biggest challenge is it's completely teacher-centered.
00:04:05
Speaker
So the idea of, let me give you this example of the school I'm starting to work with now.
00:04:10
Speaker
I visited there
00:04:11
Speaker
again 4 000 kids from kindergarten to high school that's a big school the average class size that i saw was 30 to 35 so say i go into a third grade class and they are they're learning english well they're only budgeting in their time scale time frame two sessions a week for for english and what they do is that the teacher gets up and he's teaching grammar rules
00:04:38
Speaker
So here in Ethiopia, that's very standard.
00:04:41
Speaker
The regional teachers are trained in universities in rules of grammar, and it's all rote learning.
00:04:46
Speaker
They don't really understand the English language, but they understand the rules.
00:04:51
Speaker
So they'll have a sentence and they'll tell the kids, maybe they'll do introductions, sort of how we do introductions, what's formal and what's informal.
00:04:59
Speaker
And they'll call two or three kids up to do that.
00:05:01
Speaker
And then they'll move on to the next example.
00:05:04
Speaker
So in a class that I watched for 45 minutes or so, there were probably five kids that had a spoken moment, an interactive moment.
00:05:14
Speaker
And the rest of the kids just sit there at attention and they note things in their book, what's ever written on the board, they write down.
00:05:20
Speaker
That isn't really learning.
00:05:22
Speaker
And it goes completely against how kids learn language.
00:05:26
Speaker
The research shows that they can learn 10 to 12 words a day.
00:05:31
Speaker
And none of that is sitting in a chair and copping off of a board.
00:05:35
Speaker
It's all social.
00:05:36
Speaker
My biggest challenge in working with teachers is to realize that they've got this whole thing backwards and they shouldn't be the center of anything.
00:05:45
Speaker
And to turn it over to the kids, you know.
00:05:48
Speaker
So when you've had a teacher who's been doing this for many years and has a lot of pride in the way they're doing it,
00:05:55
Speaker
You can't go in and imply, listen, you're doing this all wrong, even though that's exactly what I'm thinking.
00:06:02
Speaker
You have to find an incremental way to introduce new things to them.
00:06:07
Speaker
But the vast majority are just extremely resistant to change.
00:06:12
Speaker
so it's teacher-centered you know it's like i'm the fountain of information and again you've got 30 40 kids maybe more so compliance and order is really important i want to try and get these teachers particularly the ones that are motivated at this new school to just try the idea of setting up group work put the kids in their own conversation groups you know make 12 groups of kids
00:06:37
Speaker
It's not Stone Age mentality, but it's a Bronze Age mentality towards education.
00:06:42
Speaker
You can't really fault people because they were educated that way.
00:06:46
Speaker
If we are to establish the good life for students, we have to have teachers who understand what it is that they're trying to do and how they're going to get there.
00:06:54
Speaker
Teacher training programs may bring up progressive ideas.
00:06:56
Speaker
I'm pretty confident most educators know who Dewey is.
00:06:59
Speaker
But in practice, we're typically taught to be directors of a traditional system.
00:07:04
Speaker
As in how to reach particular standards in an efficient way and how to do well on standardized tests.
00:07:09
Speaker
After all, that's what our future employers will likely want.
00:07:12
Speaker
The question then becomes, how can we train teachers to teach progressive values?
00:07:17
Speaker
How can we train them to be basically rebels in the system and
00:07:20
Speaker
that doesn't have a student's best interest at heart?
00:07:22
Speaker
And even more so, how do you convince a traditional teacher that what they're doing is well wrong?
00:07:27
Speaker
Well, you know, you have to do a little bit of everything is my view.
00:07:31
Speaker
It came home to me in very, very hard way, difficult ways when I was, it first came to Ethiopia and I was a science department chairman.
00:07:39
Speaker
And there were a group of
00:07:40
Speaker
old veteran British teachers.
00:07:42
Speaker
Most of those Brits that I've met teaching abroad feel they've got the answers.
00:07:46
Speaker
They know the gold standard.
00:07:48
Speaker
The rest of the world just needs to get with the program.
00:07:51
Speaker
And then they do the same thing.
00:07:54
Speaker
I had nine faculty and
00:07:57
Speaker
Seven of the nine disliked me right away.
00:08:00
Speaker
I go into a class every day and say, I hope this goes well.
00:08:05
Speaker
But at night I go home and say, wow, could I have done that better?
00:08:08
Speaker
The best teachers I've ever worked with are very harsh on themselves.
00:08:11
Speaker
They're very tough critics.
00:08:13
Speaker
And they're always looking for a better way to motivate.
00:08:16
Speaker
And if you're a good teacher, it's a very humbling profession because you can feel great one day and just, you know, have a great lesson plan the following day and it just falls.
00:08:25
Speaker
And so you need to be freshly creative.
00:08:29
Speaker
And if you're freshly creative and you have energy, the kids pick up on that and they'll come with you.
00:08:34
Speaker
But the old Brits just were so angry with me.
00:08:38
Speaker
So I just asked in the first meeting, I said, I'd like us, since we're all new to each other, I'd like to know why we do what we do.
00:08:45
Speaker
Why do you like working with kids?
00:08:47
Speaker
What do you enjoy about teaching science?
00:08:50
Speaker
And they thought that was the most absurd thing for me to ask them.
00:08:53
Speaker
They were insulted.
00:08:55
Speaker
and so i you know here i came from research where being fresh and attacking things and problem solving and working together was just natural and i thought that would be a way to introduce trying to look at some new things and it just became a battle because they were insulted by that approach towards the end i said how can you use
00:09:17
Speaker
a handout from 1982 in a biology class.
00:09:21
Speaker
And I said, why can't you get excited about what's new out there and show the kids you're learning with them?
00:09:29
Speaker
And that's, I think that's the key point somewhere is that whether it's in the U S or in a school somewhere in the world, there are a group of teachers who are doing their job.
00:09:40
Speaker
I often describe it as they're delivering the mail.
00:09:43
Speaker
And that's what they think their job is.
00:09:45
Speaker
Then there's a group of teachers who feel they're there to excite the kids to learn because they're excited about learning.
00:09:51
Speaker
They've never lost their love for learning.
00:09:54
Speaker
And I think that's a critical difference.
00:09:56
Speaker
So that seems like we're at a crossroads, right?
00:09:59
Speaker
If someone's closed-minded and they're not willing to accept changing how their classroom looks, and if they think that they're superior or infallible, they're not going to ever consider that what they're doing is wrong.
00:10:09
Speaker
which I suppose means that the only way to go forward is to fire close-minded teachers.
00:10:14
Speaker
It's very rare that I would come across someone who is a traditional teacher who started off as progressive.
00:10:20
Speaker
Most progressive educators started off as traditional.
00:10:23
Speaker
We kind of know both sides.
00:10:25
Speaker
So is it that we just want to ensure maybe that newly hired teachers are those that we want to stick around, people that are progressively minded?
00:10:32
Speaker
I sent them something like what you sent me.
00:10:35
Speaker
I sent them three or four probing essay questions.
00:10:39
Speaker
including a question about tell me an experience in the classroom that you'll remember forever and value and tell me one out of the classroom.
00:10:48
Speaker
And if people can't answer that, then the fire's not there.
00:10:51
Speaker
And see, my point is that if you're in the position of training new teachers or hiring teachers, you can always teach skills.
00:11:00
Speaker
But if someone says they have skills and the fire's not there,
00:11:04
Speaker
How do you teach the fire?
00:11:05
Speaker
You can't.
00:11:06
Speaker
The heart of teaching can't be taught.
00:11:08
Speaker
That's a real conundrum in all of education because we need millions and millions of teachers and they're not all going to have that kind of heart.
00:11:15
Speaker
It is a huge challenge in getting teachers to come along.
00:11:19
Speaker
And I think anybody that tells you they know how to do that is lying.
00:11:23
Speaker
it's a dance with adults that have set up all sorts of barriers and guidelines for learning and protecting their professional integrity you know to be a learner you have to be vulnerable you have to say i don't know in the adult world that's very hard to get people to do kids are easy they're willing to learn until we beat it out of them but adults that's that's the tough one i would love to be able to write a book on
00:11:48
Speaker
how to motivate and get teachers to come along like that.
00:11:52
Speaker
But I think it's a real dance and it has to be programmatic.
00:11:56
Speaker
There has to be higher up support for this.
00:12:00
Speaker
They need to realize it's part of their job demand, that they have professional development and that they have to show it.
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:07
Speaker
And then wouldn't that lead to an issue of people leaving?
00:12:09
Speaker
One thing I
00:12:10
Speaker
think a lot about is that progressive educators likely left the profession because of the traditional constraints and mindset of our institutions.
00:12:18
Speaker
Without a support network, we're basically in like the wild west.
00:12:21
Speaker
Many times I feel like I can legitimately be fired by giving students actual voice, assuming that it goes against the standards or potentially lowers one of their test scores.
00:12:29
Speaker
International schools have the problem of turnover.
00:12:32
Speaker
There's turnover of leadership.
00:12:34
Speaker
The school in Lusaka had set a record that they had the most heads of school.
00:12:41
Speaker
Two of them came and went in the two years I was there.
00:12:44
Speaker
And that alone just creates chaos.
00:12:47
Speaker
Boards are often not healthy.
00:12:49
Speaker
Then on top of that, you get a variety of teachers.
00:12:53
Speaker
And I can sort of lump them into types, but you do get a large variety of teachers.
00:12:59
Speaker
Even those teachers may not stay very long.
00:13:02
Speaker
They do bring a number of different agendas.
00:13:05
Speaker
But I have found that, again, like I said, there's sort of a British model.
00:13:09
Speaker
They're just there to perpetuate what's been done before.
00:13:13
Speaker
It's about control and being rigid.
00:13:16
Speaker
And then they had essentially communists and sons
Cultural and Political Influences on Education
00:13:19
Speaker
of communists in horrible years here.
00:13:22
Speaker
And so you have a couple generations raised under another kind of control.
00:13:26
Speaker
We're imprinted very young with ways of learning.
00:13:31
Speaker
What's acceptable?
00:13:31
Speaker
What isn't?
00:13:32
Speaker
What are the best ways, et cetera?
00:13:35
Speaker
And sort of this Western view of being open and analyzing, you know, you're seeing it in the U.S. now.
00:13:43
Speaker
You're seeing a huge minority of people in the U.S. I'm not going to go into politics here, but you see there's a significant part of the country that is not progressive, is not open-minded, is not intellectually curious.
00:13:57
Speaker
But some of the challenges in international schools, when you throw in the cultural context, you know, look at Myanmar.
00:14:04
Speaker
It's a military-controlled, you know, government.
00:14:07
Speaker
You see that effects in the way people think.
00:14:10
Speaker
and the way they deal with authority.
00:14:12
Speaker
There's a lot of teaching in Asia that's real nice because Asian kids overall are incredibly respectful of authority.
00:14:18
Speaker
And so you'll see teachers who have taught in really tough schools in the UK or the US or in South Africa, and they love coming to Asia because you don't have any discipline problems.
00:14:29
Speaker
You may have kids having nervous breakdowns because they got their first B, but that's your crisis for the year.
00:14:36
Speaker
To be clear, the implication you're making is that this authoritarianism, the academic rigor, is not necessarily a good thing?
00:14:42
Speaker
No, not necessarily at all.
00:14:44
Speaker
I would have kids sign up.
00:14:45
Speaker
Oh, I'm going to take the SAT again.
00:14:47
Speaker
Well, how many times have you taken?
00:14:48
Speaker
Well, this is my sixth time.
00:14:50
Speaker
I said, you know, what are you doing?
00:14:52
Speaker
Are you crazy?
00:14:53
Speaker
I don't even remember what I got on the SAT now.
00:14:56
Speaker
There's very little joy in learning.
00:14:58
Speaker
And so the school I was at, the American school in Hong Kong, it called itself an American school, but the
00:15:05
Speaker
The headmaster was a Scottish guy who used to come to assemblies to make sure the girls didn't have fingernail polish on and that their socks were the right length.
00:15:14
Speaker
He wouldn't come to listen to music.
00:15:16
Speaker
The kids were just amazing what they could do.
00:15:18
Speaker
And he just wanted to check their socks and their fingernails.
00:15:20
Speaker
So that told you what kind of a manager he was.
00:15:23
Speaker
And then the principal, he was just worried about everything in order and everything.
00:15:27
Speaker
make sure we keep these parents happy.
00:15:29
Speaker
And he was a very fearful man.
00:15:31
Speaker
And I had a group of ninth graders in like homeroom and they had all these classes.
00:15:36
Speaker
And at the end of the day, they had like a 15 minute homeroom.
00:15:40
Speaker
And we had a meeting where someone said, we've got what's what kind of work can we have them do in those 15 minutes?
00:15:46
Speaker
And I said nothing.
00:15:48
Speaker
And they looked at me like, no, we have to use this time.
00:15:50
Speaker
And I just kept quiet.
00:15:52
Speaker
I refused to do it.
00:15:53
Speaker
Because these kids, they would be taking two or three APs, they push all this, and then they leave school and they go to something at night, you know, cello lesson or something.
00:16:02
Speaker
And at the last 15 minutes of a day in high school, they can't put up their feet and talk to each other or talk to me about an issue.
00:16:09
Speaker
So I just used to shut the door and
00:16:11
Speaker
We had a fun time.
00:16:13
Speaker
We unwound at the end of the day.
00:16:14
Speaker
Or I'd show them a Monty Python video to get them to realize, you know, there's more to life than worrying about grades because their parents are quite neurotic.
00:16:24
Speaker
And so to me, I had to be a counterweight.
00:16:27
Speaker
And I think actually any effective teacher realizes after a while the group of kids they have, you need to be a counterweight.
00:16:35
Speaker
for whatever kind of negative influences or you know kids are bringing the class what's missing and these kids didn't have a lot of healthy fun connections with adults we're all human you know there are some days you're just like i can't do it today and that's okay and to tie this back to training teachers to doing what's best for students to give them human-centered approaches that care and love them how do we actively encourage that
00:17:00
Speaker
rather than it being something that's subversive or something that you're doing in spite of what authority says?
Collaborative Learning and Teacher Development
00:17:05
Speaker
How can it be more explicit?
00:17:07
Speaker
When you're teaching teachers, you can't fall into the same habit that you're criticizing schools for.
00:17:13
Speaker
It shouldn't be teacher-centered.
00:17:16
Speaker
I'm not there to tell them how to do something.
00:17:19
Speaker
I want to sit down as I, what I did with the primary school teachers here, we ended up with nine teachers all.
00:17:24
Speaker
Now that sounds small, but we started there.
00:17:27
Speaker
We used to have the most fun faculty meetings.
00:17:29
Speaker
I led them and I had somewhat of an agenda, but I said, I want to run this like a graduate seminar.
00:17:35
Speaker
We're all equal here.
00:17:36
Speaker
The American National Academy of Science, you know, in the U.S. has these two series, how people learn and how people learn too.
00:17:43
Speaker
They're just wonderful, wonderful things.
00:17:46
Speaker
And I said, I want to take a chapter a week or chapter every other couple of weeks.
00:17:50
Speaker
You go read it and we'll come back and we'll discuss it.
00:17:54
Speaker
And I wanted to sort of mentor and coach them.
00:17:57
Speaker
I didn't want to teach them.
00:17:59
Speaker
I did show them some videos to excite them, to show them teachers who had completely reversed their teaching and let the kids decide, for instance, in AP biology, which labs they were going to do.
00:18:12
Speaker
And so I got them thinking about that, but I wanted them to realize that we were learning as a group.
00:18:17
Speaker
I didn't have all the answers.
00:18:18
Speaker
You know, the kids that we had here in Ethiopia, we had a very mixed group of kids and they were all trying to learn English and they offered a lot of challenges.
00:18:27
Speaker
But it was real fun because we could do whatever we wanted.
00:18:30
Speaker
And that's how I approached it.
00:18:32
Speaker
I said, I'm not here to tell you the Ten Commandments and this is what we do.
00:18:36
Speaker
Let us figure out how to do this.
00:18:38
Speaker
But I want you to know what is learning?
00:18:41
Speaker
And so we started with some of that and it was great.
00:18:44
Speaker
They really appreciated it because I found out one Australian lady had had a lot of good education, particularly in English language instruction.
00:18:53
Speaker
I felt more like a very much like a coach.
00:18:56
Speaker
We always enjoyed our beatings.
00:18:57
Speaker
We laughed, we pushed each other, we demanded a lot, but it was all for the kids.
00:19:03
Speaker
it was all for us to enjoy what we were doing.
00:19:06
Speaker
I think we got to remember that I know when I've been in sessions where someone's given me professional development, I'm almost a cynic going in because most of them are boring and at least my time.
00:19:17
Speaker
No one's ever actually got me directly involved.
00:19:20
Speaker
There was one exception that was a writing workshop that I went into thinking, oh, this won't be very good.
00:19:25
Speaker
And it was wonderful.
00:19:26
Speaker
Why?
00:19:26
Speaker
Because they all put us to work and we were prompted and then let go.
00:19:31
Speaker
and we got to know each other, we formed bonds, we listened to each other, and they treated us like good learners.
00:19:40
Speaker
I think teaching is something as an art that has to be learned by doing.
00:19:44
Speaker
But that kind of collegiality is very difficult to build.
00:19:48
Speaker
And you can throw in one really toxic person that doesn't like that.
00:19:53
Speaker
And that's the difficult part of management and leadership in any business, dealing with the personality types.
00:20:00
Speaker
But my goal going into it is to always come in as an equal.
00:20:04
Speaker
And I think teachers need to have a stronger sense of that kind of professionalism.
00:20:08
Speaker
And they do in certain core areas, in certain groups.
00:20:11
Speaker
You could be in very healthy groups.
00:20:14
Speaker
But if you teach around much at all, you've also been around unhealthy groups.
00:20:19
Speaker
But particularly in really large schools, that's where it breaks down.
00:20:23
Speaker
You can have a lot more impact, just like a classroom of 15 versus a class of 40.
00:20:28
Speaker
It's just, it's completely different.
00:20:33
Speaker
Human Restoration Project, the whole point of it is to find like-minded people in progressive ed to ensure that you're not crazy.
00:20:41
Speaker
I know when I first got started with these things, I read a few books and it felt good that authors agreed with me, but it was really hard to find people that actually thought that the traditional system was wrong, that weren't someone acting outside of the education system.
00:20:54
Speaker
There are plenty of teachers out there in many different pockets who believe these things, who maybe
00:21:00
Speaker
aren't allowed to share their thoughts, maybe are kind of hesitant to be more frank about it, but there's a lot of them.
00:21:07
Speaker
And I think that we need something that helps unite us all, and that is meant to be the Human Restoration Project.
00:21:18
Speaker
As you walk into practically any school in the United States, you'll be greeted by a mission statement somewhere in the building.
00:21:24
Speaker
Saying something like, to prepare students for life and job prospects, to produce literate, responsible citizens, to succeed in an ever-changing community,
00:21:32
Speaker
ready for the future, to be college and career ready.
00:21:35
Speaker
But we don't often stop and really think about what we're aiming toward.
00:21:39
Speaker
And everyone seems to have a different view on what is best for their child.
00:21:42
Speaker
And without a doubt, children have their own ideas on what they want.
00:21:45
Speaker
How often do we listen to them?
00:21:47
Speaker
And do we really know what's best for them?
00:21:49
Speaker
Teachers aiming to meet all of these differing voices are faced with unrelenting pressure to conform to a system that likely isn't reaching any of these objectives and are struggling to figure out, well, what's next?
Re-Envisioning Educational Goals
00:22:00
Speaker
Taking on the challenge of defining what the good life is is Re-Envision Ed, headed up by Aaron Robb and Nicole Hensel.
00:22:07
Speaker
The program was born out of the Stanford Graduate School of Education and is seeking to do a massive re-envisioning process of figuring out what the good life is through a series of interviews of roughly 10,000 people.
00:22:21
Speaker
They partner with schools, individuals, and community organizations to collect and share these stories about what it means to live a good life and what the role of school is in doing so.
00:22:30
Speaker
Erin holds a PhD in education from Stanford, where her scholarship pertained to the question on how can we transform education systems to foster individual flourishing and thriving democracies.
00:22:41
Speaker
And Nicole obtained a dual master's in public policy and educational leadership, also from Stanford.
00:22:46
Speaker
You can find all of their work in the attached show notes.
00:22:49
Speaker
Currently, Erin serves as the vice president of research and evaluation, and Nicole, the deputy vice president of research and evaluation at The Future Project,
00:22:58
Speaker
which is a nonprofit organization that helps ensure that young people can build a better life in the world that they love.
00:23:04
Speaker
So in summary, Read&Vision Ed wants to figure out what exactly is the good life by, well, asking what that means.
00:23:10
Speaker
With a shared vision, we'll be able to build something to meet it.
00:23:12
Speaker
Aaron explains.
00:23:14
Speaker
So the idea about asking about a good life was really like trying to understand better.
00:23:19
Speaker
I had done all of this work from a systems perspective, thinking about like, well, what is a system for, right?
00:23:25
Speaker
Like what is the purpose of schooling more broadly and came out with across whether it be sociology or economics or teacher training or, you know, whichever body of literature, like whether it be policy,
00:23:40
Speaker
that there were kind of four major ways of thinking about the purpose of school, four purposes.
00:23:47
Speaker
You can think about mapping these on to two axes, which are on the Y-Xs, it would be intrinsic to instrumental, and on the X from individual to collective.
00:23:59
Speaker
And I think the individual to collective, the fact that we have individual reasons why we have school and we have collective reasons we have school is fairly intuitive.
00:24:07
Speaker
I think that
00:24:08
Speaker
The fact that we have reasons for school that happen through the actual practice, the everyday experience of school, which are the intrinsic ones, and reasons we have school that are instrumental, the ways we use schooling as a system to achieve other kinds of outcomes is a little less intuitive.
00:24:22
Speaker
And intrinsic reasons, so something that happens through school itself, through the experience of school that's individual, is like the classic human development.
00:24:29
Speaker
This is like, how do we ensure kids learn literacy?
00:24:32
Speaker
How do they develop empathy?
00:24:34
Speaker
These kinds of things that like an individual develops curiosity over time.
00:24:38
Speaker
If you think about intrinsic and collective, this is like the socialization processes that school serves.
00:24:45
Speaker
So this is like, how do we socialize citizens into a shared set of values?
00:24:52
Speaker
How do we create a we that
00:24:54
Speaker
a sense of who we are at the micro level and at the macro level at a national level, right?
00:24:59
Speaker
Like what does it mean to be American, right?
00:25:02
Speaker
And who belongs and who doesn't?
00:25:03
Speaker
Those all happen through how we do school and how we learn how to be with one another.
00:25:08
Speaker
So those are the intrinsic purposes.
00:25:09
Speaker
Those are individual possibility and social possibility.
00:25:12
Speaker
On the instrumental side, you have social efficiency, which is like the classic economic kind of perspective on schooling.
00:25:19
Speaker
A lot of policy, this is the like,
00:25:22
Speaker
How do we make sure we can grow our GDP?
00:25:26
Speaker
How do we make sure we have enough STEM workers?
00:25:27
Speaker
How do we make sure we have enough teachers?
00:25:30
Speaker
How do we make sure we fill all the different positions in society and compete as an economy?
00:25:34
Speaker
And then on the individual and instrumental, you have individual efficiency, which is like, how do I make sure my kid ends up at the top of the socioeconomic system oftentimes?
00:25:42
Speaker
Or in a better framing, how do we make sure they make it into the right job for them?
00:25:47
Speaker
How do they navigate this system
00:25:50
Speaker
to get the outcomes that they care about most.
00:25:51
Speaker
But it's not really necessarily through the schooling system itself.
00:25:55
Speaker
It's by like accruing the credits.
00:25:57
Speaker
So essentially, re-envisioned aims to figure out how people view education in these lens, then find a way to share how people plan on getting there.
00:26:05
Speaker
And what came out of that work of creating this kind of meta framework for putting all these different ways we talk about the purposes of schooling into one conversation, A, I really want to understand because like oftentimes we conflate these.
00:26:17
Speaker
And if you talk about social efficiency and human development in one sentence,
00:26:21
Speaker
What you need to do to achieve those is often different.
00:26:24
Speaker
And so you just like end up muddling what it is.
00:26:26
Speaker
I think this is why we have a lot of issues in terms of our conversations about school, because we want to achieve all of those purposes.
00:26:32
Speaker
Right.
00:26:32
Speaker
But like what it means to do that can be slightly different.
00:26:36
Speaker
And I think that's particularly true if you try and design for the instrumental purposes.
00:26:40
Speaker
I think if you design for the intrinsic purposes,
00:26:42
Speaker
you get all four.
00:26:44
Speaker
And that's a much longer conversation as to like how, but like if you design for the experience itself, I think that you can create a system that achieves all four purposes.
00:26:52
Speaker
Where I think right now we largely design for individual efficiency, which I think is highly detrimental.
00:26:58
Speaker
What I was really curious about was like to what extent there would be a shared vision.
00:27:02
Speaker
And I wanted to ask about a good life because oftentimes when we ask about school, if you go and ask somebody, how are you going to re-envision school?
00:27:08
Speaker
They have all kinds of implicit assumptions.
00:27:10
Speaker
You can think about the theory of change of being like, what kind of lives in society do we want to create?
00:27:16
Speaker
What do we think the role of school is in creating that?
00:27:20
Speaker
Is my school doing that or is it not?
00:27:22
Speaker
And if not, why not?
00:27:24
Speaker
And I think that almost all of our conversations start on if not, why not?
00:27:28
Speaker
And we rarely understand, even if we're aiming for the same kinds of
00:27:33
Speaker
lives.
00:27:33
Speaker
And you can't understand people's diagnoses about what's wrong with schools unless you understand about the kinds of lives they think they want to create and what they think the role of school is in doing that.
00:27:43
Speaker
And to do this, Re-Envision Ed is cataloging stakeholders, students, parents, community members, teachers, administrators, and more, and asking a series of questions on what the good life is to them
00:27:54
Speaker
then you're sharing this common vision out?
00:27:56
Speaker
Two things.
00:27:57
Speaker
One, that we think it's about the process and not the answer.
00:28:00
Speaker
You could send a survey to everybody and get some answers and then try and design from that.
00:28:04
Speaker
But we think it's about a process of having conversations about what it is we ultimately want.
00:28:08
Speaker
And the same way that as an individual, the reflection itself on your purpose is oftentimes more important than what you come out with as like what the actual purpose is.
00:28:17
Speaker
And then two, that I think we often think about school as preparation for the future, but in the same way that Dewey would talk about that as being a false way of looking about it, like it's actually about living today how you want people to become, right?
00:28:31
Speaker
Like we are the, like how we create habits of being for ourselves and with one another is the kind of society we're going to create.
00:28:39
Speaker
And so it's not so much about some future state, but rather about how do we live that now?
00:28:43
Speaker
And note, you can view all of Re-Envision Ed's work, including videos and transcripts, on their website.
00:28:49
Speaker
Nicole adds, We believe that this kind of conversation cannot draw solely from the opinions of policy elites or researchers, but it truly needs to be a collaborative meaning-making process that involve stakeholders across the country, parents, teachers, students, families,
00:29:06
Speaker
community members.
00:29:09
Speaker
And so that is why we set the ambitious goal of capturing the voices of 10,000 people across the country and asking them to articulate their theory of change or schooling.
00:29:22
Speaker
So what makes a good life?
00:29:23
Speaker
What kind of society do they want to live in?
00:29:27
Speaker
Do they want their children to live in?
00:29:28
Speaker
What is the role of school in creating these lives in these communities?
00:29:35
Speaker
And do we think schools are currently playing that role?
00:29:38
Speaker
And why or why not?
00:29:40
Speaker
And then do you think others agree with you?
00:29:42
Speaker
And we hope that these conversations remain things.
00:29:46
Speaker
The first of which is that we hope that the conversation itself is really powerful.
00:29:51
Speaker
I think something that Aaron mentioned earlier is that it would be relatively easy for us to send out a Google survey to 10,000 people and say, hey, what do you think the purpose of school is?
00:30:03
Speaker
And we might get some interesting responses.
00:30:05
Speaker
And in fact, I think there is like a
00:30:07
Speaker
poll that does that currently.
00:30:10
Speaker
But what that doesn't allow for is to allow space for reflection, to sit down with someone that you love and grapple with tough questions.
00:30:25
Speaker
And we believe truly that the power of the 10,000 interviews is not just in the number 10,000, but is in the process of meaningful reflection with people you care about.
Designing Student-Centric Environments
00:30:37
Speaker
So after we've gathered this data and we begin to interpret it, Aaron likens our classrooms to a garden, and in this case a tomato garden.
00:30:45
Speaker
There are two things that teachers have control over and it's not the size, redness, or actual full development of the tomato, an individual tomato itself.
00:30:58
Speaker
What they have control over is the school and classroom environment they create and they have control over the experiences they design.
00:31:08
Speaker
And it turns out that human beings, similar to
00:31:11
Speaker
with different tomatoes we'll just keep pushing this keep pushing this metaphor depend very heavily on the social environment that they're in and that we have social psychological needs that are just as important as our physiological as our physical needs so like food and water we need and you can think of maslow's hierarchy of needs right um but there's been a huge amount of research around like these core
00:31:36
Speaker
social psychological needs and we have needs for a sense of autonomy so a sense that like our actions are volitional a need for competence this is from social self-determination theory Ryan in DC it's like 40 to 50 years of research we have a need to feel competent and that doesn't mean in the way we often use that in schools but in the sense of like I can predict that my behavior what what the result of my behavior is going to be so you can think about that in a
00:32:04
Speaker
if you have a very unpredictable environment, it undermines your sense of confidence, right?
00:32:08
Speaker
Like if you can't ever predict day to day, what's going to happen, you feel less confident in it.
00:32:13
Speaker
We have a need for a relatedness with other people, right?
00:32:17
Speaker
We are like fundamentally and before anything else, social creatures.
00:32:20
Speaker
And so the need to feel seen and to be related to others is a core need.
00:32:26
Speaker
And then from a different body of literature,
00:32:29
Speaker
We have a need for meaning.
00:32:31
Speaker
We're constantly, we are meaning-making creatures.
00:32:33
Speaker
And part of that is purpose, right?
00:32:36
Speaker
So you can think about that, but we make meaning in lots of different ways.
00:32:38
Speaker
Out of our life, you can think about that through religion, through philosophy, lots of different ways of making meaning.
00:32:44
Speaker
But we have these four core needs.
00:32:46
Speaker
And when we design environments, I'm going to go through a couple of design principles.
00:32:52
Speaker
But I think one, there are things you can add.
00:32:55
Speaker
So for like autonomy support, you give kids more choice, you give more direction, you
00:33:00
Speaker
You allow them the freedom to think about what it is that they want and how it aligns with their interests, right?
00:33:05
Speaker
There are also things that stand in the way.
00:33:07
Speaker
So I'm going to first go through the things that stand in the way because oftentimes we think about adding things in.
00:33:12
Speaker
But actually, it's just as I think we've largely designed schools to stand in the way of our ability to meet our core needs.
00:33:18
Speaker
And so thinking about that alienation and enemy.
00:33:21
Speaker
So when rules are too tight or too loose.
00:33:24
Speaker
if you have too much of a structure or too little of a structure, it makes people, it undermines people's sense of autonomy and their sense of competence.
00:33:32
Speaker
If you have a high shame, all of Brene Brown's work on shame and how that inhibits our ability to relate with others, to show up as our full selves in our environments, scarcity has very predictable effects and not just scarcity of like money, but scarcity of time, scarcity of resources.
00:33:49
Speaker
And think about educators, I mean,
00:33:51
Speaker
Maybe I can just ask you, like how much it just feels like there is never enough time.
00:33:55
Speaker
Like how much like we design like classrooms so that like in our 42 minutes and 30 seconds together every day, right, we're going to like get through all of these different things.
00:34:05
Speaker
Like there's just this constant enforced time scarcity as well as just never feeling like there are enough resources.
00:34:10
Speaker
And that both inhibits our ability to like
00:34:13
Speaker
be empathetic with one another actually inhibits your ability to like feel empathy for others think about when you're like really rushed to go to a meeting right and you pass by somebody it looks like they're having a bad day you're way less likely to stop there's a ton to consider here if you want to learn more about aaron's research i highly encourage you to check out her work in our show notes and at re-envisioned and in addition to their work at re-envisioned aaron nicole both were just hired on at the future project the future project aims to um
00:34:42
Speaker
make sure that every person can build a life and world that they love, starting with
Innovative Educational Projects and Mentorship
00:34:48
Speaker
youth.
00:34:48
Speaker
And right now, our main program is one in which we put dream directors in schools.
00:34:55
Speaker
So a dream director is like a new role in a school.
00:34:58
Speaker
It's like part role model, part coach, part mentor, part educator.
00:35:02
Speaker
And they work with a cohort of students to develop
00:35:05
Speaker
a set of mindsets and sales sets to allow students to identify what it is they care about and pursue that.
00:35:14
Speaker
And to create projects that benefit their community, right?
00:35:18
Speaker
So to think about what it is they hope to see in their school and how they wanna serve other students in their school.
00:35:25
Speaker
And so we're doing a case study for instance right now on one of our longest running Dream Directors and really it's been a whole school transformation.
00:35:34
Speaker
over six and a half years now, right?
00:35:36
Speaker
But like, and really student-led and student voice thinking about how to shift school culture in these particular ways.
00:35:45
Speaker
So our major
00:35:46
Speaker
program is one in which Dream Directors work with students in schools.
00:35:51
Speaker
And I think, oh man, I know that we're in nearly 50 schools and I'm going to mess up the number of states because we have like three different sites in Connecticut, but we're in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, DC, Chicago, Detroit, LA, and San Francisco.
00:36:08
Speaker
We've just launched a new program.
00:36:11
Speaker
which is a three-day version.
00:36:13
Speaker
So you can think about Dream Directors as like really intervening in the entire ecosystem, right?
00:36:16
Speaker
Creating like a greenhouse, if you're thinking about that metaphor.
00:36:20
Speaker
But we've just launched Future Camp
00:36:23
Speaker
which is how many sites are they visiting?
00:36:25
Speaker
They've done three.
00:36:27
Speaker
10.
00:36:27
Speaker
But I think they're visiting 10 sites.
00:36:28
Speaker
And it's like a three-day intensive transformative experience for students where they go through a lot of the different exercises.
00:36:37
Speaker
They meet other students from other schools.
00:36:39
Speaker
So I think about 150 students from around the community come together and learn about each other and envision for their community and learn the skills to kind of begin driving change themselves.
00:36:50
Speaker
So in summary, check out these programs and see if they interest you.
00:36:53
Speaker
Re-Envision Ed is a free learning experience for your students to share their story and open that dialogue, as well as you could take the survey yourself.
00:37:00
Speaker
Nicole explains what that process is like.
00:37:02
Speaker
I actually think for teachers to go through the interview process, the interview protocol that we have on our website.
00:37:10
Speaker
So even if teachers just look at the questions that we have in the interview protocol and do their own reflection on what they believe their personal theory of change of schooling is, both at the individual and collective level.
00:37:23
Speaker
that that and that that vision becomes a grounding for the types of environments and experiences that they cultivate in their classrooms, the ways that they relate with students.
00:37:35
Speaker
I think that although my skill as an educator improved over my time in the classroom, that actually I was
00:37:43
Speaker
much closer to my personal vision for schooling in my first year of teaching, although everything else was a disaster.
00:37:53
Speaker
I think that I am more proud of the work that I did in that first year because it was more in alignment with my values and my vision for school.
00:38:01
Speaker
Versus as I became more seasoned in the classroom, I think I adapted what I thought was important to what the system was reflecting back to me was important, what my school district was reflecting back to me as important.
00:38:17
Speaker
And so advice I would give to teachers, you know,
00:38:19
Speaker
walking into their classroom is to do that deep internal reflection on their personal theory of change for schooling and then almost like pressure testing how their current environment and experiences are doing
00:38:36
Speaker
in cultivating the daily practice of that vision.
00:38:39
Speaker
As Erin mentioned before, like this idea that if we want students to, you know, be curious and empathetic and kind, that that's not something you prepare them for in the future.
00:38:51
Speaker
That's something they have to practice daily.
00:38:54
Speaker
And so if we're really clear on, you know, the kinds of
00:38:59
Speaker
lives we want for children in the long term and the kind of societies that we want children to be a part of, then ensuring that our classrooms are daily reflections of those values and that vision.
00:39:11
Speaker
I have a lot of regrets of like how I, how my teaching style changed over my time in the classroom because I had lost sight of that.
00:39:23
Speaker
And I wish that I could go back to those years and reprioritize the things that I knew to be true.
00:39:33
Speaker
Even though I was 22 years old, I think I was much closer than I was at the very end of my time.
00:39:41
Speaker
And that point that Nicole just made is the resounding theme of the rest of this podcast.
00:39:46
Speaker
There's so much to unpack and discover as we push for progressive, educated values, letting children learn, removing rank and file standardization, stopping feel bad education and ensuring teachers are empowered to do so.
00:39:57
Speaker
And the question becomes, how do we even do that?
00:40:00
Speaker
And how can we maintain our sanity while we push our developing collective vision?
00:40:23
Speaker
And so I had an advantage a lot of teachers didn't have is I was working for 10 years and then got 10 years off basically and read nothing but reason, wanted to see what could I do to improve how things work.
00:40:37
Speaker
This is Richard Luperviti, an educator who finished a career at a top-ranked charter school in the United States, then ventured overseas with his wife, a U.S. diplomat.
00:40:46
Speaker
While searching for work, he reminisced on the work of Alfie Kohn, which was recommended by one of his elite student's parents.
Progressive Education in Practice
00:40:53
Speaker
And being a curious individual, he started to incorporate progressive ideas into parenting, as well as a new position at an international school in Chengdu, China.
00:41:01
Speaker
When I got into the school, it was finally a time after even a year of homeschooling my kids and doing all this research and reading finally gave me an opportunity to say, all right, here's what I believe.
00:41:11
Speaker
Now, how do I implement it without getting fired?
00:41:13
Speaker
Because to go gradeless, I wanted students to direct their own learning.
00:41:17
Speaker
I wanted all these things that I've discovered work with my own children, with other children I came in touch with, with other people I knew who homeschooled and things like that.
00:41:27
Speaker
How do I help these students get that?
00:41:29
Speaker
And one of the very first new teacher orientation days, our headmaster said, what is one of the things in the next five years education better do to stay relevant?
00:41:40
Speaker
And I said, take up some of the principles of homeschooling and unschooling.
00:41:44
Speaker
And he said, I think you're exactly right.
00:41:46
Speaker
And so I knew I had a head of school now who was open to a lot of different things.
00:41:50
Speaker
And so I thought, all right, here we go.
00:41:53
Speaker
Richard taught IB English, which is an advanced program typically aimed at accelerated academics, to both native and non-native speakers.
00:42:01
Speaker
First, the class that was on their first year, I said, here, guys, here's what the IB gives me.
00:42:06
Speaker
You design the course.
00:42:07
Speaker
Let's do it together.
00:42:08
Speaker
Why should I tell you what to study?
00:42:10
Speaker
And they loved it.
00:42:11
Speaker
And so we designed a two-year scope and sequence that actually ended up changing because our desires changed.
00:42:18
Speaker
We found out we weren't as interested after one year in the stuff that we thought a year ago that we would be interested in.
00:42:25
Speaker
It was even this thing that wasn't set in stone.
00:42:28
Speaker
It could change as it went along.
00:42:30
Speaker
And because the IB has its own summative exam at the end of two years that gives them a score and kind of undermines a lot of the philosophy of the IB itself, I never had to grade anything.
00:42:41
Speaker
So it was easy to go gradeless and to let students direct their own learning, pick their own books, things like that, because the ethos of the IB was that way.
00:42:49
Speaker
And I had a headmaster that wanted to do it.
00:42:52
Speaker
And I had these students in this class.
00:42:54
Speaker
There were 10 students in it, I think,
00:42:58
Speaker
One was from Brazil, one was from Taiwan, and the others were local Chengdu kids who got passports from somewhere else and allowed them to go to an international school.
00:43:09
Speaker
I didn't find any problems.
00:43:11
Speaker
I said they were open to it, they wanted to do it, they liked the idea of doing it.
00:43:15
Speaker
We even studied man's effect on nature.
00:43:19
Speaker
I think was that we studied.
00:43:20
Speaker
And we actually use that as a way to discuss schooling's effect on the nature of an individual.
00:43:26
Speaker
And so they got into it.
00:43:29
Speaker
And even with students in that class had started a company while in the last two years of helping other Chinese kids understand how Westerners teach and what those philosophies are.
00:43:39
Speaker
as sort of this after school program for kids in traditional Chinese schools.
00:43:43
Speaker
So they had a profitable company when he graduated and took a gap year to run it.
00:43:48
Speaker
And then he's at UC Berkeley now.
00:43:50
Speaker
So there's a lot of good things that were happening in that class.
00:43:54
Speaker
I didn't run into a problem, though, with the typical, what we would see as a stereotypical mindset of, I need you just tell me what to know and I will give it back to you.
00:44:05
Speaker
until when I taught English A and did the same thing.
00:44:08
Speaker
These were for the more advanced English speakers, and they've had more exposure to Western ideas.
00:44:14
Speaker
Two of the students in the class didn't like the approach as much.
00:44:18
Speaker
They wanted to know, what do I need to pass this IB exam with a six or seven?
00:44:23
Speaker
And how do I just do that?
00:44:26
Speaker
Don't give me choices.
00:44:27
Speaker
Don't tell me, you know, tell me what I need.
00:44:30
Speaker
And so they were more resistant to it.
00:44:33
Speaker
And I found that it took a while to convince them.
00:44:35
Speaker
I had to convince them that, you know, I've taught at,
00:44:39
Speaker
freshman composition at a university when I was in grad school, I know where you're going.
00:44:43
Speaker
I want to ignore the exam right now and help give you the skills that will help you succeed best where you're going, not just pass the IB.
00:44:51
Speaker
I said, I can give you the skills you need for that exam two to four weeks leading up to the exam.
00:44:57
Speaker
Don't worry about that.
00:44:58
Speaker
We'll focus on that when it's necessary.
00:45:01
Speaker
And so it took a while.
00:45:01
Speaker
I had to build trust with them first.
00:45:04
Speaker
So then when I think about Chinese academics and assume that their idea of preparing for the future is rigorous traditional academics, is that not the case?
00:45:12
Speaker
Right.
00:45:12
Speaker
And they did.
00:45:13
Speaker
The student who I told you ended up starting this company.
00:45:17
Speaker
He came from a mother who was in the military.
00:45:21
Speaker
But it was very interesting because they did open him up to art and other things.
00:45:25
Speaker
And he was a very diverse.
00:45:27
Speaker
He was a math, physics guy, no doubt.
00:45:30
Speaker
It was interesting that these parents all had
00:45:33
Speaker
some kind of influence in that realm.
00:45:36
Speaker
For one of the girls in the class who was interested in economics and actually had started a business on her own, she painted dolls' faces.
00:45:45
Speaker
I didn't even know there was a market for this, but people would send her expensive dolls because I thought, oh, I'll get her to do it for my daughter for her birthday.
00:45:52
Speaker
I'll buy a doll and see if she made it.
00:45:55
Speaker
I couldn't afford the doll, what she charges to paint faces on them.
00:46:00
Speaker
And she was into economics.
00:46:01
Speaker
Well, of course, because she's her.
00:46:03
Speaker
But her dad actually, during one conference with her econ teacher said, what do you think about a girl studying economics?
00:46:10
Speaker
So,
00:46:11
Speaker
Her interest in this was maybe even a rebellion against this over force in her life.
00:46:18
Speaker
But otherwise, there were a lot of students in that class who had parents that were very open to these ideas as well.
00:46:23
Speaker
And that's what I have to be grateful for as well.
00:46:25
Speaker
Not only a headmaster, it seemed like a convergence of a lot of forces at one time, but I had parents who never questioned, and I couldn't believe this, that I never gave a grade during the semester.
00:46:37
Speaker
This is especially important in eighth grade English where there was an ABC grade.
00:46:42
Speaker
never question the fact that not one assignment ever had a grade on it, but at the end of a semester, their kids had grades.
00:46:50
Speaker
They never questioned that because I had a whole room of kids working on different things.
00:46:55
Speaker
I had six of 12 kids in this class working on their own novels, and by the end of the year,
00:47:00
Speaker
The six of them had 50,000 plus words, at least of their own novel.
00:47:06
Speaker
I had other students who were in that class said, I want to work on this genre of writing.
00:47:11
Speaker
So I taught them how to look at a piece of writing that's that people have published in this genre and pick out little things to play with, little formal elements to play with and do that on your own.
00:47:23
Speaker
You can do that.
00:47:24
Speaker
And so they would submit writing and I'd give them comments and give it back.
00:47:28
Speaker
And then they would work on a new piece and then rewrite this other piece.
00:47:31
Speaker
And so I let them establish, what is it that kind of grade do you think you deserve for this?
00:47:36
Speaker
And then I talked to them after we each have a conference, you know, 10 minutes with each kid.
00:47:40
Speaker
And they would tell me what they think they earned.
00:47:41
Speaker
And I
00:47:42
Speaker
I had no reason to distrust them.
00:47:44
Speaker
It's amazing how few A's you still have when kids are grading themselves.
00:47:49
Speaker
And kids, I'm like, I'm not giving you a B. I'm going to give you an A. I'm sorry.
00:47:53
Speaker
I refuse to listen to you on this one because they've been beaten down so long.
00:47:59
Speaker
And a lot of the feedback was, you know, thanks for making me realize I could write, that I can learn to write, that I
00:48:05
Speaker
I have something valuable.
00:48:07
Speaker
But the parents never questioned any of that.
00:48:09
Speaker
I think it was just they trusted me.
00:48:10
Speaker
Their kids always came back with Mr. Lupita is doing this thing with me and I really enjoy it and I feel like I'm learning.
00:48:16
Speaker
So what I find interesting about your story is that it seems like progressive education practices just fall into place and work.
00:48:24
Speaker
We spend so much time trying to figure out how to engage kids with gimmicky lesson plans or make them comply with grades or outlandish like drill and kill practices.
00:48:33
Speaker
Certainly funding our education systems better to lower the number of students per class would be really beneficial.
00:48:38
Speaker
But even in spite of that, do you find that your stress and well-being as a teacher improved because you adopted Progressive N?
00:48:43
Speaker
It became loads easier because I quit planning.
00:48:47
Speaker
I quit writing lessons.
00:48:49
Speaker
I had years of that.
00:48:51
Speaker
I got lucky.
00:48:52
Speaker
Every job I had in education after grad school, I had to design my own curriculum from scratch.
00:48:57
Speaker
I started at a school that was
00:48:59
Speaker
adding grades as they went along.
00:49:00
Speaker
So I was in on writing ninth grade curriculum, in on writing 11th grade curriculum.
00:49:04
Speaker
I taught at St.
00:49:05
Speaker
Albans in Washington, D.C., which is all boys school, the all boys school, National Cathedral School.
00:49:09
Speaker
They allowed me free reign to write the curriculum when I taught seventh grade.
00:49:13
Speaker
People have always allowed me to write curriculum and design lessons and all that.
00:49:17
Speaker
So I never worried about not being able to come up with something on the spot.
00:49:21
Speaker
I had this years of experience.
00:49:23
Speaker
And so I
00:49:24
Speaker
That was awesome because I could deal with each thing as it occurred and as was necessary.
00:49:30
Speaker
I didn't have to plan for a whole room of individuals, some who might not need anything that I have to say that day and might need a lot more previous to that to even get to where I was that day.
00:49:42
Speaker
And so it was wonderfully freeing.
00:49:44
Speaker
And instead of worrying about lessons,
00:49:47
Speaker
I would go down and play basketball with kids during the break to get to know them better.
00:49:51
Speaker
I would hang out at lunch.
00:49:53
Speaker
I didn't worry about writing, you know, grading or anything at lunch because I had students come to my room.
00:49:58
Speaker
They would eat in my room and we, I joined them for lunch and I would get to know that.
00:50:02
Speaker
I mean, yeah, in some ways it's easier, but it's much more difficult because you have to be scared to death at some point that what if I'm wrong?
00:50:12
Speaker
What if I'm not directing them the way they should be directed?
00:50:15
Speaker
What if they don't get something vital?
00:50:18
Speaker
But I've always found that if you've developed that relationship and you really concern yourself with individuals, that you're going to find out that
00:50:27
Speaker
If you do see somebody who needs something, like if kids want to go to school in college, well, I do need to have them write a literary analysis or understand how to develop a literary analysis.
00:50:39
Speaker
And as much as I hate, I think the analysis paper in English classes done more to destroy a love of reading than maybe anything else.
00:50:47
Speaker
My eighth graders, I did tell them, look, here's a skill you might want.
00:50:52
Speaker
Now, I can give it to you, but I want you to select the book.
00:50:56
Speaker
I want you to I'm not going to grade you on it, but I want you to see how we read.
00:51:02
Speaker
And so I let them select a novel.
00:51:04
Speaker
And as a class, we went through it together, talked about it.
00:51:07
Speaker
I showed them how I develop an idea for what a book might mean or something like that.
00:51:14
Speaker
And it worked.
00:51:14
Speaker
It worked out fine.
00:51:15
Speaker
But I've always found that kids will take recommendations if they trust you.
00:51:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:19
Speaker
And it seems like building trust, developing positive relationships, it typically leads us to creating slightly revolutionary students, perhaps in a Paulo Freire-esque way.
00:51:30
Speaker
We're empowering students to understand and to an extent
00:51:32
Speaker
play the system, which if you're going to be giving students voice and choice, it kind of makes sense that you're using them under the blanket of traditional, you have to do this mentalities.
00:51:42
Speaker
You're kind of telling them about the system that they're playing.
00:51:45
Speaker
I have used that we're rebels against the whole system thing to motivate.
00:51:50
Speaker
I mean,
00:51:51
Speaker
That one class, the English B class that everybody bought in pretty quickly, I decided to give them sort of that final lecture thing.
00:51:59
Speaker
I said, look, we've been talking all year.
00:52:01
Speaker
This final class period is yours.
00:52:02
Speaker
You each get, what, 10 minutes.
00:52:04
Speaker
You give the whole class one final lecture.
00:52:06
Speaker
What is it you've gotten now as you're about to graduate high school?
00:52:10
Speaker
What is it you want us to know?
00:52:13
Speaker
And I
00:52:14
Speaker
I didn't know it was going to do this, but it ended up turning into a big crying fest about we've learned more than it.
00:52:22
Speaker
This is the class that we've learned stuff in.
00:52:24
Speaker
This is the way that and I've never done that as a way of.
00:52:28
Speaker
you know, seeking praise or something like that.
00:52:31
Speaker
It was a way of giving them another chance to voice us.
00:52:34
Speaker
What is it you really want everyone to know now that you're graduating about your experience?
00:52:39
Speaker
I even found out that one of the girls in the class who wanted to go study in Korea and go to Korean university and interestingly, I spent a year and a half teaching in Korea too.
00:52:50
Speaker
And we talk about Korean.
00:52:52
Speaker
She was teaching herself the Korean language.
00:52:54
Speaker
I was the only person who told her that she should go and that I loved it.
00:52:58
Speaker
And everybody else was telling me, why would you want to go there, blah, blah, blah.
00:53:01
Speaker
And she, on that day, broke down.
00:53:03
Speaker
I had never even known over the last two years my support of her dreams there meant so much.
00:53:08
Speaker
So at the very end of that class, I said, look, I've never asked you guys for a favor.
00:53:14
Speaker
But on this last test in English, your English B exam, I'm going to ask for one favor.
00:53:21
Speaker
And that is prove me right.
00:53:23
Speaker
That's the only favor I want.
00:53:25
Speaker
If you do well on this exam, you're going to prove me right.
00:53:29
Speaker
And you're going to prove yourselves right.
00:53:31
Speaker
You're going to prove to everyone that there's a better way, a more humane way.
00:53:35
Speaker
And the numbers showed that that grade on that exam for them was almost a full point higher than all their other exams.
00:53:44
Speaker
During the summer, I found out all the numbers.
00:53:47
Speaker
And I've had since had lunch with some or things like that or been in communication with most of them.
00:53:54
Speaker
And I said, well, thank you, because you did it.
00:53:57
Speaker
I think part of that mentality of we're fighting a system that hasn't been just to us, I think, move them in some
Evidence Supporting Progressive Education
00:54:04
Speaker
ways.
00:54:04
Speaker
I know people can think it's hokey, I guess.
00:54:07
Speaker
But, you know, if we read Henry V, that's basically how he united all of Britain is he found, hey, let's attack France.
00:54:15
Speaker
Let's find an enemy for all of us and and let's all gather around that common enemy.
00:54:20
Speaker
So.
00:54:21
Speaker
How then do we instill progressive vibes into schools and convince other educators that these aren't hokey ideas?
00:54:27
Speaker
I know that some people see it as like the hippie kumbaya thing.
00:54:31
Speaker
We're all sitting around in a circle talking about how we feel.
00:54:34
Speaker
And that really isn't the point of recognizing individuals as people, although it certainly could be a major element.
00:54:39
Speaker
But how can we convince people that progressive education is honestly a lot more rigorous and challenging than traditional ed because we're letting students have so much of that control that they're pushing themselves?
00:54:48
Speaker
I've read some introductions, some books.
00:54:53
Speaker
where they go over the history of progressive ed.
00:54:56
Speaker
And these are books that are meant to discount progressive education.
00:55:00
Speaker
And I never found one of those books that alluded to the eight-year study.
00:55:05
Speaker
If you're not familiar, the eight-year study was conducted throughout the 1930s into the early 1940s.
00:55:10
Speaker
And it looked at students at progressively focused schools, ones that had cross-disciplinary classes, more arts and music programs, blended learning, and in general, a more fluid learning environment.
00:55:19
Speaker
It looked at
00:55:20
Speaker
Everything from very traditional rank and file schools to really interesting experimental schools.
00:55:28
Speaker
And usually what these results showed was that students outperform their traditional counterparts in pretty much every realm.
00:55:34
Speaker
So academically, like your standardized testing, but also when it comes to social and emotional well-being, artistically, all sorts of different kinds of things.
00:55:42
Speaker
And it's a pretty extensive study.
00:55:44
Speaker
And we can't miss the fact that these students were highly privileged.
00:55:46
Speaker
It's something that's part of that can potentially alter the findings because the schools that could do that were mostly more well-off kids.
00:55:53
Speaker
That doesn't mean, though, that we couldn't ensure that for all of our schools.
00:55:56
Speaker
And then the Cold War came about.
00:55:58
Speaker
And, of course, everybody reverted back to more.
00:56:01
Speaker
We have to get the rigor and the science of math, blah, blah, blah.
00:56:03
Speaker
And we kind of disbanded the idea.
00:56:05
Speaker
But.
00:56:06
Speaker
the information that's out there is always going to be skewed.
00:56:10
Speaker
And so, yeah, the more information that can get out there, the more, and I don't know how many people I've talked to in education who don't know about the eight-year study.
00:56:18
Speaker
And I've yet to hear somebody say it was a terrible study for this reason or that it failed.
00:56:24
Speaker
And all I've heard is it did show this one thing.
00:56:28
Speaker
People say explicit learning is shown to work.
00:56:31
Speaker
I have evidence of it.
00:56:32
Speaker
Okay, under what condition and what did it work for?
00:56:36
Speaker
Show me the evidence that it works without using a score increase on either a grade or a standardized test.
00:56:42
Speaker
Well, that's not there.
00:56:43
Speaker
So what is it working for?
00:56:45
Speaker
I don't, the stereotypes that are out there.
00:56:49
Speaker
People, and people love to make fun.
00:56:52
Speaker
Oh, lack of rigor, oh, we're going to run around and sing Kumbaya like you said.
00:56:57
Speaker
More people showing that that's not the case.
00:57:01
Speaker
When kids set their goals, they have a mind to do it.
00:57:03
Speaker
They'll work their tails off for it.
00:57:07
Speaker
Never seen the opposite to be true.
00:57:09
Speaker
I've seen kids do amazing things.
00:57:12
Speaker
And I've seen a lot of athletes.
00:57:14
Speaker
I mean, look at athletes who choose to play a certain sport.
00:57:17
Speaker
They'll kill themselves to be good at that sport.
00:57:20
Speaker
um and any other hobby or game or activity kids who want to be great guitarists man they go to stores and they just start banging away on that guitar over and over i'm glad no one told dave grohl to go back to school and start doing that homework and get really good glad his mom let him tour to europe with a band at 17 so he could continue playing because i kind of like some of the music dave grohl has put out
00:57:46
Speaker
And I benefit greatly from his mom's open-mindedness to the path he should have taken.
00:57:52
Speaker
And not everybody's going to be that.
00:57:54
Speaker
But we don't know where everybody's going to head.
00:57:57
Speaker
I find that I've read most of the stuff the other camp has read.
00:58:01
Speaker
They haven't necessarily read the stuff I've read.
00:58:04
Speaker
And I don't mean to get on my high horse or sound braggy right now.
00:58:08
Speaker
But if that's true, why don't we all read all the same stuff and see what happens?
Personal Stories Advocating for Change
00:58:31
Speaker
I always believe strongly that every child and every human has gifts and strengths that really place them in a valuable role in society.
00:58:38
Speaker
We all have our different strengths and weaknesses and a place where we're needed within society.
00:58:45
Speaker
Anne Connelly is a special ed and inclusion specialist in Ontario who has been teaching for 20 years embracing a progressive mentality.
00:58:53
Speaker
And I guess my own experience really kind of deepened when as a mom, I was faced with the disappointing reality that this progressive, inclusive, positive approach was not encouraged or embraced by all teachers or classrooms or schools.
00:59:08
Speaker
When my first child, my daughter, who was a very naturally very bright, funny, curious, articulate child started school.
00:59:16
Speaker
I was shocked and saddened that she didn't like school at all.
00:59:20
Speaker
Her kindergarten experience was not particularly welcoming or engaging.
00:59:24
Speaker
The school that she attended, the primary school she attended here in Ontario, was a very highly rated school.
00:59:32
Speaker
It performed very well on our standardized EQAO test, but it quite literally completely failed my daughter and other kids as well in terms of engagement, social skills, inclusion.
00:59:46
Speaker
And her mental health and her overall well-being were quite honestly damaged at that school.
00:59:52
Speaker
She was bullied.
00:59:53
Speaker
She was not supported.
00:59:55
Speaker
She was made to feel stupid.
00:59:58
Speaker
She was humiliated and ultimately, you know, not supported by the adults in the buildings for all the way from the teachers to the principal.
01:00:06
Speaker
And me as a teacher, I kind of I kind of knew how to try to get in there to get that support for her.
01:00:12
Speaker
But we were not successful.
01:00:14
Speaker
And
01:00:14
Speaker
we witnessed firsthand how detrimental such an unsupportive negative school environment could be, how detrimental it can be on a child.
01:00:24
Speaker
And she had everything else going for her.
01:00:27
Speaker
You know, this is a child who came from a great family, a great home life, you know, socioeconomic status.
01:00:32
Speaker
She was at an advantage, at a privilege from the beginning, and it just destroyed her.
01:00:38
Speaker
At the time, it really broke our heart, but
01:00:41
Speaker
As I've healed my heart, I've become stronger in my own commitment to positive progressive education.
01:00:47
Speaker
And like I said, it was always there, but it just made me realize that, wow, it really isn't everywhere.
01:00:53
Speaker
And it needs to be.
01:00:55
Speaker
Like, it's so critical for, and I love how you guys call it the Human Restoration Project.
01:01:00
Speaker
Like, there's no other way to say it.
01:01:03
Speaker
When you were talking about positive progressive practices, can you go into more detail about what those are?
01:01:08
Speaker
Going from strengths, giving the kids choice, giving the kids voice, letting them have a say in the classroom environment, letting them, not everyone does well sitting at a desk.
01:01:17
Speaker
So again, flexible seating, like these are just some of the things.
01:01:21
Speaker
Technology these days, assistive technology is fantastic for so many kids.
01:01:27
Speaker
I mean, it's a universal design for learning in the sense of
01:01:30
Speaker
it's not just good for, for kids who have learning disabilities.
01:01:34
Speaker
It's great for all kids.
01:01:35
Speaker
And these are the kinds of things that we, we have to just, I guess, I think maybe teachers sometimes are afraid to take risks and to, I guess, think outside the box.
01:01:48
Speaker
And so it's very, you know, it seems easier to just check off the curriculum and follow that very safe plan.
01:01:55
Speaker
But, um,
01:01:56
Speaker
I don't know, I find it actually easier, easier to go with the kids, let them, you know, and they, when we give them that kind of autonomy or that kind of power, I don't love the word power, but that kind of independence, they thrive, they will take it and they will run with it.
01:02:14
Speaker
And the things you see are just, you know, beyond your expectations.
01:02:20
Speaker
When we know
01:02:21
Speaker
how we want to try, how to try and bring out the best in them, but we have to trust them that maybe they know and they know their limits and they know their strengths and their weaknesses.
01:02:30
Speaker
And, and of course, you know, as educators, we want to, we want to push them beyond their limits and we want them to reach their potential.
01:02:37
Speaker
But I honestly think when you've got a kid in the zone and engaged and interested, they push their own limits.
01:02:45
Speaker
It's not external.
01:02:46
Speaker
It's totally intrinsic motivation at its truest form.
01:02:51
Speaker
And it seems like those notions are heavily reflected in what the best classrooms are doing throughout the country.
01:02:56
Speaker
Ironically, most of the time the teacher seems to get in the way and really just needs to take that risk, as you said, and letting kids control much of what happens in a practical, authentic way.
01:03:06
Speaker
We could drastically change classrooms tomorrow if we just asked, what do you want to do?
01:03:11
Speaker
How does all this translate then into inclusion and special education?
01:03:15
Speaker
I'm a CERC teacher, S-E-R-C.
01:03:18
Speaker
I have a special education resource classroom.
01:03:21
Speaker
which I love because I still have my own group of kids.
01:03:26
Speaker
I can create that classroom, that great classroom community, classroom vibe, really get to know my students.
01:03:34
Speaker
And I only have them for 50% of the day.
01:03:38
Speaker
So they are included.
01:03:39
Speaker
They are absolutely integrated into the other classes.
01:03:42
Speaker
They come to me for 50% of the day for language and math only.
01:03:45
Speaker
I find that kind of a lot of that project-based learning and a lot of those other
01:03:51
Speaker
really great pedagogical models.
01:03:55
Speaker
Those worked so well in like science and social studies and history and geography.
01:04:01
Speaker
In language and math, I do have to do it.
01:04:04
Speaker
It's a little bit different in there.
01:04:06
Speaker
I teach primary, so I teach the younger ones.
01:04:08
Speaker
So we're kind of starting from the beginning.
01:04:10
Speaker
But I guess, you know, in terms of, for example, time, we're starting to look at time on an analog clock, which, you know, nobody really uses anymore.
01:04:18
Speaker
But
01:04:18
Speaker
As we were talking, as I was showing it, the kids were watching videos about it.
01:04:23
Speaker
We were talking about it.
01:04:26
Speaker
They made their own clocks, just paper plate clocks, nothing fancy.
01:04:31
Speaker
But we kind of realized that the whole purpose of time and the idea that it's cyclical and that it goes around.
01:04:37
Speaker
And it was through exploring that kind of that model, working with the round paper plates, making the little hands go around, like all that stuff.
01:04:48
Speaker
physical movement, the creating it themselves, making their own colors, you know, noticing that there's big numbers that count the hours.
01:04:59
Speaker
There's the little numbers that count the minutes.
01:05:01
Speaker
And, you know, I have a little boy.
01:05:03
Speaker
He's in grade two.
01:05:04
Speaker
He's language impaired and he's been struggling a lot.
01:05:08
Speaker
But once he realized the connection between like the hours and the minutes, he was able to tell time to the quarter of an hour to 15 minutes.
01:05:17
Speaker
And that's not even part of his grade two curriculum, never mind the fact that he's on an IEP and, you know, it's beyond what he should be doing.
01:05:24
Speaker
So I guess when I think about it now, I do work, it does work its way into my class, but I definitely as a classroom teacher, regular classroom teacher, kind of, I guess, maybe more progressive type of teaching and the choice in voice that, that definitely came more integrated with science and social studies.
01:05:44
Speaker
But,
01:05:45
Speaker
I guess now that I'm thinking about it, I do do it in math almost naturally without even thinking about it.
01:05:51
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:05:51
Speaker
It's almost not, I didn't think it was that type, but it really is.
01:05:57
Speaker
Right, right.
01:05:57
Speaker
And in the same vein, progressive education isn't necessarily that we have to do experiential learning or we have to do a certain type of education.
01:06:05
Speaker
It's that, as you said, we're providing students with the outlet and voice to take control of that education and
01:06:10
Speaker
and then offering those experiences as a potential outcome.
01:06:13
Speaker
It's not all or nothing.
01:06:14
Speaker
You can have direct instruction as long as the students are consentful towards actually accepting that direct.
01:06:20
Speaker
I talk to kids all the time that want that experience, and that's perfectly fine.
01:06:24
Speaker
It's not about an all or nothing thing.
01:06:26
Speaker
We have circumstances.
01:06:27
Speaker
Like, for example, at a special education facility at a primary school,
01:06:31
Speaker
where we want to assist young people in reading basic math, you know, it makes sense sometimes.
01:06:36
Speaker
And I found, too, that for older kids, high schoolers, our more advanced topics are actually brought to life by students doing more experiential learning and doing something that's a little bit more experimental, probably because it's very much a propose-your-own-way-of-learning type thing.
01:06:51
Speaker
So students on IEP or 5 or 4, it's naturally differentiating.
01:06:55
Speaker
It really is.
01:06:56
Speaker
universal design for learning, like UDL in my special education training, you know, that's something obviously we learned about differentiated instruction and universal design for learning.
01:07:05
Speaker
Like you, you can't go wrong.
01:07:07
Speaker
You're going to, you're going to allow the academically inclined students to succeed and do well.
01:07:13
Speaker
And you're opening a door of, you know, possibilities and entry points and just different ways for those, those kind of different learners to think outside of the box and to succeed outside of the box.
01:07:26
Speaker
Based off your experiences of being a mother and elementary educator, what recommendations do you offer teachers who want to engage a class which is inclusive?
01:07:34
Speaker
Getting to know them, like establishing a relationship, getting to know their talents, their passions, their fears, what they're really good at.
01:07:41
Speaker
As soon as you know what makes them tick, then you use that and you weave it any way you can into whatever curriculum you're trying to teach or whatever subject you're trying to teach.
01:07:54
Speaker
So one of my little fellas, I know he's
01:07:56
Speaker
very artistic and he's really good at art.
01:07:58
Speaker
So when it came to making his clock, he got to decorate it and, you know, add color, whereas the other ones, some of the other ones who wouldn't be as artistic, they didn't, they didn't go in that direction.
01:08:10
Speaker
So it gives them kind of a sense of ownership and pride and a reason to be intrinsically motivated to really want to do this work.
01:08:20
Speaker
Because a lot of times with some of these kids, it's
01:08:23
Speaker
I mean, some of the stuff we have to teach them is so, to them, it's so random.
01:08:27
Speaker
It's so unimportant.
01:08:29
Speaker
And we just, we got to find a way to hook them and to get them interested and to show them why it's relevant or why it's valuable.
01:08:38
Speaker
And, you know, oftentimes we do that by just finding something they like.
01:08:43
Speaker
You know, I had this little boy who loved Batman.
01:08:46
Speaker
So wherever I could put Batman in, Batman was there.
01:08:50
Speaker
Just again, just to keep him engaged.
01:08:53
Speaker
allowing the kids, giving them tools, a variety of tools, a variety of strategies to kind of support them.
01:08:58
Speaker
So, for example, again, in math, we've spent a lot of time kind of exploring different tools, for example, hundreds charts and number lines, which are really, really great for almost any type of math.
01:09:13
Speaker
Once you've kind of introduced it to them, given the kids a bunch of different experiences, exploring them in different ways, creating them,
01:09:22
Speaker
dissecting them, kind of deconstructing them, constructing them, working with them in different ways, then the students are able to kind of say, you know what, I prefer, I like working with this.
01:09:34
Speaker
This is going to help me.
01:09:35
Speaker
And then giving them choice again, giving them choice, letting them see what works for them, what makes sense to them.
01:09:41
Speaker
We want to expose them and share different options of tools and strategies that will help them, but ultimately they need to make the choice of what's going to work for them.
01:09:50
Speaker
and giving them that responsibility and that independence, even for a grade two student, even for a little one.
01:09:56
Speaker
I love the point you bring up surrounding elementary students.
01:09:59
Speaker
I don't think we believe in them enough.
01:10:01
Speaker
We certainly say we do, but people assume that things like expositions of learning
01:10:06
Speaker
celebrations when students present at the end of the year.
01:10:09
Speaker
It's too much for younger kids, but kids know what they're doing.
01:10:12
Speaker
They might need a little nudge towards something sometimes, but it isn't a uniform learning process for every seven-year-old.
01:10:18
Speaker
We can do a lot of different things.
01:10:20
Speaker
In the same line of thought, what are your concerns then for inclusive practice in particular?
01:10:24
Speaker
People, sometimes teachers, educators, parents, administrators, we kind of think that
01:10:33
Speaker
Just by putting a bunch of kids in a class together, that's inclusion.
01:10:37
Speaker
And it couldn't be further from the truth because putting a bunch of different kids with different strengths, different weaknesses, different issues, I guess, in a room, different personalities, they need coaching and modeling and they need constant, I don't want to say supervision, but
01:11:01
Speaker
instruction or coaching, maybe coaching is a better word, and how to relate to one another.
01:11:06
Speaker
Because inclusion is not a physical thing.
01:11:09
Speaker
Inclusion is not putting them in a room together.
01:11:12
Speaker
And there we have it.
01:11:13
Speaker
It's a relationship.
01:11:15
Speaker
It's a deep connection to feel included.
01:11:18
Speaker
And I think that is one of the biggest, scariest things
01:11:22
Speaker
is that teachers don't understand that putting them in the room together is one thing, but we have to teach them, coach them, we have to model how to respect one another, how to all, even if we don't like each other, we still have to find a way to get along.
01:11:39
Speaker
I know, for example, in September, a lot of classes, classrooms, teachers, they're establishing, you know, classroom rules or classroom expectations.
01:11:46
Speaker
Things can't just be
01:11:48
Speaker
talked about in September and written on a chart and stuck on the wall.
01:11:51
Speaker
It has to be lived and experienced and the kids have to breathe it.
01:11:56
Speaker
You have to talk about it all the time and integrate it and show it explicitly and deliberately how, you know, well, the way you just said that to her, that wasn't very respectful.
01:12:07
Speaker
Is there another way you could phrase it?
01:12:09
Speaker
Or, you know, you're having a difficulty with that student.
01:12:11
Speaker
How can you solve that problem?
01:12:12
Speaker
And coaching them through those things because, you
01:12:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think the biggest mistake we make is that we don't know how to teach inclusion.
01:12:23
Speaker
We don't know how to really make it happen.
01:12:27
Speaker
And that's scary because as soon as the teachers aren't looking, that's when the bullying happens.
01:12:32
Speaker
That's when the kids will say or do something.
01:12:35
Speaker
And especially I'm just thinking, I know my daughter's experience and lots of other kids
01:12:39
Speaker
that I teach kids with LDs, you know, dyslexia who have terrible spelling.
01:12:44
Speaker
I mean, all day long, those kids are writing, expected to write.
01:12:48
Speaker
All day long, they're making spelling errors.
01:12:51
Speaker
And all day long, the other kids are just giving them a look or making a comment or that's not how you spell this or that's not how you spell that.
01:12:58
Speaker
And it just, it cuts them to the core.
01:13:01
Speaker
And if you would really, if you really are able to teach the whole idea of respect and appreciation and the fact that
01:13:08
Speaker
you know, we all have different talents.
01:13:10
Speaker
We all have strengths.
01:13:10
Speaker
We all have weaknesses.
01:13:12
Speaker
You know, these, you know, you might be a great speller in the class.
01:13:15
Speaker
You may struggle with spelling, but guess what?
01:13:17
Speaker
He's going to be able to help you with art or with math or music or, you know, something like that.
01:13:23
Speaker
That's what they need.
01:13:25
Speaker
And I don't mean to, I guess, get down on teachers because, yeah, the way the system is structured, it's really hard for teachers to do all that they need and want to do.
01:13:39
Speaker
you know, it's, it's not individual teachers, individual schools, although in some cases it is, but, you know, overall the system is just not designed to allow us to do our jobs to the best with, I guess, the right priorities in mind.
01:13:53
Speaker
And yeah, it's standardized testing and, and, and all this kind of strict rigid curriculum.
01:13:59
Speaker
It, it, it doesn't help.
01:14:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:02
Speaker
And then on the other side of that is, is,
01:14:05
Speaker
these kids who are struggling for so many different reasons.
01:14:08
Speaker
I mean, it's, it doesn't really matter if it's an overdiagnosis or an underdiagnosis.
01:14:12
Speaker
The bottom line is these kids are struggling.
01:14:14
Speaker
They're struggling with whether it's, it's the type of classroom environment they're in or whether it's something within their own path, their own mental health, their own trauma.
01:14:24
Speaker
You know, there's, there's a lot of stress and anxiety in the world all around and it rubs off on kids.
01:14:32
Speaker
That's a whole other area of, of,
01:14:34
Speaker
exploration that I'm kind of delving into into the self-reg world self-regulation and and and kind of healing that part of kids and adults but yeah parents and as a parent of a kid who had an LD ADHD who struggled a lot it's really hard for parents too because
Supporting Progressive Education Initiatives
01:14:54
Speaker
there's so much shame and there's so much blame and there's so much that we you know feel responsible for and you know
01:15:01
Speaker
Sometimes we have to just acknowledge that there's a lot out of our control.
01:15:04
Speaker
You know, we feel like we need to be in control of everything and we're not.
01:15:07
Speaker
So, I mean, but again, I think it all comes back to the idea that we all kind of have our strengths and our weaknesses and we all just need to focus on the priorities and everything will fall into place, I think.
01:15:27
Speaker
Hey, thanks again for listening into Things Fall Apart here at the Human Restoration Project.
01:15:31
Speaker
If you enjoy what you're listening to so far, be sure to check us out on our Patreon, which you can access at humanrestorationproject.org.
01:15:38
Speaker
If you support us on Patreon, we'll give you all of our blog postings from all of our contributors and an electronic magazine every couple months.
01:15:45
Speaker
That way it's a little bit easier to keep up on and read and learn a lot about what we're talking about and a lot of things that are backed by solid foundational research.
01:15:52
Speaker
Thank you.
01:16:01
Speaker
One thing that I wonder through all this is, are we pushing for something that some people really don't like?
01:16:06
Speaker
They consider progressive ed counter to the goals of education or the good life, and that adds a lot of stress.
01:16:12
Speaker
Not only are teachers underpaid, undervalued, and often misrepresented,
01:16:16
Speaker
they now have the added burden of feeling like they're doing something wrong, as in it feels like bad teaching to make some of these transitions, as we're going against really what we might have learned in college or maybe we saw in a quote-unquote good classroom growing up.
01:16:30
Speaker
Someone working really hard to change that narrative and help teachers cope is Gamal Sharif, who has taught across middle and high schools for the last 20 years, serving as a fellow with the U.S. Department of Education and is now an ambassador for the U.N.
01:16:42
Speaker
Sustainable Goals Project.
01:16:44
Speaker
He thinks it's time to develop the hashtag sustainable teacher.
01:16:48
Speaker
We really want to take care of our kids.
01:16:50
Speaker
We want to be our kids.
01:16:52
Speaker
We want our kids to be engaged.
01:16:53
Speaker
A lot of us, I assume, have enjoyed school or were good at school in the past.
01:16:58
Speaker
So there's this achievement orientation that is part of what we bring to the classroom.
01:17:04
Speaker
Not a bad thing.
01:17:06
Speaker
However.
01:17:07
Speaker
Part of that really has the potential to impinge upon our energy for our kids and for ourselves.
01:17:13
Speaker
So the first thing about the sustainable teacher is, one, self-care.
01:17:18
Speaker
And I think that's something that teachers need to be more explicit about.
01:17:22
Speaker
Sometimes I wonder if we are a little bit shy about saying that we have our own needs or saying no to colleagues or administrators.
01:17:31
Speaker
That's where I would start the conversation with the sustainable teacher is learning to take care of the self so that you have more for your students and colleagues.
01:17:38
Speaker
Right, right.
01:17:39
Speaker
This overwhelming stress reminds me of Bell Hooks, who talks about in Teaching to Transgress, that concept of educators trying progressive teaching practices.
01:17:47
Speaker
And she explains that, you know, students weren't sitting straight up anymore and they weren't responding in that trained fashion we've taught them to do.
01:17:55
Speaker
And maybe they were a little bit more rebellious, which makes sense because it's the first time maybe that they ever had more freedom.
01:18:00
Speaker
And then the teacher quickly doubles down on traditional practice because they became nervous because they felt like they were losing that control of the quote unquote good classroom.
01:18:08
Speaker
Well, yeah, I, in my, on my, on my worst days, I revert to get it done kind of mode, um, which is not good for me or for my students.
01:18:18
Speaker
So it is, I think you're right about this, uh, this double consciousness part of the teacher experience because on one hand we're put on a pedestal and on the other hand we're sort of like
01:18:30
Speaker
disrespected and told, we are told, do what you have to be, do what you're told.
01:18:36
Speaker
So it really does not, you know, and all those voices are coming at us, telling us different things about who we are, our value in the classroom.
01:18:44
Speaker
And parents have their own stories about teachers, kids have their own stories.
01:18:49
Speaker
And I guess coming back to the sustainable teacher, we have our own stories that we tell ourselves as well.
01:18:55
Speaker
So the quality of our self-talk
01:18:57
Speaker
has to be something that we look at to make sure that we are not deluding ourselves and that we are having messages about what we think is valuable.
01:19:10
Speaker
As we progressed in our conversation, Gamal and I spoke about what progressive ed actually is.
01:19:15
Speaker
I think most people listening in have a general consensus, but in the same way that we don't necessarily all agree on what a good life is, there's differences in what someone means by progressive ed.
01:19:25
Speaker
Those voices, in addition to all the others from the other side, or the traditional side, if you will, can be overwhelming.
01:19:31
Speaker
Well, you know, it's weird because there's so many different voices about that.
01:19:35
Speaker
There are people who are advocates of social justice who think that we need high-stakes standardized tests and
01:19:44
Speaker
to hold teachers accountable to make sure that there is racial and economic equity.
01:19:50
Speaker
And I don't get that argument because it seems to me that what we want to do within education in general and within progressive education in particular is to foster individual liberty and a child's love of learning.
01:20:06
Speaker
If they're not loving learning, then we have work to do as educators, as stewards of their learning.
01:20:13
Speaker
But then again, over in Ecotopia, sorry, Edutopia, there is this recent Twitter back and forth about teachers having these cooperative meetings with students and saying, based on your needs, let's design a plan of study.
01:20:31
Speaker
And so many people that I have respected in the progressive education circles are saying that it's just rubbish.
01:20:36
Speaker
It's a terrible framework.
01:20:39
Speaker
And there was something about the way it was written that kind of got on my nerves, too.
01:20:43
Speaker
There's this cognitive dissonance about what we experience in our schools.
01:20:48
Speaker
I think there are a couple of good books that have helped me reframe and focus on
01:20:54
Speaker
developing my own narrative, but also not being like independent from whatever else is going on around me.
Fostering a Love of Learning Over Standardization
01:21:00
Speaker
It's important to acknowledge that there are stressed out administrators who are worrying about the standardized test scores.
01:21:07
Speaker
and colleagues who have those classes who are being affected in some kind of way.
01:21:10
Speaker
Yeah, it makes sense that we need to instill a love of learning before anything else.
01:21:14
Speaker
That intrinsic motivation is sort of the entire point.
01:21:17
Speaker
I think there's a lot of room for productive debate within the education community, but the harder question for me has always been, how do we even start this conversation with someone who's not even willing to consider it?
01:21:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question.
01:21:30
Speaker
I think one strategy is to have teachers take more stewardship of
01:21:37
Speaker
professional development and I think that means in part identifying institutional goals.
01:21:45
Speaker
There's something that a principal or superintendent understands about a system that is just hers because of her perspective, her viewpoint.
01:21:54
Speaker
So what are the values or what are the go-to
01:22:01
Speaker
goals for an institution.
01:22:03
Speaker
We need to marry those with what we think teachers need and what we know about what students need.
01:22:10
Speaker
So professional development in professional learning communities as one model is a way to have teachers experience gradeless learning as they identify opportunities or problems, as they work together over time, months or weeks,
01:22:30
Speaker
And then coming together to present and share what they've learned for the value of learning, for the value of the collaboration, and for the value of enriching the school learning environment.
01:22:41
Speaker
No grades needed.
01:22:43
Speaker
But when they experience their own stewardship of their own learning, they are in a position to
01:22:50
Speaker
transfer that experience to their classmates.
01:22:54
Speaker
But unless it's part of the school-wide culture, it's a really challenging position to be in.
01:22:58
Speaker
I think a lot of it, too, is just a misunderstanding of what progressive education is.
01:23:02
Speaker
We were talking earlier about the characterization of progressive ed being completely hands-off, and that's not really true.
01:23:08
Speaker
It could be, depending on the learners, we could definitely have multiple different options.
01:23:13
Speaker
But we're still mentors and coaches.
01:23:14
Speaker
You know, I don't scream at kids.
01:23:16
Speaker
I don't take away their cell phones, nothing like that.
01:23:18
Speaker
But I certainly encourage kids to focus and prompt them to meet the goals that they're setting for themselves.
01:23:23
Speaker
I also tell my kids, if you
Misconceptions and Challenges in Progressive Education
01:23:25
Speaker
have your cell phone out, you should be using it for research or to learn something during this activity.
01:23:32
Speaker
So either A, you're by yourself doing your own research, pursuing your own questions, or
01:23:38
Speaker
or B, you're with a small team planning and reviewing your research, or you're doing some other kind of learning.
01:23:45
Speaker
But I mean, I don't even mind, you know, those quick study breaks when the kids are just playing on their little, little games like jewels or gems or whatever it is.
01:23:54
Speaker
Those little five minute breaks or three minute breaks are okay.
01:23:58
Speaker
I prefer maybe we do some more mindfulness.
01:24:01
Speaker
But yeah, and, and people see that as lack of discipline.
01:24:06
Speaker
And I don't think it's, it's,
01:24:08
Speaker
but it's not lack of caring.
01:24:10
Speaker
And actually there is a form of discipline in there because it's, it's the, it's the helping children arrive in a place where they can take care of themselves and take care of their classmates.
01:24:21
Speaker
If they have that self-discipline to not be off task or, which is a loaded word, or just to be wasting time.
01:24:28
Speaker
Um, that is something that a lot of them are uncomfortable with.
01:24:32
Speaker
And I think that, um, um,
01:24:36
Speaker
I can get more assertive about creating those spaces for students to make choices.
01:24:43
Speaker
I also think that we should look at the long term because I do have high school kids over months or over four years.
01:24:51
Speaker
I think I've seen kids grow in that direction and when they increasingly become more comfortable.
01:25:00
Speaker
One question I have, though, is when you exist in a school that has a lot of teachers who are tired or fed up or burnt out or defaulting to command and control.
01:25:11
Speaker
Plus having the backing of a progressively minded leader like a principal, that's huge.
01:25:16
Speaker
Someone has to hold everything together or else you have to band together and basically rebel against your superior.
01:25:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really good to have administrators who are...
01:25:28
Speaker
understand what you're seeing and setting up opportunities to succeed across the school for that kind of thinking.
01:25:37
Speaker
And, you know, a lot of people, the counter to progressive education for me has been this structured, data-driven, concrete, procedural, teacher-proof way of doing school.
01:25:55
Speaker
Whereas
01:25:56
Speaker
the possibilities with progressive education are endless.
01:26:01
Speaker
And I think that might be a little bit worrisome to administrators or colleagues, teachers, because if you have this different value of framework, what's the pathway to get kids to want to learn?
01:26:16
Speaker
If you have 30 kids in your classroom, or God forbid, if you have 20 kids in your classroom, there's probably 20 ways to get kids to want to learn.
01:26:24
Speaker
And
01:26:26
Speaker
that could be kind of challenging for people or worrisome.
01:26:31
Speaker
Right.
01:26:31
Speaker
So as progressive teachers that are facing all these different voices, including their own cognitive dissonance of what's best for kids, something that we're always thinking and worrying about, how do we then avoid burnout?
01:26:42
Speaker
Well, I, um, you know, and going to, going to work every day in that setting again, with that cognitive dissonance, knowing what needs to happen and seeing that there's not capacity, um,
01:26:54
Speaker
is a tough burden to carry.
01:26:57
Speaker
So one of the things that I've done to avoid burnout is, um, take lots of naps, uh, get to bed on time.
01:27:05
Speaker
I read a really
Integrating Broader Goals and Student Voices
01:27:06
Speaker
good book, uh, by Barbara Larrabee called cultivating teacher renewal, which is a terrific guide about, um, the habit of positive thinking without hiding your head in the sand.
01:27:17
Speaker
Um,
01:27:18
Speaker
But I also have discovered the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for transforming curriculum, instruction, assessment, and policy.
01:27:29
Speaker
These are sustainable development is much more of a social and economic thing.
01:27:33
Speaker
For me in education, I'm like, what else are we working on?
01:27:37
Speaker
So all, like no matter what happens in society,
01:27:42
Speaker
no matter what kids are experiencing, when they walk into a school, it should be a beautiful place with clean water.
01:27:51
Speaker
It should also have opportunities for kids to understand how to conserve energy and model that and practice that.
01:27:58
Speaker
Because looking at the planet, I think we have a little window here.
01:28:03
Speaker
There has to be a commitment to like playgrounds and open space where kids can just be.
01:28:08
Speaker
And I'm not just talking for little kids.
01:28:10
Speaker
I'm talking big kids.
01:28:11
Speaker
You know, they need to have access to nature.
01:28:14
Speaker
So every school should have a green band, a little wildlife habitat.
01:28:20
Speaker
Convert the parking lot, please, into a green space that kids can understand and be part of nature.
01:28:26
Speaker
I think it's good for their brains.
01:28:29
Speaker
And I think that advisory is a very concrete thing within the school that needs to be a, that can be a mechanism, a strategy, a scheduling opportunity to have the critical conversations where it's one to 15 or one to 20.
01:28:49
Speaker
a couple of times a week, not just for 10 minutes to get your trance passed for the bus, but to actually have longer classes with a low bar grading, like one or two assignments a quarter.
01:29:02
Speaker
I'm getting to the nitty gritty here, but it's like the value of advisory as a way to help foster social emotional learning.
01:29:09
Speaker
I think there needs to be a real commitment to that.
01:29:11
Speaker
And when kids experience it and teachers experience, it transforms the school.
01:29:24
Speaker
In conclusion, whose role is it then to decide what kids learn and what will lead them on a path to the good life?
01:29:32
Speaker
I think based on the arguments laid out here that we should just listen, learn, and do whatever the individual decides.
01:29:38
Speaker
That might seem kind of lackadaisical or not very conclusive, but we don't really spend enough time listening and learning from students, nor do we really give them that much of a voice.
01:29:48
Speaker
We need children not only involved in planning our classrooms, they should be involved in meetings and school planning.
01:29:54
Speaker
They should be constantly sharing what matters to them.
01:29:57
Speaker
I feel like I don't let students share enough in my class about what they want to do.
01:30:01
Speaker
We might start off with it, we might do halfway points, but it has to be a constant process.
01:30:06
Speaker
And what they think it might matter in the future, it might not, but the main thing is that it matters to them right now.
01:30:11
Speaker
We're meeting students where they're at.
01:30:14
Speaker
And there's certainly a place for teachers to implement their own expert opinions on what a good life is.
01:30:19
Speaker
There has to be some kind of voice of a teacher, but it's not a top-down policy or standardized movement.
01:30:24
Speaker
It's going to matter the local community, it's going to matter to an extent their personality and their background,
01:30:29
Speaker
And that's all absolutely fine.
01:30:30
Speaker
There's an art to teaching.
01:30:32
Speaker
We are experts.
01:30:33
Speaker
We have our own purpose.
01:30:34
Speaker
But we have to kind of push for trust with our students in order to make those decisions.
01:30:38
Speaker
I can pump in, you know, 20, 30, maybe even 40% of what I think is important to students if they trust me and they know that I'm doing what I believe is best for them.
01:30:48
Speaker
While still making sure that, again, we're giving up the majority of our time to serving their needs.
01:30:53
Speaker
There's practically no way to figure out what the future is going to hold.
01:30:55
Speaker
But the best we can do is give them the reins.
01:31:02
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed listening in today.
01:31:03
Speaker
You can find a bunch of helpful links and background information in our show notes.
01:31:07
Speaker
Also, be sure to check us out on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
01:31:11
Speaker
And if you like our content, consider supporting us on Patreon.
01:31:14
Speaker
Let's continue to restore humanity to education.