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46: Innovation in Progressive Education feat. Bennett Jester, Ted Fujimoto, Deanna Hess, & Sophie Fenton
18 Plays6 years ago
By far the most inspiring thing about living in the communication age is seeing school innovation at work throughout the world. Sometimes we can get trapped in our microcosm obsessing over what doesn’t work in schools - after all, there is a lot that needs changing. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t awesome things happening.
To expand on the word "innovation" - I know that these word can be "fad worthy" - if you will. The education community tends to look at every new initiative as innovative, including those that just do everything most normally do - better. But that's not what I'm getting at here...innovation is taking a risk against the status quo, doing something that little to no other people are doing. It's important to highlight and express these ideas are not only legitimate, but extraordinary - we should celebrate work and be careful of solely critiquing the established system.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
Bennett Jester, a high school freshman at the progressive Clark Street Community School in Middleton, Wisconsin, who blogs and speaks on issues of grades and traditional education at-large.
Ted Fujimoto, the president of Landmark Consulting Group, a business that focuses on scaling, leadership, and redesign, and whose hand shaped the growth of New Tech Network and Big Picture Learning, both of which have seen massive whole-school progressive redesigns.
Deanna Hess, an English educator at Dover High School in Dover, Delaware, who teaches a range of classes including dual-credit courses, where she focuses on developing purpose in writing and reading in what is typically regarded as a traditional setting.
Sophie Fenton, the Head of Education Design at the Asia Education Foundation in Melbourne, Australia, who focuses on promoting intercultural and communicative schools in an increasingly connected world.
RESOURCES
- Clark Street Community School
- Rise Up & Write Program (WI)
- New Tech Network
- Big Picture Learning
- Go All Creative
- Asia Education Foundation
- Foundation for Young Australians
- An Overview by Insight.com on the “Intelligent Digital Mesh”
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Season 3, Episode 4 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:17
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt, and I serve as a high school social studies instructor, soon to be digital media educator in Springfield, Ohio.
00:00:24
Speaker
In this podcast, we're talking to a variety of people, from students in high school to business leaders, on what innovation looks like in schools.
00:00:31
Speaker
However, instead of focusing on broad, sweeping topics of progressive ed, which tends to lend itself to a lot of banal conversations about inspiring creativity or preparing for life,
00:00:41
Speaker
We want to hone in on specifics.
00:00:43
Speaker
Each person we've invited has a different speciality, whether it be enabling student and teacher relationships or even tackling AI and digital literacy or scaling progressive ed.
00:00:52
Speaker
I guarantee that you're going to learn from these conversations.
00:00:55
Speaker
I hope you love listening in.
00:00:56
Speaker
But first, our podcast takes a lot of time and resources, but it's kept alive by generous patrons on Patreon, three of whom are Aaron Godot, Paul Wan, and Stephen Gumbe.
00:01:06
Speaker
Thank you for your support.
00:01:07
Speaker
You can find more information about the Human Restoration Project, as well as how we're helping to promote progressive ed through free resources, thoughts, and more on our website at humanrestorationproject.org or on Twitter at humerespro.
What is Innovation in Education?
00:01:35
Speaker
By far the most inspiring thing about living in the communication age is seeing school innovation at work throughout the world.
00:01:41
Speaker
Sometimes we can get trapped obsessing over what doesn't work in schools.
00:01:45
Speaker
After all, there's a lot that needs changing.
00:01:46
Speaker
But that doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't awesome things happening.
00:01:50
Speaker
To expand on the word innovation, I know that that word can be fad-worthy, if you will.
00:01:55
Speaker
The education community tends to look at every new initiative as innovative, including those things that mostly everyone just does, but doing it better.
00:02:04
Speaker
That's not what I'm getting at here.
00:02:05
Speaker
Innovation is taking a risk against the status quo, doing something that little to no people are doing.
00:02:11
Speaker
And it's important to highlight and express these ideas are not only legitimate, but extraordinary.
00:02:15
Speaker
We should celebrate work and be careful of solely critiquing the established system.
00:02:20
Speaker
Now, the expectation isn't that we're going to jump into classrooms tomorrow and rapidly change everything about what we've learned here.
Shifting Pedagogical Dialogue and Progressive Education
00:02:26
Speaker
No, our goal is to have these conversations in order to shift the pedagogical dialogue.
00:02:31
Speaker
There's not a set curriculum or a step-by-step you could purchase or a podcast that you'll hear.
00:02:35
Speaker
that can just make changes in your school.
00:02:38
Speaker
Instead, developing a mindset of progressive education, hearing these thoughts and bringing your perspective, then of course taking action, is the only way that we'll see true innovation in schools.
00:02:49
Speaker
In other words, listen, dissect, question, reflect, and engage in this field.
00:02:54
Speaker
Don't let time and, that's not just realistic, wear you down.
00:02:58
Speaker
Any measure of progressive education is possible anywhere.
00:03:01
Speaker
And our guests on this podcast are from all walks of life, all stages of teaching across the United States and in many countries.
00:03:08
Speaker
Once you understand what you feel when it comes to restoring humanity means in schools, and you have the ample research and expert voices to back you up, and then you form that in the mitigated risk you can take, we'll see more and more communities embracing positive, educative change for the souls of our students.
00:03:24
Speaker
After all, that's the Human Restoration Project's goal.
00:03:27
Speaker
One stop for everything you'll need from research, resources, pedagogical guides, expert opinions, and opinionated targeted blogs that actually push some boundaries.
00:03:35
Speaker
Let's push forward together in innovating education.
Student Experiences in Progressive Education
00:03:44
Speaker
Our first guest is Bennett Jester.
00:03:47
Speaker
Bennett is a promoter of removing grades from schools and an advocate for progressive, educative practice.
00:03:52
Speaker
You can find his blog in our show notes.
00:03:54
Speaker
And importantly, Bennett is a ninth grade at Clark Street Community School.
00:03:58
Speaker
I have been doing educational activism since last summer.
00:04:05
Speaker
I grew up in a Montessori school through eighth grade, and I now attend a charter school called Clark Street Community School that furthers some of those ideas of self-directed learning.
00:04:18
Speaker
place-based learning.
00:04:19
Speaker
So I've always been really interested in the ideas that I've found myself kind of surrounded by.
00:04:24
Speaker
When I was going to a summer camp called Rise Up and Write for activism and writing, I decided that my focus was going to be on grades and how they impacted students.
00:04:36
Speaker
And I learned a lot from there from the Twitter community, especially there are a lot of people doing really cool things around that.
00:04:43
Speaker
Bennett attends a mostly self-directed style school where students demonstrate their knowledge for graduation requirements on their own terms, often taking a model of experiential learning and mostly without grades.
00:04:54
Speaker
I asked Bennett what the role of students and teachers was when it came to challenging the traditional
Role of Students and Educational Activism
00:04:58
Speaker
system.
00:04:58
Speaker
There's a lot that students can do to take charge of their education in almost any model.
00:05:04
Speaker
And part of the Montessori idea is that when you need assistance, you can really ask your teacher and they will more often than not
00:05:14
Speaker
help you with what you need.
00:05:15
Speaker
You just kind of got to be an advocate for yourself in that way.
00:05:19
Speaker
For teachers, I think the goal is to kind of shift the mindset so that it's not the teacher is in charge of the room.
00:05:27
Speaker
It's kind of the teacher is facilitating the students learning.
00:05:31
Speaker
And that can take a lot of different forms, whatever form that needs to take for the class to give them the most freedom that they can have and to let them explore and learn.
00:05:42
Speaker
So what is the role of students in the long term when it comes to educational activism?
00:05:46
Speaker
Do you see the end goal as expanding into almost a protest of sorts?
00:05:50
Speaker
After all, there's way more students than there are teachers.
00:05:53
Speaker
I don't know.
00:05:54
Speaker
I think that would be a really interesting place for it to go.
00:06:00
Speaker
I don't know if it has that kind of momentum yet.
00:06:02
Speaker
I don't know if people, a lot of the time when I tell them about this kind of thing, they're like, okay, that sounds really cool, but what about colleges?
00:06:10
Speaker
What about my future?
00:06:12
Speaker
There's just so much that you need to unlearn in order to start thinking about all this stuff the right way.
00:06:19
Speaker
Okay, with that being said, what work do we need to do in order to inform others of what's going on?
00:06:25
Speaker
To understand the issues, I think we've got to just spend time thinking about them.
00:06:30
Speaker
Like, too many people will just think of education and school as like, yeah, it kind of sucks, but what are you going to do?
00:06:37
Speaker
We're just going to go do what the teacher tells us, try to get the good grades so that we can get into the good college and have a good life.
00:06:45
Speaker
And part of it's just like making it clear that there is an alternative.
00:06:50
Speaker
There are actually a ton of alternatives.
00:06:52
Speaker
There are a million different ways to do this thing.
00:06:56
Speaker
And some of them are better than others.
00:06:59
Speaker
And really what educational activism is about is thinking, okay, so there are so many different ways we can do this.
00:07:05
Speaker
I think we can all agree that what we're doing right now isn't the best one.
00:07:08
Speaker
And so it's just like, okay, we're not in the best scenario for our students.
00:07:14
Speaker
So what are we going to do to change the scenario so that it's better?
Combating Student Apathy
00:07:18
Speaker
You know, I agree.
00:07:18
Speaker
It just seems like a lot of what we're talking about is common sense.
00:07:22
Speaker
I mean, it works.
00:07:23
Speaker
We have ample research to back up what we're talking about.
00:07:25
Speaker
And people in other fields are clamoring for a better system.
00:07:28
Speaker
And even students such as yourself recognize it.
00:07:30
Speaker
Do you hope that students will take more charge in leading this change?
00:07:33
Speaker
I think students specifically need to do a lot more organizing.
00:07:38
Speaker
I mean, on individual level, I've talked about how they should be advocating for themselves and asking for what they need.
00:07:43
Speaker
But I think we also are going to need a collective level of that.
00:07:47
Speaker
We're going to need to have that as a group.
00:07:49
Speaker
We're going to need to have students, unions.
00:07:51
Speaker
We're going to need to be organized in a way
00:07:54
Speaker
that'll allow us to say, this is what we're looking for out of our education.
00:07:59
Speaker
Here's how you can do it.
00:08:00
Speaker
We want you to do this.
00:08:02
Speaker
There are so many different voices in progressive ed.
00:08:04
Speaker
There's like a lot of different things that we're advocating for.
00:08:08
Speaker
And on a district to district level, if we're going to make something different happen, we need to first figure out what we're asking for.
00:08:15
Speaker
And then we're going to need to
00:08:17
Speaker
organize for it.
00:08:18
Speaker
And I think that's where what you said earlier about how like there might be a protest for this kind of thing.
00:08:24
Speaker
That's the place where that would fit in.
00:08:25
Speaker
Like the students in the district have figured out what they want to change.
00:08:29
Speaker
There's resistance from administration or from whatever higher power is setting things.
00:08:36
Speaker
It's obvious that this is incredibly important to you and you're engaged in this topic.
00:08:40
Speaker
I wonder how all of this relates then to discouragement and apathy and even depression among students, especially teenagers.
00:08:47
Speaker
I know that school isn't wholly to blame for the problems that you face, but there's certainly evidence to support that schools aren't doing a lot to make things better.
00:08:56
Speaker
I mean, sometimes they can actually make things a lot worse.
00:08:58
Speaker
In the same way, say a business may dishearten employees by crushing their desires for better working conditions, like saying, you know, yeah, right, that'll never happen here.
00:09:07
Speaker
And then just continuing the status quo.
00:09:09
Speaker
That's basically what teachers do when students question or concern about anything.
00:09:14
Speaker
How can we help to deal with the apathy crisis among the student body?
00:09:18
Speaker
I think once you get into that sort of apathy, I don't think resistant is really the right word.
00:09:23
Speaker
I think it's more like this is how it is.
00:09:25
Speaker
What's the point looking for anything better?
00:09:27
Speaker
We're going to be gone in three years anyway.
00:09:30
Speaker
And that mindset is totally there.
00:09:32
Speaker
Like I see it.
00:09:33
Speaker
at the traditional high school.
00:09:35
Speaker
And it's really, it's troubling.
00:09:36
Speaker
I'm not really sure what the solution is.
00:09:39
Speaker
I think showing them that something better is possible is a huge part.
00:09:43
Speaker
And that's part of what Clark Street is doing.
00:09:44
Speaker
We're like a few hundred feet away in our own little separate building.
00:09:48
Speaker
We're going to be in the same building in a couple of years.
00:09:50
Speaker
We're moving in.
00:09:52
Speaker
And it's just going to be able to show something better is possible.
00:09:56
Speaker
There is a system where students at the traditional high school can take our classes.
00:10:01
Speaker
I don't think it's ever used, but we could get that system into use and really show people you could be doing this.
00:10:09
Speaker
Let's shift gears here for a second and talk about what you believe is working in school.
00:10:13
Speaker
It's so interesting because you're living it right now.
00:10:15
Speaker
Practically everyone I talk to is just framing from what we saw in school or secondhand through our classrooms.
00:10:20
Speaker
What innovation do you see among your teachers and perhaps something that you wish could be solved?
00:10:25
Speaker
When we look at practices that work on an individual level in the classroom, even in the most traditional classroom, like no matter what environment you're in, the more choice the students have on an assignment, the better they're going to do.
00:10:38
Speaker
If an assignment is closed ended, if it's like you're going to do a pretty specific thing here, you're not going to get the highest level of engagement because a lot of people aren't going to want to do that specific thing.
Critiques and Recommendations for Student Engagement
00:10:49
Speaker
If you have, on the other hand, something that's like very open-ended, where there's a lot of different ways you could go about doing the thing, then you're going to get a lot more student engagement because students are going to look at that open-endedness and depending on how used to it they are, they might need some help kind of focusing on something that they want to do, but usually they'll be able to find something that they want to do.
00:11:10
Speaker
That practice alone can do a ton to get people more engaged in their learning.
00:11:15
Speaker
And then there's one
00:11:17
Speaker
kind of unrelated practice.
00:11:19
Speaker
When I was looking at practices that kind of don't work in the classroom, one thing I've noticed is some teachers assign homework that's due the next day.
00:11:27
Speaker
And this is just remarkably inconvenient at times.
00:11:30
Speaker
Like, even if it's just 20 minutes of work, when you do a lot of stuff, when you have those extracurriculars, it can be really hard on people.
00:11:38
Speaker
Bennett goes on to elaborate how in one of his traditional classes he takes Spanish that isn't offered at Clark Street, does something a little bit peculiar, and note he does like his Spanish teacher, so if you're listening in, please remember it's critique, not criticism.
00:11:52
Speaker
So in my Spanish class, there's the use of these little tokens that we are awarded for participating in class.
00:12:01
Speaker
Well, we're awarded for speaking in Spanish in class as it's a Spanish class.
00:12:06
Speaker
They're part of our grade, I want to say 20% each quarter.
00:12:11
Speaker
I mean, the issue with that is like,
00:12:14
Speaker
Last week, I saw somebody sitting there with his hand up and then he puts his hand down and he's just like, oh, yeah, she's not holding the tokens.
00:12:25
Speaker
And I'm just like, wow, that's you just got right out there and said it.
00:12:30
Speaker
And how do you see that expanding to the school level?
00:12:32
Speaker
What can an organization at large do better?
00:12:34
Speaker
I think there should be a lot more input from students as to what curriculums look like.
00:12:42
Speaker
And I think it depends on the class.
00:12:44
Speaker
Like in my Spanish class, that wouldn't make sense because the student doesn't know what they're going to be learning and they kind of just need to know a certain set of things to be able to speak Spanish reasonably well.
00:12:54
Speaker
But in a lot of classes, it's like in an English class,
00:12:58
Speaker
there should be like, okay, so we're going to be learning these kind of ways to write and then we're going to apply them somehow.
00:13:06
Speaker
Or we're going to be learning how to do reading comprehension and then we're going to apply it somehow.
00:13:11
Speaker
And that isn't as good for students as letting them kind of figure out on their own what
00:13:17
Speaker
they're going to be looking for.
00:13:18
Speaker
The teacher just goes, okay, so this is what we're trying to learn in this class.
00:13:22
Speaker
How do you guys want to go about this?
00:13:24
Speaker
And give them that opportunity.
00:13:26
Speaker
When they have a hand in creating something, they're going to be much more engaged in it than if they're just kind of having it handed down to them.
00:13:33
Speaker
And Bennett wanted to add one more thing he really likes about Clark Street.
00:13:37
Speaker
In most classes, at the start of a class, we'll do something called a circle.
00:13:41
Speaker
So there will be a question.
00:13:43
Speaker
Sometimes it's as basic as like, what did you do this morning?
00:13:46
Speaker
Or what did you eat for breakfast?
00:13:48
Speaker
And sometimes it can go deeper, like into the class material, like a question about
00:13:54
Speaker
something that they've been learning about in the class, but they'll just go around and everybody will briefly speak to the question and then they'll proceed with the class and that kind of, it gives students an opportunity to get to know each other
00:14:09
Speaker
in a way where they wouldn't otherwise.
00:14:10
Speaker
Even if it's just knowing a little bit, that can build a connection.
00:14:15
Speaker
And then it also lets teachers, depending on the question, gauge how energetic a class is on a given day or how much they know about a thing.
00:14:27
Speaker
And it can lead into a class discussion as well.
00:14:30
Speaker
I think it's just kind of a versatile tool that can be used really well by teachers.
00:14:40
Speaker
So there you go.
00:14:41
Speaker
We can't really get much more on the nose than that.
00:14:43
Speaker
Here's a current high school student describing everything we always talk about.
00:14:46
Speaker
Project based learning, student voice and choice, gradeless learning, critical pedagogy, and saying that it works for him.
00:14:52
Speaker
I mean, it's all really common sense, but it does involve giving up a lot of power in front of a classroom and working against much of the standardized traditional teaching model and accountability measures.
00:15:02
Speaker
Therefore, pushing back against that system is innovation within itself.
00:15:06
Speaker
Further, what an innovative concept is it for students to use social media to spread awareness on these issues?
00:15:12
Speaker
It's sort of a catch-22 because Bennett and those like him tend to be growing up in progressive schools.
00:15:18
Speaker
You know, it's kind of like the prisoners in Plato's cave not understanding when the guy comes back after being set free.
00:15:25
Speaker
It's really hard for students in a traditional classroom to have these revelations.
00:15:30
Speaker
And hopefully the teachings that we have in our progressive classrooms inspire more to demand a better classroom experience.
Scaling Progressive Education with Ted Fujimoto
00:15:46
Speaker
Next, we're joined by Ted Fujimoto.
00:15:48
Speaker
whose CV is quite extensive.
00:15:50
Speaker
In summary, Ted is the president of Landmark Consulting Group, a business that focuses on scaling, leadership, and redesign.
00:15:57
Speaker
And further, Ted's world-class driven high school helped shape the growth of New Tech Network and Big Picture Learning, both of which have seen massive whole school progressive redesigns.
00:16:07
Speaker
I invited Ted on to share his thoughts on what he does best, scaling progressive education.
00:16:12
Speaker
So starting off, I offered a simple question.
00:16:15
Speaker
What exactly is it that we're trying to scale?
00:16:18
Speaker
I would start by saying what it's not.
00:16:21
Speaker
And a lot of people have the idea of replication equal to cloning.
00:16:26
Speaker
And that is, I would say, the lowest form of scalability.
00:16:31
Speaker
For some simple things, it might make sense.
00:16:33
Speaker
But for deeper things, whether it is providing personal experiences for customers, for hotel guests, for students, for healthcare, it's not about cloning.
00:16:47
Speaker
So what's worth scaling?
00:16:49
Speaker
What's replication?
00:16:51
Speaker
We have a process that we lead organizations through that helps them define some of the non-negotiable, timeless, and universal design elements that drive their success.
00:17:05
Speaker
And it's an important process because it's so easy for organizations to get this wrong.
00:17:11
Speaker
On one end, they can get it wrong by simply stating their design elements as goals.
00:17:18
Speaker
So, we want to offer friendly service to our hotel guests, or we want personalized learning for students.
00:17:25
Speaker
Well, that's a great goal, but pretty much everyone has the same goals, but how do you actually execute it, right?
00:17:33
Speaker
And that's where the gap typically is.
00:17:35
Speaker
And then oftentimes I hear the next kind of answer, well, how do you get there?
00:17:41
Speaker
If only we had really great principals, if only we had really great teachers.
00:17:47
Speaker
So essentially they're going after superstars to make that happen.
00:17:51
Speaker
But I've been around enough around many different sectors that just throwing a bunch of superstars on an island doesn't turn into a Ritz-Carlton automatically.
00:18:02
Speaker
There's a bit more that has to happen.
00:18:05
Speaker
Yes, you always want great talent, but you can't always be hiring the superstars.
00:18:10
Speaker
When I sold my technology companies, I was part of a venture group that acquired...
00:18:15
Speaker
a consulting company that had created the Saturn Car Company retailing concept and re-engineered 11 automotive and hospitality brands to retail experiences for their customers worldwide.
00:18:28
Speaker
And that business problem was, how do you get a bunch of redneck, I mean, stubborn auto dealers to do something completely different, their employees, their buildings, their capital, and how do you create this brand new culture and replicate that 1,100 times in seven years?
00:18:43
Speaker
It was a period of time, three and a half year period of time that Ritz-Carlton was doubling the number of locations.
00:18:49
Speaker
And they were literally, their team members were going from 35,000 to over 75,000 people.
00:18:55
Speaker
And almost every one of their locations was on a island where they were the first five-star property.
00:19:01
Speaker
And they were literally hiring most of the island who lived in huts.
00:19:06
Speaker
And on day one, guess what?
00:19:08
Speaker
They had to deliver a world-class five-star experience.
00:19:11
Speaker
You know, how do you do that?
00:19:13
Speaker
And so that's part of the kind of the DNA that I have applied to all my scalability work is how do you replicate mindset culture and what are the systematic things that you need to do to cultivate it.
00:19:27
Speaker
And all of this experience brings us to another issue that Ted applies to schools.
00:19:30
Speaker
That brings me to the second kind of pitfall that I see a lot of organizations and schools fall into when you ask them, well, what are the non, you know, what are your design elements that make you successful?
00:19:41
Speaker
is that they will come up with a hundred different procedures and very task-based things that they do, which they might actually be doing, but no one can replicate that.
00:19:52
Speaker
And it's a very different thing.
00:19:55
Speaker
When you walk into a Ritz-Carlton and someone smiles at you and is genuinely friendly, that feels great.
00:20:02
Speaker
But put smiling as a procedure,
00:20:06
Speaker
And especially when your team members don't feel happy or don't feel friendly or don't feel like dealing with death, then all of a sudden that smile feels fake.
00:20:17
Speaker
And there's this magic of, you know, how do you create an environment and a mindset that is driven by intrinsic motivation, not just extrinsic factors.
00:20:30
Speaker
And so a lot of organizations, when they come up with their design elements,
00:20:33
Speaker
they'll fall into the trap of proceduralizing everything.
00:20:36
Speaker
And it really takes a soul out of the effort.
00:20:39
Speaker
And it also sets you up for creating extrinsic motivation.
00:20:44
Speaker
It sets you up for having to inspect a lot of things.
00:20:48
Speaker
It sets you up for lots of failure and not knowing why, because you keep measuring this stuff.
00:20:54
Speaker
So the magic sauce comes in is how do you articulate your design elements that are timeless, universal,
00:21:03
Speaker
non-negotiable that not only define the goal and the mindset, but what are the systems and supports making it really easy to do that?
00:21:13
Speaker
And an example of this is, you know, Ritz Carlton, along with other five-star brands, pretty much have the same regulatory constraints, the same level of buildings, the same basic operations of, you know, the types of services that you would expect from a five-star property.
00:21:33
Speaker
the only difference that they have between other five-star properties and brands is the mindset of their team members.
00:21:43
Speaker
So it is so important to ensure that that mindset is at the world-class level that non-negotiable, 15 minutes a day, every team, every chef worldwide, they have a circle time where they share information
00:22:02
Speaker
and reflect on the value of ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen as a mindset.
00:22:08
Speaker
And what does that mean as an individual?
00:22:09
Speaker
And what does that mean as, how do I see that?
00:22:13
Speaker
How did I see my team do it?
00:22:14
Speaker
How did I demonstrate that?
00:22:16
Speaker
How can I do better?
00:22:17
Speaker
How can my team do better?
00:22:19
Speaker
And that
00:22:20
Speaker
gets the very best story that comes out of that day gets sent up to Ritz Carlton and the very best stories worldwide that truly exemplify that mindset gets disseminated as a calibration experience for this is what this actually means and looks like.
00:22:38
Speaker
And that's an example of your design element is around the need for this mindset and
00:22:46
Speaker
But there are procedures that enable the organization to do that consistently.
00:22:51
Speaker
Like you have to meet 15 minutes a day at the beginning of every show.
00:22:55
Speaker
You must use a certain set of protocols.
00:22:57
Speaker
You must input the very best story to the system.
00:23:02
Speaker
And, you know, that's just an example of a high quality design element that completely makes
00:23:09
Speaker
the outcomes in both employee turnover and customer satisfaction and class of its own compared to the other five-star competitors because of their attention to a very fundamental thing that's so important for human motivation and behavior and just the need to belong and the pleasure of serving.
Balancing Teacher Autonomy and Systemic Support
00:23:32
Speaker
You know, all of this is very interesting because we run into some potential pitfalls with the common methodology that's propped up as something to achieve in schools, which is teacher autonomy.
00:23:42
Speaker
You mentioned superstar teachers as something that many schools aim for, and they tend to promote those superstar teachers doing whatever they believe is best.
00:23:51
Speaker
Of course, this is good in theory, but the problem is that many of the things that maybe I believe are good are not necessarily what the person next door thinks is good.
00:23:59
Speaker
So how do you go about developing a shared pedagogy without lessening the motivation or achievements of a sizable portion of the building?
00:24:07
Speaker
You look at the superstar teachers, and it's amazing how much of their energy is spent
00:24:15
Speaker
ducking and fighting the system, right?
00:24:17
Speaker
That gets in their way of doing what they know is really great for kids.
00:24:22
Speaker
And everyone agrees they're amazing teachers.
00:24:25
Speaker
There's a misalignment of system supports to even the basic things that they know is effective for learning, right?
00:24:32
Speaker
And the analogy that I use is it's a freshwater fish getting dropped in a saltwater tank.
00:24:38
Speaker
Some people last longer than others, but eventually have to jump out or they end up succumbing.
00:24:43
Speaker
And so system design matters.
00:24:46
Speaker
Now, if you have really great pedagogy that's rooted in brain science that actually is, that works.
00:24:58
Speaker
Well, there's ranges of that.
00:25:01
Speaker
I've seen many different ways of doing inquiry-based learning and project-based learning.
00:25:07
Speaker
The only two things that I ask for
00:25:12
Speaker
and I look for is, number one, are you asking kids and are you giving them exposure to what world-class work looks like?
00:25:22
Speaker
You know, are teachers, when they're designing their projects,
00:25:25
Speaker
designing to a world-class level of project, right?
00:25:29
Speaker
Because there is such a thing of, oh yeah, I want autonomy, but I don't even know what a five-star experience looks like.
00:25:35
Speaker
I've only stayed in one-star motels.
00:25:38
Speaker
Well, even if you were thinking you're aiming at five-star, you might only end up at two and a half star and you don't even know it, right?
00:25:45
Speaker
So that's where the process of calibration and joint discovery of the entire school team of what is world-class
00:25:54
Speaker
What does this mean to be, if we're going to do deeper learning, if we're doing project-based learning, if we're doing STEM, we're trying to teach math, what's world class in this area?
00:26:06
Speaker
So as long as they're asking that question and they're consistently giving themselves calibration experiences to know what that is, I have no doubt that that's the first step on getting better.
00:26:18
Speaker
And
00:26:19
Speaker
a good calibration experience, and all of us have had these throughout our lives and careers.
00:26:25
Speaker
And it doesn't have to be a complicated one or a long one, but it's that experience or someone says something that completely rewires your brain where you can't look at this problem the same way again, right?
00:26:38
Speaker
And you can't look at, you couldn't even go back to the same way of doing things because you just see things so differently now.
00:26:45
Speaker
And as long as teams are doing that,
00:26:49
Speaker
they will get better and better and better.
00:26:51
Speaker
That's number one.
00:26:53
Speaker
The second piece around autonomy is that if you're not cloning, but you're creating that mindset, and that mindset also includes calibration, and that calibration is around the very best brain research out there on human motivation and all of that.
00:27:16
Speaker
Generally, teachers will end up with a very similar set of pedagogical approach.
00:27:22
Speaker
And direct instruction as the lead is not it.
00:27:28
Speaker
And so as long as they are calibrating, they will generally end up in the right direction.
00:27:36
Speaker
Now, once they have agreement to, this is a pedagogy that we know
00:27:41
Speaker
is based on world-class learning and understanding and creativity.
00:27:47
Speaker
Then the next question is, what do we need in our system to align to help support this and not be toxic to this?
00:27:56
Speaker
And that's where the inventory of policies and practices and even going up to board level policies and practices around what are neutral
00:28:06
Speaker
what things are helpful, what things are hurtful to actually supporting what we say we need to get done.
00:28:15
Speaker
It's incredibly interesting to me that Ted Fujimoto and Bennett Jester basically say the exact same thing here.
00:28:21
Speaker
No matter what walk of life we're on, the same conclusion is being reached that if you dig deep enough, we come to terms that progressive educative practice is doing research-based work, which if you follow the Human Restoration Project, you know is a big deal.
00:28:35
Speaker
If we want world class, we should be looking at what world class is.
00:28:39
Speaker
And sadly, the status quo hasn't caught up to that yet.
00:28:42
Speaker
I asked Ted about why it is that progressive ed is not typically seen as research-based pedagogy.
00:28:48
Speaker
It's usually seen maybe as a philosophic-based or a radical motion.
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah, I would add to that that there is actually a reason why that reputation is out there.
00:28:59
Speaker
And some of it is self-induced by the practitioners because I've been through many deeper learning schools,
00:29:05
Speaker
I don't think that they are calibrating world class.
00:29:08
Speaker
So even though they're going through the mechanics of doing projects, and those projects in itself might be the right pedagogy in practice, but they're not doing it at an authentic level that would pass any kind of muster outside of that classroom or outside of that school.
00:29:29
Speaker
And so it starts looking like a bunch of artsy, craftsy projects that don't hold any water.
00:29:35
Speaker
And there is no rigor in it.
00:29:37
Speaker
There is no, yeah, it doesn't hold up.
00:29:40
Speaker
And so I worry that many of the practitioners jumping into this saying, we just want autonomy.
00:29:47
Speaker
We want to free flow.
00:29:48
Speaker
We want engagement and we want just to be happy and all that.
00:29:53
Speaker
Well, that's, you know, those aren't all,
00:29:55
Speaker
necessary ingredients, but that by itself doesn't get you to where you need to go.
00:30:00
Speaker
And I think that's the difference.
00:30:02
Speaker
They're missing the calibration component.
00:30:04
Speaker
And when you do that, then you start having a misstep on fidelity of implementation.
00:30:09
Speaker
So an example of this is, I'm sure when a country came out of, let's say, communism, right, where there was no such thing as private ownership, and all of a sudden, the idea of entrepreneurship
00:30:23
Speaker
and you could actually own your own business was even a concept.
00:30:28
Speaker
Well, the notion of owning your own business and even just owning it versus being successful at it are two different things because there's such a thing as lots of new businesses failing because they have no idea what they're doing.
00:30:42
Speaker
So the freedom is great, but you have to know what to do with it.
00:30:45
Speaker
It has to be rooted in
00:30:48
Speaker
and really powerful practices that are world class so that you have the very best chance of actually getting it done and executing it.
00:30:55
Speaker
And then one thing we haven't spoken about is student input.
00:30:58
Speaker
At what point do you see students entering these discussions?
00:31:01
Speaker
We've spoken before on this podcast and in writing about requiring students at staff meetings, for example, or maybe even in curriculum planning.
00:31:07
Speaker
That's a huge step.
00:31:09
Speaker
Where do you see students in this calibration process?
00:31:12
Speaker
the earlier, the better, at the beginning, the best, with one huge caveat, which has to be executed, otherwise it can go in very strange, disastrous ways.
00:31:24
Speaker
And that is you as an adult in the conversation,
00:31:28
Speaker
have to ensure that students are getting world-class calibration experiences to stretch their thinking.
00:31:35
Speaker
Because otherwise, because they're young, they haven't traveled the world, perhaps.
00:31:39
Speaker
They haven't seen outside of their neighborhood.
00:31:41
Speaker
Who knows, right?
00:31:42
Speaker
So their decisions and their perspective of what they believe is world-class work or opportunities or even the excitement of all the things that they could solve and the connections they could have throughout the world.
00:31:54
Speaker
I mean, it took me...
00:31:57
Speaker
Even as an entrepreneur launching companies at 18, it still took me probably until I was in my 30s to fully understand what I needed to do and the people I needed to connect with and not work in isolation and what world-class actually meant, right?
00:32:12
Speaker
Despite some of the early successes that I had, that's something that I think is really important for the adults in the room to do is you've got to curate amazing mind-blowing calibration experiences to help everyone get better.
00:32:28
Speaker
And that goes for your own teams, it goes for your students, and also recognizing that if you're in a particular city or town or you're in a particular school building,
00:32:41
Speaker
That by itself limits you to your ability to always create mind-blowing calibration experiences.
00:32:50
Speaker
So you've got to curate and search outward as well across outside of education, outside your country or city or residence to see what this actually means.
Redefining World-Class Education
00:33:01
Speaker
To add, Ted wanted me to throw in one of his new ventures with his wife, a website called Go All Creative, which you can find in the show notes.
00:33:09
Speaker
Essentially, Go All Creative is a series of videos on things that creative people throughout the world do and what they value.
00:33:15
Speaker
People in really interesting professions that probably would be seen by most as very successful.
00:33:20
Speaker
If you're familiar with maybe the Masterclass series, it's basically that, but for teachers.
00:33:25
Speaker
The idea is that you watch these videos together when you're calibrating your school,
00:33:30
Speaker
and you're having basically PD discussions on it.
00:33:33
Speaker
Now I asked Ted what exactly is a world-class education in the 21st century?
00:33:38
Speaker
We see initiatives such as the one happening in Ohio to promote coding.
00:33:41
Speaker
In the way that I see it, huge ideas from a couple decades ago that are relatively popular, but you know they're kind of on the way out.
00:33:48
Speaker
Coding isn't exactly something that I would see innovative.
00:33:51
Speaker
Yet the states continue to invest in relatively safe and streamlined ideas.
00:33:56
Speaker
So I would state right up front that coding is not it because most people would be doing less and less coding.
00:34:04
Speaker
And there will be some people that that's their thing and they're going to push in that direction.
00:34:09
Speaker
But there, I mean, just think about what it took to 10 years ago to use and create some certain types of video or
00:34:22
Speaker
PowerPoint presentation and all that versus 20 or 30 years ago, you don't have to worry as much about the technical.
00:34:31
Speaker
And we're seeing the technology gaining much more sophisticated than any routine mechanical tasks that are pattern-based.
00:34:40
Speaker
Machines are actually going to get better at it than humans will.
00:34:43
Speaker
However, there's a couple of things that humans can only do.
00:34:49
Speaker
And it's also where the biggest deficits in organizational teams are that it's really hard to find people who know how to do this.
00:34:57
Speaker
And that is, number one, looking around in a very undefined sense to identify key challenges and opportunities for this needs to be solved.
00:35:11
Speaker
Whatever it is, it could be a social justice thing or it could be a gap in technology or product or service.
00:35:17
Speaker
And then it's
00:35:19
Speaker
It's also knowing how to iterate on your ideas so that you don't just run with what first comes to mind because it's almost never right.
00:35:31
Speaker
It's never refined enough to be of full success.
00:35:35
Speaker
It is about how to lead your team, not as I'm the expert and everyone follow me because
00:35:44
Speaker
Everything is moving so quickly and you're having to rely on so many strategic partners that, yes, you all need to agree to a vision, but it's a facilitated process to get agreement across all the parties and say, this is what we're trying to solve.
00:36:00
Speaker
And if it's truly innovative, no one has a roadmap.
00:36:04
Speaker
That's the crazy part.
00:36:05
Speaker
Everyone has bits and pieces of this is what we've tried.
00:36:09
Speaker
But when you put it all together in context of where things have evolved to, no one has a roadmap.
00:36:16
Speaker
And so the idea of how do you lead a team, how do you facilitate a team so that they are maximizing their neural pathways to really look at
00:36:27
Speaker
whatever problem you're trying to solve in a holistic way, iterating on that so they're drilling deeper, they're really worried about more about what they don't know and where the blind spots are because that's where not only the immense opportunities lay, but it's also where the biggest risks are as well.
00:36:46
Speaker
And if you can navigate through that, that's where the opportunity is.
00:36:49
Speaker
If you have a roadmap already, well, Finn, that means there's 100 other companies and people that have done that already.
00:36:55
Speaker
And that's not innovation.
00:36:57
Speaker
That's not moving forward in the future.
00:36:59
Speaker
And I can tell you, in media, in technology, in music, you picked a profession.
00:37:06
Speaker
In finance, what's keeping CEOs and executive teams awake at night is they literally do not know how to navigate this stuff.
00:37:14
Speaker
It's happening so fast that their ability to pull together the right strategic alliances and partners to help them get through this
00:37:23
Speaker
it's messy.
00:37:24
Speaker
And this is where the technology, the issues, the complexity and the speed are outpacing our own
00:37:35
Speaker
organizational teams and cultures and humans to evolve.
00:37:39
Speaker
And it's a very, I don't think we've ever experienced this, this case in history.
The Role of Ed Tech and Brain Science in Education
00:37:44
Speaker
I also have to ask you about ed tech.
00:37:46
Speaker
I know you're a huge proponent of ed tech and talk a lot about AI, the fourth industrial revolution and other future driven things.
00:37:53
Speaker
And as you know, ed tech can be used for good or for evil, so to speak.
00:37:58
Speaker
On the one hand, it can open up information to everyone, almost anywhere and connect people in so many different ways.
00:38:04
Speaker
But on the other hand, it can replace worksheets with iPads and manipulate digitally illiterate students.
00:38:08
Speaker
And so what initiatives do you see in ed tech that are being used for good?
00:38:12
Speaker
That's a really good question.
00:38:14
Speaker
I, you know, I review for ed tech digest, hundreds of products every year as part of their ed tech digest, uh, recognition and awards.
00:38:22
Speaker
And I have to say that most education technology that I have come across, um, is based around the wrong brain science and pedagogy.
00:38:32
Speaker
And when you start there,
00:38:34
Speaker
Yeah, you'll get sales, you'll get districts signing on, but it's a dead end path.
00:38:38
Speaker
And I have started to see a few starting to move in direction, in the right direction.
00:38:43
Speaker
But here's a fundamental thing.
00:38:45
Speaker
And this is probably for even another podcast, but there's a whole series of brain science research around what they call the default mode network of the brain.
00:38:56
Speaker
And that is the very complex regions of the brain that activate when you're not doing cognitive tasks.
00:39:04
Speaker
And in a healthy person, when you start doing cognitive tasks, the default mode network shuts down.
00:39:10
Speaker
When you stop doing cognitive tasks, it lights up.
00:39:12
Speaker
Now, it turns out what your brain is processing in the default mode network are things like your view of yourself, perception of yourself, your ability to put yourself in context of others, including empathy.
00:39:27
Speaker
So social context.
00:39:29
Speaker
It's about looking in their past, be able to project to the future.
00:39:32
Speaker
It's where stories are interpreted.
00:39:34
Speaker
It's where epiphanies happen.
00:39:36
Speaker
It's essentially where your deepest thinking happens.
00:39:40
Speaker
So if you think about saying, okay, all these leadership skills and calibration and be able to think very, you know, these complex issues that have no right answer.
00:39:53
Speaker
If you switch the brain to cognitive test mode, you're literally shutting down the brain
00:39:57
Speaker
that we needed to process this.
00:39:59
Speaker
So going back to the technology, using that framework, and there's a whole brain science around what happens with PTSD and depression and the different neurological disorders and how that is basically unbalanced between the default mode network
00:40:18
Speaker
versus task mode.
00:40:20
Speaker
For example, people on the spectrum tend to have a very active task mode side but have an underactive default mode.
00:40:27
Speaker
That's why they have a hard time interpreting social context, as an example.
00:40:31
Speaker
And there's a whole, that's a whole other topic.
00:40:34
Speaker
But there's a fundamental design problem with almost every technology tool out there, especially as it interfaces more closely with human thought and that technology human interface.
00:40:48
Speaker
And that is that if you want someone to be creative, you can't be shoving someone into a task mode.
00:40:55
Speaker
And I don't care if you're film editing or I don't care if you're music editing or creating a document or presentation, but as soon as you're having to think about these technical sequential tasks, oh, I need to do that command.
00:41:07
Speaker
I need to do this command.
00:41:08
Speaker
It's literally shutting down your brain.
00:41:10
Speaker
That's why some people like to sketch things out in notes on pen and paper,
00:41:14
Speaker
before they even try to do it in the computer.
00:41:16
Speaker
There's a reason for that.
00:41:18
Speaker
No one's really understood why until you start to see how the brain activates.
00:41:22
Speaker
So I think there's a huge opportunity that I'm starting to see, especially in the intersection between medical, technology, learning, and entertainment.
00:41:34
Speaker
And some of those, there are companies being formed that are trying to intersect those variety disciplines.
00:41:41
Speaker
because that is what is needed to develop the next set of technologies that will really empower and enable humans in the right way, maximizes their brain development.
00:41:53
Speaker
And in the meantime, the technologies that
00:41:58
Speaker
might have gotten developed by accident.
00:42:01
Speaker
Some knew more about what they were doing than others, are the ones that make it easier for people to have natural organic conversations, discussions, and sharing of information together.
00:42:12
Speaker
I think that removing those barriers, making it much more seamless so that you can brainstorm together, you can think together, you can plan together.
00:42:23
Speaker
Those types of technologies
00:42:26
Speaker
are very helpful.
00:42:29
Speaker
But I think this is the next five to 10 years of immense evolution in product and service and technology design that will be exciting.
00:43:03
Speaker
I hope you're enjoying the podcast thus far.
00:43:05
Speaker
I sincerely appreciate you listening in.
00:43:07
Speaker
And if you enjoy this work, head on over to humanrestorationproject.org to find a ton of free resources and a wealth of writings.
00:43:14
Speaker
And then, if you think we should keep going, take a gander at our Patreon page.
00:43:19
Speaker
For a dollar a month, you'll receive a professional, print-ready electronic magazine of our works every two months.
00:43:25
Speaker
But as always, all of our work is available free online.
00:43:28
Speaker
The best practices shouldn't be gatekept.
00:43:30
Speaker
So we're here as a resource to support progressive ed for everyone.
00:43:34
Speaker
Thank you.
Authentic Learning and Project-Based Approaches
00:43:41
Speaker
We give the kids the work and the kids do the work.
00:43:43
Speaker
Typically, you know, they have to write an essay and their essays are incredibly inauthentic.
00:43:51
Speaker
And so there's no...
00:43:52
Speaker
You know, it's like we want them to write for an audience, but usually the audience is the teacher.
00:43:57
Speaker
And they just don't think they don't write for an audience who's really going to read their work.
00:44:04
Speaker
I believe really I was put on this earth to be a teacher in some way, shape or form.
00:44:08
Speaker
And I feel like a lot of what I was having my kids do wasn't really honoring my purpose, nor was it honoring theirs.
00:44:16
Speaker
This is Dina Hess, an English teacher at Dover High School in Dover, Delaware, who teaches a range of English classes up to dual credit college coursework.
00:44:25
Speaker
That has, you know, changed over the last several years to me offering more opportunities for students to be able to stretch themselves and reach out to audiences that are truly more authentic so that they really understand their purposes for writing.
00:44:39
Speaker
And so I have done this a couple of ways.
00:44:42
Speaker
It works out
00:44:43
Speaker
a little better for my seniors than it does my 10th graders.
00:44:47
Speaker
I'm kind of, I'm put in a position with my 10th and 11th grade classes where I have to co-plan with somebody else and I have to respect that they're not in the same place as I am with being able to let students direct their learning a little bit more.
00:45:02
Speaker
So it works out exceptionally well with basic class and I'm just kind of planning on my own.
00:45:05
Speaker
So typically what I do with my senior students who are fully enrolled is I have five units that I have to teach
00:45:13
Speaker
Each unit has to culminate in an essay according to the university's rubric.
00:45:18
Speaker
So I have those things.
00:45:20
Speaker
And really in the grand scheme, it's supposed to prepare them to do college-level writing.
00:45:24
Speaker
What we typically do is I allow them to do a lot of self-directed tasks during the unit so that when they get to writing that major piece, that the piece seems a little bit more authentic for them.
00:45:40
Speaker
So I tackled this one of a couple of ways.
00:45:43
Speaker
One way is to allow the students to do a lot of goal setting in terms of improving their writing.
00:45:49
Speaker
So I have, usually what I do is at the end of the unit, when they culminate in the essay writing, they take a look at areas on the rubric and look for where would they like to meet some of their greater improvements.
00:46:03
Speaker
And that usually culminates in us sitting down and conferencing and speaking about their writing and
00:46:08
Speaker
I did a conference a couple of times.
00:46:10
Speaker
And what it does for the major culmination of that is that's what their midterm exam is.
00:46:15
Speaker
It's a portfolio assessment where we look through their writing.
00:46:18
Speaker
And what I have found since doing this, this year is my third year teaching dual enrollment.
00:46:25
Speaker
I find that they get better and better every year, just as I get better and better every year of letting them direct their own learning.
00:46:33
Speaker
They notice things about their writing that
00:46:35
Speaker
If I had just pointed them out to them, it wouldn't have changed them as writers.
00:46:40
Speaker
And so it allows for a lot of self-discovery and a lot of being able to just take things that they would just normally send a paper and go, oh, okay, well, she said that, you know, I need to work on my mechanics and my grammar.
00:46:54
Speaker
That wouldn't really change them as writers.
00:46:57
Speaker
I find that this has really been changing and it's become a lot more self-aware.
00:47:02
Speaker
And I get a lot of feedback from the kids that say things like,
00:47:05
Speaker
I really was bad at this and I didn't realize how bad I was.
00:47:08
Speaker
For me, that's the best thing I can hear from a student is that they realize things about their own writing that they need to change and they're more apt to change those things because they figured it out themselves.
00:47:19
Speaker
Another way is to allow the student to really truly do what we want them to do with researching by letting them form their own questions and kind of come up with a product based on whatever it is that they have formed a question around.
00:47:34
Speaker
So I try to make it a little bit more project-based, and the students love that.
00:47:39
Speaker
They get very involved and engaged with what they come up with.
00:47:44
Speaker
Recently, we did a project where they're actually in the process of finishing it up right now, where they decided one of the questions on the Midterm Exam Portfolio Conference was, what is a skill that you really feel that you need to work with?
00:47:58
Speaker
And I heard basically eight comments from the students.
00:48:01
Speaker
One of them was we really want to make sure that our language and our syntax is really meeting the purpose of the text.
00:48:08
Speaker
Because we have a lot of discussion around, you know, well, why would you make the sentence a shorter sentence here?
00:48:14
Speaker
You know, what are your hopes that it will do for your reader by doing this?
00:48:19
Speaker
And so what I had them look at was Humans of New York.
00:48:24
Speaker
And the fact that you have this image that really goes a long way to help support
00:48:31
Speaker
the text underneath the image.
00:48:34
Speaker
And so we looked at that first and then they decided that I said, you know, I just want to see what you do with this.
00:48:41
Speaker
I said, I had a whole assignment in mind, but I really would kind of like to see what you do.
00:48:45
Speaker
And I threw it out to the kids and it made them a little uncomfortable at first because they're so used to teachers telling them what to do.
00:48:51
Speaker
You know, just, they just want, you know, I just want you to tell me what to do.
00:48:55
Speaker
And it made them a little uncomfortable at first.
00:48:58
Speaker
But once they got rolling with it, they came up with ideas.
00:49:01
Speaker
And my one class all came together in a collaborative effort and decided that they all wanted to work on pieces toward maybe putting together like a newspaper.
00:49:11
Speaker
And they all worked very well together and really cherished each other's ideas and said, you know, well, let's divide this up.
00:49:18
Speaker
They solved their own problems.
00:49:19
Speaker
My other block was having a really difficult time with it.
00:49:22
Speaker
They just, they didn't like the fact that so many people had so many ideas.
00:49:26
Speaker
And so,
00:49:28
Speaker
I basically said to them, well, you're going to solve it.
00:49:32
Speaker
If you're having an issue with this, you're going to solve this.
00:49:33
Speaker
I said, this is going to be the rest of your life.
00:49:35
Speaker
You're going to have to work with people whose ideas differ from yours.
00:49:38
Speaker
How do you come to a meeting of minds on this?
00:49:41
Speaker
So they all had realized that they could meet the requirements of the project by all doing something a little bit different.
00:49:48
Speaker
And once they became at peace with that, they were like, oh, so this is really just me doing what I want to do.
00:49:55
Speaker
And I was like, yeah, I said, you see this list of
00:49:58
Speaker
learning targets here, that's what I need you to demonstrate.
00:50:02
Speaker
You tell me your idea.
00:50:04
Speaker
And so it ended up becoming, oh, well, and then they started to think about, well, you know, can I use a sentence this length at this part?
00:50:11
Speaker
Will that work?
00:50:12
Speaker
And does it work if I do this?
00:50:13
Speaker
So they were actually asking me more pointed questions around, you know, how they were able to convey meaning in the text.
00:50:20
Speaker
And so I'm kind of excited because this is the first time I did this.
00:50:25
Speaker
The first day that I kind of let them go, I was
00:50:28
Speaker
I was really nervous about wanting to jump in.
00:50:32
Speaker
I was giving me anxiety.
00:50:33
Speaker
I wanted to jump in to solve their problem for them.
00:50:36
Speaker
And I realized, I was like, no, they're going to, they can do this.
00:50:39
Speaker
They can, they can really do this on their own and I need to let them do it.
00:50:42
Speaker
And so they, and they did.
00:50:44
Speaker
And it, it worked out beautifully and, you know, they're all working on their projects.
00:50:47
Speaker
So I'm kind of excited.
00:50:48
Speaker
They're not due until Monday and Tuesday.
00:50:51
Speaker
So I get to see what they, what they came up with.
00:50:54
Speaker
Exactly.
00:50:54
Speaker
All this stuff is so cool.
00:50:55
Speaker
It sounds like the shift that you made is similar to my own, where essentially it was born out of frustration.
00:51:00
Speaker
I was so disengaged with the teaching process that I no longer saw any point in what it is I was doing.
00:51:06
Speaker
I was grading compliance and there was no real purpose in my work.
00:51:09
Speaker
So I switched it up and obviously it's working out.
00:51:12
Speaker
Did you find that teaching traditionally caused you a lot of frustration?
00:51:16
Speaker
For me, what creates anxiety is chasing the trail of papers.
00:51:22
Speaker
That is what gives me anxiety.
00:51:23
Speaker
And I've realized over the years that I just, I don't know that I was doing any grading meaningfully.
00:51:31
Speaker
I just don't think that I was.
00:51:33
Speaker
I think, you know, the whole idea behind assigning work to kids is so that they receive feedback in order to improve themselves as writers, as, you know, curators of content, as producers of anything.
00:51:49
Speaker
I don't know that I was really doing a great job as a teacher because, you know, I do what a lot of teachers do where I collect the work and then, you know, life happens outside school and I don't get to the papers right away.
00:52:02
Speaker
And so then they're not really getting timely feedback by the time they get them back.
00:52:07
Speaker
They're just kind of looking at the paper and going, Oh yeah, you know, I did poorly on that or, Oh, I did well on that.
00:52:13
Speaker
And they don't actually really read the feedback that comes to them.
00:52:17
Speaker
And so,
00:52:18
Speaker
They just are basically doing it for a grade.
00:52:21
Speaker
And if you have really great students who know how to do school, they actually read the feedback and they go, oh, okay, well, I need to remember to do this for the next essay.
00:52:30
Speaker
But I really can't tell you how many years, and I'm in year 15, I can't tell you how many years where I've actually had kids really read the feedback.
00:52:40
Speaker
And so what this has ended up doing, and this is where it kind of trickles into my 10th and 11th grade classes, is
00:52:47
Speaker
that they're kind of forced now to make some sense about their own writing so that they can improve.
00:52:55
Speaker
And that's really what I've wanted.
00:52:58
Speaker
I grade a whole lot less, which has really helped me out, you know, both with planning and my personal life, because, you know, we all have lives outside of work and it's made me less stressed out.
00:53:13
Speaker
And I'm not, you know, I, and I'm not doing,
00:53:17
Speaker
the teacher guilt on Sundays where, you know, you go, oh, I should have, you know, I should be doing some work, but I also want to spend time with my family or I want to be able to get to other things that I need to do to take care of my own self so that I could do my job more effectively.
00:53:31
Speaker
So I'm not coming in Monday morning feeling like I, you know, I didn't get everything done and therefore that's stressful.
00:53:38
Speaker
So it is really substantially cut down on the level of stress that I'm experiencing and the level of anxiety and making me enjoy my job a whole lot more.
Prioritizing Student Well-being and Restorative Practices
00:53:46
Speaker
And of course, your focus too is on how all of this ties into relationship building.
00:53:51
Speaker
Educators talk a lot about relationships in general, and I think most people listening to this understand why we value relationships.
00:53:58
Speaker
But could you go into some detail on how this ties to a progressive classroom?
00:54:01
Speaker
I really find that students are not going to participate in their own learning if they don't have a relationship with a teacher under which they are being taught.
00:54:12
Speaker
I would love to believe, and I was telling somebody this the other day, I said, I would love to believe that I could get up in front of a class full of students and just, you know, do what, you know, teachers did when I was in high school where they would just get up and they would espouse literature and, you know, the kids would just do the work because that's what they were supposed to do.
00:54:30
Speaker
But it just doesn't work that way.
00:54:33
Speaker
And I remember my best experiences that I had as a high school student were with teachers who,
00:54:41
Speaker
developed a relationship with me.
00:54:43
Speaker
For some reason, I just always felt more compelled to do well in their classes.
00:54:49
Speaker
And I was not a great student in school.
00:54:52
Speaker
I was probably a student at best.
00:54:55
Speaker
And I just, I felt that if there were teachers that understood me or connected with me or made an attempt to connect with me, that I would just be more compelled to work harder for them.
00:55:07
Speaker
And so for students that I have now,
00:55:11
Speaker
They, you know, they like the fact that they can choose what they want to do and they love having that autonomy.
00:55:18
Speaker
But the problem with allowing students that self-directed experience is that if you don't have a relationship with them, they get stunted somewhere in the process.
00:55:28
Speaker
So I have a lot of students who are used to a culture of compliance.
00:55:33
Speaker
They're used to, you know, the teacher assigns the work, they do the assignment, they get the grades.
00:55:38
Speaker
and not really thinking with a whole lot of depth somewhere in between.
00:55:42
Speaker
And so what ends up happening is that when they get stuck, they're afraid to ask questions if they don't have relationships with those teachers.
00:55:52
Speaker
And they're afraid to ask even other kids.
00:55:56
Speaker
If I have not established some level of culture within my classroom, they're afraid to even go to other kids for help that really could help them.
00:56:03
Speaker
And so I have to do that because
00:56:06
Speaker
it's not just beneficial for the kid who is, you know, is maybe a B or C student that being able to come ask questions is helpful, but also for those kids who function at a higher level that they just, they see their approval seeking.
00:56:22
Speaker
They want to know that they're doing the right thing.
00:56:25
Speaker
If they don't feel that they have that kind of relationship with the teacher, they're going to be afraid to ask for help when they need it.
00:56:31
Speaker
And that has to do with a lot of other things too.
00:56:33
Speaker
We have,
00:56:34
Speaker
Unfortunately, as our society has progressed, so have levels of stress and anxiety.
00:56:39
Speaker
I mean, our students are more stressed now than they have ever been.
00:56:43
Speaker
I don't remember, and I, you know, I have friends who were, you know, graduated as valedictorian, salutatorian, you know, top 5% of the class.
00:56:51
Speaker
I don't remember them being as anxious and stressed out as what I see kids are now.
00:56:57
Speaker
And they, you know, I've had students over the last 10 years that have had to
00:57:03
Speaker
you know, have had to go to stay in hospitals for weeks at a time because of stress and anxiety.
00:57:08
Speaker
I have had students who have attempted to commit suicide or have committed suicide because of those experiences and they felt they had nowhere else to go and no one to talk to.
00:57:17
Speaker
So it isn't even anymore about just the learning.
00:57:19
Speaker
It is about making sure that the kid understands that their situation is very temporary.
00:57:25
Speaker
And to me, that's more important.
00:57:27
Speaker
And I told a kid recently, I said, there is nothing you're going to do for my class that is more valuable than your life.
00:57:34
Speaker
So please understand that, you know, if it is an issue or something happens that, you know, you can come to me and we can talk through it.
00:57:42
Speaker
And, you know, and that usually will put them at ease because I am also a teacher who is very firm with them and make sure that, you know, that they understand that I'm here for your learning, but your learning might also mean helping to take care of yourself.
00:57:58
Speaker
And I also, I teach in a school where I have a lot of students who are,
00:58:02
Speaker
On their own.
00:58:03
Speaker
You know, it's like they've got parents or they've got grandparents or aunts and uncles who they live with, but they're kind of on their own.
00:58:10
Speaker
And so I might be the only person in their life at that point who has actually even had a conversation with them or asked them how they're doing.
00:58:19
Speaker
So if I don't have that relationship with them, they can't accomplish tasks that they know are very crucial to their survival outside of high school.
00:58:29
Speaker
Further, I wanted Dina to share which practice she'd want to target in traditional education that should be really eliminated as soon as possible.
00:58:36
Speaker
Grades put so much pressure on both the kids and the teachers.
00:58:40
Speaker
And that, if it were up to me, that would be where I would see everything go next, just in terms of, you know, that initiative.
00:58:48
Speaker
The other thing that I've seen that I have really just kind of started to embrace as a teacher is the whole idea around doing more restorative justice with my students.
00:59:00
Speaker
And kind of where I have, you know, I'm using the words bought in for lack of another way to describe it, where I've bought in with restorative justice is I have so much, I have better relationships with my students now because I have decided, and it's, you know, a lot of people think restorative justice, they think for, you know, elements where you might have some behavioral issues in your classroom, which is certainly what I thought when I started, you know, listening to
00:59:30
Speaker
podcasts that discuss that and having discussions with other professionals.
00:59:33
Speaker
But I realized that there are situations that as a teacher, I have caused that environment or climate in my classroom.
00:59:44
Speaker
And I wasn't even aware what I was doing.
00:59:48
Speaker
And now what it has done is it's made me a lot more mindful of my own language as a professional and
00:59:55
Speaker
And that has in turn allowed me to build much better relationships with my students.
01:00:00
Speaker
And so I just, you know, I'm practicing a lot of those, you know, kind of pieces of restorative justice now that it's really, what it's done is it's built a better relationship with the student, which has in turn allowed a lot more learning to take place.
01:00:17
Speaker
And finally, she offers a word of advice to teachers.
01:00:20
Speaker
I think if I had to leave other teachers with,
01:00:24
Speaker
you know, just kind of a thought is, and I probably would have disagreed with this when I was in my first two years of teaching, but relationships really are everything.
01:00:32
Speaker
They are everything with your kids.
01:00:34
Speaker
They are everything as a teacher to keep your own sanity.
01:00:37
Speaker
And it's gotten so much harder.
01:00:39
Speaker
Teaching has gotten harder over the last 15 years that I've been in it.
01:00:43
Speaker
And for anybody who's been in the profession longer than I have, it's gotten substantially harder.
01:00:47
Speaker
And I think to our
01:00:49
Speaker
first-year teachers, our first- and second-year teachers who don't have the kind of experiences and wherewithal to understand that your difficult situations will pass.
01:00:59
Speaker
You just have to kind of hang in there.
01:01:01
Speaker
I think that we just, we need to do a better job of just taking care of each other, you know, taking care of each other so that we can take better care of our students and ensure their learning.
01:01:11
Speaker
So that's the thing that I've been left with lately is, you know, what can I do to
01:01:18
Speaker
better ensure that, you know, we're all meeting that goal of improving student experiences.
01:01:24
Speaker
And so, you know, we just need to do a better job of taking care of each other and taking care of ourselves.
Reclaiming Humanness in Education with Sophie Fenton
01:01:35
Speaker
Sophie Fenton is the head of education design at the Asia Education Foundation in Melbourne, Australia, who focuses on promoting intercultural and communicative schools in an increasingly connected world.
01:01:47
Speaker
I think of myself really these days more as a philosopher around education, what it is to design education and what it is to be a learned being.
01:01:56
Speaker
I've been in education for 30 years, both as a student and as a teacher, and these days as a researcher.
01:02:06
Speaker
And really, my education experience has really been around designing programs, both in classrooms through professional learning,
01:02:13
Speaker
but also systemically.
01:02:15
Speaker
So I've been involved in founding a new school and then now really working cross-culturally across a range of regional, national and infrastructure contexts as well in education.
01:02:28
Speaker
As you go and connect schools and head these programs, what is the mission and vision of what you're trying to accomplish?
01:02:34
Speaker
For me, I believe absolutely fundamentally that education is a human experience.
01:02:40
Speaker
And of course, all lived beings educate, right?
01:02:42
Speaker
All animals educate in order to enable their own worlds to thrive and function.
01:02:49
Speaker
But for me, education is a magnificently human experience.
01:02:55
Speaker
And I think what drives me these days is actually to reclaim, ironically, reclaim the humanness that sits inside, that human experience.
01:03:04
Speaker
So if you look at education over the last couple of hundred years,
01:03:08
Speaker
With the emergence of an industrial revolution context, education transferred away from thinking deeply about what it was to be human in our world.
01:03:17
Speaker
And rather instead said, oh, look, thanks, Enlightenment era.
01:03:20
Speaker
Thanks, ancient philosophers, for telling us what it is to be human.
01:03:24
Speaker
Now we're going to teach at you humans and ensure that you're capable of being producers for commercial interests.
01:03:31
Speaker
So I guess for me, my main mission is to reclaim our humanness.
01:03:36
Speaker
and bring it back to the purpose and practice that sits at the centre of teaching and learning.
01:03:42
Speaker
And the reason that I feel urgent around that, not only because I'm a historian and a political junkie by heart and believe deeply in human beings, but because our world is deeply changing.
01:03:54
Speaker
You know, we are going into a world of immersive and mixed reality technologies.
01:03:58
Speaker
And for that world, I believe deeply that education needs to equip us
01:04:03
Speaker
around an awareness of our humanness in order to thrive in and design for that world.
01:04:10
Speaker
A world where what it is actually to be human is being significantly challenged.
01:04:14
Speaker
Further, what specific skills and ideas are we engaging when we're talking about preparing students for the modern world?
01:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, really interesting.
01:04:21
Speaker
So I guess I would break that down into two components.
01:04:25
Speaker
I see that there are a number of sort of uniform practices that
01:04:29
Speaker
that are responding to this changing world.
01:04:32
Speaker
So if you think about today's landscape, the language of today's landscape is the VUCA world.
01:04:37
Speaker
You know, this notion of a world being increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous.
01:04:43
Speaker
And I think that today's education is rapidly reframing in order to address that world.
01:04:48
Speaker
And it's a highly skills-based teaching approach, right?
01:04:52
Speaker
So if you think about, you know, obviously the fundamentals of literacy and numeracy skills,
01:04:57
Speaker
But also there's an increasing focus around the capabilities or the capacities around cognitive skill development, how we process, analyze, evaluate, think inventively, think critically, system thinking, creative skills.
01:05:12
Speaker
So it's all about innovation and delivering on ideas, increasingly education is being designed to be highly authentic.
01:05:19
Speaker
And of course, there's the emphasis around social emotional skills, right?
01:05:22
Speaker
How we collaborate, work in teams.
01:05:24
Speaker
becoming adaptable, taking risk, developing resilience in the face of ambiguity, and also impose self-sufficiency.
01:05:32
Speaker
That's an increasing pressure on all of us.
01:05:36
Speaker
We no longer have the job for life.
01:05:37
Speaker
In fact, we have to create our own jobs.
01:05:40
Speaker
So how are we able to manage ourselves in a world that is no longer kind of laid out for us?
01:05:47
Speaker
So I think that they are the skills
01:05:49
Speaker
that are being increasingly taught and becoming increasingly uniform practice.
01:05:54
Speaker
Before we get into your work at the Asia Education Foundation, I'd love to talk for a second about the school you started in 2016, the Sandridge School.
01:06:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:02
Speaker
Well, look, Sandridge was an incredible project that myself and a fellow educator, Dr. Jeannie Shaw, worked on.
01:06:10
Speaker
So we kind of came together in 2014 with a crazy idea to open a school, you know, two school teachers opening a school.
01:06:15
Speaker
We were two teachers that came together to set up a school.
01:06:18
Speaker
And she brought her
01:06:19
Speaker
research around the essentialness of relationships that sit inside schools.
01:06:23
Speaker
And I brought the teaching and learning experience and I brought the ideas of authentic learning, proactive citizenship and real outcomes.
01:06:30
Speaker
And together we created a school that had an independent secular framing that was shaped by citizenship, entrepreneurial thinking rather than entrepreneurialism, but entrepreneurial thinking, generating ideas and then putting them into action.
01:06:45
Speaker
And really, the emphasis around the school was that it was an incubator for innovation and positive social impact.
01:06:51
Speaker
Now, when we first talked about that in 2015, it was like, you know, we were kind of in the wilderness in many ways because the conventional system was still very much around, you know, literacy and numeracy and assessment and results and learning outcomes and learning intentions.
01:07:07
Speaker
But four years on, it is now absolutely mainstay for schools to talk about students being champions of humanity, curiosity, being active citizens, entrepreneurial thinkers.
01:07:20
Speaker
Schools are championing citizenship, immersing kids in community, empowering them to be change agents.
01:07:26
Speaker
Learning is now authentic.
01:07:28
Speaker
It's connected to activators.
01:07:29
Speaker
It's real world.
01:07:30
Speaker
It's looking for real world outcomes.
01:07:32
Speaker
All of those things in our mainstay in practice.
01:07:34
Speaker
So I feel really proud of the contribution that Sandwich made to that shift in education, but probably more than that, I actually feel that these shifts are essential to generating future citizens that will go on to shape our world.
01:07:46
Speaker
So that was an incredible experience and I feel an important contribution that we've made to the shaping and change of education.
01:07:56
Speaker
I guess before I talk about AES and maybe contextualise the work of AES a bit,
01:08:02
Speaker
You asked earlier around what were the existing uniform practices.
01:08:07
Speaker
And I would guess that on top of those uniform practices, and I'd say that sandwich kind of fits inside that uniform practice context now.
01:08:16
Speaker
Only within a few years it's become uniform and that's fantastic.
01:08:19
Speaker
But I think that there is more to our practice.
01:08:25
Speaker
And that's kind of the work that I'm now deeply interested in, both in my research work
01:08:30
Speaker
and in the work that I'm doing with Asia Education Foundation.
01:08:33
Speaker
So the reality is that not only are we looking at working in an inter-digital world, but we're actually also working in an interconnected world, right?
01:08:41
Speaker
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work of Foundation for Young Australians in Australia.
01:08:46
Speaker
So they have done some incredible work in kind of synthesising the changing context, the digital landscape that's changing our world,
01:08:56
Speaker
and the impact that that has on the design of education programs.
01:08:59
Speaker
But they've done some really interesting work that talks about how technology is going to transition us away from routine tasks and that transitioning from routine tasks will free humans up to be more creative and strategic in their thinking.
01:09:14
Speaker
but it will also require them to be far more engaged with each other, interestingly enough.
01:09:19
Speaker
And that people-to-people context actually poses real challenges, right?
01:09:23
Speaker
So how do we as humans actually learn to connect and interact more effectively in a world that's shaped by technology and where singularity actually looms on our horizon?
01:09:36
Speaker
Our landscape is going to change incredibly significantly.
01:09:42
Speaker
For me, as our world is redefined by technology, the practice of teachers need to hone in on human-centered learning, right, and teaching students what it is to be human.
01:09:53
Speaker
So I'm currently undergoing, I'm currently engaged in a PhD research at Monash University as well.
01:10:02
Speaker
And there I'm exploring whether or not having our humanists back at the center of purpose
01:10:08
Speaker
and practicing teaching and learning can better equip students to prosper in and create for a world where, as I said earlier, we will coexist with immersive and mixed technologies.
01:10:18
Speaker
This world where what is to be human is really being challenged.
01:10:21
Speaker
And that kind of ties in really powerfully to the work that I'm doing with Asia Education Foundation.
01:10:27
Speaker
So as I said, not only is our world being shaped by technology, it's just technology is shrinking our world.
01:10:36
Speaker
And this world not only needs to be about being aware of what it is to be human, but having that cognizance of our humanness connected to intercultural understanding.
01:10:47
Speaker
So not only are we humans, but as humans, there's an incredible diversity amongst us.
01:10:54
Speaker
And so at Asia Ed, we really work around this notion of a shrinking world and how intercultural understanding can equip us to thrive in and create for a shrinking world.
01:11:06
Speaker
So you have a lot of complex topics that you're bringing up.
01:11:09
Speaker
Could you go into some detail about what the intelligent digital mesh is?
Ethical Use of Technology in Education
01:11:13
Speaker
Gartner Institute, American-based kind of think tank, they're kind of, I guess, coined this term of an intelligent digital mesh.
01:11:21
Speaker
And it's the idea that we have the immersion of mixed augmented realities.
01:11:27
Speaker
So it's the idea of meshing people, processes, and objects together in an immersive way.
01:11:33
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world where AI is really kind of the engine and the physical and virtual environments are conflated into these immersive digital existences.
01:11:41
Speaker
Okay.
01:11:42
Speaker
So this is the world really, it's a world of tomorrow, but, and it's happening today.
01:11:47
Speaker
So inside this space of sort of, you know, intelligent digital mesh, we need to understand cognitive processing, ethical reasoning, social and emotional interactions that sit alongside
01:12:00
Speaker
the creativity of what it is to be human.
01:12:04
Speaker
And we need to have a keen sense of both self and others in order to navigate this new way of being in this new conflated mixed reality world, right?
01:12:15
Speaker
We're working to design programs and experiences that incorporate all the cognitive, creative, social, emotional stuff that I talked about earlier alongside the humanness and then internationalize that.
01:12:28
Speaker
So place that in an internationalized context.
01:12:30
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So our programs are really designed around developing empathy and the capacity to see the world through the eyes of others.
01:12:38
Speaker
And we would argue that that's really crucial to development of a cohesive, collaborative and generative society.
01:12:44
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So our programs are very much designed around providing learning experiences to develop the ability to be receptive of alternative points of view, to question our own assumptions and biases,
01:12:56
Speaker
and to see connections in disparity.
01:12:58
Speaker
And we're all about enabling people that go through our programs to read and understand diversity, understand how others live and others think, because that enriches then how we collaborate and create new ways of being and seeing that are cohesive and inclusive in the world.
01:13:19
Speaker
All right, so I'm going to be honest that I still have little to no idea what any of that means.
01:13:24
Speaker
So I did some reading and I kind of understand what's going on.
01:13:27
Speaker
To elaborate on what Sophie is saying, the intelligent digital mesh basically is using artificial intelligence to predict the future to solve problems using big data.
01:13:38
Speaker
In an article by interest.com, which I've placed in the show notes, they describe this company named Narrative.
01:13:44
Speaker
that places wearable cameras on children with autism, which has integrated AI that learns behavioral and emotional facial expressions, and then it gives feedback to the child using gamified tasks.
01:13:55
Speaker
It's learning it on its own.
01:13:57
Speaker
Basically, this digital mesh thing is like a cyborg, cyberpunk type thing, which I'm totally on board with, as long as it's not a matrix like TakeOver or we're like corporate robots like Blade Runner.
01:14:07
Speaker
Sophie's work is basically designed to ensure that emerging technological trends are used for human-centric practice in education.
01:14:16
Speaker
The Asia Education Foundation offers specific classes that students can attend outside of school, preparing students for their tech-based future.
01:14:24
Speaker
Can you describe what these look like?
01:14:26
Speaker
Let me talk about the experience through a day in one of our youth forums through Asia Education Foundation.
01:14:31
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So we run a
01:14:34
Speaker
I guess there are three elements that we're developing around our youth learning experience.
01:14:39
Speaker
We have an ASEAN Australian Youth Forum.
01:14:42
Speaker
We have a Go Global Youth Forum where our students work through the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
01:14:49
Speaker
And also we're developing youth summits where our kids can actually come together and explore notions around global competency.
01:14:54
Speaker
But if we just break down to one of our youth forums, we'll bring kids together together
01:14:58
Speaker
They will take on the lens of another state in our region.
01:15:04
Speaker
And then through the eyes of that state, they will then come together and grapple with common issues.
01:15:11
Speaker
So there might be issues around trade.
01:15:13
Speaker
There might be issues around asylum seekers.
01:15:15
Speaker
There might be issues around global warming.
01:15:17
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And then through different perspectives, they will engage with each other to come up with
01:15:24
Speaker
a common ground, common resolutions, common understandings that can take the communities forward.
01:15:29
Speaker
Now, in order to do that, they actually need to grapple with different perspectives.
01:15:34
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They need to engage with diverse notions of understanding.
01:15:38
Speaker
They need to be aware of their own biases and they need to collaborate in order to come up with these shared understandings.
01:15:46
Speaker
So that's a really typical example of students going through this space.
01:15:50
Speaker
Now, the next stage of our development around these programs
01:15:54
Speaker
is to actually start to enunciate what it is to be human inside those spaces.
01:16:00
Speaker
So instead of going through the experience and designing for the intercultural notions of it, we're increasingly starting to design a program language whereby the students start to understand what it is to be human in that intercultural space.
01:16:15
Speaker
Of course, all of this technological revolution stuff is all well and good if it actually helps everyone.
01:16:20
Speaker
But more often than not, at least in the United States,
01:16:22
Speaker
we're seeing that it's increasingly a digital divide.
01:16:25
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People who are digitally literate achieve over those who don't.
01:16:28
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And even those who are digitally literate may be missing out on some of those human-centered practices like tolerance and understanding, for example.
01:16:35
Speaker
What are your thoughts on that?
01:16:37
Speaker
It's really interesting.
01:16:38
Speaker
When we develop Sandridge, the motto of the school world is that no person is an island.
01:16:45
Speaker
The idea that our world is actually only as rich as we live
01:16:50
Speaker
collaboratively and inclusively create it.
01:16:53
Speaker
And so, you know, and that's, you know, education has to come back to the fundamentals of what it is to be human, but to be humans that are respectful, inclusive, compassionate, ethical,
01:17:08
Speaker
And I guess that notion of intercultural that sit across the AEF is a really powerful component of that.
01:17:14
Speaker
So you talk about scaling.
01:17:16
Speaker
So this is kind of where my research sits.
01:17:18
Speaker
It sits in the pedagogical design space, right?
01:17:22
Speaker
So I think about how do we actually design a pedagogical framework that can actually be applied in any given context that enables learners to identify themselves as human and then design things
01:17:37
Speaker
ethically and justly as humans.
01:17:40
Speaker
So I'll just talk a little bit around the research and then I might kind of explain the impetus for that context at the simplest.
01:17:47
Speaker
So again, I'm PhD at Monash University and I'm exploring whether or not having our humanists back at the center of purpose and teaching and learning can actually equip kids to prosper in and create for this world, right?
01:18:00
Speaker
Both to be learned and wise consumers of their world and
01:18:07
Speaker
but also ethical architects who design for that world.
01:18:13
Speaker
And let me just give you kind of a bit of context, I guess, around what makes me question and think about that.
01:18:19
Speaker
So if you think of this conversation that we're having today sits inside some relatively tumultuous last couple of years.
01:18:27
Speaker
So if we think about the conversation around Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, you're coming right through to the recent tragedy
01:18:36
Speaker
around what happened in Christchurch and the role that digital technologies play around that.
01:18:44
Speaker
So I think as educators, we actually need to deeply design for ethical design, or teach for, sorry, ethical design, right?
01:18:51
Speaker
We don't want any more Cambridge Analytica behavior.
01:18:54
Speaker
We don't want interference in sovereign state election frameworks.
01:18:59
Speaker
We don't want tech platforms to be selling or sharing user details.
01:19:03
Speaker
Just because technology can do something, should it?
01:19:06
Speaker
We want to educate around ethical use, right?
01:19:09
Speaker
Things like cyberbullying, trolling, the dissemination of traumatic, horrendous information, the garnering of hate speech that sits inside a platform.
01:19:21
Speaker
We also want to teach for informed use, right?
01:19:24
Speaker
So AI is incredible, but we actually need to understand that we are engaging with AI and be alert to it.
01:19:31
Speaker
We want to understand the nature of
01:19:33
Speaker
extent of our digital footprint.
01:19:35
Speaker
So how do we equip learners to be cognizant, cognizant of themselves as humans, cognizant of the digital infrastructure that they exist in and create?
01:19:54
Speaker
Yeah, how do we take our kids from a place?
01:19:58
Speaker
I think that education is
01:20:01
Speaker
for decades, maybe for centuries, has actually taught at us rather than teaching us to be us.
01:20:11
Speaker
So I kind of use a language around a renaissance.
01:20:14
Speaker
I believe that we need to be in a renaissance of education.
01:20:18
Speaker
The concept of renaissance has two parts to it, right?
01:20:21
Speaker
So it has a new birth and we need to come up with new ideas for this new world that we're in, this VUCA world,
01:20:27
Speaker
But Renaissance language also speaks of rebirth.
01:20:30
Speaker
So the original Renaissance harked back to the original thinking around the ancient philosophers and brought that understanding into the 15th, 16th century world.
01:20:41
Speaker
We now bring, I would argue, enlightenment thinking, which itself is highly problematic.
01:20:47
Speaker
But the richness of enlightenment thinking was around questioning deeply what it was to be human and how those humans shape and craft their world.
01:20:57
Speaker
We look at the French Revolution and we get documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Citizen and Man, the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence.
01:21:08
Speaker
The language that sat inside those documents spoke about ethics, inclusion, justice, good governance for a sustainable, inclusive world.
01:21:21
Speaker
That's where we need to go back.
01:21:22
Speaker
We need to go back to that language rather than my learning outcomes, my grades,
01:21:27
Speaker
What university are I getting to?
01:21:28
Speaker
What job I can get so I can get the money I need to live the world I need, the life I need to live.
01:21:34
Speaker
That's how we scale change, Chris.
Diverse Voices and Innovation in Education
01:21:48
Speaker
Again, I want to highlight how important all these voices are in pushing true innovation in schools.
01:21:53
Speaker
These are things that we don't hear a lot about, or if we do, they're very surface level.
01:21:57
Speaker
If we want education to become world class, we need to explore voices from around the world and push government mandated curriculums to catch up.
01:22:05
Speaker
None of this is easy or the job of one educator, but progressive education can enable us to tackle objectives that are beyond the scope of much happening today in schools.
01:22:13
Speaker
I highly encourage you to check out the links in our show notes to find out more and have an important dialogue with your coworkers.
01:22:19
Speaker
Question what you're doing and reflect and start setting the stage for potential change.
01:22:23
Speaker
And when you're ready, armed with research and the current tide, take that plunge into changing the future.
01:22:28
Speaker
After all, our kids deserve it.
01:22:34
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Things Fall Apart from the Human Restoration Project.
01:22:38
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
01:22:43
Speaker
If you have time, I'd love for you to leave us a review on iTunes, social media, or anywhere you see fit.
01:22:48
Speaker
The more people that share this, the more that will feel comfortable having these conversations.
01:22:53
Speaker
Let's restore humanity together.