Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Season 3, Episode 4 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of the Human Restoration Project.
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.
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.
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,
Speaker: We want to hone in on specifics.
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.
Speaker: I guarantee that you're going to learn from these conversations.
Speaker: I hope you love listening in.
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.
Speaker: Thank you for your support.
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.
Speaker: By far the most inspiring thing about living in the communication age is seeing school innovation at work throughout the world.
Speaker: Sometimes we can get trapped obsessing over what doesn't work in schools.
Speaker: After all, there's a lot that needs changing.
Speaker: But that doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't awesome things happening.
Speaker: To expand on the word innovation, I know that that word can be fad-worthy, if you will.
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.
Speaker: That's not what I'm getting at here.
Speaker: Innovation is taking a risk against the status quo, doing something that little to no people are doing.
Speaker: And it's important to highlight and express these ideas are not only legitimate, but extraordinary.
Speaker: We should celebrate work and be careful of solely critiquing the established system.
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.
Speaker: No, our goal is to have these conversations in order to shift the pedagogical dialogue.
Speaker: There's not a set curriculum or a step-by-step you could purchase or a podcast that you'll hear.
Speaker: that can just make changes in your school.
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.
Speaker: In other words, listen, dissect, question, reflect, and engage in this field.
Speaker: Don't let time and, that's not just realistic, wear you down.
Speaker: Any measure of progressive education is possible anywhere.
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.
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.
Speaker: After all, that's the Human Restoration Project's goal.
Speaker: One stop for everything you'll need from research, resources, pedagogical guides, expert opinions, and opinionated targeted blogs that actually push some boundaries.
Speaker: Let's push forward together in innovating education.
Speaker: Our first guest is Bennett Jester.
Speaker: Bennett is a promoter of removing grades from schools and an advocate for progressive, educative practice.
Speaker: You can find his blog in our show notes.
Speaker: And importantly, Bennett is a ninth grade at Clark Street Community School.
Speaker: I have been doing educational activism since last summer.
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.
Speaker: place-based learning.
Speaker: So I've always been really interested in the ideas that I've found myself kind of surrounded by.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: I asked Bennett what the role of students and teachers was when it came to challenging the traditional system.
Speaker: There's a lot that students can do to take charge of their education in almost any model.
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
Speaker: help you with what you need.
Speaker: You just kind of got to be an advocate for yourself in that way.
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.
Speaker: It's kind of the teacher is facilitating the students learning.
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.
Speaker: So what is the role of students in the long term when it comes to educational activism?
Speaker: Do you see the end goal as expanding into almost a protest of sorts?
Speaker: After all, there's way more students than there are teachers.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I think that would be a really interesting place for it to go.
Speaker: I don't know if it has that kind of momentum yet.
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?
Speaker: What about my future?
Speaker: There's just so much that you need to unlearn in order to start thinking about all this stuff the right way.
Speaker: Okay, with that being said, what work do we need to do in order to inform others of what's going on?
Speaker: To understand the issues, I think we've got to just spend time thinking about them.
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?
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.
Speaker: And part of it's just like making it clear that there is an alternative.
Speaker: There are actually a ton of alternatives.
Speaker: There are a million different ways to do this thing.
Speaker: And some of them are better than others.
Speaker: And really what educational activism is about is thinking, okay, so there are so many different ways we can do this.
Speaker: I think we can all agree that what we're doing right now isn't the best one.
Speaker: And so it's just like, okay, we're not in the best scenario for our students.
Speaker: So what are we going to do to change the scenario so that it's better?
Speaker: You know, I agree.
Speaker: It just seems like a lot of what we're talking about is common sense.
Speaker: I mean, it works.
Speaker: We have ample research to back up what we're talking about.
Speaker: And people in other fields are clamoring for a better system.
Speaker: And even students such as yourself recognize it.
Speaker: Do you hope that students will take more charge in leading this change?
Speaker: I think students specifically need to do a lot more organizing.
Speaker: I mean, on individual level, I've talked about how they should be advocating for themselves and asking for what they need.
Speaker: But I think we also are going to need a collective level of that.
Speaker: We're going to need to have that as a group.
Speaker: We're going to need to have students, unions.
Speaker: We're going to need to be organized in a way
Speaker: that'll allow us to say, this is what we're looking for out of our education.
Speaker: Here's how you can do it.
Speaker: We want you to do this.
Speaker: There are so many different voices in progressive ed.
Speaker: There's like a lot of different things that we're advocating for.
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.
Speaker: And then we're going to need to
Speaker: organize for it.
Speaker: And I think that's where what you said earlier about how like there might be a protest for this kind of thing.
Speaker: That's the place where that would fit in.
Speaker: Like the students in the district have figured out what they want to change.
Speaker: There's resistance from administration or from whatever higher power is setting things.
Speaker: It's obvious that this is incredibly important to you and you're engaged in this topic.
Speaker: I wonder how all of this relates then to discouragement and apathy and even depression among students, especially teenagers.
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.
Speaker: I mean, sometimes they can actually make things a lot worse.
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.
Speaker: And then just continuing the status quo.
Speaker: That's basically what teachers do when students question or concern about anything.
Speaker: How can we help to deal with the apathy crisis among the student body?
Speaker: I think once you get into that sort of apathy, I don't think resistant is really the right word.
Speaker: I think it's more like this is how it is.
Speaker: What's the point looking for anything better?
Speaker: We're going to be gone in three years anyway.
Speaker: And that mindset is totally there.
Speaker: Like I see it.
Speaker: at the traditional high school.
Speaker: And it's really, it's troubling.
Speaker: I'm not really sure what the solution is.
Speaker: I think showing them that something better is possible is a huge part.
Speaker: And that's part of what Clark Street is doing.
Speaker: We're like a few hundred feet away in our own little separate building.
Speaker: We're going to be in the same building in a couple of years.
Speaker: We're moving in.
Speaker: And it's just going to be able to show something better is possible.
Speaker: There is a system where students at the traditional high school can take our classes.
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.
Speaker: Let's shift gears here for a second and talk about what you believe is working in school.
Speaker: It's so interesting because you're living it right now.
Speaker: Practically everyone I talk to is just framing from what we saw in school or secondhand through our classrooms.
Speaker: What innovation do you see among your teachers and perhaps something that you wish could be solved?
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: That practice alone can do a ton to get people more engaged in their learning.
Speaker: And then there's one
Speaker: kind of unrelated practice.
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.
Speaker: And this is just remarkably inconvenient at times.
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.
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.
Speaker: So in my Spanish class, there's the use of these little tokens that we are awarded for participating in class.
Speaker: Well, we're awarded for speaking in Spanish in class as it's a Spanish class.
Speaker: They're part of our grade, I want to say 20% each quarter.
Speaker: I mean, the issue with that is like,
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.
Speaker: And I'm just like, wow, that's you just got right out there and said it.
Speaker: And how do you see that expanding to the school level?
Speaker: What can an organization at large do better?
Speaker: I think there should be a lot more input from students as to what curriculums look like.
Speaker: And I think it depends on the class.
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.
Speaker: But in a lot of classes, it's like in an English class,
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.
Speaker: Or we're going to be learning how to do reading comprehension and then we're going to apply it somehow.
Speaker: And that isn't as good for students as letting them kind of figure out on their own what
Speaker: they're going to be looking for.
Speaker: The teacher just goes, okay, so this is what we're trying to learn in this class.
Speaker: How do you guys want to go about this?
Speaker: And give them that opportunity.
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.
Speaker: And Bennett wanted to add one more thing he really likes about Clark Street.
Speaker: In most classes, at the start of a class, we'll do something called a circle.
Speaker: So there will be a question.
Speaker: Sometimes it's as basic as like, what did you do this morning?
Speaker: Or what did you eat for breakfast?
Speaker: And sometimes it can go deeper, like into the class material, like a question about
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
Speaker: in a way where they wouldn't otherwise.
Speaker: Even if it's just knowing a little bit, that can build a connection.
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.
Speaker: And it can lead into a class discussion as well.
Speaker: I think it's just kind of a versatile tool that can be used really well by teachers.
Speaker: So there you go.
Speaker: We can't really get much more on the nose than that.
Speaker: Here's a current high school student describing everything we always talk about.
Speaker: Project based learning, student voice and choice, gradeless learning, critical pedagogy, and saying that it works for him.
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.
Speaker: Therefore, pushing back against that system is innovation within itself.
Speaker: Further, what an innovative concept is it for students to use social media to spread awareness on these issues?
Speaker: It's sort of a catch-22 because Bennett and those like him tend to be growing up in progressive schools.
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.
Speaker: It's really hard for students in a traditional classroom to have these revelations.
Speaker: And hopefully the teachings that we have in our progressive classrooms inspire more to demand a better classroom experience.
Speaker: Next, we're joined by Ted Fujimoto.
Speaker: whose CV is quite extensive.
Speaker: In summary, Ted is the president of Landmark Consulting Group, a business that focuses on scaling, leadership, and redesign.
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.
Speaker: I invited Ted on to share his thoughts on what he does best, scaling progressive education.
Speaker: So starting off, I offered a simple question.
Speaker: What exactly is it that we're trying to scale?
Speaker: I would start by saying what it's not.
Speaker: And a lot of people have the idea of replication equal to cloning.
Speaker: And that is, I would say, the lowest form of scalability.
Speaker: For some simple things, it might make sense.
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.
Speaker: So what's worth scaling?
Speaker: What's replication?
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.
Speaker: And it's an important process because it's so easy for organizations to get this wrong.
Speaker: On one end, they can get it wrong by simply stating their design elements as goals.
Speaker: So, we want to offer friendly service to our hotel guests, or we want personalized learning for students.
Speaker: Well, that's a great goal, but pretty much everyone has the same goals, but how do you actually execute it, right?
Speaker: And that's where the gap typically is.
Speaker: And then oftentimes I hear the next kind of answer, well, how do you get there?
Speaker: If only we had really great principals, if only we had really great teachers.
Speaker: So essentially they're going after superstars to make that happen.
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.
Speaker: There's a bit more that has to happen.
Speaker: Yes, you always want great talent, but you can't always be hiring the superstars.
Speaker: When I sold my technology companies, I was part of a venture group that acquired...
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.
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?
Speaker: It was a period of time, three and a half year period of time that Ritz-Carlton was doubling the number of locations.
Speaker: And they were literally, their team members were going from 35,000 to over 75,000 people.
Speaker: And almost every one of their locations was on a island where they were the first five-star property.
Speaker: And they were literally hiring most of the island who lived in huts.
Speaker: And on day one, guess what?
Speaker: They had to deliver a world-class five-star experience.
Speaker: You know, how do you do that?
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.
Speaker: And all of this experience brings us to another issue that Ted applies to schools.
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?
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.
Speaker: And it's a very different thing.
Speaker: When you walk into a Ritz-Carlton and someone smiles at you and is genuinely friendly, that feels great.
Speaker: But put smiling as a procedure,
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.
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.
Speaker: And so a lot of organizations, when they come up with their design elements,
Speaker: they'll fall into the trap of proceduralizing everything.
Speaker: And it really takes a soul out of the effort.
Speaker: And it also sets you up for creating extrinsic motivation.
Speaker: It sets you up for having to inspect a lot of things.
Speaker: It sets you up for lots of failure and not knowing why, because you keep measuring this stuff.
Speaker: So the magic sauce comes in is how do you articulate your design elements that are timeless, universal,
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?
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.
Speaker: the only difference that they have between other five-star properties and brands is the mindset of their team members.
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
Speaker: and reflect on the value of ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen as a mindset.
Speaker: And what does that mean as an individual?
Speaker: And what does that mean as, how do I see that?
Speaker: How did I see my team do it?
Speaker: How did I demonstrate that?
Speaker: How can I do better?
Speaker: How can my team do better?
Speaker: And that
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.
Speaker: And that's an example of your design element is around the need for this mindset and
Speaker: But there are procedures that enable the organization to do that consistently.
Speaker: Like you have to meet 15 minutes a day at the beginning of every show.
Speaker: You must use a certain set of protocols.
Speaker: You must input the very best story to the system.
Speaker: And, you know, that's just an example of a high quality design element that completely makes
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: So how do you go about developing a shared pedagogy without lessening the motivation or achievements of a sizable portion of the building?
Speaker: You look at the superstar teachers, and it's amazing how much of their energy is spent
Speaker: ducking and fighting the system, right?
Speaker: That gets in their way of doing what they know is really great for kids.
Speaker: And everyone agrees they're amazing teachers.
Speaker: There's a misalignment of system supports to even the basic things that they know is effective for learning, right?
Speaker: And the analogy that I use is it's a freshwater fish getting dropped in a saltwater tank.
Speaker: Some people last longer than others, but eventually have to jump out or they end up succumbing.
Speaker: And so system design matters.
Speaker: Now, if you have really great pedagogy that's rooted in brain science that actually is, that works.
Speaker: Well, there's ranges of that.
Speaker: I've seen many different ways of doing inquiry-based learning and project-based learning.
Speaker: The only two things that I ask for
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?
Speaker: You know, are teachers, when they're designing their projects,
Speaker: designing to a world-class level of project, right?
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.
Speaker: I've only stayed in one-star motels.
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?
Speaker: So that's where the process of calibration and joint discovery of the entire school team of what is world-class
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?
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.
Speaker: And
Speaker: a good calibration experience, and all of us have had these throughout our lives and careers.
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?
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.
Speaker: And as long as teams are doing that,
Speaker: they will get better and better and better.
Speaker: That's number one.
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.
Speaker: Generally, teachers will end up with a very similar set of pedagogical approach.
Speaker: And direct instruction as the lead is not it.
Speaker: And so as long as they are calibrating, they will generally end up in the right direction.
Speaker: Now, once they have agreement to, this is a pedagogy that we know
Speaker: is based on world-class learning and understanding and creativity.
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?
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
Speaker: what things are helpful, what things are hurtful to actually supporting what we say we need to get done.
Speaker: It's incredibly interesting to me that Ted Fujimoto and Bennett Jester basically say the exact same thing here.
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.
Speaker: If we want world class, we should be looking at what world class is.
Speaker: And sadly, the status quo hasn't caught up to that yet.
Speaker: I asked Ted about why it is that progressive ed is not typically seen as research-based pedagogy.
Speaker: It's usually seen maybe as a philosophic-based or a radical motion.
Speaker: Yeah, I would add to that that there is actually a reason why that reputation is out there.
Speaker: And some of it is self-induced by the practitioners because I've been through many deeper learning schools,
Speaker: I don't think that they are calibrating world class.
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.
Speaker: And so it starts looking like a bunch of artsy, craftsy projects that don't hold any water.
Speaker: And there is no rigor in it.
Speaker: There is no, yeah, it doesn't hold up.
Speaker: And so I worry that many of the practitioners jumping into this saying, we just want autonomy.
Speaker: We want to free flow.
Speaker: We want engagement and we want just to be happy and all that.
Speaker: Well, that's, you know, those aren't all,
Speaker: necessary ingredients, but that by itself doesn't get you to where you need to go.
Speaker: And I think that's the difference.
Speaker: They're missing the calibration component.
Speaker: And when you do that, then you start having a misstep on fidelity of implementation.
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
Speaker: and you could actually own your own business was even a concept.
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.
Speaker: So the freedom is great, but you have to know what to do with it.
Speaker: It has to be rooted in
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.
Speaker: And then one thing we haven't spoken about is student input.
Speaker: At what point do you see students entering these discussions?
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.
Speaker: That's a huge step.
Speaker: Where do you see students in this calibration process?
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.
Speaker: And that is you as an adult in the conversation,
Speaker: have to ensure that students are getting world-class calibration experiences to stretch their thinking.
Speaker: Because otherwise, because they're young, they haven't traveled the world, perhaps.
Speaker: They haven't seen outside of their neighborhood.
Speaker: Who knows, right?
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.
Speaker: I mean, it took me...
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?
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.
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,
Speaker: That by itself limits you to your ability to always create mind-blowing calibration experiences.
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.
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.
Speaker: Essentially, Go All Creative is a series of videos on things that creative people throughout the world do and what they value.
Speaker: People in really interesting professions that probably would be seen by most as very successful.
Speaker: If you're familiar with maybe the Masterclass series, it's basically that, but for teachers.
Speaker: The idea is that you watch these videos together when you're calibrating your school,
Speaker: and you're having basically PD discussions on it.
Speaker: Now I asked Ted what exactly is a world-class education in the 21st century?
Speaker: We see initiatives such as the one happening in Ohio to promote coding.
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.
Speaker: Coding isn't exactly something that I would see innovative.
Speaker: Yet the states continue to invest in relatively safe and streamlined ideas.
Speaker: So I would state right up front that coding is not it because most people would be doing less and less coding.
Speaker: And there will be some people that that's their thing and they're going to push in that direction.
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
Speaker: PowerPoint presentation and all that versus 20 or 30 years ago, you don't have to worry as much about the technical.
Speaker: And we're seeing the technology gaining much more sophisticated than any routine mechanical tasks that are pattern-based.
Speaker: Machines are actually going to get better at it than humans will.
Speaker: However, there's a couple of things that humans can only do.
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.
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.
Speaker: Whatever it is, it could be a social justice thing or it could be a gap in technology or product or service.
Speaker: And then it's
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.
Speaker: It's never refined enough to be of full success.
Speaker: It is about how to lead your team, not as I'm the expert and everyone follow me because
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.
Speaker: And if it's truly innovative, no one has a roadmap.
Speaker: That's the crazy part.
Speaker: Everyone has bits and pieces of this is what we've tried.
Speaker: But when you put it all together in context of where things have evolved to, no one has a roadmap.
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
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.
Speaker: And if you can navigate through that, that's where the opportunity is.
Speaker: If you have a roadmap already, well, Finn, that means there's 100 other companies and people that have done that already.
Speaker: And that's not innovation.
Speaker: That's not moving forward in the future.
Speaker: And I can tell you, in media, in technology, in music, you picked a profession.
Speaker: In finance, what's keeping CEOs and executive teams awake at night is they literally do not know how to navigate this stuff.
Speaker: It's happening so fast that their ability to pull together the right strategic alliances and partners to help them get through this
Speaker: it's messy.
Speaker: And this is where the technology, the issues, the complexity and the speed are outpacing our own
Speaker: organizational teams and cultures and humans to evolve.
Speaker: And it's a very, I don't think we've ever experienced this, this case in history.
Speaker: I also have to ask you about ed tech.
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.
Speaker: And as you know, ed tech can be used for good or for evil, so to speak.
Speaker: On the one hand, it can open up information to everyone, almost anywhere and connect people in so many different ways.
Speaker: But on the other hand, it can replace worksheets with iPads and manipulate digitally illiterate students.
Speaker: And so what initiatives do you see in ed tech that are being used for good?
Speaker: That's a really good question.
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.
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.
Speaker: And when you start there,
Speaker: Yeah, you'll get sales, you'll get districts signing on, but it's a dead end path.
Speaker: And I have started to see a few starting to move in direction, in the right direction.
Speaker: But here's a fundamental thing.
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.
Speaker: And that is the very complex regions of the brain that activate when you're not doing cognitive tasks.
Speaker: And in a healthy person, when you start doing cognitive tasks, the default mode network shuts down.
Speaker: When you stop doing cognitive tasks, it lights up.
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.
Speaker: So social context.
Speaker: It's about looking in their past, be able to project to the future.
Speaker: It's where stories are interpreted.
Speaker: It's where epiphanies happen.
Speaker: It's essentially where your deepest thinking happens.
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.
Speaker: If you switch the brain to cognitive test mode, you're literally shutting down the brain
Speaker: that we needed to process this.
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
Speaker: versus task mode.
Speaker: For example, people on the spectrum tend to have a very active task mode side but have an underactive default mode.
Speaker: That's why they have a hard time interpreting social context, as an example.
Speaker: And there's a whole, that's a whole other topic.
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.
Speaker: And that is that if you want someone to be creative, you can't be shoving someone into a task mode.
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.
Speaker: I need to do this command.
Speaker: It's literally shutting down your brain.
Speaker: That's why some people like to sketch things out in notes on pen and paper,
Speaker: before they even try to do it in the computer.
Speaker: There's a reason for that.
Speaker: No one's really understood why until you start to see how the brain activates.
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.
Speaker: And some of those, there are companies being formed that are trying to intersect those variety disciplines.
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.
Speaker: And in the meantime, the technologies that
Speaker: might have gotten developed by accident.
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.
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.
Speaker: Those types of technologies
Speaker: are very helpful.
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.
Speaker: I hope you're enjoying the podcast thus far.
Speaker: I sincerely appreciate you listening in.
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.
Speaker: And then, if you think we should keep going, take a gander at our Patreon page.
Speaker: For a dollar a month, you'll receive a professional, print-ready electronic magazine of our works every two months.
Speaker: But as always, all of our work is available free online.
Speaker: The best practices shouldn't be gatekept.
Speaker: So we're here as a resource to support progressive ed for everyone.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: We give the kids the work and the kids do the work.
Speaker: Typically, you know, they have to write an essay and their essays are incredibly inauthentic.
Speaker: And so there's no...
Speaker: You know, it's like we want them to write for an audience, but usually the audience is the teacher.
Speaker: And they just don't think they don't write for an audience who's really going to read their work.
Speaker: I believe really I was put on this earth to be a teacher in some way, shape or form.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: And so I have done this a couple of ways.
Speaker: It works out
Speaker: a little better for my seniors than it does my 10th graders.
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.
Speaker: So it works out exceptionally well with basic class and I'm just kind of planning on my own.
Speaker: So typically what I do with my senior students who are fully enrolled is I have five units that I have to teach
Speaker: Each unit has to culminate in an essay according to the university's rubric.
Speaker: So I have those things.
Speaker: And really in the grand scheme, it's supposed to prepare them to do college-level writing.
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.
Speaker: So I tackled this one of a couple of ways.
Speaker: One way is to allow the students to do a lot of goal setting in terms of improving their writing.
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.
Speaker: And that usually culminates in us sitting down and conferencing and speaking about their writing and
Speaker: I did a conference a couple of times.
Speaker: And what it does for the major culmination of that is that's what their midterm exam is.
Speaker: It's a portfolio assessment where we look through their writing.
Speaker: And what I have found since doing this, this year is my third year teaching dual enrollment.
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.
Speaker: They notice things about their writing that
Speaker: If I had just pointed them out to them, it wouldn't have changed them as writers.
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.
Speaker: That wouldn't really change them as writers.
Speaker: I find that this has really been changing and it's become a lot more self-aware.
Speaker: And I get a lot of feedback from the kids that say things like,
Speaker: I really was bad at this and I didn't realize how bad I was.
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.
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.
Speaker: So I try to make it a little bit more project-based, and the students love that.
Speaker: They get very involved and engaged with what they come up with.
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?
Speaker: And I heard basically eight comments from the students.
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.
Speaker: Because we have a lot of discussion around, you know, well, why would you make the sentence a shorter sentence here?
Speaker: You know, what are your hopes that it will do for your reader by doing this?
Speaker: And so what I had them look at was Humans of New York.
Speaker: And the fact that you have this image that really goes a long way to help support
Speaker: the text underneath the image.
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.
Speaker: I said, I had a whole assignment in mind, but I really would kind of like to see what you do.
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.
Speaker: You know, just, they just want, you know, I just want you to tell me what to do.
Speaker: And it made them a little uncomfortable at first.
Speaker: But once they got rolling with it, they came up with ideas.
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.
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.
Speaker: They solved their own problems.
Speaker: My other block was having a really difficult time with it.
Speaker: They just, they didn't like the fact that so many people had so many ideas.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: I basically said to them, well, you're going to solve it.
Speaker: If you're having an issue with this, you're going to solve this.
Speaker: I said, this is going to be the rest of your life.
Speaker: You're going to have to work with people whose ideas differ from yours.
Speaker: How do you come to a meeting of minds on this?
Speaker: So they all had realized that they could meet the requirements of the project by all doing something a little bit different.
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.
Speaker: And I was like, yeah, I said, you see this list of
Speaker: learning targets here, that's what I need you to demonstrate.
Speaker: You tell me your idea.
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?
Speaker: Will that work?
Speaker: And does it work if I do this?
Speaker: So they were actually asking me more pointed questions around, you know, how they were able to convey meaning in the text.
Speaker: And so I'm kind of excited because this is the first time I did this.
Speaker: The first day that I kind of let them go, I was
Speaker: I was really nervous about wanting to jump in.
Speaker: I was giving me anxiety.
Speaker: I wanted to jump in to solve their problem for them.
Speaker: And I realized, I was like, no, they're going to, they can do this.
Speaker: They can, they can really do this on their own and I need to let them do it.
Speaker: And so they, and they did.
Speaker: And it, it worked out beautifully and, you know, they're all working on their projects.
Speaker: So I'm kind of excited.
Speaker: They're not due until Monday and Tuesday.
Speaker: So I get to see what they, what they came up with.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: All this stuff is so cool.
Speaker: It sounds like the shift that you made is similar to my own, where essentially it was born out of frustration.
Speaker: I was so disengaged with the teaching process that I no longer saw any point in what it is I was doing.
Speaker: I was grading compliance and there was no real purpose in my work.
Speaker: So I switched it up and obviously it's working out.
Speaker: Did you find that teaching traditionally caused you a lot of frustration?
Speaker: For me, what creates anxiety is chasing the trail of papers.
Speaker: That is what gives me anxiety.
Speaker: And I've realized over the years that I just, I don't know that I was doing any grading meaningfully.
Speaker: I just don't think that I was.
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.
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.
Speaker: And so then they're not really getting timely feedback by the time they get them back.
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.
Speaker: And they don't actually really read the feedback that comes to them.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: They just are basically doing it for a grade.
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.
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.
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
Speaker: that they're kind of forced now to make some sense about their own writing so that they can improve.
Speaker: And that's really what I've wanted.
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.
Speaker: And I'm not, you know, I, and I'm not doing,
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: And of course, your focus too is on how all of this ties into relationship building.
Speaker: Educators talk a lot about relationships in general, and I think most people listening to this understand why we value relationships.
Speaker: But could you go into some detail on how this ties to a progressive classroom?
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.
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.
Speaker: But it just doesn't work that way.
Speaker: And I remember my best experiences that I had as a high school student were with teachers who,
Speaker: developed a relationship with me.
Speaker: For some reason, I just always felt more compelled to do well in their classes.
Speaker: And I was not a great student in school.
Speaker: I was probably a student at best.
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.
Speaker: And so for students that I have now,
Speaker: They, you know, they like the fact that they can choose what they want to do and they love having that autonomy.
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.
Speaker: So I have a lot of students who are used to a culture of compliance.
Speaker: They're used to, you know, the teacher assigns the work, they do the assignment, they get the grades.
Speaker: and not really thinking with a whole lot of depth somewhere in between.
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.
Speaker: And they're afraid to ask even other kids.
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.
Speaker: And so I have to do that because
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.
Speaker: They want to know that they're doing the right thing.
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.
Speaker: And that has to do with a lot of other things too.
Speaker: We have,
Speaker: Unfortunately, as our society has progressed, so have levels of stress and anxiety.
Speaker: I mean, our students are more stressed now than they have ever been.
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.
Speaker: I don't remember them being as anxious and stressed out as what I see kids are now.
Speaker: And they, you know, I've had students over the last 10 years that have had to
Speaker: you know, have had to go to stay in hospitals for weeks at a time because of stress and anxiety.
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.
Speaker: So it isn't even anymore about just the learning.
Speaker: It is about making sure that the kid understands that their situation is very temporary.
Speaker: And to me, that's more important.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: And I also, I teach in a school where I have a lot of students who are,
Speaker: On their own.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: Grades put so much pressure on both the kids and the teachers.
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.
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.
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
Speaker: podcasts that discuss that and having discussions with other professionals.
Speaker: But I realized that there are situations that as a teacher, I have caused that environment or climate in my classroom.
Speaker: And I wasn't even aware what I was doing.
Speaker: And now what it has done is it's made me a lot more mindful of my own language as a professional and
Speaker: And that has in turn allowed me to build much better relationships with my students.
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.
Speaker: And finally, she offers a word of advice to teachers.
Speaker: I think if I had to leave other teachers with,
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.
Speaker: They are everything with your kids.
Speaker: They are everything as a teacher to keep your own sanity.
Speaker: And it's gotten so much harder.
Speaker: Teaching has gotten harder over the last 15 years that I've been in it.
Speaker: And for anybody who's been in the profession longer than I have, it's gotten substantially harder.
Speaker: And I think to our
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.
Speaker: You just have to kind of hang in there.
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.
Speaker: So that's the thing that I've been left with lately is, you know, what can I do to
Speaker: better ensure that, you know, we're all meeting that goal of improving student experiences.
Speaker: And so, you know, we just need to do a better job of taking care of each other and taking care of ourselves.
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.
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.
Speaker: I've been in education for 30 years, both as a student and as a teacher, and these days as a researcher.
Speaker: And really, my education experience has really been around designing programs, both in classrooms through professional learning,
Speaker: but also systemically.
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.
Speaker: As you go and connect schools and head these programs, what is the mission and vision of what you're trying to accomplish?
Speaker: For me, I believe absolutely fundamentally that education is a human experience.
Speaker: And of course, all lived beings educate, right?
Speaker: All animals educate in order to enable their own worlds to thrive and function.
Speaker: But for me, education is a magnificently human experience.
Speaker: And I think what drives me these days is actually to reclaim, ironically, reclaim the humanness that sits inside, that human experience.
Speaker: So if you look at education over the last couple of hundred years,
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.
Speaker: And rather instead said, oh, look, thanks, Enlightenment era.
Speaker: Thanks, ancient philosophers, for telling us what it is to be human.
Speaker: Now we're going to teach at you humans and ensure that you're capable of being producers for commercial interests.
Speaker: So I guess for me, my main mission is to reclaim our humanness.
Speaker: and bring it back to the purpose and practice that sits at the centre of teaching and learning.
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.
Speaker: You know, we are going into a world of immersive and mixed reality technologies.
Speaker: And for that world, I believe deeply that education needs to equip us
Speaker: around an awareness of our humanness in order to thrive in and design for that world.
Speaker: A world where what it is actually to be human is being significantly challenged.
Speaker: Further, what specific skills and ideas are we engaging when we're talking about preparing students for the modern world?
Speaker: Yeah, really interesting.
Speaker: So I guess I would break that down into two components.
Speaker: I see that there are a number of sort of uniform practices that
Speaker: that are responding to this changing world.
Speaker: So if you think about today's landscape, the language of today's landscape is the VUCA world.
Speaker: You know, this notion of a world being increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous.
Speaker: And I think that today's education is rapidly reframing in order to address that world.
Speaker: And it's a highly skills-based teaching approach, right?
Speaker: So if you think about, you know, obviously the fundamentals of literacy and numeracy skills,
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.
Speaker: So it's all about innovation and delivering on ideas, increasingly education is being designed to be highly authentic.
Speaker: And of course, there's the emphasis around social emotional skills, right?
Speaker: How we collaborate, work in teams.
Speaker: becoming adaptable, taking risk, developing resilience in the face of ambiguity, and also impose self-sufficiency.
Speaker: That's an increasing pressure on all of us.
Speaker: We no longer have the job for life.
Speaker: In fact, we have to create our own jobs.
Speaker: So how are we able to manage ourselves in a world that is no longer kind of laid out for us?
Speaker: So I think that they are the skills
Speaker: that are being increasingly taught and becoming increasingly uniform practice.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, look, Sandridge was an incredible project that myself and a fellow educator, Dr. Jeannie Shaw, worked on.
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.
Speaker: We were two teachers that came together to set up a school.
Speaker: And she brought her
Speaker: research around the essentialness of relationships that sit inside schools.
Speaker: And I brought the teaching and learning experience and I brought the ideas of authentic learning, proactive citizenship and real outcomes.
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.
Speaker: And really, the emphasis around the school was that it was an incubator for innovation and positive social impact.
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.
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.
Speaker: Schools are championing citizenship, immersing kids in community, empowering them to be change agents.
Speaker: Learning is now authentic.
Speaker: It's connected to activators.
Speaker: It's real world.
Speaker: It's looking for real world outcomes.
Speaker: All of those things in our mainstay in practice.
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.
Speaker: So that was an incredible experience and I feel an important contribution that we've made to the shaping and change of education.
Speaker: I guess before I talk about AES and maybe contextualise the work of AES a bit,
Speaker: You asked earlier around what were the existing uniform practices.
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.
Speaker: Only within a few years it's become uniform and that's fantastic.
Speaker: But I think that there is more to our practice.
Speaker: And that's kind of the work that I'm now deeply interested in, both in my research work
Speaker: and in the work that I'm doing with Asia Education Foundation.
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?
Speaker: I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work of Foundation for Young Australians in Australia.
Speaker: So they have done some incredible work in kind of synthesising the changing context, the digital landscape that's changing our world,
Speaker: and the impact that that has on the design of education programs.
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.
Speaker: but it will also require them to be far more engaged with each other, interestingly enough.
Speaker: And that people-to-people context actually poses real challenges, right?
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?
Speaker: Our landscape is going to change incredibly significantly.
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.
Speaker: So I'm currently undergoing, I'm currently engaged in a PhD research at Monash University as well.
Speaker: And there I'm exploring whether or not having our humanists back at the center of purpose
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.
Speaker: This world where what is to be human is really being challenged.
Speaker: And that kind of ties in really powerfully to the work that I'm doing with Asia Education Foundation.
Speaker: So as I said, not only is our world being shaped by technology, it's just technology is shrinking our world.
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.
Speaker: So not only are we humans, but as humans, there's an incredible diversity amongst us.
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.
Speaker: So you have a lot of complex topics that you're bringing up.
Speaker: Could you go into some detail about what the intelligent digital mesh is?
Speaker: Gartner Institute, American-based kind of think tank, they're kind of, I guess, coined this term of an intelligent digital mesh.
Speaker: And it's the idea that we have the immersion of mixed augmented realities.
Speaker: So it's the idea of meshing people, processes, and objects together in an immersive way.
Speaker: world where AI is really kind of the engine and the physical and virtual environments are conflated into these immersive digital existences.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So this is the world really, it's a world of tomorrow, but, and it's happening today.
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
Speaker: the creativity of what it is to be human.
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?
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.
Speaker: So place that in an internationalized context.
Speaker: So our programs are really designed around developing empathy and the capacity to see the world through the eyes of others.
Speaker: And we would argue that that's really crucial to development of a cohesive, collaborative and generative society.
Speaker: 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,
Speaker: and to see connections in disparity.
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.
Speaker: All right, so I'm going to be honest that I still have little to no idea what any of that means.
Speaker: So I did some reading and I kind of understand what's going on.
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.
Speaker: In an article by interest.com, which I've placed in the show notes, they describe this company named Narrative.
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.
Speaker: It's learning it on its own.
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.
Speaker: Sophie's work is basically designed to ensure that emerging technological trends are used for human-centric practice in education.
Speaker: The Asia Education Foundation offers specific classes that students can attend outside of school, preparing students for their tech-based future.
Speaker: Can you describe what these look like?
Speaker: Let me talk about the experience through a day in one of our youth forums through Asia Education Foundation.
Speaker: So we run a
Speaker: I guess there are three elements that we're developing around our youth learning experience.
Speaker: We have an ASEAN Australian Youth Forum.
Speaker: We have a Go Global Youth Forum where our students work through the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Speaker: And also we're developing youth summits where our kids can actually come together and explore notions around global competency.
Speaker: But if we just break down to one of our youth forums, we'll bring kids together together
Speaker: They will take on the lens of another state in our region.
Speaker: And then through the eyes of that state, they will then come together and grapple with common issues.
Speaker: So there might be issues around trade.
Speaker: There might be issues around asylum seekers.
Speaker: There might be issues around global warming.
Speaker: And then through different perspectives, they will engage with each other to come up with
Speaker: a common ground, common resolutions, common understandings that can take the communities forward.
Speaker: Now, in order to do that, they actually need to grapple with different perspectives.
Speaker: They need to engage with diverse notions of understanding.
Speaker: They need to be aware of their own biases and they need to collaborate in order to come up with these shared understandings.
Speaker: So that's a really typical example of students going through this space.
Speaker: Now, the next stage of our development around these programs
Speaker: is to actually start to enunciate what it is to be human inside those spaces.
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.
Speaker: Of course, all of this technological revolution stuff is all well and good if it actually helps everyone.
Speaker: But more often than not, at least in the United States,
Speaker: we're seeing that it's increasingly a digital divide.
Speaker: People who are digitally literate achieve over those who don't.
Speaker: And even those who are digitally literate may be missing out on some of those human-centered practices like tolerance and understanding, for example.
Speaker: What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker: It's really interesting.
Speaker: When we develop Sandridge, the motto of the school world is that no person is an island.
Speaker: The idea that our world is actually only as rich as we live
Speaker: collaboratively and inclusively create it.
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,
Speaker: And I guess that notion of intercultural that sit across the AEF is a really powerful component of that.
Speaker: So you talk about scaling.
Speaker: So this is kind of where my research sits.
Speaker: It sits in the pedagogical design space, right?
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
Speaker: ethically and justly as humans.
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.
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?
Speaker: Both to be learned and wise consumers of their world and
Speaker: but also ethical architects who design for that world.
Speaker: And let me just give you kind of a bit of context, I guess, around what makes me question and think about that.
Speaker: So if you think of this conversation that we're having today sits inside some relatively tumultuous last couple of years.
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
Speaker: around what happened in Christchurch and the role that digital technologies play around that.
Speaker: So I think as educators, we actually need to deeply design for ethical design, or teach for, sorry, ethical design, right?
Speaker: We don't want any more Cambridge Analytica behavior.
Speaker: We don't want interference in sovereign state election frameworks.
Speaker: We don't want tech platforms to be selling or sharing user details.
Speaker: Just because technology can do something, should it?
Speaker: We want to educate around ethical use, right?
Speaker: Things like cyberbullying, trolling, the dissemination of traumatic, horrendous information, the garnering of hate speech that sits inside a platform.
Speaker: We also want to teach for informed use, right?
Speaker: So AI is incredible, but we actually need to understand that we are engaging with AI and be alert to it.
Speaker: We want to understand the nature of
Speaker: extent of our digital footprint.
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?
Speaker: Yeah, how do we take our kids from a place?
Speaker: I think that education is
Speaker: for decades, maybe for centuries, has actually taught at us rather than teaching us to be us.
Speaker: So I kind of use a language around a renaissance.
Speaker: I believe that we need to be in a renaissance of education.
Speaker: The concept of renaissance has two parts to it, right?
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,
Speaker: But Renaissance language also speaks of rebirth.
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.
Speaker: We now bring, I would argue, enlightenment thinking, which itself is highly problematic.
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.
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.
Speaker: The language that sat inside those documents spoke about ethics, inclusion, justice, good governance for a sustainable, inclusive world.
Speaker: That's where we need to go back.
Speaker: We need to go back to that language rather than my learning outcomes, my grades,
Speaker: What university are I getting to?
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.
Speaker: That's how we scale change, Chris.
Speaker: Again, I want to highlight how important all these voices are in pushing true innovation in schools.
Speaker: These are things that we don't hear a lot about, or if we do, they're very surface level.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: Question what you're doing and reflect and start setting the stage for potential change.
Speaker: And when you're ready, armed with research and the current tide, take that plunge into changing the future.
Speaker: After all, our kids deserve it.
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to Things Fall Apart from the Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
Speaker: If you have time, I'd love for you to leave us a review on iTunes, social media, or anywhere you see fit.
Speaker: The more people that share this, the more that will feel comfortable having these conversations.
Speaker: Let's restore humanity together.
