Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 132 of our podcast.
Speaker: My name is Chris McNutt and I'm part of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Darren Oshinowski, Angela Boston and Kate Skye.
Speaker: Thank you for your ongoing support.
Speaker: You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org or find us on any major social media platform.
Speaker: On today's podcast, we're joined by Dave Runge, co-founder and director of Future Schools.
Speaker: Future Schools is an Australian-based innovative schools organization centered on exploring what's possible by connecting together like minds across over 100 school partners.
Speaker: Both in and outside of Australia, Future Schools helps educator teams explore what's possible, evolve their practices and transform their spaces.
Speaker: Dave works on change leadership, recognizing that we need to focus on systemic change to achieve lasting results.
Speaker: And in today's conversation, we'll talk about that change making process, why so many spaces feel stuck and what we can do to help them branch out.
Speaker: So Dave, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Speaker: Chris, pleasure to be here and so good to be able to make the time to have a conversation with you.
Speaker: Looking forward to this.
Speaker: Yeah, I think this is going to be great.
Speaker: And I figure where we can start is just talking about what led you to co-founding Future Schools and just giving us a high level overview of your work.
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: What are you doing?
Speaker: Where are you at?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Well, it feels like it's been quite the journey.
Speaker: We've now been on this project for around about seven years.
Speaker: And I guess the incentive to start down this path and to begin this journey was what we were seeing as a level of stalling around innovation, adaptation and evolution in education.
Speaker: So that was really the primary motivator.
Speaker: And more than that, we were really keen on this idea of bringing together
Speaker: the wisdom of the crowd, like minds, people who have really thoughtful, innovative ideas, getting them in the same room, getting them to share and ensuring that that was passed through the system.
Speaker: So I guess what makes us a little bit unique in our context, and I'll talk about an Australian context here,
Speaker: is that we're cross-sectorial.
Speaker: So I'm not sure whether your listeners know, but in Australia we have three sectors.
Speaker: One sector is the Catholic sector.
Speaker: We then have the independent sector and the government or state school sector.
Speaker: And we were really intent when we set out on this journey to ensure that we made ourselves available, that we created an offering,
Speaker: that we built a system that allowed for cross sector sharing so that we could learn from each other.
Speaker: Because what we were seeing in this country is the sectors in isolation.
Speaker: So we're really intent on building something that allowed for that.
Speaker: And more than that, we're also intent on ensuring that we were across jurisdiction.
Speaker: So we now have representation into every state and territory across the country.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Because it ensures that we get the best sharing, the best collaboration, the best wisdom and insight being passed through each of those areas of operation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it sounds too like you're traveling internationally all the time as well.
Speaker: So it's not just honed in on Australia, but you're also doing some work with some partners elsewhere.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So interestingly, I'm into California later in the year.
Speaker: I'm working with some of our partners in California.
Speaker: I've just come back from Bali Green Schools.
Speaker: We've been collaborating on a potential project which will roll out into 2024, really focused on how do we bring about more sustainable and regenerative leadership practice?
Speaker: People will know that Bali Green School is big into sustainability, and we're going to take that and think about that through the lens of leadership.
Speaker: How do we increase the sustainability of our leadership practice?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And let's kind of dive into then what exactly that change making process looks like to put it into, I guess, layman's terms.
Speaker: So most young people, most educators, most administrators recognize that schools have to change in some way.
Speaker: You practically can't walk into a classroom.
Speaker: and a teacher is going to tell you everything's going perfectly here.
Speaker: People recognize that we need to make change happen.
Speaker: There's not sure where to start.
Speaker: So where do you start with your work when you're talking to school leaders or teachers about what needs to happen?
Speaker: Yeah, really interesting question, but also quite a complex question that you've just put to me.
Speaker: I guess for me, a really important place to start is with an invitation to invite people into the work so that we really honor what's already happening inside the system or inside the school.
Speaker: By making the invitation, we're encouraging people to step into the work with their own personal agency.
Speaker: And for us and for our work, that's really important that people come to the work with a genuine sense of connection and wanting to collaborate around what is possible.
Speaker: So the invitation for me is really important.
Speaker: An extension on and beyond the invitation is this idea of building awareness.
Speaker: And the building awareness piece is around ensuring that all of those people who are inside the school, inside the system, working on really important work every day that they roll up to work, that we're building an awareness with them around what is possible.
Speaker: So really starting to shape the narratives, the language and the future perspectives with reference to what is possible.
Speaker: Our experience shows us that when people can see a pathway, when they can see what could be and when we as change leaders support them on that journey, that they find it much more manageable, that they can tread that in a whole, in a different way.
Speaker: So for us, that awareness piece is really important.
Speaker: Understanding the system, understanding the role we play in it.
Speaker: is fundamental to any change process.
Speaker: So we would start there.
Speaker: We would start with building awareness.
Speaker: And it's interesting to note, and I don't know if you see this with the schools that you're working with, but when HRP goes into a school and talks to kids and teachers about district mandates, things that are going on, typically things that we're invited in to talk about,
Speaker: No one really knows what's going on.
Speaker: We find that a huge breakdown of our work occurs when students feel like teachers are doing a bunch of random stuff that makes no sense to them on why all these things are changing because they're not looped into those awareness conversations.
Speaker: Or teachers, more often than not, are just mandated to do a bunch of tasks, but they don't see the greater picture.
Speaker: And therefore, teachers
Speaker: Everyone's just kind of off doing their own thing without any alignment or something.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So that level of alignment is super important in any change effort, because what we know and what you know about change is that as much as people may have an aspiration for change or evolution or adaptation, without that alignment, we can get lost.
Speaker: can really get lost in the process of change because we're dealing in complex systems.
Speaker: We're dealing with a high level of complexity.
Speaker: We're dealing with human nature, human beings, social systems.
Speaker: So really that idea of alignment is fundamental.
Speaker: How do you create that alignment?
Speaker: Our experience is you invite people into conversation around it.
Speaker: You invite people into conversation around what could be rather than, as you just described, this idea of mandating what is.
Speaker: We've got a whole lot of expertise and wisdom
Speaker: in this system that we call education across the world that I would contend at times is untapped.
Speaker: And that wisdom sits in educators who are close to the work, who are on the ground, who are involved with young people and the experience of teaching and learning and education every day.
Speaker: And for me, how do we find better ways to untap that potential in order to create evolution across the system
Speaker: pretty fundamental to the conversation.
Speaker: And I think it's a conversation that we need to start having more readily and in a far deeper way.
Speaker: And I know that's at the heart of your work.
Speaker: I mean, exactly.
Speaker: And it reminds me a lot as you're speaking about, there's this fascinating, that research that came out, it was like a decade ago or so now,
Speaker: It was called Pressure from Above, Pressure from Below.
Speaker: And it was a study about autonomy.
Speaker: And it found that if we treat educators like experts, give them autonomy over their pedagogy and allow them to implement innovative solutions into their classrooms, they in turn provide students more autonomy.
Speaker: By providing teachers more autonomy, students have more autonomy.
Speaker: And by having students having more autonomy, teachers have more autonomy.
Speaker: They loop into each other.
Speaker: And by allowing for that
Speaker: that freedom, we can then allow teachers to network with each other and share best practices.
Speaker: And as opposed to a top down approach or a bottom up approach to changing change making within your school.
Speaker: I'm curious about how students loop into all of this process.
Speaker: So the first part, just addressing the first part of your positioning there, and that is creating the opportunity for collaboration, both
Speaker: across the system, but also up and down and through the system.
Speaker: And I think that's really fundamental to supporting the type of change that I know you and I are interested in, this system change across jurisdictions, be it here in Australia or abroad.
Speaker: And for me, that's a real key is how do we liberate, how do we open up the potential of all that's inside the system
Speaker: Fundamental to that, in my opinion, is helping people see the existing worldviews and beliefs that are holding the system in place.
Speaker: Because when we can see the existing worldviews and beliefs that we bring into the work, that we bring into our roles within the system, we can then start to liberate that, we can start to manipulate that, we can start to move forward from there.
Speaker: But until we can see that, we'll be held by them.
Speaker: So a lot of our work is around lifting up worldviews and beliefs around, well, what is good education?
Speaker: What is good practice inside the school?
Speaker: What does good pedagogy look like?
Speaker: What does emerging pedagogy look like?
Speaker: So we're really having these conversations around what are the beliefs that sit inside the work we do as educators?
Speaker: That's the first part.
Speaker: And I guess I segue from there into the second part of your question around students, because I think the beliefs that we hold about young people is fundamental to us being able to evolve the system.
Speaker: Do we hold beliefs that young people are agent?
Speaker: that they're capable, that they have potential to not only be recipients of this thing we call education, but to actually drive, develop and evolve their own education.
Speaker: What are our beliefs?
Speaker: What are our worldviews?
Speaker: What are our perspectives and attitudes about the young people that we work with?
Speaker: Certainly at a personal level, I hold a strong belief that young people are incredibly capable, more capable than I think sometimes we give them credit for.
Speaker: So therefore, the question that I would put to the listeners, and certainly the question that I grapple with internally a lot, is how do we create the space for young people to step into that agency?
Speaker: It fundamentally makes us question, first off, before we can start talking about change, what is the purpose of school?
Speaker: Which, sadly, that's been lost along the way.
Speaker: the vast majority of educational systems across the world where folks are rapidly trying to quote unquote improve, but what are they improving towards?
Speaker: What is the purpose of improvement?
Speaker: And is it a rope-based standardized test?
Speaker: Well, the standardized test measure, what exactly are we aiming for graduates after they leave the school environment?
Speaker: And in a world that's increasingly hostile to both adults, adults and youth, there's a purpose of school there, in my opinion, that focuses on democracy and care and loving and mental health and all these various different things that if you ask kids and teachers what's important to them, all of those themes are going to come out.
Speaker: It's just sadly a lot of those voices are stifled in lieu of a more traditional standardized process.
Speaker: All of those things, Chris, that you just mentioned, I would 100% agree with, totally subscribe to, buy into.
Speaker: And I would add one thing, and it's not the only thing, but it's the thing that has come to my mind.
Speaker: And that is, I believe one of the dispositions or the skills required as we move into this emerging future is adaptability.
Speaker: Our ability to be adaptive, our ability to be able to recreate ourselves, to change, to morph, I think is going to be fundamental when you have a fast changing and moving world.
Speaker: So therefore, I would just add to that idea of humanness, of the wellbeing initiatives, this idea of adaptability and how do we increase the adaptability both within the broader education system, but also open up an opportunity, open up a pathway for people inside, educators, leaders, bureaucrats and young people to work on their own adaptability.
Speaker: to work on their own resilience and their own agency in the system so that they can continue to face into the changes that are coming down the pipeline.
Speaker: I think that's really fundamental in the modern system as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, that's such a huge point, especially when
Speaker: In the past, a lot of times educational reformers will focus on what they assume the future will be.
Speaker: So as opposed to teaching adaptability, I remember like 10, 20 years ago, the big thing was we're going to teach everyone how to code.
Speaker: And it's going to transform society because everyone's going to be a coder.
Speaker: And we're finding right now, like at this moment, coding is starting to be automated.
Speaker: Like, oh, I thought automation was only for certain types of work.
Speaker: Well, actually, it's for other types of work as well.
Speaker: And there's jobs that we didn't even know were going to exist that exist now.
Speaker: And the folks that are going to be able to take those things on are going to be our most creative, adaptive folks.
Speaker: And that's just going to continually happen, especially as the rate of technological innovation increases.
Speaker: increases over time.
Speaker: And kind of second part of that too, I'm wondering what this looks like in practice.
Speaker: So we're talking a lot about systems evolution.
Speaker: We already established that the first thing we got to do is get folks on the same page, get them connected together, ensure that we have a common message, idea, goal, what have you.
Speaker: But let's say now that we got that, we're all on the same page, what do we do now?
Speaker: Again, a really complex question.
Speaker: What do we do now?
Speaker: You do a lot of things now.
Speaker: Yes, we do a lot of things.
Speaker: But fundamental to, I guess, taking the first step for us has been this idea of building into our work what we describe as an experimental mindset.
Speaker: In other words, little micro-interventions within the school, within your area of influence,
Speaker: can make a huge difference when amplified across 100, 200, 300 staff within a school.
Speaker: And so one of the things that I do very regularly when I'm working with educators, with teachers, or even with young people or leadership teams within a school is ask them, where can we have an impact?
Speaker: Like this is the challenge.
Speaker: This is the opportunity.
Speaker: Where can we start to prototype or experiment and have an impact in line with moving that challenge forward?
Speaker: Let's make it manageable.
Speaker: Let's make it something we can do on a Friday afternoon.
Speaker: Because so often when we're talking about this idea of change or evolution, we think really big.
Speaker: We think often in a really massive way that, oh, well, we've got to rewrite the whole curriculum.
Speaker: That's not a Friday afternoon job.
Speaker: That's a two, three, four, five year job.
Speaker: So what I contend is let's start small.
Speaker: Let's find places of impact where we can start to initiate some of this change, this evolution, this adaptation that we're talking about and do it on a Friday afternoon or on Monday morning.
Speaker: Test, pilot and get those feedback loops, those learning loops coming back through the work that we're doing so we can keep iterating, developing and evolving our response to the situation that we're facing.
Speaker: For me, this experimental mindset is really foundational to supporting school leaders, particularly educators in the classroom.
Speaker: And increasingly we're working with young people around how do you do this within your sphere of impact and influence.
Speaker: So that experimental mindset I think is foundational.
Speaker: Conference to Restore Humanity 2023 is an invitation for K-12 and college educators to break the doom loop and build a platform for hopeful, positive action.
Speaker: Our conference is designed around the accessibility, sustainability, and affordability of virtual learning, while engaging participants in a classroom environment that models the same progressive pedagogy we value with students.
Speaker: Instead of long Zoom presentations with a brief Q&A, keynotes are flipped and attendees will have the opportunity for extended conversation with our speakers.
Speaker: Antonia Darter, with 40 years of insight as a scholar, artist, activist, and author of numerous works, including Culture and Power in the Classroom.
Speaker: Cornelius Minor, community-driven Brooklyn educator, co-founder of The Minor Collective, and author of We Got This.
Speaker: Jose Luis Vilson, New York City educator, co-founder, and executive director of EduColor, and author of This Is Not a Test.
Speaker: and Iowa WTF, a coalition of young people fighting discriminatory legislation through advocacy, activism, and civic engagement.
Speaker: And instead of back-to-back online workshops, we are offering asynchronous learning tracks where you can engage with the content and the community at any time on topics like environmental education for social impact, applying game design to education, and anti-racist universal design for learning.
Speaker: This year, we're also featuring daily events from organizations, educators, and activists to build community and sustain practice.
Speaker: The Conference to Restore Humanity runs July 24th through the 27th.
Speaker: And as of recording, early bird tickets are still available.
Speaker: See our website, humanrestorationproject.org, for more information.
Speaker: And let's restore humanity together.
Speaker: This is a fun conversation for me because we also focus a lot on systems and a lot of folks tend to get frustrated when we have conversations about this because you can't prescribe systems-based change.
Speaker: It's not a step-by-step process.
Speaker: It's multifaceted and you're working at multiple hierarchical levels at different times at different spaces in a different context.
Speaker: So it's very difficult to explain to folks how do you make change because one, it's highly complicated, but two, it's also heavily relational.
Speaker: So depending on who you're talking to, what group of people it is, what their purpose and goals are, even if you're all in alignment on where you want to get, people still have different ways of getting there and different solutions to those problems.
Speaker: And you have to kind of embrace anywhere, everywhere all at once, right?
Speaker: You have to be at every single little spot.
Speaker: And as you're talking about
Speaker: mindsets, theories, frameworks.
Speaker: A lot of it's about flipping that switch that when folks are approaching a problem, they both have the proper mindset of fixing that problem so we don't go backwards, but they also kind of know where to look.
Speaker: They themselves are being trained to be adaptive themselves.
Speaker: Absolutely, Chris.
Speaker: And to find pathways and understand, as you just alluded to, that there's multiple pathways.
Speaker: but there's no singular or linear pathway toward a given outcome.
Speaker: We also know from the change literature, and you'll be across this and very aware of this, that people will push back when they sense loss, when they sense loss in their world, when they sense disequilibrium.
Speaker: So as change practitioners leading system change across education and other sectors, how do we support people to be in control of the journey?
Speaker: Because when they're in control of the journey, when they're agent in the journey,
Speaker: there's less loss involved, right?
Speaker: They're taking control, they're taking ownership over where to move next.
Speaker: So this idea of micro experiments within your area of influence, I think is a really good way to invite people into the work in a non-confrontational way that supports this ripple effect, this ripple effect across the school or across a broader education system.
Speaker: And it's certainly working for us and we use it fundamentally and foundationally in our work.
Speaker: And
Speaker: To, I guess, complicate matters as you're going about this change making work.
Speaker: I mentioned before that most folks are going to tell you, hey, something needs to change.
Speaker: But there is that 20, 10, 5% of people that they feel everything's going great.
Speaker: Like the system's working perfectly.
Speaker: More often than not, I find that there's a lot of folks that believe the old system was working great.
Speaker: We need to go back to that.
Speaker: and go even harder on it.
Speaker: We need to go back to basics, increase drill and kill testing, because when I grew up or whatever, things were great.
Speaker: So how do we deal with or kind of conversate with that issue of folks who are not only resistant to change, but actually want to propagate the old system?
Speaker: Again, it talks to this idea of what are we moving toward?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And
Speaker: People at some point have to make a decision as to whether they're engaged or involved in that piece of work or not.
Speaker: And for some people, and certainly in some of the schools I work with, for some people, the journey is not the journey they want to be on.
Speaker: So then in a really caring, compassionate way, we help them move into the next phase of their life.
Speaker: And I think these open, transparent conversations about this life that we live is not a dress rehearsal.
Speaker: Make sure that what you're engaged in, what you're connected to, the work that you're doing is really meaningful for you.
Speaker: It's really connected to your deep purpose and what you want to bring to the world.
Speaker: So we have those sort of compassionate, caring conversations.
Speaker: And sometimes people will self-select out of the initiatives that we're involved in.
Speaker: At times they won't.
Speaker: So therefore, for me, when they don't,
Speaker: I always keep the door open to the potential of them evolving personally, shifting their worldviews, changing their perspectives, modifying their attitudes in line with the new direction, the emerging direction of the school or the system.
Speaker: So I'm very open to people being able to develop and I keep that door open.
Speaker: But you're right, sometimes people push back and they go back to what was known, what was before.
Speaker: And I guess that talks to my earlier point around
Speaker: When we sense loss in the change process, we seek to create equilibrium, right?
Speaker: We seek to create balance and we all do it.
Speaker: And it makes a lot of sense as human beings that we would do that.
Speaker: No one likes to be out of control or in a place of chaos.
Speaker: So the response is quite normal.
Speaker: For me, lifting the response up, highlighting the response, identifying that some of the behaviours that we're seeing play out are intended to hold us in the status quo.
Speaker: can be a really powerful intervention that helps people see how their behavior is stalling the potential progress that we could be making as a collective, as a team, as a school.
Speaker: So this idea again of building awareness into every interaction you have within
Speaker: a change process, a cultural evolution process is incredibly important.
Speaker: Incredibly important.
Speaker: I mean, there's certainly a struggle there.
Speaker: And I don't know if you probably see this in your work as well.
Speaker: When people sign on to some of these changes, I don't think that everyone recognizes that
Speaker: when you adopt reimagining education, it's not just the content and the delivery mechanism that's going to change.
Speaker: It's also the look and feel and just daily life of being an educator and being a student, which we often describe as organized chaos, like learning, hands-on learning and working on projects and getting out in the community.
Speaker: It's a lot more messy than just traditional worksheets or whatever it might be.
Speaker: And certainly you can organize that messiness, but things like the classroom loudness level are going to be slightly higher than what you're used to.
Speaker: What kids push back on and what they tell you because they have more power to actually speak up, that freaks a lot of people out.
Speaker: They're like, why is this kid talking to me like that?
Speaker: Because they're expressing themselves.
Speaker: That's what they do.
Speaker: And all of those little micro events add up.
Speaker: quite rapidly.
Speaker: And we experienced the exact same issue where you have some folks that were initially on board and they start seeing it and they go back to their comfort zone.
Speaker: Like, no, no, no, like it's not working.
Speaker: And we often tell people like, you gotta give it some time.
Speaker: Like we gotta take a few weeks here because at first it's always going to be, I guess, worse than where it's going to be in a few weeks because people are in that adjustment phase.
Speaker: And if you tell a group of let's say eighth graders who have for the last year,
Speaker: 10 years, been in a fairly controlled environment, we're going to switch things up and we're going to do something new.
Speaker: There's going to be a few weeks of adjustment where kids are also finding their space there.
Speaker: Having that mindset switch makes a big difference.
Speaker: There's a quote by E.W.
Speaker: Eisner.
Speaker: He's an educator.
Speaker: And he said something along the lines of the most important thing you should do with a teacher is change their mindset because once they close that door, they're going to do whatever they want or something like that.
Speaker: The mindsets, which is pretty darn important.
Speaker: 100%.
Speaker: And I suppose I've been substituting things like worldviews, beliefs.
Speaker: We could bring mindset into that part of the conversation as well.
Speaker: And as you were talking, it was making me reflect on some of the frameworks and tools that we have and the interventions that we put in place.
Speaker: are really focused on two primary elements.
Speaker: The first element, which is what you were talking to in part through that last part of the conversation, and that was what are the external interventions that we put in place?
Speaker: You know, how do we change the pedagogy?
Speaker: How do we move the classroom around?
Speaker: You know, do we use design thinking, PBL, or some other form of intervention, right?
Speaker: That's an external intervention, a structural intervention, a system intervention, which is incredibly important.
Speaker: And in education, my experience is we focus a lot on those types of interventions.
Speaker: The other part of what you were describing, which really resonated with me, was how do we need to involve our internal worlds, our interiors, to support the type of adaptation or evolution that we've been talking about through this podcast?
Speaker: And for me, that is incredibly important.
Speaker: What sort of inner work do we as practitioners need to do in order to create the space and deliberate the potential that sits inside our classrooms, our schools and our education systems?
Speaker: Because that inner work, that developmental work is foundational to then being able to create really good external interventions.
Speaker: So it's a balance between the two and in our work and in our frameworks, we've really been focused on ensuring that we have a balance between those two elements, inner development and external intervention.
Speaker: I do want to make sure as well, we get into showing rather than telling the theory.
Speaker: because that is really the way at which most of these changes are made.
Speaker: People see it first and then everyone wants to do it.
Speaker: It's like, I want to see that exact same thing in my classroom.
Speaker: That's a lot of what you're doing at future schools.
Speaker: I've been to some of your webinars.
Speaker: I think most folks in the US could probably make it to half of them because of the time zone difference, but
Speaker: They're often showing what's possible within different school environments.
Speaker: And although there's similar running themes, there's different ways you could spin off of that and start incorporating these techniques either at the classroom level or at the school level.
Speaker: And I'd love to talk more about what that looks like.
Speaker: Like what can folks do in order to get more involved with the work that you're doing to see this stuff in action?
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: So, you know, you mentioned the webinars that we run.
Speaker: We run a series of webinars across the year with thought leaders, but also thought doers.
Speaker: You know, so we really focus on bringing educators into and onto our webinar series to share what they're doing inside their schools, inside their classrooms.
Speaker: Because to your point,
Speaker: Seeing is believing, right?
Speaker: Seeing creates a pathway to potential.
Speaker: Seeing opens up the future as it could be.
Speaker: Yep, so we've been really focused on these webinars, not only being about thought leadership, but also about doing, action.
Speaker: which is really important, which talks back to that experimental mindset that I was describing earlier.
Speaker: That's the first thing.
Speaker: But even beyond that, we do this thing called virtual school tours, where we take an iPad and we go into the school and we wander through the school to give people a sense of what's happening inside that context.
Speaker: Now, we don't know of anyone else that's doing that.
Speaker: I'm sure there is.
Speaker: But we find that incredibly uplifting for educators,
Speaker: at four o'clock after a long day to be able to just go through someone else's classroom.
Speaker: Maybe they're in Melbourne and the classroom is in Perth.
Speaker: That's a long trip that we can do it virtually.
Speaker: So therefore we do.
Speaker: And we find that those things work really well.
Speaker: The other thing that our members are talking to us about as being really foundational and fundamental in the development of the schools that they either lead or that they educate and teach in is
Speaker: is this idea that we twice a year run on-site educational tours, I guess you'd call them, of five or six schools in an area.
Speaker: So we've just come back from the ACT, the Australian Capital Territory, Canberra, where we ran a primary school-focused educational tour.
Speaker: And in Term 3, around August, we're heading to Adelaide, South Australia, to look at innovation inside schools in Adelaide.
Speaker: That idea of being immersed in, but not just being immersed in and seeing,
Speaker: More than that.
Speaker: It's actually more than that.
Speaker: It's being around like minds.
Speaker: It's being around innovative educators who you can share practice and share observations with and learn from.
Speaker: So it's those reflective, recursive learning loops that take place when we're in person, when we're together, and we're going through the process of unpacking what we're seeing.
Speaker: For us, that's been really foundational for our members and for the work that we do at future schools.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I mean, I love that.
Speaker: I mean, seeing really is believing.
Speaker: I had the opportunity, not early in my teaching career, but a while ago, to go to Hitech High and tour the building.
Speaker: We went back a few different times as a cohort of different educators.
Speaker: And Hitech High is, I mean, well known for being a fantastic project-based learning school, great environment, really cool campus.
Speaker: But what I enjoyed about the process was I had walked into it seeing most likely to succeed as many teachers have done.
Speaker: And when I watched that film, I was very intimidated.
Speaker: We were trying to do a lot of that work and we were trying to do that work and I felt like I wasn't doing it that well.
Speaker: And when I went, it felt way more real.
Speaker: And this is not to downplay the work that they're doing as much as describe the fact that learning
Speaker: is done by actual human beings and not by robots.
Speaker: So when you go and I see two kids watching ESPN and doing nothing, I'm like, oh, this is an actual school.
Speaker: People are doing normal kid things here.
Speaker: And it's something that everyone's doing, just an entirely different mindset and framework than what we're doing back home.
Speaker: And by doing those those virtual and or in-person school tours, I think it helps ground the work a lot because it makes it way more human.
Speaker: Sadly, a lot of the stuff that we have in the education world is very highly produced, whether it be like framework guides or videos that you find on YouTube.
Speaker: It feels all overproduced to the point where it feels
Speaker: sterile or perfect.
Speaker: Whereas in the real world, every school is going to have a little bit of messiness to it.
Speaker: But to me, that's what makes the work fun.
Speaker: That's what makes it way more authentic and plausible.
Speaker: So it makes me quite hopeful when I go to those things because I see that it's normal.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I think the idea of being immersed in experience is really important for educators.
Speaker: One of the risks is that we spend a lot of time immersed in our own classrooms or our own schools.
Speaker: And what we're trying to do here at Future Schools is open the world up, help people see that there's other practice playing out around the world, help people to step into that practice, to connect with people who are working in different, emerging, innovative ways, and to learn from each other.
Speaker: Fundamentally, it's about learning.
Speaker: It's about us as the adults in the environment, as the educators in the environment, being on our own learning journey, our own developmental and growth journeys.
Speaker: I think we need to take that back.
Speaker: We need to take our own growth and development back and say, how do we need to evolve so that our schools and our classrooms and we can be in better service of the young people that we work with?
Speaker: And for folks that are listening to this whole thing and they're like, man, that sounds great.
Speaker: I want to do it right now.
Speaker: I want to get involved with future schools.
Speaker: Is it open to U.S. educators?
Speaker: How can they get involved?
Speaker: Most certainly.
Speaker: I guess the way to connect is to reach out through the website or through
Speaker: my contacts and we'll make them available.
Speaker: But most certainly we have people from all over the world involved.
Speaker: We have members from the US.
Speaker: We have members out of California at the moment.
Speaker: We have members out of Hong Kong and other parts of Asia and increasingly into Europe.
Speaker: So we're working across the world in service of creating a space where people can share and learn and collaborate.
Speaker: So I would be more than happy, interested, open to having
Speaker: people who are listening to this podcast, reach out and connect with us and learn more about what we're doing because we'd love to be in service of your schools and your environment as well.
Speaker: I can't overemphasize enough how important it is to make those international connections because it's one thing to connect with schools in your region.
Speaker: That is important to have that local connection so you can face local issues together.
Speaker: But when you immerse yourself internationally and begin to understand how not only other school districts work, but how other cultural contexts work as well, you can build something quite marvelous that doesn't exist anywhere else, as well as have connections that really no one else has.
Speaker: And as you
Speaker: we've kind of been talking about as a common thread this entire conversation.
Speaker: The main issue that we're facing isn't necessarily that people don't have solutions.
Speaker: It's just that not the right people are connected to the right people.
Speaker: And to an extent, people don't have enough support, time, sustainability in order to make those connections to begin with.
Speaker: And organizations like Future Schools, what HRP does, what a variety of organizations are doing,
Speaker: is the primary goal is to build up systems by networking people together rather than prescribing yet another acronym or tool that you just kind of buy, purchase, and hope it works.
Speaker: Chris, the solutions exist between us.
Speaker: That's your point.
Speaker: The solutions are there.
Speaker: The solutions exist.
Speaker: exist between us.
Speaker: What we need to do is create spaces where people can come together and share and collaborate and learn collectively and share the wisdom that sits inside this amazing thing that we call the education system across many jurisdictions, across many countries.
Speaker: So our intent, our motivation is to catalyse some of this future-focused, progressive, board-facing approach to education by bringing people together.
Speaker: We don't see ourselves as a solution.
Speaker: We see ourselves as a catalyst.
Speaker: Music
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
Speaker: If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
Speaker: Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
Speaker: Thank you.
