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Confronting the Education Polycrisis w/ Dr. James Mannion
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“The problems we face are not the fault of any single individual or organisation. They are often the by-product of good intentions. And yet, alongside children and young people and their parents and carers, it’s educators who are most exposed to these pressures – who confront them every day, and try to make it all work regardless,” writes today’s guest in a piece from May titled Confronting the educational polycrisis.
Joining us from Brighton, UK Dr James Mannion is a keynote speaker, teacher trainer, researcher, consultant and author with a passion for educational and political reform. He is the co-founder and Director of Rethinking Education, a teacher training organisation specialising in implementation and improvement science, self-regulated learning and practitioner inquiry. A former teacher of 12 years, James has an MA in person-centred education from the University of Sussex and a PhD in self-regulated learning from the University of Cambridge. He is also the host of the popular Rethinking Education podcast, of which I have been a huge fan for a long time. In fact, HRP contributed the very first video essay we ever made to a virtual arm of James’s Rethinking Education Conference back in 2022. This conversation crossover has certainly been a long time coming!
“We have multiple crises on our hands,” James writes, “They interact and have become entangled. This makes them difficult to resolve - but resolve them we must.” And my hope today is that even if we can’t untangle the polycrisis today, we can at least get a better grasp and perhaps loosen their hold on our education systems.
https://drjamesmannion.substack.com/
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Transcript
Community as Resistance
00:00:01
Speaker
In stressful, uncertain times, when cynical powers attempt to divide and isolate us, community and solidarity are acts of resistance. But there are no superheroes here and no simple answers to be found.
00:00:12
Speaker
Only the quest for connection.
Transforming Conferences for Humanizing Dialogue
00:00:16
Speaker
In 2025, we are responding to the need for community and solidarity in uncertain times by turning Conference to Restore Humanity into a model for humanizing critical discourse and dialogue, bringing together students and teachers, researchers and doers, thinkers and visionaries to explore complex topics in education and illuminate a path forward together.
Educational Fringes as Blueprints
00:00:38
Speaker
What if instead of viewing the fringes as an educational afterthought, we treated them as a blueprint for what schools could become? In our opening flipped keynote, Dr. Sarah Fine will explore what can be learned from spaces that are often seen as peripheral to the core purposes of school.
00:00:54
Speaker
Elective courses, career and technical education pathways, alternative education programs, and extracurricular activities. These spaces carry powerful lessons about how to design for authentic relationships and deeper learning.
Flipped Keynotes and Panel Discussions
00:01:07
Speaker
And we are taking our flipped keynote model one step further by adding fireside chats. Moderated panel discussions followed by audience Q&A. Shanae Bond, Maria Monroe-Schuster, Luckett Keish, and Will Richardson will lead us in dialogue about the challenges facing education today and how we can collectively address them in 2025 and beyond.
AI and Edtech in Education
00:01:28
Speaker
Audrey Waters, Shana V. White, V. Dow, and Charles Logan will help us answer What, if anything, should be the relationship of AI and edtech to education?
Indigenous Youth Perspectives
00:01:38
Speaker
We'll also be hosting a student panel of young people from Great Plains Action Society, an Indigenous-led grassroots organization advocating for Indigenous rights, to speak to their experiences and perspectives as Indigenous youth today.
Workshops on SEL and Family Practices
00:01:51
Speaker
And instead of week-long learning tracks as we've had in the past, we are including two-hour daily workshops with expert practitioners. Nawal Karuni will help participants understand and connect family practices to curriculum to create deeper, more authentic caregiver collaborations.
00:02:07
Speaker
Dr. Emma McMain reimagines SEL as open dialogue, not a checklist, connecting social and emotional learning to culture and society. Angela Stockman invites participants to explore how pedagogical documentation can serve as an act of stewardship, honoring, preserving, and nurturing rich narratives about learners and learning.
Conference Accessibility and Details
00:02:27
Speaker
And we'll continue to use our Discord as a hub for camaraderie, community, and to keep the conversation going beyond the live events. Our virtual Conference to Restore Humanity 2025 runs July 21st through the 23rd.
00:02:40
Speaker
To make this year as accessible and sustainable as ever, we've cut the ticket price to just 50 bucks. You can learn more about Conference to Restore Humanity and register on our website at humanrestorationproject.org slash conference.
00:02:54
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining us on our quest for connection as we continue the journey to restore humanity to education together.
Introduction to the Human Restoration Project Podcast
00:03:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 173 of the Human Restoration Project podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Julia Valenti, Janet Clark, and Timothy Fox.
00:03:28
Speaker
Thank you all so much for your ongoing support. The problems we face are not the fault of any single individual or organization.
Complex Educational Problems
00:03:37
Speaker
They are often the byproduct of good intentions.
00:03:39
Speaker
And yet, alongside children and young people and their parents and careers, it's educators who are most exposed to these pressures, who confront them every day and try to make it all work regardless, writes today's guest in a piece from May titled, Confronting the Educational Poly Crisis.
Introducing Dr. James Mannion
00:03:57
Speaker
Joining us from Brighton, UK, Dr. James Mannion is a keynote speaker, teacher trainer, researcher, consultant, and author with a passion for educational and political reform. He's the co-founder and director of Rethinking Education, a teacher training organization specializing in implementation and improvement science, self-regulated learning, and practitioner inquiry.
Mannion's Educational Reform Journey
00:04:19
Speaker
A former teacher of 12 years, James has a master's in person-centered education from the University of Sussex and a PhD in self-regulated learning from the University of Cambridge.
00:04:30
Speaker
He's also the host of the popular Rethinking Education podcast, of which I've been a huge fan for a long time. In fact, HRP contributed our very first video essay to a virtual arm of James' Rethinking Education conference way back in 2022.
00:04:46
Speaker
So this conversation crossover has certainly been a long time coming. We have multiple crises on our hands, James writes. They interact and have become entangled. This makes them difficult to resolve, but resolve them we must.
00:05:00
Speaker
And my hope today is that even if we can't untangle the polycrisis, we can at least get a better grasp and perhaps loosen their hold on our education systems. Thanks so much for joining me today, James.
00:05:11
Speaker
You're very welcome. This is like as you say, it's been a long time coming and it is a long time bucket list item to come on the Human Restoration Project podcast. And my my good buddy, Kate McAllister, is seething with envy that I've managed to beat her to this because I know that she she shares that bucket list ah desire as well.
00:05:32
Speaker
Well, James, before we dive into the poly crisis and everything that deals with that's untangling, I've got to know more about your training and your academic work in person-centered education and a PhD in self-regulated learning, which honestly sounds like it's a little bit of an oxymoron.
00:05:50
Speaker
But what experience led you to decide that as a course of study that you wanted to dedicate yourself to? Yeah, that's a good question. It actually has really long roots, this this question. and and it A long time sort of precedes my entry into the profession as a teacher.
00:06:06
Speaker
um where where i saw I think just for like through most of my 20s, had quite a ah gentle start to my career, let's say, i was I was really into art and doing like yeah music and poetry and stuff. And so when I left uni, I just wanted to work in in jobs, that manual labor jobs, basically, something that didn't occupy my brain space, which I wanted to keep for myself.
00:06:28
Speaker
So I did lots of like building work and and laboring and green keeping and golf courses and gardening and what have you. um And I just went but went from pillar to post, really, and just sort of spent a lot of time thinking about stuff, mulling things over. And whenever I thought about the problems of the world, i would just in ah invariably, like just following the thread, I would just find myself back at education's doorstep.
00:06:50
Speaker
I'm necessarily saying like the education system is directly the to blame for all the ills of the world, but rather that if we had a different system, we would see a very different world.
00:07:01
Speaker
and And that really crystallized for me when I had, I worked just as ah as a as a typist for like a few months, I was temping as a typist for the probation service. i don't know if you have quite something that's quite the same. do you know dude you have Do you use that word probation in the States? I'm not sure if it's a different context. What what is the context of probation in the UK?
00:07:20
Speaker
Okay, so the probation services, essentially, like, it's a public service that's around around the the legal system. and And so probation officers work with people often to try to understand them, to try to sort of help to keep them out of prison, to understand why why they're offending and so on. And so so when somebody has um has committed a crime and they've been convicted by a judge, but they're awaiting sentencing,
00:07:42
Speaker
they would have an interview with a probation officer who would find out their backstory, right? And then they would write a pre-sentence report that they would then send to the judge to inform sentencing. So don' do do you have something equivalent to that in the States?
00:07:55
Speaker
i'm Yes, I'm sure we do. i'm I haven't worked in similar positions, so it's hard me to be the judge of that. But yeah. Yes. I imagine that there is a word that's like, anyway. Yes. yeah so So it was my job to type up all of these pre-sentence reports so that the the probation officers would dictate them into into old tapes. this is This was in the olden days, 20 years or so ago, before the internet had really taken off.
00:08:17
Speaker
And I would type them up. And so so over a period of like three or four months, I had this insight into all of these people's life stories, essentially. And and the the desk that I was working on, it was mainly just like people who were like...
00:08:29
Speaker
stealing stuff out of shops really they would have some sort of addiction and their life had gone wrong and they were just like shoplifting right and not always but most of the time and in almost invariably in these life histories I saw this pattern where people would sort of have the usual stuff that that that that life is made of right they would have a partner a home a job whatever kids some some good stuff in their life and then almost invariably there was like a bad thing would happen some of the stuff that life throws at everybody at some point right like a bereavement sudden, sudden, like, you know, an infidelity, you lose your job, somebody gets really ill, whatever it might be, some really difficult thing to to to deal with.
00:09:08
Speaker
And then the person would just be completely incapable of dealing with that and would not not cope with it. Well, wouldn't have the strategies, the dispositions, the tools to be able to deal with life's knocks. They would invariably start drinking, taking drugs of one description or another, would get addicted, get into debt, lose their friends, family, end up on the streets stealing stuff from shops. And there are like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in my hometown alone who who fit that exact pattern.
00:09:35
Speaker
And I remember just thinking like, it's like some of those people had a, we're just dealt a really rotten hand, right? They just would like, the cards were stacked against them from the outset. and But not, not in, not, not in every case, but I sort of remember thinking like, you know, if somebody born into a really difficult situation, their parents are in prison or they're addicted to things, or they're not around or they're neglectful, like it's, that's horrendous. And there's nothing that you can really do about that as a state, but All of those people, are the the vast majority of those kids, unless they were homeschooled, right, went through the education system. And we had this like daily window into their lives.
00:10:11
Speaker
And I remember just sort of thinking, like, to what extent do do we as educators, does this does the school system help to prepare people to deal with the vicissitudes of life, you know? And to what extent does it actually make things worse? Does it add to the pile of problems on the in-tray?
00:10:27
Speaker
And I quickly ascertained that it was the latter, um at least at at least to some extent. it's so so It's always a bit of a complicated thing to talk about education, isn't it Because of course, there are loads of amazing things that schools do.
00:10:40
Speaker
They offer a stable platform for people to make friendships and connections and learn about the world and be taught stuff. There's loads of cool stuff in schools, and I don't want to just paint it all as problematic. But it's very clear that we are not preparing people very well for the world of work.
00:10:56
Speaker
And that's not, or rather the world of work, the world beyond the school gates, as it were. And that's not just for those kids who who were dealt a difficult hand and who struggled, but you know the people who are the so-called successes of the of the education system are often also quite sort of underdeveloped in other areas of their life, let's say.
00:11:13
Speaker
And so it's like, we're not really sort of getting, we haven't quite nailed this yet. And yeah, I'll stop talking for now. i could go on for a long time, but um yeah, that said that that was sort of my entry into the into becoming a teacher.
00:11:25
Speaker
No, no, no. I want to come back because I'm fascinated by you know the the backgrounds and biographies that you ah got to internalize over your course of a work as the probationary typist.
00:11:39
Speaker
and And let's build a bridge to education. what were did Did those ever speak to educational experiences? Were these... um People who had struggled in school behaviorally, were they people who had been um suspended, expelled, um or had negative experiences otherwise? or was there anything you would say characterized that experience for them?
00:11:59
Speaker
I don't think, like looking back, I don't remember that there was a particular pattern in terms of their their experience of school. as As I recall, to the extent as I recall it, as I say, it was a long time ago.
00:12:10
Speaker
It's a really mixed bag. Like you though some of those kids were like, you know, you get some people who are very able at school, but they've just got other stuff going on in their home lives. And they were sort of successful on paper, but they were struggling for whatever reason. And their lives still sort of fell through the cracks as it were.
00:12:27
Speaker
um And so, and so guess so he so essentially, I i'd like I've decided that education was going to be my thing. And I, and and I wasn't initially going to be a teacher, I just wanted to study it and to understand it. But then I just thought, you know, how can I to the what extent can you really say that you understand something that you haven't been fully immersed in. And so I signed up to be a teacher and then like 15 years flew by, right? Because the school system just like sucks you in and spits you out the other end. And then I was, yeah, you're on rails and you just go, you know, one holiday, one break, one thing to the next and 10 years goes by.
00:13:01
Speaker
Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Although, so so i did get into research. So as you say, you know, you're asking about person-centered education and self-regulated learning. And so right from the outset, I was i signed up to do a master's because I wanted to study it alongside teaching it in my my second year of teaching.
00:13:17
Speaker
And that was there was a master's at my local university in what they call person centred education. And I remember being very influenced at the time by Carl Rogers, right, from whom that language comes, the person centred therapy.
00:13:30
Speaker
And this idea that he has that you may have noticed, I always ask people about on my podcast about this idea of significant learning. Like what are the what are the episodes that are really shaped you as a person? the learning that counts really. and And ah very often that stuff doesn't happen in formal educational settings.
00:13:47
Speaker
It's sort of accidental, incidental stuff that happens, just the randomness of life. um And so, um yeah, I signed up to do this person-censored masters and got really into philosophical inquiry through doing that, like as a way to to have you know one one pedagogical approach. I don't know if that's particularly widespread in the States, is it?
00:14:08
Speaker
have you come across An inquiry-based approach. i I would say that increasingly it's been, ah i don't know, demonized or it's become sort of a four-letter word to speak of inquiry in schools anymore.
00:14:20
Speaker
Right. Well, I think there's a slight distinction perhaps between this general like inquiry learning, but sort of like yeah like like project-based learning, open-ended learning. But then this in particular, I'm um'm speaking about philosophical inquiry, which is like, it was actually developed in the States. Matthew Littman in the 1970s developed this approach. I think he might have been at Columbia University, perhaps.
00:14:42
Speaker
um And he was a philosophy professor who was quite frustrated with his and with the inability of his philosophy undergrads to engage in reasoned discussions.
00:14:53
Speaker
And he was like, you guys need to, like we need we need to start this whole process a lot earlier. And so he wrote a range of children's books and he developed this pedagogy where you sit in a circle and you you have big, big open-ended conversations about about big, important ideas.
00:15:08
Speaker
And it's a wonderful thing. It's quite widespread now around the world. and It goes by a number of names, but it's mainly called P4C, Philosophy for Children. It's a brilliant way to spend an hour with a group of kids. It's a wonderful thing. Again, it's something that's been been quite demonized. The traditionalists hate it because the traditionalists just seem to think that education and learning subject knowledge are synonymous and that there's nothing else to see here.
00:15:32
Speaker
ah So they don't like it because it's not about teaching subject knowledge. But it is a wonderful thing. It's an incredible way to to help kids in all kinds of ways to develop education their ability to just speak and listen, to change their mind, to explore ideas, to test their understanding of reality, you know, to to learn how to agree with and with one another and disagree with one another, learn how to disagree with themselves, right? So understand how, you know, and paradoxes can be a thing and we can, you know, the world is is not no just neatly divided into things that are right and wrong or true or false.
00:16:06
Speaker
So it's ah that's an amazing thing. And then that sort of but yeah that sort of set the path for me to. So actually what happened there, just to just to close that bit of the story, I i did this philosophical inquiry. I did as my dissertation for my master's was all about this of this approach.
00:16:21
Speaker
And I did these six lessons and I recorded them and and typed up everything that was said and tried to see if there was any any changes, anything useful in the data. And there was just nothing. It was just, I was basically trying to run before I could walk and I hadn't really got the hang of this pedagogy yet. And I was working with a class that I didn't usually teach. so I didn't have that rapport.
00:16:40
Speaker
And basically there was just nothing good in this data. And I spent six months writing this 20,000 word essay about a thing that didn't work. And it just felt grim, you know. um And then at the end, and and I thought at the end of that summer, i'm I'm done with academic writing and I'm just going to go back and maybe go into school leadership or something.
00:16:58
Speaker
And then what I found was that the the the process of thinking so hard and reading all of this fascinating stuff about thinking and reasoning and reading and writing and speaking and learning and what have you, and and thinking about what had gone wrong and where I had where he had sort of fallen short,
00:17:15
Speaker
it had just completely transformed me as a teacher and when I went back into the classroom that September I was just a different person like I like I just was in my bones I was a different practitioner it was like the biggest shot in my arm that I'd ever had in terms of professional learning um which was good in one sense but then in the other sense I was like right I need the next the next hit and so I needed to sign up for for a ph d Yeah.
00:17:40
Speaker
To what extent did your return the classroom having been transformed sort of make you like a square peg in a round hole? Did you feel angular to the system that you were trying to head back into? Or was it a welcome landing place for, you know, new ideas about this philosophical inquiry and self-guided learning?
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good question. And it was very much the latter, like the school that and it was just just completely out of happenstance. The school that I was working in was a school in very challenging circumstances, the high levels of disadvantage.
00:18:09
Speaker
The school was in special measures, which is like the naughty step when you get inspected by the school inspectors. And it's like you're about to be closed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. um And so the the history of declining results and so on. And we had this new head teacher who had come in and who was just a really forward thinking guy, a brilliant guy called Stuart McLaughlin.
00:18:27
Speaker
and and And he brought that person that I mentioned earlier, Kate McAllister, who he had worked with at a previous school. He brought her over to head up this this learning. At the time, it was called a learning to learn team, a team of five teachers who were tasked with teaching the whole of year seven, which is like age 11, the first year of secondary school.
00:18:45
Speaker
And we had them for five lessons a week. So like 20% of curriculum time. And they just, the the senior team just went like over to you, like whatever you think these kids need to to find their on switch, to become a bit more curious and proactive and engaged, do whatever you think it is. So there was a huge amount of trust placed in us um and away we went.
00:19:05
Speaker
so so So it was a very much a fertile ground for exploring all of these weird and wacky ideas. Yeah. How did that land with the students that you were teaching? Did you find a lot of success with that approach? Did the you know your head teacher approve of the transformation that you brought with you?
00:19:22
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Not everything that we did landed. like we've We made some mega rookie errors you know along the way, of course, but we were given the freedom and the autonomy to to do that, right? And we there was no judgment there.
00:19:35
Speaker
But very early on, We could see a difference just like anecdotally. First of all, people were sort of saying these kids are different. like They're just more willing to take risks. They're more willing to get involved and to have a go and to sort of to respond to feedback that you give them, which is often, you know, it's not that widespread that that happens.
00:19:52
Speaker
um And then it started to show up in the data in their sort of like we used to keep like attitude to learning scores and then on the spreadsheets and their progress data. And they would just so so so I realized very early on that this was an amazing thing that was happening and I wanted to capture it, you know, in the best way that I could. And so I signed up to do a Ph.D.
00:20:12
Speaker
And that turned out to be an eight-year study because we followed four cohorts of kids from from year seven through to year 11 when they sit their high stakes end of school exams. There was one control cohort, the pre-learning to learn cohort, if you like, and then three of these learning to learn cohorts.
00:20:29
Speaker
And the curriculum time, as I say, it started with five five lessons in year seven, but then that curriculum time expanded into year eight and then again into year nine because we could see that This was going really well, but there was still more work that we wanted to do.
00:20:41
Speaker
And so over over three years, those kids took part in over 400 lessons. So it was an absolutely massive intervention. And yeah, it had an incredible impact on those kids. They got the best results that that school had ever seen by some margin, massively outstripped that control group.
00:20:57
Speaker
Who is worth remembering had 400 more lessons of subject based learning, right? Because they weren't doing all this stuff. And yet in subsequent measures of subject knowledge, they were being seriously outstripped by this this learner effectiveness cohort.
00:21:10
Speaker
And it was especially beneficial for disadvantaged kids. So that cut the gap closed from the bottom up almost completely, which was absolutely and you know amazing. Yeah. I'm so curious. I'm just going to keep driving on this because I think it's so fascinating. what What is like an example of an intervention that you did in in this new group that was different than like the what was business as usual for these students that you think right was the cause to the effect of the transformation that you saw?
00:21:39
Speaker
Yeah. So there are a number of them. So we did what you might call, as as you can imagine, in 400 lessons, like there's a lot going on. And so so we did We would call it a complex intervention, so and like an intervention with many moving parts. um and so and like Just to break it down a bit, so one thing was project-based learning, right? And i know that like PBL also gets a bad name, right? And it's also yeah on the naughty step, as it were.
00:22:04
Speaker
of education. And I think that i I can sort of understand where that's coming from in the sense of like, if you're, if I was a science teacher originally, and if you're trying to teach science and you do it in an open-ended project based way, it takes, so I remember doing like a six week project once about chromatography and the kids finally figured something out that I could have taught them in about a five minute demonstration, you know, and you sort of think, That's probably not the best use of time. You know, maybe it was just like, if you're trying to teach science, maybe just teach science.
00:22:31
Speaker
But if you're trying to teach people how to become more effective learners, how to manage their own time and resources, learning how, what they can and can't do under their own steam, then absolutely project-based learning is is the way to go.
00:22:44
Speaker
And so we would, one thing that was, really different to what they would have experienced anywhere else would be that we like so so for three of those five lessons a week it was project-based stuff and the very first project was a who am i project right so it's like identity who are you over to you you've got six weeks to answer that question and there's no further scaffolds or anything just go and you know and it's really interesting at that point you know some of the kids are naturally very organized. Perhaps they have parents who keep to-do lists and they're super organized and they've seen this model perhaps elsewhere and they just start ticking off to-do lists and they organize their time and they think, right, i'm going to do this for homework in week three and they just, they they crack on.
00:23:23
Speaker
And other kids, many of them really flounder and they just go like, I can't, there's no way that I could begin to organize my thoughts. This is too wide open and they sort of become this like beached jellyfish.
00:23:36
Speaker
And then there's a, There's a really interesting like tension then because as a teacher, the the temptation is to swoop in, to like intervene and throw them a life raft you know at the first sign of difficulty yeah and just like holding that tension. And obviously, you don't want them to flounder for six weeks and have nothing to show for their time.
00:23:53
Speaker
But you do have to bite your tongue a bit. And essentially, what we would find is that you you slip into ah like a coaching role rather than an instructional role. And so you sort of sit alongside the kids and because the other ones are all cracking on with their projects, you have more time in the classroom to do this.
00:24:07
Speaker
You can just sit alongside a kid and say, what's going on? And just gently try to question them towards sort of their own solutions. That's so brilliant. and And I i've see so many common threads of folks that I talk to who have switched to ah call it a project based, call it inquiry, whatever label you want to put on it, like this kind of pedagogy, right? An open ended one where, you know, um kids are tasked with organizing themselves, their orientation, their the processes that are going to work for them to approach a task. And it's going to be, you know, more or less um open-ended and ah divergent thinking as opposed to, you know, sort of a closed, what's the most efficient way from point A to point B that we can use to accomplish this learning task. And what you're saying is that the students, as a result of that, felt
00:24:55
Speaker
better and seem to, at least anecdotally, perform better on those things that we were saying at the beginning of the episode when we were looking at um troubled youth or teens who got on the wrong side of of the law for whatever reason, seem to flounder when they hit those times of uncertainty, you know, whether it's because of a lack of um resilience or a lack of tools in their toolkit for yeah how do I deal with these difficult situations?
00:25:21
Speaker
What you seem to be saying, what I hear you saying here is that perhaps your model and vision of the school experience for those kids was one that was more preparing them to deal with uncertainty and open-endedness and to know the tools in their own toolbox that they can wield against the you know wicked problems that pop up in their life and school as a really low stakes situation.
00:25:43
Speaker
safe place with a lot of supportive adults to try and new things and fail perhaps, or try new things and succeed and think, what can I do better next time? How do I iterate yeah on on these things? um yeah And yeah.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. and And the other big thing, or one of the other big things in this in this intervention was oracy. Again, I'm not sure if you use that word in the States, but like oracy is this word. You're right. So speaking and listening, spoken language.
00:26:11
Speaker
um And we we did everything with RSC. So like, like lots of paired talk, group talk, philosophical inquiries, as I said, like formal structured debates at the end of each half term project, the the kids would have to stand up and do some sort of presentation, like some sort of teachable moment.
00:26:28
Speaker
And they could choose the level of challenge there that could just be to one person or the teacher after school. If they felt really nervous, it could be to the class. It could be to an assembly, to parents, whatever. Sometimes we took them out into primary schools and they would run sessions for other kids.
00:26:41
Speaker
um And that is that was the special source, I think, more than anything. like When you when you look at what the kids... We would get them to write in their learning journals every week. We would have to ask them to write reflections on and how they learn in different subjects and and helping them to facilitate the process of transfer between subjects.
00:26:58
Speaker
um And we would often ask them, like do these lessons help you to learn more effectively in in your other subjects? And if so, how? And very strongly in the data it came through, which is which was A, like the vast majority said, yes, I do think that this helps me.
00:27:14
Speaker
And then it was confidence. It was just like they they they would use lots of different language to describe it, but they essentially nearly always said, it's the confidence that I've discovered through learning how to stand up in front of a room full of people and have my voice heard.
00:27:26
Speaker
I feel proud of myself. I have courage. I've found my sort of my core core. identity. This is quite emotional, this work. Sometimes I remember this was actually in a different different school, but I was working with with an Oracy initiative. And remember this girl, she was at about 14, and she was saying that before she had done this this speaking and listening qualification, that she felt invisible, that she was just like one of those kids that just ignored, that they didn't really have friends, they would never be sort of named by other kids, they weren't even disliked, they were just neglected, essentially, socially.
00:27:57
Speaker
And she said that this this project had sort of just helped her to find who she was as a person and not, and not only is she sort of now got friends and she developed this like really like sort of like and black sense of humor that had really made her very well liked among her peers, but she was from a very big family. She had like eight or nine siblings and she was able to take her place within her family. And she was just bursting with pride. And it was just, it's so beautiful to see that.
00:28:23
Speaker
And so I think that like ah out of all of the things in this complex intervention, it's probably the oracy what done it as it were. That's such a great way to put you know to put such a powerful statement. It was the oracy what done it.
00:28:36
Speaker
That was it. yeah What I'm hearing in that transformation right is that the business as usual school really seems to focus focus on content. right Content is going to be the way that you know kids are going to be smarter. They're going to be more able. They're going to be more capable in the world and as human beings, and whatever.
00:28:54
Speaker
And that other stuff, that ah that squishy stuff about identity and yourself and your relation to peers, society, family, what that'll just come. You know, we don't have to necessarily worry about that. That'll come. And when it doesn't, then we see the results of that. I think about myself at the beginning of my decade in the classroom and the kind of teacher i was.
00:29:13
Speaker
versus the one that I left and perhaps your own story too, James, like thinking about your you know decade plus in the classroom, who you were and then who you came back as in your transformation, but kind of thinking about teacher training, what could the typical teacher training stand to learn from looking in that direction, from peeking in your transformed classroom or learning from the world of self-directed education that's currently absent or missing in the UK context?
00:29:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, what a great question. I mean, like to pick up um on the thread that you just that you just and offered there of of like this focus on content and cognition, especially, like the they the raise of the rise of CogSci. And I've followed a few of your your tweets and posts in recent weeks and months.
00:29:57
Speaker
But there is more to education. I think I wrote this in a blog recently and put each word on a separate line in like bold letters because i was just really trying to emphasize it. There is more to education than cognition.
00:30:10
Speaker
like There's more to human development than just like memorizing information. And, and, and it's one of those funny things where like, if you say that to a trad, right, they will, they will go, well, nobody, nobody would say that. Nobody would, nobody would ever argue that that is the case.
00:30:27
Speaker
And yet, if you look at virtually all of the discourse around education, virtually all of the, the blogs and the posts and the talks and the conferences that are going on. is all about cognition.
00:30:39
Speaker
And so we've, like I've recently done this really interesting project with the Welsh government. And and there's a huge curriculum reform effort happening in Wales at the moment called Curriculum for Wales.
00:30:50
Speaker
um And we've been working on this project around learner effectiveness, which is like another name for learning to learn. It goes by many names. This, you know, we talked about self-regulated learning internationally. They often call it like competency-based learning.
00:31:04
Speaker
Oh, sure, sure. But it's all the same stuff, really. um It's like just the holistic, you know, like like the whole child, that sort of thing. And so we've developed this model, which we call the life wheel. And I'm going to try and like paint a picture in your mind and in the minds of your listeners.
00:31:19
Speaker
Take us on that ride, James. i mean for it We'll see how it goes. So imagine a circle with five wedges in it, right? um And so and so there's and then around the outside of that circle, there's a steering wheel, like a ship's wheel with handles sticking out.
00:31:35
Speaker
So the five wedges in the middle. Right. So we have physical domain. Right. So is are your learners looking after themselves physically? Do they do they get enough sleep? often that's not the case do they understand they have a healthy diet again often not really so much that you often see kids going into school like nailing a liter can of like monster or something some energy drink on the way into school not even really being aware of what that does to their blood sugar and what that does to like their neurotransmitters and how that might make them feel a bit cranky at half past 10 in the morning but they don't really know why and It's good to know that Welsh high school students and U.S. high school students are exactly the same in that regard.
00:32:15
Speaker
i always used to tell my high schoolers, I was like, what do you guys need energy for? You're 17 years old. you're as at You have as much energy as you're going to have in your entire life. I'd hate to see what's going to happen when you're my age, guys.
00:32:29
Speaker
But anyway, this is so funny. But it's just in it's just a cheap high, isn't it? right Or even they're not even that cheap, those drugs. But it's just like it definitely makes you feel like a bit too alert, let's say.
00:32:40
Speaker
and so um so um yeah so So we have the physical domain. So that like sleep, diet, also like like exercise, of course, but also like understanding your body and how your body how you can use your body as a tool for self-regulation. right So that you know if you're feeling nervous about stuff,
00:32:56
Speaker
Wiggling your toes, like pressing your feet into the ground, wiggling your fingers, just bringing your consciousness down into your body is a very, very powerful way to sort of to override your nervous system, to send a message to your nervous system that actually you're safe, you're okay. you're Because in the present moment, what what that exercise does is it brings you into the moment, doesn't it?
00:33:14
Speaker
Yeah, grounding exercise. yeah Yeah, exactly. Grounding exercise. Breath work is hugely powerful. Lots of different ways of using breath work. um And also the physical environment, understanding how the physical environment affects you. We won't go into all of that. So so that's wedge number one, the physical.
00:33:31
Speaker
Next, we have emotional, right? Emotional learning, emotional literacy, talking about your feelings, naming them, understanding the feelings of others. and also developing emotional self-regulation tools and strategies.
00:33:44
Speaker
And the the key there is to is to share a lot of strategies with your students and then allow them to choose and to experiment and to find what works for them. Because you could, for example, as a teacher, let's say you know like you're teaching a primary class and they all come in after after lunchtime and they're all like bright pink faces or they've all you know been running around and they they obviously you know the their their heart rate is raised, say.
00:34:08
Speaker
And the teacher might go, okay, everyone, we're all going to do like a breathing exercise to just get ourselves down. And we're going to just regulate our bodies. And here's a breathing exercise, breathe in for four, hold for four and all of that.
00:34:18
Speaker
And for probably about two thirds of those kids, that will that will probably work really nicely. But for for some of them, having your breathing externally regulated, like really just is like makes you feel quite panicky.
00:34:30
Speaker
And that's not for you. And so the key is to so rather than doing sort of like we're all going to self-regulate and I'm going to control that, you sort of share all of these resources and then go, right, kids, you've got like, let's say three three or four minutes just to self-regulate. Do what you need to do.
00:34:44
Speaker
Have a stretch. Just like shake out your limbs. Maybe you need to tidy the resource trays. Maybe you want to just put your head down quietly on the table. Whatever it is that you need to do so just... you know change your change your mindset and just get into the zone and we're going to do some whatever it might be you know in a few minutes to help make that transition from right one you know kind of learning and being at school to like another kind you know to help manage that transition and make it smoother for everybody Yeah, exactly. because it and Because often, you know, kids come into a lesson and if something's happened in the playground or in their social circle, somebody just ghosted them right in the corridor and they're were freaking out and they're like, all they want to do is text their friend and go, why didn't you say hello? What's going on? And and they they can't do that. But like they walk into the classroom and there's a quiz on the board and they're expected to sort of talk about all this geography stuff and their frontal lobes aren't online, right?
00:35:36
Speaker
When that social thing is all they can see or, you know, to think about, because the other part of this too, is younger kids, they struggle more with, you know, we would call them like executive skills or, you know, self-regulation. So giving them those tools and giving them the opportunity to practice that is such an awesome transferable skill. And so, yeah, so so you're saying the welsh Welsh government is being responsive in this kind of direction to help kids be more self-regulated and, ah um i guess, emotionally, physically grounded amongst other things as a way to perhaps address some of the problems that they're seeing, as opposed to one other response, which might just be like the, you know, crack the cane, down and strict discipline, no talking, you know, zero tolerance.
00:36:25
Speaker
and And this side of the Welsh border, there's no shortage of that. um You know, absolutely. that they that So, so there's yeah, there's plenty of that happening. But, yeah, the Welsh government are being really, really forward thinking.
00:36:37
Speaker
And so so, yeah, so that's – I'll go through this quickly. So that's wedged to emotional. Then we have the habitual domain or the behavioural domain – dialing up the habits of effective learners, right? That's stuff we were talking about, about like keeping to-do lists and calendar reminders and workflow.
00:36:53
Speaker
And then on the flip side, like dialing down, you know, if you if you have problematic behaviors that you habitually engage in, if you are addicted to technology, as so many people are, if you're ah if you're a chronic procrastinator, as so many people are, like how can you sort of learn how to dial that down a little bit so that you can learn how to, how to,
00:37:13
Speaker
allow the procrastinator the procrastinator within yourself to have a bit of air time. like you don't and you don't want to You don't want to just crack the whip and zero tolerance yourself into submission because that doesn't work.
00:37:24
Speaker
And likewise with tech, like how can we help kids to develop the tools? you know In the wake of Jonathan Haidt's book, lots of schools are saying, well, we're just going to ban smartphones. And that sort of deals with the problem as far as school goes. But if the kids are then exploding onto their smartphones as soon as they get out of school,
00:37:39
Speaker
which many of them are doing, then that's not enough, I don't think. I think that we need to be helping kids to develop those. those Yeah, it it just kicks the can down the road a little bit, doesn't it? It just says, this is just not something that school is going to deal with.
00:37:52
Speaker
So you deal with it outside of school. And as we've just been talking about, there are varied responses to what the you know that world outside of school looks like. And not all of those are healthy or sustainable or anything else, desirable.
00:38:05
Speaker
Right. Absolutely. Yes. So that's the habitual domain. Then we have relational learning. And first of all, that's like, how do you relate to yourself? You know, like like lots of people have lots of negative self-talk, right? They sort of the beat themselves up.
00:38:17
Speaker
They're inner critic. They sort of tell themselves little bits of scripts like, oh, you're stupid. You're terrible at math. That teacher hates you. You're unpopular. You're ugly. Whatever it might be. Like lots of people carry around that sort of stuff.
00:38:31
Speaker
and And they really believe it. and And one of the beautiful things about metacognition is that it just puts the brakes on. It's just a way to just sort of put the brakes and just to notice that pattern and then to sort of go, well, what if that's not true? You know, that that mantra that meditation teachers often say, like, you are not your thoughts.
00:38:48
Speaker
Like often people go through their whole life and they never realize that you don't have to identify with those thoughts. That that that's not true. That's not necessarily true. It's just like an unhelpful bit of scripts that's often coded in early childhood.
00:39:01
Speaker
And you just sort of telling yourself this story that you come to believe. But when you, when you, go through this process of metacognitively reflecting on that. And then you say, oh okay, what if that's not true? Like, what if there's another story that I could tell myself?
00:39:13
Speaker
what if What if that story was true up until today? But but from from this day forth, maybe a different story could be true. Maybe I could step into that reality. And maybe I could start to enjoy aspects of math. Or maybe I could start to love myself or be kinder to myself, you know. And all of that stuff is possible.
00:39:30
Speaker
um And so relating to self is a big one. Also relating to others, of course, and self-re in in relational learning and relating to the wider world. So that's the relational wedge. Then we have the fifth one, which is cognitive.
00:39:42
Speaker
So this is not some sort of anti anti-cognition, anti-memory thing. So, you know, learning cognitive strategies, understanding about how brains learn things, how memories are formed and what have you and what works for you.
00:39:54
Speaker
And then developing yeah developing strategies. And then around the outside is this did the the ship's wheel bit. We call it the life wheel is the navigational domain. Right. Which is like, OK, sort thinking about where are you now in relation to any of this stuff? Sleep, diet, exercise.
00:40:08
Speaker
Have you got a really chaotic social life and there's always drama everywhere and you keep generating it and you don't know how to make it stop? Whatever it might be. And where do you want to be? and And how might you get from A to B? And then there's these sort of change tools.
00:40:20
Speaker
And so we've developed this with with Kate and this this steering group of 17 schools around Wales. We've created this toolkit. There's like 72 strategies. So there's like 12 in each of these six domains that are designed to help kids to...
00:40:35
Speaker
well, to to figure out what's going on for them and how they can how they can move forward in all of these areas of their life. And so it's not, like I say, it's not anti-cognition at all. But what I what often see in schools is that, like if you picture that that ship's wheel as like a ah roulette wheel, it feels like schools have just put all their chips in the cognitive wedge.
00:40:52
Speaker
And it's all that you hear people talking about. And I see this so often in the schools that I work in where they're The teachers are doing a really good job in that cognitive wedge. You know, they're they're planning really good lessons. There's good resources. There's revision strategies. They've got all the equipment and flashcards and all of that.
00:41:07
Speaker
But the the information is not sticking. And it's not because of any cognitive deficit. It's because there are unaddressed issues in these other areas of their lives that are just, you know, not getting the attention that they need.
00:41:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's putting the cognitive. I mean, it's situating it inside the whole learning context. I mean, students aren't able just to take their brain out and put it on the desk and say, OK, just teach this part of my brain today, separate from all of the other separate from my body.
00:41:34
Speaker
which is separate from the space, which is separated from the social context and the behavior, of relational, Yeah, and separate from my feelings, my inconvenient feelings. Yeah, unfortunately, as a human being, I have to deal with all of these things all the time, all at once. I can't do that. I can't, I can't, ah wouldn't it be great if ah students could be severed, like in the show Severance, where when they walk into school, suddenly they forget.
00:41:59
Speaker
Oh, man. There are some traditionalists working on a severance chip. I i assure you that's happening. i won't I won't give Greg Ashman any ideas, but ah ah but that that is truly their vision of it And I think this is just so much more of an honest thing.
00:42:14
Speaker
approach to say, right, like we't we don't have the luxury of just teaching cognitive beings, right? We teach kids, embodied humans in all of the messy context. And we have to grapple with those in schools, whether we like it or not, because if we don't and we don't give kids the tools um to either self-regulate or co-regulate, right, with people who have more ah capability in that area, so that way they can one day self-regulate.
00:42:42
Speaker
Then we're just kicking the can, be it with phones, which explode outside of school or with other behaviors, too, where kids were nominally successful in the cognitive parts of school hit a wall and have neglected the what we've you know called soft skills or any of these other um executive skills. And now they don't know how to function and fall into bad habits and behaviors. So it really just seems like so much more of a an honest, holistic, human um approach to things. How has the Welsh government, how have they navigated the pressure from test scores or from, you know, being put in the league tables on international assessments? Or do they just say like, do they have the courage to say, we don't care about all that. We care about our kids and we want to do what's best for them, regardless of what the league tables say.
00:43:31
Speaker
Right. I mean, of course, there's a bit of both there, right? like And and there theyre like with any sort of national reform efforts, like there there is an understandable degree of anxiety around what yeah what is this going to do? Is this going to negatively impact ah literacy, numeracy?
00:43:46
Speaker
There are lots of issues that are just common across the across the world, but that are very live in Wales around absenteeism, lots of sort of disengagement, lots of like quite challenging behavior in schools and so on.
00:43:57
Speaker
and And of course, they're they're concerned to to improve literacy and numeracy and and and exam scores as well. It's just about finding the balance, right? And and and I think that like like a completely self-directed um environment, and I've worked in places like that that are just like,
00:44:14
Speaker
Yes, like the self-managed learning college in Brighton, which was just is literally self-managed like the whole the whole way through. And I kind of feel like that's just a bit too loose. Right. And I'm i'm very comfortable with the idea of just finding this middle ground of having subject learning and self-directed learning.
00:44:31
Speaker
I think my ideal model would be something like 60 percent of the time would be spent in subject learning. 20% in self-directed learning, a bit like what we had five five lessons a week, and then 20% interdisciplinary learning, right? Because that's the other thing that just so often, well, it just just doesn't get addressed, does it? Like the world is not divided into, you know, if you turn the news on at night and they go, in geography news, we've discovered a new volcano. And in history news, like that's not the world, is it? the world Like you say, just like people are all are all a mess of interconnected stuff.
00:45:03
Speaker
So is the world. And this this this sort of very atomized model of of understanding the world that's presented by a purely subject based curriculum is wild. And so, um yeah, I would i would go 20% interdisciplinary learning as well so that we can start to figure out how all of this stuff fits together.
00:45:20
Speaker
And probably overlapping Venn diagrams between all of those things, right? Your interdisciplinary is going to touch the disciplinary. Of course, yeah. you know You're going to dip in and out of you know deep so subject matter and then come back up to make the interdisciplinary connections. And then there might be a self you know um self-guided inquiry in and amongst all of those two and then ah collaborative piece. So, oh, it's just...
00:45:44
Speaker
I think it's it's such a refreshing um approach and an honest approach to, I think, to really the the multiple and varied goals of schools, which have to be more than, ah you know, just ah filling your brain with as much um ah content as possible. I found, quick side note, but I found the piece that you were talking about where you wrote, there is more to human development learning of subject knowledge. And you have this great cartoon on here.
00:46:09
Speaker
It shows kids with barcodes. I don't know if it's barcodes or if they have USB drives. It's USB ports. It's USB. Okay. It says, just upload the curriculum into their long-term memory and call it a day. If only it were so easy, right?
00:46:21
Speaker
If only that was the task ah before us, but it is not. Yeah, but but i i like people they know there are there are people who genuinely do think that that is your job as a teacher and that if you that that that people like you and I and other people who are interested in this...
00:46:37
Speaker
in this um broader agenda are guilty of overreach right and that this this that this is like the domain of parents and that we should just we should just like resign ourselves to just teaching geography in the most efficient way possible or whatever subject it might be and then leave all of that messy stuff beyond beyond the school um and we need that you know we need we need people who are subject specialists you like One of my educational heroes is a guy called Ian Cunningham, the guy who set up the self-managed learning college in Brighton, where I worked for a while.
00:47:09
Speaker
um And he talks about P-mode and S-mode learning. And he sort of says you need both. And for him, P-mode is like, who is the person? What are the problems that they face? what are the What are their patterns, their proclivities, right? You could come up with a bunch of Ps, but it's essentially person-centered stuff.
00:47:24
Speaker
And then S-mode learning is like subjects and skills and specialisms and so on, stuff. stuff that you need to know and what he says is that you need to start with p and then go to s so like figure out who is the person what is it that they want to achieve in life what what are their goals and then we'll figure out what what's the s stuff that's going to help them become the p that they want to be And schools just start with S and stay there, right? And it's we don't really care who you are as people or what you're but your passions are or proclivities or problems.
00:47:56
Speaker
It's just like, you've just got to do this stuff, right? And we've just we've we've got it all worked out for you. um And that's why we see so much of this disengagement, right? And the what's what's just so interesting is that... um like In some ways, as as teachers are sort of getting better at their jobs in many ways, ah being more sort of efficient at at subject teaching and at testing and using formative assessments and becoming much more research engaged as a profession and using you know engaging with aspects of cognitive science and what have you.
00:48:29
Speaker
In some ways, the the the profession feels sort of more professional and a bit more sure-footed than it has been in the past, certainly in my early early years as a teacher. And yet, at the same time, if you look at what's going on and beyond the test scores, the attendance crisis is absolutely devastating.
00:48:50
Speaker
bewildering the mental health crisis is bewildering there's uh teacher retention and recruitment issues are plenty there's so many like lots of challenging behavior there's so many issues the so-called poly crisis right that i that i wrote about recently um and and so we've got this very sort of like bifurcated image where on one hand on the one hand schools are sort of becoming more efficient and yet it seems to be having a sort of like I don't know whether I would I would I would hesitate to to to put a causal relationship on this I think that these two things are sort of happening in tandem rather than one necessarily being caused purely by the other although you could probably draw a few lines across um but yeah like the picture is not pretty right like kids are kids are really struggling to attend they're not feeling good about themselves and all of this very efficient teaching and learning doesn't really seem to be helping very much
00:49:44
Speaker
Yeah. So earlier this year, James, you published a piece on your substack titled Confronting the Educational Crisis, Poly Crisis, forgive me, Seven Crises, One System and a Path Forward.
00:49:56
Speaker
We've been kind of skirting around the edges of it. I quoted it in the introduction. And it seems like in an age of marketing and easy answers, that piece, like the rest of this conversation so far has been the most honest that I've seen about the scope and scale of the problems facing schooling and society, as well as, you know, the complexity and urgency of those solutions.
00:50:16
Speaker
Yeah. I think for listeners, despite having a localized UK context for you, I found those issues and the potential solutions universal across what we might consider Western school systems. And there are echoes to me of what Posse Sahlberg dubbed germ or the global education reform movement. And this ensuing malaise, you know, that seems to be more than just a lingering side effect of the pandemic. Something seems to have been transformed. And I'll i'll bring up an example um for for listeners if they're not super familiar. But in a recent episode of your own podcast, um you highlighted UK trends in international math and science data or the TIMSS data.
00:50:58
Speaker
that reported secondary pupils in England have amongst the lowest school engagement rates in the world, which just shocked me. And and the difference was so stark um between past performances, stark differences between girls and boys.
00:51:13
Speaker
At the same time, as you were mentioning, growing absenteeism, behavior and disciplinary crises, these um girls feeling far less safe at school compared to boys, less safe than girls in peer countries.
00:51:27
Speaker
There's just so much to unpack in that in that poly crisis. How would you describe the current state of schooling in the UK? And what are those challenges shaping the poly crisis? Yeah, yeah.
00:51:38
Speaker
It's a heavy topic, this one. um And it's so so so they this term, this term polycrisis is generally used like just more broadly to describe the sort of like like nexus of like interlocking issues like around global conflicts, energy crises, the climate crisis and economic fluctuations and what have you.
00:51:57
Speaker
ah And it's often referred to as the polycrisis. And in that piece, I sort of tried to argue the case that we have an educational polycrisis. If we just zoom into education, this is one part of the polycrisis, as it were. But within education, there are all of these, there's this like multiple pileup and like you were describing. And so, yeah, so in that in that piece, I mentioned seven, but I could have easily gone into high into the double figures.
00:52:23
Speaker
um For example, I didn't mention the special educational needs and disabilities crisis, which is very acute in this country. So looking at attendance, behavior, teacher retention and recruitment, um almost any metric, mental health and well-being is in terrible shape, not just among children and young people, but among educators as well. Mental health of of educators is is not in good shape.
00:52:47
Speaker
and And it's it's one of those interesting, like, so the word crisis is is used in different ways, isn't it? Like sometimes people sort of like something like a humanitarian crisis, there's there's something that's sudden, there's been an earthquake or something, and there's just like sudden bad situation that needs to be dealt with.
00:53:03
Speaker
And then there's a more of like a creeping crisis, something that's sort of just gradually getting worse, a little bit like the attendance figures, for example, ah like there were there were more and more and more kids not attending school. And that that was, that would the the trend was increasing quite steeply before COVID.
00:53:19
Speaker
It was hugely exacerbated by COVID, but it's still continuing to increase post COVID. And these things eventually get to the point where you point where you might say, well, we are at crisis point now. Like this is, you know, at the moment now we're over 20%, over 20% of the kids in this country are persistent absentees from school.
00:53:40
Speaker
And there's only 9 million kids. So that, you know, so yeah, it's over 2 million. and students are persistent absentees and of those about 150,000 are missing more than half of their time at school there's on top of that there's about another 100,000 150,000 kids who are homeschooling the numbers of those are increasing all the time as they are in the states as well um and and And within that, there's lots and lots of suffering, you know, and it's it's that like the it's it's not, and we're not having this conversation in a vacuum, you know, it's not just some sort of ideological
00:54:16
Speaker
did like discussion of on an intellectual level about like the merits of of inquiry learning versus you know direct instruction. It's like there are lots and lots of people who are really suffering and because of the way that the system is currently configured.
00:54:30
Speaker
and And I think that I'm not really like ah conspiracy theorist about that. I just think that like the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And at every turn people have sort of tried to do things that like, that they think are in the, in the children's best interests.
00:54:46
Speaker
Like for example, setting up Ofsted, we have this like school inspectorate called Ofsted. And the aim there was that that there were some schools that were so unruly and that, you know, we needed to get a window into those schools and and the harsh conditions. gaze of of this this school inspectorate would persuade those schools to jolly well pull their socks up and get their game in order and improve outcomes for kids.
00:55:06
Speaker
And in some ways, that is what happened when we introduced Ofsted. But also, Ofsted became this very, very toxic influence of just this site high stakes, high pressure accountability And recently there was this huge, um very tragic situation in this country where a school was was judged to be inadequate and by by as by a team of school inspectors. And the headteacher took their own life as a consequence of this. And there was this huge... um sort of backlash against that. And, and so it's it's just one example, or, or, you know, like introducing standardized exams, you know, having setting high, high expectations in terms of literacy and numeracy, having a pass fail rate so that, you know, so that it's sort of, so that it means something, but of course that then means that you have enforced failure.
00:55:52
Speaker
And so that every step along the way, we've sort of like individuals have tried to tinker with the system and we've ended up with this, with this set of, of, of policies and practices that,
00:56:03
Speaker
um together are proving to be really quite problematic and in all kinds of ways. And and they're showing up in in, as you say, in all of these different crises, which are very sort of interconnected.
00:56:15
Speaker
and But therefore, I think the the hopeful spin on all of this is that because these crises are all interconnected, if we can figure out where the end of the piece of string is, and I have one or two suggestions,
00:56:27
Speaker
We're going to really alleviate lots of those problems simultaneously because they sort of have knock-on effects, you know. I get the sense in the United States that it's not necessarily, as you were saying earlier, cause and effect, but I get the sense that a contributing factor to the crises of both K-12 and of higher education in the United States is just the high stakes That we've put on education as a whole to solve all of the problems of society in lieu of other social, political you know structures and supports. So, you know, in the United States, we just say, hey, education is the pathway to
00:57:02
Speaker
a good job. itll And a good job will get you healthcare care and it will get you housing and it will get you these things. And if you don't have those in the United States, right, you're destitute, you know? So education is and incredibly high stakes um and the the results of a lack of success within that system can be incredibly punishing.
00:57:20
Speaker
yeah um And I don't know if maybe... in the UK, you've seen a shift to that too, in a, in the sense of cuts to, um you know, healthcare, more austerity measures, less social spending and things. I kind of see these as interrelated factors. Do you get that sense as well?
00:57:37
Speaker
hundred percent. Yes, absolutely. And, and, and again, again that's probably some of the reason for all the the distress that's felt by teachers, I think, is that ah there's been so much discussion around disadvantage as though it's like,
00:57:48
Speaker
teachers jobs to to fix the disadvantage gap and actually the disadvantage gap is economic and and like the and the answer to that is to give money to poor people and that's gonna they close that disadvantage gap uh but we haven't quite we haven't quite taken to put two and two together there and so absolutely yeah there's our story austerity that was happening throughout the twenty ten s and and rather grimly even though we've recently just had a change of government to a government that on paper looks more progressive there's still like a two-child cap on child benefits there's they they're taking the winter fuel allowance away from pensioners they're reducing disability allowance you know like it's it's grim right and absolutely and so that they these wider societal uh pressures
00:58:35
Speaker
uh, the economic reality of the, of a very divided and unequal and polarized external world is, is like an unhelpful backdrop for sure. Yeah. And in trying to use school-based solutions as, you know, as school-based policies, as solutions to structural, social, economic inequalities that existed before kids got through the schoolhouse door and that they'll go back to, you know, when, when they leave school. Um,
00:59:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's sort of all downstream from from those things in my mind. Yes. Yeah, I think so. We have, we like, like, yeah, there was, you were saying about how that in the UK, we have this like, like terrible data around like the their kids, are the like the they they, I think that the Tim's data that you mentioned, it was something like, do you enjoy school? I think that was the question. and It was like far fewer kids are are answering yes to that than at any point in history. Um, and that's also happening against the backdrop, as you say, of, of, um,
00:59:36
Speaker
You know, it's it's just actually just just to just so to to link to something else that you mentioned earlier about the sort of that the the manosphere. Right. And like recently there was this program i don't know if you caught it. It was on Netflix called Adolescence.
00:59:47
Speaker
It was very much a UK based program, but it was about this young boy who sort of gets involved in this crime. And he was influenced by these online sort of manosphere type people. And it was all about misogyny and incels and all of that stuff.
00:59:59
Speaker
um And there was this, um there was sort of this moral panic about it. There was a bit like a public outcry and people were like, oh my goodness, there's this new sort of like terrible thing happening in schools.
01:00:11
Speaker
um And, you know, like things like this flare up from time to time, you know, like like the issues around smartphone use, issues around whatever, like the Me Too movement and, you know, like like sexual equality and gender issues and what have you.
01:00:25
Speaker
And there just needs to be some time and space for, in the school day for us to just talk about this stuff and like like another piece that I wrote recently was it was making the case for making sense lessons just like one lesson a week to just sit like in one of those inquiry circles like we're talking about earlier and just so that who who's got something to bring you can you can have a little suggestion box what do you want to ask questions about you might not want to say it publicly but what do you want to ask a question about and let's just let's just talk about this let's talk about the manosphere let's talk about misogyny or whatever and and just let's sort of make sense of this of this um very rapidly changing world that we're all sort of plugged into and everyone's a bit on the back foot you know ai is just rampantly eating away at almost every aspect of our lives and every time you open your computer there's a new ai they're trying to do something for you and
01:01:17
Speaker
we we all sort of need time to to just like have a conversation about this and say like, you know, is everyone okay with this? Like, like what's it is everyone okay? Like what's happening? it could just It could just be the, is it everyone okay circle? And we'll just go around and just be like, hey, are we all doing okay? Are there things that we want to talk about here, whatever? And and again, it that doesn't have to be an eight hour a day, five days a week program. That that takes five, 10 minutes.
01:01:43
Speaker
You know, maybe it's a mini lesson that emerges out of that, but at least you're being responsive to students in that moment. um This conversation brought to mind a conversation we had with, um a real small staff of teachers in North Carolina um a while ago.
01:01:57
Speaker
And, you know, when we were talking about um students and their needs, sort of the typical um teachers lounge criticisms of kids came up where, you know, they don't know how to write emails, they don't know how to change a tire, they can't, you know, they don't have all of these things.
01:02:12
Speaker
And we just sort of redirected the conversation to say, like, hey, if we think that these are important things, don't we think that's worth taking time out of the day to teach for kids? And again, not eight hours a day, but if you want kids to know how to write an email to an adult, you know, who it it might be a little bit more of a formal relationship instead of just talking like you're texting your friends, we'll just teach a 15 minute lesson and about that, right? Like, and maybe, hey, once a week,
01:02:36
Speaker
for, don't know, half an hour, you can just make a list of all those things, either that you think kids should be able to know and do or go to kids themselves and ask, hey, what's a question that you guys have about, you know, the world that scares you? What do you want to know how to do?
01:02:51
Speaker
And us as supportive adults in the community, we'll take the time out of the week and help you you you, know, be more confident and capable with those things, right? Pull up you know, the principal's car outside and let's all take turns, you know, um jacking it up here and and and swapping the tire out. Let's take half an hour just to learn how to do that. How do you, you know, how do you deal with all these different things that pop up in in the course of your life? And if we think as adults that they're important, let's take time out of the school day to to deal with it instead of, you know, just say like the path to success is through memorizing memorizing content knowledge. I think
01:03:26
Speaker
ah Maybe I've stumbled onto something here but in my in my head as I've been talking my way through this, but perhaps is it the case that kids feel an alienation from the world and they can tell they can sense the artifice of school you know in the sense that they school is not addressing things that I find are important and it it's not that venue for me to find purpose and meaning. So I find that elsewhere. Could that be a little bit of the disengagement just in terms of- 100%.
01:03:55
Speaker
alienation and isolation from school itself. I really think so. I mean, we're just we're just telling this very outdated and really quite dry story, which is like if you attend school every day, which is hard and you probably don't want to do that.
01:04:07
Speaker
And and and will by the way, we'll fine your parents if you if you don't attend. And if you you know study really hard for all these exams, which has got stuff full of all this like arcane, dry knowledge.
01:04:19
Speaker
And by the way, there's too many of them. like You only need five exams to get into college, but we're going to make you do 10. 10 subjects. And actually across a month, like our our kids at age 16, they do 27 exams in the space of a month.
01:04:32
Speaker
It's just absolutely inhumane. And those exams essentially, you know, mark a trajectory for the rest of your adult life, you know, basically in the GSEs.
01:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. and then and then you know And then if you pass those exams and you do really well, then you can go on to university and get into £100,000 worth of debt and then you'll be happy, right?
01:04:54
Speaker
That's literally the story that we're saying. And and none of the teachers even believe that. like like I think that you know when when when un you when university tuition fees were free, and And I was in one of the last cohorts to go through with that.
01:05:06
Speaker
um You know, that was, it was an appealing story. Yeah. Fuck it. Go to university. Sorry. I don't know if we're allowed to swear on your podcast. and Yeah. Just like, yeah, go to uni and just study something, but for the, you know, just, just for the love of it. But now that's a very different equation.
01:05:22
Speaker
And of course those kids have been told this irrelevant story by, by people who are, you know, purveying this like quite difficult abstract, often really just quite arcane, like I say, uh, knowledge about the, whatever the periodic table and, and the nitrogen cycle and the, the electro, whatever magnet magnets and things and things that, you know, you could very well find very interesting if you did that P mode to S mode thing, but just starting with S mode, just out of the clear blue sky, here's the specific heat capacity of steel kids. And they're all like,
01:05:52
Speaker
Thank you. whoa, whoa. Almost the only the only rational response to that is is to reject it. And as you say, they go like they explode onto their smartphone and there's like Andrew Tate smoking a cigar in a sports car surrounded by whatever semi-naked people.
01:06:09
Speaker
And then they're like, here's another version of of like of what what masculinity is or what a successful life is or how to make money on OnlyFans or whatever. And you can live this materialistic life. And naturally, you know,
01:06:23
Speaker
kids are finding that an appealing story. And so- Which one's more appealing to a 13 year old, right? Right, right. Absolutely. And so, um so, so we need, we need to figure out like a way to tell better stories. And like you said, you know, the thing that you've got on your t-shirt, ah trust students, man, like that's all it takes is just to like, just to do, just to give them.
01:06:44
Speaker
And and um I think maybe even more than trust, just like respect students. It's just like, literally just like listen to them. let them be, let their views and concerns and anxieties and hopes be heard and seen and taken seriously and help to help them to sort of, to take their, to take their own steps on that journey. And that's, you know, going back to that life wheel thing, the aim of that is that the kid stands at the helm, as it were, the kid is standing ah that at at that ship's wheel, figuring out where they want to steer their ship from one week to the next.
01:07:17
Speaker
And like I say, I'm not so saying that we should get or do away with subject learning and only do this stuff. I reckon about 20% of the curriculum time would be a good a good balance. And I think over the course of the conversation, we've we've charted some models and examples of schools and contexts and classrooms like your own that have seen turnarounds in students and schools as a result of ah you know just not not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but just shifting the balance a little bit, right? Being that much more responsive, providing that much space, incorporating different frameworks. And I think as we...
01:07:53
Speaker
As I think about you know the United States and its poly crisis as the one in the UK and its ah relationships, and then the need for poly solutions to the poly crisis, what needs to change? You have sort of a 95 theses on this piece, James, about what needs to change.
01:08:14
Speaker
What needs to change and how do we get there, man? So, so if that feels like the sort of question that I should say. And go. Yeah, that feels like the sort of question that I should say, well, I couldn't possibly daint it. But I actually, ah literally do think that I have like a really good workable solution. do, yeah. And and and so so, and it comes in two layers, right? So one of them is like what we do in terms of like what we're doing with the kids. And one of them is about how we run schools.
01:08:40
Speaker
So in terms of the kids, like ah like we've already touched upon it a few times, but just carve out some time in the space and space in the school week as much as you can muster up to you know like that that maximum model that I talked about. So the minimum offer, I would say two lessons a week.
01:08:56
Speaker
Number one, one of those making sense lessons, which I think would act as almost as like a release valve. It's just like... oh, you don't have to write anything in this lesson. you Teachers don't have to plan anything.
01:09:07
Speaker
They just have to sit there and just check in with each other and make sense of stuff and speak and listen together. And that's that's a wonderful thing to do. And also a weekly review lesson. So like,
01:09:18
Speaker
did this work that's i've been doing with welsh government so so we're advocating not every school will do this these things can fit it fit into school days in all kinds of different ways but the idea is that you have one lesson a week where you sort of spend 20 minutes looking back at the previous week so it might have been the previous week you might have set yourself a goal and it was like develop ah a sleep routine so like ah a winding down routine set yourself a bedtime alarm turn your screens off read a book have a bath whatever it is just like figure out how to make sure that you're getting enough sleep. And so that was your target last week. And so let's just review that.
01:09:49
Speaker
How did it go? how How is your sleep looking? Maybe you've got some data on an app on your phone whatever, right? And then, so you reflect on that and you all talk together. And then the middle bit of the the the the filling of the sandwich, if you like, is like, here's a new strategy that we might try this week. And this is breath work or it's about, you know, whatever it might be. There's 72 of these strategies that we've come up with.
01:10:09
Speaker
And then there's the the final bit of the um lesson is, planning, right? So like, when are we going to do this? What does it look like? Let's practice some of these breathwork techniques so that we've got the hang of it and think about when and when in the next few days, do you think might be a good time to to do that?
01:10:24
Speaker
When do you think that you might, you know, if you're about to go and... ah you know, play a sports match or something. Maybe you want to do it before then. whatever it is So you can sort of plan it. And then again, you review that the following week. And it's just, and and that's sort of very simple, just like checking in and taking action. It's like monitoring and control.
01:10:41
Speaker
That is, that's what metacognition and self-regulation boils down to. It's just like checking in, taking action, look notice patterns in your thoughts, your feelings, your behaviors, try stuff, do stuff.
01:10:54
Speaker
feedback on it and just talk about it, you know? And so that would be my, my minimum offer. Like if you have a weekly, weekly making sense lesson and a weekly to do lesson, something like lasting on a Friday, first thing on a Monday, something like that to bookend the week would be lovely.
01:11:10
Speaker
If you wanted to dial that up a little bit, I would go 20% self-directed learning, a bit like the model that we developed at Seaview. um And there's quite a few people who advocate for this. there's a guy in this country called Derry Hannam, who's been campaigning for years on 20% curriculum time.
01:11:26
Speaker
And if people are interested in that, I hesitate to do the book plug thing. But I wrote a book a few years ago called Fear is the Mind Killer um with my amazing colleague who I've mentioned about five times already, Kate McAllister.
01:11:39
Speaker
um And that's that's like a working sort of handbook for like how to do that 20% thing. It's got all of all the information that you need is in there. and ah And then if you really wanted to dial it up, I would do that 20% interdisciplinary learning thing.
01:11:53
Speaker
um So I think, yeah, just carve out time and space in the school day for kids to to to take more ownership over their learning. And then... On the leadership side, i wrote another book that came out earlier this year called Making Change Stick.
01:12:07
Speaker
And it's about like drawing lessons from implementation science and improvement science and applying them to education. And at the heart of this model is this idea of a slice team. So you have, instead of the instead of decisions all being made by senior leaders, which is what nearly always happens, the the top brass, the leadership, the...
01:12:25
Speaker
the like the myth of the heroic leader that we labor under, not just in education, right, but in health, in business, in politics. We all just seem to accept that there is just supposed to be a small number of people at the top of these pyramids who can sort of save us from ourselves.
01:12:41
Speaker
And it doesn't work very well, does it? is If you look at all of these like very deep rooted problems that are happening around the world, it's very clear that our that our political leaders do not have the answers to those to those and problems.
01:12:53
Speaker
And likewise, senior leaders, and part of the reason is groupthink, which is just like, those people are all quite like-minded. School leaders are all school leaders. They are not classroom assistants. They are not early career teachers.
01:13:06
Speaker
They are not kids with special needs. And so the idea of a slice team is you get a representative group of people, all those different types of people, all around the decision-making table together, not just as a consultation exercise, but literally like that slice team becomes the executive that's tasked with overseeing this particular area of school improvement.
Decision-Making with Slice Teams
01:13:25
Speaker
Yeah. And it's amazingly effective. I've been doing this, again, lots in Wales, but also around the world. And two things happen when you work with a slice team in this way. One is that you get much better decision-making because you're looking at these problems from all of these multiple lenses, multiple perspectives.
01:13:41
Speaker
And two, you get buy-in. Like people come with you on the journey because they can see that this isn't just more like being told what to do by somebody in a suit, but they they feel represented and and respected and listened to.
01:13:52
Speaker
And they come with you on the journey. um And I think that that's a ah big part of the solution as well. Yeah, just as just as I would imagine there's a shift in the classroom, there has to be that shift in leadership towards a more balanced approach. And for for me, it just sort of makes sense, I think, because one person can only ever have one set of maybe changing ideas or they're getting orders from somebody else if they're a government officer or something like that. But I would imagine that a larger group of people, you know, if you take that slice or that like ice core sort of idea, right, if you drill down, pull that out here and count the slices, we you're going to inevitably end up with more and better ideas from the people about which those policies and changes are going to impact.
01:14:37
Speaker
So not only are they going to be better ideas, but they're going to be more sustainable and you're going to get buy in anyway. So that just makes so much sense as a starting point for leadership anyway. Is there is there a third layer
Slice Politics in Government and Education
01:14:50
Speaker
to this? There's like a school-based one.
01:14:52
Speaker
There's a school leadership one. there like a third leg of the stool here? Or what what what's what what do we got?
01:15:02
Speaker
Oh, no, James. I... I don't know if that was me. Oh, sorry. I beg your pardon. No, I muted myself. Okay. No, no, no. I'm back. and Yeah, so so funnily enough, I've just spent most of the last week um writing a ah green paper, like an uninvited green green paper, an independent green paper.
01:15:20
Speaker
Do you know if your green paper's in the States? It's sort of like it's usually a... A government paper. so So you have a green paper, which is like a discussion paper, and then a white paper, which sort of sets out what what this legislation is likely to to do.
01:15:32
Speaker
And then you have legislation, right? And so a green paper is essentially a discussion paper. But I've just written a ah green paper, which I'm going to um approach some friends in politics with and say, like, we should have slice politics, right?
01:15:46
Speaker
Right. That's what we should have. that Instead of just having like a small number of of people at the top of like the Department for Health or the Department for whatever it might be. You've got some interesting picks for the for departments in your country at the moment.
01:16:00
Speaker
ah Not all of them with much domain expertise, let's say. and And so, but but if you had a ah slice team, right? So if you think about the Department for Education, which is the most natural one to think about, instead of just having one person at the top of that organization, and if you go to the Department for Education, ah i imagine they still have this, they did a few years ago, they have one of those like pictures of everybody on the on the wall and and the Secretary of State is at the top, then they've got their senior leadership team in a row beneath them. And then it's this very, it's just that pyramid again.
01:16:32
Speaker
And it's ridiculous to think that that one person has got all the answers, but instead we should have a slice team at the top of that, at the top of that organization with, with, with a horizonrid sorry a horizontal slice, first of all. So you have like somebody who's an expert in special educational needs in early years in assessment, curriculum, whatever it might be. There's probably about 20 different areas of education.
01:16:53
Speaker
And then each of those people would be supported by a vertical slice team. So in special educational needs, there would be, a SENCO, the Special and Educational Needs Coordinator from a school or two, primary and secondary, young people who you know have experienced what it's like to to um live life with these with these um special educational needs and neurodivergences and what have you, parents, classroom teachers, middle leaders, senior leaders, researchers, policymakers, all working on SEND policy, right? and then the next And then you'd also have a SLEIS team looking at
01:17:27
Speaker
attendance and behavior you'd also have a slice team and so you and then each of them would be connected geographically through further horizontal teams so you have this this network of slices where you just have much more representative decision making essentially and i think that that is also like yeah as if you were to say like what's the third leg of the stool let's change what's happening at the classroom level let's change what's happening at the level of school leadership And yeah, we need to we need to shoot the big the big fish in this tank here and say, like, we need to really, really rethink the way that we go about politics.
01:18:01
Speaker
And I think maybe this is a bit off the charts for your podcast, but just very briefly, if I may, like, it really feels like this is an idea that that for which the time has is ripe, where we've got this very, like, super polarized world, ever ever further polarizing. The algorithms are just dividing, dividing people day by day by day.
01:18:21
Speaker
to the extent that we have just wildly different... you know I listened to a really good podcast about US politics recently. They were talking about it's like the same people are watching the same news stories, but they're just watching two different movies. There's just these two completely different narratives are playing out.
01:18:37
Speaker
We're looking at the same stuff and and interpreting it in wildly different ways. And I think the only the only way that we're going to navigate this very complex, rapidly changing, divided world is by putting diverse groups of people together in rooms and just talking it out, right? And this this just feels to me like this idea of slice politics is the operating system that we need.
01:18:59
Speaker
And it's also, in some sense, it's like a pure form of populism, right? It's like it's it's the ultimate anti-elite, ah anti-incumbency movement argument it's just like we need to not just have like these career politicians making decisions let's have people like you in the corridors of power make shaping the decisions that affect people like you it feels like that's an idea whose time has come but so far there's only me who thinks that so i'm working on that banging that gone Although, you know what I have to say, as someone who's been like inundating himself with Dewey and reading, know, back 100 years through Dewey's works, sounds a lot like the kind of participatory democratic classroom models that, you know, in the Dewey-an sense, which is an American ideal at its heart,
Democratic Decision-Making and Hierarchies
01:19:43
Speaker
Right. As a participatory democratic education a bulwark against, you know, autocracy and oligarchy and, know, anti-democratic illiberal ends in society. And think, you know, Dewey would argue that like.
01:20:01
Speaker
That dialogue between classroom and the world outside of the classroom, right? They influence each other, just like you said at the B, the inkling that you had at the beginning of this episode, right? And, and i think the more that we've lost um schools as the kinds of places like you're talking about here, um,
01:20:21
Speaker
When I was listening to to your solutions, James, it sounds like you have one solution for all three of those places. And it's it's more democratic decision making, right? More responsiveness, not less. It's break down, you know, hierarchies both within the classrooms between teachers and students, right? And those dichotomies and contentions between novice and expert and teacher and learner.
01:20:45
Speaker
And then- Within schools, between teachers and head teachers and school administrators and and officials, and then outside of the classroom as well in government and politics to say like, oh, I'm the administrator for this program or I'm this officer, I'm that.
01:21:02
Speaker
But really just like flattening those and getting a wider um range of participation from a number of voices seems to... being responsive to a wider range of voices seems to resolve all three legs of that stool. It seems almost too easy, honestly.
01:21:16
Speaker
um I'm glad to to have your vote. it' set and And it's not that radical an idea. like we're not it's not We're not saying like smash the hierarchies. We're just saying, like let's just get people from different layers of the hierarchy to just be in communication and see if we can like work in harmony towards common goals.
01:21:34
Speaker
And people at different layers of the hierarchy are very willing and able to to take part in that conversation. I'm i'm delighted to report.
Engaging with James Mannion's Work
01:21:42
Speaker
James, if people wanted to continue this conversation after hitting stop on the podcast app, how can they connect with you? How can they read the work? How can they go through the various articles that you've been talking about um ah in the course of this conversation?
01:21:58
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. so So I'm quite easy to find. I have a fairly unusual name. So so just Google me. And um and I suppose my Substack, like most people, I'm gravitating towards Substack, which for now feels like the civilized social media platform that the world has been waiting for. But who knows? It probably won't be too long before it becomes...
01:22:18
Speaker
I do goodness knows what happened to X. Like, Oh goodness. If anything, it's like, it seems like it's quite, it's been number one. I'm really glad to Musk for just like breaking my addiction to that website. Like he just snapped it overnight and so many other people.
01:22:32
Speaker
And it's also been a sinkhole for like all of those people who want to just like explore the worst facets of human nature. They're all over there now. Like this this civilized discussion is happening in Substack.
01:22:43
Speaker
so So yeah, like look me up on Substack. I had do two Substacks. One of them is called Rethinking Education. And the other one is called Making Change Stick. And that's more about and school leadership than the slice team stuff.
01:22:55
Speaker
There's way more to it than than just the slice teams. um And yeah, drop me a line if you if you would like. And yeah, I'm involved in all kinds of other things. Actually, I'll just do a quick name drop for a couple.
01:23:07
Speaker
One of them is um if you're in the UK and you're listening to this, there's a thing called the Education Policy Alliance, which, as you as you would probably guess by now, is a slice of different types of people, kids, parents, educators, academics, classroom teachers, um all working together on policy solutions. And we're holding an event in Manchester later this year um in the north of England, not the US, Manchester, Australia.
01:23:33
Speaker
um So um come along to that and get in touch with that's educationpa.org.
Conclusion and Audience Engagement
01:23:38
Speaker
oh And in the States, so so it was not it's more of a global thing, really. But off the back of that Making Change Stick book, um there's there's a guy in in Canada called Richard Fransham, who's like an alternative educator, ah very interested in in democratic education and rights-based education.
01:23:56
Speaker
And we've recently set up a group and of people who are dotted all over the world, but quite quite a lot of them based based in the US. There's a guy called Don Berg, he might have come across. wrote so I know Don Berg. It's so wild.
01:24:08
Speaker
You mentioned him in that episode with ah with ah Warwick and with Naomi. And I was like, hold on. I had to pause it at the gym. I was like, is he talking about Don Berg that I know? Don Berg? Yeah. In his book, like the agentic schools manifesto and everything. Yeah, which is brilliant. So Don's du's involved in this. And there's also these other people who are great, ah who are from ah an organization called World Systems Solutions, WSS. okay look up I think that might be WSSnow.org.
01:24:34
Speaker
And they're really interesting. i had some fantastic conversations with them. And they are essentially about like what we're talking about doing to fix education. They're sort of making the the very interesting point. Like, what if we what if we've managed to turn education around and we create these agentic self-directed learners who then go out into the world and just hit all of these brick walls because there's all this.
01:24:57
Speaker
all this other stuff, there's all these other problems. And so they're they're talking about this very complex model that they have called the Phoenix platform, which is about figuring out how we can create synergy between all of these different systems at different layers of of society so that we can bring um like-minded people together to to figure out some of the world's most pressing problems.
01:25:16
Speaker
They're really interesting. And so there's this new sort of think tank, if you like, that's set that's emerged. I'll send you a link if you want to stick it in the show notes. Yes, of course. And it's called RCE, Making Change Stick.
01:25:27
Speaker
And the RCE stands for Rights Centric Education. um And so we we have these weekly conversations on a Tuesday. and think there's actually one in in just a few hours from now. um Feel free to join that and get involved in that conversation because there's some really interesting people um all over the world who are putting our heads together and and figuring out what we can do to to chip away at this at this polycrisis situation that we find ourselves in the middle of.
01:25:59
Speaker
Yeah, this looks incredible. I'm definitely going to follow up on this. James, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Nick. It's been an absolute delight. And thank you so much for the invitation. We'll have to return the the favor. I'll get you on the Rethink in Ed podcast sometime soon.
01:26:16
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
01:26:27
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.