Podcast Episodes Archive | Getting Smart

Town Hall Recap: Health Science Pathways

Getting Smart Staff — Thu, 30 May 2024 09:15:00 +0000

This Getting Smart Town Hall focused on pathways in health sciences and highlighted the following elements of effective pathways:

sector job prospects and entrepreneurial opportunities
career exploration resources
high school pathway examples
work-based learning and credentialing opportunities
postsecondary pathway examples.

The event also demonstrated the critical role of education leaders, intermediaries, and thought partners in shaping the future of the healthcare industry and empowering the next generation of healthcare professionals.

Dr. Kyle Hartung from Jobs for the Future (JFF) discussed the evolving landscape of healthcare careers and the importance of designing educational pathways that lead to meaningful employment. He underscored the need for systems that integrate secondary and postsecondary education, work-based learning, and leadership. Kyle highlighted the demand for durable employability skills and the disconnect between the current education system and the needs of employers. He proposed innovative solutions like the Big Blur, which reimagines education for 16 to 20-year-olds by integrating high school and community college experiences.

The town hall also featured insights from Kate Kreamer of Advance CTE, who discussed the revitalization of the National Career Clusters Framework to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of modern work. Christine Rodriguez from NAF shared success stories from their academies, emphasizing the importance of work-based learning and advisory boards in preparing students for healthcare careers. Jason Rausch from Project Lead the Way highlighted their hands-on, real-world learning approach and the importance of creating a STEM identity for students. The event concluded with a discussion on the collaborative efforts needed to create clear and effective pathways in the healthcare sector, ensuring that students are prepared for high-demand, high-wage careers.

Here is the revised text with improved punctuation, grammar, and spelling, while maintaining the original tone, style, and diction:

Shawnee Caruthers: Hey everyone, good morning. I’m so excited to see you all. Thank you all for joining us today for the Health Science Pathways Town Hall. If you’ve been following us for any time, then you know that pathways are really important to the work that we do.

We really want to ensure that students understand their next steps, their next best step. And with the help of our partners from ASA, Stand Together, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Walton Foundation, we’ve been able to explore what that looks like, both foundationally and beyond. As education leaders, intermediaries, and thought partners, you all play a crucial role in shaping the future for our students and the healthcare industry. Today’s town hall offers an excellent opportunity for us to come together, as we like to do, to share insights, provide thought leadership, collaborate on strategies, and share generously as you all normally do.

If you’ve been to any Getting Smart town hall, you know that a lot of information is shared. We are truly a community. By fostering these pathways, like health science, we can empower the next generation of healthcare professionals and support the development of a more robust and equitable healthcare landscape.

The campaign we’ve been running, in which we have been deeply engaged and invested for quite some time, is a roadmap for American schools, regardless of zip code. We believe students need to understand their next step after high school because we want them to be on a productive path to citizenship, high-wage employment, economic mobility, and a purpose-driven life. We believe that the purpose of learning is embodied in our new pathways campaign.

There are many jobs, trends, and opportunities that we’ll be exploring over the next year and a half. The first focus is on the health science pathway, as we think about the future of work and its changes. Health science is no exception to these changes. The trends in health science are in high demand and growing. The top five fastest-growing occupations in health science are nurse practitioners, physician assistants, PT assistants, home health and personal care aides, and occupational therapy assistants. The population is continuing to age, and the needs are constantly changing. Health is no longer just about a personalized approach; it’s also about community wellness. We need to ensure that students understand how to take care of themselves, their loved ones, and their communities.

The baby boomers are getting older, and their needs around chronic disease management, home healthcare, etc., are growing faster than ever. Technology is changing every second of every day. The world of healthcare today will not be the same in 10 or 11 years. We have some great guests to dive into this with us, sharing their knowledge around healthcare and pathways. We’ll kick it off with Dr. Kyle Hartung from JFF, then Kate Kreamer from Advance CTE will share, followed by Dr. Christine Rodriguez from NAF, and we’ll close with Jason Rausch from Project Lead the Way. Kyle, I will turn it over to you.

Jobs for the Future (JFF)

Kyle Hartung: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Hello, everybody. As indicated, my name is Kyle Hartung, Associate Vice President at Jobs for the Future. My pronouns are he and him. I’m excited to do a quick walkthrough of some big ideas. Much of what you’re going to see is more of a leave-behind. I won’t linger on a lot of the data and content of these slides, but let’s dive in quickly. For those who don’t know, Jobs for the Future is a national nonprofit organization that’s been around for over 40 years, focused on driving transformation and innovation in the US economic, education, and workforce systems, with a focus on equitable economic advancement. We partner with business leaders, education, and industry leaders across the country to design solutions that make a difference in the lived experiences of young people, young adults, and ultimately the communities in which they thrive.

I’ve had the privilege of co-leading a national body of work called Pathways to Prosperity at JFF for over 12 years. We’ve partnered with federal, state, and regional leaders to design and scale career-connected learning pathway systems in over 16 states and over a hundred regions across the country. As I think about the pathways construct, I want to share how we view this. These are our core levers for implementation to build systems transformative to people’s lived experiences: the integration of secondary and postsecondary career navigation systems, work-based learning, the role and scaling of intermediary functions, and leadership and policy, with both big L and big P and little l and p.

To dive into healthcare and the future of work, I’ll name quickly that most students are not getting the right credentials. Earning a credential with value in the labor market is important, but it’s not the same as getting a good job. Data shows we’ve overcomplicated things. Employers are asking for about 50 of the thousands of credentials offered to high school students, signaling many disconnects. Many on this call are committed to changing that narrative.

We see a disconnect between what we think is important for career preparation and what employers say they want. Most employers aren’t looking for highly trained technical skills in early career roles; they want durable employability skills. This is true in healthcare as well as other industries. There are many middle-skills jobs available, but not enough to go around. Seismic shifts in data show the level of credential needed for good jobs, and not enough young people are attaining them or are positioned to get them.

I won’t unpack this whole thing but look at a prototypical cohort of high school students. Few move through postsecondary to a bachelor’s degree and into a good job. Education is not the great equalizer it should be, and wealth gaps exist at every level. The BA remains a gatekeeper, with median wealth for white households with only a high school diploma the same as black households with a BA. Few students transition to education or training leading to good jobs. We don’t need a return to four-year college for all. We need systems with no dead ends, avoiding a second-class system.

Healthcare offers many strengths, with jobs in high demand and security, and varied educational requirements. But there’s variability in job requirements and occupational segregation, with women, black, and Latin workers underrepresented in higher-wage occupations. We must design systems with intentionality to address this.

What does this look like? High-wage jobs require higher credentials, which varies by support role jobs, many requiring prior work experience hard to get for young people. There’s opportunity to reimagine systems. I’ll leave you with questions for designing pathways into healthcare, considering dual credit alignment, access to work-based learning, career advancement opportunities, stackable and portable credentials, and clear paths into additional education and training.

One more thing: how do we disrupt systems at scale? One idea is the Big Blur, reimagining institutions for 16 to 20-year-olds, rather than cobbling together high school and postsecondary. Look at the Sturm Collaboration Campus in Colorado, integrating high school students full-time on a community college campus with work-based learning, co-taught by industry professionals. Innovate locally for real collaboration, not just stronger bridges or band-aids. That’s a lot; thank you. Kate, bring it on.

Advance CTE

Kate Kreamer: My name is Kate Kreamer. For those not familiar with Advance CTE, we are the national membership organization representing state leaders overseeing career technical education across the country. Our members are in all 50 states, D.C., and the U.S. territories, working in state agencies across secondary, postsecondary, and workforce development.

Before discussing a major initiative impacting health pathways and all pathways, I like to start with our vision for the CTE system. Over the past 10 years, we’ve created shared visions, bringing together stakeholders to think about where we are and where we need to go. In 2020, we created and released a vision in 2021, with over 40 organizations signing on, including JFF, NAF, and others. This vision focuses on dismantling barriers, recognizing that our systems often create limitations and silos that don’t understand the learner experience.

We aim to de-silo across K-12, postsecondary, and workforce; de-silo academic and technical instruction; de-silo credit and non-credit; and center equity so every student feels they belong, are welcome, and prepared. We want students to navigate the system with the necessary tools and support, understanding high-skill, high-wage career opportunities. We value skills, not just seat time, and ensure skills are affordable and recognized wherever acquired—in classrooms, workplaces, military experience, etc.

Addressing geographic barriers is crucial. Industry doesn’t see state lines, yet policies often make everything site-based. We must look at how courses are coded, data collected, and teachers certified to align with the needs of today and the future.

I also want to talk about the revitalization of the National Career Clusters Framework. It’s been around for 22 years, and although validated over time, it hasn’t had a major update since 2002. A lot has changed in the world of work, and the updated framework must reflect the interdisciplinary nature of work and bridge education with industry. It must include current skills and approaches and remain flexible for future changes.

One example is the connection between health careers and community services. Health careers now intersect with community services and human services. Biotechnology, currently within healthcare, is also relevant to agriculture. Programs should draw on expertise from both sectors.

We will release the updated framework in October 2024, with policy support for de-siloing and pushing the system forward. This means looking at course coding, data collection, and teacher certification to match the updated framework.

Questions for Kyle and Kate

Tom Vander Ark: Thanks, Kate. We’re all looking forward to that update. I want to ask Kyle a quick question. Compared to other pathways, health pathways seem to work well. They’re visible, and families know about them. Even though they are complicated with licensure and degree requirements, aren’t there fewer dead ends in health pathways than in other sectors?

Kyle Hartung: I think there are many, though. While health is a field with visibility, many behind-the-scenes occupations aren’t well-known to young people. The dead ends come when good, high-paying jobs like CNA or phlebotomist roles don’t easily lead to further education. People may find themselves supporting families in their late 20s and needing to re-enter formal education. We need to leverage pre-existing credentials and build broader programs of study, ensuring pathways to roles like nurse practitioner or business administrative positions.

Tom Vander Ark: Corey [Mohn in the chat] mentioned high turnover in entry-level jobs like patient techs, which are modestly paid. Why is there so much turnover, and are these early credentials stepping stones to high-wage employment in health?

Kyle Hartung: It’s likely due to the job’s nature—long hours, low pay, and burnout. Without support structures, people feel stuck. We need people in these roles, but also need to partner with employers to reimagine working conditions. Pathway systems should promote dialogue with employers to support transformation in both education and job conditions.

Kate Kreamer: Emerging research shows younger generations seek jobs with clear paths and professional development. In health care, while CNA roles seem to lead to nursing paths, data shows this isn’t happening. There are many forces against it, including lack of communication and partnership between industry and education. Hospitals may have a disincentive to move people out of entry-level roles due to high demand.

Tom Vander Ark: Health care involves a lot of licensure, not always connected to degrees, which are often required. Is there an opportunity to better integrate degrees and licensure requirements?

Kate Kreamer: Licensure provides clear requirements, which is an advantage. During COVID, states enabled reciprocity, easing recruitment, but have since pulled back. We should reopen reciprocity to allow cross-state opportunities. It’s easier to work with licensure in healthcare than with murkier credentials in other fields.

School Models

Tom Vander Ark: I’ll note that Anna Hennis has pointed out that hospitals are really good at this and understand the pathways, helping clear the path. As Josh mentioned earlier, school systems with close partnerships with hospitals can take advantage of pathway clarity and work experiences related to degree completion.

Let me use this opportunity to mention a couple of schools that we think are interesting examples of productive pathways. I’ll start with Del Lago Academy. This is in North San Diego County. It is a single-purpose, single-pathway high school with about 800 students in the Escondido school district, started about 10 years ago. It’s a great example of project-based learning with health sciences and biotech applications across the curriculum. Every junior does an internship, and there are great partnerships with two local hospitals, as well as hundreds of biotech companies in San Diego. It’s a great example of a single-path, single-purpose high school focused on healing the world.

There are dozens of really great next-gen career centers around the country that feature health pathways. One of our favorite examples is Summit Tech in southeast Kansas City. They have, over on the right, a terrific professional nursing program. They also have the upper division Project Lead the Way courses. One of my favorite things about visiting Summit Tech is that they have trophy cases filled with Project Lead the Way research, not sports trophies. This is a school that celebrates its professions-based learning.

One of the most important advances in health pathways is the development of health P-TECHs. These are early college high schools with health-related work-based learning experiences. The center of that movement is really Texas, particularly Dallas, where every comprehensive high school has a P-TECH, many of them focused on health. Roosevelt P-TECH is featured here. We’ve seen that same sort of movement in St. Vrain in Colorado and also in rural Texas. It’s really exciting to see Collegiate Edu-Nation (CEN) leading a rural revolution. They’re working now with about 40 school districts to create P-TECH high schools in rural communities. We’re seeing really high percentages of students graduating with an associate degree but also with work experiences, in their case, many times in health, biotech, ag tech, and animal health. It’s exciting to see CEN moving into a number of other states. We really appreciate their rural leadership, showing that you can create accelerated, supported pathways connected to high-wage employment anywhere.

We love Health Leadership High School in Albuquerque because they take a slightly different approach to pathways. They’re helping every one of their students become a health advocate for their own health, their family’s health, and their community’s health. This really paid off during the pandemic when very quickly all the Health Leadership students were involved in the community response to the pandemic.

Finally, a quick shout-out to Polytechnic School in Pasadena. They’re doing really terrific upper-division research, and it’s all published in national journals. This is a great example of inviting students to do work that matters. With the rise of generative AI, this kind of research—inviting students to do professional-quality work that takes on subjects that matter to them and to their community and then publishing it—is a really exciting opportunity going forward.

Our friends at NAF run about 620 career academies around the country, and many of those are in health sciences. Christine’s going to tell us a little more about their health pathways.

NAF

Christine Rodriguez: Hi, everyone. I’m Christine Rodriguez with NAF, Director of Instructional Services. NAF has been dedicated to ensuring students from underinvested communities, particularly students of color, have equal access to opportunities. Our educational design revolves around four gears: academy development and support, curriculum instruction, work-based learning, and advisory boards.

Work-based learning is huge for us. We provide career awareness, exploration, and preparedness through internships, guest speakers, site visits, job shadowing, and mentorship. Our advisory boards support educators, leaders, and students, ensuring seamless transitions from high school to college and career.

We’re revamping courses like anatomy and physiology, global health, and developing a unit on oral health with Delta Dental. We work with Amgen and Delta Dental, Harvard LabXchange, and promote CTSOs like HOSA, aligning with Advance CTE standards.

Currently, we serve about 113,000 students, 18,000 in health sciences. One powerful anecdote: former students of mine, now RNs, cared for my father in his final days, showcasing the impact of our Academy of Health Sciences. Another success story is Karthik Tyagi, UNC Chapel Hill graduate and senior strategist at NC Department of Health and Human Services, former HOSA international president.

Recently, our Work-Based Learning Impact Award featured a Student Community Health Project, promoting empathy, community pride, and equitable healthcare awareness. It’s imperative to support our students for economic mobility.

If you want to get involved with NAF academies as an individual, corporation, or organization, we already have 3,700 business and community leaders on advisory boards. We need more volunteers to speak in classrooms, mentor, and provide internships. We need everyone.

Project Lead the Way

Jason Rauch: I’m Jason Rauch with Project Lead the Way. I’m our Senior Vice President of Programs, a lifelong educator supporting the development of biomedical science, computer science, and engineering curriculum. Project Lead the Way started 26 years ago, now with over 100,000 teachers from pre-K through 12, supporting career pathways.

Our program provides in-demand skills, technical and professional, through hands-on, real-world learning. We offer four biomedical science courses and a new interdisciplinary Capstone course for seniors, bringing together biomedical science, computer science, and engineering students.

We highlight successful programs like Elkhorn Crossing School, emphasizing micro-credentials and industry-recognized credentials. Our partnerships with NAF and others enhance our programs. We’re excited to be part of this conversation. I’ll turn it back to Shawnee.

Shawnee Caruthers: Thank you, Jason, and all our speakers. We had a rich discussion with much information shared. Unfortunately, we’re out of time and can’t address the questions or comments. Thank you to everyone who participated.

As you can see, health science is layered, and I love the conversation around cross-cutting points and the emotional toll on students in health care and other fields.

Links:

The post Town Hall Recap: Health Science Pathways appeared first on Getting Smart.

Dr. Shari Camhi on Purpose, Media Literacy and a Decade of District Leadership

Getting Smart Staff — Wed, 29 May 2024 09:15:00 +0000

This episode of the Getting Smart Podcast is sponsored by Mrs. Wordsmith, learn more at mrswordsmith.com

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Tom Vander Ark is joined by Dr. Shari Camhi, Superintendent of the Baldwin School District in Long Island.

Together, they discuss the need for enhanced media literacy in an age where information credibility is increasingly questioned. Additionally, Dr. Camhi shares insights from her decade-long tenure in Baldwin, highlighting how her personal experiences as a parent and educator have shaped her approach to creating diverse, enriching educational experiences. She stresses the importance of adapting education to ensure each student’s unique needs are met, rather than conforming to traditional, one-size-fits-all models. She argues that media literacy is essential for developing critical thinking skills, enabling students to discern between true and false information. The Baldwin School District’s strategy, known as Baldwin 2035, focuses on fostering civic engagement and community connections across all grade levels.

Dr. Shari Camhi

Dr. Shari L. Camhi is the Superintendent of Schools for the Baldwin Union Free School District. With more than three decades of experience in the field of education, Dr. Camhi has not charted the conventional career path, having worked in private industry as a manager of training and development in the field of technology, a visiting “expert” in educational technology overseas, as well as adjunct professor, technology director, assistant superintendent, and currently, superintendent of schools.

In addition to her role as superintendent, Dr. Camhi was elected the 2022-23 president of the National School Superintendents Association (AASA). She has served as a member of the Executive Committee and Governing Board of AASA, the American Association of Community College’s Commission for College Readiness, WNET Business Advisory Council, CoSN K-12 Innovation Advisory Council, and the Cradle of Aviation Museum and Education Center Board of Directors. She was appointed chair/vice-chair of the Educational Telecommunications Service Committee for WLIW, co-chair for the Superintendent/College Presidents Partnership for the Long Island Regional Advisory Council on Higher Education (LIRACHE) and has been an active participant in the Long Island Consortium for Excellence and Equity (LICEE).

Dr. Camhi was one of only twenty school superintendents selected for the Successful Practices Network (SPN) Innovation and Transformational Leadership Network. In addition, she was named Education Week’s “Leader to Learn From,” National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA)’s “New Superintendent to Watch,” Education Dive’s “Administrators to Watch” and was the recipient of the ISTE Sylvia Charp Award for district innovation in technology. Educational leaders and dignitaries from across the country have visited Dr. Camhi’s district to see the success story firsthand. Her district has also been designated a Lighthouse District by AASA and was the only K-12 district to be honored by the New York State Business Council with the inaugural Workforce Innovation Award, among other accolades.

Outline

Navigating the New Era of Social Media and AI
The Evolution of Media Literacy in Education
Revolutionizing High School Experience
Baldwin 2035: Cultivating Future-Ready Citizens
Embracing Media Literacy and AI in Education

Tom Vander Ark: We are 15 years into the addictive age of social media, and we’re about 15 months into a brand new era of generative AI and building relationships with these new reasoning engines that use natural language processing. Recently, the Wharton professor, Ethan Mollick said, you can no longer believe anything that you see or read. And given that it is time to double down on media literacy.

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Vander Ark. Today we’re talking to Dr. Shari Camhi. She’s the superintendent on a Baldwin out on Long Island where she’s had a terrific 10-year run. And it’s not only doing great work locally, but work done so well locally that has been nationally influential.

Shari, welcome.

Dr. Shari Camhi: Thanks, Tom. Appreciate you having me.

Tom Vander Ark: We connected when you were president of the School Superintendents Association a few years ago. Has AASA been an important partner for you?

Dr. Shari Camhi: AASA is an incredible partner. Not only do they represent every type of school system around the country but they represent, in my opinion, some of the best thinking that’s going on out there.

Tom Vander Ark: Shari you’ve been in the district just about 10 years and you’ve accomplished so much. I’d love to have you just recount how you built that strategy, how it came together, and what were The key elements,

Dr. Shari Camhi: I think that the work that we all do is best driven by our own experiences.

So I think about my experience as a student, I think about my two kids, their experience as a student, and you can learn a lot from your own personal experiences.

Tom Vander Ark: Now, Shari I’m smiling because I was also superintendent when my kids were teenagers. And man I learned a lot just by being a dad, like going along to registration day, going, wow, this is right, be able to see your system through your kid’s eyes.

Dr. Shari Camhi: And when you have that conversation with yourself that says, Should I say something or not say something? Am I the dad or the school administrator? Who am I?

Tom Vander Ark: Maybe I’ll let my spouse say something.

Dr. Shari Camhi: That’s exactly right.

Tom Vander Ark: Anyway I do appreciate that being a parent is a is primary learning experience.

Dr. Shari Camhi: The perspective I think that I have from my own experiences, from my kids’ experiences, is that school has to be a deep, enriching, experience lots of opportunities that there’s a place for every child, right? I the analogy I use sometimes is that very traditional approaches to learning look like a funnel, right?

It’s wide at the top. You put all of this varied young people in there, but we squeeze them out of one tiny little hole and we hope that they’re all going to come out the same. But the fact of the matter is that, in my school system, I have 4, 600 unique kids. And so I’m not going to have 4, 600 different programs, but I am going to have enough variety that there’s a home for every student.

And I think in part that philosophy along with we’re more than a number and it’s not about being better. It’s about being different, which really drives the thinking here and the design of opportunities for young people.

The Evolution of Media Literacy in Education

Tom Vander Ark: So 2014, we’re like 10 years into Facebook, just starting to gain momentum and Instagrams around … was media literacy on your radar 10 years ago when you started? How does that surface later as a priority?

Dr. Shari Camhi: That surfaces later. In the last six-ten years so much has changed. I know we talk about being exponentially moving that fast and, it scares me to think what the next 10 years are going to be like. I’m not trying to even keep up with it anymore. But it’s not just the availability of the differences in media.

It’s not about the variety, it’s the availability, right? 10 years ago, 15 years ago, every 11 year old didn’t have a $1,500 powerful device in their hands. I think that this idea of information literacy, media literacy, news literacy, whatever you wanna call it, is so important right now because I know you and I have talked forever about critical thinking, but this is critical thinking at its best.

And it’s fundamental. This could be a crisis if we’re not careful about it. You put all that information in the hands of kids. If you don’t give them the filter with which to decipher what it is that’s being fed to them, how do they know the reality of the information?

Tom Vander Ark: Yeah it’s critical thinking under duress though. It’s your right. Your brain has been hijacked by a dopamine producing agent. And then we’re asking you to engage in critical thinking. So it is very different. I want you to talk a little bit more about the strategy and how you want the learning experience to be different, not just a little better, but to be different. What did that look like in elementary school? What did that look like in high school?

Dr. Shari Camhi: So the first thing is, a lot of times when people approach “change” (I feel like I need to put that in quotes because it sometimes has such negative connotation to it) you think, okay I’m going to start in kindergarten and then I’m going to add one grade level every year, but it takes 13 years to get any change.

And in 13 years, everything’s different. So that’s a system that, generally does not work. We’ve really engaged our faculty, our parents, our community in this idea that it is all about the opportunities that you put in front of young people and they fall for us into certain buckets. So there is clearly across the board, a level of civic engagement involved in everything that we do.

We don’t think that you teach civics in isolation. We think that you do civics. And so through social studies, through science, through literacy in elementary school, middle school and high school, there is a component of civics that’s built into everything and that creates really smart, thoughtful, empathetic citizens, and that’s what we’re aiming for.

Focus on everything from K to 12. But if I think, for example, about our high school, we have a whole academy program at our high school, which is not a school within a school. We have really, in the last four years, focused on senior year. Everyone knows the term senioritis, right? We’ve all had it.

Revolutionizing High School Experience

We’ve all had kids who have had it. And so we’ve looked at the senior year and we’ve said, what are the opportunities that we can put in front of young people who are in their last year of high school that keep them engaged, keep them excited And so we have a program with our local community college where kids are full time on campus college students embedded within other courses with college kids.

We’ve started a course called Senior Experience, which combines Social studies, English and business. And our kids are doing civic minded research and capstones and internships in the community for at least half the day, they do not go to class every day at the end of the day.

Their day is different and they love it. They feel involved. They feel important. Their day is different. It’s not the grind of nine periods a day. That’s

Tom Vander Ark: Beautiful, Shari. Like you said, the senior year is usually such a waste, you’re trying to check a couple AP boxes and then taking a few study halls and leaving early. The idea of creating this big block of community-connected work that matters to the learner and to the community is that’s super important. Love that.

Dr. Shari Camhi: I mean, we have kids that are involved in that community college program that have gotten 4. 0 GPAs and 32 credits as a senior in high school. Why are they going to be a senior in high school if they can achieve that in that year, right? So using it a little differently again different not better but thinking about the experiences we want our students to have and designing programs around that.

Baldwin 2035: Cultivating Future-Ready Citizens

Tom Vander Ark: Shari, your strategy, I think you may have called it Baldwin 2035 has this beautiful statement of purpose.

“We will develop citizens with the skills and mindsets to successfully navigate an uncertain and complex world. We will nurture grit, resilience, self awareness, self direction, and personal agency.” Was that developed early in the process?

Dr. Shari Camhi: So that was developed around 2018. That was a collaboration between administrators our teachers, our educator residents, which is another conversation our community was involved in. We used the first six years to set the stage for what’s possible in schools, and then once people had a really good idea of thinking out of the box Baldwin 2035 was born and we work multiple times a year as a full group and then the rest of the year building based.

To give you a sense of that whole idea “different, not better,” we have five elementary schools in the district and all five elementary schools as they define Baldwin 2035 — while the skills and the dispositions that we’re looking for might be the same, the method at which they get there is different from school to school.

It’s not about better. It’s just about different. But in the end, they are all focused on civics. They’re all focused on important skills and community connections. They’re looking at the world bigger than their own environment, whether it’s in Baldwin or in their classroom. They’re just going at it from a different perspective.

Tom Vander Ark: Shari, in 2021, we talked about teacher learning and you were contemplating a teacher residency program and you were looking at like externships where teachers could get out and visit other schools. I think I might be the leading advocate of visiting schools as a professional learning opportunity, but talk about teacher learning and educator development as part of the strategy.

Dr. Shari Camhi: There’s a tie to the name of your podcast, right? “Getting Smart.” What we know about teaching as a profession is most people who become teachers always knew they wanted to be a teacher.

So they went from being students to being college students to being teachers. And what we know about that is you sit in rows and columns, you give information, you test the information, you develop great relationships with young people, and then you move on to your next set. But that’s just not the world anymore, right?

And so we created what we called an Educator Residency Program, where 14 teachers at the secondary level from middle school and high school were involved in professional learning and included in that professional learning were online courses about visible thinking and visible thinking strategies using protocols.

It was going out into the community and doing internships with businesses. So if we talk about preparing our students for the world of work, if the only world of work that you know is being a teacher, how do you know what the world of work is? And so our teachers spent time with lawyers, with businesses, with politicians, with all these different career choices so that they could get a sense of outside of education — “what does the world of work feel like and actually experience it themselves?”

We had them involved in designing leaving to learns. In schools, we call them field trips, right? And so you go somewhere and you do some cool things and then you come back and you use some of it. How deep do you actually go? We call them leaving to learns and they are embedded inside the curriculum. There’s a lot of planning that goes into that.

Embracing Media Literacy and AI in Education

Tom Vander Ark: All right. Let’s talk about media literacy. It just strikes me that the idea of media literacy, the making it a priority, just flows so naturally from your statement of purpose. Cause it’s about developing citizens with the ability to navigate uncertainty and complexity and cultivating resilience, awareness, self-direction, age, agency… all of those things are super central to media literacy. So tell us about what you’re doing. What do you teach? How do you teach it? Where does it surface?

Dr. Shari Camhi: When I think about information literacy, when I was in school, which, granted, was a while ago I could still see the volumes of the world book sitting on my bookshelf, right?

It was a very static way of getting information, but I knew that information went through a vetting process, that if they were printing it on paper, it had to be true. At least I think it had to be true. We’re in a position now where information is just flowing all of the time and we know that there’s information out there that is incorrect. We know there’s information that’s being targeted. I firmly believe that every one of our students must graduate high school knowing how to tell the difference between truth and fiction. That is a fundamental skill that every single person has to have in today’s day and age.

Tom Vander Ark: Yeah, and it just got harder, right?

Dr. Shari Camhi: It gets harder every day, but when you think about it (and without any judgment), if you graduated high school and you could not do geometric transformations, you’d probably be okay, unless you were going into the field of, mathematics or fractals. If you, as a citizen, can’t know if the information that is put in front of you is truthful, we all have a problem. That is a skill that is really fundamental to citizenship. As you mentioned it’s fundamental to personal agency. How do you know, how do you take a stand if you don’t know if the information you’re basing your opinion on is real information? What’s almost more critical is the ability to pivot quickly, right?

Because things change quickly and you need to be able to have the skills to do that. And so we’ve embedded news and media literacy in grade six through 12 in ELA And social studies across the board for every single student. We also have the opportunity for a college level course at the high school level in 12th grade.

It’s part of our participation in government and economics courses as well, but the skills that you need are embedded within the curriculum. And so our students, as they’re writing capstones, as they’re writing research papers, have developed the skills necessary to know if the information that they are putting forward is truthful information before they complete their projects.

Tom Vander Ark: All right. I have to ask if if they are they using a Gen AI to co-author those papers or not?

Dr. Shari Camhi: Here’s what I think. I think that for schools, we’re seeing. We really are at the beginning of this and I think that we haven’t quite defined what it’s going to look like.

If the skills that our kids are going to need after this whole AI revolution gets through whatever it’s going to get through is really knowing if it’s truthful, being able to rewrite, being able to edit being able to create the writing so that it’s in your voice. It’s just a different level of skill, right?

Tom Vander Ark: Right. It may shift to a heavier emphasis on curation, on editing, right? On the voice and choice of creation. But, in just the same way that in the last 15 years many of us have been co-creating in Google Docs, with somebody in the same building or somebody across the planet, we’ve been co-creating in this virtual environment.

And now we have a new team member called Gen AI. It’s a, it is a different way to think about what we produce and how we produce it, it is going to take us a while to get comfortable with that idea though.

Dr. Shari Camhi: I think so. And, we’re going to navigate through that. I think one of the things that’s different about AI is none of us are ignoring it. We’re not pretending like it’s going to go away. We know that it’s here to stay. Initially, I think I know for myself when I would be typing in like word and it would complete my sentences for me at first, I was like, why are you completing my sentence, and now I’m happy not to have to complete the sentence.

But I do think that we are having the conversations around what skills are necessary to be smart in this world that we now live in. How do we use the skills that, or how do we use the tools that are in front of us to our advantage and not be behind the eight ball on that?

Tom Vander Ark: Sure. Here’s The hard question, the Ethan Mollick quote, “you can no longer trust anything your read or see.” It hurts my heart that we have to teach media literacy and lead with skepticism. I think about my own kids, grandkids… and the flip side of this is that Gen AI is this brand new sense of possibility that allows us to create things we couldn’t have imagined to solve problems we couldn’t have imagined. So what I’m most wanting to cultivate is curiosity and possibility. And yet Mollick is saying we have to start with skepticism. So how do we balance those things? Can we embrace the paradox of saying we want to cultivate possibility and curiosity while we’re leading with skepticism?

Dr. Shari Camhi: So I’m not sure I would call it skepticism. I think I would just say, we’re leading with a critical eye. And I think we should have always been leading with a critical eye. Why wouldn’t we want to read something or look at a piece of artwork. We’ve always done that, right? Use artwork. We look at art and we say what does that mean to you? And you look at it critically and you ask yourself those questions, which is all about being creative and being critical thinkers.

And I’m not sure that it’s that different than that? If you put the political lens on it, then yeah, then it’s uncomfortable. And then maybe you do lead with skepticism.

Tom Vander Ark: I like that you went back to critical thinking and if we lead with that it even rewards that notion of curiosity and possibility.

We’re talking to Dr. Shari Camhi. She’s the superintendent in Baldwin out on Long Island. Shari what happens in Baldwin with cell phones? Do you have cell phones in class?

Dr. Shari Camhi: Yeah, so we do not have cell phones in class at all. We do not allow cell phones at all, K-8. And the reason for that has nothing to do with instruction or instructional strategies. It has to do with distraction. I can tell you, I was in a physics class once and I was sitting next to this amazing young man and we were having a great conversation and he took out his phone. He started texting. I said, “You’re not supposed to be doing that.” He just looks at me with this look and he said, It’s my mom. And I said, tell your mom, the superintendent’s sitting right next to you, and she said, don’t text me while I’m in class. So here’s this young man who’s as adorable as can be, and he has a choice: ignore his mom, which, as a mom, I’m going to tell you, you don’t want to ignore your mom, right? Or do something your teacher has told you not to do. It is a distraction. You can get to the information through something other than a cell phone. And, it’s funny when you think about media literacy and, part of that is when you see things posted on Facebook and Instagram and everybody looks beautiful and, okay, so is that real or is it fake, and I think we need to be having these conversations because we need our kids to be confident in who they are. We need them to feel good about themselves. We need them to know that it’s okay to make a mistake, but you need to know how to recover from the mistake.

Tom Vander Ark: Let’s try to wrap this up with some advice for other Edleaders, school and system leaders, like specifically on around media literacy. What do you think they should be doing?

Dr. Shari Camhi: First they need to be doing something right. And we have a partnership with Stony Brook University which has really at least out here, pioneered this. I am doing my part in presenting and introducing them to school systems across the country. So number one is you need to do something. There are multiple universities and organizations around the country that are happy to partner to help navigate the curriculum part of this. And again, I go back: It’s not about better, it’s about different. It fits almost everything, right? Is this something we needed to do before? We all did, triangulation of data. We all did making sure, if the world book said it, then Encyclopedia Britannica said it also. So it’s not about better. It is about thinking differently and making sure that our young people know how to navigate this whole content of thinking.

Tom Vander Ark: And when does media literacy start?

Dr. Shari Camhi: Formally here in a curriculum, it starts in grade six. Grade six through 12 ELA and social studies.

Tom Vander Ark: Shari we started out with with a shout out for AASA, which I think has become very responsive to the context and is providing great direction and support for superintendents. Anybody else that you want to mention that’s been inspirational to you or supportive of the journey that Baldwin schools have been on?

Dr. Shari Camhi: Specifically for Baldwin my school board has been incredibly supportive. Our community has been incredibly supportive. And I don’t say either of those as a political statement, I say that as a hundred percent honest and to go back to your the beginning of your statement, like what kind of advice, I think superintendents need to be incredibly courageous these days.

I think you need to always focus on what’s best for your kids. Thinking about what is their future going to look like and how do you make sure that they’re prepared for their future? It’s certainly not an easy space to be in, in some places, but our community has embraced the thinking, they’ve embraced the work.

I think in part because it’s been clear and understandable. We’ve included them as much as we can include them in the process. They know the purpose of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. And so that understanding leads to supporting. the work that we’re doing.

Tom Vander Ark: Thanks to Dr. Shari Camhi. She’s the superintendent in Baldwin School District setting a great example by leading on media literacy.

The post Dr. Shari Camhi on Purpose, Media Literacy and a Decade of District Leadership appeared first on Getting Smart.

Juan Jose Gonzalez and Gina Schuyler on Community College Networks and Radical Dual Credit

Getting Smart Staff — Wed, 22 May 2024 09:15:00 +0000

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Shawnee Caruthers is joined by two of the leaders leaning into this space, Juan Jose Gonzalez, Managing Director of Pathways & Operations at Education Systems Center at Northern Illinois University (EdSystems) and Gina Schuyler, Department Chair of Career and Technical Education at Grayslake Central High School, a partner of EdSystems.

EdSystems is a part of the Accelerate ED initiative, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Accelerate ED is built on the idea that high schools can provide early access to quality higher education in ways that incorporate work-connected learning and have long-term benefits for students. This initiative helps state- and region-based groups plan and build accelerated pathways between K-12 education, postsecondary education, and careers.

Together, Gonzalez and Schuyler discuss the implementation of Illinois’s Postsecondary Workforce Readiness Act and the College and Career Pathway Endorsement Framework. The conversation highlights the collaboration between K-12 education, post-secondary institutions, and the workforce to create equitable access to high-quality career and technical education (CTE) and dual credit courses. They emphasize the importance of innovation, partnership, and continuous learning to prepare students for both college and careers and showcase the successful integration of these pathways in Illinois schools.

Juan Jose Gonzalez

Juan Jose Gonzalez is the Managing Director of Pathways & Operations at Education Systems Center at Northern Illinois University where he is heavily involved in implementing Illinois’ Postsecondary Workforce Readiness Act, State Perkins V Plan, College and Career Pathways Endorsements framework, and in developing industry-specific pathways in school districts and communities throughout the state.

Juan Jose began his career as an immigration rights organizer for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, where he mobilized immigrant citizens to vote and lobby at the state and federal levels for better immigration policy. He then served as the Chicago director for Stand for Children Illinois, leading regional advocacy and policy efforts. Following, he was the director of youth and education policy for the City of Chicago Mayor’s office under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, managing a portfolio that included elementary and secondary education policy, college access, summer employment, and out-of-school time opportunities.

Juan Jose received his Bachelor of Arts at Princeton University and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago Harris School. Since 2018, Juan Jose has volunteered as a student mentor with Chicago’s I-Mentor program at Phoenix Military Academy, supporting Chicago students in the college application and transition process. He is an elected parent member of a Chicago Public Schools Local School Council and previously served as an elected community member and council secretary.

Gina Schuyler

Gina Schuyler is an accomplished education professional with over 26 years of experience in Career and Technical Education (CTE). She serves as the Department Chair of CTE at Grayslake Central High School in Grayslake, Illinois. In her role, Gina has been instrumental in pioneering innovative CTE programs and integrating dual credit opportunities for students.

Outline

Introduction to Career and Technical Education Advocacy
Exploring the Impact of EdSystems and Partnerships
Strategies and Successes in Illinois’ Education and Workforce Development
Navigating the Dual Credit Landscape in Illinois
Looking Ahead: The Future of College Credit Education in Illinois

Introduction to Career and Technical Education Advocacy

Shawnee Caruthers: You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Shawnee Caruthers. If you’ve ever tuned into a Getting Smart Podcast, you may have heard me say that career and technical education is my jam. I’m a longtime advocate for all learners having experiences that teach new skills, explore possible careers, and build their confidence and sense of belonging.

I’ve seen firsthand how lives are changed when given access to workforce opportunities. Utilizing career and technical education as one vehicle, systems across the country are doing the critical work necessary to build stronger connections between K-12 education, post-secondary institutions, and the workforce.

By engaging in continuous learning and discussion around this work, learners will be more successful, learning environments will become more equitable, and the impact becomes more scalable. Today, I’m joined by two of the leaders leaning into this space: Juan Jose Gonzalez, Managing Director of Pathways and Operations at Education Systems Center at Northern Illinois University, also known as EdSystems, and Gina Schuyler, Department Chair of Career and Technical Education at Grayslake Central High School, a partner of EdSystems.

EdSystems is heavily involved in implementing Illinois’s Post-Secondary Workforce Readiness Act, the State Perkins V Plan, the College and Career Pathways Endorsement Framework, and developing industry-specific pathways in school districts and communities throughout the state. EdSystems is also part of the Illinois cohort of the Accelerate ED initiative supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Accelerate ED is built on the idea that high schools can provide early access to quality higher education in ways that incorporate work-connected learning and have long-term benefits for students. This initiative helps state-based groups plan and build accelerated pathways between K-12 education, post-secondary education, and careers. Welcome, team. How are you?

Juan Jose Gonzalez: How are you? Thank you.

Shawnee Caruthers: I’m doing well. Welcome to the podcast. We’re really interested to hear about all the great work that’s happening in Illinois, and it’s always nice to have a partner in the school district come on together to talk about the well-rounded services that you’re providing for students.

Exploring the Impact of EdSystems and Partnerships

Juan, I’ll start with you. I would love to learn a little bit more about EdSystems and your background. Can you describe what is the core mission and vision of EdSystems, and how do those align with your personal values?

Juan Jose Gonzalez: Yeah, so the mission of EdSystems is to shape and strengthen the education and workforce systems to advance equity and prepare more learners for careers and lives in the global economy. We’re based out of a state university here in Illinois, and we work hard to collaborate with regional and state institutions to provide better education and workforce systems.

I’ve been involved in education policy and advocacy for about 14 years now. It’s been a central part of my career. I’ve been both a municipal administrator and a budgeter and financer, as well as an education advocate trying to convince large systems to shift. It’s been a central part of my career and something I really value as someone who grew up in a public high school, struggled with college selection, and as a child of first-generation immigrants who really struggled to navigate the educational system here in this country. So, it’s been a pleasure to work with partner school districts and to inform how policies get made here in Illinois.

Shawnee Caruthers: Juan described his experience in public education working at Grayslake Central High School. I’m sure a lot of that probably resonates with you and what you may or may not see with your students. Can you tell us a little bit about Grayslake Central High School and why working with EdSystems is really critical to the work that you’re doing?

Gina Schuyler: Definitely. Grayslake District 127 has two high schools, Grayslake Central and Grayslake North, both integral in the career pathway endorsement process. Juan has been an advocate for our school. He’s allowed us to be innovative at a time when, having been in CTE (Career and Technical Education) for 26 years, we had to be the loud voices to ensure that students, parents, and stakeholders knew about what career and technical education is. Partnerships with EdSystems and Juan, along with the timing of the CCPE in Illinois, have been a perfect marriage where school systems are shifting their dynamics to be more pathway-focused. Our visions, values, and initiatives mirror each other’s, allowing us to succeed in our endeavors, goals, and values.

Strategies and Successes in Illinois’ Education and Workforce Development

Shawnee Caruthers: Yeah, I love that you’re talking about being a cheerleader for CTE because sometimes you do have to help your community understand the value, and there are lots of different strategies to make that work. Juan, as we think about some of the key strategies you employ in your work to promote education and workforce readiness, what are some of the strategies used in Illinois?

Juan Jose Gonzalez: We have three buckets of work that we focus on. First is the development of college and career pathways in Illinois, not only CTE systems but also more robust and advanced pathways. We focus on bridges to post-secondary, including dual credit, early college policy and implementation, college and career readiness, work-based learning, and the transition to post-secondary through transitional instruction. Lastly, we care about state longitudinal data systems and the use of data for evaluation. We use these three buckets at three different levels: partnering with state agencies, working regionally with local communities, and piloting innovations to inform state-level work.

Shawnee Caruthers: And Gina, that convening of intermediaries from state and regional levels to workforce, what does that mean for you in the work that you’re doing and the impact you’re trying to make?

Gina Schuyler: Correct. We’ve seen a huge shift where discussions were once only college-related for students. Now, education past high school can look like various things, such as entering the workforce with certifications or earning dual credit, providing significant savings for families. This partnership allows students to be more informed about their options, moving from blind post-secondary education choices to informed decisions. It brings together all the components Juan mentioned, giving students and stakeholders a comprehensive understanding.

Shawnee Caruthers: Juan, as we think about the experiences, because that was among the many things Gina said that stood out to me, and I know that is just one of the values of career and technical education. How is EdSystems promoting or strengthening pathway progressions?

Juan Jose Gonzalez: EdSystems acts as an intermediary organization within a state policy framework central to pathways implementation in Illinois. We identify gaps or barriers, pilot solutions with regional teams, and share lessons learned to inform state policy. For example, dual credit implementation might struggle due to a lack of credentialed teachers. We look for innovative solutions, such as virtual opportunities or regional career centers. Our role is to pilot, scale, and facilitate communication and solutions across various educational and workforce systems.

Gina Schuyler: Juan mentioned having an overview of what’s happening in Illinois. Our district’s partnership with EdSystems means he’s able to connect us with initiatives like IT pathways or help other districts by sharing our experiences. It’s like having eagle eyes, putting partners together to replicate best practices across the state for the benefit of all students.

Shawnee Caruthers: Yeah. It sounds like you all have a lot of partners to help inform decisions regarding pathways and beyond. So why IT pathways?

Juan Jose Gonzalez: For the Accelerate ED initiative, we chose to pilot IT pathways due to the sector’s growth and lagging implementation in Illinois. The College Career Pathway Endorsement Framework initially saw health science, manufacturing, and education pathways. IT was the next in-demand sector not yet addressed. IT pathways offer opportunities for virtual learning and innovation, making it a prime candidate for accelerated implementation.

Shawnee Caruthers: And Gina, have you found that to be true for your community in terms of the need for increased IT pathway exposure?

Gina Schuyler: Definitely. We work closely with Lake County Partners and Lake County Workforce to identify needed areas. Health science, manufacturing, and IT are prominent, with IT embedded in the others. With the rise of AI, it was a perfect partnership for our students to access these growing fields.

Navigating the Dual Credit Landscape in Illinois

Shawnee Caruthers: As we think about the state dual credit policy and its impact, how has the implementation of the Illinois Post-Secondary and Workforce Readiness Act impacted the accessibility of college credit courses for students?

Juan Jose Gonzalez: The Post-Secondary and Workforce Readiness Act, passed in 2016, has four key components. Relevant to this discussion is the implementation of transitional instruction—college readiness courses in math and English that place students into college-ready coursework. Another component is the College and Career Pathway Endorsement Framework, defining a pathway as two years of coursework, including college credit, work-based learning activities, and career readiness in math and English. This endorsement on a diploma signifies a student’s completion of this structured pathway.

Initially, only a few school districts adopted this framework. In 2022, an amendment required all school districts to implement at least one pathway. Consequently, we now see about 280 school districts implementing pathways. This framework has increased access to career-focused dual credit coursework, fostering more collaboration between high schools and community colleges. It encourages a marriage of systems that might otherwise only be dating.

Shawnee Caruthers: I love that analogy! And Gina, can you articulate what dual credit looks like in CTE in your space and the impact of increased readiness in math and English?

Gina Schuyler: Grayslake District 127 was a pilot district for the CCPE process, starting in 2019-2020 during the pandemic. When I arrived, we had no early college credit in CTE. Now, we have dual credit in several areas. This has diversified students’ portfolios, offering more than just AP courses. It’s created equitable access to early college credit, benefiting students and families with a significant return on investment. Career exploration and internship coordinators now help coordinate work-based learning and team challenges, reshaping the high school education framework.

Shawnee Caruthers: Juan, congratulations on the systemic work you’re doing. One challenge you mentioned is ensuring parents are informed. How will changes in pathways influence the scale and scope of college credit courses offered? What challenges and opportunities do you foresee, especially regarding mixed student eligibility courses?

Juan Jose Gonzalez: In terms of scale and scope, the pathway endorsement framework, along with innovations in the state’s dual credit quality act, has raised questions about teacher credentialing and student eligibility for college-level courses. We aim to ensure equity in course access, making sure benchmarks aren’t unnecessarily high. For example, medical terminology doesn’t require college-level junior standing. By focusing on equity and access, we see increased dual credit implementation. Research shows that dual credit access has doubled in recent years, though disparities remain. We focus on supporting districts with high racial minorities, low-income status, or rural locations to scale dual credit implementation equitably.

Shawnee Caruthers: That’s a great approach. Gina, are you finding a shift from more AP to dual credit in your space?

Gina Schuyler: Yes, though AP remains strong, dual credit is now at the table. We have dual credit in math, English, and science. The Dual Credit Quality Act has opened discussions and created equitable access. In Lake County, our dual credit partner has great communication, dedicated roles, and collaboration with EdSystems. This helps highlight curriculum gaps, creating plans to ensure equitable access to dual credit.

Juan Jose Gonzalez: Traditionally, public high school systems had distinct tracks for college-bound and workforce-bound students. The pathway frameworks in Illinois raise the floor for career-focused students, making them college and career-ready simultaneously. This inclusion of dual credit in CTE sequences shows students they can achieve both career readiness and college credit, enhancing their career trajectories.

Gina Schuyler: It allows students who might not have considered post-secondary education to succeed in their first college class, building confidence. We celebrate their successes and help them identify skills and interests, even if they discover a field isn’t for them. It’s about transferable skills and continuous learning.

Shawnee Caruthers: How will this be measured? What does impact measurement look like for students transitioning from high school to beyond?

Juan Jose Gonzalez: Several metrics are in place. The state tracks students earning the college career pathway endorsement on their diplomas. In 2023, the number of students increased from 50 in 2020 to 1,000. I expect this to double as more districts implement the pathway endorsement framework. The Illinois school report card now tracks CTE students’ graduation rates, post-secondary enrollment rates, and dual credit completion rates. We’ve seen a doubling of dual credit and AP completion rates in the last five years. EdSystems also has a longitudinal data system with data-sharing agreements to track students’ post-secondary success and the impact of their high school experiences.

Shawnee Caruthers: Gina, how does this program specifically benefit your IT pathways?

Gina Schuyler: The data shared with EdSystems has led to a deep dive into our IT pathways. We discovered we had more than one pathway, providing additional on and off ramps for students. It has offered access to equipment and work-based learning opportunities that might otherwise be unaffordable. Partnering with other districts to share best practices has been invaluable. The unrestricted innovation funds from EdSystems have allowed us to incentivize student engagement in career interest exploration, creating a snowball effect of interest and conversation.

Shawnee Caruthers: How do you get educators and leadership to adapt to these legislative changes?

Juan Jose Gonzalez: It can be tricky. Sometimes it’s about weathering storms and waiting for things to normalize. EdSystems uses a carrot approach, providing innovation funds to districts willing to try new things. Once we have proof points of success, we systematize good baseline implementations across different districts. Giving regional partners a voice in advising policy increases their buy-in. However, not everyone will always be happy, and that’s okay. We continue to work together and find common ground.

Gina Schuyler: We used EdSystems funds to incentivize students to identify their career interests using platforms like YouScience and Schoolinks. Small rewards created conversations about pathways and interests, demonstrating the power of unrestricted funds for innovation.

The Future of College Credit Education in Illinois

Shawnee Caruthers: As you both think about the future of college credit education in Illinois, what do you see?

Juan Jose Gonzalez: Illinois is unique with two models: traditional CTE and high-dosage college credit models. The pathway endorsement framework creates an attainable benchmark of college credit for as many students as possible. Access to six hours of college credit and the encouragement of college credit in math and English sets students up for success. This approach doesn’t restrict high-dosage models but offers an equilibrium that many districts can reasonably attain for a significant portion of their students.

Gina Schuyler: I see a huge shift, removing silos and creating more cross-curricular pathways in high schools. There will be a better return on investment and a stronger pipeline entering the workforce. The CCPE helps businesses engage with schools by showing that students are receiving college-level courses and work-based learning opportunities. This changes the landscape of education and workforce engagement.

Shawnee Caruthers: I appreciate the foundation you’re setting in Illinois and the intentional buy-in at all levels, ensuring equitable access to dual credit and beyond. Great job, and thank you for stopping by Getting Smart today.

The post Juan Jose Gonzalez and Gina Schuyler on Community College Networks and Radical Dual Credit appeared first on Getting Smart.

Lona Running Wolf on Education Reform and Cultural Preservation

Getting Smart Staff — Fri, 17 May 2024 09:15:00 +0000

This episode of the Getting Smart Podcast is part of a new short monthly series where Mason Pashia is joined by Dr. Jason Cummins, a previous guest and a friend of the podcast, to speak with indigenous leaders and academics to discuss how indigenous ways of knowing and leading can, and should, shape the education system.

On this podcast episode, they are joined by Lona Running Wolf from the Piikani Nation to discuss her extensive work in educational reform and cultural preservation. Lona shares insights from her journey, highlighting her current role as the project administrator for Blackfeet ECO Knowledge, a nonprofit organization aimed at reversing the effects of historical trauma on Native communities through cultural, language, and environmental initiatives. Together they discuss the systemic challenges faced by Native students, the impact of policies such as the boarding school era, and the importance of integrating cultural knowledge into educational frameworks to better serve diverse learner needs. Lona also discusses the profound influence of Blackfoot culture on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, emphasizing a community-centric approach to education and well-being.

Lona Running Wolf

Lona has served in many capacities in education including as a teacher, instructional coach, curriculum and instructional leader, and a university adjunct professor. She has also worked with districts across Montana toward school improvement in her previous role at the Montana Office of Public Instruction as the Director of American Indian Student Achievement. She is currently a faculty member at the University of Montana Western working with the tribal grant partnerships of several tribal community colleges’ educator prep programs. She also is co-owner of 4-Poles Educational Consulting in which she provides consultation on Indigenous education and pedagogy. Lona has an Associate of Arts in Elementary Education from Blackfeet Community College, a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education from Salish Kootenai College, and a Master of Education in Curriculum & Instruction- Triple Literacy from the University of Texas and is currently completing her doctoral program at the University of Montana. Lona and her husband Tyson Running Wolf are involved in the cultural revitalization of the Nitsitapii (Blackfoot) societies, ceremonies, and language and are cultural leaders in their community. They are blessed with seven children and ten grandchildren.

Abridged Outline

Lana’s Journey: From Education to Nonprofit Leadership
Exploring Blackfeet Identity and the Impact of Borders
Shifting Educational Paradigms and Addressing Historical Trauma
Blackfeet ECO Knowledge: Merging Tradition with Modern Education

Jason Cummins: Hello, everybody. Jason Cummins here, happy to be on the podcast again with Mason, my good colleague. We have with us today Lona Running Wolf of the Piikani Nation. She’s an educational leader there and does training around the state. I’ve worked with Lona for a while when she was leading at the state level and also with the 2+2 teacher prep program that specifically prepares teachers to work with two particular Native nations. Welcome, Lona. I’ll ask you to introduce yourself.

Lana’s Journey: From Education to Nonprofit Leadership

Lona Running Wolf: Thanks, Jason. Happy to be here. It’s really good to see you again. We have a lot of experience and work that we’ve done together, which I think is really meaningful and has led to the work that I do now. I currently am the project administrator for a nonprofit organization called Blackfeet ECO Knowledge. I moved out of the education field, although the work I do in the nonprofit is still in that area, just outside the formal education system, which I’ll explain later why I think that’s important. Previously, I was the director of American Indian Student Achievement at the Office of Public Instruction in Montana. The work we did there was focused on improving school performance in our districts that are in the lowest five percent, which happened to be all the Native school districts in Montana. My role and my team’s role were to figure out why that was happening, even though we had some understanding, and to try to change the system to match the learners, which is not that easy to do. I also worked in the 2+2 program partnership between the University of Montana Western and Blackfeet Community College and with Little Big Horn College, where we designed teacher prep programs geared towards developing the skills of teachers to match the learners in those communities. Thank you for inviting me.

Jason Cummins: Yeah, that was pretty exciting work, and we have to shout out Dr. Vicki Howard as well from UMW. She’s just a super ally to a lot of our communities and does really good work.

Mason Pashia: Just on that point, for our audience, when you’re demonstrating a proficiency in the culture, is that like an assessment or how is that demonstrated?

Lona Running Wolf: For me, it’s not like an assessment. In the work I was doing with Blackfeet and LittleBigHorn, it was about developing their understanding of why, as teachers, we need to incorporate culture and language as the foundation of their classroom, not as a side thing. So, to me, proficiency means understanding. To truly know a culture, you almost have to be born and raised in it. When you have disruptions like the boarding school era, it can be problematic. It’s not about being proficient in the language, but about being motivated to bring the language into their classrooms and being open to learning the culture and incorporating it into their teaching. At the same time, we did have standards to ensure that teachers knew their culture at a basic level. So, it wasn’t an assessment per se, but more like a standard we wanted our teachers to meet when they left the program.

Exploring Blackfeet Identity and the Impact of Borders

Jason Cummins: Tell us a little bit about the Blackfeet. Aren’t there different bands?

Lona Running Wolf: Yes, there are four different bands. There are three on the Canadian side of the border: the Siksika, the Kainai, and the North Peigan. On the American side, there’s the Blackfeet. People may get confused between Blackfeet and Blackfoot, but the difference is if you’re in Canada, you say Blackfoot, and if you’re on the American side, you say Blackfeet. However, our true collective name is Niitsitapi, which means “the real people.” The bands are called Kainah, Kiksika and on the American side, we’re the Amskapi Piikani.

Jason Cummins: How does it work having the boundary of Canada and the United States right in the middle of your homeland?

Lona Running Wolf: It’s been really challenging. The border creates a division where you either belong to Canada or the U.S., leading to different histories. The bands in Canada have gone through different policies, some similar but some not, compared to our side of the border. These policies determine our connection to our culture. While both Canada and the U.S. had policies aimed at erasing our culture and language, the Canadian side held onto the language better. On our side, for some reason, whether due to harsher policies or other variables, we were more impacted in terms of retaining our culture and language.

Jason Cummins: In my previous work, I was fortunate to meet with Blackfeet leadership, like Pat Armstrong and Davis Marvin Weatherwax, who were really engaged in their communities’ issues. That’s when I first learned about the Jay Treaty Tribes, which are tribes at the border of northern United States and Canada, and at the southern border with Mexico. These tribes are guaranteed unfettered access to visit relatives across the border, but this hasn’t always been honored, leading to family separations.

Mason Pashia: Lona, could you provide a quick overview of your work around shifting educational paradigms for our listeners?

Lona Running Wolf: Sure. This work is a culmination of everything I’ve done in education and my personal journey of reconnecting to my culture. Changing a system entrenched in a dominant cultural worldview is extremely difficult, whether at the state or federal level. The article I wrote was a way to articulate my perspective on the urgent need for educational system reform. It discusses the significant mismatch between our educational system and the needs of our learners, which is evident not only among Native students but also non-Native students who are stagnating in their educational achievements. The system, as it is currently structured, serves neither effectively. The article calls for a change that acknowledges this disconnect and emphasizes the need for a shift towards educational practices that genuinely reflect and serve the diverse cultural backgrounds and learning styles of all students.

Mason Pashia: That’s incredibly important. Could you expand on the research and ideas surrounding Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how that ties into your work?

Lona Running Wolf: Yes, about 13 or 14 years ago, while pursuing my bachelor’s degree at the University of Montana, I first encountered Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It appeared straightforward—fulfill one level of need to progress to the next until self-actualization is achieved. However, it wasn’t until I attended a workshop by my elder, Narcissus Blood, that I realized there was much more to it. Maslow developed his theory after researching the Blackfoot, which challenged his initial assumptions about what motivates people. Unlike his prior beliefs that personal gain drove human behavior, he found that the Blackfoot community demonstrated a profound self-awareness and esteem that was not driven by materialistic desires.

Our research has shown that Maslow’s concept was profoundly influenced by his time with the Blackfoot people, who emphasized community and cultural continuity over individual achievement. This communal focus is something that was somewhat lost when Maslow translated his observations into what we now know as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

It’s crucial to understand that while we speak about the past impacts of U.S. policies and the boarding school era on our cultures, these influences extend into the present. These historical traumas, while rooted in the past, continue to affect us today because the policies and their consequences have not been fully addressed. This ongoing impact is what we see in the educational challenges and social issues within our communities. It’s not just about overcoming past traumas but about actively dismantling the remnants of these policies that continue to hinder our progress.

Jason Cummins: So for our listeners who aren’t aware of the horrors of boarding schools, can you talk about the results of that we see in our schools today and what we could do about that when serving our students?

Lona Running Wolf: Yeah, just to go along with what I was talking about with the research of Maslow and all that, what they basically did was take a snapshot of our culture at that time and place in the 1930s. Even though U.S. policies were already in play that were eroding our culture and our systems, there was still enough in our communities that Maslow and Ruth Benedict saw. So even without us being fully intact in our ancestral paradigm, there were so many policies that were happening with the true intention of breaking down exactly what I talked about—breaking down that synergistic society, breaking down all the things that made our people, all Native Indigenous people, self-actualized, and stopping the transmission of our culture and language. The boarding school era was one of the main policies that did that work, but there’s much more than just the boarding school era. There’s the Sixties Scoop, the Relocation Era, the Dawes Act—so many different policies that were intentionally and purposely meant to break down those systems.

People think that, and we call that historical trauma, which is true. It happened—it was a trauma that happened back in the boarding school era or when those policies were first enacted. But the problem is that we haven’t cleaned up those policies, even though they don’t exist anymore. We haven’t stopped the effects of those policies. For example, the Dawes Act is a policy that still affects us today. It was stopped, but the policies put in place still exist today. That’s why we have so many jurisdictional issues and land issues.

Basically, what I’m saying is that the boarding school era happened in the past, but it started generational cycles. At the boarding schools, the family dynamic was intentionally broken. The ability or understanding of raising children and creating a positive self-identity in children as parents, family, and community was intentionally shattered. That doesn’t mean all aspects of us were lost, because we had enough resiliency to hold on to a lot. Somebody at a training recently said you can think of the boarding school era like an egg. Every time a policy came about, the shell was getting cracked, and the pieces of the shell fell away, but the membrane stayed intact. That’s where we are right now—our membrane is still intact, but it’s very delicate. We don’t have that hard shell around us to help protect us.

The boarding school era did that to us, and today, what we see in our communities are high levels of negative coping mechanisms passed down through generational cycles. We’re at the highest level in every negative statistic, but that’s not who we are. That’s just the product of the boarding schools and all those policies.

Jason Cummins: Yeah, we’re still here. Resiliency is definitely in our DNA. What can school leaders do to address a lot of these issues because it seems like a big issue? I like what you said about how the effects of those policies are still here. It’s like if you throw a rock in a pond, and right now we’re feeling the waves of it. It’s against the law to forbid Natives from speaking their language, but in practice, we know a lot of educators still try to do that. I think that’s where some of our work at the state level intertwined within my community. We had educators who were unaware of the federal protections of Native languages, and we were trying to get the state to support the federal policies. What can school leaders do about that? And if you’re comfortable, we can also talk about the work at the state level.

Lona Running Wolf: That’s so true. Just thinking about that membrane that’s left, that’s the resiliency we have, and it’s holding us together right now. But those little pieces of the egg are still laying there, and they’re shattered. What school administrators need to do is put as many pieces back as they can, those protective layers. We did a research study when I worked at OPI to give voice to our people in the trenches working with Native students. I wanted them to share what they felt were the issues causing the achievement gap. Not surprisingly, what we got out of that study was all the stuff we’re talking about today. Very little had to do with whether our students were intelligent enough to do well on tests or in the educational system. It had everything to do with all these issues we’ve already discussed.

The hardest part for school administrators to understand is that if they’re not thinking about putting those pieces of the egg back together, they’re just kicking the can down the road for our students, who will never be able to get past that resiliency stage. Like I always say, I’m tired of being resilient. I don’t want trauma in my family or my life anymore. Our communities are tired of it too. We want to be successful, and we are in many ways, but the statistics are what they are. School administrators have to think outside the box that the state levels tell them are the answers. They have to be willing to incorporate elements like culture and language, things that build a strong self-identity, and put those on the same level as academics.

Understand that they’re spending all this money and effort on instruction, and it’s not yielding the results they want. If they invested the same effort in the social and emotional side of students and put as much emphasis there as they do on academics, they would see the results they’re looking for. It takes thinking outside the box, because it’s scary for an administrator to go against the grain. That’s what administrators really have to do.

Jason Cummins: They can. The thing is, as a school leader or school board member, I know there are challenges, but they can make positive changes for their local community. It’s strange to think that almost every teacher who has graduated with a teaching degree has learned about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but we’ve rarely seen it implemented.

Jason Cummins: We understand it, but we’ve rarely seen a school system try to serve students’ needs.

Lona Running Wolf: That’s the problem. The educator prep programs are the first cog in the system. They get into the prep programs, and they’re indoctrinated into the same mainstream idea of education. They’re taught the same things, with an emphasis on math and reading. I’m not saying we don’t need strong academics in our schools, but they don’t spend time looking at the whole child in educator prep programs. That’s why our educator prep programs were so different, because we balanced that. We really pushed the whole child approach on our teachers, focusing on culture, language, family dynamics, community structures, and the breakdown of culture. We did all that. So when we sent these teachers into the field, they weren’t indoctrinated into that system. But then they get into the school system and are told to use this curriculum, follow this program, teach with fidelity, follow this schedule. It’s so prescriptive that it’s hard to get out of that system.

Jason Cummins: Even though the data says it’s not working, looking at the achievement gap, a lot of our students for whom the system works have those elements you mentioned working in their favor. It is their culture, their history, their language—that’s the default of the school system. So there aren’t the same learning barriers that other students might face.

Lona Running Wolf: I saw somebody say, “We don’t teach culture in our schools.” This person replied, “What are you talking about? You teach it every day. You teach American culture every day.”

Jason Cummins: Those conversations are important. Because it’s the default, we often don’t recognize it, like the proverbial fish that doesn’t know it’s in water.

Mason Pashia: Being mindful of your time, Lona, I may pivot to what you’re up to now. Earlier, you mentioned that you’re working with Blackfeet ECO Knowledge. Can you give us an overview of what they’re doing and how it extends the legacy or mission you’ve been leading for your career so far?

Lona Running Wolf: Yeah, as we’re doing this work, there are so many different levels to consider. The policies today, like the Every Student Succeeds Act, allow school districts to incorporate culture and language. Your Title I funds can be used to incorporate whole child approaches. That’s the whole premise of it. But what I saw is that our own people are afraid to move outside of this system, and that’s part of the fracture of our culture and paradigm. I tried to make a lot of changes at the state agency level, but it was very difficult. My dream is for Native students to be in schools that aren’t just inside buildings—they should be out in nature, on the land, learning our stories and songs, connecting to the landscape, understanding ecosystems and how our actions affect climate change. My dream is to blend the new world we live in with technology and the things we taught our kids pre-contact. But doing that within the system is too hard.

Blackfeet ECO Knowledge is all about reversing the effects of historical trauma. We want to measure and reverse language loss and the disconnect from the land and environment. We want to see people using the land appropriately through hunting, land use, and stewardship, and practicing our culture, reversing cultural loss. Historical trauma didn’t only happen to the people; it happened to our environment, land, animals, language, culture, and people. All our projects aim to reverse these effects. One project we do is the Blackfoot Way of Life Project, where we develop modules about our culture and take participants through the journey of our stories, with the main story being Scarface. These modules help create an understanding of our culture. We also have language-based projects and others focused on the land or buffalo.

My husband, Tyson Running Wolf, and I co-created Blackfeet ECO Knowledge as a nonprofit organization. Our intention is to deliver these educational tools to organizations that don’t have the funding or ability to include them in their programs. We partner with schools, tribal programs, and various community organizations to break free from the fear of our culture and practice the top part of our hierarchy of needs. That’s the work we do.

Jason Cummins: That’s exciting work.

Lona Running Wolf: Yeah, and hopefully one day, we’ll be able to infiltrate the system itself, although it’s very difficult. We hope this work will be constantly embedded into the system until it starts to change its motion.

Jason Cummins: As a practitioner, just experiencing school and never having a different example of what school could be, people replicate the system they experienced. When we first created language programs, we were afraid in a different way—how are we going to do this? At the state level, people were afraid too, wondering what we were doing. Historically, when it came to our cultures and languages, the school was the steamroller that rolled over them. It was fine to have German, French, and Spanish in school, but people were uncomfortable with indigenous languages.

Lona Running Wolf: Yep, it’s still like that today, but it’s a lot better than even five years ago. Because of the work you all did, not being afraid to incorporate that, there’s now research showing that language immersion classrooms are not only successful in their own language and culture, but they actually do better than English-speaking classrooms in reading. There’s research now behind that because people weren’t afraid to try.

Mason Pashia: My two wrap-up takeaways are about the ways in which educational leaders are not only urged but very able to work within current policies to make these changes happen, as well as a litany of amazing names and resources for people to dig deeper. We’ll include links to those folks referenced throughout, who are doing critical research on these topics. Thanks for joining, and everyone, thank you for listening.

Lona Running Wolf: Thank you guys so much.

The post Lona Running Wolf on Education Reform and Cultural Preservation appeared first on Getting Smart.

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel on The Cultivate Project and Global Citizenship

Getting Smart Staff — Wed, 15 May 2024 09:15:00 +0000

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast Nate McClennen is joined by Sarah Elizabeth Ippel, Founder and Executive Director of the Academy for Global Citizenship, a public K-8 charter school that opened in 2008 on the southwest side of Chicago. ACG just moved into a brand new campus in partnership with the Cultivate Collective project — a multi-generational community hub that includes an urban farm, health center, and adult education programs.

Together, Nate and Sarah discuss her journey to founding the Academy for Global Citizenship, how she was shaped by international travel, her observations of both innovative and inequitable education systems, and her non-traditional way of navigating the educational ecosystem.

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel’s life mission is to cultivate thriving communities. When she was 23 years old, she rode her bicycle to the Chicago Board of Education with a request: to reimagine what is possible in public education. Three years later, in 2008, the Academy for Global Citizenship (AGC) opened in a former dental tool factory on the city’s under-resourced southwest side where Sarah Elizabeth serves as its Founder and Executive Director. A Chicago Public Elementary School on a global mission that serves 96% minority children and families, AGC is developing the next generation of critical thinkers and mindful leaders to positively impact their communities and the world beyond.

Sarah Elizabeth completed a yearlong Entrepreneur in Residence Fellowship with Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective where she contributing to authoring AGC’s book titled “Reimagine Education: Designing a School to Change the world” and is continuing this work to build an Institute to disseminate evidenced-based strategies. Sarah Elizabeth spearheaded the plans for the “school of the future” and community learning hub in Chicago called Cultivate Collective to serve as a prototype for the United States and that demonstrates cutting-edge education and sustainability practices.

During her five-year term as Vice President of Education on the governing board of the United Nations Association, Sarah Elizabeth fostered broader implementation of The Growing Connection, an organic gardening initiative established to cross-culturally connect children and educators across continents through technology. She has also served on the Chicago Chapter of the United States Green Building Council Green Schools Advocacy Committee, Chicago Public Schools’ Environmental Action Plan Taskforce, and is a founding member of Conservation International’s Generation Conservation and Adrian Grenier’s Lonely Whale ocean conservation foundation. Sarah Elizabeth’s additional leadership and civic contributions have also included executive board memberships with Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently serves on Partners in Health’s Summits Education board that is scaling educational models in rural Haiti.

Sarah Elizabeth was selected as a United States Delegate to Terra Madre in 2010, where she met with representatives from over 60 nations to discuss the sustainability of our local and global food systems. In 2011, she was named one of Monocle’s Top 20 International Pioneers in Education and visited the White House to receive a national award from the Obama administration. In 2012 and 2013, Sarah Elizabeth was appointed as one of 100 Delegates from 20 countries across the globe who assembled for the G8 Young Global Leaders Summit, preparing recommendations for a communiqué for President Obama and the U.S. Department of State. In 2013, Sarah Elizabeth was recognized by Forbes as one of the nation’s “top five game changers in education”, was the recipient of the GOOD 100 list of “people pushing the world forward through doing”, was named a Bluhm Helfand Social Innovation Fellow and was selected by the Council on Global Affairs as an Emerging Leader Fellow. In 2014, Sarah Elizabeth was recognized as one of the top 100 US entrepreneurs and was honored at the United Nations. In 2017, the British Council honored Sarah Elizabeth as a finalist for the University of Cambridge Alumni Award for her “exceptional contribution and commitment to creating positive social change and improving the lives of others.” Most recently, Crain’s Chicago Business recognized her as a Notable Leader in Sustainability. When she is not traveling around the world, speaking about the Academy for Global Citizenship’s vision for systemic change, Sarah Elizabeth enjoys honing her skills as an urban farmer and beekeeper.

Outline

Introducing Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: A Visionary in Education
The Founding Story of Academy for Global Citizenship
Evolving Education: The Impact of AGC and Future Visions
Expanding the Vision: Cultivate Collective and Beyond

Nate McClennen: Hello, everyone. This is Nate McClennen, and I’m excited to dive into another Getting Smart podcast to see what’s new and interesting in education. So, I was thinking about the podcast and thinking that 20 years ago, I had the opportunity to join a team launching a school. It was hard. It was joyful. It was rewarding all at the same time.

And I remember meeting every single morning and every single afternoon. So today, I was thinking we would talk about what it takes to start, launch, and run a school. As I was researching this podcast, I found a great report from Carnegie Corporation from last year, and it found that 34 percent of schools didn’t even exist in the public sector 30 years earlier. So that means about 17 million public school students are in schools that are less than 30 years old. So, we know there are some amazing lessons to be learned for both those who want to start a school—spoiler, it’s super hard and it’s the most challenging thing you might ever do, but it’s also the most rewarding thing you might ever do—and also those who are redesigning schools who can learn from school launches but need a whole different change mindset. So, with school redesigns and microschools and charter schools and just new public schools launching all the time, I think it’s important that we learn from those who have come before us.

So today, we’re joined by Sarah Elizabeth Ippel, the founder and executive director of the Academy for Global Citizenship, a public K-8 charter school which opened in 2008 on the south side of Chicago. AGC just moved this past fall into a brand-new campus in partnership with the Cultivate Collective project, a multi-generational community hub that includes an urban farm, a health center, adult education programs, and much, much more, which we’re going to learn about today. So welcome, Sarah Elizabeth. So excited to hear about the work you’re all doing locally in Chicago and also your vision for how your project can have a global impact.

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: Thanks, Nate. I’m so thrilled to be here.

The Journey of Starting a School: Challenges and Rewards

Nate McClennen: Alright. So, let’s start with my favorite question, which is a memory of your most impactful learning experience when you were growing up. So, what was it? Why did it impact you so much?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: Throughout my childhood, I spent a lot of time in the forest. I grew up in a family with five kids. We didn’t necessarily have resources to go on trips. So, my parents would pack us up in the family van and take us into the woods where my grandparents had this piece of land with no electricity and no running water. We would spend our days and our nights and our weekends exploring, building forts, climbing trees, and looking at bugs. I look back on my educational experiences and my time in school, and I can’t help but think about all that time spent in nature, all the unstructured play, and all the time to wonder, and how that contributed to me falling in love with the natural world.

Nate McClennen: I think we’ve talked about this before, but I had a similar upbringing. We grew up on a small farm, and we were outside all the time. I never considered it learning until I was a teacher and an educator. I said that was the most impactful part of my childhood—being outside in forts, chasing fireflies, playing in the creek. So, we share a love for the natural world and also this idea of awe and inquiry. It just happens when you’re outside of your house or outside of the classroom. It feels like that part of learning is the work to be done to transfer into the school systems themselves. So, let’s now fast forward from my background reading and our previous conversations. You’re pretty young, in your early twenties, when the idea of the Academy for Global Citizenship, AGC, emerged. So, what’s the origin story? What were the key milestones and some hurdles early on? And what are your biggest memories about that first year? That’s a lot of questions, but describe the scenario for us.

The Founding Story of Academy for Global Citizenship

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: Well, a few years later, after leaving Michigan and leaving the country for the first time, I ended up going to graduate school in England. And for me, this was a mind-blowing, eye-opening experience where I was suddenly surrounded by people from all over the world who had different perspectives, who spoke different languages. And although I was not studying education in graduate school, I became so intrigued to understand the state of our world and expand my own horizons by visiting schools in other parts of the world. So, on the weekends, I would pack up my dissertation writing, put on my backpack, and stay in youth hostels all over—initially all over Europe—and started visiting schools as a way to learn about how different people were developing these perspectives about the world. Suddenly, at some point in that first year, this curiosity shifted to more of a determined quest to really study and understand these international systems of education. That eventually took me to schools in over 100 countries, and as you can imagine, Nate, throughout that experience, I visited some parts of our world that have extraordinary education systems, right? They’re known for their outcomes. They’re known for their innovation. And at the same time, I spent many of those months and years in some of our most developing parts of our world and saw the extraordinary disparities and challenges and inequities that exist on a global level. When I moved to Chicago, what I quickly realized is that I was living in this city where this was not just a global issue, that these systemic inequities and challenges existed in my own backyard. And being in my early twenties, being naive and idealistic, I thought we’ve got to do something about this. I woke up with this conviction and felt that as a member of this community in Chicago, we needed to think differently. And we just needed to fundamentally reimagine public education. And I thought, after all of these things that I’ve seen all over the world, it just seems so straightforward, right? That we needed to be cultivating this next generation of mindful leaders and global citizens. So, I started writing what ultimately became a 600-page proposal. I jumped on my bike when I was 23, rode down Clark Street to the Board of Education in Chicago, and explained all of this to them, thinking that of course, they would pat me on the back and say, “This sounds like a magnificent idea.” And that is absolutely not what happened. Having had no track record, no experience, never taught in a school, and having no education credentials, it took a few years to convince the Chicago public school system to approve this idea as a public charter school. It ultimately happened on the third try after three years in 2007. And then we had eight months to turn those 600 pages into reality in this former dental tool factory in one of the most underserved parts of our city.

Nate McClennen: That is quite a story. Okay, I have a couple of follow-up questions. Number one, it’s amazing that you were able to visit 100 different countries and see schools there. Quick sidetrack: what was your dissertation on when you were over in England?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: I wrote my dissertation on social conceptions of giftedness. So, I was in the political science field, very interested in social and developmental psychology.

Nate McClennen: Gotcha. But at that point, did you enter your doctoral program thinking that you wanted to do schools, or did that happen prior or after as you started to do this traveling and experience?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: It happened after. Yeah, I had no interest in schools when I started grad school.

Nate McClennen: First year, you have this memory of pre-opening, you’re riding your bike. Okay, year one, what’s a memory from year one that you have? Most of it is probably a blur, given the work that you’ve done. But what is a year one memory that’s sticky for you?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: My goodness, there are many different ways that I can answer this question, but we did some pretty funny things. We were a very small group of idealists, right? We’re all in our early twenties. Suddenly, we get this approval to open a public school. So, we thought to ourselves, gosh, we need to see if we can get everything donated, and then we can go to IKEA to buy the rest of the things so that we can be really scrappy with the limited dollars that we have to open the school. So, we would rent U-Haul trucks and drive around the city, picking up all sorts of odds and ends. I remember somebody told me one day that they had carpet squares, and we were like, this is perfect. So, we would drive around picking up all these things, and then we would spend hours and days—and sometimes we would sleep over at the dental tool factory—assembling this IKEA furniture and installing the carpet. It was a scrappy, hands-on time.

Nate McClennen: I love it. You think about also just the teamwork and team building and collaboration and all those things that you’re developing. We now formally call them transferable or durable skills or 21st-century skills, but you all were iterating on that in real time. I appreciate that. Okay, so now, can you describe what AGC looks like today and how it’s different from what you imagined? What have you learned from your own iterations of the model? Because I assume it doesn’t look exactly the same as what you put on those 600 pages. Maybe it does. I don’t know.

Evolving Education: The Impact of AGC and Future Visions

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: Yeah, it’s interesting when I think about this question and I look back and I laugh, in so many ways, because I think, what could I possibly have known in my early twenties? I still feel like I’m learning today, right, after two decades of doing this work. But I look back and chuckle. And yet, what’s so interesting is after two decades of all sorts of growth and evolution and strategy and really smart people plugging into this team, we have these six pillars that we developed before the school even opened that we said, these are the six things, right? These are the six foundational aspects of our model. And what’s so interesting is, although we’ve revisited those over the years, they have remained constant. But the way that they take shape and what they have become to mean to us has really deepened. And I think an example of what that means is student agency. Now that we have hundreds of children that have gone through the school, we’ve got graduates and alumni. It’s so interesting to think about how an aspect of our model, for example, global citizenship and all that means and represents, has evolved. We had a group of eighth graders come to us when there were a lot of critical things happening in our country, conversations about race and ethnicity and racism. They came to us and said, we need an anti-racist framework and policy. So, it’s an example of something where this sort of collective, a collective of people, students and teachers and families have really shaped and brought to life—literally brought to life—this spirit of our organization that looks so different than when we were just opening our doors almost 16 years ago.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, it’s amazing. It feels to me that a lot of school founders have these central tenets that don’t change, but the evolution of those is really dependent on the community that you’re involved with. It’s this co-evolution where it doesn’t matter really. It matters a little bit what the founding group thinks and they articulate a language and a vision. But it comes to life by the students and the families and the teachers and everybody else who evolves with it over the years. So, yeah, I really appreciate that. Did you start out with the International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years and Middle Years Program? Did you start out with that or did you adopt that along the way?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: We did start with the IB program. It took us time to go through the authorization process, but that was one thing that we knew from the get-go. It was foundational to our ethos and model. So, we did open our doors implementing the International Baccalaureate program on day one.

Nate McClennen: And a lot of your students, you had to recruit a first group of students. Was it all currently your K-8, and you’ve opened an early childhood or pre-K now with your new campus? Did you start K-1-2 and then grow up from there, or did you start K-8? What was your opening model?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: We started with kindergarten and first grade. Those first graders grew into our second-year class, and we grew the school in that way.

Nate McClennen: Got it. Okay, let’s dig into the name a little bit. So, global citizenship. You’ve talked a lot. I’ve heard those words come out in a variety of places from your description of some of the pillars to also your travels before you even opened up the school. So, what does that look like daily in the program? And you have green and sustainability and healthy living and social justice. All these things show up over and over again in what you’ve written and what’s on the website, etc. What do your graduates look like when they leave eighth grade? Do they have this ethos of sustainability that they’re embedded with? How do they react to that?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: Yeah, this is another example of something that has really evolved. In some ways, if you think about two decades ago, when we started writing the foundational vision of what the school would be, our world was in a different place, politically and socially. There are so many things, even from a climate change perspective. The language and the discourse on a global level have really shifted over the course of the last two decades. For us, global citizenship is really inextricably linked to climate justice, health equity, and food sovereignty. These aspects relate back to the pillars of what is integrated not only into the curriculum and what happens starting at age three that our students are learning about on a daily basis but also into the operations and the way we structure everything from our food program to now being in a fully net-positive energy, climate-resilient, fossil fuel-free campus that we just constructed. We translate that technology and innovation back into the immersive environment that our students are learning about every day as the next generation of environmental leaders.

Nate McClennen: You have this wonderful experience K through eight. They go through this great journey together and co-design and learning and leading through the IB program and these great pillars. And then they leave. Where do they go? What are the reports back? You’ve got a handful of graduating classes now that have graduated out. What have you learned from your alumni?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: We have learned and begun to see this before they embark out into the world. We see students who have become social justice activists, global citizen leaders, and students with agency and voice who are spearheading change and impact in their own communities and the world. When they get to high school, we see this taken to a whole other level. Our graduates have a reputation when they enter high schools throughout the city. It’s been exciting to hear these reports of students initiating change and stepping into leadership opportunities. We support our students in applying and entering schools all over the city. As I mentioned, we are an International Baccalaureate school and a dual-language program. All our students have the opportunity to graduate with what’s called the Seal of Biliteracy. So, our students are prepared to enter dual-language high schools, providing them the opportunity to do their chemistry and all their high school classes in two languages. We have students accepted into selective enrollment programs. We have a disproportionate percentage of our students who gain access to those selective programs all over the city. We intentionally located ourselves in one of the most underserved neighborhoods in Chicago, but one that does have an International Baccalaureate high school option for students. Many of our students pursue that path. One of my lifelong or two-decade-long dreams is about to come true, as we are nearing the time we may be ready to hire our first graduate.

Nate McClennen: That would be such a cause for celebration. That’s amazing. Schools that decide to be K-8 often face the question, “What about high school?” Have you resisted that for the last 16-17 years intentionally? What’s your thought on high school?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: If we had maybe $100,000 for everyone that asked this question, we would perhaps be able to fund this by now. But we have been very focused on developing the campus we just launched this fall. We needed to prioritize our fundraising efforts on the next phase of our development, explicitly focusing on expanding to build out an entire early childhood aspect of our model. So, we just launched, for the first time this past fall, a program for three- and four-year-old students that includes a Head Start program.

Nate McClennen: You and your team have had this amazing opportunity to redevelop this six-acre piece of land on the southwest side of Chicago into this thing called the Cultivate Collective. Can you, this is an audio, so we can’t show video or an image here, but can you paint the picture of what this thing is now and then what it’s going to look like? Because I go back to that map or that image you showed at some point to me of all the amazing things that are going to be on this plot of land. So, can you describe now and future?

Expanding the Vision: Cultivate Collective and Beyond

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: Yes. So, two blocks from where our former school was located was a 40-acre public housing project site. The city of Chicago tore down this housing project back in 2011, and the 40 acres were vacant. When we thought about someday having a dream for a future home for our school, we started working with the Chicago Housing Authority, community residents, and neighborhood residents, alongside all our students and families. Our vision kept growing and expanding to think about how we could meet the multi-generational and holistic needs of our community. This culminated in the launch of the Cultivate Collective Hub, which we opened this past fall. It now houses the Academy for Global Citizenship. Our students moved two blocks away, but we are now located in a building that has a federally qualified healthcare center offering prenatal, behavioral, mental health, and pediatric care to our entire community. We have six teaching kitchens, a neighborhood fresh food marketplace where families can access fresh food for the first time in our food-insecure community, walking trails, apiaries, and orchards being developed this spring on a three-acre farm. We are producing a significant amount of fresh food for our community and our food program at the school. I mentioned that we’ve got an early childhood Head Start program and a reimagined learning environment. We’ve taken 20 years of learning from over 100 countries and schools worldwide to rethink the way we design what we call school. That’s what you’ll see there today. There’s a whole second phase to the project we’re soon embarking on, which relates to how we scale and open up this model to the world, how we train the next generation of teachers, and how we welcome students coming on field trips from all over the region. I’m excited to welcome you for a visit.

Nate McClennen: It’s definitely on my list next time I’m in Chicago. Will the housing be rebuilt around it as well? Is that also a parallel set of development that you will be in the center of?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: 700 units of housing are in the process of being redeveloped surrounding the six-and-a-half-acre hub. That will be a combination of public housing, affordable housing, and mixed-use market-rate housing. For the first time, residents will have access to these fundamental resources and programs and services offered by the school and Cultivate Collective, another nonprofit organization spearheading much of that community work.

Nate McClennen: Got it. So, is Cultivate Collective running the farms and the apiaries? Is there a co-share between AGC and Cultivate? What’s the relationship between the two?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: Yes. Two delineated nonprofit organizations coexist within the Cultivate Collective Hub and have some shared partners. We have a farming partner overseeing urban food production, a federally qualified healthcare center partner running that portion of the project, and AGC focuses on overseeing the public school. Cultivate Collective has an expanded mission that includes multi-generational learning pathways, sustainability, health and wellness, and economic vitality.

Nate McClennen: So, Cultivate Collective will offer adult education in entrepreneurship, business development, degrees, or certifications relevant to the model and area? Is that true? Will you have a whole multi-generational learning environment?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: Exactly. That programming and work are currently active and will only grow in the future.

Nate McClennen: Amazing. You alluded to training others and introducing them to this vision. What does the programming look like? Is it focused on educators and IB, or this larger picture? What do those programs look like? What’s your vision for scaling the model?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: From day one, we had this vision at the Academy for Global Citizenship to serve as a learning laboratory, an incubator of innovation, and a place where people could come from all over the world to learn about different aspects of the model. Some people come because they’re interested in implementing a dual-language International Baccalaureate program rooted in environmental education and serving a 96 percent Latino, Hispanic, and African American student population. Others are interested in aspects of our model analogous to the challenges, assets, and needs in their community. Some come for our innovative food program and the way we think about nutrition and wellness. We’ve trained over 10,000 educators and impacted 5 million students by disseminating components of our educational model. With the expanded vision of Cultivate Collective, we aim to scale this holistic model to other communities and cities.

Nate McClennen: I love it. There are few examples of projects like this. Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City is one, and there’s an interesting project called Runway Green in New York City. Have you seen similar initiatives worldwide now that you know where the vision is going?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: There are a few. Purpose Built Communities is a national organization rooted in an evidence-based framework integrating multi-generational learning, health and wellness, economic vitality, and mixed-income housing. Communities across the country are part of this best practice community, and that is powerful work. There are also communities focused on environmental sustainability, though perhaps not as focused on education or economic vitality. We are the first project in Illinois to achieve an unparalleled level of environmental sustainability and have received an international designation that no other project in our state has received. We’re proud that this project is happening in one of the most underserved parts of our city, disproportionately impacted by climate injustice for decades.

Nate McClennen: I agree. Innovative projects often happen in more affluent, suburban areas. I appreciate that this is happening in a more impacted area. We’ll put a link to Purpose Built Communities and Green Schools National Network in the show notes. Sarah Elizabeth, this has been awesome. Are there any other projects you’re dreaming up, or is this your final adventure?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: You’ve probably picked up on the fact that I’ve got some fire in my belly and am passionate about what more we can do as a community and as a world. We have additional phases in the work we hope to do, including building a teacher training institute and an environmental education learning laboratory. This will enable us to amplify and expand our scale and dissemination globally. We also have a Green Business Institute focused on closing the racial wealth gap and ensuring inclusive participation in the growth of the green and clean economy.

Nate McClennen: Who or what organization in the education space would you like to amplify?

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel: There is an amazing school in Costa Rica called La Paz that shares many commonalities with AGC. We’re developing a partnership with them. They’re doing innovative things with IB, dual language, and environmental education. People should definitely check it out.
Nate McClennen: Thank you, Sarah Elizabeth. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for everything you’re doing for the world, young people, and their families. You’re doing amazing work, and we have a lot of gratitude for that.

The post Sarah Elizabeth Ippel on The Cultivate Project and Global Citizenship appeared first on Getting Smart.

Yu-Ling Cheng on Remake Learning Days

Getting Smart Staff — Fri, 10 May 2024 09:15:00 +0000

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast Tom Vander Ark is joined by Yu-Ling Cheng,Co-Producer of Remake Learning Days and Director of Kidsburgh and Parents as Allies, (Kidsburgh operates as a project of Grantmakers of Western PA).

Remake Learning Days is one of the world’s largest festival of hands-on learning where parents and caregivers learn alongside their kids. The festival began in 2016 in southwestern PA and has since taken root in other regions. In 2024, there will be 2,000+ events across 16 regions, including 3 international regions, between the dates April 20-May 31. The festival events are an opportunity for families to learn together, to encourage kids to be curious and to learn about community resources.

To view events in each of the following regions please visit https://remakelearningdays.org/.

Badgerland WI; Apr 20 – Apr 28
East KY; Apr 20 – May 5
Uruguay; Apr 25 – Apr 27 ; Christchurch, New Zealand; May 13-19, Doncaster, United Kingdom; May 22 – May 31
Kansas City; May 1 – May 16
Knoxville, TN; May 10 – May 19
PA – SW; May 2 – May 22; NW; May 2 – May 22; Central; May 2 – May 22; North Central; May 2 – May 22; South Central; May 2 – May 22; NE; May 2 – May 22; SE; May 2 – May 22
Suncoast Region, FL; Apr 20 – May 4; West Virginia; May 4 – May 19
Pop-Up Events (events hosted outside of festival regions); Apr 20 – May 31

Yu-Ling Cheng

Yu-ling advocates for relevant and equitable learning opportunities, provides resources that support families, and creates compelling stories that celebrate the work happening across communities and inspire youth and families. She is a regular Kidsburgh guest contributor for KDKA-TV. Prior to Kidsburgh and Remake Learning Days, Yu-Ling produced Trying Together’s UnConference professional development series for early childhood educators, taught as an adjunct professor of arts marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, and spent nearly a decade leading marketing, earned revenue initiatives, and research for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Yu-Ling currently serves on the Avonworth School Board, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust marketing advisory committee, and Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School committee.

Outline

The Growth of Remake Learning Days
The Impact of Remake Learning
Real-World Learning in Pennsylvania
Kidsburgh, Parents as Allies and Other Collaborations
Yu-Ling’s Unique Background in Arts and Economics
Performing Arts at Remake Learning
Family Development Experiences

Tom Vander Ark: The goal of our new Pathways campaign is that every learner, regardless of zip code, is on a pathway to productive citizenship, economic mobility, and a purpose driven life. The campaign embraces a set of design principles that themselves embrace the Pathways paradox. New pathways are intentional and equitable.

That means they’re linked to opportunity. They’re accelerated, articulated, and supported, so that more students have an opportunity to enter high wage employment and, contribution. But they’re also, personalized. They’re co-created, they’re unbundled. Some would call it permissionless.

They’re interest-based, they’re place-based, they embrace. Discovery and creativity and difference making and in this second way, they, help what Charles Fidel, calls the drivers. They help develop the motivation, identity, purpose, and agency and today we’re talking about that side of new pathways, the unbundled, the student-driven, the place-based authentic kinds of learning experiences.

And we’re talking, about that. With Yu Ling, the co-producer of Remake Learning. Welcome to the Getting Smart Podcast, Yu Ling.

Yu-Ling Cheng: Thanks, Tom. Happy to be here.

Tom Vander Ark: You have a couple of really interesting jobs and you’ve had a really interesting life. And, in addition to Remake Learning, you’re the director of Kidsburghand Parents as Allies. We’ll come back and talk about those related. entities, but, we’re really big fans of remake learning. it started in Southwestern Pennsylvania, how long ago now?

Yu-Ling Cheng: Well, remake learning, the network started in 2007 and it was, yeah, I, it was over informal pancake breakfast, literally where people who just cared about kids and learning came together. So whether you’re a roboticist, an artist, a teacher, an afterschool teacher, childcare educator, coming together and just talking about how to make learning relevant for kids. So that’s how it started.

Tom Vander Ark: it was originally sponsored by the Grable Foundation? Were there a number of grantmakers?

Yu-Ling Cheng: originally, the Grable Foundation, the community cabinet of the Grable Foundation said, let’s bring people together and get them talking to each other. So that’s how it started, and the funding, started with the Grable Foundation, but now Remake Learning and the festival Remake Learning Days are supported by a number of entities and foundations and corporations.

The Growth of Remake Learning Days

Tom Vander Ark: Remake Learning Days exploded through Pittsburgh and then across the region as this really beautiful, Invitation to learn in school, out of school. and it quickly attracted lots of interesting partners. Like what kinds of] community partners get involved in Remake Learning in Pittsburgh?

Yu-Ling Cheng: Yes, so with the remake learning starting in 2007, we started to realize that we were missing parents and caregivers with the festival. And so we started the festival in 2016, and the idea behind it was to go to all the places that families and kids are learning. So we were hoping for all these different backyard places, making it easy for families to find learning resources.

So the different places could be a library, a park, community center, a tech center, a maker space. you could go to a museum, a place of faith. and of course, schools and libraries. All those, different organizations where kids are learning. And we also recognize that home and mentors and online resources are a part of a child’s learning ecosystem.

Tom Vander Ark: When did it start to spread to other regions?

Yu-Ling Cheng: Yeah. So in 2016, Remake Learning Days launched in Southwestern PA. And then starting in 2019, it started to take root in other regions across the United States. and so fast forward to today in 2024, we have 16 regions. Seven of them are across Pennsylvania, so the entire state of Pennsylvania is covered with, gosh, more than 830 events as of today.

And then we also have regions in Suncoast, Florida, Eastern Kentucky, Knoxville, Kansas City, Badgerland, also hosting festivals. And then. We also have three international festivals in Doncaster, United Kingdom, Uruguay, and, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Tom Vander Ark: Most of those Pennsylvania, festivals are in May. Is that right?

Yu-Ling Cheng: Yeah. specifically for Pennsylvania is May 2nd through 22nd, but as far as all the festivals across the world, it’s between April and May, and we intentionally host it in the springtime because, we know that families are starting to look for learning resources for the summer, and we want to introduce them to learning resources that might be happening in their backyard.

So hopefully then they’ll continue that learning through the summer and together as a community, we start to combat that summer learning loss.

Tom Vander Ark: Since the last time we looked at Remake Learning, it’s exciting to hear that it’s spreading internationally. You said you were just talking to folks in Uruguay this morning?

Yu-Ling Cheng: I was, yes. So they do a festival, over three days and. And they really have a different take on the festival where they ask their community members, whether you’re an organization or individual, to take 60 minutes and share your passion. And so sharing your passion of whether it’s something artistic you may do, it may be something related to robotics, it may be something, a nature hike that you’re taking, but whatever it is, taking that time to share that passion with families in your neighborhood.

The Impact of Remake Learning Days

Tom Vander Ark: Yu-Ling, do you, you get the sense now that this has been so active in Pennsylvania, that it’s more than just that long weekend of activities? Has it started to change the ecosystem? are schools more open to and aware of out of school learning? what kind of spillover effects have you seen?

Yu-Ling Cheng: So in Pennsylvania, over the three weeks that we host the festivals, We’ve definitely seen more partnerships and collaboration between schools and after-school organizations, and this year we’re working very closely with the Department of Education in Pennsylvania and they’re supporting the festival, and they’re using our festival events as career readiness events.

For example, in Pennsylvania, all public schools have to keep a career readiness portfolio for their students. Well, now you can go to Remake Learning Days and search across the events. We will tell you which ones are approved by the Department of Education as career readiness events. Your child can go to that event, you can go with them, fill out a short survey afterward, and you earn a digital badge towards your career readiness portfolio.

And in addition to that, your school gets credit for it through PDE. It’s really a great partnership, but it also brings relevant learning experiences to kids, right? So you might be learning about, let’s say salamanders in school, but then during remake learning days in Southeastern PA, you can actually go on a nature walk with a naturalist and go find salamanders during their salamander safari, right? Another thought is we have an event where a school is opening their doors for all the parents to come in and learn with them. This is in Southwestern PA and one of the activities they’re having is called Wonders of Holograms. So they learn about the holographic light display and how it can make 3D images and you can turn yourself into a hologram.And then these are all career readiness events and they can earn a badge as well.

Tom Vander Ark: That’s really exciting. And, this is called remake learning days. You can find it at remakelearningdays. org. Check it out. you, if people wanted to learn more and maybe wanted to start one in their own region next April or May, what should they do?

Yu-Ling Cheng: first I would check out remakelearningdays. org and you can search through events through different areas and themes and ages and it’ll give you a sense as to what kind of events we have. but you can be a regional festival where there’s more than 50 events in that region or. Or you can also host a pop up event.

We have more than 70 pop up events in our festival this year. and these are just individual organizations that just want to be part of the Remake Learning Days movement. What’s exciting this year is we actually have an event from Antarctica where you can learn about what life is like in Antarctica.

Real-World Learning in Pennsylvania

Tom Vander Ark: That’s really exciting. I’ve been visiting, Southwestern Pennsylvania for 40 years. I started my career there actually 40 years ago. and what I think what I’ve noticed in the last 15 is that there’s a cluster of districts that have really embraced this idea of relevant, real-world community connected learning that, that have grown with and alongside the Remake Learning movement Districts like Avonsworth, where you’re a school board member, South Fayette and Montour and Fort Cherry. These are just great school districts that are really connected to their community and value, community-connected learning. In fact, we’re bringing a group of from Kansas City to visit, schools there to see another region that’s really lighting up real world learning.

Uh, so we, we appreciate that. group of districts and thanks for leading in the Avonsworth school district.

Yu-Ling Cheng: Thank you. I joined the school board in 2019 and was just reelected and it’s a call for service, but I just also genuinely care about what’s happening in our districts and want to be a part of this. I think what makes Southwestern PA and Pittsburgh so special is the collaboration.

This just, attitude of, hey, I still can learn and I can learn from all my colleagues and I’m willing to learn and try new things. And so that’s what I think brings all these great school districts together.

Tom Vander Ark: I want to follow up on this thread of collaboration. so one strand is higher education, I’m a big fan of Carnegie Mellon and the way they’ve partnered with Southwestern Pennsylvania school districts. They have a great relationship with South Fayette and support their computational thinking strand. Are there other other university partnerships that support the remake learning festivals at all?

Yu-Ling Cheng: So we work very closely with University of Pittsburgh, in addition to Carnegie Mellon University, and they host different events on campus, as well as with community partners. for example, you could go to an event about architecture and walk through the streets and learn about the building and the building blocks of architecture through Pitt, during Remake Learning Days.

Yeah, and then I would say there are also different community college partners as well that open their doors and do hands-on activities, whether it’s in robotics or automobile or nursing. those are important partners to us as well.

Kidsburgh, Parents as Allies and Other Collaborations

Tom Vander Ark: Speaking of community partnerships, you’re also the director of Kidsburgh. That’s another collaborative. is that a project of the Grantmakers of Western PA?

Yu-Ling Cheng: Yes. So Grantmakers of Western PA is our fiscal sponsor and Kidsburghis a nonprofit media site. We write stories that are relevant to families in this region. So it could be about events. It could be about people. It could be about ideas. It could be about resources for families. Anything that we think families might find interesting and helpful to them.

Tom Vander Ark: A related project is Parents as Allies. Is that a project of Kidsburgh?

Yu-Ling Cheng: It is. So Parents as Allies, we were tapped to lead this project and we’re probably not you’re a typical leader of this type of project, since we’re more of a media site, but we are connecting people together. So Parents as Allies is about family-school engagement. We work with 31 teams across 28 school districts in Western Pennsylvania and these teams are led by parents and educators, and they dive into just what does family school engagement look like? How do we build trust? What kind of new ideas should we test? And so we give funding to all these teams to try new ideas in family school engagement. So I’ll give you a couple examples.

One would be in rural area, they use their funding to buy 10 fire pits and they hosted fire pit conversations and they had s’mores, of course, but they had parents, teachers and youth sitting around a fire pit and they talked to each other about what they thought was the purpose of education, right?

If you’re in agreement on what the purpose of education is over K through 12 years, then you can figure out the little things that come from that. and so that basically became their working plan for the future. Yeah. Another event that I’ll highlight or another project that came out of Parents as Allies is from Northgate School District. They created a program called Maker Coaches. And so parents signed up for a three-course session on maker learning. And so session one, parents learned about what does it mean to become a maker teacher and what are the design principles behind making. Session two, they were given tools and they started to actually do it. Session three, the parents then created their own maker project and tested the teachers. And if they graduated, they got their apron that said maker coaches. But what’s really cool about this program is now those parents that have been trained as maker coaches are in the classroom helping teachers. And you can imagine then how strong that relationship is between families and schools through that program.

Tom Vander Ark: That’s a really exciting program. and that’s just in Pittsburgh or is it around Southwestern PA?

Yu-Ling Cheng: It’s around Southwestern PA. It’s literally, we go all the way up to Crawford central and gosh, I don’t know who is the furthest Southern point of it, but we’re in rural areas, suburbs in the city of Pittsburgh.

Yu-Ling’s Unique Background in Economics and the Arts

Tom Vander Ark: Were talking to Yu-Ling Cheng. She’s the co-producer of Remake Learning Days, and she also directs Kidsburgh. And we were just talking about. Parents as Allies. Yu-Ling, you have a really interesting background as a concert, violin player. what’s the,

Yu-Ling Cheng: Violinist.

Tom Vander Ark: Thank you. but you’re also an economist. So you went across the country to the University of Washington and did this double major. What, was the double major for your mom? Why violin and economics? That’s,

Yu-Ling Cheng: Yeah, so i will give the truthful version. I went to University of Washington as a chemistry major. I thought I wanted to be a doctor and I advise everyone that I meet when they ask me like how do I figure out what I want to do and what I say go try it. So I did an internship at a hospital and I realized I did not want to be a doctor.

Tom Vander Ark: that happened to me too. There was an internship in a hospital. I was like, I don’t want to spend my life doing this.

Yu-Ling Cheng: I realized it wasn’t the right lifestyle for me. so then, this is the end of my sophomore year and I needed to switch majors. so I, all along I kept playing the violin. So I switched to music and…

Tom Vander Ark: When did you pick up the violin?

Yu-Ling Cheng: I was three years old and yes, I started with the Suzuki method. Yes. I think it was meant to be a hobby for my, and my parents thought it would be a good hobby for me and good way to pass the time.

And I became very serious about it and passionate about it. yeah, so I switched my major to music, but my parents said that I needed to also have another major. So economics was my backup plan. And, I’ve always been fascinated by how. the world works and economics is one lens to look at that.

Tom Vander Ark: Now, after UW, you went to the New England Conservatory, and that was before you went to Wharton, so you were really serious about the violin.

Yu-Ling Cheng: I was. I was teaching violin. I was performing. I wanted to study it further. I felt like I got a later start with it, with my junior year in college. So I wanted to study it more. and I wanted to be with other artists and musicians. And so at New England Conservatory, I was given that environment to really deeply dive into music, not just the playing of the violin, but, the history behind music, the artistic format, the studying of it, I know a lot of times people think art is something that you just create out of passion, but there’s so much diligence and studying that goes behind that to be able to get to that point of where you’re artistically free.

Tom Vander Ark: Was it a difficult decision when you stepped out of the path of being a professional musician into the business side of music?

Yu-Ling Cheng: It was a little bit hard. I mean, I I love performing. I love being on stage. I love doing chamber music. but while I was at New England Conservatory, I did an internship at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And that’s where I started to see how important the backstage work was as to What makes what happens on stage happen every night.

So I, I did an internship in development and then I started to learn more about marketing and the business side. And I realized having that musical background as a musician, as a, performing artist, as a violin teacher, that I also spoke that language and I felt like I could translate it to potential audience members who I was trying to pull into the classical music world.

Tom Vander Ark: Yu-Ling, I really believe that every student should have the chance to have a performing arts success, maybe one a year, at least one every other year in their secondary career. It could be front of the house or back of the house, but there’s something about a performing arts experience where you’re going individually and collectively from novice to early mastery, both individually and collectively.

To go from that really scared, getting a score or a script for the first time going, there’s no way that I’m going to learn this in six weeks to being on a stage performing with colleagues and having what can often be a transcendent experience. This compressed, accelerated, individual and collective learning journey is just so unique and special. I don’t know. Is there any reflections on that As a valuable experience for young people.

Yu-Ling Cheng: It’s a journey that you just can’t replicate like through learning or through reading you have to do it. And I do think it’s important that not just kids but adults to have some sort of performance in their life. Part of the reason why is one, you work towards a goal, right? And you stretch yourself, right?

You get a little bit out of your comfort zone. You try something new, and if it’s part of a larger performance, maybe it’s a play, or maybe you’re, singing in part of a choir, right? There’s this, communal moment too where you’re like, I am contributing to something bigger than me, and I’m creating something that’s only going to exist at this moment, and it’s going to be unique and beautiful and special, and I want everyone to have that experience because then I think you start to find your voice as to what’s important to you, what you’re passionate about and what you want to share with the world.

Performing Arts at Remake Learning Festivals

Tom Vander Ark: I’m curious if any of the Remake Learning festivals have any performance aspects. They must have a lot of creative, activities and. Probably some include performing arts.

Yu-Ling Cheng: Absolutely. The performing arts are a big part of the Remake Learning Days Festival, so I’ll give you a couple examples. You could go to a musical theater, and in three hours, they will put together a short performance, very short, but you can try a backstage role or a front of house role, an on stage role, and you put it together, and then your parents come and watch it at the end.

Another example is you could go to a museum and you could create this rubber stamp that you carve yourself of an image that’s important to you, right? Identifies who you are, and then you stamp it onto fabric and you’re creating your own personal fabric. The last example I’ll give you is, we have an organization here in Southwestern PA called Saturday Light Brigade, and they’re hosting family podcasting. So you as a family can go into a real podcast booth, what we’re doing right now, and record a special family memory and talk about it and interact with each other. And what I love about that is I think a lot of times parents and caregivers think they know what their child is going to say and in that moment with their own microphone they have their own voice and they will share something that I guarantee you will surprise you.

Tom Vander Ark: let’s dive into that a little further. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent thinking about the impacts of artificial intelligence and what’s happening in the world of work, but things feel like they’re moving really quickly. It seems like a time when educators are being invited to rethink the skills that matter most, maybe even rethink youth development and the kinds of experiences that matter most in this new age of AI. My sense is that the kind of experiences that you’re trying to create through Remake Learning are more important than ever. But the kinds that are focused on creativity, on play, on discovery, on, on problem solving, both individually and collectively.

Do you have a sense that, that you were ahead of the curve and the world is heading your direction now in terms of new priority learning experiences?

Yu-Ling Cheng: So what we hope Remake Learning Days does for kids and families is that it grows their confidence, it creates a lifelong passion for learning, and that it gives you the tools to do things that are problem solving, critical thinking, Using creativity to create new things, collaborating with others, right?

So that no matter what comes, whether it’s AI or back in 2007, it was the smartphone, right? That you’re able to use those tools and enter it into who you are and how you want to use it. I think of those as just tools. they are changing the world. I agree. My own daughter said to me the other day, I looked at her PowerPoint presentation for school and I was like, wow, that’s a really beautiful image, where’d you find that? And she’s oh, I created it using AI. And I thought, oh my goodness. And she’s 12 years old. But what was more important to me was she’s I was looking for something. I was very specific. I knew the point I wanted to make.

I knew what I wanted to communicate and what was relevant for this moment in my presentation. And those are the skills that we hope, that families will take the time to instill in their kids and learn and experience with them through events like Remake Learning Days or just even through your schools and engaging with them.

Family Development Experiences

Tom Vander Ark: We’re talking about Remake Learning Days. Check it out at RemakeLearningDays. org. You know, it strikes me that you’re not only helping to expand access to really powerful learning experiences for young people, but this is also a really cool family development experience and community development experience.

You just think about all the ties, the loose ties that you’ve helped stitch together in Pittsburgh and now around the country. It’s really an interesting community development activity, isn’t it?

Yu-Ling Cheng: It is, and what’s neat is like now we have friends in Kansas City working with friends in Doncaster, working with people in Eastern Kentucky, right? And so we’re experiencing that, and we’re all learning from each other and there’s similarities and there’s differences but we’re all doing work that we hope will provide better experiences for kids and put them on a path to success however that child defines that.

Tom Vander Ark: any parting advice for any of the edleaders that are listening? People that are school leaders or system leaders, community leaders? What? What would you, love to see them do next?

Yu-Ling Cheng: Many schools do this and education leaders, but what I will highlight is it’s important to bring the parents and caregivers into the conversation. They want to be a part of the conversation. I’ve seen it over and over and parents as allies. But it’s hard to have that intentional time and space where parents and caregivers can interface with educators, right?

If you think about how schools are built today, you have to ring a doorbell, you have to sign in, you have to give your ID, you have to be there for a very specific purpose, and then you’re escorted out when you’re done. So creating that time to have those conversations, I think will bring even more relevant learning experiences for kids, parents want to learn from educators want to learn more from parents as to how they can better support learning at home.

And I just think I want educators to also know that you’re not in this alone. There’s a whole ecosystem of afterschool organizations and parents and families that want to be a part of this and want to help shoulder the responsibility. And oftentimes I feel educators, for all the amazing work they do, I just want to hug them and say I’m right here and I’m ready to support you, and I don’t want you to think you’re alone in this.

Tom Vander Ark: We’ve been talking to Yu-Ling Cheng. She’s the co-producer of Remake Learning Days. We really appreciate the work that you’re doing at Remake Learning in Kidsburgh, parents as allies. you’re lighting up that region and now the country with powerful learning experiences. We, thanks for joining us and thanks for the work that you’re doing.Yu-Ling Cheng: Thank you. I turn to Getting Smart all the time for resources. So thank you.

The post Yu-Ling Cheng on Remake Learning Days appeared first on Getting Smart.

Jennifer Mellor and Mike Huckins on How Chambers of Commerce Can Get Involved in Accelerated Pathways

Getting Smart Staff — Wed, 08 May 2024 09:15:00 +0000

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast Shawnee Caruthers is joined by Jennifer Mellor, Chief Innovation Officer at the Phoenix Chamber Foundation and Mike Huckins, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs and IT Operations at the Greater Phoenix Chamber. Together, Jennifer and Mike are working on ElevateEdAZ, a remarkable initiative by the Arizona design team that’s revolutionizing education and workforce development in the state, is working to be at the intersection of key stakeholders to provide real opportunities for learners. Their tireless efforts have led to scaled pathways for students to earn an associate’s degree in their 13th year, with a focus on high-demand industries like advanced manufacturing. By fostering collaboration among local employers, educators, and policymakers, ElevateEdAZ is creating transformative opportunities for students.

With the support of a $750,000 grant from the city of Phoenix, ElevateEdAZ is set to expand its impact by reaching more schools and students. The funding will enable broader access to work-based learning experiences, internships, job shadows, and mock interviews, preparing students for success in the modern workforce.

The Phoenix Chamber Foundation is leading this Arizona Accelerate ED cohort, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Accelerate ED is built on the idea that high schools can provide early access to quality higher education in ways that incorporate work-connected learning and have long-term benefits for students. This initiative helps state-based groups plan and build accelerated pathways between K-12 education, postsecondary education, and careers.

Outline

Introduction to the Digital Credential Summit Insights
The Chamber’s Role in Bridging Education and Industry
Challenges and Strategies in Policy and Workforce Development
Focusing on Manufacturing: A Strategic Choice for Arizona
Looking Ahead: Dual Enrollment and Workforce Development Goals

Introduction to the Digital Credential Summit Insights

Shawnee Caruthers: You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast, I’m Shawnee Caruthers. At the 2024 Digital Credential Summit in New Orleans, Louisiana the message was clear: by 2030, there will be 80 million unfilled jobs as skills become the new currency and school systems work alongside industry to include more real-world learning opportunities for learners. The Venn diagram circles of secondary, post-secondary, and industry continue to intersect. ElevateEdAZ, a remarkable initiative by the Arizona design team that’s revolutionizing education and workforce development in the state, is working to be at the intersection of key stakeholders to provide real opportunities for learners. Their tireless efforts have led to scalable pathways for students to earn an associate’s degree in their 13th year with a focus on high-demand industries like advanced manufacturing.

By fostering collaboration among local employers, educators, and policymakers, ElevateEdAZ is creating transformative opportunities for students. With the support of a $750,000 grant from the City of Phoenix, ElevateEdAZ is set to expand its impact by reaching more schools and students. The funding will enable broader access to work-based learning experiences, internships, job shadows, and mock interviews, preparing students for success in the modern workforce. The Phoenix Chamber Foundation is leading this Arizona AccelerateEd cohort, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AccelerateEd is built on the idea that high schools can provide early access to quality higher education in ways that incorporate work-connected learning and have long-term benefits for students. This initiative helps state-based groups plan and build accelerated pathways between K-12 education, post-secondary education, and careers.

To help think about bridging the gap between education and industry and fostering a new generation of skilled professionals, I am joined by Jennifer Mellor, Chief Innovation Officer at the Phoenix Chamber Foundation, and Mike Huckins, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs and IT Operations at the Greater Phoenix Chamber.

Jennifer, Mike, so happy to see you all. Welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer Mellor: Thanks so much for having us.

Mike Huckins: Yeah, really appreciate it. Great to be here.

Shawnee Caruthers: Yeah, thank you. There’s a lot going on in Arizona and just across the country around really thinking about what is the best path for students and how do they get there, how do they navigate their way through, you know, what happens after high school. You all are doing a lot of this work at the chamber. So Jennifer, can you tell us about the chamber and what the organization’s mission is?

The Chamber’s Role in Bridging Education and Industry

Jennifer Mellor: Sure. So we have the Greater Phoenix Chamber, which is really focused, it’s a membership organization really focused on creating a business-friendly environment in Arizona. And so a lot of that work is around public policy and advocacy, which Mike leads, as well as economic development and business connectivity. Several years ago, we launched the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation, which is a little bit more community-focused, really trying to ensure that our community is prepared and that we have the workforce that we need for the future.

Mike Huckins: I would just say Jennifer did a great job of describing the two entities, and they really work hand in hand. On the programmatic side, which Jennifer houses most of on the foundation side, along with some of the policy-oriented goals that we take care of over on the chamber side, I know we’re going to get into it, you know, more in just a few minutes. But the perfect example was the dual enrollment appropriation we were able to get from the state legislature, which helped supplement the great work that Jennifer and her team had already done through private dollars on the foundation side.

Shawnee Caruthers: And in the intro, we talked about the project that you all are working on, ElevateEdAZ. How did the chamber get involved in this project?

Jennifer Mellor: Yes, so we started an economic development initiative about ten years ago, really focused on business retention and expansion. And as part of that work, we were going out and meeting with industries. And the one thing that we continue to hear time and time again is, “We don’t have the workforce we need to grow and expand our business.” So we knew that if we were really going to make an impact on economic development and business growth, that we had to help employers come together to meet those needs. And so as a result, we launched the foundation back in 2016 and really brought together industry leaders around different workforce sectors. So, for example, we have a healthcare workforce collaborative that worked and identified a need to train specialty nurses. And we worked with community colleges and actually created two new specialty nursing programs.

And then through our collaboration with Mike and his team on the policy side, we were actually able to get the state to provide an appropriation to the community colleges to build the simulation labs and the infrastructure needed to actually support that program. So a lot of our work on the foundation side for several years was focused on our post-secondary partners, primarily the Maricopa community colleges. And what we recognized is that we needed to bring that work down into our secondary system. And what we found is we have really great CTE programs at all of our school partners, but they’re not necessarily aligned to workforce demand. And so we’ve been working through ElevateEdAZ, we’ve actually been working with 20 high schools throughout Maricopa County that covers five different school districts and a charter network.

And we’re actually working with the schools grassroots. We have college and career coaches that are embedded at each campus, working with those schools to try to increase the number of students that are pursuing high-wage, high-demand CTE pathways and then are trying to improve outcomes for those students through internships, job shadows, early college credit, industry-recognized credentials. And then we’re working systematically with the school districts to also try to improve processes and outcomes for our districts. And then we’re able to bring that up to the big picture strategy and think about things that are working and not working within our system and things that we can change legislatively or do on behalf of the state that will improve outcomes for students.

Challenges and Strategies in Policy and Workforce Development

Shawnee Caruthers: Mike, Jennifer referenced a lot of great things that you all have been able to accomplish, but I know, and our listeners know because they, I’m sure, try to accomplish some of these things as well. It is not easy, and there are a set of challenges that come along with those things that you have to navigate. And especially from a policy perspective, what are some of those challenges that you all had to navigate in order to get to some of the success factors that Jennifer mentioned? And then how did you go along? How did you go about doing that?

Mike Huckins: Yeah, I would say probably the biggest obstacle to accomplishing some of the goals that Jennifer outlined is just the whole, not fight is probably the right word, but the whole discussion, maybe at the legislature and beyond, about education funding. So I think it’s always a debacle between, when you get a bunch of groups, especially the education groups and others in a room to say, “Hey, we need this much funding, this much funding for X, Y, and Z.” Policymakers have sometimes a hard time understanding what that’s for. They seem to think, not all, but some seem to think it just goes into a big black hole and disappears and there’s no real outcome.

So I think what with some of the items that Jennifer described, we were able to demonstrate to them, one, there are real workforce outcomes with these dollars, whether it be the nursing cohort that Jennifer mentioned earlier or dual enrollment, tying it back to workforce was, I think, the biggest positive thing we could have done to help the legislators understand that, hey, this isn’t going to a black hole. These are actually going to provide real jobs. Whether they be, as Jennifer mentioned, whether they be a CTE program, somebody going on to a community college and getting a certificate of higher education through there, or if they want to go onto university, that’s fine. But the ultimate goal is to get us, the workers we need.

Shawnee Caruthers: And I know that you all have tried a number of things, including employer convening, surveys, series of workforce collaboratives, in order to continue to show that impact and to make those connections for all of your key stakeholders. Jennifer or Mike, what did you all learn from utilizing those different strategies, and how did you inform this approach?

Jennifer Mellor: Yes, I think the biggest thing that we learned is that when we can bring industry together and they stop competing for talent, competing against each other, and actually start working together, we can come up with some really effective strategies. And it takes some time to develop that trust and that partnership and that collaborative spirit. But once we’re able to do it, the impacts are so significant. So just yesterday, we actually hosted a convening, and it was all of our hospital partners throughout Maricopa County, and were talking about, like, real specific workforce challenges and workforce needs. And our facilitator actually came in from another community, and they were super impressed that we had people from different employers that were sitting at the table together really being open and honest and communicative.

And when we can do that, we can have, again, just really great outcomes, and we can start to lift the boats for all.

Focusing on Manufacturing: A Strategic Choice for Arizona

Shawnee Caruthers: You all landed on manufacturing as an industry that you all were going to promote in order to, for this particular initiative. What made you all land on advanced manufacturing specifically? And what were some of the other credentials or industries that were on the table? You mentioned nursing, but what are maybe some others?

Jennifer Mellor: Sure. So Arizona is leading the way in manufacturing jobs. It seems like every day we have a new announcement of a new company coming in, adding different manufacturing jobs. When we started looking at our high school partners, there was one manufacturing program serving 24 students, and we’re talking about 60,000 plus jobs just in the semiconductor space. We need more programs at the high school level to meet that need. And so when were able to articulate that demand to our high school partners, they one and saw, okay, yes, we see the connectivity to the labor demand and the need. Now, we’ve been working with them on, okay, how do we start to build out those pathways? Those CTE pathways don’t currently exist, at least for semiconductor, and so it’s starting from scratch and building that pathway.

And we also have a huge misperception of what manufacturing jobs look like. And that’s not just with our students, it’s with their parents and with our administrators. So we’ve had to do a lot of work to change that perception. And it’s been really interesting. As part of this work, we’ve also been able to bring in some of our community partners. So the community colleges and also our career technical education district. Both of them have come to the table as a collaborative partner. Knowing that again, if we can, you know, that there’s enough work for everyone, and if we can figure this out together again, we can lift all ships.

Shawnee Caruthers: Mike, I’m curious what policy shifts you all had to make in terms of providing more access to manufacturing opportunities. Because now you’re going to have more credentials that you’re going to have to offer and make sure that there’s funding for students to be able to take advantage of those types of things and maybe even some requirements around what students have exposure to, even maybe before high school. So did you all make any policy shifts around that particular industry in preparation for the work that was happening at secondary and beyond?

Mike Huckins: Yeah, I think it was a perfect example of public and private partnership, one, to bring TSMC here to Arizona, and two, to help expand out intel, which already had a significant presence here in the state to help them expand out their facility over in Mesa. Also, as Jennifer mentioned, the demand is just through the roof. It’s interesting that we’re doing this podcast today when actually the president is in town to just announce that they are going to provide intel with about $8 billion of direct funding through the ChIPS act to help them get their expansion off the ground. A lot of that money, frankly, is going to be needed for workforce, as Jennifer mentioned, both at, you know, the community college level down into high schools, because frankly, a lot of this training can be done in high school.

They might have to go, you know, for a little bit of specialty training afterwards. But as much as they can get done in high school that I think that benefits everybody. These are, as Jennifer mentioned, these are high-paying jobs that may have a little bit of a stigma around them. I think the interest will be there, and now it’ll just be sort of making sure that government priorities, along with the private sector partners, are aligned to get these folks into the jobs that we need them for, whether beyond the fab line or, you know, or beyond.

Shawnee Caruthers: Yeah, my television stays on CNN. So I did happen to walk past and saw that President Biden was in your state with intel doing exactly what you said. So it’s such a timely conversation, and hopefully it begins to change the narrative around, like you said, the stigma around all of the great opportunities that are existing in a manufacturing industry and beyond. So what were the other options that were on the table? If you didn’t do manufacturing, what would you have chosen?

Jennifer Mellor: Honestly, I don’t even think that there were other industries that were up for grabs. But because there was such a limited number of manufacturing programs in existence, it was just instantly we, all of our partners agreed that this is where we need to focus.

Shawnee Caruthers: As we think about manufacturing and we think about just work in general, but let’s focus specifically on manufacturing. And we know and what it looks like in 2024 is not what it’s going to look like in 2030. And beyond. What are you all doing to prepare not only yourselves but the Arizona landscape and students and the schools, etc., to think beyond what advanced manufacturing is now? And so that they are ready to pivot as necessary as the job continues to shift, but the opportunities remain plentiful.

Jennifer Mellor: So I think manufacturing jobs, as any jobs, will continue to shift over time. And if we look at, you know, the jobs of yesterday were definitely not the jobs that we’re seeing today. The jobs today are much more highly technical. And I think that’s one of the challenges is in filling these job opportunities. So I think where we’ve been focused is one making sure that we’re not designing programs after one specific employer, but they’re designed with multiple employers in mind, so that if we do have an employer, for example, that maybe slows down their hiring, that those individuals can be transitioned to another employer that might be hiring at that time, and then also making sure that we have truly stackable credentials. And I think this is where the Accelerate ED work becomes so important.

But making sure that our high school students, as part of their CTE pathway, that they can get an industry-recognized credential, but that they continue their education beyond that. So step one might be that credential. Step two should be their associate’s degree. And if they want to continue their education, we want to make sure that associate is transferring into a related bachelor’s degree.

Shawnee Caruthers: And so, Mike, as you think about the things that Jennifer just referenced in terms of the stackability of all of the different learning opportunities for students, and one of those being the dual enrollment programs, what are you all doing, from your perspective, at your level, to meet the evolving needs of the Phoenix job market to ensure that those type of opportunities, like dual credit, remain available and equitable for students?

Mike Huckins:

Yeah, I think one, and a big part of our sort of strategy now is, you know, we got the dollars in last year. That was great. But what we’re seeing now is a little bit of difficulty with getting the word out, both to students and teachers, regarding the dual enrollment opportunities, you know, specifically related to dual enrollment we provide through the bill. Would the teachers get a stipend? It’s not life-changing money, but it is money to show them they’re appreciated for their extra work to get certified in dual enrollment. And it does provide some subsidies for the kids to take these classes.

So I think part of the issue that we’re dealing with now that Jennifer’s working through now, along with her team, is really doing an education campaign to make sure that the students know that these opportunities out there, no matter which career pathway they decide to go. If it’s manufacturing, great. If it’s nursing, that’s great, too. If it’s something completely different and that they want to go into, as long as it meets the core areas of academics or through the CTE programs, then they should have that ability to do so. And frankly, down the road, it’s going to save them some money, whether they decide to go on to four-year university or the community colleges on getting those credits out of the way.

As long as everybody has that sort of base structure of what they need driving them into these specialty areas, it should be, you know, fairly, I’m oversimplifying it, but it should be fairly easy, once they have that base set of skills for whoever it may be, to sort of guide them into that next step in their career path.

Jennifer Mellor: And if I can just touch on Shawnee, I think Mike is absolutely right. Thinking about equity, especially here in Arizona, when we think about dual enrollment, I think one of our big challenges is we don’t have equitable access to dual enrollment. And especially in our rural communities, in our more affluent communities in Arizona, you’ve got a plethora of either AP or dual enrollment courses to choose from, and those could be in core academic areas or in CTE programs. But when we look at some of our other communities, we have areas where, you know, English and math are not offered as dual enrollment courses. And so one of the things that we’ve really been trying to promote is getting more teachers certified to teach those dual enrollment courses.

Shawnee Caruthers: So it sounds like that’s the start of, like, your outreach to, like you said, to make sure students and families know, what other strategies do you all employ to really ensure, like you said, for those communities that maybe have the same amount of information coming in at them constantly, what else are you all doing to ensure that’s happening? And how do families and students become eligible for ElevateEdAZ?

Jennifer Mellor: Yes, so ElevateEdAZ, we are actually working in 20 high schools throughout Maricopa County. So our footprint is fairly small in the big scheme of things. When we talk about dual enrollment, for example, we are actually doing massive pushes on our campus to try and get students dual enrollment or registered for the dual enrollment class. And our college and career coaches that are embedded on those campuses, they’re doing that work. They’re talking to the teachers, they’re talking to the students, they’re talking to their families. So we feel like we’re making good headway with our ElevateEdAZ schools. Where we are really trying to shift focus is again, just kind of more grassroots campaigns across the state.

We actually just convened a group of stakeholders to try and create some social media campaigns around dual enrollment, the benefits of dual enrollment, how to access the tuition assistance, and we’re trying to leverage partners from throughout Arizona to help us spread that word and use those social media messages to get more information out to the communities.

Shawnee Caruthers: Mike, that tuition assistance, I know you all just received that funding, but what, I guess, programs will you all be putting in place to ensure that’s sustainable? So when that kind of bucket is no longer available but that need is still there, how will you all ensure that students don’t go without.

Mike Huckins: Yeah, I think it’s a multi-year program in that the money was good for if, say, everybody applied that was eligible, it would last probably about two years. Obviously, not everyone who’s eligible is going to apply. So it’ll probably go two and a half years, maybe even three. So I think, again, key, and, you know, the legislature is dealing with a budget deficit this year, so it was good that money that we got appropriated last year was held over. It wasn’t, it didn’t lapse back to the general fund if it wasn’t used. It was, it was housed there for, you know, however long it takes to use it. So, like I said, it’s going to take a few years for them, at least a couple years, probably three for them to get through it all. But I think the onus will be on us.

We want to continue those dollars or add more dollars down the road is to explain to lawmakers, you know, sort of the outcomes that come along with those, with those monies that were appropriated. As Jennifer mentioned, we means tested the first tranche of dollars to make it more impactful for those communities that often don’t have access to be able to afford some of these dual enrollment programs on their own. So whether that’s the case, if it’s needed again after this next round will be sort of a discussion point for us to see what communities are using it, which ones still need it?

And do we need to continue that trend or we need to say, open it up to more, just sort of statewide and say, okay, everybody’s free game, everybody gets the same shot at the target versus the more targeted approach this time around.

Jennifer Mellor: And I think the data tied to that is going to be key to show that return on investment. Last year, we actually saw a 40% increase in dual enrollment registration thanks to a lot of the push. This year, with that added funding, were able to see a 6% increase. And we also know, based on data, that students that take dual enrollment courses are more likely to enroll in post-secondary education, and they’re more likely to be successful and persevere in that post-secondary education.

Shawnee Caruthers: And with that increase in that enrollment of 40%, that means that the wraparound support that you’ll have to provide to students to ensure that they’re meeting the criteria to continue to be eligible for that funding also increases. Has that been the case for you all, that you all needed to provide more kind of wraparound services to support students?

Jennifer Mellor: So I think the thing that we’ve been really laser-focused on with ElevateEdAZ is how do we create the right systems and infrastructure to make that process easier for students and their parents. And, you know, I have two daughters now in high school, and the process to enroll for the dual enrollment credit, it’s not easy. And so we’ve been really trying to put in support and infrastructure to allow students to more successfully complete that process. And even looking at things like, could we just automatically enroll students so that we take that registration barrier out of the way?

So we also are convening a coalition to share best practices around dual enrollment and see, again, how do we remove as many of those barriers as possible so that we can try and get students, one, to see themselves as college students and see the benefit of taking dual enrollment, and two, make that process as easy as possible.

Looking Ahead: Dual Enrollment and Workforce Development Goals

Shawnee Caruthers: So, looking forward, what are the Chamber’s goals? Are plans for enhancing dual enrollment opportunities and workforce development in the greater Phoenix area?

Jennifer Mellor: Yeah. So from a programmatic standpoint, I would say, you know, continuing to remove those barriers, we’ve got a lot of barriers that are in place for students we also know that there is a perception challenge when it comes to dual enrollment, and we have a lot of students. We actually just did a couple of focus groups, and we have a lot of students that aren’t opting into dual enrollment because they don’t see themselves as going to college and that could because they can’t afford it. They just don’t see it in their future. And so they are not opting to take those dual enrollment courses because they don’t see the value down the road. Right.

And so one of the things that we’re trying to do is, through the social media campaign and marketing campaign, is ensure that students can see themselves. You know, we had one young lady in our focus group that shared, you know, her freshman and sophomore year, she didn’t think she was going to college. She didn’t think she would be successful. So she didn’t take her dual enrollment courses her junior and senior year. She saw herself as college bound. She was doing well in school, and she took those dual enrollment courses, and she’s now regretting the fact that she didn’t take them her freshman and sophomore year.

So using her voice, using that message to communicate to her peers, I think, will be critical for us to be able to change that narrative and that perception, not just with our students, but with the people that have an impact on their life, whether that be their family members or other community members.

Shawnee Caruthers: Well, I just really appreciate the way you all are being very student-centered in your approach, recognizing that a student’s needs kind of can transfer, go beyond state lines, and it may go into Missouri or wherever else, but making sure that you all have a strong systemic approach that allows students to kind of go where their journey takes them. And so through your dual enrollment program, the way that you all are making those resources available and ensuring that both students and families, community, workforce, everyone, that they’re all in conversation with each other to really solve your workforce needs, specifically around advanced manufacturing, is obviously going to be such a great economic lift for Arizona. So thank you for being here with us today to talk to us about your program.

The post Jennifer Mellor and Mike Huckins on How Chambers of Commerce Can Get Involved in Accelerated Pathways appeared first on Getting Smart.

Town Hall Recap: Microschools: Sustainability, Scalability and Accessibility

Getting Smart Staff — Mon, 06 May 2024 09:15:00 +0000

On this Getting Smart Town Hall we provided an overview of our microschooling initiative, unpacking three emerging themes: sustainability, scaling, and accessibility. We were joined by Coi Morefield of Lab School of Memphis and Julia Bamba of Issaquah School District who shared some of their many learnings from running microschools.

Annotated Transcript

Victoria Andrews: I’m Victoria Andrews, and again, thanks for joining us as we have a community conversation on microschools, sustainability, scalability, and accessibility. I will be joined by some of my GettingSmart friends, Jordan Luster and Nate. We’re also joined today by two great friends of Getting Smart, Julia Bomba and Coi Moorfield. Coi is the lab school’s founder and executive director and is based out of Memphis, Tennessee. Julia is a member of the Issaquah School District and is now in the role of secondary innovation. She was a former principal at one of the high schools in Issaquah that we absolutely adore and love. That was super instrumental in getting the students out into the community and giving them internship opportunities and just really rich learning experiences.

So we are getting to know Coi in this space, and we’re super happy to have both of you guys joining us today. I’m going to let them both share and give a little bit more information about their schools and how they function as microschools.

Coi Morefield: Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here and in such great company. I see some friends and community members, friends who have become microschool family, who are here as well. I’m really excited to be a part of this conversation. I am based in Memphis, Tennessee and founded the Lab School of Memphis. We serve pre-K through 8th grade learners, focusing on centering learners in addition to equipping them academically, also focusing on community-based learning and project-based learning. So ensuring that we’re cultivating real skills for real life.

So whether that’s forest school or through internships at the middle school level, we’re really connecting our learners to community experts and all of the knowledge and future possibilities that are available to them right in their communities. These diverse pathways that we are hoping to help them shape as they go with the goal, honestly, of community development. We’re a school, but at its core, we are looking forward to developing people and communities.

And that’s right on time with what we just mentioned in the program. So we love that. And we’re anxious and eager to hear and learn more about the Memphis Lab School.

Jordan Luster: Julia.

Julia Bamba: Hi. Thank you so much for having me here today. I see a lot of familiar and friendly faces, as Victoria shared. I’m in the Issaquah school district, about 20 miles east of Seattle. We’re a school district of about 20,000 students, a pretty traditional learning environment. After spending seven years as the principal of Gibson Eck High School, we just cooked up all good things about learning that we really want students to enjoy and experience. Personalization, student agency, interdisciplinary learning. Students spending two days on internships every week.

And while that’s incredible and available to 200 students, in my new role, I’m trying to break into our traditional system and see how we can take all of that goodness and learning that we want our students to experience that we know is relevant and important in their lives and developing them as people and connected to their future. How can we start to get into our traditional system, stir things up a little bit, help our educators think differently about what learning can be for our students and put students at the center. So with our microschool that we have just started in the last few months, it’s in one of our comprehensive high schools that is a school of 2500 students.

And so we have a small team of incredible students who have joined our microschool and they learn through interdisciplinary learning, project-based learning. Our huge goal is to just get them out into the community. They’re earning environmental studies credit as well as English credit. So, for example, taking the kids rock climbing and hiking in North Bend on Friday, just helping them see that learning doesn’t have to always exist within the classroom and as they know it, how can we help them experience learning in a different way that’s meaningful?

Victoria Andrews: Thanks. And we’re huge fans of place-based learning and project-based learning here at Getting Smart. So to hear that’s happening in a school within a school model, you’re just giving us, you’re hitting all of our levers. We’re just, we’re loving that and we are super grateful to have you here again, Julia and Coi. Next up, we’ve got Jordan who’s going to share a little bit more about what we’re doing internally to help support microschools.

Jordan Luster: So the last time that we hosted a town hall discussing microschools, the discussion was framed around how microschools can lead to macro change. And we talked about how microschools create new options for families, how they can be used to quickly address underserved populations, and how they’re basically a catalyst or vehicle in starting innovative practices. So since then at Getting Smart, we focused a lot of our efforts in supporting microschools with an emphasis on just that high-quality, innovative models that are serving historically marginalized and underserved communities. We understand that the creation of microschools can lead to inequities and we’ve kept that at the forefront of all of our efforts and our microschool initiatives, including facilitation of community practice strands, providing coaching and technical assistance, and most notably, our funding efforts.

Last year, in the fall, our Learning Innovation Fund partnered with Walton Family Foundation and launched this big push for Small Schools grant program. And our mission was basically to foster a network of microschool leaders by offering grants to propel the development of their innovative learning spaces. And we’re focusing on operators who were looking to scale their high-quality models. For our first round of grants, we selected a very diverse group of grantees who’ve been making incredible strides and impact and growing and expanding, many of whom are on this call today. A couple will be chiming into the chat to answer some questions, so hopefully, you all will get a chance to connect with some of our grantees today.

But it’s been really great working with such a dynamic group of microschool leaders through these initiatives, we’ve learned a lot about the sector and the landscape, and we’ve learned that sustainability, scalability, and accessibility are the emerging key themes within the microschool landscape right now. So we wanted to dive into it and talk a little bit about that today, some of the opportunities and challenges that exist within those themes. One thing that has been clear in our findings is that microschools are not monolithic. They are existing in both private and public spaces, and they encompass a variety of small school models under that umbrella of microschools, which Nate’s going to talk a little bit about.

Nate McClennen: All right, so let’s take a pause for a second and think about the ice plunge or the cold water plunge in the chat, because I think it’s a great analogy for microschools is that I’m quite sure that we have 81 people on this town hall and that the vast majority won’t appreciate the cold plunge. But there are a few on this call that appreciate the cold plunge. And this is a great analogy for microschools, right? So microschools are trying to serve more learners in different ways so that every child is able to succeed, and we’re not, we all know we’re not quite there yet in the existing system. So we’ve been doing a lot of work trying to map the ecosystem.

Early draft of mapping the microschool ecosystem

We feel that there’s a lot of people thinking about microschools and defining microschools and saying microschools are this and microschools are that. And we’re sitting back on the broad definition that Jordan provided in the beginning about personalized, learner-centered environments that are less that they’re small in size and we’re seeing as we map it, that there are a number of different types of microschools out there. So clearly there’s the homeschool environment that could be categorized as a microschool, the private school environment, not all private schools, but there is a number of microschools that sit within the private school sector in terms of whether they’re tuition-charging or tuition-free or ESA funded, even chart public school charter partnerships. And then Jordan alluded to the centralized or decentralized networks of private microschools.

So that whole ecosystem is blossoming right now. And then on the blue on the right, there’s a huge sector of public school microschools that are out there, those that are creating them for R and D. So you create a microschool in your district, perhaps like Julia’s thinking about, to help spread innovation in a district, specialized offerings within the districts, lab schools that are based in the University UNC, University of North Carolina has an extensive lab school network that all could be considered microschools that are focused on developing teachers and innovative practices. Certainly work-based learning co-located in corporations. So GPSED is an organization that really provides spaces for businesses to host students in their business locations to help develop skills around the CTE world. There are schools that are made up of all microschools in the nineties and the early two thousands.

The school within a school and the academies model was an example of that. And then newer versions of we’re calling satellite microschools. So gem prep learning societies, ASU prep, Purdue Polytech, they’re all thinking about how to take their model and replicate it in smaller little geographic locations. And so we know that this map isn’t perfect yet, but what we’re trying to do is better understand a big tent view of microschools. And so a couple of our conclusions. One is that we all have to acknowledge that microschools are not new. There have been microschools in sort of rural public ed for years and years. There’s been homeschools for years and years, small private schools within a school. So it happens to be getting a lot of attention, but there’s a lot of great history we have to go learn from and acknowledge.

I think what’s new is that there are new formats, especially with the ESA, a lot of growth and a lot of attention. So those are the new things that are happening. And so this big tent definition we think serves more learners. And Jordan and I are authoring a blog right now. We’re going to try to extrapolate on this a bit more with a lot of different examples, and we hope a lot of you will read that and then ping us back and say, no, you missed it here. You got it here. To help develop a bit more of a universal understanding of what are microschools for all those that are in education, but also those that are outside of education that are using that term. So a couple big trends that we should all acknowledge. Obviously, ESA funding is on the rise.

19 states have ESA legislation, another eleven considering passing. This is causing the proliferation of microschool opportunities where public dollars can flow individually to families and or students to go then put into funding the private microschool sector. Interesting phenomena that’s happening and something that we need to pay attention to. And the second thing is that public school enrollment is on the decline. And while some folks have said it’s because of the rise in microschools, I actually think the demographics would suggest that really were experiencing a birth rate decrease. And there’s a great article in the 74, I think yesterday or the day before that did an incredible analysis of projections moving out over the next decade. And so there are going to be enrollment declines.

And so that provides a warning for, I think, those that are in the public sector saying, oh, how do we deal with different budgets and enrollment decreases, not only from COVID but just general demographic changes, but also an opportunity for everyone to think about. How do we create incredible learning opportunities to attract and retain the learners that we have, whether it’s in the private or public sector? So two, a couple things to think about from a landscape point of view that we are thinking about in partnership with our grantees.

Victoria Andrews: Thanks for sharing all that, Nate. And like he said, we’re super excited to have any kind of feedback or just poking holes or even sharing your curious thoughts. In regards to the graph that he shared earlier about microschools. We that’s a constant conversation of just like what does it mean, what does it look like? And then the different schools that are falling into that. So we’re going to dig a little bit deeper by touching on sustainability and scalability and accessibility when it comes to microschools. So some of the factors that are impacting microschools and that we’ve noticed in conversations are just their business model structure. What’s their value add to their community?

Sustainability of Microschools

Victoria Andrews: First of all, being knowledgeable of their community so that they can, maybe they are in a rural location and they’re trying to offer more hands-on, real-world learning for their students. It might be that they are in an inner city. And so they are building a microschool that is targeted towards unhoused youth or youth that have been historically marginalized or overlooked. And so what is the business model structure? What are they going to contribute that’s not already in existence or that is even of greater value to the community? Key factor is just the ability to build and maintain those partnerships, because microschools cannot operate alone. And both Coi and Julia have mentioned several times how it is key that they just plug into those partnerships and really capitalize on them to continue to sustain the amazing work that they’re doing.

Also looking at operations, microschools, this is key is just how are they, when are they going to do it? Where are they going to do it? The building? If you’ve ever worked in a traditional setting, then you’re very familiar that operations and transportations, that tends to be some of the highest expenditures. So those don’t go away for microschool leaders and founders. So they often look at going into joint agreements with other partners and maybe even splitting some of the costs and the share and the burden of that. And I know that’s something that both Julia and Corey are going to be able to share about in a little bit too. Also just where they located being super creative and looking at places that are not being used during typical school operating times.

So places like libraries or places of worship, or even like spa, which operates out of goodwill. So partnering with other nonprofit organizations and using their shared spaces as being a real smart way to defer some of those, the costs in regards to buildings and then staffing. This is something I really want Coi to discuss. Just being real smart and creative about staffing and just bartering staff in partnership with the local public school. Coi, can you share a little bit more about that?

Coi Morefield: Sure. So I’m sure that most here have either experienced or anticipated experiencing issues with appropriately staffing their learning environment. One of the things that we did this year and sort of getting creative is we needed someone in the studio working face to face with learners who had a strong background in support around academics. In middle school, were not in a position to bring in another full-time person, and I was connected with a veteran educator who began a tutoring company and was still trying to build traction and get it off of the ground.

And so what I offered, I outlined an MoU, a memorandum of understanding that she would come in and support our middle school group in the mornings around academics, but also building community, getting them started for the day with their morning invitations, and in exchange we would allow her to use our space for tutoring. So she then had an amazing space, a beautiful studio that had lots of resources and manipulatives that she could use free of charge. She had access to our wifi, to our printer, our office space, so that she could then build her business. And of course, being present here, she also had access to our community for any learners who may be interested in outside tutoring. So were able to leverage her vast experience and skills as a reading specialist and a veteran educator while also supporting her.

Victoria Andrews: So it was a mutually beneficial relationship that didn’t require the exchange of any financial resources, and that is huge because it served both her and both you. So I love that example of just being able to barter both space and skills and just microschools having that in order to sustain a program and to sustain, you know, just even how money is being used and allocated towards staff, being real creative and innovative in that. So some of the challenges that are facing some of the microschools that we’ve discussed, and we’d love to hear more that you can think of in regards to sustainability. Our enrollment.

As Nate mentioned before, if the basically for lack of the number of students that are available for microschools have just declined with birth rates, then how are they going to meet that need, the financial structure, some of them, if you’re not in an ESA state or you’re awaiting ESA legislation, how are you going to fund the microschool? Is it going to be through grants? Is it going to be through private donations? Endowment? What is that going to look like of closing schools? We’ve heard that schools are closing both in the public, private, all over the country based on enrollment and other factors. But within the case of microschools and other learning environments, the perception of closing the school doesn’t necessarily have to be noted as a failure. Maybe you’ve sustained the purpose that was necessary for that duration.

And so based upon community need and whatever the case may be, just that perception of closing a school as not a failure, but that it served its purpose for that duration in time. And then also the policies. I know that some people have mentioned already some of the policies that are state related that serve as challenges and barriers to the sustainability of microschools. So some of the opportunities were intentional partners or our intentional partnerships being very strategic, looking at again, community needs.

Is necessary for young people to be successful and for parents to have that trust in that community, and then succession planning being very wise about how do we plan to carry on? Is it just for a limited time. If it’s only for research and design, then maybe the goal is not to have a microschool for 20 and 30 years. Maybe it’s supposed to just serve as how can we grow this so that it can be impacted on a larger scale. So I’d love to hear any other challenges or opportunities that you might think of when it comes to sustainability. You can drop them in the chat or come off of mute as well. And then we’re going to prepare for some discussion questions. So what innovative strategies can micros employ to continue their impact without compromising their school identity?

And Coi and Julia, if you guys want to share some of the things that you are already doing, you can do that.

Julia Bamba: Yeah, I’ll go ahead and jump in and just share a little bit about the school identity. I think using what we’re using our microschool for now is trying to test the innovative learning strategies. Things that we know are not experiential, they’re research based, they’re good practices that we wish that all students would have. And in trying to sustain this in a larger, comprehensive high school, through the school within a school model, is testing these and helping other adults in the school building see that these practices are incredible. It also allows an ability. So we’re running through competency-based learning. So any teacher in our district has the opportunity to set up their gradebook through competency-based, but very few do it. And so this is a way for us to show that our students are still demonstrating the skills that they need.

They’re just doing it in a different way, not through the same content delivery, but they’re able to do it through creating portfolios and collaborating on projects in our community. So those are a couple things. The other thing through our small pilot right now is that we’re able to have, like, as Coi was saying, how do we use staffing in different ways? So we have on-time grad specialists that they are working every day with students, but how can we leverage their time and their experience and have them now in the microschool teaching? And then as we sustain and grow this, how can they then become coaches and mentors in the building as new staff?

Take this on, and not only think about it as a microschool, but then why do we not have other courses that then become interdisciplinary, real-world learning courses, not just through the microschool? So this is really like, how do you spark ideas? A lot of times in our traditional systems, people don’t even know it’s possible. And so how do you create this identity of like, this isn’t just a microschool over here. They’re doing this. They’re the only ones that can do this. It’s like, no, anybody can embed these practices into their school design. They can embed it into their daily classes and courses. And so how do we generate excitement? It generates sparks around that and then continue to grow and create mentors within our staffing model that can help inspire and coach along the way.

Victoria Andrews: And I love that you guys are using it as a hub of innovation to grow. So that when we talk about equity, as Jordan mentioned before, that’s at the forefront when we’re talking about microschools for us here at Getting Smart. And so that’s a real strong equity play to make sure that it’s not just those students that are in that microschool that are experiencing it, but how can you expand it to a larger scale?

Nate McClennen: Just thinking about sustainability. Love to hear Scott Van Beck come off for a second. Just talk about the limitations of ESAs, because I think they appear to be monolithic in the news, but really they come in a lot of flavors and shapes and sizes. Yeah.

Scott Van Beck: Thanks, Nate. I think we just need to be clear that just because the state has passed ESA legislation doesn’t mean that the opportunities are wide open for out of school opportunities. A lot of these states, their ESAs are only qualified if a family decides to move from an established public school to an established private school. And so, you know, we really need to work hard with our policymakers and our politicians to make them understand, to really open the gates wide. Microschools, learning pods, homeschools, all of these out of school opportunities need to fall within the confines of ESAs.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. So that variety matters. And I think that’ll have an impact on, especially the private ESA-funded microschool sector. Again, one part of the larger microschool sector.

Jordan Luster: And I think just to add to that, one of the barriers here is that legislators are looking for schools that are accredited and microschools, you know, a lot of microschools have opened to kind of come out of that box that accreditation can sometimes place these different learning systems in. And so it’s almost like, how do we be, when we’re talking about, I saw a few people in the chat discussing accreditation, how do we balance accrediting microschools while also allowing them to maintain their autonomy and flexible nature to provide that personalized learning? So if anybody wants to comment on that or share their thoughts.

Coi Morefield: So our school is accredited and in our state there is a short list of accreditors that are approved and I would recommend before assuming that accreditation will put you in a box, you know, do some shopping around, like do some research, do some, I don’t know, interviewing so to speak, of some of these accreditors. We have a fantastic relationship with our accreditation agency and specifically the evaluators who work directly with our school. They’ve been incredibly supportive. And also the directors that are here in our region formerly worked for our state. So they’re extremely knowledgeable as well.

So I would say that beginning to shift in the mindset and maybe look at the accreditation agencies as sort of an ally and a partner and just doing some research and getting educated before maybe entering into that process could be helpful, I think, in selecting the right fit for your school. It doesn’t necessarily have to be limited.

BB Ntsakey: Coi, I just want to give you a huge shout-out for how clearly you separated accreditation and what’s out there. And I just want to add one piece here because we’re here, Misa, and went through an accreditation process and what that process has taught us is that accreditation process, a process that isn’t as relevant to what we’re doing with microschools. And so I think the question that we’re posing and asking to sort around is how do we like this community that’s here? How do we sort of say what accreditation means to us, especially given that what traditional accreditation has meant and the sort of hoops people go through all things that are not relevant to us and the children we’re serving.

And so also one innovation, one strategy for us to really consider and bring together is how do we sort of say what our core pieces of accreditation process is so that we can get more of us through that process. Because as the process stands now, it is definitely beyond a burden for schools to go through. And it’s also going to ask for resources that we can marshal to other places. And so I guess the sort of question back to you is this, which is how do we, how does this microschools, community, right. How do we say what accreditation is? Is it having a certain competency-based approach? Is it place-based? What are the things?

And I think if we can begin to say what those are, we’ll have a really beautiful accreditation process that is much stronger than what folks are experiencing now.

Victoria Andrews: And real quick, BB, where are, what’s the name of your microschool and where are you guys, what state are you guys located in?

BB Ntsakey: Yeah, we are Mysa schools from the People’s Republic of DC. The district is here. We also are in Vermont, see this energy, you’re going to get this right. This is DC, this is Vermont, this is Mysa.

Coi Morefield: Yeah, I think, and I was mentioning in the chat when someone talked about accreditation sort of for microschools and I said I am so here for that and would love for us to come together and outline that. Like what does accreditation look like? But I think that there are, unfortunately, I guess I will say I do think that those are two lanes, not that we can’t travel both in tandem. Like I absolutely think that we should work on that and would love to be a part of that. But I think for existing schools now, particularly those who are required to be accredited to operate as private schools and are required to operate as private schools in order to access ESA funding, like that practical standpoint I think is, okay, well then how do we make this less awful for us as a process?

And I love what BB said about like sharing those resources. Like I’ve been through the process, I am happy to support so that other microschool leaders do not have to lose as much sleep as I did being the only non-student-facing person in my building during that process. So I do think that this sharing of resources, supporting and collaborating around that process, you know, for the practical side of it, like okay, until we have this place and get it accepted by states, how do we get through the necessary route to increase accessibility for our schools and then at the same time thinking through how do we establish a more formal system within our community?

Victoria Andrews: I’m going to pass it on to Jordan and she’s going to give us a little overview on scalability.

Scalability of Microschools

Jordan Luster: I think when we talk about sustainability and sustaining microschools, sometimes scaling gets coupled in with that. And you know, our last town hall when we discussed like how do we move microschools to, you know, move from microschools to macro change and creating that macro impact and you know, how can we kind of, how can we move this along a little bit faster? And I feel like that’s happening now. But the question, I mean, I think the answer is scaling microschools. And when we talk about scaling microschools, the question is almost always, well, what do you mean? What does it mean to scale a microschool? So some might think growth and I think that they are definitely, they work together, but they’re different.

So growth in microschools is just referring to the process of increasing enrollment, resources, and educational offerings. This might be like adding more teachers or expanding families, introducing new programs that, you know, meet the needs of your growing student population. But when we talk about scaling, we’re really talking about expanding reach and impact of the entire educational model. And so that might be increasing the number of campuses or enrolling more students, at times developing partnerships with other educational institutions. And I think this all ties back into how you sustain your model. So one thing that we’ve observed is that there is an increased demand for innovation and personalized learning options. So inherently, microschools being, you know, this growing movement, the demand for them has increased. Unlike traditional schools that might just scale through enrollment, this isn’t always the goal for microschools.

They want to remain intentionally small. So what does that look like in growing or scaling your model while preserving the uniqueness and the small by design intentionality? Many different microschool leaders are scaling in different ways. Right. We have learned that there are two major ways that microschool leaders are thinking about scaling into networks. And one of those ways which we kind of touched on earlier is decentralized, and the other is centralized. So when we talk, you know, independent, small microschools who are, you know, they’ve created amazing school models that are so specific to their community, they don’t see, you know, they don’t have a desire to scale that exact same school into multiple sites because it serves a very specific purpose, but an option. And what a lot of them are doing is codifying their framework to be replicated by others.

And this is more of a decentralized type of scaling. And so I heard a leader at a conference recently say, our focus is scaling deeper and not wider. And I thought that was a really great analogy in her attempts to scale through this decentralized method. And what it does is it provides autonomy to tailor the school model to the community, which is what we want, but there’s a risk there in quality control. And so how do we control for quality of a model? And a lot of microschool leaders are doing that through centralized scaling and scaling into more centralized networks that open and operate multiple sites. And they are able to oversee the operations of what’s happening at each one of those sites to make sure that the quality is there.

And so I wanted to, I want to open this up a little bit and discuss, you know, your thoughts on decentralized and centralized types of scaling. I know that Coi is currently, she opted for the centralized method, and I’d like to know a little bit more about that. What factors kind of led you to choosing a more centralized network?

Coi Morefield: For us, the impetus was the question, how do we get these community-based satellite studios or replications of our studios into communities who experience, whether it’s transportation barriers or financial barriers? How do we get our studios onto the block or the next block or the end of the block within walking distance right there. How do we address the barriers? And we’re still offering what parents in every community are looking for, which is that highly personalized experience focused on accelerating learning and a future-focused lens. Right. Because I not only want you to learn today, I want you to have a secure future tomorrow. So how do we bring that right to door or the end of their block? That was our goal.

So given that went with that sort of centralized approach because we felt that was the most direct path to ensure that were able to address those barriers, because with that approach, our accreditation, as I just mentioned, goes with us. Our status as a public private school in the state, that comes with us, our ESA approval, that goes with us. So there are all these things that are embedded and included that we take with us into these communities when we establish these satellite studios without a lot of extra paperwork or applications and processes, we are also able to scale our resources that way with that centralized approach. That means that the resources come along as well and quite frankly, are more attractive for the people that we partner with.

So whether it’s Olympic training center, which is here locally, or ASU from all the way out in Arizona, whether it is Nextdoor, the neighborhood app that we partner with, or the Pacers Athletic association and their G League team, the Bad ants, it is attractive to our partners for them to understand just how far their reach and their impact are going as well. And then that also means every community we touch, these resources that we feel are valuable, which is why we partner with them, are also touching them. So that was an important part of that, too. How do we get what we do here, what we have here, into as many communities that are demonstrating the most urgent need as possible?

Jordan Luster: Thank you for that. I think that’s what makes community-based schools so important is that you said, like, they’re all of the different pieces of the community that they’re touching through building of partnerships, our grantees are scaling as well, and not just in private sectors, but in public sectors as well. So Julia’s on the call. She also has been thinking about how to use microschools as a way to scale out innovative practices, and she touched on that a little bit earlier. But we are seeing tons of growth in the number of students that we’re touching and impacting. And so we’ll continue to publish updates on these numbers. But here’s just a glimpse of how many sites and students that are growing from last year to this year.

Nate McClennen: Mark asked a good question just to see if Julia has any comments about how microschools and districts so this public version can lead to broader transformation. So what’s the diffusion of innovation? Julia, in your experience, from what you’ve seen in landscape or your own school.

Julia Bamba: I think we’re a great example of trying to expand or transform a system. So starting with our choice school that started with 200, and we realized these are things that are really working for our students, especially students who are at risk or come into high school, who are hating school, who just want a different style of learning. And so taking what we learned there and then bringing it to one high school, our dream and our goal would be that we have a microschool within each of our three comprehensive high schools and then also expanding into our middle schools. So starting with one or two of our middle schools and then growing to all six of those, I think the important piece of this is what we’re seeing.

I experienced this in our choice school, and I’m seeing this now with our kids, is how do we use our students and their experiences to tell the story. And so we can do what we talk about learning that we want, but it comes to the students. It’s like, what is it that they’re seeing that they’re given the opportunity to do that no one else in their school is having this chance to. So it’s not seen as different, but it’s important. And other students are looking to it. When we started to reach out to students to invite them to join the microschool, what started happening was one would come and say, yes, I’m in, and I’d like my friend to join as well. And so there was this energy around.

School can look different, and we need to help students see what that vision is. And so again, this is a way to be able to provide a different experience for our kids so that they can see learning differently, so that they don’t have to see that they have to drag through seven periods a day. And it’s a way to test different learning models. And then how do we help expand this across the system? And the biggest thing not only is that student voice, but then the adults who are part of that, and how do they help tell that story? How do they become leaders?

How do we give students agencies so that they are seen as mentors and leaders, and that they’re the curators of this, of the microscope, and that they are the ones that can help us transform it and we as adults are there, you know, to help corral and to help make sure that we’re meeting the, you know, our district mission and what we need to do. But the kids are the ones that can really help us grow this.

Accessibility of Microschools

Nate McClennen: So maybe we close this section to think about hash student learners as curators. Right? Like that’s what we really want to get to. So Jordan, I’m going to flip to this last section, if that’s okay, and just do a quick, not in terms of importance, but really thinking about accessibility, because I think there’s a lot of big questions out there. And the reason we’re talking about a big tent and the reason we’re giving examples that are both private and public is we really want to make sure we’re thinking about accessibility. Every learner in the country or across the world should have access to a microschool if they want to participate in a microschool, and we’re far from that right now. So I think the things we need to think about are financial.

So tuition or tuition-free if it’s in the private sector, really accelerating public models. So where are the microschools in the public sector really thinking about ESA and how ESA is used wisely and more expansively and perhaps all sorts of partnerships in between there. So public and private partnerships could be a good part of this. And that’s especially in terms of services. We’ve seen some good examples of public services or public schools serving private schools or private sector educational opportunities, and the opposite private sector opportunities serving public schools. And I think we need to create a bit more of diffusion through those barriers between public and private to make access increase. Geographic is important. So are there virtual, hybrid or physical locations? I do a lot of work in rural and there are some microschools in rural.

Often the school itself is a microschool. But how do we make sure that in places that don’t have high densities of resources, young people, families, etc., how do we make sure they also have access to the microschool opportunities? I think staff quality and quantity is that I feel for the single leader, perhaps Julia and Coi, you both feel this way sometimes where you’re leading, but you’ve got a small team, you’ve got a program that you have a strong vision for, but it gets tiring after a while. So how do we make sure they’re sustainable in that way? And that affects accessibility and then breadth of services. Right? So microschools have to be able to serve all students and not just some students. And so we have to think about learning differences and students that are on IEPs.

If they’re in the public sector, how do we make sure that they’re accessible to all? So certainly challenges around cost and location. And really, the opportunity is that ultimately we have a model that every learner, a model for every learner that has strong culture and climate and every relationship that people are looking for so that students can grow and reach proficiency and feel like they belong in all scenarios in their schooling. And we know we’re not there yet. And I think microschools are a big leap in that way. So I’m going to pass it back. I think we’ll skip the discussion on this. Feel free to definitely throw things into the chat. Thanks, Rebecca. Around transportation, super important, and I know some schools are working on that, but I’ll pass it back to, I think, Jordan or Victoria to close us out here.Victoria Andrews: Again, thank you to our amazing guests, Coi and Julia. Thanks for sharing your lived experience of microschool founders. And thank you to everybody else who came on and just shared. Hope you guys have an amazing rest of your day.

The post Town Hall Recap: Microschools: Sustainability, Scalability and Accessibility appeared first on Getting Smart.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel on Designing Social Change

Getting Smart Staff — Fri, 03 May 2024 09:15:00 +0000

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast Tom Vander Ark is joined by, Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, a professor at North Carolina State University. Lesley-Ann is also author of Design Social Change, a new book from Stanford’s d.School run featuring past guests Sam Seidel and Olatunde Sobomehin on Creative Hustle and Sarah Stein Greenberg on Creative Acts for Curious People. Just the other day we ran an episode we recorded live at SXSW EDU 2024 with some of her colleagues.

In a great moment on the podcast, Lesley-Ann highlights the three key steps to making a utopia:

Critique the World
Create Your Utopia
Identify Actions

Dr. Lesley Ann Noel

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel focuses on equity, social justice, and the experiences of people who are often excluded from design education, research, and practice. She teaches at North Carolina State University. Formerly, Lesley-Ann was the associate director of Design Thinking for Social Impact at Tulane University, as well as a lecturer at Stanford University and the University of the West Indies.

Lesley-Ann has a BA in Industrial Design from the Universidade Federal do Paraná, in Curitiba, Brazil. She has a Master’s in Business Administration from the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. She earned her PhD in Design from North Carolina State University in 2018.

Lesley-Ann practices design through emancipatory, critical and anti-hegemonic lenses, focusing on equity, social justice and the experiences of people who are often excluded from design research. Her research also highlights the work of designers outside of Europe and North America as an act of decolonizing design. She also attempts to promote greater critical awareness among designers and design students by introducing critical theory concepts and vocabulary into the design studio e.g. through The Designer’s Critical Alphabet.

Lesley-Ann’s research interests are emancipatory research centered around the perspectives of those who would traditionally be excluded from research, community-led research, design-based learning and design thinking. She practices primarily in the area of social innovation, education and public health. She is co-chair of the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group of the Design Research Society. She is a co-editor of “The Black Experience in Design.”

Outline

Importance of Designing Social Change (00:10 – 02:15)
Understanding Design Thinking (03:21 – 07:48)
Reflection and Critical Awareness (09:14 – 15:20)
Emotions and Action for Change (16:00 – 20:21)
Prototyping and Designing New Worlds (22:34 – 30:20)
Education and Designing for Social Change (30:52 – 32:18)

Importance of Designing Social Change

Tom Vander Ark: We’re talking about change making today. We call it difference making. Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel calls it designing social change. We’re going to be talking about her book today on the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Vander Ark, and let me start with two points on why I think designing social change might be the most important topic in the world. The first is that after the turn of the century, I get the sense that the challenges that we’re facing are so large and so complicated that they’ve outstripped our collective change making capacity. So we need desperately more positive social change making capacity in the world. Number two, that’s the macro point. The micro point is that the act of change making or difference making in the development of a young person might be the most valuable human growth experience that could be provided or supported.

We think change making is the fastest way to build the most important skills and to develop what Charles Fadal has been calling the drivers of motivation, identity, purpose, and agency. That making a difference, learning how to frame a problem, design a solution, and deliver value to a community that you care about, is just an incredible growth experience. And so from both a micro and macro standpoint, we think designing social change might be the most important capacity in the world. That might be the most important pedagogy in the world. Doctor Lesley-Ann, do you buy any of that? Do you think this is maybe the most important topic in the world?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: So, I do believe it is the most important topic in the world. And, you know, when sometimes people ask me about it, I know it can sound so vague, you know, where they say, but what is it that you want us to design? And, you know, what is the change we’re looking for? And I guess maybe before we even start, I will say that social change is when an entire society changes the way they think about an issue. So, you know, in one of the classes that I teach, I like to talk about our parents’ lifetimes or our grandparents’ lifetimes, you know, and what are the big shifts in societal thinking that happened across that period? And then how did that thinking, how did that change in thinking happen?

And I used those examples so that students could start to see, oh, we could make a small change or big change, but we’re moving towards that goal of changing the way that society responds to an issue.

Understanding Design Thinking

Tom Vander Ark: Leslie-Ann, how do you define design thinking? You’ve taught design thinking at Tulane, at NC State. You taught at the D school at Stanford. But what is it? Is it a mindset, a methodology, or both?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: Yeah, I’ll say both. And I’ll say, frankly, I use the terms design and design thinking almost interchangeably, and I change the term according to the audience that I’m speaking with. So when I’m speaking with designers, I’ll normally just say I’m talking about design. And then when I’m speaking with people who think that they are not designers, I might use the term design thinking, which becomes a term that somehow becomes palatable to the people who think that they’re not creative. They’re like, okay, I can try out these design thinking methods. So when I talk about design thinking, I am talking about the way that designers think. And sometimes then I’m talking about using the ways that designers think outside of traditional designerly and creative spaces. And so, like, you ask if is it a mindset or is it about a methodology?

I think of it as both. So, you know, if I think about mindsets, it might be related to, oh, one that we talk about at the D school is navigating ambiguity, you know, just dealing with the fuzzy stuff in the world. Designers are good at that, right? Because we take chaos and somehow start to make sense of that chaos and turn it into a need and then maybe turn it into a product. Another mindset, I think, is, or maybe this is a methodology, is related to iteration, and designers do things over and over and reflect and get feedback, and not everybody in the world solves their problems like that. So it’s both mindset and methodology where you are borrowing the ways that designers think to solve problems.

And it’s also methodology where you’re using the steps generally the design would use to solve a problem. So that is around framing a problem, creative ideation, delivering some kind of prototype and getting some feedback on it, and then going back into the process again.

Tom Vander Ark: Doctor Noel, you have such an interesting design ethic, and you have such an interesting life. I’m interested in what are the top three or four influences in the way you think about design.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: I think I’m from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, and I lived there till I was about 19 or 20. And then I went to Brazil, which was a huge eye-opening experience for me. I spent about six years in Brazil, where I did industrial design, then returned to Trinidad, came to North America to do a PhD, eventually went to Stanford for a year, then went to Tulane for a year. So there are a lot of mixers and influences. So I think the socio-political context of Brazil in the nineties affects the way that I think, and then some of the people that I read, some of the people that my colleagues were talking about when I lived in Brazil also affect the way that I think. So in my book, I refer to Paulo Freire many, many times, you know, because that’s.

That’s the way that I think about the world. You know, the time that I spent at Stanford also changed the way that I think about the world. It, I think, made me ask more critical questions, you know, because even though I was in design, at Stanford, I was always in design. At Stanford, I became more of an outsider, and I could kind of look at design from a distance and start to be pretty critical of the design process and then really reflect on how maybe we could make it better. Then the time that I spent at Tulane, we focused on social innovation. And so that changed my design practice again, where I completely moved away from products that were just pretty. And all of my work became about really trying to create services that could respond to social issues.

And now that I’m at NC State, I am reflecting on maybe philosophical questions about design. Who gets to design? Why do we design? How do we design? There’s a mishmash of a lot of different things. I’m happy that I was able to both work in the design world and the design thinking world, which sometimes seem like two completely different spaces. And I’ve learned to talk different languages about design with people.

Tom Vander Ark: We’re talking to Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel. She teaches design thinking at North Carolina State. She has this great new book called Design Social Change. It’s part of this d.school series of really amazing books, all roughly on the subject of design thinking. What are you teaching at NC State these days?

Reflection and Critical Awareness

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: So I teach a class called Contemporary Issues in Art and Design, which my students can recognize the book in the class because we talk about building a critical awareness of the world, understanding oppression and the oppressions that people face, and then trying to figure out how, as designers, can we impact these big societal problems. So that’s one of the classes that I teach. I teach another class called Design Process, where we reflect on the many different processes that people say they use in design. Then I challenge students to come up with their design process. And then I teach Design for Social Innovation class, where we work with a community in Trinidad and Tobago where I’m from. And again, students have to reflect on different ways of doing design and, you know, design across different cultures.

So I really enjoy what I teach. We question design practice all the time to try to see how can we be more reflective designers and how can we actually make some kind of social impact in the work that we might do.

Tom Vander Ark: Let’s talk about the book a little bit. It’s a beautiful, short, concise, wonderful, poignant, challenging book. It was challenging for me in all the best ways. The artwork is really extraordinary. I want to give a shoutout to your illustrator. Who did you work with on that?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: So I worked with a friend of mine called Che Lovelace. Che is a well-known Trinidadian painter. Actually, I remember Che when I was in school. He’s a few years older than me, but I remember him as one of the cool kids in school. So, you know, when I was able to select an artist, I was really happy to be able to call on somebody who I knew, and he is known for representing life in Trinidad. And I really wanted to give a different spin on the books in this design series.

So my book, as you said, is very colorful, and there are banana leaves and banana trees and paintings of Port of Spain, where I’m from because I was thinking, if I think about where I want to see social change in the world, there are places in Port of Spain where I really want to see that happen, or places in Trinidad where I want to see that happen.

Tom Vander Ark: Definitely the first third of the book is just titled simply “What’s Wrong?” It’s about developing a critical awareness, and it’s both an inward look, right? It starts with knowing yourself and then looking, and thinking critically about your context. I know that’s the first step in design thinking, but your book does it in a different way than any other design thinking experience I’ve had. It really stopped me in my tracks and invited deeper introspection, a critical introspection. So I appreciate that. It’s important to your practice.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: Yeah, I actually start every single design project, every design class, with a reflection on positionality. So I invite students to think about all of the complex identities that they have and to reflect on how those identities could impact the work that we’re doing. When I was doing my doctoral research, I learned how to reflect on positionality in a way that I had never learned in my design practice, really. In design, we say we do these things, maybe we think about who we are, but I learned how to do that in a different way when I was doing my PhD. And I was able to see more clearly during my PhD research how my positionality or my identity could affect the questions that I wanted to ask.

And you know, when I ask students to do this, I’m not asking them to change their identity, but I’m really asking them just to see their identities and understand that they are part of the design process. So we bring our identities with us all the time, but we are not always aware of that if we don’t create that space to reflect on us.

Tom Vander Ark: I really appreciate that it was a personal section of the book, but for me, it also opened up a sense of critical awareness at the macro level. It’s easy to forget that we’re living through this unique period where we’re experiencing things at a planetary scale. Disease, communication, inflation, and now with AI accelerating economic inequity, those things happen, and the rate of change in those things speeding up inequity, speeding, happens without us noticing. And so it takes this critical awareness of stopping and saying, what’s happening? Is it the way things should be? Right? So I appreciate this. It’s the difficult sort of beginning of the design process. And then the second section of your book is also really interesting. And I’ve never read anything in design thinking like it because you talk about how that feels.

And you talk both about anger and joy. Why is that important?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: So I’m from Trinidad, and when people are angry, maybe they burn tires in the road. And so people looking on will say, “Oh, goodness, those people are so angry. Why are they doing this?” And people often get misguided where they’re focusing more on suppressing the anger than getting to the root of the anger. So, you know, in that section, I really wanted people to learn to pay attention to the emotions of the people around us because that tells us where change is needed or maybe where things are good enough and there’s no change needed, or maybe there are good feelings that need to be sustained. As I mentioned, you know, anger is one that people suppress. And we can find ways of listening to that anger and using it as a cue to understand people better.

Emotions and Action for Change

And then the other thing about anger is that anger is also a fuel. And, you know, when we are so angry about something, it really is important for us to take that energy and do something. And I mention in the book, but this is a real story, there was a point where I was really very angry. And this professor, the older professor, took me aside and said, “Well, do something about it.” And if we’re talking about making change in the world, we have to find then that anger and that passion about issues inside of ourselves and then figure out, okay, what are we going to do next? You know, how are we going to take that anger into something?

Tom Vander Ark: I was listening to a podcast with Doctor Becky Kennedy this morning talking about parenting, and she said, “We’re born with lots of emotions, just not the skills to manage those emotions.” So in some respects, design thinking is a way to notice our anger, the source of it, and then in a positive way put it to use.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: Yeah. Move into the next action so we’re not just sitting around doing nothing, but.

Tom Vander Ark: I’m not sure that we always notice our anger. I think that’s why your opening section is so important – that sometimes anger is. We teach, particularly in schools where we teach compliance, we teach kids to repress these important emotions. And I think you’re saying, no, we actually have to be critically aware of what’s going on. And that may produce a sense of anger, and that’s okay. That’s actually positive and important, but then it’s what we do with that. How do we channel that?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: Yeah, what do we do next? And actually, I’ll tell you a funny anecdote or aside. When I wanted to do the workshop with the children in Trinidad, the school administrator was very worried, and she said, “You’re gonna make these children angry.” And actually, I didn’t have the courage to tell her that was okay. But I do believe that is okay. How do we get people to make change? We actually sometimes have to stir things up so that people see, you know, what, this phenomenon is not okay, you know, or this whatever’s happening is not okay. And then we actually get them a little bit excited and angry and ask them, well, what do we do next? And get people to take that anger into a brainstorming activity or, you know, take that anger into action mode.

I think that’s really important. So, yes, anger is scary, but we can use it to figure out what’s next. Like, I deal with angry students all the time. And, you know, just about two weeks ago, two students confronted me after a class and I was terrified. I knew that they were angry and I thought, okay, where are we going with this? And their anger was interesting because this is my contemporary issues class. They were actually angry that we weren’t getting deep enough in some of our discussions. And so that’s actually, that’s like, again, good anger for us to figure out what we do next. We sat down, the three of us, sat down in my office and we started to brainstorm what could I do to respond to their frustration. And then how could I also continue to engage the students who just were not interested in the issue that they were that passionate about?

Yeah. Well, let’s acknowledge the discomfort here in that second section. You also talk about oppositionality, and to an old white guy like me, to experience agency within young people expressed in the form of oppositionality, feels really uncomfortable. Right. And, like, making room for that and responding to that effectively, those are new skills for somebody like me. I appreciated your discussion of oppositionality, but I had actions of fear and my own sense of opposition to that. And so it was important. I guess you’re probably experiencing that on a wide scale. We’re seeing this sort of pushback on the DEI movement now, right? Where it’s impacting people and they’re scared and they’re responding in a reactive, not very positive way. Right?

Yeah, definitely. I’ve had to develop different strategies to allow space for people’s opposition to different ideas. So I guess those different strategies are what allow me to be able to sit down with those two angry students and work something out. Things are definitely changing, and we need different skills to be able to navigate the world that we’re moving into right now. Yeah.

Prototyping and Designing New Worlds

Tom Vander Ark: Let’s say the third section of the book is on designing new worlds. I love this. I claim to live in the future where everything’s better for kids and families. You had beautiful sections on prototyping and reflecting. Maybe a few words on how you think about prototyping and reflecting.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: So the important message about prototyping that I think everyone can get from designers is to not wait until something is perfect. So, you know, if we take all of the ideas of the book where we’re understanding ourselves and our world, we’re understanding how people feel, then we can get into a design phase where we’re thinking about, okay, what could be something that addresses this issue? And then we put an idea out. So we try something out, and that’s not something that every discipline does, but that is the way that designers think, that we have to put an idea out. And then we reflect on that idea. Well, we ask. Before we reflect, we even ask for feedback.

And one of the things that I have to do in the way that I teach is to get students comfortable in collecting feedback, knowing that this feedback doesn’t have to validate them. It doesn’t have to say that their idea is fantastic. They just need to learn to ask people, well, how did this work? Do you think this was a great solution? Was this a terrible solution? And so in that reflection, we learn about the ideas that we’re putting out there, and then we can go back into the process again and try things out. In the book, I use this cooking metaphor. Sometimes I use a gardening metaphor where people, I think, can take risks a little bit more easily.

If they think about the analogy of cooking, where we try a recipe, the first time we try it, maybe the recipe is terrible, then we might try it again and it will get better and better. And so I think I wanted to create that ease of trying something out with social change. So if there’s something that bothers you, the example I’ve been using these days is about left-handed exclusion, for example. So if it bothers you that the left-handers in your life can’t use the can openers, do something about it, create a poster about it, write a letter to the newspapers, communicate with teachers, but create some action around the issue, then you can stop and reflect and say, well, how did that go? Did we make a change? Can we do something bigger next time?

And then you can try something again and always go back and keep in that iterative loop until eventually you change the way that people think about an issue.

Tom Vander Ark: This topic of prototyping reminds me of Design Tech High. It’s close to Stanford D school, and they have a whole 9th-grade class on prototyping where they teach young people to express themselves in many different mediums, to build things, to draw things, to sew things. So I appreciate their commitment to prototyping by teaching the hard and soft skills of prototyping as part of a design ethic. And then they finish with an engineering design project where teams of students are delivering value to their community. So it’s a great design thinking school. But speaking of schools, where and how would you like to see these skills of designing social change? Where would you like to see them show up? Do you want them to show up in a 9th-grade class on design thinking?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: Yeah, I do want to go earlier than that. I worked with the fourth grade. You know, in the workshop that I did in my PhD, I worked with fourth graders and asked them to identify issues that they saw in the ways that they were allowed to play the rules of the school, their community, their country, and even such young children can identify issues with the world. And that thing of being able to design a solution to those issues, I think that builds agency. So really that’s why I chose that age group. I actually did like psychology classes and identified which age group made the most sense. And I found that age group just around fourth grade, fifth grade, they can think critically already and they’re already in that solution-finding kind of age group. So we don’t have to wait until 9th grade. We can come much younger and get people into that mindset.”

Tom Vander Ark: I agree. We love the idea of difference-making and creating opportunities to invite learners to make a difference in their community. And we love to see periodic opportunities for that to show up. And again, that could happen K-12. Do you have any examples of that where schools have invited individual students, and groups of students, and supported the opportunity for them to make a difference in their community?

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: At this moment, I can only think of the little workshops that I’ve done with children. So, I did workshops with the fourth graders in Trinidad, and then I did a similar workshop with maybe middle schoolers in Oakland, where they had to again imagine some of the social problems they wanted to address, and then figure out which technologies they would want to adapt to change those. And then also with a colleague of mine in Puerto Rico, we worked with university students to get them to imagine the future after Hurricane Maria, and what was Puerto Rico they wanted. So, you know, those are the examples that I’ve been doing with people where I’m asking people to imagine a utopia.

That’s the methodology that I like to use, critical utopian action research, where first they critique the world, they then dream of the utopia, and then they try to figure out what are the actions that are needed to get to utopia. And I think that’s a really nice design formula.

Tom Vander Ark: We have been talking to Doctor Leslie Ann Noel. She’s a professor at North Carolina State and, the author of a great new book. Designing social change is part of a great series from the D School. Leslie Ann, we really enjoyed your book. It was challenging interesting and beautiful, practical, and really useful. We do hope that teachers read this. I think this would be a terrific textbook in high school or college. Any parting words of advice for the education leaders that are listening in?

Education and Designing for Social Change

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel: So, I would like other educators and education leaders to think about what are the mechanisms that exist or can be created for young people to influence issues. I’d encourage everybody, all the educators and leaders to remember that young people have great ideas and are passionate about issues, and we have to support that passion so that they will continue to want to make change in the future.

Tom Vander Ark: Thanks to our producer Mason Pashia and the Getting Smart team and sponsors for making this possible. Until next week, keep learning, keep leading, and keep designing for social change.

The post Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel on Designing Social Change appeared first on Getting Smart.

Getting Smart and the d.school: Live from SXSW

Getting Smart Staff — Wed, 01 May 2024 09:15:00 +0000

This special episode of the Getting Smart Podcast is a live broadcast of a conversation between Tom Vander Ark and authors from the Stanford d.school. Together they discuss four new books that speak to important aspects of this work. This conversation features Sam Seidel and Olatunde Sobomehin of Creative Hustle, Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro of Experiments in Reflection, and Grace Hawthorne of Make Possibilities Happen to discuss what educators can learn and use from these books and the authors’ work at the Stanford d.school and beyond. Equal parts inspiration and actionable ideas, this conversation is a great survey of meaningful works.

Sam Seidel

Sam is the co-author of Creative Hustle and the author of Hip Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education and the Director of K12 Strategy and Research at the Stanford d.school. Sam speaks internationally about innovative solutions to challenges facing schools, community organizations, and prisons. He is a passionate and experienced leader in education transformation. Sam has taught in a variety of settings from first grade to community college. He has built and directed programs for young people affected by incarceration. As a consultant, Sam worked with leading national education organizations, including the Black Alliance for Educational Options, Big Picture Learning, and Jobs for the Future, as well as a spectrum of other clients on a diverse set of projects, ranging from redesigning a statewide juvenile justice system to working with the Rockefeller family to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Sam was the Director of Partnerships, Annual Reviews, and Student Leadership for the Association for High School Innovation, a national network of school developers and replicators funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Olatunde Sobomehin

Olatunde is the co-founder and CEO of StreetCode Academy, a community-based organization providing free tech education to communities of color. In addition to StreetCode Academy, Olatunde has co-founded Esface, a youth sports and culture brand and Trillicon Valley, a lifestyle brand with products in technology, fashion, and branding. He is also the co-author of Creative Hustle.

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro

Leticia co-directs the University Innovation Fellows Program. She is an adjunct professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), where she teaches Stanford students of all disciplines how to build their creative confidence to become engines of innovation in their own lives, and as members of teams and organizations. She is also the author of Experiments in Reflection.

Grace Hawthorne

Grace Hawthorne is an entrepreneur, artist, author and educator. She is the Founder & CEO of Paper Punk and author of Make Possibilities Happen. As an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University’s design institute (aka: the d.school), she has taught courses on creativity/innovation/failure for over fifteen years and spearheaded a groundbreaking research project on creative capacity building published in Science and covered by Wired magazine. Previously, she founded ReadyMade, the culturally disruptive design magazine that ignited the maker movement, and led its acquisition by Meredith Corporation (NASDAQ: MDP) and co-authored the critically acclaimed book on reuse design, ReadyMade: How to Make (Almost) Everything (Random House/Potter). Her products can be found on the shelves of mass retailers and her artwork has been exhibited in several national museums including the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum Triennial. She holds an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA, MFA from UCLA’s School of Film and Television, and a BA in Visual Communication from UC Berkeley. Grace has dedicated her life to making things and experiences that cultivate human creativity through the marriage of art + commerce. She believes that (almost) anything is possible.

Links:

Transcript

Outline

Introduction to the Series (01:56 – 06:04)
Frameworks and Mindsets (06:19 – 13:07)
Blazing Your Own Path (16:02 – 21:10)
Reflective Practices and Learning Experiences (27:25 – 35:10)
Leveraging AI for Reflection (49:12 – 57:32)

Tom Vander Ark: Hello everybody, I’m Tom Vander Ark from Getting Smart and we’re live at SXSW EDU. How are you doing? We’re here talking about what I think might be the most important subject in the world. So, I talked to Letitia a couple of days ago, the author of one of these cool design books from the Stanford d.school. And I argued that the world is changing so fast that I think we reached a point about ten years ago where the problems we’re facing are more complicated than our collective response, our collective problem-solving ability. And so, I think what we desperately need are collective problem-solving, and collective design strategies to save the world. I also think, as somebody really interested in human development, that experiences where young people, in particular, have the opportunity to frame a problem, design a solution, and sprint to impact is super rewarding.

Introduction to the Series

They supercharge identity and purpose and agency, and they build these super valuable leadership and problem-solving skills and so on a macro and micro level of developing super capable human beings and addressing the big problems in the world, I think design solution design might be the most important issue in the world. And we just happen to have a fantastic series from the Stanford d.school on the subject of design. And today, we’re celebrating four of the great books, I guess three of the great books in this design series. And they’re not just toolkits. I almost think this is like a spiritual series because it’s really about inviting learners to figure out who they are why they’re here what they’re good at and what they care about, and then how to actualize that in the world.

And for me, that’s just not about making a living, that’s about being a human, a full human being, and making the world a better place. And so for me, this is a super practical series. It’s a spiritual series, and it’s a beautiful series. Sam from the d.school is the author of one of those books, and co-author of one of those books called Creative Hustle. But you’ve kind of… been there from the beginning. But what else did you say about the series and how it came together?

Sam Seidel: Yeah, thanks, Tom. Well, first of all, welcome everyone. It’s cool. I’m a listener of the Getting Smart podcast. It’s cool to be here for a live recording in person. It’s a treat. So glad to be here with you. Thank you for doing this with us. An author I know named Frank Wilson told me years ago, that he spent ten years writing a book called The Hand that he thought was about the relationship between the human mind and the hand. And then he spent the next ten years with people telling him what the book was actually about. And hearing you talk about what these books are kind of is like that for me. It’s cool to hear what you’re getting out of them and it’s helping me understand what the heck we just did doing these books.

But this series, as Tom was sharing, was really meant to kind of crack open the d.school, right? We’re part of Stanford University and a lot of our work, since we’ve existed, has been pouring attention and care into students at Stanford University. What these books are allowing us to do, and we’ve always had big ambitions to bring folks in and share, we’ve had a very active K-12 lab for years that’s really prioritized access for K-12 educators, students, and leaders to get some of the d.school experience. But we’re limited by the size of the space and how hard it is to get there and all these things.

So this series of books that we’ve been doing over the last few years has been our attempt to crack, to open what the d.school does and share it with the world in a much more accessible way. And what we want in the series, there are ten guidebooks, three of which are represented, as Tom was saying today, and we have two other books that kind of bookend. The series was to give as many different perspectives and windows into the work we do as designers and the things that we teach as we possibly could. So each one is going to look different, and at points, you might even look across the ten and say, how do these connect? That’s a good thing. We want to expand the conversation about what design can mean and can do in the ways that you were just getting it.

So want to say that I’m super excited to hear this conversation today between you and these authors and check out the other books.

04:53

Tom Vander Ark: All right, so here’s what we’re going to do. In our first sprint, we have these three extraordinary authors, and I’ve invited them because these books are each a framework, right? It’s a framework of mindsets and skills and a bit of methodology for how you should think about yourself and your work and how your entry points into how you approach the world. So I think of that as sort of a framework, and each of them has these beautiful books that have succinct visual frameworks. They’re each going to describe that frame and then give you just a glimpse of the origin story of how that framework emerged in their work in life. We’re going to start with Grace Hawthorne. She has this spectacular book. I told Grace that I felt like II should apologize to people on the airplane because it was so. It’s violently colorful.

Grace Hawthorne: Thank you so much. He said it all. No, I’m kidding.

Frameworks and Mindsets

Tom Vander Ark: Describe the frame. And then, like, where in the world did this come from?

Grace Hawthorne: Okay, so Make Possibilities Happen. I’m gonna break it up into two parts. Part one: the logistical framework. It teaches you or informs you of how to make the future and create the life that you want. And what I found is that two primary pain points are standing between us and our possibilities. The first one is starting, and the second one is finishing. And so I break that up into four parts. See, start, do, finish. And it comes from 35 years as an entrepreneur and 15 years as an educator. The genesis of that framework really comes from a creativity study that arose out of the 15 years of teaching this course called Creative Gym.

In year six, a brain surgeon who was a visiting fellow from Taiwan came up to me after class and said, “Am I different?” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, you’re different. You just sat through ten weeks of this amazing course,” and he’s like, “No, is my brain different?” I’m like, “I don’t know. You’re the brain surgeon, not me. You tell me that.” And that simple query of curiosity launched an almost decade-long research project on creativity, which answered the question: yes, you can teach creativity and no, it is not acquired knowledge like riding a bike. Once you know how to ride a bike, you forever know how to ride a bike. It’s actually a muscle you need to condition, like sit-ups to maintain and build.

And if you’re not in academia, which I am not, it’s a published research paper, and it’s not often talked about, so I get to talk about it kind of to a more public, kind of general audience. And it’s something that I’m really proud of because we have scientific evidence that the work we do at the d.school does change your brain for the better. So I’m very happy about that.

Tom Vander Ark: Thank you. It is. This is the growth mindset, design thinking guidebook. Ready? See, Start, Do, Finish. I loved it.

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, you’re a very interesting human being because you’re a developmental biologist, right?

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: Yeah, that’s true.

Tom Vander Ark: And so your book is called Experiments in Reflection. I found your book to be a science book because it’s a series of experiments, right? But it’s also a very spiritual book. I found it super reflective. And the opening, you called it a whole-body experience that through reflection brings forth possible futures. I mean, it’s really. You use sort of developmental biology language. Describe the frame and where it came from.

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: Yeah, sure. So first, hi everyone. It’s so great to see the faces that we’ve seen at the Future Studio that the d.school has here at SXSW who are coming and also new faces. So the book Experiments in Reflection was my attempt at taking essential elements of what the experiences that we create at the d.school for our students are, which is learning by doing and reflecting, right? Like, so you experiment, you try something, but then you make connections through reflection and bring it, put it into a book form so that anyone, anywhere can access it and put it in practice. Because reflection is one of those things that we feel like, “Yeah, we have that, right?” It’s just like I stop and think or I journal, and there’s so much more to it.

So in the book, as you mentioned, I put a non-definitive definition of reflection, a way of looking at reflection as a whole-body process of transforming experience into meaning to shape futures. So in other words, three dimensions of reflection. Noticing is a whole-body process. So, like using all of your senses to be aware and notice things of the world around you, but also look inside, right? Like, notice things about you. Notice, tuning into your moods, into kind of, like, how do you see yourself? How does that affect how you relate to others? Like transforming experience into meaning is about going beneath the surface, right? Making connections between what you notice and what you already know or what you think you know, your assumptions.

And finally, and very importantly, to shape the future, right? Because we tend to think that reflection is looking back, but I think it has to be, and it can be, and it needs to be about reflecting forward and not thinking about the future as something that is happening to us, but we are happening to the future. We are imagining a range of possible futures and then choosing what to do today, to strive and drive towards those futures.

Tom Vander Ark: In the opening of your book, you describe reflection, and I think almost all of us think of reflection as backward-looking. But the way you invited us to reflect on possible futures was its design. Right. But we don’t think about it that way. So it was beautiful.

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: Yeah. And I think what is interesting also about all of the books in the series is that there is not one way that is like, “okay, this is the way of defining something,” or “this is the process.” But there are multiple ways in which you can achieve your goals of, for instance, building a better future for yourself and others. And so, like, having multiple entry points. And reflection is about that. It’s about making it personal and figuring out what works for you. How do you need to shape your environment, shape your relationships, connect with others, and find frameworks that work for you? Right. Like, so at a given moment, a certain frame or a certain entry point might be what you need, and someone else might go about it differently or talk about it differently.

We are all striving for a better future, becoming better humans, and contributing, to make a difference.

Tom Vander Ark: Olatunde… How do you say your last name? Sobomehin? I got it wrong.

Olatunde Sobomehin: You’re close.

Tom Vander Ark: Yeah, I got it wrong. 40% on our first podcast too. I’m just gonna say Tunde.

Tom Vander Ark: Tunde. Speaking of reflection, one thing I love about your book, there’s a magic chart in your book that it’s this gift-to-goals chart that invites you to reflect on your people, the process, and your practices. So it’s a spiritual practice of figuring out who you are, and then your framework is about your code. What does that mean?

Olatunde Sobomehin: Yeah, this is the only book on here co-written. Right. So we had to kind of merge experiences that my co-author, Sam Seidel, who’s in the room, and I found in common. The origin of the book came when I spent a lifetime of work in a community called East Palo Alto and East Palo Alto’s Neighbors, Stanford University. Not a lot of pipeline from East Palo Alto students into Stanford University. Resources are very lopsided. And so when Sam and I got together, we both had an appreciation for these communities. He had a lot of work. He was at, you know, he was based in d.school but had done a lot of work in communities like East Palo Alto. And I had been a student at Stanford University and was living and serving that community there.

So we felt like, what could we do to bring these communities together? We wanted to do a class together, so we brought together a class hosted at the d.school but made up and comprised 50% of street-coat students. And there was when we brought these folks together and we thought about, you know, what could we teach?

Blazing Your Own Path

The idea of creative hustle came to me because no matter where you were, whether you were an established career student going back to business school, which we had in that class, or whether you were a fresh undergrad, or whether you were a parent living in East Palo Alto, you all felt like there were expectations on you, from your family, from businesses, because you looked a certain way, had a certain amount of money in your account, or because melanin was in your skin, that made you feel like you were expected to go a certain way. And that’s not the way I wanted to go. I’m a law student, but I really love visual design and I want to make my own path. The subtitle is “Blaze Your Own Path and Make Work That Matters”.

And so many of us, I think you said it in a spiritual sense, are trying to make work that makes money. But we want to make work that matters. We found that this was a path that everyone wanted to be on. When we explored in class and through many interviews, with creative hustlers, we call them, people who can navigate and blaze their path, we found a particular sort of framework, or pattern, rather. Everyone had gifts. We all have gifts in the room. Some of us don’t know what they are and need to unlock those gifts. But we all had gifts, and we all had goals. And we call that the bookends, gifts to goals.

But then there was this pathway, this bridge between gifts to goals, and principles. People had a code, like a set of moral values or just a direction. People understood how to leverage and un-tap the people around them, and how you relate to people in the community. And then you had practice. What did you do daily to make those things happen? And so we broke the book down into principles, people, and practice. That’s the framework.

Tom Vander Ark: Tunde, I want to ask each of you, because I found your book. All of these books are super personal. There are personal reflections on the journey that these professionals have been on and then lessons for learners on the journey. But I found myself a couple of times stepping back, saying, “What would this mean for the community? What would it mean for the creative hustle community?” So, when you think about those practices, are they ever shared practices among a community? What do you think about cultivating hustle and the role that the community can and should play?

Olatunde Sobomehin: I’m gonna… There’s a cheat code for all these books, and that is to look back at what we wrote. And I have an even bigger cheat code because some of these ideas weren’t my own. Some of these were from Sam, and I appreciate being able to read this real quickly. “To be fully alive is to find purpose in the lowest of lows and highest highs. Community helps us grow through the vulnerabilities of life and gives us cause for celebration. So the best creative hustlers surround themselves with a crew to help navigate the tumultuous seas of creative hustlery. The best creative hustlers know when to work alone and when to pull others in, how to build alliances, how to be effectively engaged antagonists, and how to learn from everyone with whom they come into contact.”

They understand that building community, facilitating collaboration, and understanding relationships are the center lanes in moving from our gifts to our goals.

Tom Vander Ark: Beautiful, Grace — this book is super personal. It’s like having a little cheerleader on your shoulder. But it made me wonder, like, if an organization wanted to make possibilities happen, what would that look like? What would this look like in the community?

Grace Hawthorne: Okay, so I feel like in an organization, oftentimes the left-hand doesn’t talk to the right-hand, and maybe even they don’t know they exist, which makes it even worse. And I think in an organization where possibilities exist, they’re holding hands. And I think what that entails is shifting the conversation away from the word creativity, which is something that is often talked about, into the word creator. Everybody is a creator. I don’t care if you’re in accounting or you’re in marketing, if you’re an administrator, if you’re an educator, every day we show up, we are making something happen. We’re making something happen for somebody else or for our community or our own lives.

And I think when we recognize that’s our power, and that’s what this book is, what I want to really impart to people is, that you have everything you need to create whatever possibility it is that you want in your organization or in your life. And we are predisposed to certainty, safety, and comfort, to shy away or to shrink away from things that don’t feel right. But in reality, it’s like, okay, that might have saved your ass when you ran away from, you know, a furry mammoth like when you were a caveman. But today, you kind of need to step forward. You need to, like, lean into, like, that discomfort. And that’s what it means to be a creator. You gotta get out of your own way and embrace that. And so in a community of possibilities, everyone’s a creator.

Everyone owns it, everyone builds it, and they support each other for a larger purpose in a larger context.

Tom Vander Ark: Letitia, what would reflection look like in a community?

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: Before I answer that, I want to go back to the decision to make these, in particular, Experiments in Reflection. I’ll speak for my book about individual experiments and private experiments, right? You could think about how most of the experiences at the d.school involve working with others, being in teams in pairs, and having whole group discussions, right? But if you think about it, a book is normally an individual experience, right? You’re reading the book on your own. So you could think about that as a limitation. How do you translate some of the experiences that you create for a group and turn them into a book?

But you can also think about it as a strength, as a positive from the point of view that for many of these activities, it takes courage and trying something new, trying different ways of work. And sometimes when we do that as part of a team, as part of a whole group, it might be scary, right? Like, I’m showing up and doing something that I don’t know if it’s gonna work, right? Like, what are. Am I going to? What are others going to think? So actually doing individual private experiments gives you the freedom to try things that you don’t know if they’re going to work, but you’re on your own. You can then decide to share your experience with others, but you can have that safety.

That was the intent in creating personal experiments and lowering the barrier for it to be something that you can do and apply in every single d.school course or in the experiences that I teach. Every course is a learning community, and as such, you need to build that community and set the foundations for that. So one thing that we do, and I’m looking at Sam, I’m looking at Meenu Singh with whom I teach, we really start by setting norms, setting shared norms of the community that guide how we’re going to show up for ourselves and others so that we can all make the most of the learning experience, right? And in the book, I invite people to do that for themselves as well. But thinking about, like, well, for instance, seeing failure as a springboard for learning. Right.

Or being okay with experiences that create more questions than answers. Right. And seeing that as a good thing. Right. That propels your learning. Right. So really what’s important is that every single thing that we do, for instance, in a course or maybe like with our teams, we really need to build shared norms that allow us to be a community. It can be a community of two people, but understanding what are our shared norms and values allows us to show up as our best selves for learning.

Tom Vander Ark: Tunde, do you buy that the hustle is sometimes individual and sometimes it’s team? Is it both?

Olatunde Sobomehin: You described Leticia as a behavioral. I mean, as a scientist, as you know, she’s a practitioner. Whatever she says, I believe. So, I’m not gonna go against Dr. Leticia. No. But we saw that in the interviews that we talked about. I think about Jadenna. Jadenna is a recording artist we profile in the book Nigerian background. And he talks about his father giving him the physics formula for velocity. And then he talks about what happens when you collaborate with other people. And so when you collaborate and when you work inside of a community, what that does do to you? To your momentum and how fast you can achieve your goal. And so he talks about that.

There’s another person that talked about Bryant Terry, talked about not really knowing where to go in his career and then bringing together almost a personal board of advisors to come together for one night to kind of help shape new possibilities, to help dream alongside him what new possibilities could be. And, you know, Sam was along, Bryant Terry, for this ride and saw all this transformation happen. Bryant Terry at the time was doing social justice food, social justice work, you know, through a nonprofit, and now has five books. He’s a James Beard award-winning author and cook. He’s a five-time author and has his own print to produce another kind of cookbook. So he’s doing all the things that these other folks did inside of the community. So I buy that these kinds of practices, the creative hustle have done best in the community.

Tom Vander Ark: Your book had a lot of beautiful stories in it that just bring to life what this is about. Leticia, on the other hand, what I found most provocative was imagining future possibilities. And so that’s a different application of story because you think about the story and the lesson from a story, but you’re like inviting us to reflect on future possibilities and imagine stories yet to be told. Is that fair?

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: Yeah. We might think that reflection and imagination are at odds, but actually, you need to be able to activate your imagination to be able to. You cannot build a future that you cannot imagine. Right. That you have not imagined. So really being able to see and to imagine many possible futures. Right. And then think about, like, well, what’s interesting about that future or what’s scary about that future? And what do I do today to, like, direct myself and others towards those futures, but also thinking about how we stretch our time horizons? We tend to be very kind of thinking about it in a very short-term, and maybe it’s a five-year plan. It’s like, great, but that’s kind of short when we think about humanity.

Reflective Practices and Learning Experiences

So can we really stretch ourselves and think about what we want to see in 100 years, in 200 years, when we are not going to be here? And that’s crucial because that requires that we enlist, if you will, an intergenerational collaboration that we think about. What can we…? So one of the experiments is called “Don’t Finish What You Start.” Right. Actually, like, I was able to get my editor to let me kind of, like, say, start, dot, dot. But it’s about thinking because we tend to think it was like, okay, I’m going to do this project, and this is going to go this way and kind of like this. This is a successful outcome. But what if we imagine something that we actually need to pass along to future generations? Like, you need to continue this work.

Tom Vander Ark: All right, I have a story I got to tell you really quick. Is anybody here from Cajon Valley East San Diego? I was just a few minutes ago writing about the launchpad that they have in middle school. They create these immersive experiences, and then they invite reflection, and they say, given those experiences that you just had, what can you imagine about your future? How does that align with how you think about your identity your strengths and your values? They created this launchpad along with workforce.org, Santiago workforce partnership, and they invite parents to come in, do the same thing, and some days it brings parents to tears because nobody has ever asked them to imagine a possible future. Right?

And so imagine being drawn into that possibility space with your kid. Right? It’s super powerful. What do you think about the story? Where does it show up in the design process?

Grace Hawthorne: What? Stories?

Tom Vander Ark: Yeah. Are stories important?

Grace Hawthorne: Stories are really important. And it’s something that I didn’t really recognize because until recently, actually, when doing the book, each one of us, like, we don’t choose, as Tunde, say, who our parents are, what neighborhood we’re born in. Every one of us is like a unique individual based on our context, and our experiences. So when I say blue, like, I always say, it’s like, words are so important, but they’re also deficient. If I say blue, like, maybe you were just in Cancun, and I’m just thinking of the gray sky that’s in northern California, but that, to me, is blue, right? So we bring different meanings. And I think in story, when we communicate who we are and what is meaningful to us, it gives. It gives it more power. It gives it more meaning. It gives it.

I think about values a lot, and I think about the human condition a lot. And I was just talking to Sam. We were talking about, like, okay, well, you know, this audience is filled with administrators and educators, and everybody might be, but many of you may be parents. And it’s like, what do we want and why do we want it? And what are we trying to solve for? And it’s like, are we creating band-aids or are we creating cures? And what’s the timeline for that? And how do we service both, right? The immediate need for something in a classroom to the larger purpose and future of the tomorrow that we’re all trying to create? And you talk about reflection. Nobody stops. And does that?

Like, the fact that you wrote a whole book on that is amazing because every school activity follows with a debrief. And that is a moment of reflection, as you just described in that San Diego classroom. Like, what just happened? What did this mean? And even though, like, we may all have the same shared experience of whatever that experience was, we now have exponential information and context of what just happened. And that just expands my story and my experience exponentially in a way that is gold, is literally gold.

Tom Vander Ark: In the pandemic, we released a couple of books. The first one was the Power of Place. And in that, my co-author, Nate McClennen, reflected that every place is a place worth exploring and experiencing. And every person experiences every place in a different way. And you described that beautifully, so it’s so important with place-based learning or project-based learning to invite that reflection, because everybody just had a very different experience, right?

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: Yeah. And I think that’s key because reflection is what allows making the experience not about the thing, the activity, but about the person and what that means to them. And it’s different for everyone. Right? Like, so if you don’t allow for that reflection to really make the connections from what we all experience or the information that we got, how does that jive with what I know or what I assume and what I’m going to make with it tomorrow, next year, and how that transforms me. So one of the things that we like to say when we create learning experiences is not learning about. It’s about learning to become, helping learners become more creative, become more observant. It’s really about how it transforms you.

Grace Hawthorne: Can I add something to that? Okay, so this might be out there, but it’s like there’s a saying and it’s a quote, and it’s in my book, and I’ve attributed it to somebody who I don’t think was the originator, but “we don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.” Right. And that, to me, encapsulates this idea of reflection and context and provenance and stories, and not to undervalue like we should all. There’s so much currency in our uniqueness and never sell that short. Never sell that short.

Tom Vander Ark: I loved all of these books, and to me, these books are a very different experience than my high school experience, which mostly sucked, you know, because it was training in compliance and regurgitation. Right. And because my life is really about helping America create better high school experiences. And what I most want in life, like Corey Mohn at CAPS, is to invite more kids into work that matters, where it’s connected to who they are and to their community and where they’re sprinting to deliver value. So I kept thinking about that when I read your books. And so I’d love each of you to reflect on what does this mean for high school? And so you can do it in one of two ways. Tunde, you can describe what would Creative Hustle High look like? Or if you want to do a smaller, like, where would you want to see creative hustle surface in a learner’s journey? So what does Creative Hustle High look like?

Olatunde Sobomehin: No, that’s a great question. I would want to go to that high school. I like the sound of that. Few thoughts. First, you know, he referenced, Sam wrote a book about that. It’s called Hip Hop Genius. He just celebrated ten years of the original release. So that’s Hip Hop Genius 2.0. It’s in the bookstore, so you can read it for yourself. In terms of our book, one of the most humbling things, our book has been out for about a year and a half. One of the most humbling things that happened was that there was a school district in Eugene that actually said, “Hey, for our career technical education program, they have a program called CalSci Center for Applied Learning and Community Impact.”

We would like all of our, every single student that goes through our school, our program, we want them to have the creative hustle and identity, and I think that’s pretty powerful. And so we’ve been working with them over the last year to make this happen, and we’re working through it. But in concept, everything that you’re learning in high school should be through the context that you just beautifully said, Grace, which was, “Who am I in this?” And so if you do this, the very first thing that you do is to write down, what you assume your gifts are. What do you say in the community? You attribute your gifts, and then you figure out what your goals are for that moment in time. What are you going to leverage? What are your principles? How are you going to leverage people?

Olatunde Sobomehin: What are your practices going to be? And then I take a math class, and then I take a design class, and then I take, now I’m able. And then I reflect on that throughout the period, throughout the process. That to me becomes a cyclical kind of almost reflection moment where you are thinking about yourself inside of that learning. And that to me feels like a better high school experience.

Tom Vander Ark: Your gifts to goals chart just ought to be in every learner’s, every secondary learner’s advisory system, and you ought to cycle through that at least once a year. But what about entrepreneurial experiences? Because this is kind of a guidebook to entrepreneurship. And I found that’s the hardest thing to introduce into high school because of the nature of entrepreneurship. The nature of the creative hustle is you’re not sure where it’s going to start, and you’re sure not sure where it’s going to end. And so you may end up creating something and learning something that you didn’t anticipate at the beginning. And that makes it difficult to stick into something called a course in a master schedule. So like, do you have an idea of where and how we could surface entrepreneurial experiences for young people?

Olatunde Sobomehin: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if the word entrepreneurship is the appropriate word to attach to the whole book. Right. We have some professionals in there. I’m thinking about Tessa Aragonis. The book ends with this idea about don’t let hustle kill your creativity. And our story, we profile this professional, Tessa Oregonis, who’s the president of AKQA and has a long professional career. Right. So she’s not in a sense an entrepreneur. But what she is in charge of is her own right output. She is that “I’m a start and stop what I want to do” even inside of a company. So I think that idea of don’t lose track, you said it, Grace. Like, don’t ever lose track of the fact that your perspective, your journey, your personhood matters. Everybody in that book has done that now.

Tom Vander Ark: Right. And let me just underscore what you described as hard to do in what we call high school today. Cause you just described high agency learning. You described learners who are empowered to frame up problems and attack them with a sense of agency, maybe towards an outcome that wasn’t anticipated. And none of that is easy in the way that we have structured high school.

Olatunde Sobomehin: So you said it better, more hustle.

Tom Vander Ark: One way or another. Letitia, you’re actually doing this. You created the University Innovation Fellows, which is. What is that program?

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: So it’s not high school. It’s for university students, mostly at the undergraduate level, but also graduate students participate as well. There are students from over 300 universities that we help prepare as change agents who notice opportunities at their schools and their communities, opportunities to make education better for themselves and their peers. And they have to do the creative hustle to actually make those possibilities happen. When they notice something, they notice an opportunity. It’s not just about saying we need this, but it’s like, okay, what are you going to do as a student to collaborate with leaders, with professors at their university, to change things up, to embed more experiential learning, to create more spaces for student creativity and collaboration. And they’re doing that in many. The program has been around for more than a decade now.

Tom Vander Ark: Is that an out-of-school experience?

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: Yes. So you could call it a co-curricular or extracurricular layer of the experience, but really empowering the students to see themselves as someone who can make a difference. Now, they don’t need to wait to graduate, to be anointed with a degree or a title, to do something, and especially contribute to transforming our educational institutions, which require innovation and transformation. And we need to enlist the ingenuity of the young people, of the learners, not as just customers of the system, but as protagonists, right? Like that, actually, they know a lot about what their needs are, what their experiences are. So we need to empower them as change agents, and that’s what the program does.

Tom Vander Ark: Grace, what would Possibilities High look like?

Grace Hawthorne: Okay, so I really love this idea of agency and entrepreneurship. I think it’s going to take us and the creators and us and entrepreneurship. And I agree. I mean, that sounds like I’m creating a whole organization and business, but literally, when you make Sunday dinner or whatever, like, you’re starting something and you’re finishing it. And I used to have this magazine called Ready Made, which was like Martha Stewart meets This Old House. We had thousands of reader submissions. They would send in a lamp that was made out of a blender. The pride in what they created was crazy. Like, it was fanatic. And there is so much joy and self-accomplishment and confidence that comes from making something.

So, like, you don’t have to build a company. You can just make a thing, right? You have to just start and finish, and you can. So the possibility is high. Okay. You would go to your math, just like today said. You’d have your math, you’d have your core subjects, and then we would talk about, well, what did you learn and what did that process. How do we apply it to a prescribed context or situation? Like, we do that when we create our activities in the classroom. Like, okay, you have five minutes, and you have, you know, a constraint of these materials, and this is the outcome we want you to drive to. Then part two, you would, instead of a prescribed context, you would pick a context within your community.

How would I apply this, whatever this learning is to my school, to my classroom, to something identified that’s in here that affects all of us? And then part four, how would you do that in the real world? So you’d start like this, and then you’d literally kind of, like, grow, grow. Imagine rings in a pond. It would start in the center, and then, like, the echo would get bigger and bigger. So they see themselves. They’re like, I did that. I did that. Oh, my God, I did that. I did that. And I’m telling you, that building of confidence, it’s this momentum that just carries an internal person forward, upward, and beyond.

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: And if I may add, Tom. And making can be a reflective activity, right? Like, so one of the experiments in the book that is called Build Futures, you can touch because you can make. You know, makes to think, right? Like. Or build to think and think with your hands, right? Like, as you create something, your brain starts, like, seeing other things that, oh, I wasn’t thinking of this, and this gives me other ideas. So making can be a reflective activity as well.

Tom Vander Ark: Let’s grab a couple of other ideas of schools that are putting these practices into motion. Sam, you’ve written a couple of times about a place called Hip-Hop High. How does that work?

Sam Seidel: Well, I think you’ve gotten at a couple of the constraints that most of our schools have. The kind of master schedule, course sequence stuff, the division of subjects, when in real life, we’re rarely doing our math 100% separate from our language arts, 100% separate from our science, right? And so one thing is breaking down some of those artificial, what I would call artificial structures that we’ve created and integrating those subjects to say, okay, if I’m trying to produce a record, what do I need to know about math, science, language arts, humanities, business, all of these things, centering it around the work of production and a real need to know. And I think one of the challenges a lot of times in our schools is that we say, yes, we’ll teach you all of that.

And then at the very end of your senior year, you get to do a project where you put it all into place. And for some kids that work, they can sort of see that and believe in that light at the end of the tunnel. And for a lot of kids, because it’s like it’s too abstract, it’s too distant. First I need to be frustrated. Why can’t I make this album? Why isn’t this thing happening? And then if you start teaching me sound waves, if you start teaching me the math on whatever it is, I need it now, and I want it. And so you mentioned hip hop high. The formal name is High School for Recording Arts. It’s been running for over 25 years in St. Paul, Minnesota. This is a project-based.school.

The school leader and founder, David TC Ellis, came up with something called St. Paul Open School. And so he had been in a project-based.school, and he figured out how to apply it specifically in this area of hip-hop culture and music making. So, I mean, I think that when I hear about the topics that Grace and Leticia and Tunde are talking about, and you’re talking about Tom. I think I see them all playing out in a school like that because young people are doing stuff from start to finish. They’re reflecting and they’re basing it on their principles with their people and their practices.

Tom Vander Ark: I’m taking a busload of people to high school recording arts next week. So we see Victoria and I see design-based learning surfacing all over Kansas City, where people are sneaking projects and entrepreneurial experiences into existing courses. Cory and Nate are in a CAPS network. You guys are, you’re still within the confines of things called courses. You’re helping kids surface entrepreneurial experiences and projects all over the country.

Cory Mohn: Absolutely and absolutely. All those constraints. True. I think the key through all this is you have to believe that young people have the ability to shock the world with what they’re capable of when they’re given the chance to lean into what they’re really good at and what they care about. And we know that’s true when you give them authentic work. So do that as early and often as you can. I love the reflection piece, and we’ve been talking here. We need to work more of that into our model. Yeah. Fantastic.

Tom Vander Ark: The last time I visited them, I reflected because I walked in the front door and three young men were building an airplane in the lobby. So part of your gift is saying yes to crazy stuff. You probably should have stepped back and reflected on how are they going to get that out of the other great examples of design-based learning, inviting kids into work that matters, things that we should surface quickly. The good thing is there’s great stuff happening all over the United States. But we’re acknowledging it’s hard, right? We’ve built a container that almost systematically inhibits the kind of work that we’ve just described. All right, a quick lightning round tech, especially Gen AI. Good, bad. Does it help? How do you see Gen AI surfacing in the hustle? Tunde? Is it Leticia, what’s your take?

You’re a computational biologist, so you’ve got to be giddy about the possibilities of Gen AI?

Leveraging AI for Reflection

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: Well, my co-advisor in grad school was from computational sciences and computer sciences, but I’m a developmental biologist, which is not quite the same. However, I’ve been experimenting, and I’ve been using generative AI to build Reflection Assistant, a tool for teachers to be able to incorporate reflection in their learning experiences, be it in person or online. Because, as I think – I hope I conveyed – learning doesn’t happen without reflection. But it’s difficult to incorporate reflection at scale in a way that is effective. Providing the opportunity for reflection is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. We also need to provide tools for the students to really do reflection well. So, this tool that we created is called RIFLE. It asks questions to the students, starting with a question that the teacher has asked based on the experience. So, let’s say we do a workshop, we do a class on a certain topic, and the teacher sets the initial question. But then the generative AI is asking the student that question and then generates specific questions based on what they answer. There’s the possibility of really prompting the students to ask themselves questions that get them to go deeper. So, instead of just getting that first one-shot answer that they might give if you asked them to submit a reflection paper, we can get them to be more specific, to notice specific things, to make connections, make inferences, think about the future and what that means for themselves and for how they’re going to show up in the future. So, I think there are a lot of possibilities with the right design. Really thinking about how, if it’s AI, for instance, for what goal? For what purpose? And not just say, “Oh, we just have, like, AI-augmented teachings.” Well, what does that mean? What are specifically you trying to achieve?

And it asks questions to the students, starting with a question that the teacher has said based on the experience, right? Like, let’s say we do a workshop, we do a class on a certain topic, and so the teacher sets the initial question, but then the generative AI asks the student that question and then generates specific questions based on what they answer, right? Like, so there’s the possibility of really prompting the student to ask themselves questions that get them to go deeper. So instead of just getting, like, that first one-shot answer, that if you gave them, it’s like, okay, like, do your reflection here on this discussion board or submit a reflection paper, and they might just, like, say, “Oh, it was great,” right? Like, well, what specifically made it great? And, like, and start getting them to be more specific, to notice specific things, to make connections, make inferences, think about the future and what that means for themselves and for how they’re going to show up in the future. So, I think there are a lot of possibilities with the right design. So really thinking about, like, how, if it’s AI, for instance, for what goal? For what purpose? And not just say, “Oh, we just have, like, AI-augmented teachings.” Well, what does that mean? What are specifically you trying to achieve?

Tom Vander Ark: You just helped me make a connection. I think Ethan Mollick is doing the most interesting work in the country in terms of teaching entrepreneurship at Wharton. And Mollick pointed out the other day, he has a great substack that comes out once a week. You have to read it because it’s just super thoughtful. And he made the point that we’ve raised a generation of kids who think they can Google an answer, and it’s a one-shot answer. He said, this new generation of reasoning engines invites us into an inquiry-based dialogue where we have to get better at asking better questions and that the responses that we’ll get continue to improve as we improve our ability to prompt a response. But it’s the dialogue with a reasoning engine that is the power.

And he’s seeing this inviting young people to use Gen AI to brainstorm ideas for companies and to build new impact organizations. But it’s the reflection. It’s the inquiry-based dialogue that’s key to why this is a different technology than we’re used to. Grace, you’re a bit more circumspect, okay?

Grace Hawthorne: Oh, I know. Okay, so I’m going to take the extreme other side just for this context. Okay? So, as a champion of the analog and a semi-Luddite, okay, I’m going to say that you’re human-powered. Yeah, I’m human-powered. I feel like to solve the world’s messy problems, you have to interact in the built world, and that’s not on a screen, number one. Number two, I love these tools. Technology is a tool, right? So when I think of a tool, what is it? Is it for productivity? Is it for speed? What I realized after we kind of talked about what we’re going to discuss on stage here, and I know AI is such a hot topic, I went back and I thought about, like, why does that scare me? Why do I think it’s incredibly dangerous? I distilled it and tried this on for size. I don’t know if this is where it should go. I feel like AI chat GPT and all these tools are removing processes from our lives. We no longer know how to spell. We don’t write handwriting anymore. I’m telling you, writing cursive and reading script, there’s pattern recognition, there’s geometry. There are so many things that relate to the human condition that we are just no longer doing. And so to me, when I think about AI and chat GPT, it’s like, okay, well, students, they can just write a paper through chat GPT. I’m sorry, but a collection of somebody else’s pieces of information is not an insight. To arrive at an insight, you have to think, and you have to connect the dots, and synthesize stuff on your own with your context.

So, Einstein said it best. There’s information, there’s knowledge, and there’s wisdom. Wisdom only comes from experience. Experience comes from, for me, the process. And if you’re having a machine do it, you’re not processing diddly squat. But that’s just my extreme view.

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: Yeah, and I think, like, you’re right. And also, like, we, I think there’s, we have to go beyond, and we’re probably past that, like, just thinking about AI, equal chat GPT, right? Chat GPT is a very specific application that is, like, also a generalist application. It’s like a Swiss Army knife, one of those things that, like, does a lot of things, but not one particular thing really well. And so, for instance, when I designed Rif, it was about a very specific need and designing for that. Right? And so I think that’s the best way to go. But also, I think we need to be better at helping learners interact better with multiple types of intelligences, human and artificial, and understand that it’s a process. It’s not just a one-shot.

So, for instance, with the rise of generative AI, I updated the pedagogical contract that I do with the students. And I said, “You may use AI, but it cannot be your whole process. It’s not okay to kind of, like, give. If I give you an assignment, input it into an AI tool, and then get the output and submit it of your own. That’s not okay. However, it is okay if, for part of the process, you use it, and then you’re demonstrating, like, okay, I got this text, I used this, I learned this. And you’re really. It’s kind of, like, part of your process and not your whole. You’re not using it to bypass thinking, reflecting, and synthesizing.

The other thing that I would say is, like, you can also use these tools to actually have learners engage with the world, which you said is key. Right. And so these tools, for instance, the learning experiences that we created at the Discord, unfold. So you are not giving everyone, “Here’s the ten things that you’re going to do in the next hour.” You say, “Tunde, do this,” and then kind of like, “You did this. Great. Now let’s reflect on that. Meet with Grace and talk about this. Now do this.” And so things unfold, and you’re giving instructions as they go. You can do that with chatbots. And I’ve created other non-generative AI chatbots that guide you in engaging with the world, in doing those activities. And it’s like, “Okay, go there and look at that. Great. You did that.”

Take a photo and now do this. Experiences that unfold out in the world. So that’s possible as well.

Tom Vander Ark: All right, Grace, I’m on team possibility.

Grace Hawthorne: Yeah, I’m okay.

Tom Vander Ark: I’m just bringing my algorithm to the party.

Grace Hawthorne: Okay, okay, fine. You can bring it.

Tom Vander Ark: But we can both be champions for possibility.

Thank you. All right, a quick headline on the way out. What’s the big takeaway you want these ed leaders to take from Creative Hustle and our dialogue?

Olatunde Sobomehin: I think I’m most proud of the profiles that we had in the book because I think, and you said it really beautifully, gentlemen on the front row here just talked about, like, what is already happening with our students and how could we name it appropriately? And I think what we’ve named inside of this, inside of the book, is nine profiles of creative hustlers, many of whom, as educators, we probably have all in our classrooms, and we probably have more than we think of. And so they’re navigating and making meaning of their own lives, and that’s valuable. So I think to recognize that and.

Tom Vander Ark: To celebrate it is, well, Letitia, headline?

Dr. Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: So without reflection, learning doesn’t happen, period. So my question to all of you is, where are you allowing reflection to happen for your learners, for your colleagues, for yourself? Right? And you can, like, as you’re waiting for your flight, you can map that out. And then, like, think about, like, well, what can I do differently? How can I embed reflection? It doesn’t take that long. It just takes an intention of that reflection always being part of a learning experience for real learning to happen.

Tom Vander Ark: Grace, take us out.

Grace Hawthorne: So I’m taking you home. The d.school is not about innovations. It’s about innovators. And as educators, I don’t care what part of the organization you guys play a role in. You guys are there transforming people, and that is the gift that keeps on giving. So hats off to all of you in this room, number one. Number two, just start. Like, just begin. I know, like, you might not have the resources. You might not have the environment or whatever it is you think. Have an entrepreneurial mindset. You can get it done. Have the grit. Just do it in a small way, but you can do it. You have all the resources you need to create the future and possibility you want at your organization and in your life. I promise you just have to do the work.
Tom Vander Ark: Thank these amazing authors.

The post Getting Smart and the d.school: Live from SXSW appeared first on Getting Smart.

Podcast Episodes Archive | Getting Smart

Town Hall Recap: Health Science Pathways

Health Science Pathways

Abridged Transcript

Jobs for the Future (JFF)

Advance CTE

Questions for Kyle and Kate

School Models

NAF

Project Lead the Way

Links:

Dr. Shari Camhi on Purpose, Media Literacy and a Decade of District Leadership

Dr. Shari Camhi

Links

Outline

Navigating the New Era of Social Media and AI

The Evolution of Media Literacy in Education

Revolutionizing High School Experience

Baldwin 2035: Cultivating Future-Ready Citizens

Embracing Media Literacy and AI in Education

Juan Jose Gonzalez and Gina Schuyler on Community College Networks and Radical Dual Credit

Juan Jose Gonzalez

Gina Schuyler

Links:

Outline

Introduction to Career and Technical Education Advocacy

Exploring the Impact of EdSystems and Partnerships

Strategies and Successes in Illinois’ Education and Workforce Development

Navigating the Dual Credit Landscape in Illinois

The Future of College Credit Education in Illinois

Lona Running Wolf on Education Reform and Cultural Preservation

Lona Running Wolf

Links:

Abridged Outline

Lana’s Journey: From Education to Nonprofit Leadership

Exploring Blackfeet Identity and the Impact of Borders

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel on The Cultivate Project and Global Citizenship

Sarah Elizabeth Ippel

Links:

Outline

The Journey of Starting a School: Challenges and Rewards

The Founding Story of Academy for Global Citizenship

Evolving Education: The Impact of AGC and Future Visions

Expanding the Vision: Cultivate Collective and Beyond

Yu-Ling Cheng on Remake Learning Days

Yu-Ling Cheng

Links:

Outline

The Growth of Remake Learning Days

The Impact of Remake Learning Days

Real-World Learning in Pennsylvania

Kidsburgh, Parents as Allies and Other Collaborations

Yu-Ling’s Unique Background in Economics and the Arts

Performing Arts at Remake Learning Festivals

Family Development Experiences

Jennifer Mellor and Mike Huckins on How Chambers of Commerce Can Get Involved in Accelerated Pathways

Links:

Outline

Introduction to the Digital Credential Summit Insights

The Chamber’s Role in Bridging Education and Industry

Challenges and Strategies in Policy and Workforce Development

Focusing on Manufacturing: A Strategic Choice for Arizona

Looking Ahead: Dual Enrollment and Workforce Development Goals

Town Hall Recap: Microschools: Sustainability, Scalability and Accessibility

Links:

Annotated Transcript

Sustainability of Microschools

Scalability of Microschools

Accessibility of Microschools

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel on Designing Social Change

Dr. Lesley Ann Noel

Links:

Outline

Importance of Designing Social Change

Understanding Design Thinking

Reflection and Critical Awareness

Emotions and Action for Change

Prototyping and Designing New Worlds

Education and Designing for Social Change

Getting Smart and the d.school: Live from SXSW