Will Richardson, co-founder of the Big Question Institute, explains, “It’s not going back to school, and doing things a bit better, but doing things differently; creating environments where learning happens really deeply. It’s capacity building around a coherent definition of learning, arising from conversations with students, teachers and the school community. It’s strategic design for the future.” https://bigquestions.institute/bqi-new-homepage/
After experiencing incredible challenges during the pandemic, schools are returning to in-person learning. Podcasts for Leaderful Schools hosts, Bob Maxfield and Suzanne Klein, invite their guest Will Richardson, co-founder of the Big Questions Institute, to reflect on the pivotal question of what’s worth teaching and learning, and how to promote learning so we can live up to the promise of American public education.
“It really is about not going back to school, but going back to creating environments where learning happens really deeply.” Will Richardson pointed out “the distinctions between learning loss and schooling loss; let’s get back to learning versus let’s get back to school; and not just going back and doing things a bit better, but doing things different. We’re helping schools, teams and communities build capacity to engage in conversations around different not just better, which is a shift in the way we talk about schools and education traditionally.”
What is a coherent definition of learning? “The first step is you have to have some coherence as to how you define what learning is, and how it happens, and what the conditions are that are required for that. And the honest truth is that a lot of schools are still incoherent about that.”
“If you don't have a coherent, shared, lived definition of learning, then kids are in ‘incoherence’. They're going from classroom to classroom, having to figure out what every teacher means when they say to learn something. There isn't a coherent narrative or this thread or through line in their experience where everyone is building on the same understanding of how learning happens and what it needs to look like in classrooms.”
What contributes to learning? “We're starting to realize that a lot of what we do in schools really is not supportive of the way humans learn. Putting kids into age-grouped classrooms is not a great condition for learning, nor is limiting them to fifty or sixty, or eighty-minute time sessions, one subject at a time. That's not how we learn in the real world. None of those are conditions for really great learning to happen.”
“The type of learning that we want to see our kids do in classrooms is problem-based, question-based and meaningful. I think a lot more schools are trying to figure out how to create situations where kids can do more agentic learning where they have more agency, more choice, and more real freedom to pursue what they want to learn on their own terms. Adults in the room fill in and support, question and probe, and do all those things that deepen that experience for them. I think that we're seeing a lot more opportunities for kids to really go in their own direction.”
“What we are seeing now are schools popping up on the edges that are really different and going about things very differently. They’re basically leaving the traditional systems, narratives and practices behind and going grade-less. They're not organizing by age. It really is about deep student-driven, project-based inquiry-based learning, with teachers more as supports. “
“Teachers may be up against a whole bunch of obstacles when it comes to moving into those types of pedagogies and those types of learning environments, because there is no coherent vision for what they want it to look like as a school, as a community. I don't think they've had the conversations.”
What do leadership teams need to do? “One of the most important jobs for leadership teams right now is to figure out a capacity building strategy for the community to understand a different narrative, a different story about the experience of school for their kids. How are kids going to thrive in the future if they continue to live the current story?"
“Helping to create a different narrative or story is something we have to embed in our practice on a regular basis as school leaders, teachers and people in school.It's things like exhibitions of student work during the year or the community open exhibitions where kids are showing the types of interesting learning that they're doing, and describing it and talking about why it matters to them.”
“There is another layer to this that gets even more complicated, but is equally urgent. It’s not just about our kids in our schools; it’s about the world now. How do we all see ourselves as a part of the much larger kind of living system that is on this planet that is under duress right now? I know a lot of people have a struggle even having that conversation in the community.”
Should schools be places for the private or public good? “Schools have to be places now for literally the public community good, where we frame our work in the context that says we are part of a much larger system here. It can't be about ‘me’; it has to be about ‘we’. It really has to change in terms of what we teach, how we teach it, the experiences we provide for kids, and the conversations we have in an ongoing way with the people in our communities.”
“We are facing a lot of challenges right now in the world. We’re not going to solve them without education. We can mitigate the challenging hardships and really contribute to the solutions if we think about education differently.”
What are two books you recommend to school leaders? “The first one is Who do we choose to be? by Margaret Wheatley, which is the powerful question she asks leaders. How do we lead in our communities at a time of very, very deep difficulty, being good human beings and interacting with one another with a spirit of joy and hope but understanding that the larger problems may be unsolvable?”
“The second book is Education in a Time Between Worlds by Zachary Stein. His thesis is that we are in a ‘world system transition’. For education this brings up an almost unimaginable design challenge in terms of how we create an education for humanity at a moment of huge, huge shift.”
“Meg's book is about how we take this particular moment and make the best of it. Zak's book is how we take this particular moment and aspire to something that really is different, and then begin to think about pathways to getting there.”
What is the design challenge for schools? “We're helping schools move away from strategic planning to strategic design instead. How do we create the skills, literacy and disposition of designers, when we have conversations around schools, our practice and our environment?”
“So, if we're in this ‘world system transition’ and if we have this design challenge, then can we transport ourselves into the future to look into schools and see what are the things that are happening there that are good or bad, but then actually create artifacts and bring them back into the present?”
“As powerful as a story and narrative is when it comes to thinking differently or changing the script, even more powerful is actually holding an artifact in your hand and thinking about it. How do we get there, if it's something that we want to have happen? How is our work in the present getting us toward this kind of aspirational future?”
Final thoughts:
“I think that leaders have to engage in radical truth telling right now. I think that we have to just be deeply honest about what's working and what’s not working in schools, in the context of how we understand learning and human beings, and acknowledge those things.”
“It requires a truthful assessment about the state of schools today, as well as thinking about potential opportunities for students and teachers and learners in communities in a world where we continue to see an explosion of ways that we can connect, create and access teachers and information in interesting and fascinating ways.”
“Engage students, teachers, parents, community members in these ongoing conversations. Bring people together in groups and ask questions like: what is learning, what success means right now for this community. Be transparent about those conversations, and really try to use them as ways of building capacity in their communities.”
References: https://bigquestions.institute/bqi-new-homepage/
Stein, Zachary, Education in a Time Between Worlds Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology and Society, San Francisco, California, Bright Alliance, March 1, 2019.
Wheatley, Margaret, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity, Oakland, California, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, June 9, 2017.
Podcast for Leaderful Schools, previous episode with Will Richardson, October, 2021
https://podcast-for-leaderful-schools.simplecast.com/episodes/epic-design-challenge-for-schools
Bob Maxfield:
Welcome to Podcast for Leaderful Schools coming to you almost live from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, actually, coming to you almost live from the Galileo Institute in Pawley Hall at Oakland University. This is Bob Maxfield and I'm joined today by my always wonderful co-host, Dr. Suzanne Klein. Sue, how are you today as we begin this new year?
00:20 --> 00:34
Suzanne Klein:
I am doing beautifully with an exciting school year starting to unfold as our students return; I can look out the window and see them walking back and forth to class, as well as the baseball team out on the field practicing a bit. So, there's lots going on.
00:35-->01:41
Bob Maxfield:
It's a beautiful fall day here in Michigan. So, we're delighted that our listeners are with us. Last year we conducted a series of interviews, focusing on lessons learned during the pandemic and the need to get back to the business of educating students in our schools. And if you were listener, we began that series with today's guest, and we continued with a number of other folks.
This year we're going to look more closely at what's worth teaching, what's worth learning rather, and how we need to teach and promote learning, so that we can live up to the promise of American public education, so that we can make sure that all the adults and children in our schools are fulfilled and achieve what they set out to achieve in the first place.
So, today's guest is Will Richardson. Will is co-founder of the Big Questions Institute. He's an old friend of ours. If you'll go back in our podcast files, I think you'll find about three different interviews with him. We were privileged at least two different times that I recall, to have Will here at Oakland as a speaker. So, Will welcome, we are so thrilled to have you here again.
01:41--> 01:44
Will Richardson:
Well, thanks so much for having me back. It's always nice when I get the re-invite. So...
01:45 --> 00:02:06
Bob Maxfield:
That's right. That's a tribute. So, tell us a little bit about the last year with the Big Questions Institute. It was a year or so new. We've now had a year under your belt. Before we went on the air we were talking about how widely we're distributing some of your stuff. What have been some of the highlights in the last year?
02:07--> 03:57
Will Richardson:
Well, first appreciate all your support. Thanks very much for that. So, we're almost at three years since Homa Tavangar and I founded the Big Questions Institute, and obviously we founded it right before the pandemic hit. So that was a pretty interesting first six months. I don't know if they actually count as a business, but we actually did a lot of work during the pandemic with international schools primarily and have done some… now are beginning to do some more face-to-face work again with schools all over the world. We've actually had a number of public schools now that have reached out.
We're doing a lot of strategic design with them, trying to think about where they want to go into the future. And I think really that's become the emphasis of our work, is helping schools, helping teams and communities build capacity to engage in conversations around different, not just better. That requires some real contexts about and some real truth telling about the state of schools today, and the conditions that they're operating under which many of them are obviously still challenging, but it also requires to begin to think about what the potential opportunities are for students and teachers, and again, learners in communities in a world where we continue to see an explosion of ways that we can connect, we can create, and access teachers and information in continuing kind of interesting and fascinating ways.
It still is this kind of liminal moment we feel for schools where we're moving from one kind of way of thinking about learning and education to another. We're not exactly sure what that looks like, but we're pretty convinced that it does look very, very different for schools, for the value of schools and for what we do in schools with kids.
03:58--> 04:46
Suzanne Klein:
Your newsletter is something that we read carefully here at the Galileo Institute and share it with our students. And in your message to educators early last month you got to the theme that you just mentioned, about just not going back and doing things a little bit better, but doing things differently. As you introduce the notion of let's get back to learning versus let's get back to “school”, and you did this by scanning back to school advertisements and other information, and then thinking about those items and how important they were. Instead, you wondered what a back to learning list would look like, which kind of captivated my thinking, and I spent some time thinking about that.
Elaborate for our listeners what you had on your mind as you were thinking about this distinction between school versus learning.
04:46-->09:18
Will Richardson:
Well, I think I'm always looking for a turn of the phrase, for a shift in the ways that we talk about schools and education traditionally, and I think that that's a big one. Another turn is this idea that we had a lot of learning loss because of remote schooling, and it's not remote learning, it's remote schooling that we went through. I really believe that kids never stopped learning. It wasn't necessarily learning loss but it was schooling loss. And similarly, it really is about not going back to school, but going back to creating environments where learning happens really deeply.
And to do that, the first step is you have to have some coherence as to how you define what learning is, and how it happens, and what the conditions are that are required for that. And the honest truth is that a lot of schools are still incoherent about that. They say things that they believe contribute to really deep and powerful learning, but then they do things that pretty obviously stand in the way of deep and powerful learning. It's that disconnect and that dissonance, I think that most educators know is there, but that they don't really want to get to. And now, I think it’s more important than ever that they really begin to interrogate that.
So we talked a little bit about, you know, going through some a process to figure that out. How do you define learning? Is there coherence? That's number one. If you don't have a coherent, shared, lived definition of learning, you need that, otherwise kids are in incoherence. They're going from classroom to classroom, having to figure out what every teacher means when they say to learn something. And then, secondly, to really think hard about what it is that contributes to learning, when we're doing it ourselves. I will say that, and we may have talked about this last year. But the most profound, intensive learning that I experienced during the pandemic was facilitating a weekly call with international school heads from around the world, every Thursday morning at eight in the morning, from March twenty-twenty all the way through up until summer this year, where they were just trying to figure out what to do, how do they navigate school closures, testing, the Covid testing, all of that stuff. It was the type of learning that we want to see our kids do in classrooms. It was problem-based, question-based. It was urgent. It was meaningful. They wanted to learn more; they were constantly collaborating.
That's really powerful learning and those are the conditions that we all know are required for learning to happen. But even when I ask those school leaders afterwards if that's what learning in their classrooms look like, most of them are kind of honest, and they said, ‘No, that's not what it looks like. It doesn't have many of those conditions at all.’ So, I think we have to articulate what gets in the way, what are we doing that doesn't make a lot of sense, and some of those answers are pretty hard.
Putting kids into age-grouped classrooms is not a great condition for learning. That's not how we learn in the real world; limiting them to fifty or sixty, or eighty-minute time sessions, just, you know, taking out one subject at a time. None of those are really powerful conditions for, or are conditions for really great learning to happen. So, I think you know, we can't get rid of those right away. I get it because those are embedded in the ways that we think about the school experience. But I think we have to ask ourselves, well, what if we didn't do those things?
What could we do differently, right? What if we didn't put kids in same age groupings? What if we didn't do just one class, one subject per class, and all of those things? And I think that the schools that are having those conversations and are willing to say, “Okay, I know we can't turn those things over overnight, but what do we want our classrooms to look like in ten years?” If we could create the ideal classroom conditions in ten years, what would they be? And then let's map that path backwards to now, see where the gaps are, and let's start working on those gaps to really begin to live what we say we believe about learning, but in many cases don't do in the classroom.
09:19 --> 09:59
Suzanne Klein:
Let's unpack that a little bit more, because that's an intriguing thought in terms of what the roadmap might look like, and that notion of beliefs and practices, and interrogating the why, as you just talked about, with what school looks like today.
I'm thinking particularly because I'm sitting in a university that has a teacher preparation program as well as school leadership preparation program. So I'm thinking about the folks that are already out there doing those day-to-day things, as well as those who are preparing to step into those roles. Talk to us a bit about that road map, and how that parallel track with folks that are in the moment already doing it, as well as people who are getting ready to step into that, might look.
10:01 -->13:52
Will Richardson:
I think a lot more schools are trying to figure out how to create situations where kids can do more agentic learning, where they have more agency, they have more choice, they have more real freedom to pursue what they want to learn on their own terms, and then to have the adults in the room fill in and support and question and probe, and do all those things that deepen that experience for them. And so that's good. I think that we're seeing a lot more opportunities for kids to really go in their own direction.
But the problem is that many of those are kind of special programs on the edges. So, we have experiential learning programs where you'll get two or three teachers who are really committed to making Piaget live in the classroom, where learning is a consequence of experience, where the kids are actually doing thing: they’re going out in the community, they're solving real community problems, they're apprenticing, they're doing all those types of things. But then the rest of the school is still kind of traditional in terms of: you've got to go through this, you've got to get through the curriculum,you have to pass the test.
And teachers, I think, are trying. I don't want to throw teachers under the bus here because they are up against a whole bunch of obstacles when it comes to moving into those types of pedagogies and those types of environments. But I think that again in many places there is no coherent vision for what they want it to look like as a school, as a community. I don't think they've had the conversations. You know I go back, I say this all the time, I taught twenty-two years in a local high school year high-performing Blue Ribbon School in New Jersey. I can't remember ever having a like a day or two to sit down with faculty members and just go ‘Well, what do we mean when we say learning? You know, what do we mean? And what does it really look like in our lives?’ And then how do we replicate those conditions in our classrooms?
You know, I watch my own kids, as I said before, go from first block and have to figure out what learning looked like in that classroom, then go to second block and have to figure it out all over again, because there was this, there wasn't this coherent narrative, or there wasn't this thread, this through line in their experience, where everyone was kind of building on the same understanding of how learning happens and what it needs to look like in classrooms. So it's a really, it's again one of these kind of in-between moments I think, where we're starting to realize. And I think the pandemic accentuated this actually, we're starting to realize that a lot of what we do in schools really is not supportive of the way humans learn.
But we're not quite sure how to change a lot of those traditions and stories and embedded narratives around what school is supposed to look like and move it to another place. I'll just finish by saying what we're seeing now is actually a lot of schools just popping up on the edges that are really different, that are going about things very differently. And basically leaving the traditional systems and narratives and practices behind, they're going grade-less. They're not organizing by age. It really is about deep student-driven, project-based, inquiry-based learning with teachers more as supports for that and connectors around that, than it is about standing up and going you have to read this on this particular day, so you can take this particular test and get to this particular grade and go, you know what I'm saying, and go through that whole process.
Now, they haven't overwhelmed the traditional system yet. But there were a lot of parents in the pandemic who looked at what their kids were doing in schools, and said, ‘I'm not sure that I really want them to be in these environments. And oh, look! There's something new over here. This looks really interesting.’ And I think there's going to be a lot more of that happening as we move forward,
13:54 -->14:59
Bob Maxfield:
In that most recent piece that you put out that where you described as I think you call it “a framework for reconciling our practices with what we know we ought to be doing.” One of the things you talk about that I found really interesting, I think it was the first part, was the need to help your community, the community surrounding the school, the community that pays the school, understand that things can't look the way they've always looked, that we need to embrace a different approach.
What we're finding as we meet with our folks over the last year particularly, this has become even harder; harder because people have been polarized. There are the debates over masking, debates over properly teaching issues of racial equity. And so here at Oakland, we've launched something we're calling a civility project. But, I know Will, you must wrestle with this whole issue of how do we bring a community along? How do you overcome these very troubling, polarizing times that we're in? So, what advice do you have? How might we deal with this in a constructive and positive way?
15:00 --> 17:37
Will Richardson:
Well, I think it's an ongoing capacity-building plan. It's something that we have to just embed in our practice on a regular basis as school leaders or as just people in school, teachers as well.
I think its things like exhibitions of student work during the year, or the community open exhibitions where kids are showing the types of interesting learning that they're doing, and describing it and talking about why it matters to them. I think it's making sure that parents know at least, or the community knows at least there are things like mastery. The mastery transcript consortium that's out there right now that is moving into lots of schools, and really taking a look at why grades don't make a lot of sense. And that you can get into college without grades and that you can actually find a path forward into higher education without necessarily jumping through those hoops and all of those things that make school a game. I think it's constantly sharing news articles about things that are happening in the world about, and then contextualizing those things in terms of education. What does this mean?
You know I see things every day where I want to go on Twitter, and I want to post it, and I just want to ask the question, “Are we teaching our kids this?” And in most cases, we're not. Now I think, to be honest with you, I think it's one of the most important jobs for leadership teams right now is to figure out a capacity building strategy for the community to understand a different narrative, a different story about the experience of school for their kids because you know, you mentioned, how are kids going to thrive in the future? They're not going to thrive in the future if they continue to live the current story, they're not.
And, by the way, there's another whole layer to this that gets even more complicated, but I think is equally urgent, and that is, it's not just about our kids in our schools, it's about the world now. This is not something that is limited to local conversations and local problem solving.
This is now how do we all see ourselves as a part of the much larger kind of living system that is on this planet that is under duress right now. Now I know a lot of people have a struggle even having that conversation in the community. But I think more and more communities are waking up and going, yeah, we have a climate problem right now, because they're being impacted by the climate problem.
17:38 --> 18:01
Bob Maxfield:
I think what you're saying is that we used to refer to this as “reclaiming the agenda”. I think some school leaders have just, unfortunately, in the face of all this stuff sort of hunker down and hope the politics will pass, and what you're suggesting is, no, we have a story to tell and it's a good story and we need to find ways to show people what we're trying to accomplish.
18:02 --> 20:00
Will Richardson:
But we have to do it over time. It has to be continual. It can't be just a one-off event where we say, Oh, the world is changing, here listen to the speaker, and then nothing really follows up from that. And let me just say, too, one of the one of the real challenges for schools right now is that schools have become pretty much, they're for the private good. We have developed a school system that really is now about the individual. It's about how does this individual succeed at the highest level, get into the best college, get the best job, make the most money. Whereas that's not going to, we're not going to get into a future if we continue down that path. Schools have to be places now for literally the public community good, where we frame our work in the context that says we are part of a much larger system here. It can't be about me; it has to be about “we”. And it really has to change in terms of what we teach, how we teach it, the experiences we provide for kids, and the conversations we have in an ongoing way with the people in our communities.
We are facing a lot of challenges right now in the world. We’re not going to solve any of them without education. They're not going to be solved unless we unless really begin to understand a different way of thinking about what it means today to be educated. It's not the same as it was, certainly not the same as it was fifty years ago. Arguably it's not the same as it was five years ago, and so until we begin to engage in those conversations and begin then to audit our practices in light of those conversations I think that we're going to be in some real challenging hardship.
We're going to be in challenging hardship, anyway, in the short term, and I think we have to just admit that, and that's a truth that we're going to have to accept. But I think we can mitigate that and improve it, and really contribute to the solutions if we think about education differently.
20:01 --> 20:36
Bob Maxfield:
And really the way you framed this last five minutes is really, really worth recapturing. I hope my notes do it justice. I want to go back for a second in response to Suzanne's question about shopping lists for going back to school, and was there a shopping list for going back to learning. You like turning a phrase. What occurred to me at the time was you were talking about a return list, the stuff we want to take back to the store. These are the returns. It's the stuff you line up at the returns counter to get rid of some of the…
20:37 --> 20:39
Suzanne Klein: …or you leave it for the Amazon delivery person.
20:41--> 21:05
Bob Maxfield:
One of the things that struck me on your website was that I don't think you've done this before is you listed, you prepared a list of ten books that should be read by school leaders, that you hope to be read by school leaders, and people can access that if they want to. But what are a couple of them, Will that you would hope that people listening today to this conversation would say, “Yup, but I get out there and order this one right now.”?
21:05 --> 22:46.
Will Richardson:
Well, I would suggest two, if you are courageous in entering these conversations. I mean, if you really are serious about getting into this space and grappling with the challenges and the context that we have right now in thinking about education, then there are two books at the top of my list. One is by Margaret Wheatley. It's titled Who Do We Choose to Be? And it is a powerful question that she asks of leaders, of people in communities.
And I'll tell you this just straight out. She basically says at the beginning that we are not going to be able to overcome some of the climate challenges that face us. And so now the question becomes, How do we create spaces where humaneness or humanness, I should say, and joy and hope sustain even in what she calls “islands of sanity”, which I love that metaphor.
And that's the work of leaders today. How do we lead in our communities at a time of very, very deep difficulty and really center being good humans and um interacting with one another with a spirit of joy and hope because we can still do that, but understanding that the larger problems may be unsolvable? Which is a, you know I said, if you really want to get challenged, if you're really courageous read that one. Who Do We Choose to Be? by Wheatley, oh, yes. Margaret Wheatley.
22:47 --> 22:49
Bob Maxfield: Is this is our old friend, Meg Wheatley?
22:51 --> 23:01
Will Richardson:
Meg Wheatley. Yes, it is, and it's just a brilliant book. In fact, we're starting a book club in our B.Q.I. community tonight, over the next six weeks on that, or the next two and a half months on that.
23:02 --> 23:05
Bob Maxfield: She was one of the old Galileo prime books during the Galileo Academy.
23:05 --> 23:06
Will Richardson: Was that one of them?
23:07--> 23:09
Bob Maxfield: Yeah, but not this one. This was a one of her earlier books.
23:10 --> 26:30
Will Richardson:
Yes, so this was pre-pandemic, but still has a lot of resonance. The other one is a book by a gentleman by the name of Zach Stein, and it is titled, Education in a Time Between Worlds. Basically what he, um his thesis is that we are in a “world system” transition, and that what that does for education is it brings up an “almost unimaginable design challenge”, um in terms of how do we create an education for humanity at a moment of huge, huge shift? And, to be honest, we have used that design challenge. We have pretty much hung our practice on B.Q.I. on that quote.
We are deeply into design strategic design. We're helping schools move away from strategic planning to strategic design instead. We are really thinking about how do we have, how do we create the skills, literacy, and dispositions of designers in this moment, when we approach conversations that we have around in schools and our practice and our environments and um, you know, there's just so much.
The last six months for me has been just fascinating to find some future designers. They're called archaeologists of the future. That's kind of what they call themselves. And it really is trying to say, Okay, if we're in this world system transition and if we have this design challenge, then can we transport ourselves like thirty, forty years into the future, and look into schools and see what are the things that are happening there that that are good or bad, but then actually create those artifacts and bring them back into the present and say, Okay, what does this mean?
How did we get to this point? What were the good things about this? What were the challenges about this? What happened because of these things? And it's kind of hard to describe without actually doing it. Um, but it is a way for people, I think and a lot of research is showing that as powerful as story and narrative is when it comes to beginning to think differently or to kind of change the script, even more powerful is actually holding an artifact in your hand and manipulating it and looking at it and thinking about it.
And so these people who are training these design fictions they're called, which is just really fascinating to me. That's what they're doing. They're saying, Okay, here's an artifact from the future. What is it? How do we get there, if it's something that we want to have happen? And it causes us to really think hard about is our work in the present, getting us toward this kind of future , aspirational future, perhaps that we want to get to.
I think that that's where that both of those books are very provocative when it comes to thinking about what do we do now? Meg's book is about how do we take this particular moment and make the best of it in a sense. Zack's book is how do we take this particular moment and aspire to something that really is different, and then begin to think about pathways to getting there.
26:31 --> 26:32
Bob Maxfield: So I see a book study coming.
26:32 --> 27:45
Suzanne Klein:
…as early as this evening. As we draw to a close Will, it's interesting that notion of archaeologists Um and I'm thinking about a term we've used here for school leaders as architects of the future. It seems like both roles need to intersect, because that notion of holding something in your hand is such a resonant one, of how do we get there from here? So any last words of advice, because those that are listening to this podcast might be rolling over in bed at two a. m. in the morning thinking, oh, my gosh! You know I'm getting my “Indiana Jones” backpack out, or I'm going “Back to the Future”, depending on your favorite movies and metaphors. But very seriously, what other pieces of advice? Because you've talked about a very a courageous set of steps, a roadmap that requires both that whole notion of being coherent, but also being, I love the word you used earlier, agentic. There needs to be a lot of agency on the part of school leaders in order for there to be a lot of agency for teachers and their students. So what might be the final thoughts?
27:46 --> 29:24
Will Richardson:
Well, let me just say that those two books are not a cure for insomnia. So if you're waking up in the middle of the night, you probably don't want to read this in the middle of night. But I think that leaders right now, you know we use, we kind of use this word radical quite a bit, and I think that leaders have to engage in radical truth telling right now. That's number one. I think that we have to just be deeply honest about what's working and what isn't working in schools in the context of how we understand learning and human beings, and acknowledge those things.
That doesn't mean that we have to change them right away. But we have to begin to just say, “Look, let's be honest here. These things stand in the way of learning, and somehow we have to figure out some ways to not do those things any longer.” Similarly, these things stand in the way of creating the society in the world that we want, and we have to stop doing those things as well. So I think that's, number one.
And then the second thing is, I think, as much as is possible to engage students, teachers, parents, community members in just these ongoing conversations. Just bring people together in groups and ask a question, you know, like ask that question, what is learning, just to have that conversation.I mean, we have nine questions you can ask in our book. It's actually going to be eleven in the next edition. But you know, like, what is success? Let's just talk about that. What does success mean right now for this community? And see what comes out, and be transparent about those conversations, and really try to use them as ways of again building capacity in their communities.
29:25 --> 30:01
Bob Maxfield:
That's all excellent advice, and we hope that our listeners will tune into what you're doing. The website is very intuitive, our, when we put out the transcript to this we'll include that. I know you have a free book that's available, and then you've got a new service in terms of this reading, so we encourage people to look at that, so we'll thank you. Thank you for being our guest again today. Thank you for starting this year of Podcast for Leaderful Schools, and listeners, thank you for tuning in and staying with us, and we hope you will join us as we continue this conversation, What is it we should be teaching and what is it we need to know about how teaching and learning needs to take place in ways that Will Richardson would applaud? Because I've been hearing him say this stuff for a long time, and you know what, he's right. So again, thanks to everybody, and stay tuned for further installments of Podcasts for Leaderful Schools.
Resources:
Stein, Zachary, Education in a Time Between Worlds Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology and Society, San Francisco, California, Bright Alliance, March 1, 2019.
Wheatley, Margaret, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity, Oakland, California, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, June 9, 2017.