"Schools are in the midst of an epic design challenge," according to Will Richardson, co-founder of the Big Questions Institute. His foundational big questions and compelling observations will lead school leaders to rethink every aspect of their systems and practices, then re-imagine and redesign schools and school systems to ensure all students are successful, contributing important work to the world. https://bigquestions.institute/9-questions/
Dr. Robert Maxfield and Dr. Suzanne Klein welcome podcast guest, Will Richardson, the co-founder of the Big Questions Institute. Author Homa Tavangar, who has frequently spoken about diversity, equity, justice and global competence co-created this Institute, which is driven by questions. Mr. Richardson explained, "We don't believe that there are a lot of answers right now, but we do believe that there are some really important questions that we need to be asking."
According to Will Richardson, "We are in the midst of an epic design challenge right now, to try to figure out what it is that schools need to become. This is not just because of the pandemic, but because of many other things that have happened and come to the surface in the last couple of years. What we have been doing has contributed to this moment in some pretty powerful ways, and the only way we're going to get out of this moment is through education redesigned. We have to be willing to take every part of our system, every piece of our practice and ask: Do we want to continue doing this? What is sacred? What do we want to leave behind in this moment? What do we want to take forward with us? How does it comport to our understanding of how people and specifically children learn? How is it relevant for the moment that we find ourselves in? Do we want to continue to do it and if not, then what do we replace it with? The problem is that a lot of these practices are very deeply embedded in the narrative of school.”
Looking at models of redesign, Will Richardson pointed out, "most of the really transformative, progressive changes are in new innovative startup schools that have been built for that purpose. Kids are doing real work for the world there. They have real agency and input on what the experience of school looks like. They are developing all sorts of skills and literacies and dispositions, more than this emphasis on content knowledge and on recall. But taking a school or school system that's been around for a long time, and moving it to something like that is excruciatingly difficult for any number of reasons.”
When asked what two or three things he hopes that schools have the courage to begin with, Will Richardson suggested that right now “there's just a ton of capacity building that we need to do in terms of leadership- teachers, parents, community members. That's number one, we have to get a contextual coherence as to what's happening in the world. Budget our time and money to educate ourselves to a level where we can look at schools through a different lens to make the best decisions we can for kids.”
“The second thing is that we need to get some coherence around or some common language around what learning is. Learning, success, achievement, all of those things; we need to have some conversations as to how we define those and how maybe our mission becomes different when we use those lenses to look at our work.”
Will Richardson observed “kids find that they have a lot more agency outside of school to learn, to connect, to create. Most kids say they're doing their most interesting, important work on their own, not in school. Kids have a sense of the changes and challenges we face in the world today. They are aware of the conversations around justice and concerns for the climate, so schools need to be relevant."Student voice and agency is critical. “If we're talking about kids, kids need to be at the table. Kids need to have a voice because they are bringing a perspective and a knowledge base that many adults don't have. We can't make really good decisions about the future for our children if we're not listening to them. In many ways they know more than we do about what's going on and about how learning is possible in the world today. If we are going to make good decisions, we have to put the collective in front of the individual. He referred to Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U, (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018) whose work advances the need to shift from ego systems to ecosystems.”
When asked about how to reverse the declining numbers of education majors, Mr. Richardson proposed “we have to make it more of a learning opportunity for the teachers. Create environments where they are engaged, creating and learning. The way to do that is redesigning the role", so students and teachers can come together in really healthy, joyful ways, to do collaborative, dynamic, important work in the word. "We need to center wellness in order for kids to learn and flourish by cutting back to the things that are most important and that matter most. I think that would be the one message; try as hard as you can to advocate for less right now and more wellness."
https://bigquestions.institute/9-questions/
will@bigquestions.institute
Bob Maxfield:
Welcome to Podcast for Leaderful Schools coming to you as always, almost live from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan; actually from the School of Education and Human Services, and the Galileo Institute. This is Bob Maxfield and I'm joined on this beautiful late September morning by Dr. Suzanne Klein. Sue, how are you this fine day?
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Suzanne Klein:
I am in a very wonderful mood because fall is starting to appear on our trees here in Michigan, which makes it a gorgeous landscape. But most of all I'm looking forward to our conversation with Will Richardson, who is somebody that we've had the opportunity to talk with and learn from over the years.
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Bob Maxfield:
We are delighted to have Will with us. For our listeners, this is a continuation of a series that we began several months ago that we initially called "The Great Reset", looking at schools beyond the pandemic. Foolishly of us when we started this, we thought that by the time we got to almost October 2021, we'd be past all this. Well we're not past all this at all, but schools are navigating it and the conversation as you'll see today, continues to provide some leadership in that area. So welcome to Will Richardson, we're just delighted you could be with us.
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Will Richardson:
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate being here.
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Bob Maxfield:
You've had as we know; you've been involved in a variety of roles. We've had the privilege of speaking with you before and now you're involved with something called the Big Questions Institute, but before we get into that, give our listeners the short version of what your background is, and what got you to this point in your life.
[01:35 →03:24]
Will Richardson:
So I actually was a high school educator and administrator for 22 years. I taught English and worked with technology, implementing technology in classrooms with teachers, but I left that about 15 years ago. And have since then had the huge privilege of traveling around the world; I think I've been to 27 different countries, working with teachers, leaders, board members, to try to help them contextualize this moment, and obviously it's gotten even more interesting in the last couple of years, in trying to bring a message of we in education need to take a long hard look at our practice given the way that the world is spinning.
And that my new favorite phrase is that we're in the midst of an epic design challenge right now, to try to figure out what it is that schools need to become, not just because of the pandemic, but because of many other things that have happened and come to the surface in the last couple of years. It's become really obvious that what we have been doing has contributed to this moment in some pretty powerful ways, and the only way we're going to get out of this moment with all these existential crises that we're facing, is through education redesigned.
We're not going to get out of it if we'd simply continue to do what we've been doing and go back to normal. We need to really rethink it and it is a huge design challenge right now. So that's kind of the moment that I'm in right now. It's on one hand really daunting, but on the other hand really exciting too, because I think there are a lot of opportunities for us to do really good work right now.
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Bob Maxfield:
You sort of anticipated my next question. Really what you're saying is the past 15 years you've been doing some of the same kind of work, but it's morphed into something quite different given the circumstances of today. Let's talk specifically about the Big Questions Institute- What is it? How did it come about?
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Will Richardson:
So the B.Q.I. is a partnership with Homa Tavangar, who is an author and someone who has spoken a lot about diversity, equity, justice and also global competence. We found a couple of years ago we did a conference together. We started having some really engaging conversations and decided to come together and create this Institute, which is driven by questions. We don't believe that there are a lot of answers right now, but we do believe that there are some really important questions that we need to be asking. And they're not confined to what we put out in an e-book earlier this year called, “Nine Big Questions Schools Must Answer Before Going “Back to Normal” Because “Normal” Wasn't That Great to Begin With".
And so you know, there are questions like: What is sacred? What are the things that we want to carry forward through this moment? We look at this moment as kind of a portal moment and that's a quote from Arundhati Roy, the Indian writer who said, “The pandemic is a portal". So what is sacred? What do we want to leave behind in this moment? What do we want to take forward with us? We ask questions like: What is learning? How do we define it? Do we have coherence around what that is? Where's the power right now? Who is unheard? Are we well?
And so we're trying to engage educators and mostly educational leaders at a pretty high level, to build capacity to interrogate the system as it currently is constructed, and then kind of audit those answers against the realities of the world right now. And in most cases, what we're finding and what schools are finding is that there's some pretty huge gaps between what we do and what the world is demanding of us right now. So we're trying to get through that, through inquiry and interrogation and it's hard work but it's, we think, the work to be doing right now.
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Bob Maxfield:
It certainly is.
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Suzanne Klein:
You know picking up on that theme, on the Big Questions Institute website you state (quote) "now is not the time to get back to normal" (unquote). And this notion you're talking about as we're at a portal right now, you use the words earlier "epic design challenge", and all those fit nicely with the frame that we've been talking with our guests about over the last six to eight months, in terms of the notion of redesign, re-imagining, resetting education post-pandemic and what we've learned during that period of time.
The good news is many schools have geared up and have begun in-person learning again. And yet, as you mentioned earlier Will, as we do that we know that there's some truths that we have to confront; there's some questions we have to resolve that might have been hidden before or we had not considered carefully enough. So let's start with this, what do you think has been learned during this time? Digging a little bit deeper into your comments earlier, what questions are people needing to live into right now, as well as consider solutions for?
[06:54--->10:21]
Will Richardson:
Well, I think there are lots of questions that we need to lean into right now. I think that we have to be willing to take every part of our system, every piece of our practice, put it on the table and ask do we want to continue doing this.
You know our definition when we talk about "normal"… if you really take a look and you go to a lot of schools and you kind of step back, I mean really, "normal" is kind of defined as a whole bunch of different things. You know we have a pretty long list, but I mean "normal"- it’s this kind of unnatural segregation by age; it's this kind of real push to get good grades; to measure learning through numbers. And kids, normal in a lot of schools, the one thing they learn more than anything else is how to get a good grade, how to play that game. And there are a lot of these normals that really when you look at them, you have to ask why do we want to go back there. Why do we want to continue to do those things? So I think that it takes a lot of courage right now for people to kind of step back and say, why do we do this. How does it comport to our understanding of how people and specifically children learn? How is it relevant for the moment that we find ourselves in? And then, do we want to continue to do it and if not, then what do we replace it with?
Now the problem is obviously that a lot of these "normals" are very deeply embedded in the narrative of school. This is the way we've been doing things for a long, long time. To suggest that we're going to get rid of age groupings; to suggest that we might get rid of grades because grades really don't measure learning and they cause a lot of anxiety and for all the reasons why grades are just not a healthy thing to be doing in schools; to suggest that maybe we want to get rid of disciplines because no one in the real world learns math for 45 minutes and then goes to science for 45 minutes and does all of that, right- that's a very scary thing to do, because it goes against our own experience and our own comfort. And it then opens up this blank canvas that we're not sure how to begin to paint on it; you know, like okay, we're not going to do that, then what does it look like. And it's really hard. You know in my darkest moments I wonder if it's possible. I really do. I wonder if it's possible for schools that have been around for a long time to actually shift in any meaningful way.
Most of the really transformative, progressive change that we're seeing is in schools that have been built for that purpose, where they are new innovative startups on the edges, where kids are doing real work for the world there. They have real agency and input on what the experience of school looks like. They are developing all sorts of skills and literacies and dispositions, more than this emphasis on content knowledge and on recall, and those places are fascinating right now. But taking a school that's been around for a long time, taking a system that's been around for a long time, and moving it to something like that is excruciatingly difficult for any number of reasons.
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Suzanne Klein:
To that end I like your metaphor of starting to paint a canvas. The other metaphor that comes to mind is doing a jigsaw puzzle where you're starting to create a framework and then filling in some of the detail on that. With either of those metaphors in mind, what are two or three things that you hope schools will have the courage to start on first, knowing that this is not something you do overnight, nor is it something that has a magic wand that somehow makes things just go right. It's a lot of hard work, a lot of work by people who were striving for coherence so that all kids are going to be successful, those things that are the hallmarks of that re-imagined, redesigned school experience. What are two or three things that you would put on that list and then, what from the student voice that you've been listening to might they put on that list?
[11:23 --> 16:34]
Will Richardson:
So that's a great question, so I think that right now there's just a ton of capacity building that we need to do in terms of leadership- teachers, parents, community members, just an understanding more, as much as we can, the world as it is today. I think that if we don't invest and I mean that seriously, and budget our time and money to educate ourselves to a level where then we can look at schools through a different lens. I mean the world is changing so fast right now, so much- it's very different the way again, the arc of so much of this higher education, of business, of politics, of all of this is just changing. Unless we spend some time really wrapping our brains around as much as we can what's happening, I don't think we're going to make the best decisions we can for kids right. So that's number one, we have to get a contextual coherence as to what's happening in the world.
The second thing is, I also think that we need to get some coherence around or some common language around what learning is. I think that question, What is learning?, sounds like it should be easy for schools and educators to talk about but it's really difficult. I sometimes go into schools and just pick ten people at random and ask them to define that word, and I get ten different answers all the time. There's no shared language and if there's no shared language around what learning is, then we have a problem because that's what schools are about; they're about learning. So I think that that's really important that we start with common language. Learning, success, achievement, all of those things, we need to have some conversations as to how we define those. And how maybe our mission becomes different when we talk about, when we use those lenses to look at our work.
In terms of what kids bring to it, so you know I own two children. They're grown a little bit now, they're 24 and 22. I think kids are noticing that there are lots of different ways to live in the world these days, other than the ones that we've been telling them are the ways to live in the world. I think they find that they have a lot more agency outside of school to learn, to connect, to create. Most kids when you ask them where they're doing their most interesting, important work they will tell you it's not in school, it is on their own. Even younger kids-ten, eleven, twelve years old, are beginning to really create and learn in ways that didn't exist even a couple decades ago, but now are becoming much more prevalent.
And I also think that by and large, and this certainly isn't true everywhere, but I think by and large kids have a sense of the changes that are happening in the world. I think they have a greater sense that there's this really important conversation around justice that's happening right now. They have a sense that there's this huge challenge that we're facing around climate. They are more aware. They can't help but be more aware, even if they're spending six hours a day on TikTok. I mean those messages filter through, that stuff comes through that and so they, I think, are increasingly coming to school and if you thought kids ask this, like they asked this all the time when I was teaching in the '80s and '90s, why am I learning this? They're really going to school right now and going, what is the point of this. I can go learn this stuff on my own using my device; I don't need to sit here for this many hours. Most of what's in the curriculum, I think we'd all agree, is going to be forgotten as soon as the test is over. It's never going to be used. It's never going to be applied. It has no real life purpose other than you get a grade, so you can move on to the next class, so you can move on to the next part of the narrative around what education is. I think kids more and more are just kind of going, why are we doing this.
I've gotten to the point now where in all of my speaking and all my consulting I require that kids are in the room, every session that we do anything. If we're talking about kids, kids need to be at the table. Kids need to have a voice because they are bringing in a perspective, and they are bringing a knowledge base to that conversation that many adults don't have. And we can't make decisions, really good decisions about the future for our children if we're not listening to them at this point, because in many ways they know more than we do about what's going on and about how learning is possible in the world.
[16:35 -->17:34]
Bob Maxfield:
Will, what you've described is that we're in a time, and maybe exaggerated by the pandemic, but would have happened anyway, with everything we've held sacred is up for grabs, and I think that's essentially what you're saying about schools.
But we're also at a time when and, at least in our part of the world; there's been an unprecedented number of retirements from superintendents, principals, teachers. Schools in our area are scrambling to even fill their classrooms. We've been asking each of our guests to comment on that. What do we need to do to reignite the profession to get more young people to consider it given what you just said about young people, and to move them through the system so that the next generation of superintendents and principals is more aligned with the kind of thing you're describing? So what advice do you have in that area, Will?
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Will Richardson:
I don't know. I really don't know what the answer is.
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Bob Maxfield: We don't either;that's what the question is.
[17:42 -->21:55]
Will Richardson:
I wish I could give you know some brilliant here and give you some sense of how to how to solve that problem. Look, the profession is in really serious condition right now. It is not something that many kids are aspiring to. You look at all the statistics, they show that education majors in college are dropping. It does not have the prestige or the respect in many ways that you would think it should have. And I don't know how to change that.
I think if there was one, as you were asking that question, Bob one thing that came to mind was, I think we have to make it more of a learning opportunity for the teachers as well. I think we have to create environments where they are engaged and they are creating and they are learning, and the way that you do that, is that again you redesign the role. You know it's easy to say, okay if you're a teacher or a leader today in schools, your job description has changed dramatically over the last even 18 months right. This is not what you signed up for. This is not what you expected just because of the pandemic and all the problems that we've had to solve and go through. But it's much more than the pandemic, obviously that's not it. There's a huge change that's happening in the world right now. And this is not going to get any less stressful. It's not going to get any less complicated.
There's not an easy answer to any of this so, we have to create conditions in schools, I think I"ll use a Margaret Wheatley quote, she calls them "islands of sanity". I think we have to create these spaces in schools where people can come together in really healthy ways, joyful ways, and do meaningful work with one another, in collaboration with one another. I don't think it can be simply the role is, you stand up in front of the classroom or you plan it out, even if it's not standing in front of classroom. Maybe you're configuring the work a little bit differently, but still the onus is on you to decide what to teach, how to teach it, how to assess it, all of that stuff. That's just not a really great picture. It's not an engaging picture for a lot of people.
I think we need to change that narrative; we need to change that story. And how we do that? I'm not sure; I think we... well let me offer this. I offer this just as an example of how we begin to move change forward in classrooms as well. I think we need to choose to tell different stories, to be honest with you. I think we need to choose because every story we tell is a choice. I think we need to choose to tell stories of classrooms that are dynamic, engaged, even if there's nothing about grades or college or success or achievement, or any of those old traditional stories that we tell and measure our success by. I think that when we tell stories of kids doing and teachers doing collaborative, dynamic, important work in the world, I think that that's one way to begin to shift not only the job description, but the expectations that we have. I think that in just about every school some of that has happened right, but we choose not to tell those stories very much. We choose instead to tell we had 80% of our kids accepted to these particular colleges, and our A.P. scores were up here, and you know yadda yadda, which at the end of the day really don't mean anything in terms of contributions to the world. So that might be one place to start. But it's a huge, huge question, without a doubt.
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Bob Maxfield:
You began though, answering that by saying you didn't have an answer, but you just did. Because the answer really is...
[22:02 --> 22:03]
Will Richardson:
You know..it like...
[22:03 -->22:28]
Bob Maxfield:
What made sense to me is painting a picture of teaching in the future as being relevant to those young people like your own kids, who have a very different view of the world and a very different view of justice and inequity, and you as a teacher can help facilitate that vision. And so hopefully we can get better at telling that story.
[22:28 -->24:59]
Will Richardson:
Given the right conditions and given the right support mechanisms, because all of that is fraught right now, obviously. There are people who want to push back against all that stuff. There's this kind of reactionary thing that's happening in the States and actually in other parts of the world as well, that make that even difficult to conceive of being able to do, coming in and doing that kind of work and then just having to answer questions, why are you doing that, and why aren't you getting good test scores? You know what I'm saying.
But I just you know, one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about lately, it's just all of the challenges that we face right now are just a consequence of really bad decision making. I mean there's almost nothing that if we had been making better decisions, if we had actually put the collective in front of the individual, we probably wouldn't have been in a lot of these situations right now. And there's a guy by the name of Otto Scharmer, who wrote a book called Theory U,(The Essentials of Theory U: Core Principles and Applications, Berrett-Koehler Publishers,2018), who talks a lot about this. What he sees as this big shift is away from ego systems to ecosystems. A lot of people are talking now about the fact that and I think it is a fact, if we're going to get out of any of these things we're going to do it collectively, we're not going to do it individually.
And so to position schools as a place, and I think this is what they've become, as a place to go for individual gain, to get more access to individual success, I think that's going to have to change as well. I think we're going to have to see schools as places that really are helping kids see themselves as part of humanity writ large, and as a part of the planet. We're at a point right now where we used to depend on the planet for our sustenance and right now the planet is kind of depending on us to fix it. Because we've kind of gotten to a point where we've destroyed it in so many ways, and we've developed such bad habits that if we don't take a different path, and if we don't see each other as all a part of this path, this collective piece, we're not going to fix it.
So yeah I just think that there's some fundamental types of lenses that we have to change about our work.
[25:00 --> 25:25]
Bob Maxfield:
I will call to your attention, and we'll send you the link of a previous interview we did with a young man named Grayson McKinney, who was a teacher a fifth grade teacher in one of our local districts, because what goes on in his classroom day in and day out, is exactly what you just described. He has figured out how to break so many of those old boundaries that we're stuck with. So you're a couple guys who should meet each other.
[25:05 --> 25:29]
Will Richardson: So are they are telling those stories in his district?
[25:30 -->26:01]
Bob Maxfield:
Yes, pretty well. We were running a series for teachers and principals in the tri-county area on resetting after the pandemic and he was one of the leaders of that. So we hope that more of that'll get out there. We're getting near the end of our time with you Will, and I guess a couple things. One, is there anything else that you would want to say to today's generation of teachers and school leaders that you haven't already said? Stop right there for a minute.
[26:03 -->27:17]
Will Richardson:
Well, I think that the paramount thing that we need to focus on right now is our own mental, physical wellness. That we have to find ways like I said; I love that metaphor of islands of sanity. We have to find ways of making sure that despite all of the headlines, and all the challenges and stresses, and exhaustion and whatever else, that we make space for ourselves and for our own health.
I think that you know that we were talking about change job descriptions. I think that's a part of the job description for teachers now is to center, to really center wellness because you know kids aren't going to learn, they're not going to flourish. None of us are going to learn or flourish if we're not well, so that's a part of it. I think that means really advocating for grading less, less homework, less curriculum. What I mean really cutting back to the things that are most important and that matter most. I think that would be the one message; try as hard as you can to advocate for less right now and more wellness.
[27:18 -->27:30]
Bob Maxfield:
That too has been a continuing theme through these interviews as we've talked with local superintendents. One of the things that they worry about is protecting their own sanity and that of the people with whom they work.
[27:30 --> 27:48]
Will Richardson:
And just to put a pin on that too, I mean that needs to be post-pandemic as well. That conversation doesn't end when hopefully this pandemic thing ends, all the stresses that go along with this. This is something that I think is going to be a focus moving forward into the future, you know consistently.
[27:49 --> 27:57]
Bob Maxfield:
Sure. So if somebody's listening to this conversation wants to know more about Will Richardson and the Big Questions Institute, how do they do it?
[28:00 -->28:24]
Will Richardson:
Well it's easy, big questions dot institute and you know email is Will@bigquestions.institute or Homa@bigquestions.institute
If you go to big questions dot institute slash nine, the number nine, dash questions, bigquestions.institute/9-questions, you can download our free e-book and hopefully that'll be a great conversation starter or for you or for people in your school. So that's the place to go.
[28:25 -->28:42]
Bob Maxfield:
It reminded me that you were still out there, doing good work when I downloaded the book, so we will put that on our website so that people have an easy connection to it. And so Suzanne, I'm struck by how much this interview tied in with several we've done before. It was really quite remarkable.
[28:43 --> 29:30]
C. Suzanne Klein:
And the theme that continues to echo across those conversations is that notion of redesign, re-imagining and Will, the three words that you started us off with early in the interview will resonate with me in the conversations I have, that we're looking at an epic design challenge, and what might we learn from what we've learned, and then keeping in mind that schools are a place where kids are coming, what is going to be their experience when they arrive, and how might we take that metaphor as a canvas and think about what we're going to paint in this new picture. So thank you so much for not only your comments and thoughtfulness, but also the resources that the Big Questions Institute offers for those that want to pursue them.
[29:31 --> 29:40]
Will Richardson:
Thanks so much for having me; really appreciate it. I wish everyone who's listening sincere success and health in the work that you're doing in the future.
[29:40 --> 29:55]
Bob Maxfield:
Thank you again Will, and to our listeners thank you for being part of this installment of Podcasts for Leaderful Schools, as always we're coming almost live from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Stay tuned for further conversations along these very same themes.