20: Empowering Childhood Learning with Amos Fodchuk

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Welcome to the Revel Educator Podcast where we talk to students, educators and thought leaders who are innovators and creatives in education. I'm your host, Tanya Sheckley. Thanks for joining us.

Hi everyone. I'm here today with Amos Vodchuk. He's the president and founder of Advanced Learning Partnerships where they strive to empower every learner to be the change their community needs. So Amos, what challenge in education did you see that you set out to solve when you founded the company?

Hello Tanya, it's nice to be with you today.

I am in my 22nd year of education and didn't even think that I would be a teacher. I set out to be the opposite when I was in high school. I grew up, well, I grew up as a child in the home of entrepreneurs and didn't like the lifestyle and asked my high school guidance counselor with the opposite of being an entrepreneur and he said, well, be a teacher. And I took that to heart and actually ended up applying to the College of Education out of rebellion. Not the first teenager to do that. But then I fell in love with the profession and became a teacher and spent a decade in the classroom. And so as a high school English teacher, I never really took the traditional approach to teaching the literary canon or literary movements. I was so much interested, so much more interested in language and philosophy and the collective wisdom that comes through literature. And I was more interested in understanding the troublemakers that put pen to paper and then eventually fingers to keyboards. And so we had a great time in our classrooms and we really tried to find the humanity in the learning. And we worked hard and revised our curriculum a lot to find interesting approaches. And I think the problem that became obvious after a decade in the classroom was that that didn't scale and that my kids who were engaged and interested and curious in this medium, later in the day, if I walked down the hallway and saw them in another classroom with their head in their hands, I didn't even recognize them or sitting in an assistant principal's office with an ISS form in their hands, wondering why that would have happened. And as a teacher, I didn't have the political capital to make anything grow. And so 11 years ago, I decided to try my hand and become an entrepreneur to my parents continued joy and amazement that the apple ultimately never flew far from the tree. And I started Advanced Learning Partnerships with the support of my wife Katie, who as an organizational psychologist gave me the perspective that I needed to have an answer to the question of how do you empower childhood learning through empowered adult learning? And we've been chasing after that ever since.

That's a great thought. How do you empower childhood learning? How do you empower those adults to really impart that onto their students and give them that, that sense of relevance and interest? Which kind of leads into my next question. We talk a lot about student agency and creating student centered learning and letting students guide what they are learning. But that requires a very different teacher than a teacher who wants to just share information and then test students on it to really allow the students to explore and identify. So in the schools that you've worked with and the ways that you, that you've understood, can you help us understand how we can move from that system that's really passive with students just taking in information which might end up with students heads in their hands, as you mentioned, to one where there's really more of a supportive environment where teachers become facilitators or engineers of learning and support student ideas and interest and supporting students to really become not good students that sit still and listen, but good learners who are really interested in information and the way it all works together.

Well, that is such a complex interaction. And then it exists at the individual and at the cohort and community and region and then metaphysical level. So it's a hard problem to solve for. And I take the approach of appreciative inquiry in our work where we're continuously looking for assets that an individual or a community has and then working very carefully to build on that strength so that it's easier to unify areas of growth with areas of strength. And then when you run into a systemic issue now you've got some internal momentum that's customized to the ecosystem that that struggle lives in. Right. Because I think one of the biggest issues that exists in scaled learning environments is that the structure needs to be convenient enough to operate. And so that's where teachers get the term teacher and students get the term student. Administrators are administrating a thing, right? And so I think something that I've learned in this work is that you can't be impractical or idealistic and just say, oh, we should all be facilitators. Because teacher preparation for someone like me who didn't even want to go into teaching, but did out of some misguided youth. I went to a really good college of education and I learned education theory before I'd ever taught a day in the classroom. So what was I supposed to do with that? And then I was given the opportunity to practice teaching and work alongside a mentor who didn't have anything taken off of his plate. So his work was. I was just lucky to have a good mentor because he went above and beyond anything that you'd reasonably expect someone to do. So I think teachers are so impressive because in many cases they're heroic and they succeed despite that. And not always because the system and so the profession itself needs to be defined as a profession. The learning organization itself needs to have a better balance of accountability measures, some of which are local, some of which are state or provincial, some of which are federal. But we need to make a better investment in the ecosystem. And you can't do that whole scale without a revolution.

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That we lead in our communities is almost always grounded in customization and starting with where the community possesses strengths and not necessarily cheerleading or just kind of amplifying something that's already pretty good, but using it as a measure to bridge toward areas of need, areas of uncertainty, areas of possibility. And we tend to work with communities over multiple years because this type of work doesn't dramatically shift nor does it shift sustainably if you're rapidly yanking on levers and disequilibrium, then takes everyone's willingness to try new things away. So it really is complex in terms of the way that we manage change. And we can only do that collaboratively with communities and teachers and administrators and students. They need to behave like learners if it's going to work. And so having a common language that describes what critical competencies in learning look like at early phases of exploration, phases that approach a certain degree of efficacy, and then ultimately getting to the point at the highest level of efficacy when you can actually help others, that's an important metric to acknowledge and then trace as we move through any of the collaborations that we have with communities.

You mentioned a lot of things there. Sorry, from. No, it's good. But from talking about the way that we train and prepare our teachers to the size of our schools and how it's challenging to create change in a large space because there are so many different moving pieces. And also looking at what would an education revolution look like? And you work with communities and very organically work with communities and find their strengths and build upon those and use them to help them change and shift in the direction that they want to go. But we're collectively in this moment of time where education is clearly in crisis. And if there was ever a time for an education revolution, this is a pretty good one. So if we were gonna completely evolve education and you were a master puppeteer, what would that look like?

You wanna cause some trouble, Shekley? Let's do it.

Well, I would be lying if I said I didn't think about that a lot. And the connection that schools and school districts and learning organizations have, they aren't isolated, and you can't take them out of the contexts in which they exist. Right. So I find that in the United States, there's an ongoing conversation and an urgent desire to change healthcare, to change policing, to change education. These are gargantuan systems that are in place and are fundamentally tied to a society that's complex and that is stable. When you think about globally, what. Where other countries are, even though we're going through some hellacious dissonance right now, I think that the first systems thinking oriented piece that I hold onto pretty tightly is if we want to do anything worth doing in public education or private or independent, whether it's a district or a state or province or a singular school, you have to start by looking at the relationship that the community has with its learning structure and where are those strengths and how do you bring community together to develop some pride if it doesn't exist, or to augment it if it does? So anything that amounts to change, whether it's revolutionary or incremental, there has to be a collective vision. Otherwise you're really only subject to the strengths of a charismatic leader or someone or some group that happens to have its act together for a certain period of time. There's no answer to scale if we're really thinking about this from the point of view of let's change because we know we need to. So to me, that's number one, and that's kind of a politician's answer, because that doesn't change anything. But having a collaborative and cross disciplinary and cross community partnership, that's the only circumstance where I've ever seen sustainable and impressive change happen. If you don't have it, then stop using those words. And then the other really important driver to acknowledge is when human beings feel safe and curious, they know how to learn and they know how to create. They know how to collaborate. So we take terms and we call them 21st century skills, or 4, 5, or 6 Cs, or we talk about resiliency. Like these are all constructs that we put on human beings that under normal circumstances can do it. So instead of trying to define exactly what these outputs are that we want from learners, we have to simplify some of the structures that we put in front of them so they can get back to what they did when they were in kindergarten. Because play and learning are more or less the same thing. So there's a certain degree of simplification that needs to take place. And if you can, if you can understand how a school works or a district or a learning organization, you need to have metrics, you need to have some form of management structure for the orchestrators of the thing. And then you have to have an ecosystem that allows for your quote unquote learners to thrive. So flattening that and helping administrators and teachers be more like learners more frequently helps. And the way that you do that is you do that by simplifying their tasks. You do that by being audacious with the way that things have always been done. You come up with new roles that haven't existed in the past. And you'd be pretty ruthless about the jobs that people end up taking on and whether they're directly or indirectly important to learning. And then, then you need some very careful leadership that allows for people to be uncomfortable in the shift. Because we're by nature creatures of habit. And once we get Comfortable with something, even if it's terrible, we don't want to see it go. So I don't know if I've answered the question. I think though, that the triggers for a revolution are when people feel empowered again to move. And whether that's for good or bad reasons. I think that helping the adults feel like they can do something purposeful together is the most powerful way of passing that forward to children who have no political power, who have no decision making capacity in a traditional system. Learning is better when people feel like they can make decisions together. So how can we do that more frequently and build on that strength?

Yeah, I agree. Learning is better when people feel like they can make decisions together. Yeah. And I think we are at a place as a society, like as a whole, as a community, where we really are questioning education and why we're doing what we're, what we've been doing for so long. And there is still this fear of change and fear of shifting and not wanting to let go of the way we've always done it. But there's also all these new things right now because right now we can't do what we've always done. And so it's leading this societal shift. And I think the piece that maybe isn't here yet because everything's ambiguous in the world right now is that feeling of empowerment that we really have the opportunity to make a real in lasting change. With all of that and looking at where we are right now and all the changes that have happened in the last year since the pandemic hit and blended learning changes and hybrids and online learning and changes with testing requirements and assessment requirements, Are there things that you've seen that you hope will stay or that you hope will continue, or that you hope will grow, or that you hope will just go away and we never see them again?

Yeah. Well, I grew up in rural Canada and when I was 22, I bought a one way plane ticket to Cairo because I wanted to see the pyramids. And the only reason that I did that was because I was around people that I had never met before who came from different cultures and countries and had different life experiences. And it activated my curiosity to travel and explore. And I was so lucky to have a job during university that allowed me to keep my student loan debt down. And I knew how to play an instrument, so I played in a band and I earned enough money to travel. And so that backpacking trip through Africa and the Middle east and Europe and eventually Asia, because I got the travel bug and kept traveling for Another year changed my life. And so I've been a traveler ever since my adult life started. And what I miss the most about my service to communities in this role is that I don't get to be part of the communities that welcome my colleagues and me into the work the way that we did not that long ago. And traveling is great, right? You get to go and have nice dinners and you get to have adventures. But what makes that worth. And it's a big price to pay when you have a family, but when it's worth being away, it's because you've made a real connection with another community. And so what I am really looking forward to and what we've always stayed true to is earning trust in communities that are welcoming us into the work. And I think that technology and social media and all of this innovation has been incredible and that there are so many positives that are coming from it. But I think we're about and are already beginning to see a pendulum swing away from the convenience and the community of online to something more purposeful and something more local. And that's where I think the true revolution or the true innovation will happen in the next five to 10 years. It will be when communities remember how to be communities again. And that's not going to be easy. And it will only take talented leadership at the local level to make that happen. But what I know my entire team is looking forward to is understanding the experiences and working really hard to support communities in the guidance that they can offer to their schools and their districts in a way that truly meets their needs. I don't know what every community needs. I'm not an expert there and no one else is. It truly amounts to what communities need. And do they feel heard and do they feel a deep connection with the place that their children go? That sounds idealistic, but that's where the real equity and social justice and whatever word we want to use for getting back to community again lies. And to me, that's what the post quarantine world is going to produce the most opportunity for good. It's going to be there, especially as it relates to schooling and learning. There's the opportunity to abandon a lot of the old practice. The packets, the direct instruction, the lectures for 50 minutes every hour get away. The kids who are learning outside of school, whether it's under pandemic or under normal circumstances, they're connecting in vibrant ways. They're creating in ways that you and I never had the opportunity to do when we were kids. They're already leading Some pretty impressive learning trajectories. We need to ask them what they've done in the last year under certain circumstances and really be ready to support children and families who did not make it well through this. I'm sorry all of this sounds so complex, but I don't. I'm distrustful of people who have simple solutions.

No, it made me think of, for lack of a better term, I'm picturing a rubber band and like with community and society being on one side and as we've kind of pulled it farther and farther with technology and working and being away in the office and now we've got a pandemic that has really forced us to be really far apart, that as soon as we have that ability to be back together again instead of coming back to where we were with working and distance and the Internet and everything between us, I think people really are going to come back together as that community. And you're right. Hopefully we have some solid local leadership. But I also feel like a lot of that leadership may come from schools as schools are tasked with integrating the students learning and all the things that they have or haven't done over the last year to year and a half as we move into next school year. And how do you, how do teachers and school leaders and organizations rise to meet that challenge of the community need, the social emotional need, the connection need and also just that freedom of learning need that is different now than it was before.

Yeah, well, the graduation degree, the course grade, the end of course test, the. Those are century old milestones. And.

You look at some of the recent developments with companies that no longer require high paying jobs to carry a university degree as a gateway to an interview, and that if you can demonstrate mastery and the competencies that this role requires, then let's talk. I think that higher education, even though we're talking about K12 today, is even more tenuously perched than K12 might be. Because it's become cost prohibitive to go to university to earn the very thing that you're supposed to have in order to be quote, unquote successful. And that shouldn't diminish the importance of a higher education in a university or college or technical trade. Those are incredibly important. But I think if you bring that back to an elementary or a middle or a high school, the wall between those classrooms and that community is arbitrary. I think teachers are as or more important than they have ever been in this world. And so it's important to invest in professional preparation and continuous learning for our educators. But there should be nothing stopping an educator from building a partnership with a local community organization or business and being able to do something that is more application based than a test, or being able to do something that gives the local school an opportunity to assess in a way that is purposeful and aligned to a greater North Star, while at the same time doing it in a way that is memorable and that is building inroads with not just the school and the community, but the child in the world. And that's already happening in some schools of privilege and it certainly is happening outside of many schools where kids are just giving up on the traditional approach and finding their own pathways and some of whom are being very successful. So micro credentials, pathway based learning that's only going to scale and then really finding ways of building the confidence in parents to trust that their children can learn in new ways is something that I don't hear enough conversations about. Because as parents, as a parent, my wife and I want our kids to be successful and we want them to be innovative. But we also get nervous when the kids don't get enough assignments to know if they're doing well. Right. So that's another reason why we need to have a rich conversation, not just with our business leaders and our community organizations, for our families. Because there's a big miss in the way that families feel to be advocates for school and vice versa. And at the end of the day there aren't enough hours in it, which is why a lot of this stuff doesn't happen. Which kind of goes back to the beginning of our conversation about making the role simpler. Where are we spending our time and is it worth it?

Yeah, as humans, we do tend to over complicate things.

For sure. But since we've circled fully back, I have one more question to ask you that I ask pretty much everyone and that is because I run an elementary school. And so I'm curious if you have any memories from elementary school, if you can share a story of a favorite teacher or a project or something that stands out in your mind from your elementary school days.

Yeah, Yeah, I my fifth grade teacher's name was Mrs. Frankovich, and Mrs. Frankovich was a pistol. She said things that were shocking and abrupt. She had a boa constrictor in her classroom. She would pay anyone who brought her mice a dollar. A living being that we would all watch gladiator style when this thing just mowed them down and it was like it was the craziest place I've ever seen. And she would give us stickers even though it wasn't cool for fifth graders to get stickers anymore, and we loved it. And she was the person who introduced me to the audacious spirit of literature. And I've always loved to read and I've always read, but she, Mrs. Frankovich was the person who introduced this countercultural and and moral voice that so many of our classics carry and so much of our best modern literature is grounded in. So I would just say being never quite sure of what Mrs. Frankovich would do on any given day is one of my favorite memories from elementary school.

That's fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you for sharing all of your stories and wisdom today. This has been a phenomenal conversation and I'm sure that we could keep talking and maybe we'll have that conversation another day. But thank you so much for spending time with us today.

Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.

Thank you for listening to the Rebel Educator Podcast. To learn more about us, visit rebeleducator.com where you can learn about our professional development opportunities for educators and students and see our Project library. If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out our progressive, inclusive elementary school up academy@upacademy sf.com we'd like to say a special thank you to Atmosphere for use of their audio track. Miho, thanks again for joining us and we wish you well no matter where your educational journey may lead.

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