A New Dawn For Every Learner

Welcome to the future of Education. I'm Michael Horne. Really looking forward to this conversation because it's with a friend who's very dear to me who has been leading the charge for a learner centered future where every child is able to fulfill their passions and potential. And she's just been a leader in this movement and we've spent a lot of time on airplanes back in the day when one did those sorts of things trying to raise transform this education system. So I'm going to bring up to the stage alongside me Susan Patrick, who leads the Aurora Institute, formerly ina call for those of you who have followed the field. But she's just been an incredible leader for many years now in the education space. So first, Susan, it's really good to see you. I've been looking forward and missing our chats. I've been really looking forward to catching up on this conversation.

Yeah, it's great to see you too, Michael.

Yeah. So you just actually, let's start where we were talking backstage before, so to speak. You all just held your annual symposium. You had Secretary of Education there, among other people talking about what's going on, what did you learn from that conference and hearing all the different sessions and hearing what people are talking about and excited about in the field. It's obviously been last few years of a lot of change. What left you feeling excited and hopeful for the future?

Yeah, I mean having Secretary Cardona there was a true honor and to hear his commitment for education for all children. And what people may not realize about his work in Connecticut, in the District and in the state is that he has direct experience with learner centered education and personalized learning. His main focus was on the $130 billion coming into the education system right now over the next three years. And so a lot of our conversation across the Aurora Institute symposium was looking at where are the policy opportunities. So we had states like Utah and Washington State, New Mexico and others, South Carolina, sharing their journeys on modernizing their education systems and looking at all levels of change as well as a real focus on there's a lot of research on youth development out there on how youth brains work, how they learn and what primes the pump for deeper learning and also what students need to be able to take ownership of their work and plot goals every day, get that support from their teacher or concierge and their learning journey and experience and listening to all of the different models and entry points across the US this is also happening around the world. That is really encouraging and inspiring. So I, I came out of the, the conference just being inspired to know that there's great work happening and also with it, just a deep, deep, deep sense of humility for the challenges that people are still experiencing right now across our society of the teachers, the parents that are still experiencing what are really difficult aspects of living through a pandemic.

Yeah, no doubt about it. I want to dig in on sort of one by one a lot of the things you just said because there's a lot of important points there. So let's start with the policy opportunities. You mentioned some states, Utah, that you know for many years have been doing a lot of things to try to remove a lot of barriers to a more learner centered future. You also mentioned South Carolina, New Mexico and some others. What are you seeing in the policy arena that has you hopeful as we get into some specifics around what's actually moving some of these barriers or maybe creating some zones for innovation that didn't exist before?

Yeah, and you and I have known each other a long time and the number one policy issue that we have seen for people in K through 12 education that are really trying to reimagine education and design differently is a move away from seed time. We use time and not the amount of learning to essentially evaluate and measure how students move through the system. And so when time is the constant and learning is the variable, you get students ranked and sorted based on grades. Some kids are moving through with gaps of 20% or 30% and 40% and still moving on. And then we wonder why students are entering high school not ready, not ready with basic literacy, not ready with basic numeracy. So seat time is still a major issue. And even though a lot of states have created, created some flexibility, those waiver policies where you still have the seat time dominating and impact so many other areas, you have states. So here, here are a couple of areas, I'll say five that I'm really excited about. One is fundamentally, in order to change our systems, you've got to engage parents and educators and communities, business leaders in redefining student success. What is the purpose of our education system? And we have seen this called Profile of a Graduate Work States are working on redefining student success. And that is happening all across the country at the local level with communities and school districts as well as in states like Virginia, South Carolina, Utah, who has been doing a lot of really interesting work in innovation and pilots on competency based education. But they hadn't done the fundamental redefining student success work as now over the last year been going through and working on their Utah profile of a graduate. And I'm really happy to report on that map that we have of states advancing policies for personalized competency based learning and innovation, that the lone state with no policies was Wyoming and they are now their state board of Ed. Over the last year, virtually too, we started holding meetings and legislative task forces is working on their Wyoming profile of a graduate. And even virtually, they're doing this outreach with communities. And what you see in redefining student success is that people recognize that literacy and numeracy are essential but no longer sufficient.

Sufficient. Yeah.

Yes. And it's a broader range of knowledge and skills for the future. Other areas, states starting up innovation zones, states like Kentucky that have been doing innovation zones since 2012, competency based task forces, competency based ed pilots, and multiple pathways to graduation. And so one of the things that we saw during the pandemic was just a lot of rethinking. What does it mean to graduate? What is a high quality credential? So I'll pause there on kind of the high level. Those are state policies that really have a lot of action all across the.

U.S. let me ask the flip side. What are you pessimistic about in policy right now? Because as you mentioned, we were on the road for years hammering on this need for a move to competency based learning, moving away from seat time as the barrier. Some of these challenges aren't policy in nature. There's certainly practice and processes on the ground in schools. But what has you frustrated that there hasn't been maybe more movement during the pandemic over the last few years or something that you say, gosh, it's good we're talking about all these things, but we still need to be, you know, we're forgetting something.

Yeah. I think, you know, one of the things that I've learned from you, Michael, and disrupting class is how important it is to create space for innovation so that the parents, the teachers, I mean, this is a bottom, a ground up movement of like, how do we redesign education? With a lot of conversations on what student needs are, what community needs are. And educators and school leaders are really leading this charge on the redesign. So what's really frustrating is that we still don't have enough space. I think if we don't know right now, after what we saw in the pandemic, parents sitting next to their students, seeing that they couldn't do things that they thought that they knew how to do, we need to have more and more conversations. But this need to create space for innovation. And so while pilots are a, you know, they're an entry point and the system itself needs to be more flexible to allow this. So I mentioned waivers. But if, but, but if you and I over the years were sitting next to legislators and policymakers who said, oh, well, we have the flexibility for seat time in our state, right?

Yeah, tons. I mean, everyone almost always say, oh, the policy actually exists, just no one uses it or knows about it.

Yeah, right. Well, they saw firsthand during the pandemic how inflexible that waiver policy actually was. And so I would say the thing that is really getting me right now is that even other education advocacy organizations that support innovation are saying, oh, there are waiver policies in that state. And I think that in our field, in the US of K through 12 education, there is like a narrative that says, oh, the flexibility exists if you just do the work. But the leaders and the educators that are actually doing the work keep running against these policy barriers that include the forms of assessments that dominate our education space and that the waiver policies, if you have to apply to a state department of ed or a state board for a waiver every year and you don't know whether that waiver will be approved or not approved or how it will be received, the truth is you're not going to waiver yourself into a systems change at the local level. We've got to get there where we're having more systemic changes all across at every level.

Yeah, it's such an important point. And hearing you say it actually brings it home in a way that I don't think I had fully digested before because certainly in Massachusetts we're having this conversation live constantly about there's more flexibility. And yet the educators that I talk to on the ground don't see that flexibility. It's not obvious to them to create these different alternatives, options and so forth. And so I think what I'm taking from you is the waivers, they take time. And that's perhaps the scarcest resource in our system right now. Right. Like we need time for these separate teams and zones to create these flexibilities. We don't even have that, let alone someone trying to run through bureaucratic hoops and hurdles in their spare. In their spare time that is non existent. And so what we really need is policy. That's the default as opposed to the alternative, perhaps. Seems to be something that I take away from that. I want to double click on something you just said because it's an area that you and I have both been interested in for years as well, which is assessments. Because I think people don't think a lot about how the present system of assessments really locks us in also to our current industrial model of education, if you will. And I'm curious if you're seeing progress on that front or anything that you feel like. Yeah, there's actually some signs that we're lifting out of our current assessment paradigm that continues to act as an autopsy on learning as opposed to something that is, yes, shedding transparency and accountability, but even more so is actionable on the ground.

Yeah, I mean, the analogy that you hear of with assessment is an assessment literally means to sit beside. So I'm going to go back to the parents were sitting next to their children during the last 18 months and sitting beside and understanding what they knew or what they didn't know. And I'll just like say for assessment in the US we have a real need for assessment literacy. And I'm encouraged because that topic is being brought up and it's a little bit nerdy and academic, but essentially it means that there is a whole field of knowledge around what assessments having knowledge and skills of what assessment is appropriate at the time for what you're actually measuring of learning. And what's a little disturbing is to hear some people in really prominent policy positions talking about assessment literacy as just being able to read standardized test scores and understand them. It's a lot bigger. So 1% of our colleges of education, 1% teaches assessment literacy. So there's a whole need. So what does that mean overall if you have students learning anywhere, anytime? I mean, we haven't really talked about this vision of the future that we hope for. That's learner centered. Right. It's about empowering learner learners. And schools might be hubs in their community of learning, but students are also learning in communities and workplaces, like in paid internships. It's. So what does that mean for assessment? It means that we need to be thinking about assessment as collecting evidence of student work that demonstrates their knowledge and skills at a level we can trust. So there are things like rubrics for what a student shows and knows. These things are happening all over the globe. There's a whole field of knowledge of of interest, I would say, on recognition of learning. What does it mean to validate and recognize learning? So if you think about these broader definitions of success and a broader purpose to create young people that can thrive and flourish in the future, and they are getting engaged and setting their goals on a set of knowledge and skills, creating authentic work to demonstrate that. Then all of a sudden you really need to make sure that you have assessors that can look at that knowledge and validly judge it. So we do this with AP tests, right? But we also do it with things like karate or driver's licenses. Right. Or you're not going to give us, a young person a driver's license with just the written part of the test. You're going to have a driving test. So this is about having good information that students are creating in understanding part of the learning process. So is assessment just for accountability or is assessment for improving teaching and learning and specifically improving learning for the youth as they go on a progression across their K12 learning experience? Wouldn't it be nice if they came out of K12, you graduated with a whole portfolio of your work evidencing your different knowledge and skills. And some of these conversations are really rising to the top right now with multiple pathways to graduation and capstone projects. But it's really underdeveloped. So I'll just end this in saying I'm really encouraged by a recent development at the federal level. It's a small piece but Senator Murray in her bill, so it hasn't been passed yet, but in her bill has included $50 million for innovative assessments. And that is, that's like a first in the last 20 years. So we are working and working and working on having lots of conversations on the Hill and at the federal level in the US Department of Ed. And there's a long way to go. But that at least is a sign, a glimmer of hope in the future.

That's helpful to know. I didn't, I didn't know that was in potential I guess to say. But I'm glad to hear it. Everything you said makes a ton of sense. It mirrors as you know. Well, but for those tuning in, what Western Governors University and others have done around, you know, they have the objective, yes, sort of multiple choice assessments for more routine facts, if you will. But then really the performance based assessments with a separate group of assessors who are trained in how to, you know, use a rubric in a valid and reliable way to assess real performance on that of actual skills in the application of knowledge in a job like setting in many cases for a university, it seems like, and I'm curious your take on this. It seems like, you know, things like Mastery Transcript Consortium or Khan Academy's, I think it's called Schoolhouse. They're tutoring to evaluate levels of expertise or grade network. There's like bubbling it Feels like in some of these areas of trying to create a separate set of people who can assess performance based work and portfolios of work, even for students. But I can't tell how deep it's spreading on the ground. I'm curious, are there things you're seeing where you're optimistic around the design or are you skeptical that there's a lot of sort of bottoms up energy around this right now and maybe that federal dollars is what's needed to kick start a bigger movement?

Yeah, I would say across the US we just got asked by Senate staff and the appropriation staff to provide them with an overview. So the Aurora Institute, with partnership with KnowledgeWorks and the center for Innovation and Education and the center for Assessment, we're all working together on a student centered accountability and assessment coalition to lift up the work that's happening across the country. And there are a number of local and regional and state assessment initiatives that are happening on innovative assessments and balanced systems of assessments using, building, building capacity, like building skills for educators to do that authentic assessment. And you could do, if you have the processes in place, educators that are checking their judgments and scoring and calibrating those based on evidence of student work, you can have reliability and validity across that. But you need those processes in place. And we have like under invested and underdeveloped that mostly, but it's really encouraging. So I'm, I'm a optimist, gladful person saying that there is a lot of work that is starting to happen. It's not everywhere, but by lifting up the examples of what's happening and helping to share that with folks on Capitol Hill in a, in a bipartisan way, I would say in a nonpartisan, in a bipartisan way, there is interest. We are all about transparency and having accurate data on whether students are learning or not. We're all behind that. But there are just different ways of doing it that we've been working, we've been doing in this country for the last 20 years. And we need to keep going. We need to go beyond our current conceptions. Because like when I'm in conversations with global education systems leaders, the questions they're asking in their countries, when they're ministries of education, and I mean across the Asia, across Australia, New Zealand, across Europe, across Africa, the question is, will education systems change fast enough to save the human species?

It's not being asked here. Yeah.

What are we asking? We're asking about such minutiae, right? We're asking about like really minutiae and metrics, which matters. That's the thing that's important. But when you get to purpose and you get to like what are the mindset shifts. And we know from there was a heart research survey earlier, heart research poll of parents. 91% of parents want education reimagined. They want us to be rethinking teaching and learning in schools. And then it's like, what, what can we do to meet our children's holistic needs? How do we look at taking the research on youth development and redesigning learning and then how do we get that information to know that students are really having powerful personalized learning experiences? Well, that's where competency based education systems, where you're creating student. Students are creating evidence of their work before they're advancing and moving on in various forms and that you have the technologies too to support how you collect that data in a way that works. And we haven't even talked about like technology and innovation and all of this. But the question is, is the other disappointment that I think I have is that we have just seen how technology is being utilized mostly to support old didactic ways of teaching and learning and not to support the, you know, function functionality of a truly learner centered system. You mentioned mastery transcript where students building up that one of the most exciting things I've seen the last year in Australia, the international big picture schools in Australia are working on an international big picture learning credential that is like world class, that is all about collecting the knowledge and skills and having basically like a student learner profile over time backed up by evidence. And they're working with Sandra Milligan who's a researcher university. So universities are accepting this, this credential as a high school diploma, a new credential and this is going global. So like this picture of a mastery transcript and a learner profile that really provides evidence is so important like for the future of work, for the future of education. And we can, we can do it, we can do all of these things, which is why I'm hopeful too.

Yeah, no, that's encouraging to hear about that effort. I wasn't aware of that one at all. And I think it's interesting several things you said because they're mirroring my own thinking. I'm working on a new book right now, as some folks know. And it's the importance of starting with the purpose and enlarging it beyond just the traditional knowledge I think is critical and to your point, then a mastery view or competency based view of the skills and habits and so forth that you need. It's Something that you can look across a lot of different facets of someone's life and in the projects and authentic work that they're doing, see evidence of that in a way more authentic way than you know, say a self survey or some of these narrow assessment measures we've sometimes fallen back on. What I think is interesting as you see some of these efforts bubbling up from the ground right now is because people are using lots of imprecise language, I think, to help move them forward. We're just talking past each other, I think on a lot of these efforts. I'm curious if you saw that at all in the symposium. You all just did. But one of my frustrations I think is you see a new say mastery based way of grading is almost the wrong word frankly. But of capturing someone's accomplishments and someone says okay, well but have we lost the ability to understand, you know, their ability to meet deadlines and certain behaviors that I would call okay, those are parts of habits of success. Right. They're separate though from the content knowledge and skill question that something is asking. But we're sort of not even able to have that conversation because we're just lumping them in large movement based conversations as opposed to unpacking these. Hopefully that's articulate enough. And I'm just curious your take, if you're seeing some of the same challenges on the ground or certain places where people are actually unpacking these to get into the real design questions that are still sticky perhaps, but otherwise skated over if we're not specific enough.

Yeah, there's a lot in that question. I will say.

Yeah, it's loaded obviously.

But yeah, one of the things that our symposium just focused on is getting the really amazing people in the field that are doing this work of unpacking high quality personalized competency based learning environments and getting really specific about the frameworks. And there's so many examples out there. But like, and I don't want to pick favorites of all the people doing great work.

Give a few examples.

Yeah, I mean honestly speaking, Springpoint has been doing amazing work on the opportunity by design and they're taking all of their tools and frameworks as what does it take? What are the phases of moving to a competency based system? And you can have certain elements of it and not be fully there and keep working on it, but you have to know what the progression is of building that bridge from a traditional one size fits all school model to going to change, changing your systems to be one that is fully like has learning progressions as competency based and is doing that work. Redesign has been doing incredible work on competency based education and building a leader and educator capacity. Great Schools partnership has a whole like global best practices framework. We've seen the New Hampshire Learning Initiative. New Hampshire is a, that has been on this journey for competency based education since the mid, you know, the mid-2000s and has built lots of capacity. They are actually taking. This is one reason that we publish definitions in partnership with the field that are updated competency based education definition as seven elements. And New Hampshire Learning Initiative has actually created a framework with each of those seven design elements and how schools and districts getting started can orient their learning around what those mean in their local context and for their design continuum. I feel like I'm forgetting so, so many others that are.

No, but these are, these are good just because I think it's hard to figure out right where to. Where are the bright spots because there's so much tension and yelling right now in the education field. And you know, the emotion is real. Right. But there are some very exciting things occurring as well. And so hearing some of those examples I think are helpful.

Yeah. And I have to give a plug to my colleague Elliot Levine, who's our research director, who there are so many great research frameworks for habits of success out in the field.

Yeah, he did a great report on this. Yeah.

So what he did was he took a look at how school schools and districts were actually implementing the different ones, what the choices were made, kind of the lessons learned or recommendations. So providing a lit review on those different habits of success frameworks, but then giving some really concrete examples of what the implementation looks like to kind of help the field get past some of these bumps. We try to constantly get information from across really great educators and practitioners that are implementing these new designs and learn from them and where, where the sticking points are and try to illuminate a path forward. And the habits of success report is another one. Another area that's really important is about building student agency. We did some research a few years ago on personalized learning and found that teachers in personalized learning environments felt like they were getting to know their students a lot better and personalizing learning. We also did a student survey and the students were saying, I know my teachers are trying to personalize learning, but I am not given ownership and voice and choice over how I'm doing this, where I'm doing this. And if the pandemic didn't show us that we're not giving students enough building their muscles at Self regulation at setting goals and learning how to get through. Get through. What is that? Productive. Productive struggle and productive struggle and challenges like that's a key part of student agency. And one of the elements that we added to our definition of competency based education. Advancing on mastery, having assessment be meaningful, but is about really focusing in on the student agency aspects. If you're on a competency based approach progression, you've got to have that agency to continue on when you hit difficult times and know when to get help and support too.

Yeah, that may be a great place actually as we wrap up our this conversation together and it's been good catch up is the agency piece, which is my anecdotal observation during the pandemic was, or especially the rush to remote learning was those schools that had intentionally built agency and their learners before the pandemic had given them ownership, had scaffolded that so that they could own and make decisions and knew what the work was and you know, what productive choices to make along that pathway did far, far better than those schools that had the traditional sort of stand and delivered. I think you used the word didactic model before. It was just a total difference, I think in reaction because the students said, oh well, we're not in school, that's okay. Like I know what to do with my day today with the resources I have in front of me, which yeah, may be different from a classroom, but I can make the most of it. Right. Because I know what I'm trying to accomplish and why I'm trying to accomplish that. And that seemed like such a clear delineation from at least my perspective. I'm curious, you know, last reflections on the importance, I think of developing agency and students from your perspective.

Yeah. I think people around the globe that are thinking deeply around what the future of education looks like are really understanding that we have to move from a transmissive model of teaching to one that does build agency. That is about empowering, empowering a broader set of knowledge and skills. And I totally agree. I saw the same thing, Michael. The schools that had, and the, and the districts that had really built on agency, building that student autonomy ironically is also about building deeper relationships with people in schools and out of schools around them. And I think there's growing recognition of the importance in some schools have learner advocates, but those, those, those check ins where you're allowing students to have more agency. The students have, are known, they're known as learners and they're known as people and they're known for their whole, their whole selves and they're able to learn in, inside and outside of school, at home, in the community, because they understand and the frameworks are clear about where they need to go. And it's about goal setting and making sure that students are getting the support that they needed every step of the way. They're learning how they want to learn and they're also showing their learning in different ways. And that has been really, it's been really inspiring to hear those student stories where students have been able to, to be, to be really in charge of their own learning. And hopefully that's a signpost for the future that we can do this. And I'll leave on a really positive note, is that we have just been hearing from so many schools and districts and communities their interest in moving towards more student centered, competency based learning environments that they really want to personalize learning and see very clearly now the need for that. So that's encouraging.

Yeah, no, that's, that's awesome. And I would just say keep shining the light, keep doing the work that you're doing, because it's never felt more important. And obviously, I think the last few years has shown how important it is to know each individual for their full selves as they come into a learning environment, as they come into these relationships with teachers and others in their lives to be able to develop that full self. So, Susan, it's great to see you. Thank you so much. And for all of you tuning in, thanks so much as well. If you like conversations like this one with Susan, give us a thumbs up, but also give us a comment about what you liked because the work that I think the Aurora Institute continues to do to create this path to empowering every learner is just so, so important. And so would love to know what's resonating and what you're seeing in the field. So be in touch and thank you again.

Thank you.