Chan Zuckerberg's Head of Education on Reinventing Learning Post-Pandemic

Welcome to the Future of Education. My guest today is Sandra Liu Wong. Sandra has been the head of education and the vice president of product at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, one of the major philanthropic forces in US education since 2018, as schools have reopened and the challenges facing children remain as glaring as ever. In this conversation, I'm looking forward to talking about our shared passions around what's needed to reinvent schooling, what supports do children need to thrive, and how the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is framing the work ahead. And so with that, I will bring Sandra up to the virtual main stage, if you will. It's good to see you. Thank you for joining me.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Michael. It's great to be here.

Yeah. So I'd love to start with your personal background because I suspect a lot of folks don't know your own journey toward working in this field of education and as it's wound around into defining you, leading the education work at czi.

Yeah. So maybe I can start sort of on a. On the personal side. I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta and, you know, grew up to immigrants parents. And I knew, you know, that they really valued education for my brother and myself, even though as immigrants, they didn't always understand what was happening in school. For me, right. Like, they didn't really know, but they really wanted us to focus. And that was always very important growing up. But for me, we actually spent some years in Taiwan where my parents had immigrated from when I was in high school, and in that experience had the chance to get to know my extended family, meet my grandmother, and realize that I knew this. But I got to see firsthand that my family, you know, we're farmers. Like my dad was the ninth of nine kids. You know, my mom's a seventh of eight kids. So like huge families, my aunts and uncles still farmers today in this little village. But it really took an educator, a teacher in my dad's hometown to really kind of take a really care and take the youngest three siblings of this family of nine and really encourage them through an educational pathway that led them to graduate study and immigrating to the U.S. and for me, that just always stuck with me and obviously sticks with me today that that that educational opportunity really doesn't just change the life of that student like my dad, but really changes the life of his family and, you know, generations to come as I've been impacted. And, you know, just from a professional standpoint, I've worked in product development most of my career for about 15 years pre CZI and for me, the reason CZI kind of came about as a amazing opportunity is I've always loved working at the intersection of different disciplines because I think the problems that we face, you know, they are not. They can't be solved with just the perspective of a single discipline. And the more that we can think about how do you weave what is known from different disciplines into joint solutions, and the more powerful that is. And CZI has been a place that is really thinking holistically across our work.

No, it's an amazing, amazing upfront reflections. I'm just struck by, I guess, a couple themes. One, your point about how education just doesn't change the life of the individual, but really the branch or branches of the family tree. I've seen that as well. And I'm thinking about your own immigrant story and my own wife whose parents came from Korea and her dad who lived through the Korean War, and sort of what that does Right. To a family and how they do or don't come out of that through education. And then I'm also struck, of course, by your comment about a lot of these knotty problems and challenges being solved by multiple perspectives coming together. And I think that's right. It's true in every field that the biggest breakthroughs come not from sort of subject matter expertise, but a variety of subject matter expertise, being able to look at a problem orthogonally almost, and sort of these big breakthroughs occurring.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I want to shift then a little bit from, you know, that's your personal story getting into this. But I want to think, you know, as we're starting to. I'm not sure we're allowed to say that, but I think with the CDC guidance, we're allowed to say we're starting to exit the pandemic. There's obviously a ton of focus on a lot of issues. You know, there's a mental health crisis among our youth. There's rampant learning loss. There's a loss of connection with many students and families. There's shrinking enrollment in many traditional schools. I'd argue that there's an outdated schooling system more generally and so forth. And so I guess I'm curious, you look at all those things we could list, Right. What do you see as the. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing our youth and their education in this country at this moment? And perhaps, as you think about the role of philanthropy against that, what's the sweet spot where philanthropy can perhaps make the biggest positive impact right now?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think coming out of these last couple years, we have in some ways grappled with realities that have existed for a long time. And the way that I think about that is that our education system really is structured and designed and built to be a bit of one size fits all. It was built for a different time of bringing students in through this content knowledge that we wanted to impart on them. But during these past couple years, I think we've seen really clearly that students aren't just a, a brain that comes in where they're downloading content and that's it, but students are developing adults and humans. And we need to think about an education system that is thinking about how do you really support student well being to help them be able to pursue the academic learning and achievement that we want for them. And I just really think that as an education system, we should be thinking about how do we equip students well, because this, that equipping is going to be the fabric of our country for years and generations to come. But the pandemic, this period was a time where it was very, very clear, not just for students, adults alike, that your life and what you do in the school building or your workplace, those are intricately connected. And if you are not feeling safe or your mental health is challenged, it is going to impact your learning as a student. And so for us, that is a, our vision and hope is that the school system can really acknowledge that as a way to think about how learning can happen better. And you know, you ask about the role of philanthropy, you know, and I mentioned at cci, we really do think about how do you bring new tools and new interdisciplinary thinking to some of these problems. And for us, we are really thinking about how do you take what we know about how students learn, right? Like academic research is really, really learning and understands a lot more than it did 10, 20 years ago about how students develop, how they learn, what conditions need to be in place to help them learn and how do we take those and make it really practical and useful for teachers. So our role, I think, cause given we really think about that problem space, we think about what tools do teachers need to make this really doable and possible, what conditions need to be true to help the leaders of schools be thinking about this as the goal of education. Not just imparting the knowledge, but really equipping students holistically thinking about their learning and bringing what we know from learning.

Science into classroom practice makes a ton of sense. And I love the holistic perspective on this, right. That we need to really support all facets of a learner's home life as well as their school life, if you will. If we really hope to see the progress that they want to make to being a prepared adult for our complex evolving society. I'm curious, sort of how your strategy, for those who aren't familiar at czi, how is your strategy and the grant making and building that you all have done shifted over the course of the pandemic? There's sort of the, there's, I assume, but I don't actually know. There's probably a fire drill phase where like you just had to help the urgent and now and there was probably some work to be done there. I suspect that then there's sort of been a midpoint and maybe. Now how do you describe that strategy and sort of the work you're doing at the moment, but how that's evolved over the pandemic?

Yeah, I think one thing, the pandemic, at least for me and the team, we realized the things that we have been talking about and caring about in some sense feel really salient or felt really, really salient during these last couple years because of the different tools that we're bringing to the table. So I think, you know, maybe I can first start sort of the, the way that we thought about and then I can talk about how that's evolved.

Yeah, perfect.

So one part, a large part of our grantmaking, you know, we call that team research to practice. It is really thinking about how do we connect what we know about how students learn and develop and make that actually practically useful and doable given a classroom. And a teacher has tremendous, you know, responsibilities and, you know, very full place as it is. Right. So how do we think about the innovations that can happen there? I think in this work, the last two years, we have seen teachers be tremendous sources of innovation. Right. Because they have had no choice but to innovate to find their students sometimes. And I just find that, you know, something is really exciting energy. Even though as we sort of exit the pandemic stage, there is probably this like back to normal, you know, pool that happens. But I think we've seen that innovation is possible and that teachers really see the, the need to think about student well being as part of their learning package. So that's, that's sort of in our grantmaking work. The other major part of our work is tool building. And you know, we're, I think one of the unique perspectives of CCI is to think about how could software and product development be philanthropic tools. And our team on the tech side is thinking about how do we take what we know about those practices that can work in the classroom, make them into usable, useful, practical products that can help teachers do some of these research based practices in their daily teaching and in their daily interactions with students. And I think, you know, I would say, you know, we have really thought a lot has evolved in edtech these last couple years. And so yeah, we definitely have gone through the moment of hey, what can we do quickly? And you know, I'll talk, I could talk a little bit more about a product we built during that time which, you know, we work on. One of our largest products is the learning platform for Summit Learning. Really large program, very comprehensive. But we knew with COVID that wasn't a moment that a lot of people could take on such big change if they hadn't already started that process. So we're really excited to bring along. So the product's called along, that really takes this mentoring piece and thinks about how can we bring that practice into more students and teachers. And so along as a new product that we have rolled out, it is really to help be a teacher student connection builder. And it makes it really, really easy for a teacher to take research backed questions which are really not just, you know, sometimes you can think of getting to know someone as a very hand wavy, casual thing, but we bring, we bring sort of this framework of developmental relationships to ground in these research questions that make that are really easy to access and use through this product experience. And so we are really excited to keep working and iterating on this product because we think that that connection, teacher student connection is just an essential piece of the puzzle.

No, that's fascinating. I think I'm putting the right link below. You can double check if I have it there. But the. So folks that are interested can check that out. But I think it's interesting. What's that?

Yeah, no, sorry, alarm.org is right.

Good, good, good, good. Okay, good. Got the right one. But the. So, so check it out for sure. I want to get more into the products and so forth because you all are very unique it seems in the philanthropic landscape of you're actually building stuff that gets used, right. You're not just sort of giving grants to organizations. You're really getting into that nitty gritty. I want to dig into that a little bit more in a moment. But, but before we go there, you all also are connecting all this research from the learning sciences and things of that nature along with sort of the lived experiences, if you will, of teachers and students in these school environments. So I'M just curious. Your own learning, evolution and your own learning journey, or czi is maybe more broadly like, what is something that maybe wasn't intuitive or you've learned along the way that contradicted previous beliefs and has allowed you to evolve over time. And as you're building these tools, I'm just sort of curious for you to take us on your own learning journey, in effect.

Yeah, I think, I guess what has been interesting for me is, you know, some of the things I've talked about feel really to me very obvious in some ways, like, yes, we should take what we know about how students learn. And yes, that should be really usable for teachers. And I think for me, as those feel like really sort of that should happen, like that should just be the way it is. And I think, you know, through my time at CZI and really through my own learning, the team's learning, how we interact with really amazing partners and grantees out in the space is that just. That doesn't happen for a number of reasons. And, you know, I give the example of, you know, schools, a lot of schools still use this idea of three queuing. It's a theory around how reading comprehension happens. And it's been about maybe over 20 years since that has been debunked as the way, you know, that students are really guessing at words. But that is still being used because we don't really have the mechanisms to update that. And I think for me, that, I mean, is something that really pushes us to say, okay, well, wait, education is a complex system, so what are the different pieces that play into the fact that these innovations don't really get to teachers and obviously anyone working in education? There are many factors that come into play. But I think I can talk about our perspective on that in just a second as we go into sort of that building part that we do. But I think that's the piece where we just really think there is a lot of existing research about how students learn, but we need to think about how to unlock that and make that really available to teachers.

That's a really good example. So let's stay with that learning science strand and how it's formed. Your investment strategy, you just mentioned along, you mentioned Summit Learning. What else are you building right now that you're really excited about that you want to share with folks so that they can go check out?

Sure. Yeah. So we, you know, I mentioned that research to practice, grant making, portfolio, and you know, the team there is doing a lot of exciting work that I would say a lot of the innovation of how, where might there be good research practices to put or sorry, research learnings to put into practice. Those are the types of innovations that we've been investing in. I'll give a couple examples. You know, we think a lot about well being of students as we've talked about a little bit here. But if we want to talk about student well being, you also have to talk about teacher well being. And I mean just as an adult who's lived through these last two years, it's been hard, it's hard, but we really have to think about all these real human beings in the building. So there's been a program that came out of a team in Madison, Wisconsin called the Healthy Minds Innovations. They have built a program that's app based, that's really thinking about teacher well being and really helps teachers go through podcasts and lessons to think about how do they grow in their awareness, connection, insight and purpose. That's an example of a type of thing we might find where there's that innovation that is really practical and that teachers can pick up. After I think the early studies, after about a month of using this program, teachers both had self reported sort of feelings of just greater calm, less of that like distress and stress of life, less disconnection and loneliness. And even in the follow up, months later, there's still that persistence. So it just shows how sort of a small intervention really packaged in a way that's doable, can be really impactful. And again, thinking about how teachers can have better well being I think is really essential if we want to talk about supporting our students as well.

Totally agree. If you don't have the teachers in place supported, you're not going to get the student success either for sure. And it sounds like you haven't just funded that group to continue to advance in their own product development, but you've also monitored or funded maybe the research alongside of it, is that correct?

Yeah, a lot of our work, you know, some of it is some of that initial innovation work, but a lot of it we either follow up or pair with this goal of generating more evidence of these practices because, you know, and again, a lot of our work is around well being and relationships because we think it's, it's not a cherry on top, it's not this extra thing to academic learning. We think it should be integrated and thought about at the same time. And so in addition to the innovations. Yeah, we do, we do a lot of the funding that is, how do we generate the more evidence around this to show not just that the research is valid but that putting it into practice in these practical ways can also have impact and results.

That's awesome. I find way far too much philanthropy doesn't think about that efficacy and research piece and just sort of throws it out in the wild and hopes it sticks and hopes it does good things. So I'm glad you're doing that. One. But two, I also love that you said the word integrated because I guess that's my other piece of this, which is sometimes these different strands are very disintermediated or disintegrated from each other. So you'll support, you know, the healthy minds or good social, emotional well being and so forth. But it's not in the context of that academic growth. And so you sort of don't see the impact on the other side of it or vice versa. To your point, you treat it as the cherry on top and you forget that it's actually kind of foundational to someone having the security. If we think about this sort of as a, as a maslow right context, sort of the security to be able to think about their progression, self actualization and so forth. So that integrated piece strikes me as an important part of the conversation I want to. And I think it actually blends right into where I want to go next. Which is, you mentioned it several times. It's not just how these tools work in a vacuum, but how people actually use them on the ground. You had the reading example, which is a great one of guys, we've known this for a couple decades, but gee, it's not changing in practice. I'm curious as you fund these tools, how you think about making sure that they're designed either in accordance with how they're designed to be used or how do they fit into the progress that people are prioritizing, even if it's maybe different from the conception of progress that you all have as you create them.

Yeah, and I think it's a really salient question for us and you mentioned it earlier, sort of as ed tech developers, like hey, if the teachers would only use it this, this particular way. You know, I think for us there is a real threading that we need to think about because research is great, but if it's theoretical and not usable, it doesn't have impact. Existing teacher practices may be great, but if we don't take what we know about learning, it's less effective than it could be. And it, I think it isn't right for us to say, hey teachers, very full workload, like figure this all out on your own. And so as we think about tool building, you know, I mentioned along, I think we want to really blend. How do we take the research and make it practical. And that's the task of the tool builders. I think as a philanthropy, it is unique to be building. But there's a couple reasons. It's actually quite powerful for us to do in house. One is to really practice that interdisciplinary weaving. It's not easy. We speak different languages, we have different goals, different ways of knowing. And so as we build, we get to really share a goal of making it practical and useful with these different components. You know, in the along example, I think is quite powerful because we got to work with the Search Institute. You know, they're a partner and grantee. They have worked on this developmental relationship framework. Right. It's research based. It's intentional about how do you actually build a fruitful, positive, productive, developmentally appropriate relationship between teacher and student. So they are the backbone. But instead of that being on a website, you have to go find and sort of like figure out an action. And we partnered with them to build along, which has research questions. Those research questions are grounded to that framework. Then we could also work with communities. We've worked with the Black Teacher Collaborative Character Lab to get feedback from teachers and students about, well, does that resonate? Because as adults we can say, oh, this is a great question for my kids. If you've got students, you know, some of the times that does not land. And so if we can help do some of that research work to make it more resonant for students, as easier for teachers in the end. And so we sort of package all of these things together to make sure and then to measure and iterate, that we can bring the good practices that are theoretical into the classroom in real, practical and powerful and valuable ways for teachers and students.

Yeah, it occurs to me that that sort of learning engineering approach that you're. Because you're developing, you're getting those cracks at it, seeing how it is or is not adopted, getting to adjust and reconcile that with the research base. It transitions. Where I want to go with, as we wrap up this conversation, sort of last question, which is, you know, we sort of talked about your work in terms of developing directly, in terms of funding interesting developments and teams building things, your work doing research and efficacy and understanding the use cases and how does it actually interact, if you will, with the real world. The last piece of this is though, thinking about how, I guess, for lack of a better word, how that real world changes how the system Itself perhaps changes to determine what gets adopted. And I'm just sort of curious how you all, you know, as you're building and funding tools that have a lot of research behind them, how do you think about moving the market forward toward adopting these tools that have that rigor and efficacy research behind them?

Yeah, I think I've talked about this a little bit less, but when I think about us as builders, there is certainly the product and software component of it. But another big piece of building is actually building the bridges to partner with all the people across the ecosystem that I think are going to have to work together. I mean, this is my theme of working interdisciplinary in interdisciplinary ways. I mean, I really think that there are a lot of people who see things commonly that we can do better for our teachers and our students. And you know, in our work we are, in addition to the building work and all the things that we get to learn from that, we are also making grants that help really acknowledge all the insight and knowledge that partners know in their local communities, wherever they may be, and then figure out how do we find common ground to say, hey, you know, we need to shift whether it's the market for technology or the policies that go into, you know, what's happening that these can we have thread a needle around holistic student well being and achievement in their academics? Sort of as one conversation, I think, you know, to give an example, we, one of our partners is Kingmakers of Oakland. They are really working very deeply with their local community to think about how do we support black youth, how do we understand from the community and the caretakers and the families what they mean when they mean they want their students to become leaders and develop well. So that's sort of like an example of a really kind of going local. And then at the same time we're also looking at how do we create bipartisan coalitions. We're really proud of just the work to your point of like early in the pandemic, some of the responsive work that we did to really make sure that we were able to, with our partners on the ground, work towards that 7 billion in funding federally to push around the homework gap and connectivity that students are going to need to access during that time. So I think those are just a couple of examples, deep and broad that we are thinking about. How do you evolve that broader market or the policies that drive like what's important, what's funded.

Gotcha. And that's super helpful. Last question as we wrap up. I slightly lied, but last question, which is folks tuning in following this, they want to follow your work, they want to follow what else you're funding, developing, building. What's the best way for the field to keep up with all these developments?

Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, I hope I got to highlight some of the amazing work that our partners.

Yeah, I would say so.

And our team at cci, we just, I think, you know, major theme is like we have to work together. A lot of people are going to need to work together to evolve and to build this better future for everyone. And we're really excited if folks want to tune along too, you know, or reach out to us. Our website, chan zuckerberg.com has, you know, links to the education work and we also have, I'm sure our Twitter and other social media for sort of updates along the way. But the website probably is a great place to start and you can hear what we're up to there.

That's, that's perfect. I'll, I'll throw that in trying to grab it quickly. Chan zuckerberg.com so people can see it at the bottom here. This is where the. Doing this myself gets in the way.

But the.

There we go. Yeah, exactly. There we go. There's the use case. But Sandra, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having the conversation. Thank you for what you're building, funding and doing every day to advance this agenda, to help every child make progress in their lives and be prepared for this world in which we're living. Deeply appreciate it and for all you tuning in. We'll be back next time on the Future of Education. Thanks so much.