Episode 6: Help! My child and I are overwhelmed!

I have a nine year old boy in third grade and a seven year old girl in first grade. And the first couple of weeks of distance learning before we sorted out all the kinks, there were just so many links and emails. I literally got a gazillion emails from different teachers saying this is what's going to happen. Here's the thing they need to do. You need to log on to EPIC with this password, Seesaw with this password, Rockalingua with this password. And some were using Zoom, some were using Google Hangouts. And I was trying to create a Google calendar for my kids so they could just click into each thing at the time they were supposed to do it. But there were so many different things. I had this whole list of passwords written down on their iPad that I would stick on there.

Hi, I'm Diane Tavner.

And I'm Michael Horne. Thanks for joining us on class disrupted. Diane, I have to say that I completely relate to the point about being a password manager right now and balancing all these schedules and spreadsheets and the like. It's completely crazy the way that at the start of COVID every teacher all of a sudden seemed to have their own system for giving students and parents information. And it's really challenging right now.

Michael Some teachers were emailing worksheets, some were linking YouTube accounts, they had online programs that they wanted kids to to create accounts for. Parents were saying throughout this process, we are drowning in the logistics of it all. And let's be clear, we're not faulting teachers here. In many cases, their districts were telling them, I don't know, go figure out how you're going to serve kids. And teachers are working their butts off trying to find resources and put things together and make it make sense. But at the end of the day, it's a nightmare for the student student because they have to cobble all of this stuff together.

So what I think though, was instructive about this moment was that it actually allowed parents to see what their children deal with at school all the time. Right. A seventh grader knows that she has to turn in assignments a certain way for her math teacher and ask questions a certain way for another teacher. And so much energy is spent just trying to figure out who to be, if you will, from class to class and from teacher to teacher.

Michael it really did bring home what kids are dealing with on a daily basis at school. And you know, I often am talking to people about this and it doesn't even occur to them that this could look different. They often Say to me, this is just the way school is.

I hear that all the time, too. It's just like the attitude is basically, it can't possibly be seventh grade if you didn't switch classes at least six times a day, get your books from your locker in between each, and have all the shenanigans that happen during that time as well.

Don't forget your little planner book that you have to write.

You have to figure exactly and keep track of everything, right? And what I always say, which is what so many people don't realize, is that school hasn't actually been this way for all that long. It used to be that if you went to school, it was in the one room schoolhouse, right? And kids from all ages, they were grouped together in the same room with one teacher, who by necessity was going around and personalizing the lessons. And the older kids were actually helping to teach the younger ones. And so the learning was all very, very customized because it actually had to be.

And then that all changed in the 20th century.

Michael indeed. And it changed fast, right? In 1905, only 1/3 of children who enrolled in grade one even made it to high school.

DIANE Just pause there for a minute because that is huge. That's only 115 years ago.

It's, I mean, it's staggering, right? When you realize that's not that long ago, actually. And here's the thing, though, just a matter of a few decades. By 1930, over 75% of students were entering high school. That's an incredible jump and incredible achievement for the country, honestly.

So what you are basically illustrating is that we developed a system that we still have today in only a couple of decades. And, you know, we're all about hope on this podcast, so give us some hope there.

MICHAEL well, I think the big point, right, is that we didn't receive the system from on high. We, we created it. And we were among the first countries to create a system that could handle that growth. We were among the first to move to compulsory schooling, and that was a tremendous achievement. And when we looked at how to do it, how to get all these kids into the educational system, well, the best way we knew how was to run schools like we ran factories, basically borrowing from the cutting edge technology and techniques of that era. But.

There's always a but.

There's always a but. Go ahead.

In this case, there were some really significant implications of running schools like factories. And, you know, when I want to talk to someone about this who really understands it and really pushes my thinking on how we can do it differently and better. Today I go to Todd Rose, he's the co founder of Populous, the author of the best selling books Dark Horse and the End of Average, which honestly blew my mind and changed my thinking and I'm really excited to talk to him. Michael, Todd, I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about the roots of the education system we're working within and why from the perspective of learning science, it's not ideal for the world we live in today.

When you think about the framing for our public education system that goes back close to 100 years in terms of the current conception, it rests on some assumptions that we all would reject now and we forget that. Right. So for example, the father of educational psychology, Edward Thorndike, who built a lot of the standardization stuff, literally didn't think that all kids should even go to high school because they weren't capable. Right. There was like this idea of a bell curve and this was largely about finding the talented tenth, if you will, right. Who are the people who really have something to offer and then allocating resources appropriately. And out of that system we applied the same kind of scientific management thinking where it's like batch process, give everyone the exact same experience in the same way and then sort. Right. And it sounds like a sort of pejorative now because it is, but back then it was like was pretty innovative, right? Was thinking, hey, look what we could do in terms of productivity and efficiency. The problem is it really undermined the basic assumptions of our democracy and the things that really made the American experiment pretty fascinating with respect to the dignity and value of individuals and the potential for individuality to actually create more positive some outcomes in our society.

So let's dig into that piece a little bit more because one of the common responses we've seen from so many schools is the opposite of recognizing individuality in this time. Right. They said we're going to blanket new grading systems of pass, fail, or everyone gets A's, or if not everyone can learn, one will, school is out for everyone or we're all going to do remote learning in this exact same boilerplate way with the exact same synchronous requirements, regardless of your family circumstance. And so I guess the big question is not only where does this approach come from, but why is it at odds with what's best for learning for each student?

Yeah, look, I mean, in some ways you can kind of see why we gravitated toward a sort of one size fits all system, including the way we think about success and outcomes. Right. Because for all of us that care about it being about every kid. Right. And we care deeply about fairness and equity. In a lot of ways, it's easier to get your head around a fair system when you have a single metric. The problem is that it's completely at odds with modern science, and particularly the science that I've been a part of, around the science of individuality, where, whether it's in medicine, genetics, nutrition, learning, broader human development, we've recognized that using group averages to understand individuals is, like, fatally wrong. And we've moved past that.

Can you give us an example from outside education first?

So for a very, very long time, we've all viewed, used the glycemic index as a way to understand what do certain foods do in terms of our elevating our blood sugar. And if you go to a nutritionist now, that's usually like, okay, uh, I want to moderate my. My blood sugar levels, then they're gonna say, okay, here's what you eat. Well, it turns out that all of that entire glycemic index is based on averages, right? So here's one example, because, like, diabetes there, there's some history of that in my family. And so I've always thought about, like, let's just nip that in the bud from the beginning. One of the things I was told by nutritionists early on was grapefruit is, like, almost magical for, like, blood sugar regulation. I literally had a grapefruit almost every day of my adult life in the morning for breakfast, okay? So I get my results back, and it turns out grapefruit is literally the worst thing I could possibly eat. It spikes my blood sugar worse than chocolate cake. And my wife not at all. Right? And now, here's the thing. What's so funny about this is now I have this app. It's literally on my phone. I'm looking at this. I can know exactly how any food that I eat will affect me, and it doesn't matter if nobody else is like me. That's not the point. Right. The point is optimizing my nutrition and giving me power to have a say in that myself, rather than dependent on the system. What I love about it is by understanding my distinctiveness at that level, like gut biome and at the blood level and the genetic level, I'm able to optimize my nutrition, but so is every other person on the planet. But instead, we can get to far better collective outcomes simply by acknowledging the importance of individuality and building that in the system. So this insight of individuality not only being important but actually giving you a better path to collective flourishing as well is critical. And when you shift that over to education, the same thing holds for me. This next shift has to be the recognition of the distinctiveness of individual kids and that that matters and that it's actually a design challenge. It's not a selection problem. And when you think about the way you create environments that not only acknowledge individuality, they can actively cultivate it and allow it to find full expression in our society, could you go one level

deeper in connecting those dots? Because I think that's a super helpful set of analogies. What is the research showing on the learning side of this, of the different ways that students vary? What's the different learner variability? And that matters? And how should we start thinking about different approaches to reaching each individual?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I would say, like, what it's not is the sort of traditional. We've gone to things like learning styles, right? Which I think intuitively I understand the impulse and I get that wanting to acknowledge that people don't learn in the same exact way. The problem is swapping one average model for learning for five, right? And then saying, hey, now we're going to figure out which kind of learner you are. That's actually missing a lot of the point, right? So when we think about the way that human beings differ with respect to learning in meaningful ways, we focus on three big things, right? So the first is every single person is going to show up with a different constellation of needs, interests, and preferences and things like that. Motives, right? And so if that's true, right? And people are going to be at different levels of, say, reading ability. They're going to have different. Everything you can imagine. Great, okay, so we don't need to select on that. We need to design flexible environments, right? Just design flexibility into the system. You think about with our technology, our ability to literally embed vocabulary and reading supports right into the system, right? I don't need to give you a label. I just need to embed that flexibility. And it's pretty remarkable. And I've been a part of some of these, like, actual experiments where it's just incredible what, what you unlock in kids simply by getting out of their way and removing these obstacles. So if you think about what we would call, like, jagged profiles and using that not as selection but as design, that's like the first aspect of individuality. The second is that, and I think this is really important, is that it's context, right? That when we think about an individual learner it is nonsensical to talk about them in isolation, right? Like, it is always in the interaction with your environment, which includes resources, of course, but also other people, right? And the relationship aspect of that. So we think a lot about what we call, like, if then signatures, right? And this is why, this is why the learning styles thing breaks down, right? Because it turns out that it is absolutely the case that people have preferences for, say, visual information, auditory information, but what we find is within any one individual that is not stable. It's not as though, like, I always prefer visual information. It depends on things like the material, my background knowledge in it already. And interestingly enough, it often changes over the course of the learning itself. And so if we just lock in, like, and say, you're a visual learner, we're going to feed you all this way, it's not optimal, but if I have that flexibility that I can kind of move across these things, it's better. The final piece is with respect to how people vary over time as they learn. So we would call that like the Pathways principle. So it turns out that there's two things that are really critical. One is this relationship between time and ability, right? Pace, ability. Like, we're so used to it, it's literally baked into how if I say you're a quick learner, you think I just said you're smart. That was by design. It was assumed going in by folks like Thorndike, the intelligence was largely how fast you could form connections. And so most of our system is built around a standardized amount of time. Even our, like, high stakes tests, right, are literally the time is decided based on how long it takes the average of a representative sample to finish the test. And so it turns out that not only is there like absolutely no correlation between pace and ability, it just is not there. The same exact person will vary in how fast they learn across subjects, across time. The second thing is with respect to the sequencing, that the idea that like, okay, well, first you do this and then this, there's an optimal sequence to get to an outcome.

Todd. So listening to you, it's clear that a lot of what we do in the education system just doesn't make a lot of sense based on what we now know from the science, but also based on the life outcomes that we want all individuals to be able to achieve in a very different society and economy from the one in which schools recru created. But we also seem really stuck here, right? Like, organizations are very durable in producing the results that they were designed for. What's it going to take for change to happen.

So you know, that's a great question. I mean my, my think tank is like literally dedicated to this idea of what does it look like to change broad social and institutional structures when, when the purpose is wrong, right? When the assumptions are wrong. Because that's not reform, right? That's definitely transformation of systems. And so the good news is we actually know a lot about how to do that, right? There's an entire field of systems dynamics that exist to understand how to intervene in systems. But what we're talking about here is that by and large, and we have a lot of data on this, the purpose of education is wildly at odds with what the public wants the purpose of education to be. And so we've got a general public whose private views overwhelmingly look like this. They're sick of the comparison. They don't. They're sick of having their kid, they're sick of that view. They do not for the life of them understand why this has to be zero sum that why somebody has to lose for their kid to win. And they recognize that their kid has something to offer and contribute and they're expecting a system that develops them as a whole child. Right. Now the vast majority of the American public rightly recognizes that's not the system we have. And so the question is like if you've got a system that is built on something completely different, what do you do? Right? And the most important thing when you're trying to transform a system is that you actually need mindset shift more than anything, right? And so we have this. It's like everyone agrees that yeah, if you could change people's mindset and their assumptions that would change the system. I don't think anyone really disagrees with that. But usually it's like, well, when are you going to get to do that? Like that's literally like changing someone's religion, right? Like your beliefs are wrong. Let's convince you of that. So we kind of cheat a little, which is we've developed these private opinion methodologies to get at where, where is it that what people say out loud is not what they really are willing to, what they really believe. There's a lot of social pressure reasons. There's a number of reasons why people don't say what they really think. So what we do is look for those places where private opinion has already changed. Then the issue is not go try to convert people. It's literally like let's show the majority that they're actually a majority. Let's show them so that you can create the kind of pressure on the system that you're going to need to get that transformative change. Right. So I'm excited about the threshold we're at. Look, we have a lot of problems in society right now, but we have a lot of opportunity to go somewhere that is genuinely better. And for me, this will sound kind of cheesy, but I see this as finally making good on what a great democracy really could be in terms of human flourishing and collective prosperity. That is simply not possible in societies that want to control and manage people rather than empower them.

DIANE I loved talking to Todd. Not only did he end us on an optimistic note, which really hit home with me, it also struck me that the three of us as individuals were talking about it, because think about it, you're the leader of a set of really innovative schools. And looking at education from the user perspective, I come at this from a business and innovation background, and I look at education through that lens. And then Todd, here, he comes at education from the perspective of a learning scientist, and it's a totally different perspective, and our areas are all really different.

I had a moment, Michael, when we were talking, where I just thought to myself, oh, my gosh, like, the three of us are in this conversation. It's so fascinating.

Totally. And, you know, I, I stepped back and I said, okay, what do we have in common? And one of them is that we're all parents, so we do have that shared perspective.

Definitely, we have that perspective. But the other reality is that we come from these different places. We've gravitated to education because we care deeply about it. And, and, and what's really important is we come to the same conclusions from our using our different lenses. And that feels really powerful to me. And what that leads me to think about is what we're all figuring out is the old design just doesn't make sense for today's world for a whole bunch of reasons. And when I start to really dig into those reasons, I start to anchor on one that is really important, and that is that the old model is really designed about the adults and not about the students, and it doesn't put students at the center of learning.

So that's a really important insight, Diane and I want to pause there for a moment, because the system that we have today, that system that doesn't put students at the center of their learning, it actually made a lot of sense a century ago, and it was wildly successful. But the parents complaints at the beginning of this show, they're not emblematic of the people, the teachers, the administrators in the system, they're emblematic of the system itself. It's a system that just doesn't make the grade anymore. It was elegant at one time and it produces the results that it was designed to produce. But those just are no longer the results that we actually need for this day and age, for this knowledge economy. The students who actually spend time as the users, if you will, of that system, they can articulate that better than anyone. And so I'm really excited to hear what it's like from a student perspective. And we got to talk with a high school junior who started her freshman year in a school that looked much more like what we're used to seeing in this traditional factory model. But then she switched to something that fit much better and she agreed to share her experience with us.

So at the previous school, I just think I didn't, I got a lot less one on one time with my teachers and they didn't really like know a lot about your personal life and really know you too well. Like classes were really big and it was just too, they had too much to focus on to hear you and like support you specifically or each individual. It just didn't feel like a very like comforting like warm environment. It didn't feel like that. And like in those environments like I feel like I thrived. So when I was there I was like, I felt kind of hopeless honestly. Like I just like, I don't know, everything felt like so much like, like a big workload. But at the same time it didn't feel like I was learning that much then at my school. Now it's, you know all your teachers pretty well and you get one on one time, you get check ins. And I just think that's really important because I was just not doing as well at the other school especially like just starting high school. And the check ins, like they make sure to do those all the time to check in with you like personally and then also like academically like what support you need and they let you have like your own time in the mornings and then on certain days during class to get done what you need to. Like you, you set your own goal and it's, it's like something achievable like within your time limit and then you just work by yourself to complete it. And you can always ask questions, you can always have support, but you are given like you can do things your own way, like you can be at your own pace sometimes if you need to. And they're not doing everything at once. So if you miss it, you know, like, it's okay. Like, you. You can learn things and, like, work on your own. I just think that's, like, really beneficial. I mean, it gives you, like, a lot of responsibility, which is good to have. In high school, and I like learning. Like, I mean, used to not. I mean, I used to be, like, all about friends going to school or. And stuff like that, but in high school, I just all of a sudden got a lot of motivation to succeed in life and go to good colleges and stuff like that and set myself up for success. So, like, now, like, I really like learning, and I can really appreciate learning. And I just think now, like, more than ever, I see, like, my good teachers and my bad teachers, you know, like, I mean, none of them are bad, but, like, you can see, like, what's really working for you to help you learn and what's, like, what classes you're, like, you don't feel like you're learning much, you know, And I just think, like, at the school I'm at now, there's a lot of good teachers and you actually, like. I feel like I've learned a lot this year that I'll probably keep throughout my life if I keep practicing it, because we got to work in groups and stuff like that and, like, build on each other's ideas. And now I'll probably, like. I don't know. I think it's, like, gonna stick with me instead of, like, going in one ear and out the other, you know?

Michael, I love talking to students. They are so insightful and are able to just really capture so many of these ideas we're talking about and make them really real.

Totally Diane. And hearing the experience that she described, honestly, the more bizarre the factory model seems to me, especially the grading piece of it. I mean, I get why we started A through F letter grades in a factory model system where we were producing students for an economy rooted in factories. And we had to sort students into different stations, if you will, in life, some on the assembly line, some into managerial jobs, and some into leaders throughout the country. And it was the most logical way, or easiest way, if you will, to sort students when you were teaching so many at the same time. But now that that's no longer what we need in our society and economy have fundamentally changed, grading that way just doesn't make any sense anymore.

Oh, Michael, don't even get me started on grades. We could do an entire podcast series about the problems with the way so many schools handle grading a single. Especially now in the pandemic, and, you know, it has such a negative impact on everything we do.

All right, so I'm going to hold you there and say, let's save that topic for next time. And we won't do a whole podcast series, but we will devote the whole next episode to grading. So join us next time on Class Disrupted. Thanks for listening and thanks to our awesome crew making this all work. Jenna Free, our writer, Steve Chagaris, our producer, and Nathan James helping us with publicity and graphics. We'll see you next time on Class Disrupted.