Season 4, Episode 17: Learning in Public

Foreign. Hey, Diane MICHAEL this is our penultimate episode of season four, which is just a word I love, so I always have to use it when I can. And, and it has me feeling a little bit like, where has this year gone? And I'll admit that's a bit of a welcome change to the last few few years that have been pandemic years. And I'm pretty sure each of those years by this time, I was like, can school please just end as fast as possible? You'll keep me honest about that one, but I'm pretty sure.

Well, and I suspect you're not alone on that. I think a lot of folks felt that way, but it feels like the rhythms are returning more and more to what they are and what they were, rather, and that any scar tissue, shall we say, of past years, for better and for worse, frankly, is fading more and more into people's memories, it seems.

DIANE yeah, which is is why, you know, among other reasons, I think it's it's only fair that we share with our listeners that this time of year has us wondering a bit. You know, we started Class Disrupted shortly after the pandemic began as a way to make sense of what was happening in the world and education and in our schools, and honestly, in hope of turning that really horrible time into an opportunity for the change in our schools that we both advocate for and believe in and think is imperative. But now the pandemic is officially over, and I'm almost officially finished with my 20 years of leading a school system. And, well, I mean, I guess the big question that's coming up for us is where do we go next, if at all, with our conversations?

Wow. That if at all sort of lands with a thud for me. DIANE but we're being transparent here with our listeners. We, we always are, but we're especially being so right now because, frankly, I don't think we'd be credible, Diane, if if we weren't asking ourselves, first, should we continue doing class disrupted? And second, if we do continue it, and hopefully people are listening right now and be like, no, keep, keep on it. But I think the question then becomes, if we do, how might we iterate on it? And I'll be the first to say, selfishly, I really enjoy working together on this project with you. I love learning from you. I feel like every episode I come out a better human. So I'm not ready to end this. But but I also want what we're doing to be relevant and purposeful and helpful to the those that we're trying to reach our listeners. And so I would love it. Again, selfish requests, but for all you listening, drop us a note, you know, get us on Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever you're connected to us, email us. What are the big questions on your mind where we can be helpful? You know, what would you like to see from us if we continue this and you can tell us to stop also, that's okay. But any and all suggestions, ideas, feedback, advice, all frankly, welcome as we figure out what's next here. Diane?

Yeah, Michael, we definitely would love to hear from folks. It's one of the highlights when we hear from people, and I certainly, we always take the feedback to heart and try to incorporate it. And I think it's made us better. And, and you know, this, this concept of being purposeful is really important. There's got to be meaning and intent in what we're doing. And, you know, everyone's time is extraordinarily valuable. And we know that there's a ton of things to listen to out there. So, you know, what, what do you need? What do you want? What do you wish from us? I'm really curious to hear. And speaking of curiosity, Michael, yours is going to lead us into the topic we're going to talk about today. We've, you know, all this year we've been getting in the weeds and tracking the details of a pilot we've been running at Summit, which has helped us really think about, like, innovation, continuous improvement and all of that. And, you know, as we wrap up the year, we've both been reflecting on what we've learned and taking a big step back around that. And, and you got curious about a concept from your co author of Choosing College, Bob Moesta, and how it might be useful in my reflections on the year. And so we're going to dig into red lines and green lines today.

I suspect people are like, what the heck is a red line? And what the heck is a green line? I thought red lines were things you saw in papers, but first. So to give folks a bit of context, Bob, along with Clay Christensen, they're the originators of this jobs to be done theory, which has kind of taken on its life of its own. It's actually, I think, Googled more than disruptive innovation at this point. But it's basically a theory that says, like, people buy things or switch behavior because they have a struggling moment in their lives. They want to make progress. They aren't so much buying what you offer as they're looking to make progress. And so, you know, the focus is really on what is that? Progress and designing around that. And so if you're lucky enough to have designed your product to match the progress they want, then you could get hired. But, you know, that's sort of the simplistic way. It's more complex than that. I'm not actually sure Diane have ever described it the way I just did, but I think it's a really powerful window into product or service development. Now, Bob had, frankly, a couple other unbelievable mentors besides Clay. I feel like if you step back and you're like, you got mentored by, you know, Clay Christensen, I. I pinch myself, right? But Bob also had N word Deming, sort of continuous improvement fame that you know well. And he also had Jenny Junichi Taguchi in his corner, who was a Japanese engineer and statistician famous for developing the Taguchi methods for design statistics. So he sort of had an embarrassment of riches around him in that way. And Diane, Bob for years has been telling me that the real key in innovation is not to test and learn from what works, but to learn when something fails. And this has felt like a Yoda like statement to me.

People say all the time, right? Like, people are always talking about learning from failure. So I'm so glad we're digging in because, like, it is Yoda. Like, what's he talking about?

Exactly. And I frankly, I never fully understood because I'm like, oh, you test and learn to figure out success. And I would, like, push a couple times not get it, and I just feel really dumb. And then I'd forget about it. But he has his own podcast called the Circuit Breaker. And in a recent episode, he was talking about this concept again. And it finally clicked for me while I was at a gym at asu, gsv, of all places, the education conference. And we'll link to the episode, which is titled Redline Green Line Development. And essentially what. What Bob learned from Taguchi stemmed from what he observed when he was helping build cars for Ford and comparing it to how Toyota and the other Japanese automakers designed cars. And I'll do my best to summarize because I suspect people didn't come in for an automotive lesson. But in essence, the Japanese at the time were doing far more prototypes early in the process of design than the Americans were. Whereas the Americans were basically just trying to figure out the one quote, unquote, best process that worked and then just codified and do it again and again. And the purpose of the prototypes in Japan was, in essence, to learn where were the boundaries of the things they were building, where Things would actually break.

Yeah.

So they would basically, like, create something that worked, but then they would start to tweak it to see where won't it work.

Yeah.

And they would build lots of prototypes. Right. And it was all about learning a lot early. Early on in the beginning stages of development. Now, we talked a lot about failure here in the podcast this year, but this was like they were intentionally, in some ways, trying to fail early on so that they could learn. It almost flips it on its head a little bit so that you didn't have failure at the end of this process, but it was really to understand. I also think of, like, causality and theory building. Right. Like, what led to what and in what circumstances and where didn't it work? And in essence, the Green Line was that approach that Bob observed in Japan, where there's like, a lot of frenetic activity in the beginning. No one's waiting on anyone else, everyone's working in parallel, doing lots of experiments and prototypes. You're working on something, and I say, gee, what are the variables you're playing with? So I can learn about how it might impact my part of the project. And as you get closer and closer to launch, things actually start to calm down. And so it's sort of explore, explore, explore up front and then settle down. Whereas the Red Line approach is the opposite. It's all about just make it work. And projects start slowly. They're done in series. I wait for you to design your part, and then I get started on mine, which is sequential. And all the tests are around verifying that stuff worked, rather than learn about how they didn't work. And then as launch approached, things would get super frenetic, which I suspect people are familiar with. Like, the deadline's looming, you know, like, stuff's breaking, we gotta fix it. Lots of changes. And changes are a lot more expensive toward the end of a project than they are at the beginning. And so there'd be a lot of fixes than even once we launch. And so the big philosophical differences, I think, from this Green Line versus Red Line is that in. In the Red Line, we're sort of designing experiments to prove our hypotheses. Whereas with Taguchi and the Green Line, we're doing experiments with sort of no sense of what will happen, but we're just learning and finding limits and. And we have a certain humility right around it. Like the way I created something on a past project, it. It might inform what I'm doing, but I don't take that as, like, ground truth. I'm using it to learn more and what may or may not be relevant. It's, it's all. And it's all about discovering the boundaries. And, like, once I've built something, where does it break? Diane? So let me stop there. I'll give some maybe examples later to make it more concrete, but I'm curious how that lands.

Well, so much is coming up for me. We've been talking about this for several days now, and as you were talking this time, I was like, oh, click, click, click. A whole bunch of ideas were sparking for me. So the first one, and I'll be quick about this, but is I always want to bring it back to students. And as you were talking, Michael, I was like, oh, my gosh. You're describing the Green line is what it looks like when a project that students are doing is really well designed and working really well. Because at the beginning, there's like, this frenetic energy where they're trying things, trying things, getting feedback, getting feedback. You know, a lot of it's wrong and not good because the learning's happening. They're building the skills. But by the time you literally get to the end of the project, I'm always like, there's. There's essentially nothing to. To quote grade, if you will, because as a, as a teacher, you've seen everything all along. You've seen the growth, you've seen it come together. It's like, calmer at the end versus the reverse, which is what I think we see most in schools, which is like, nothing, nothing, nothing. It's like very linear, very ordered, very slow. And then like, the night before, something's due. It's like this cramming of trying to put things together, and then we wonder why it's. It's not good. And the learning is not there, right, when you do that. So.

Wow. And the focus is all on process, on the latter one versus, like, the learning on the front one. Wow.

Exactly. So, I mean, we've been talking for days, and that was the first time it clicked for me, just that I was trying to really get a visual in my head of the difference between these two lines when you were talking. And clearly, I think what's at the root of these two things is mindset. It's so, so key, because, look, on the Green Line, you really have a growth mindset, right? Or a childlike mind. It's just. It's filled with wonder, it's filled with curiosity. It's sort of absent of ego and certainty, and you're really just like front loading the work. And, and here's the key. It's going to be messy. It's going to look messy. It's going to seem confusing. And I think we tend to try get away from that in schools and, and in life. But that's actually where you sort of trace the outlines of the absolute limits of what's going to be possible for. For both how you're going to build the thing or your process, but also what it is you're building. And I do think there's two parts there that are important, and that's really what you're doing first is. Is figuring out that boundary. You know, this analogy of the sandbox. And like we play in a sandbox. And so when I think about, you know, a sandbox, I'm like, yeah, you're. You're pushing the. The walls of the sandbox and making it as big as you possibly can. And then, you know, what you can do sort of fits within those boundaries. And after you've done that, then you can sort of figure that out. And this brings up something for me that I'm curious about. Instinctually. I am a leader, and I think people who work around me would say this, who really likes to be involved heavily upfront. I know they would say it because I know they talk to each other and say, hey, whatever you do, make sure you get Diane involved up front. Don't get too far down the line when we're designing a new program or a project, because that's where I really like to mix it up. And as I think about that process, it's very quick and messy and there's a lot going on. And I, in my mind, always call it alignment. Like, once we then get aligned after a little bit, then I'm like, good, run with it. You know, we can check in. You know, I'm. I'm very sort of hands off at that point, but I'm thinking about those instincts I have now, and they feel green lish. I don't know. Yeah, I. I'm thinking they feel green lish.

Fascinating. Fascinating. I'd be curious. I am so curious to have Bob listen to this afterwards, because I think he's similar, by the way. He's very upfront. And then, like, once the idea is sort of understood, other people bring it into the world. But I. So I, I want to move it into education a little bit more. Another step, because you just went there with how children might approach something. I thought that was fascinating, but Diane. So I, I had Also those several AHAs as I listened to this podcast of Bob's of how it applies to education. And I'm going to get to one of them in a bit. But the first one I had was frankly, I was at ASU gsv. There's a lot of edtech companies around and I kind of think that edtech companies don't really do this green line work at all. Like almost everything you get, at least in the market, seems like it has to be implemented under perfect conditions to get these results. Almost all the research I see is very like, hey, the process works like this. If you don't get the dosage, you don't get the impact. You know, it has to be in this model with this rotation, interacting with this curriculum, blah, blah, blah. And the real world just doesn't work like that. And so I, I kind of think like, are the edtech companies, are they spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to break what they, what they create the curriculum and stuff like that to figure out like, hey, these are the meaningful boundaries so that they could stretch beyond sort of the one way to do it, the one dosage and instead like maybe get a deeper understanding of causality, like what really causes the learning outcomes that they see. What's the most important thing, what truly are the non negotiables that you have to have. Because like they've, they've looked at it through like a lot of different circumstances and developed accordingly. I, I kind of think if they did that we might see a much more robust set of products out in the market. And the word robust I use there meaning it'd be resilient to a lot of different learning models and conditions and school types and, and so forth. And, and I, you know, as you know, I'm working on a book right now again with Bob and, and with Ethan Bernstein at Harvard Business School. And it's actually adjacent to education. It's about helping people find their next job. So career switching. And we built a process actually to help people switch jobs and it started working really well. So it was like a several week long process. It was, you know, different reflection exercises and so forth. There was a coach and then we wanted to like learn how do we make it simpler and how do we make it so when you're reading it in a book you can keep doing and then where does it break? And so, you know, we did one sprint where we did it in two weeks. So we knew it was going to be too fast. Like we knew there was no way they were really going to get the impact out of it. But we wanted to understand how it broke and then like, when is it too long? Right. When is it too self guided? Like on and on. And so we had all these questions just to understand like, how do the results change in different ways of manifesting it so we really can understand how to stretch it out and like, and, and build something more resilient, frankly, that has a better understanding of cause and effect ultimately. And like, can you imagine if ed tech companies did this? Like, instead of coming into your schools and saying like, gee, Diane, we've got this great math product, but you can only use it if you dedicate this many days and this many hours and you have to change how your teachers do this thing over here. And like, I know you, you literally throw these folks out and say, sorry doesn't work for our model. Because I think you've known instinctively and, and I guess if companies, you know, came to you with a heartier set of products that actually, you know, worked in a range of circumstances and handled the quote unquote, real world better. So it could work in a Summit model, but also work in a traditional school model, like maybe it's not possible, but I don't think they're even testing it to see how does that land.

Yeah, a couple things coming up for me. One, you know, guilty is charged in terms of like being not very tolerant for a lot of products that are on the market and also simultaneously feeling, you know, a little, I want to be humble here because like, we weren't an ed tech company for sure, but we did build a technology platform to support our school model. And I'm now thinking about that work with the lens of the Green Line. And it took me back to 2010-11 when we were developing what would become the Summit learning model and platform. And I think we had a lot of the Green Line mindset, Michael, but I'm not sure we did it the way, you know, you're, you're describing there. I mean, here's what we had. We literally didn't know what would work, so we just started trying things. And at first we were like a little bit timid and slow, but honestly we just started going and picking up speed. And since education is pretty complex and it was a whole school model, there were lots of different people trying lots of different things all at the same time, which seems very green line to me and like very fast at the beginning. We had week long cycles in the beginning and you know, we were constantly watching how students and teachers Would respond to different things we tried. And we were in continual dialogue with them through focus groups and surveys and feedback. And I mean, you remember those days, like, I would walk through the room and I would just. Students would come up to me and give me feedback and be like, this isn't working and this is what we need. And we actually developed a system for this because things were moving so fast. And it was. It was literally posters, but we had, like, these posters on the wall, and they would change each week and they would say, like, here's the feedback we got from last week. Here's, you know, the input you. You all got. Here's what we've done to address it, you know, and then there was a space to gather more feedback and input. And, you know, it was literally like gathering all this data and moving really quickly. So many fails, so many fails. But we were super transparent about it. Everyone could track all of the information. And I feel like we were at least mostly on the green line because I remember simultaneously feeling, like, totally exhilarated. I look back to that time and it's still some of the most fun, like, best learning, because it felt like we were all learning together all at once. And, you know, each day was driven by curiosity and discovery and just. It felt like we were making progress and we were doing it together. And at the same time, I always felt uneasy. It. It never felt comfortable or like a place that we could stay or even like, take a breath, really, you know, and we were really testing the boundaries of what might be possible so we could figure out where they were and then design within them. And. And, you know, these are the boundaries of a personalized learning model that we were really testing. And so, you know, one of the boundaries that we push really hard on was attendance, and specifically taking attendance, which has a whole lot of legal requirements and financial implications. It's also a big time suck. And as we often talk about, like, really misaligned with the ways personalized and real world, real world learning work. And so we really, really pushed on that one. We went so far as to trying to install Michael chip readers at the doors of the building that would mark a student present when they detected the chip that we had adhered to each of their computers. I mean, and that was just one of many things we tried. So for the record, that was a step too far and it didn't work for a ton of reasons, but that's the type of thing you do on the green line, I think.

Yeah, I mean, this strikes me as exactly right. And like, you know, I, I won't say like pull it into the product that got developed, but the model, right, that you all built. I remember when you were doing all that prototyping, right, and you had like literally numerous experiments going on in the same building. Sometimes like I'd go one place to the, to the next and see two totally different things going on. And I think your description matches exactly what I saw. And, and so I guess if we take that and then extend it into what we've shared with the audience this year, say the prototype, you've done around better supporting your novice. You call them executive directors, EDs or most people call them school principals. And people might remember the basic idea is that you had the expert sort of long standing principles or EDs supporting the novice ones and helping them understand the resources that were available to them and so forth. And part of this was these regular meetings between these people, sort of budding them up, if you will. And then you started out with a hypothesis that maybe it'd be an hour long meeting and like what ultimately came out of it was the time was less important, it was more the regularity and the content. Right. Of it. And I guess on the one hand someone who's listening might say, well like did you start saying can we stretch out that to two months instead of monthly or can we do it in 30 minutes instead of an ad hoc. And so I guess I want to hear your reflections there. But before you do, my other gut is that maybe what really happened is like we left out a stage of the design process in describing what you did for our listeners that, that we may not have shared and I don't know this, some of the upfront iterations you did before you had a design, you were really ready to roll out and test. And, and so let me ask the question maybe in a more open ended way because when I listen to this, like I said, I had one reaction, I was like, oh my gosh, this is why so much edtech companies like don't hit the mark. And then the other one is like, I just really want to know what Diane has to say on this because I'm super curious. But it feels very different from a lot of the test and learn stuff we talked about in the beginning of the year. So, so I guess how might this concept change how you would design the pilots we talked about throughout this Ed pilot throughout the year? Maybe that's the open ended question.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's good to think about, you know, I think what you're surfing Surfacing, Michael, is that it can be hard to make transparent or be metacognitive about the things we do sometimes. And, you know, in this case, I think you're right. I think we sort of probably left out a whole beginning of our work, out of our conversations, mostly because I just probably took them for granted. And I'm. I'm so glad we're getting into it now. And I appreciate the framework for really triggering me to think about what would. What we did in helpful ways. And so what's coming to mind when I hear your question about what we would have done differently is actually something that Malia, who was our product lead, did instinctually, that I think represents the green line. And so, like, it wasn't planned, but it's what she did. And. And, you know, there was at this point early on in the pilot when our cooperating indies and the onboarding EDs were meeting and using, you talked about the timing. So that's one thing we were testing at that time. But also we had a template agenda for those meetings. And so we had created an agenda that they would use that we thought would help surface the things we wanted to surface. And. And Malia just kept getting a lot of folks saying, hey, we think the. The agenda needs revision. We think this should change or that should change. And they had all these various inputs that they were giving her. And their. Their mindset initially was a little bit, I think, redline, like, hey, Malia, you change the agenda and then we can continue having meetings. And Malia was like, oh, heck no, you're welcome to adjust the agenda. Just document what you're doing so we can learn, but you can. This can totally be happening simultaneously with all the other things we're testing. And as I reflect on that moment with all of it, feels more green line to me and mindset and approach and, you know, certainly we didn't have this language, and it was just a thing that Malia did. And I remember the conversation with her after, she's like, hey, I did this. Do you think that's fine? Do you think I messed up the pilot? But, you know, I was grateful that she had comfort with a bunch of people working on different parts at the same time, and that she wasn't managing the project in a way that was so linear that people had to wait on each other, which just like conjures up these. These true assembly line, you know, ideas to me, which is like, I'm waiting for the person before me and the person after me is waiting for me, and we're handing these things off and

yeah, I love it. I mean, that's, and that's. Bob uses that language even, right? He's like, you might be the UX person doing like the, you know, the website or something like that. And you think you have to wait for the person who's doing the programming on the front end instead, like, be like, okay, what are the variables you're playing with? Let me just design a bunch of prototypes off of what that could look like so I can learn. And then when we're ready to snap them together, I already know so much more. Right. And I do think it flips some of these test and learn ideas on its head a bit in interesting ways. But, but maybe it's just what we both have sort of reflected on that it'd be more of like a, let's try a bunch of upfront, you know, stuff as part of our learning agenda. And then as we start to understand the boundaries, as we start to understand what works and why, let's start to lock down into something at which point we actually start to. We're no longer, as Bob might say, hypothesis seeking. We start to actually really have some hypotheses and now we're testing and learning through those hypotheses as we get nearer and nearer to launch. But we also, by the way, have probably a lot more knowledge up front. So those hypotheses are really grounded in something compared to when we're really designing something from scratch. But we haven't prototyped it yet. And I guess that's the last piece of it. Like when you were reinventing the summit model in 2010, 11, you were, you know, there's some things that stayed constant, but you were really every. All first principles were sort of on the table, right? Yeah, yeah. Whereas like, in some ways there's a difference that, like continuous improvement sort of brings you into a different zone.

I think I, I think that makes sense to me and helps me reconcile something that I was having a hard time holding while I was thinking through this. And specifically it's, you know, our use of if then hypotheses, which you've just been referencing. And I, I, you know, obviously they're a part of continuous improvement. And Bob trained with Deming, so I know he believes in continuous improvement, but I was not sure if they're a part of the green line because, you know, in if then hypothesis you really are declaring what you think is going to happen. And so it does feel a little bit different from this sort of like learning and learning you know, trying to push failure in order to learn. And so as we've talked through this today though, I think we are just really zeroed in on an early phase in the design. And a true sort of like whiteboarding design, right? It's, it's less, it's not continuous improvements when you're really designing as we were, you know, a decade ago. And so that's very new products versus continuous improvement. And in the beginning, I'm using the word product there loosely, obviously, but in the beginning, when you, you're really just trying to establish boundaries and rule out what won't work, it doesn't make much sense to have if then hypotheses. And you, you don't know enough for that. But as you do this early work and get the boundaries and the clarity, then you can get to them later. And I, it's funny, I'm thinking back now, after we did a bunch of that early work, I remember sort of beating myself up for not having the if then hypotheses. I flagged that just because, you know, as much as I know and I've practiced this and done this. Sometimes I, I like listen to something or read something and I'm like, oh, I forgot that again, you know, and so there's a little bit of maybe giving ourselves a break and saying, oh, you use different things at different times. And before we wrap, I do want to surface one tension that I think is real. And I don't want people to leave this thinking we're totally Pollyannish, because the part of the Green line concept is that you move from theory to reality, really, and these testing, and you've brought it up like, what will really work and what won't in all these circumstances. But, but I get this sense that most of the things that this theory is addressing are still reality, like in a lab setting versus, for, for example, with real kids and real schools and you know, where they're simulating a variety of conditions that aren't optimal, but they aren't testing like in real life. Now, I could be, you know, making that up, but that's my sense. And I think this is one of the huge tensions in education. No one wants to be tested on, but I just don't know what the quote, lab setting looks like in education. I have a really hard time imagining one. And you know, for those edtech companies that we just beat up a little bit on, like, what would that actually look like for them to do this? And so maybe that's why you get these products that have really only been very theoretical. And as I say, that the field's reverence for RCTs, which I think you sort of loosely referred to earlier, is also a contributing factor here. Those being random controlled trial studies to prove that something works, which sounds good in theory, of course, we'd want things that work, but in practice, almost everything we do in education that is effective is nearly impossible to prove via an rct, because to isolate variables in the way that are required, it's just. It doesn't make sense to me anyway. I could go on and on for a long time about RCTs, but the reason I bring all of this up is I have personally experienced the push back from parents and community activists who get very angry if they feel their children are being experimented on, which makes doing innovation well and right and super hard. And, you know, I've talked extensively in the past about that very same time. I was just describing as being so exhilarating and one of the worst nights of my life with a group of parents who were really upset about what we were doing. And so I just think it's important that we point out the tensions that are very real here and the challenge of this, because, you know, it's a. It's a set of constraints that I think help lock in what we've always done in schools because somehow that feels safe.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's a great point. And you know, obviously, unfortunately, the truth is, though, that doing the same old thing itself is a risky, an unfair advantage because it doesn't work for so many.

Right.

And so in many ways, I think it's like, worse than experimenting because knowingly, to, you know, use the language. Right? Like, we, we, we, we, we, we know it's not going to work for your child, but we're still putting you in it, which is itself an experiment that I think is unfair. And it goes back to, like, I think we need to figure out places in education where we can do that kind of prototyping that you were describing when you created that summit model where it's rapid. It's a lot of things. We're playing with it. And, and frankly, I mean, this gets to the randomized control trial thing as well. Like, we need to be finding those anomalies. Like, where does it not work? Where does the thing that you just designed that you're sure is gold standard, where does it break? Right? And instead of seeing that as failure, which researchers often like, they try, you know, this. They try to do a million things to show, like, oh, that doesn't, you know, that doesn't apply because of this or like we're going to take it out of our data set because. And instead realize, like, no, that's like really like that's showing us that there's a different circumstance here that requires a different approach. What a cool thing because we can now say this approach works in this circumstance and we're trying to understand what will work for this other one. Right?

Yeah.

And I just don't think we've. We've got to be more real with parents about that as well, I think, and bring them into it. And look, it's another reason prototyping is the word. We're not saying turn over everything tomorrow. And so many superintendents, you know, they want that like, headline, right. In five years from now that they can say like, we transformed all our schools. Well, like, maybe you'll get that headline, but like, maybe you'll get a bunch of small things that teach you a lot and help you serve, you know, 20% of your kids better than they otherwise would have and the others will sort of be the status quo, but at least it's better than you were. I, I don't hate, I don't want to say that as in a down way. I just think we have to, we have to find these opportunities because we are not going to better serve kids otherwise.

Yeah. It's almost like right now the perfect is the enemy of the good. The perfection is expected. If this doesn't work for every single student in every single circumstance, then forget it, write it off versus how can we get to 20% of the kids with this? And you know. Yeah. I think that the middle ground here is collaboration, Michael. Like how do students, parents, communities, educators, how do we all work together on innovation so we aren't doing to people, but with people. And that's much easier said than done, but it's definitely worth it. And honestly, now I'm getting curious about how sort of radical collaboration could evolve and improve these theories, because I don't think any of them are really grounded in that type of before you jump,

before you jump, where you're going to go after that, like just to stay on that for half a beat. I think that's right. And you actually. All these micro school experiments right now where educators are leaving the public school districts and starting their own schools and families are opting into designs that look very different because they do not want the status quo. These are all your chances. Right. Because their parents have actively said, no, we want to be Part of something that's different. These are your opportunities, I think, to prototype, and we've got to take advantage of them because they're the ones that are demanding, the prototypes. They're not scared of them.

Right, right. Willing participants actively engage with us. I mean, I think that's probably the place to leave it today. Otherwise, I'll open a whole new can of worms. But I'm just leaving with so much to think about, as always. And before we go, I want you to give me one more thing to think about. What are you reading, watching and listening to?

Oh, gosh, you know, look. More Harry Potter in our house. Diane. We're going down that road. We've finished Chamber of Secrets. We're now in Azkaban, or however you pronounce it. You'll tell me afterwards. I finished Rick Hess's new book, the Great School Rethink, which I really enjoyed. It's a very grounds up thing. And what I liked about it is he's like. He's not like, there's one thing that's right, but you really got to figure it out for your community. And I really enjoyed that. And then, frankly, a lot of my nights are. By the time this is. Comes out, my, my, my agony of the Boston Celtics is probably going to be over. But right now, it's been a. It's been an aggravating NBA playoffs over here. Diane, what about you?

Well, I'm not following that, so I'm not feeling that. But I am. I'm sticking with fiction for a little bit here. And so I just picked up Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingslover and Michael. Several of her novels have arrived in my life at moments when I felt like I needed them, and they really resonated. And so in this moment when I'm feeling compelled to not look away from what many of our children still suffer on a daily basis, I. I'm gonna. I'm gonna give this one a go and dig into what I hear is a pretty amazing novel, but a little bit challenging. So anything inspired by Dickens is probably a little bit hard on the heart, right?

Very much so. And report back when you're done for us. But until then, I hope you all have gotten as much as we selfishly have gotten out of this conversation. And we'll see you all next time on Class Disrupted.