A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems - A Conversation with Prof. Jal Mehta

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I think we all know that we're caught in bureaucratic transactional systems that don't work very well.

And so if we could build more humanized systems, even if they were just in pockets or niches or containers, then they would go to some other committee or some other thing they're involved in, and gradually it might spread.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast this week. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. It's all too easy to come up with scripted and pre-packaged solutions to educational challenges that we know are complex, deeply human, and relational. And my guest this week has been a powerful voice globally for a long time advocating for a more nuanced and thoughtful view for enhancing spaces for deeper learning in our schools. It's my huge pleasure to introduce Professor Jal Mehta of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who joined me this week to talk about about his new book, A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems: Inside the New Methods Seeking to Remake Public Schools. He's written this with a group of other fantastic co-authors: Maxwell Yakovsky, Kim Fruman, Amelia Peterson, Rebecca Horwitz-Willis, and James Jack. And it's based on extensive empirical research across the US and Canada. Jal is the Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He's a sociologist by training, and his work focuses on how to remake the industrial-era school system into a modern learning organization that creates passion and purpose for both students, and adults. Prior to this new book, he's the author of In Search of Deeper Learning with Sarah Fine, which won the Groarmeyer Award for excellent public writing on education.

He's also a fellow podcaster, a co-host of the Free Range Humans podcast, as well as a father and son initiative called The Professor and the Point Guard. Good. Yeah, thank you, Joel. Really an absolute pleasure to be able to meet and have this conversation. Really exciting to have the book out in the world, your latest book, but a couple of months ago, I think came out over this Northern Hemisphere summer and with some fantastic co-authors, some of whom I, I know, and hopefully having Amelia on the podcast later this year as well from London Interdisciplinary School. But yeah, some really impressive work. Yeah, perhaps you could just kind of start by laying out the, I suppose, the concept, but particularly the kind of this really impressive empirical work you've done with the book over a significant number of years to generate these insights. Love to get into obviously the details on some of what you're finding, but yeah, could you tell listeners how it came about?

Sure.

Thanks, Tim, for having me. Looking forward to this conversation. So about 8 or 9 years ago, myself and a group of very talented doctoral students, a number of whom are now professors in their own right, set out on a project around the methods that people use to improve work in schools. So we kind of started with the idea that if top-down reform was often experienced as compliance and developed too far from the problem to really see the complexities of the local situation, And if bottom-up, just kind of let people do what they will, you know, people are not going to spontaneously combust from where they are today to something better tomorrow. Like, might there be a third path? And we organized a reading group to explore that idea. And we discovered that there were people ahead of us, people like Tony Bryk and Richard Elmore, and that they had developed methods, instructional rounds, Data-wise, continuous improvement, design thinking, et cetera, et cetera, all of which had predecessors either in industry or medicine or earlier in education, but methods that essentially like helped practitioners take a data-informed look at their practice, reflect on it, make changes, try to make things better. And so the question we set out to study was, Sometimes, like sometimes people do these processes and really good things happen. And many times people start with enthusiasm and it kind of peters out and you move on to something else and you sort of claim victory at the end of the year and then move on to the next thing. And so we were just trying to understand like, why do these processes sometimes really help people change their practice? And sometimes peter out.

Fantastic. And I mean, maybe it's also just worth making clear that this is really about public systems primarily in the US, but this is really a public school reform question, right?

I think we examined it in public schools in the United States and Canada. I think people use these methods all over the place, but the initial title of the grant that led to the book was Design Meets the Real World.

And so there were all these kind of optimistic practitioner-oriented books that were kind of like, you know, follow this 5-step pattern, follow this spiral, this swoosh, this cycle, and things will get better. And so we were like, yeah, but what happens when that meets the forces of organizational inertia and racial inequality and political turbulence and all those things that we know exist in schools?

Like, what's, what's the result of this collision?

Yeah. Nice. Yeah. You mean the magic swoosh doesn't work? It doesn't just bring some sudden transformation into intractable systems?

Here's a question for you, Tim.

How come the books about the problems are, you know, really thick, carefully researched things that run on for hundreds and hundreds of pages in small type? And the books about the solutions are these like thin books with these beautiful illustrations and large type and, you know, like a 5 or a 7-step, oh yeah, 10-point plan. Like the solutions are at least as complicated as the problems.

Absolutely. I mean, yes, you are speaking to something pretty profound there, I think, in terms of the, you know, some of the challenges of commodification and the market dynamics and all sorts of things. But I mean, I suppose what it does bring up is that, I mean, I really enjoyed where Even in the more sophisticated approaches, you are kind of excavating some of the quite, sometimes quite problematic assumptions in some of those things, some of those methods, right? So you call them continuous improvement and design methods, right? CID in the book, just for listeners. But just, yeah, perhaps you could just, you know, we're not pinning on a particular method. It's like a group of approaches, but sometimes they do contain these slightly problematic assumptions underlying them.

Yeah.

And as you said, the 7-step things are probably some of the most problematic. But yeah, what are the things you started to see there?

Well, that is a great kind of lead-in. So the first was not actually an empirical chapter about contemporary applications of these things to public schools, but I really, you know, these methods, particularly continuous improvement, have a long history through their role in Japanese industry and then American industry and then healthcare and finally schools. And, you know, scholars in business schools and sociology of organizations and organizational theory and so forth, you know, this was like one of the big things in the '80s and the '90s. And so they put a lot of effort into studying what happens when you use these processes, even in industry, which is relatively simpler. There's a clear bottom line and so forth. So anyway, when we reviewed the scholarship on these things, One of the biggest takeaways was that, like, to take continuous improvement for a second as an example, there are kind of 2 sets of assumptions baked into, like, W.

Edwards Deming and others who articulated those methods.

And one of them is we should reduce unwanted variation.

It's like almost Taylorist.

It's like, how come, like, over here it's not happening as quickly or as efficiently as over there?

Yeah.

But then there was a second set of assumptions which were much more humanistic, which were, well, the people who are closest to the problem are likely the people who will provide the solution. So it's the person who's on the front line of making the car who knows, like, where things are likely to go wrong. And so, and what the scholars who studied this found was organizations were much better at taking up the first than the second, because the first one was consistent with their assumptions of hierarchy, order, The people on top set the ends and the goals. The people on the bottom, some of them are screw-ups, and if we could only make them do it more this way, it would be better. Whereas the second set of assumptions that really challenged some of those hierarchical assumptions that demanded a different culture, those were the ones that were harder for even industry organizations to adopt.

So yeah, but it's fascinating, isn't it? Because there is a kind of, it's intuitive in some ways that, and built into a lot of that more industrial or mechanistic response was just kind of replaceable parts, let's say, to put it crudely. I mean, essentially one human, replace it with a different human, one part, replace it with a different part. There's this deep kind of industrial assumption built into this kind of ergodic assumption that basically all the parts are pretty much replaceable with others that look basically the same. And as you say, I mean, reduce the variation, right? That should be part of the approach. I mean, it's, yeah. Some quite challenging assumptions built into there.

I think that's—

I think you are right that that set of assumptions can be very prevalent in both industry and in education. Like, in particular, you know, you see places which try to script curriculum or are very prescriptive with what their teachers can do.

And when you talk to the people who are in charge of those systems, they frequently say something like, well, you know, people come, they only teach here for a couple of years, If I had a bunch of really skilled teachers, I wouldn't do this. But like, given who I have, you know, this is the only way to make sure the kids get a reasonable education.

And that sort of sounds appealing on its face, but it's a, like, if we really like drill down to what's actually happening, like if you're a kid in front of a teacher and you know that the teacher is just reading off of a script, like you're in an interactive interpersonal situation and the person who's in front of you.

is not responding to you or the moment or the culture or the climate.

So there's just some limits to that theory.

But also there's a sort of high road, low road, short-term, long-term problem, which is like, even if it did get you by for a couple of years, then a couple years from now you're just in the same spot.

Right.

Like, no one wants to work in that kind of environment. No one wants to teach in that kind of environment. And so in a few years, people are out doing something else and you have the next crop of new people. And so you got to take the sort of longer-term view of let's invest, let's train, let's support, and then let's create an environment where people want to stay. And then you get on the other spiral.

Then people stay, you have more skilled people, you need less prescription, you have fewer openings so you can be more selective in who you take, you have fewer new people so you have more time and money to spend on training those people.

Like, you got to get off of the one wheel and onto the other.

Right. No, I love that. But also I think the other thing, and one of the challenges that I think education has is that this, the swing and you vilify these, the kind of industrial metaphor, you vilify those kinds of approaches and swing to an opposite extreme that contains different but nonetheless significant challenges, right? And problems that manifest. And I think one of the things I really appreciated about the book was how you really are drawing out the lived complexity And paradoxes and yes, and in all of these approaches, which I just think is really powerful. I mean, the thing that jumped out, I said to you in my notes, but the thing that jumped out at me on one of your subheadings just felt like such a powerful description of a lot of the things in the book. I know there was a particular chapter about legibility, but navigating legibility, and you talk about thinking paradoxically, holding data lightly, and reasoning flexibly. And to me, that There is a lot in the book that really is about that kind of nuanced practice that, as you say, comes with time and training and support and a nurturing environment, a strong culture, et cetera, all of those things. But it's not trivial that that messy, nuanced middle is where a lot of the magic is in a lot of this kind of work. But it, again, it doesn't fit into an 80-page, 7-step algorithm, right?

Yeah, I think that is really right.

On so many different levels.

Like, in particular, this—

there's just a series of balances to be struck between, like, structure and flexibility.

Like, I feel like anyone who's run any kind of organization, team, any kind of enterprise, right? Like, you need some structure, some building blocks, some organization, some routines, some habits, some ways that you usually do things. Because if you don't have that, Then you're, you know, you're just like living in chaos.

You're spending so much time. I don't know, I coach basketball in my spare time. And, you know, one thing someone said a few years ago is just, it was so obvious, but it was like, just name all of your drills so that like each time you don't have to like explain we're doing this and we're doing that. Just like, okay, like, you know, now we're jumping into X and then everybody knows what X is.

Nice. There's that one. And I think in my—

our previous book with Sarah Fine, we, we did a chapter on International Baccalaureate where I know you have a lot of experience. And one of the things we liked about International Baccalaureate is it's got that character to it.

You know, there are some goals of IB learners, and there are some expectations for what will happen in different subjects, and there are some assessments. But then within that, there's a lot of flexibility.

And then there's a lot of learning that happens as being part of an being an IB teacher and being part of the IB community.

And, you know, it's not a silver bullet.

There are bad IB schools and places where it doesn't go well, but like on the whole, like that seems like the right constellation of things that you want to get into the mix.

No, absolutely. And maybe it'd be really interesting to get into some of the specifics on that. And I'm just conscious that it's easy to stay in the abstract, but I wondered if it might, like, Could you perhaps just describe some of the settings in which you were working? Just, you know, to kind of ground the conversation, it'd be interesting just to hear about some of the actual places you were, because I'd love to ask you about that contingency point. And so, we'll come back to that. But yeah, maybe just give us a bit of a taste of what kinds of settings were you actually in?

Sure. Great. So, they were somewhat varied in the, like, level of ambition and difference from the norm. So, like, on one end of the spectrum, you know, we had people just trying to help kindergarten and first grade teachers learn how to teach reading better.

We did our research a little before the latest outbreak of the reading wars, but this is like 2017 to '19 when we were, when we were in the schools. So there were some things where their goals were pretty basic literacy and math, the kinds of things that many, many schools are doing.

And there we had some variance between opt-in efforts and like district-mandated efforts.

So we looked at both of those. So that's sort of one category. Then we had ones where the goals were a little more ambitious, like, can we move from textbook science to next-generation science standards? So still keeping disciplinary learning as the main goal, but trying to kind of shift it. And then we had ones that were significantly more ambitious, where people were trying to mount interdisciplinary courses, land-based learning, indigenous learning, really trying to kind of remake some core aspects of the grammar of schooling itself. We also looked at some of the well-known cases from other people's research, like in Chicago, they used these methods to improve graduation rates by about 15 percentage points over about 15 years. I think that's an interesting case because they had something like 6 superintendents over those 15 years. So they were able to maintain enough stability in the kind of subsystem between the 9th grade teachers and the middle level of the Chicago bureaucracy and this organization called the Chicago Consortium, which collects data and so forth. They were able to develop a system for improving graduation rates even in a turbulent system. So I think that one is interesting as well.

Yeah, amazing. Thank you. That's great. And one of the ones that maybe I can pick up on was in One of the chapters I particularly liked was the contingency and paradox chapter, linking to my earlier point. But you talk about Wright Elementary and Adams Elementary in that chapter, just as their pseudonyms. So obviously not giving anything away. And just the implementation of DataWise as that improvement process in those contexts. But I'd love if we can just to kind of draw out some of those things about contingency first and then paradox, because I think they're just great examples of the kinds of nuance that we're talking about. But so yeah, perhaps could you talk about that a little?

Totally. So contingency is this idea that comes out of organizational theory, and it basically says, you know, you don't organize like a factory and a dance troupe the same way. You don't organize a place where you're trying to optimize efficiency the same way as you do an R&D lab that's trying to invent something different.

Right.

So you optimize efficiency, like you just sort of like push, push, push.

Can people do the things we already know?

An R&D lab, you build You know, diverse teams, you create more space and time, you send people out to visit new things, you get new inputs.

So that basically, like, different organizational forms and approaches are right for different problems. So part of what we're trying to do in this book is to get people to, like, to get to the balcony and be a little more intentional about what sort of process will help you for what sort of situation.

So. If you're trying to redesign a high school, for example, a design thinking process that gets you really deeply in the shoes of the students and the community members and forces you to question some of your kind of most basic assumptions about what school needs to be may be more appropriate than a continuous improvement process. Whereas if you're trying to get kids to— one project in California was just about trying to get kids to fill out FAFSA forms, like financial aid forms kids need to fill out to get financial aid for college. You know, there are deadlines by which they need to be turned in, and kids in general are not that great with deadlines, and they're particularly not great with paperwork and so forth.

But like, you don't need like a PhD to do this.

You just need some structure and an organization.

So, so those were 2 examples.

So the FAFSA one I would call like a routine problem, and high school redesign I would call an innovation problem.

And then there's a, there's a place in between which we call complex problems.

So this is like literacy, math, science.

Complex problem is something where common sense knowledge won't get you there.

Like, I could not teach first graders to read because I don't know enough about like how people learn how to read.

But a lot of people know that. So if you were developing an effort to build teaching reading, it's neither just the sort of common sense knowledge that's likely to be present on the team, Nor do you need radical innovation.

You need expertise, and then you need to adapt the expertise to your particular situation.

No, great. And I mean, the, the other way, I think not quite the same, but I think, but similar, the, the way you frame it is this idea of moving from order to emergence. So having, as you say, some of the more routine or more structured, as you were talking about earlier, some of you might need more structure to start with, but then perhaps what we're trying to do is move towards more possibilities for space, for choice, for emergence in professional judgment, let's say.

Have you experienced that in your career?

Have you seen places where that has worked well, started with more structure and then given people more opportunities to experiment?

So I think yes. I mean, I think on micro levels with young people, you know, in instruction itself, and then on school-wide levels for sure. I mean, you know, there's this kind of disorientation and an overwhelm if you start with not enough structure to start with, you know, An example, when I was working in the UK in further education colleges, was building a new course there. So working with staff to really ideate on a completely new offering to 14 to 16-year-olds, needing to really hone in on some structured practices first to figure out what was needed before you kind of do the broader ideating. I don't know, that's probably not the best example, but it's the one that comes to mind.

I mean, I think that people, it's kind of rare that Someone, like, the light bulb goes off, they see the world a new way, and then they, like, act in a new way. I think the fancy word would be, like, sociocultural learning theorists. The, like, non-fancy way would be we sort of learn by doing and in apprenticeship. And so I think on the whole, people sort of act their way into new beliefs rather than believe their way into new actions. Though it's a cycle. You can reflect on your new actions and that can help kind of crystallize your new beliefs. So, you know, when you show somebody a different way to do something and they try it and they have some success, that is like 100 times more powerful than any book, lecture, PowerPoint, video, etc. So yeah, sometimes just, you know, I feel like the best change management book ever written was Green Eggs and Ham. It's like if you can get people to like try a different way, then like good things can happen.

And People will resist and they'll say, well, that won't work. I want to do it this way.

But it, so that's where I feel like sometimes the structures could help.

Right. And at the same time, I think there was also, I felt in that chapter, an additional layer where it becomes order and emergence. Because for example, there's a part of that case study is where they kind of hit a plateau or they hit a rut in their practice, right? Trying to find problems of practice. And I liked that idea that it's not just therefore structure and then, you know, you have this experience and then it becomes more matured and you get more space for emergence and then that's it. Then you're, you know, you're home and dry. It's almost like it's some kind of iterative process or there's holding both, right? Or you kind of need both at certain points in a process.

Yeah.

So just since we clearly love to live in the clouds and some of our listeners might like it to be more concrete, I'll give you an example.

So pursuing this example, These folks were using the Data Wise process, which has 8 steps.

And one of those, they're supposed to, you know, look at data and then define a problem of practice. And then they're supposed to kind of examine each other's practice against some like standard or rubric. And then they're supposed to develop new ideas and then eventually they're supposed to act. And so somewhere in the middle there, there's a step where you're supposed to closely interrogate each other's practice, which I think the people who created Data Wise quite logically thought, let's not just like solve this problem on the surface.

Let's like try to get a little deeper as to how are we teaching?

Why are we teaching?

What assumptions are baked into doing it this way as opposed to that way? So that's what it says in the book. But the principle was like, okay, we don't have any, we don't have any money for subs.

So like, we don't have any time where people can really see each other's practices. So we tried having coaches like videotape little snippets of each other's practice, but then our meetings all became, well, these 5 minutes don't actually represent what happened in the class. And we were using up a lot of time on that and people were getting kind of angry and defensive.

And so they just like scrapped it. They just were like, okay, we know the problem.

We're like much more excited about focusing on solutions. Like, what could we do about this? And so they, I can't remember exactly all the details of this case, but I think they looked at some videos of what some other teachers had done. They read a book or two. They, you know, had a coach come in and offer some possibilities.

And then they picked from that menu, like what they wanted to try next.

So like from a like fidelity perspective, like they did not follow the Data Wise process.

Right. But from a, did they take the process operate in the sort of spirit of the process and like end up in a better place than they started, they did.

And so I think there's a lot of, you know, if you don't preserve that room for adaptation, people, sometimes people talk about integrity of implementation rather than fidelity of implementation. And I like that. It's like, is this consistent with the, like, the spirit of the thing rather than the letter of the thing?

Yeah, no, I love that. And you talk about adaptive and craft-like in the book as well, which I really liked. But you bring in the leader into that example, you know, the principal or the, you know, superintendent or whoever it is who's stewarding that process. And clearly there's a key role there for the way that a leader might make certain calls at a certain point in relation to the process. So yeah, perhaps could you reflect a little bit about on what you saw more generally around that kind of leadership role?

Yeah. So we were talking about examples before, you were like, well, I did this as a teacher and then I did it as a leader.

And I think there's a kind of whole sort of fractal nature to all of this where, I don't know, you're like the superintendent in a district and you decide like, or you have a sense that like we need to do something new in math and, you know, okay. So you get the like math department chairs together and you pitch that this different thing needs to happen and you're going to all figure out together how.

And then the—

okay, then the math department chairs go back to their schools and then they've got to pitch to like the math teachers.

Like, okay, we're going to try something different.

Like, here's how it'll be different. Here's why. Here are your objections. I don't want to, et cetera.

And then like at the end of the day, like the math teacher's got to go in front of the students and be like, okay, we're going to do it not the way we did it yesterday. We're going to do it differently.

And here's why and here's what it could look like and so forth.

So I think there is this kind of modeling of a stance of a little bit of optimism, a little bit of we're going to figure this out together. I don't necessarily know the answers. It doesn't matter so much if every detail isn't right. You know, there's like this idea in parenting of like good enough parenting, which is basically like if you try to be a perfect parent, you're going to drive yourself and your kids nuts. But if you like try to be a good enough parent, that's good for the kid and it's good for you. And in part it's good for the kid because it's good for you.

Like you can live your life. And I think this is definitely one of those perfect can be the enemy of the good situations. If you try to like get perfect measures and blah, blah, blah, like you're going to burn everybody out.

For sure.

You're just sort of like, we're doing this and let's try to figure it out together. And will this help us learn something about what we're doing? Try, collect, reflect was one aphorism somebody put out there.

Teachers didn't like the, like, this is a hypothesis and we're going to try it. They're like, we're not scientists. Like, this is a craft.

But like, try, collect, reflect.

Like, just try, collect something, reflect on.

Yeah. No, I love that. But it's no small feat, right? I mean, to call that out in terms of that, because it's a set of socio-emotional relational capacities. Like, it's not, It's not nothing to adopt that kind of affective response in relation to sometimes really quite high-stakes environments where failure is not necessarily always valued in the larger schooling system, the district level, whatever. And so I think there feels to me also that piece of something really important that's that relational socio-emotional piece that, yeah, I guess I just want to name maybe. In relation to some of those, not only the leaders, but also, as you say, the teachers as well.

I think that's 100% true. I think if you're working in a toxic or dysfunctional environment where there's limited trust, where there's no room for anyone to ever fail, like you can't learn without some degree of failure some of the time, it's impossible. But if you're in an environment that insists otherwise, then building a kind of a container or a space where people treat each other like human beings, where it's okay to laugh and have fun and be a little joyous, where you're really listening. I think listening is huge. So the pace at which you can do things depends a lot on like reading the room and the energy and what other things are going on and so forth. And if you're like a school leader and your district isn't holding things that way, there is a— you are like holding a lot of the tension. You may even be holding it like physically in your body.

For sure.

Like, you are correct that this is difficult work. I guess my hope is in the long run that I think we all know that we're sort of caught in bureaucratic transactional systems that don't work very well.

And so if we could build more humanized systems, even if they were just in pockets or subsystems or niches or containers, Then people would sort of experience being in those environments and then they would go to some other committee or some other thing they're involved in and they would be like, why are we doing it this way? It could be this whole other world.

Like, we should try it more like that and gradually it might spread.

Exactly. And you, I mean, you, I did want to pull on that thread because you explicitly say that in the book about creating a niche, right? And so this idea of this container or this space that you might have to do a bit of work to carve out. Maybe it's with a subject-level group or, you know, your department, or just maybe even in a classroom. But I think, I mean, in some ways I think teachers are the masters of the art of doing that in their classroom often.

Yeah.

Right. And it's the really good ones in those kinds of environments. But I think that's, again, no small thing to call out is that you can't necessarily, you know, top-down cultural change probably isn't going to happen very easily or very quickly, but incubating some kind of new way of being more humanized culture in a smaller niche seems like that's potentially got a little bit more, you know, possibility in it.

I mean, some of the sort of heartbreaking parts of the data were when, you know, there was one collaboration that was a research school district partnership. And the teachers said, like, the researchers, like, returned our emails within 24 hours. If we had a question, someone would actually respond. They had some dinners at the house of like one of the researchers who was like hosting the thing. And so just like, I mean, I guess a dinner is like a little above and beyond, but the like returning an email is not like they had a norm on their team that they would respond to emails within 24 hours.

And just this sort of like sheer fact of I have a question and someone will actually respond to my question.

Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot, one of my mentors at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote a great book about respect. And, you know, you like, you go to a hospital and you get like perfectly competent treatment, but you feel like you're being sort of poked and prodded and no one is actually listening to you or giving you any sort of— you see all these specialists, but no one's in charge of the like whole picture of what's happening to you.

And Sarah contrasts this to a midwife.

who helps a woman in Brooklyn, the Bronx, can't quite remember, give birth. And the woman said, you know, my previous birth was at a hospital and I felt like I was just like a number. And like this woman like took the time to listen to me, know me, understand what kind of birth I wanted. In the end, there was a complication and they ended up going to the hospital anyway. But like the, just the difference in the way that she had been seen.

Yeah.

So, you know, like I think that is very much under our control.

It doesn't require lots of money or huge structural changes. Like it's just about about respecting the people who we're working with.

Right, exactly. But yeah, no, I've got to just say, Sarah has been someone I've always wanted to speak to on the podcast because I think I love her work in the portraiture methodology. I mean, she's just fabulous. So yeah, just wanted to mention that.

I think part of the reason that the portraiture method works in her hands is that she's such a good listener.

She stares at you wearing her kind of regal clothing and makes you feel like you're the most important person in the world. I love that.

By the way that she's listening to you. I will say that at one point I was teaching a class early on in my career at the Ed School, and my mother, who is a very wise person and is in education, was like, could I attend this class virtually? I just love to learn. I'll do the readings. I like want to see what's going on. And she did. She like, she did the reading, she wrote the paper, it's an excellent paper, etc.

But, um, she said, Jal, you know, I can see on the video that when students are saying things, like, you're not really looking at them. Like, you're thinking about the next thing that's going to happen and who you're going to call on next and where the discussion is going to go. And she's like, you've got to stop that. Like, when someone is talking, you have to really look at them and like take in what they're saying.

Your mind can also be doing some other things, but you've gotta like, and I was like, okay, Mom, you're right. Good.

You're right. That's, that is good feedback. I love that. Brilliant. I'd love, if I can, I'd love to just ask you, I mean, you know, brought in time in the response time to emails, but you do talk about time in the book. And just briefly, I do think that's not an insignificant piece of this picture because sometimes time is taken out of the equation. It's just like, this is a thing that should work. And if we acknowledge the complexities, but it just should work. But actually sometimes things might work, but they might take their own sweet time, right? And I think you do. Yeah. I just like the couple of ways you particularly talked about time in one of the chapters. So if you could open that up.

Sure. I mean, anything that involves teachers needs to start with the sort of basic realization that teachers are the most time-starved people in the whole equation.

Like, researchers have time, district folks have time, state folks have time, foundation folks have time, nonprofit people have time. Teachers do not have time. Poor teachers. So, and the research on teacher professional learning really bears this out, that like teachers can be quite resentful of meetings of any sort because they need to prep for class, they need to grade. You know, maybe some of this will change, but like this is the way it has long been. And so any kind of initiative that involves teachers needs to like start with deep recognition of that fact and build the time that you need to do the work that you want to do, which means if it's deeper work, you need summertime. It means if it's more immediate work, if it's during the year, it needs to in some ways like pretty closely connect to the problem the teacher is trying to solve, which is like, what am I going to teach tomorrow? And How is it landing with my students and how could I adjust that?

So in theory, these methods are well suited to that because they are a little incremental, a little experimental, try, collect, reflect, experiment.

But sometimes people get on a train of, well, we're going to do this this year, and it gets disconnected from what teachers are trying to do in the immediate term. So that's one branch of the, of the time question.

I feel like you were also asking a little bit about short-term and long-term.

Yeah. Can I read the quote? Because I just think it was really beautifully said. You say that the longer unfolding of time required for a method to run its cycles, for new learning to take place and new practices to take hold. Again, in a kind of industrial, imported industrial model of things need to happen at this moment and they need to take this amount of time and then we're moving on to the next thing, which schooling is quite based on that kind of logic, right? It's somewhat countercultural to say, well, it just needs to— new learning needs to take place in its own time.

Yeah. And also building—

another thing is that school systems are very turbulent. So the people can turn over from year to year, especially in higher poverty settings. The superintendents can change, the school board can change. And so you said at one point that teachers are sort of masters of like shutting out everything that's beyond their door.

And there's like a certain adaptive logic to that, right?

If the people above you keep changing and, you know, so some of the most successful efforts, the literacy one we studied, the Chicago graduation one, you know, these things lasted over a long period of time. They like outlasted particular principals, leaders, etc. And that seems really important that if you really want to get better at something, you're not going to get it like within a month or two. Like it's going to take some significant time and there's some benefits, right?

You're building up some knowledge and some expertise on the thing.

And so if you're just like whipsawed to the next thing, then that's not going to help. So I think a big challenge of sort of human and humane school system is like how to create enough stability that people can really work on things.

Yeah, it's true. And there, I mean, you, you get the other dynamic of the revolving door of leadership, and then each leader has their own particularly favored continuous improvement design method, maybe, right? You know, people will come in with their own approaches that they want to implement, and then things shift and you get that kind of churn and fatigue of reform efforts. But, you know, I think that's also a feature sometimes.

Yep. That's interesting.

But yeah, no, just wrapping up if we can, just, I'd love, I mean, what do you hope for the book? I mean, what, you know, it's out there in the world now, you know, there's so much kind of richness in the book. So yeah. What do you hope that the book will do itself, but also more generally, I mean, what kind of sense of hope and optimism are you feeling towards these kinds of efforts in public, particularly in public systems? Yeah.

I mean, you mentioned you're going to have Amelia on later this year, who, you know, she was a part of our project and now is a professor at the London Interdisciplinary School.

And one thing she had always said about the project was our kind of hope was that you would have one of these kind of practitioner-oriented guidebooks in one hand, like, here's how to do, like, instructional rounds or whatever it is.

Yeah.

And then in the other hand, you would have our book.

So, you would be, like, trying to do the method with some guidance from the person who developed it.

And then you would have our book being like, well, just remember, like, this is a leadership task. It's more about the humans than about the process. And did you solve a problem that people thought that they had rather than a problem that you thought that they had?

And did you, did you, did you? And It would sort of give you a series of questions.

We have started to get pressed by people like Catherine Lewis, who's one of the leading scholars of lesson study.

She's like, you know, could you make some practitioner-facing assessments or tools of some of the things that you say, you know, not to be cookbooks, but just to sort of like boil down some of the key things into questions you could ask yourself as someone who's leading the process.

Yeah, nice.

I think that's a good idea. I think that might be a next step for us.

That's great. Yeah. Some kind of reflective prompts or something.

Yeah.

Interesting. No, amazing. Well, thank you, Joe. I mean, it's an honor to meet you and, you know, great pleasure to have the conversation. So no, thank you so much for taking the time to come on.

Yep.

Really enjoyed it. Thanks, Tim.

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