Adaptable Curriculum - A Conversation with AJ Juliani

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The most successful curriculum that we've seen has been locally created by educators. Yes, it's imperfect, but they own it. And because they own it and because they can tweak it and change it and have that ownership, then they are really empowered to create something that is meaningful rather than just following a script of what you're supposed to do.

Hello, thanks for joining me on the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. I've got a great conversation for you this week, hopefully for some relaxing winter vacation listening, with AJ Giuliani, who is the founder and CEO of Adaptable Learning and serves as faculty for the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. Prior to his current role, AJ served as head of learning and growth at NextLesson, Director of Learning and Innovation for Centennial School District, and Education and Technology Innovation Specialist for Upper Perkiomen School District. Previously, AJ worked as a K-12 staff developer and instructional coach at the Wissahickon School District, where he also taught middle school and high school English language arts. AJ's latest book, released last month, is Adaptable: How to Create an Adaptable Curriculum and Flexible Learning Experiences That Work in Any Environment. Previously, he authored Empower, an education bestseller and the award-winning winning launch with John Spencer on bringing design thinking into K-12 classrooms. AJ's award-winning blog and website serve as a place to share ideas and thoughts around intentional innovation and the future of learning. You can catch up with AJ on Twitter @ajguliani or on LinkedIn.

Hey, how you doing?

Hey, I'm good, man. How are you? Good to see you. Yeah, you too. Cool. Well, thank you for joining me. It's absolutely Pleasure to have you with me on the podcast. Yeah, firstly, I would love to ask you whether— so on your website, big letters, adaptable and flexible, and some big good concepts for the flux that we're living through right now. So I was just to kind of get us going, were you adaptable and flexible before the pandemic, or was this something that you've kind of learned and responded to as a result of the last couple of years?

I put on the back cover of the book, that this is something educators have always been. I think we've always been adaptable. We've always been flexible. The systems, however, around us have not always been that way, right? So I would say that I, I've definitely always been adaptable and flexible, like most of the educators that I know, but the curriculum that I had wasn't adaptable and flexible. The resources that I had most of the time, materials, textbooks, those different types of things weren't adaptable and flexible. And so I think a lot of times then that bleeds into your daily instruction, your assessments as not being adaptable and flexible. So I think as human beings, as educators, we've always done a great job of, oh, this kid, this situation, this is happening. How can we make those systems? And so that's really what the book is about. It's like, how can we take the best of what educators have always done and actually create some systems for curriculum, instruction, and assessment that actually support us. When COVID hit, we all were adaptable. We made changes in 24 hours.

Yeah.

But the curriculum wasn't built for it, right? The resources weren't built for it, right? The systems that— those are all the things that I think needed to work. But the people, we showed the world, right? We were adaptable.

Yeah, no, absolutely. No, that's interesting. And so, so did— that was already a work in progress, the book? Was it before the pandemic, or was that something that—

No, I started, I started doing a lot of research, bringing some stuff. Now the book that I wrote, the second book I ever wrote called Learning by Choice really built on that book in so many ways. And that book was really how can we add choice in our instruction? And so it kind of built on that. And so as I was leading professional development, writing articles, doing webinars, trying to help folks in the middle of the pandemic, it just really hit me that this is a system thing. You know, this isn't, This isn't a people thing. And so that's kind of where the idea came from.

Yeah, no, it's an interesting thought that I've always thought that as a teacher, you're engaged in hundreds of thousands of mini interactions every single day, right? And you know, you're adapting to each one. You're trying to understand each child or, you know, what mood are they in today? That adaptability, as you say, interpersonally is built in, but structurally very much not. Not at all. No, interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah. So your background, I was reading you were You're a kind of serial entrepreneur, right? So you started 15 businesses before you were— I don't know how old you were when you started, but also I liked your, what you call it, your failing report that you write every year.

Working on one right now.

Oh nice, good, good. So I wondered, has that kind of always informed your approach? Because I mean, clearly there's an adaptability and resilience that you have as an entrepreneur. Has that kind of always built into your feeling and kind of philosophy around education right from the start?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. So my family that I'm surrounded by, like, I didn't think I came from a family of entrepreneurs, but now looking at it, you know, my grandfather founded and started his own church and his own mission organization. My dad, very similar. My other grandfather has started his own steak shop and different types of things. And so I think it was, you know, embedded in me at a young age that if there's a problem, what are you gonna do about it? You're not looking for someone else to solve your problem, or you're trying to figure out kind of what are you supposed to do it? And I grew up in a small town where you had to do everything. So played sports, you're in the play, student council, all these different types of things. I was in a band. And I think that gave me a perspective that there's just a lot of different ways to do things, right? I was never pegged into kind of one thing. And you know, I was a working class family, grew up in my grandmom's house, lived there all the way until I was 18 years old. And I just love the idea of you can build a business around something to solve other people's problems or a problem that you have kind of scratching your own itch. And so it's always been something I've done as an educator. Most of us don't get paid enough to just be an educator.

Yeah.

So it was either finding another job, which I did for years, landscaping, waiting tables, that type of thing, or starting businesses. And so that's really kind of where I got started on the side building businesses. And then it's just kind of grown. I, love the journey of building something, whether that is a business or a curriculum or a sports team or something like that. I really enjoy that. And I realize that I like that process much more than sustaining something. And so I think that's why I've been a serial entrepreneur over time.

Yeah. Nice. And how about your feelings around what the students, young people need in terms of, you know, as an experience educationally, does that inform your view about the kind of educational experience and learning experience that young people need to support them to be more more like that?

Yeah. So, uh, John Spencer and I wrote in Empower that we don't think that everybody's gonna have to be an entrepreneur when they graduate, but everybody's gonna have to think like an entrepreneur, right? Everybody's gonna have to have entrepreneurial type skills in whatever job they have. And so I think that there's plenty of folks, my wife would be one, she doesn't ever wanna start a business, but in her roles and what she's doing, she has to think entrepreneurial. She has to come up with ideas and find solutions in what she does, whether it's working with the kids at home or working in a job or any of those types of things. And, and I, I say that because I think for a long time, we separated these ideas of entrepreneurs, like someone who's just going off problem solving, coming up with solutions, getting in touch with the empathy of your audience, the people you're working with. And I think that's why I'm so drawn to design thinking, because it's that idea of, can you solve problems for other people and yourself in ways that benefit a large mass of people, not just maybe 2 people. And I don't think everybody's going to be an entrepreneur. I'm not one of those people that say, ah, college is for nobody and everything like that. Everybody's going to take their own path and their own journey. But I do think that everybody will have to think and kind of work like an entrepreneur at some point in time.

Yeah, there's a skill set there, a set of competencies that will be useful in all sorts of different contexts, right? Wherever you find yourself.

For sure. Right. And I just look at everybody that I come in contact with nowadays in different types of professions, and most folks are, you know, not just doing the same thing every day, right? They're not just filling out their TPS report and doing the same exact task every day. And I think less and less of that type of work is happening, right? And you see people actually just leaving those jobs now, which I think is like, oh, everybody's kind of freaking out that their people are leaving jobs, but it's because they have options now. And if, as long as people have options, they're not going to want to do the same thing every day most of the time.

Well, and those, those repetitive tasks, they're going to get automated anyway, right?

They already are, right? They already are.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. And was that some of the inspiration for you to start doing the kind of 20% time and the Genius Hour and, you know, to try and give some of that experience to your students?

You know, for me, I, I started that when I was in a really bad place as an educator. I was just having a really tough year. It was 2011, and my kids weren't engaged. I had just some tough classes. I was overwhelmed with a lot of parts of the job, teaching, coaching my own kids at home, IEPs, parents, grade books, you know, all that kind of stuff, right? New initiatives. And I kind of just went down that rabbit hole looking for some inspiration myself and came across Daniel Pink's Drive TED Talk and his book talking about motivation and just started to see a couple different people that were doing things like this 20% time that Google had done. And I was an English teacher, so it really worked with my content area because it supported reading nonfiction. We wanted to do more nonfiction in our curriculum. We wanted to do it, trying to find kids that get reading that they're engaged in. And so it was just almost like the stars aligned. We were supposed to do this nonfiction marking period. I came across this idea. I had the freedom and flexibility to kind of do something different for at least that amount of time and did it. And I was by no means the first person that did it. I just— I'm somebody who just writes a lot about what we're doing. So we just shared out that learning journey.

Yeah.

And, you know, for my students, and I say this a lot of times, the thing that happened was many of them actually just cared about the learning and not about the grade. And that was the first time for many of them that they had done that. And it took a while to get through that process. And then for me to see that happen, then I was hooked, right? Then I was like, This is what we want out of education. We don't want kids just doing something for marks or grades or to move on to the next step. We want them learning because they like learning.

Yeah, it's that intrinsic motivation piece that the process of learning, that's the valuable part, not just the reward you get at the end of it. So then thinking a bit more about that is, as you were saying, writing about it. I think that's been hugely valuable for many other educators, right? Clearly. I mean, you've realized that because you get a window onto somebody else's classroom and more and more educators are doing that, which I think is really valuable. And some of the most interesting reading is when you're, you know, hearing a teacher reflect on what they've done. Did it work? What didn't work? And actually that's been, I think, hugely valuable for a lot of people from your writing. But as I say, also from other people's. Writing, doing the same kind of thing.

Yeah. And I was during a time period where blogs were really big, right? Teachers were starting to blog all over the place. You would get lots of comments on your blog. The interesting thing was I took that post and I put it on Hacker News. I don't know if you know what Hacker News is, but it's like a Reddit forum that was created by the founders of the Y Combinator. Right. So for tech founders, that type of thing. And I put it on that because I had been into that type of thing, and, uh, it exploded. It went viral. And on my blog post, my original one, I had hundreds of comments from people all around the world wanting to help my students. I was like, oh man, I think we're on to something here, right? Like, this is something that connects deeply with so many people that are like, I wish I had that experience when I was in school because much of my school was just people telling me what to learn and I had to regurgitate it back to them. So I think it struck a nerve with a lot of folks, not just educators, a lot of folks around the world.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting how we're still having those same conversations. I mean, I was talking on the podcast recently to Mary Helen Imbodino-Yang. She was talking about shifting to a pull system rather than a push system. Everything gets pushed on kids, master schedules, content, assessments get pushed on kids. And actually what we need to switch to is much more of a pull system. And more and more people are using this kind of language, which I think is really, useful, but it's still a work in progress for people to actually achieve that given the, as you said at the beginning, the rigid structure that we're working within. Yeah.

I tweeted out the other day, like, who told politicians that tests work? Where was the briefing for assessments being just tests and that type of thing? Because you look at so many of the structures that we're under, educators know, like we know kids learn best through experiential learning, through doing stuff that's hands-on and authentic experiences. We know this.

Yeah.

A lot of us feel very trapped by this assessment cycle, the standard cycle, those different types of things. It's not that we don't know, it's I think we feel, how do we get out of that given the confines of our, of our job?

No, it's a, well, it's a good question and a good segue then into an adaptable curriculum because obviously you've been writing about this a lot and the book is a lot about how to construct something called an adaptable curriculum. So Maybe if you could just kind of break that down a little bit, what does that actually mean? Obviously, you've still got, in a US context, you've still got a standards framework underneath it, or in the UK or international, you've got requirements of a particular program, but within and around that, you're building adaptability into your curriculum. So what does that mean for educators?

So I think there's 3 specific shifts that I talk about. The first is that when we're planning a curriculum, we shouldn't start with the standards. Big shift. We should start with reasons for learning because if our students don't have a relevant, meaningful, authentic reason for learning, they're not gonna pay attention. Or if they are, it's just gonna be out of compliance, not engagement and empowerment, right? So it's starting with that reason for learning. Understanding that there may have to be different reasons for different students. So right there, you're becoming adaptable, right? Just in that process of saying, what reasons would work for our students to learn this content, right? So for example, if you want students to learn Shakespeare, well, what's a reason for them to learn Shakespeare? Besides the fact that you're telling them they're gonna read a classic and everything, what's a reason for them to care about it? Does it connect to their lives now? Are there themes that are built into Shakespeare that could impact a 14, 15-year-old student? Now you're starting to talk, right? And have some authentic reasons But if you just come from a place of, well, this is in our curriculum, it's a canon classic, you're gonna need to know it, that's not a reason for our students, except if they want to get a grade. And the same thing in all different types of subject areas. So that's the first start. The second piece of it is when you build a curriculum that has performance tasks instead of assessments, what you do is you allow for adaptability in those tasks. So if a student wanted to demonstrate that they understood photosynthesis, they could do so in many different ways. If you just give them one way, if a written paragraph is the only way, if they can't design a sketch, if they can't make a video, if they can't orally talk about the process and have slides, if you don't give them those ways to demonstrate, then it's not adaptable. And the goal is for them to show their understanding of photosynthesis. And so you should give them multiple avenues through a performance task to do it, which most curriculum doesn't do, right? We just have one assessment that says, hey, here's how you need to tell me you understand photosynthesis. So there's the two first pieces. The third piece, which I think is huge, is when you look at the resources that you're using and materials, as Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop says, we need to have windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. We need to have resources and materials that students can see themselves in, see them through reflections, and see other worlds and societies and perspectives as well. And so we need to kind of develop our materials and resources through that lens. If you do those 3 things, then your curriculum is going to be adaptable. It's going to be flexible. You're going to have an ability to kind of change it and morph it as you see fit.

Nice. Yeah, it's interesting because also the role of context there, right? Like you're teaching in a school in, in a city London or wherever you are, your context will be very different to another country, another demographic, another situation, an international school in Singapore. You have different contexts. And therefore, I guess that keys into your point about reasons for learning something, because the different people are bringing different prior experiences to that. So they have different motivations, different reasons, but also that idea of the resources. I really like, you know, just thinking about that idea of some other colleagues have been looking at decolonizing the curriculum. How do you provide opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds to see themselves in what they're learning. And I like that window idea of then seeing through to other perspectives. But I think that's something that perhaps not when we have these standardized textbooks and we have these approaches, there's a loss of understanding of that importance of the context of where is the school, who are these kids, who are these families that come to the school. So I think that's, yeah, a really interesting point.

Yeah, I make the argument in the book and I've had some people kind of go back and forth about this, that I really think every community's curriculum should look different. So when I see Canada, for example, coming out with a curriculum for an entire province, it makes no sense to me. Inside that province are all different types of communities that have all different types of needs. Now, I'm not saying that the the outcomes of students demonstrating understanding of the certain things should look the same, but the materials and resources should look different. The performance tasks should look different. And we've seen this, right? We've seen this in the United States when you were giving students standardized tests that were giving them questions about farming and our urban students were supposed to answer these with some type of understanding of what that looks like in a rural context. And they, they have no clue, right? They have no background or context. And understand that. And so I really believe that every community should have a part in developing their curriculum if they want it to be adaptable. Otherwise, going through a process of what a handful of people selected that aren't in that community.

No, absolutely. I had a similar experience teaching in Tanzania, and I wasn't teaching the French course, but in, in the French program, there was a text about snow in, in France. These kids have never seen snow. Of course, they've seen pictures of it, but they've never actually experienced what that feels like, or, you know, the buzz of waking up on snow day or whatever, then they have to try and understand and explain, you know, talk about it as an assessment task. And it just has no resemblance to their lives at all. Just makes no sense. Right. Makes no sense.

Yeah.

Do you think it's an efficiency thing that we just need to create content or resources that are usable by many people and in a kind of, in a market economy type thing, or, because it seems like a lot of work, right? You say a province, like, yeah, it makes sense to break a province down into That's Alberta, right? Let's go with that. But actually, Calgary, Edmonton, different places. There are multiple different, as you say, demographics, situations.

Yeah, I think it is, right? So I think there's an efficiency piece. There's a measurement piece. They would like to— I think a lot of times politicians and folks that are decision makers want to compare. They want to say, how is this school doing compared to this school? How is this— province doing compared to this? How is this country doing compared to this country? We have that all the time. And it doesn't matter how much you compare, it doesn't really impact anyone, right? We've seen that. But you need to have the ability, the flexibility to do that. So for example, if you're in Canada as a teacher, you don't really have much flexibility in what you can control and influence in your curriculum. And if you're in a place like Alberta, that has changed 3 times in the past 7 to 10 years depending on who's in government, that really impacts you. It really impacts the students. In the United States, we have national standards. States have taken them, adopted them, but there's actually a lot of freedom in terms of how you can take those standards and develop your local assessments, your local curriculum, that type of thing. And so you have a little more control and influence, but it's hard work.

Yeah.

It takes time. It's additional work on top of the act of teaching. Do you pay people? Do you, how do you develop it? Right. Are they trained in, in writing curriculum? Like all, all those questions that you were just kind of talking about come into play. I think the, the big question people have to ask is the most successful curriculum that we've seen, and ASCD wrote kind of a whole series on this, has been locally created by educators. Yes, it's imperfect, but they own it, right? And because they own it and because they can tweak it and change it and add, modify, bring in resources, see how things are working and have that ownership, then they are really empowered to create something that is meaningful rather than just following a script of what you're supposed to do.

Yeah, nice. And then it's alive, right? Because then as the context changes, you know, the needs of kids change over the years, over decades. As the educators change, they bring different perspectives to it. I guess it's alive, it can evolve rather than just sitting there in a textbook that they've produced.

Well, yeah, I think the other barrier was funds for a long time, right? So you had like a 5-year curriculum cycle. Oh, we're going to buy math textbooks every 5 years, that type of thing. With the advent of open educational resources and things that are free now, I think that's changed a little bit. Whether people have adopted that and embraced that That's a whole different story. But I had— I was one of the 6th open education schools and districts in the United States that were brought into the GoOpen. Our superintendent went down to the White House and we did an entire curriculum from open educational resources. Was it perfect? No. Do we had to add things over the time? Yes. Did we need a lot of professional development?

Yes.

But people owned it and they made it theirs and they cared about it. It wasn't just 'Oh, that's what Pearson says,' or 'That's, you know, what's in the textbook,' that type of thing. They actually thought about instruction and assessment instead of just following what they were told.

Yeah, very interesting. And again, a nice little segue into my, my next question, because I read your piece the other day, which I really enjoyed. What actually prompted me to get in touch with you finally after all these years, but about creators and commentators, you know, you were saying it's so easy to comment and much more difficult to create. And I thought it was, you know, it's a nice provoking piece. It's definitely true. I mean, you see it everywhere, right? It's easy to have a quick jibe at somebody or on social media, whatever. But as you say in that piece, actually, it's not just, you know, you can't blame social media because we've been doing this for centuries. But now I just wanted to invite you to talk about that a little bit, because I think that's, it has big, implications on how we set up education and whether education actually supports or develops creators or just a bunch of people who would be happy to sit and comment and criticize?

I think we've all seen when people create something, some folks are going to like it, a lot of people are not going to like it. If you think 50, 100 years ago, well, that would most of the time be local, right? You know, people are going to say, oh, you own a cheese shop. The people in your town are going to say whether they like it or not. And, you know, maybe somebody says it to your face, but a lot of people say it behind, and that reputation builds upon itself, right?

I don't like his cheese. Yeah, yeah.

But, but nowadays, anything that you create, someone has an opinion on.

Of course.

And, uh, the problem I think with our students right now is that they have grown up in this world where they have seen adults tear apart other adults based on what they've created. And it's really easy to just say, well, that's not worth my time, right? I'm not going to do that. They've seen a teenager on TikTok post something and the comments flood in hating on that person or loving it or both. And so the reason I wrote the post is that actually when you look at the algorithms on most of the social media, it's set up to give more views to posts that get more comments. And most of the time the posts that get most comments is kind of hating posts and that type of thing. But the only way to kind of really combat that is actually by creating more.

Yeah.

You know, if only 10% of folks on social media are creating and the other 50, 60% are commenting, the other ones are just lurking and watching. Well, if we can bump that up to 20, 30% of creators, it's gonna be a lot less of those vitriol comments. And also there's the empathy piece, because if you create something, and someone hates on your work, you're much less likely, cuz you have that feeling, to go out and just spew those different types of comments as well, because you have experienced it. You've walked in their shoes, right? You understand what they're doing. And so I, I've used this analogy a lot of times that Tim Logan shared in a post one time called the Chef vs. the Cook. And I think schools often like producing cooks, meaning people that can follow a recipe.. And depending on how well you follow your recipe depends whether or not you get promoted and move along and that type of thing. Whereas when we see a lot of successful people in society, most of them are doing chef-like things. They're creating things, they're coming up with things on their own. They're putting things out there. They're failing, right? It's not always gonna taste good, uh, but they're putting it out there, that type of thing. And so the big question is how can we promote more creating in schools so that kids can develop that empathy, they can develop that creative muscle. And also just because it's going to be better for society. If more of the mob has created things, then there's going to be less of the mob. That's my theory.

Nice, I like it.

That's my theory.

Is that also why you— because I saw one post you wrote about giving your one of your children access to Snapchat.

Yeah, I mean, for me it's like, this is the world that they're living in And, um, I would love to be able to be alongside her in that journey, sharing an account, doing those different types of things, showing her where, hey, if you see that feed right there, all of a sudden you can start diving into stuff that's not gonna be good for you, or you have to set your profile settings like this. I, I don't want them to just, when they're 14 years old, figure it out themselves. I think that's a big danger is not having these conversations and then having the experiences. And you know, my daughter, she doesn't even use Snapchat anymore because it's not really cool to her anymore. She uses Instagram and we have a shared account and it's, it's always a conversation. We always can talk about stuff, have conversations instead of being like an, I gotcha, or a, you know, a sneaky thing. Is she going to do stuff that is going to get her in trouble? Sure. She's a teenager. Right. But I think we in schools have this really awesome opportunity to have kids create in safe places. And out in the world, a lot of these places aren't safe right off the bat. And so I think it's almost part of our role to help them do that while they're here in our schools.

Yeah. Nice. As you say, there's kind of a literacy and a confidence around using, for example, social media, et cetera. But there's also the bigger question of, of just building stuff. As you said, it feels good to build stuff, you know, creating stuff is, is an important dynamic in your life rather than just being a passenger or, you know, one of my good friends, Vili, talks about as a student, you just go and sit in the cinema and watch the movie. Whereas we want you to be acting on the stage, creating the movie as much as possible, because that's, again, maybe it's that entrepreneurial spark or that kind of sense of responsibility for your own learning that we're also trying to support, right?

Yeah. And it's that shared experience too, right? Sometimes you're not always going to be creating something yourself. Maybe you're going to work with a team and build something. You're going to help somebody out and you realize that it doesn't have to be your idea for it to have value. And I think that's one of those things that we really need to learn at a young age, that it doesn't have to necessarily be our idea to have value and also just continue to put ourselves in those shoes, right? So, uh, in the US, when we go out to a restaurant, we tip our server. They did a whole study that said people who have previously worked in a restaurant as a server tip way more than people who have not. And I would say that's probably as an educator, we are much more compassionate to other educators when we're parents, when we're going into that type of stuff, than people who have not been in their shoes. So the more we can create, I think we're gonna have a better perspective into things that we're like, you know what? That's not my perspective. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I don't need to leave a comment that's tearing this person down because it looks like they put a lot of time and effort into their work. And it's gonna stop you in your tracks a little bit more.

Yeah.

I mean, we've been talking around lots of these different kind of strategies that you've been talking about for a long time, like the launch cycle with John, or inquiry-based learning generally, genius hour, 20% time, all of that. And you wrote a nice piece earlier this year about the research backing all of that up. And it was— I was interested to see, because I do some work now with Ewan McIntosh, and you'd reference one of his posts from 2013, I think, about the beginnings of 20% time and how useful unstructured time was for students. So it's an interesting little connection there, but I wondered, yeah, what, what is your feeling as having dug into the research? Because, you know, I'm interested in that as well. I think there's a lot of back and forth about how effective these kinds of strategies are. Sometimes they're well implemented, other times not so well. You know, what are your feelings there about what you've learned from that research? And does it stack up? Does it support these kinds of approaches everywhere?

Yeah, so I think especially some of the recent research around inquiry and project-based learning show that it has some really great outcomes for students who are doing other types of standardized tests, AP tests, those different types of things. And, uh, you can look on that research roundup. I think it's ajgiuliani.com/blog/research. There's so many different things to kind of support it. Probably my biggest The one thing that I talk about though is I always want people to understand that how we're taking this research and these measurements is still flawed. Meaning we only are showing how it benefits most of the time achievement tests that are standardized, multiple choice types tests. And so if you take an inquiry-based unit and then you test them in the same way of a traditional type of unit, I think that's a flawed approach to measuring because you're, you're going to get so many other benefits from that inquiry approach. I also don't think it's new at all, right? You know, why did you want to start a podcast? Because you're curious about it. So you researched up on how to record and how to launch it and how all those different types of things. You did that because you cared about it, you're interested, you're curious about it. That's how we naturally learn. We naturally learn either because we're curious about something or because we are forced with necessity to learn something. I think schools for too long tried to use the necessity play. You got to learn this because it's going to get you ready for the next unit, for the next year, for whatever, that type of thing. And now students are sitting in our classroom saying, that's not true. I have options. It's the same reason people are leaving their jobs because they have options. We now have students in front of us that are like, I have options of what I can learn, where I can learn it, when I can learn it, how I can learn it. And so if we don't embrace that in schools, we're gonna become more and more irrelevant as learning institutions. And you've already saw this happen during the pandemic, right? We, we saw this where students were like, I'm not gonna hop on a Zoom because I can just learn whatever you guys are just teaching through a video or watching it. Like, I, I'm not gonna use my time to do that when I don't necessarily have to. And so for me, I think the research stacks up, especially some of the really recent research that came out of like the George Lucas Foundation or some of those types of places, some Gallup work that came came out of it, but bigger piece than that, to me, we're gonna lose our, our relevancy very quick. And I think we are in a lot of places if we don't shift much of our instruction, much of our assessment to these types of practices. And because we're educational institutions, I think that's really hard to do because of what we talked about with the systems that are in place and that type of thing. It's, it's very hard. It's much bigger than just one teacher saying, I wanna shift what I'm doing. It's a much bigger, larger question and problem.

Yeah. One of the things I'm interested in, in a way it comes back to what you were saying about reasons for learning and you know, you're kind of referencing it there as well. What students learn, what we all learn has to have relevance and meaning to us.

Right.

And if it does, you may use an inquiry approach because you know, that's the right thing at that point. But you may also go and say, look, hey AJ, I know, you know a load about open networks, whatever. Can you tell me about that? And so you end up in this direct instruction mode, because at that point it's the most efficient, most useful way to, to understand that concept or to get the information you need. But the point is, it's not a push system, it's coming from you. It's a pull system. It's because as a student, I'm feeling this is really relevant, really meaningful to me now, and I, I'd love to hear about it. I'd love to hear a master, someone who really understands this thing, talk about this for 10 minutes, and I'll take some notes. So you've got a mini lecture.

Yeah, I think direct instruction and lectures get a bad rap.

Absolutely.

Yeah, mostly because when we think about that, we think about someone talking to us about something that we don't care about.

Exactly.

If someone is talking to us about something we care about, yeah, you sit there and we'll ask questions and we'll go back and forth in that type of dialogue or just listen to it for a long time. But then I wrote an article one time, How Choice Makes Lectures Work, and reference that idea exactly that if I sign up for a lecture to want to go hear someone that I am excited to hear, I love it. But if I am forced to learn something that has no relevance or meaningful connection to me and in a way in which that person is just talking to me, well, that becomes the issue.

Yeah. I think the only other thing to add there that I would say is that as you were saying before, but the educator's role sometimes is to make it meaningful. So as you say, Shakespeare, there's deep meaning in Shakespeare in terms of just the experience of being human, falling in love, whatever, you know, family feuds. And so actually your role as an educator, part of that is to find that meaning and communicate that in such a way that, oh yeah, I can find myself in that, right? Yes.

So, you know, you're teaching any type of literature, fiction mirrors reality. Your job is to say, hey, which students are going to see mirrors in this? Which students are going to see windows in this, right? How can we make it a sliding glass door into another time period, but also understand that even though this time period was hundreds of years ago, the same things are happening. People were falling in love, out of love, arguments, all these different types of things. How can this help me as I'm going through this as well?

Brilliant. That's some good stuff, man. I like that. Thank you. Amazing. This lovely conversation. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Maybe just finally, where do you see the positives about the things that are coming out of the pandemic that you're seeing, some things that are shifting? Where are you optimistic? Where are you seeing some of the kind of key challenges? Maybe we'll kind of finish with that.

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing that for me that came out of the pandemic was people realized that our system of schooling was not adaptable. It was not flexible. And thank goodness we had people in it. That could work all kinds of hours and under all kinds of circumstances and make it work for students, right? And so what we've seen is, hey, we weren't prepared for that. And part of the reason we weren't prepared for that is because we have this broken idea of what it means to learn, of what it means to teach, of what it means to measure academic achievement. And so I think there's some real conversations going on around this. I do think right now is a tough time to have those conversations, uh, meaning people are still stressed, there's still a pandemic going on, there's still all kinds of things that are happening. We're living in the moment right now, and, um, I don't know if right now is the best time. Now, some places are, right? There's, there's tons of, you know, schools and communities who I'm working with that I know are going through that, hey, how can we change things that we have control and influence over to make this a better experience? In the next, I say, 5 years, schools are gonna have a, a big blockbuster moment is what I say. This idea of, are we going to take the best of what we've always done and make it work in today's world? Or are we going to say, no, no, no, we wanna keep on doing what we've always done. And, uh, it's gonna be a lot of hard conversations. It's gonna be a lot of, we've already seen it. Tough situations that people are in and figuring that out. But whether we want to or not, we've been put in that position. And I think the government is going to play a big role in a lot of different places. I think that depending on how well they listen to educators, how well they listen to parents, how well they listen to their communities, it's going to have a big impact on what that looks like, because everybody went through schooling and education. And so everybody believes that they're somewhat of an expert on what works because they had this shared experience. Not understanding that when they went through education to what we're doing now, it's a very different world, you know, and so it has to be a very different experience.

Yeah, and you, as you say, you have to listen to the educators because what— going to school doesn't make you an expert educator, right?

It does not. The same as going to a basketball game doesn't make you—

Exactly, exactly. Oh, awesome. AJ, thank you so much. Really a pleasure to talk to you, a really enjoyable and interesting conversation. Thank you so much.

Hey, thanks so much for having me on. Let me know where I can share it out. I appreciate all the work you're doing.

Amazing. Thank you, Ajin. We hope you've enjoyed this episode.

Please feel free to continue the dialogues with us on social media with the hashtag #futurelearningdesign and on the Intrepid Ed News website intrepidednews.com.