Community-Based Design & the Whole Child Model - A Conversation with Cynthia Robinson-Rivers and Jeff Wetzler

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If you just try to engineer some academic outcome and you forget that that's in the context of a person, within the context of a community, you're going to go at it in a, in a very technical, narrow way. And you might make some measurable gains, but you're not going to get all, nearly all the way there. And you're going to potentially do some damage along the way.

Hi everyone, and thanks for joining me again this week. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. Most school reform and innovation efforts claim to be research-based, but far fewer are genuinely built with the people who have to live inside them every day. Building on some of the themes that I explored with Dr. Iwan Shahril on a recent episode, this week we're diving deeper into community-based design. Rather than starting with an expert's blueprint, what happens when innovation starts with the community's own convictions about what it's children deserve, and why that starting point often determines whether an idea actually takes root or just gets installed and then quietly left to atrophy. As a fantastic example of that process working really well, I discuss with my guests the Whole Child Model, born exactly that way and now reaching thousands of students across the US and beyond. My guests this week are Cynthia Robinson Rivers and Jeff Wetzler from Transcend Education, a nonprofit that has spent the past decade helping schools redesign learning through community-led processes. Jeff co-founded Transcend in 2015 and led it as co-CEO until 2024. He's the co-author of Extraordinary Learning for All and the author of Ask. Cynthia is a managing partner at Transcend and developed the Whole Child Model as founding principal of Van Ness Elementary School in Washington, D.C., before joining Transcend to help other schools adopt it. You can find links to case studies and examples of Transcend's amazing work around the world in the show notes. So maybe what we could do first, because I'd really love to get into some of the specifics of the Whole Child Model and how it's like making real impact in many, many places all around the world by now. But could we start with the beginnings, the inception of that rooted in this idea of community-based design so that if it's okay, Geoff, you just open that up a little bit to start with and then we can see, you know, how that might manifest into the specifics around the Whole Child Model.

Yeah. Yeah, perfect. So community-based design is a method that Transcend has been developing really since the beginning of our organization. We founded the nonprofit in 2015 as a way to provide an alternative to 2 other types of change that sometimes happen in education that we see have limits. You know, one of those is a— what we would all probably refer to as like top-down change. Where there's some person, often some person in power, who thinks they have the right idea and just says to everybody, this is how it's going to be. Whether that's a school owner or whether that's a government official or, you know, a funder or, you know, we've seen, we've all seen versions of this top-down thing. Typically it doesn't get to the best answer and it doesn't sustain. The polar opposite of that is completely bottom-up, where you say to teachers who are already stretched, you know, parents who are already stretched, Just go figure it all out yourselves. And while there is great wisdom in the front lines, when people are completely stretched and have no resources and capacity to do anything other than their jobs, it's very difficult to have really thoughtful, strong design innovation come about, be robust, sustained. And so we said, what's a third way? Is there a way that we can actually tap into the collective intelligence of students who we believe are the most important experts in their own experiences? of educators who have a wealth of experience and wisdom, of parents who are critical players in this, of employers, of community members, to all participate in the design process, but not just say to them, go figure it out yourself, but to actually equip them with really, you know, critical information about learning science, about the trends that kids are inheriting, about different models that are out there, and offer them a way to participate together to come up with a vision for what they want for young people. today and in the future, for what they want their graduates to know and be able to do, for the kinds of principles that should animate their school or other learning environment. And to say, what could we either build ourselves or borrow and adapt from other places and pilot it and test it and see what works and what doesn't work, and together learn from that and continue to go through that process we call the design cycle, ultimately to get to a model that is really fostering extraordinary, not just measurable learning, but also extraordinary experiences. And we, we place as much value on the experiences that young people have as on whatever measurable outcomes they are, partly because the experiences drive the outcomes and predict the outcomes, but also because we believe that experiences matter in their own right. They are an end in and of themselves. And so part— a big part of community-based design is understanding what are the experiences that learners are having, both young learners as well as adult learners as well as family learners. And so We spend a lot of time inquiring into that, even measuring that, reflecting on that. But over time, this iterative process comes to a model that is, you know, far different, far better. And in many places, learning environments and schools get to a place where the model is so strong that other people start to say, wait, what are you doing? We want to learn from that as well. And then the community-based design process can be around how do we capture the magic of what we're doing and codify it and share it? And there's a whole set of you know, lessons we've learned around that, which we can talk about too, and different ways to do that. But in a nutshell, that's, you know, that's a lot about community-based design.

Yeah, no, super interesting. And it really makes me think a while back I had a guy called Roland Koepers on the podcast who's a complexity scientist and works in sustainable energy in the Netherlands. And he also worked with the IB to develop a complexity module for the IB Diploma. But he talked about top-down mirrors and bottom-up change or something. But it was like this idea, exactly what you've just talked about, super interesting. This kind of almost like a complexity principle of Having both, and there is a role for the top-down to kind of mirror and catalyze, but the bottom-up is kind of where a lot of the wisdom and collective intelligence is coming from in practice, as you said. So super interesting to hear that. And I mean, if I can, in my research before, I was really interested by the, what you call, is it the community conditions framework? Because—

Yeah.

I think, I don't know, Cynthia, if you wanted to speak to that, but the thing that was interesting to me there was also this idea of We sometimes go in and kind of want the situation to be a certain way and actually not necessarily looking at what's the assets of what's already here, like what's amazing that's already going on, but also just giving kind of weight to that, the conditions that are necessary for certain things. And sometimes those conditions take time to develop, you know, again, back to that like silver bullet top-down thing that we sometimes get trapped in. But there is, yeah, just nurturing those conditions, relational community conditions. is a super interesting thing for me, but I don't know, Cynthia, could you perhaps talk to that, some of those Cs of the community conditions?

Yeah, and I put a document in the chat for you that could be helpful reference. It certainly is so important as we work with schools. We typically partner with our schools that we have a deeper connection to for 3 years. And some of that is helping them engage in community-based design processes like Speaking with the families, interviewing students, shadowing students, understanding more about what's happening within the school community. But a good part of it is working with the school team to think about the conditions and how they can enable school transformation. And so one, for example, is around conviction, the mindsets of the teachers and staff members at the school. Because that's so important, before we even talk about any kind of strategies, we often are just looking at mindset shifts needed, or developing knowledge around the things that happen in a child's life that impact their development and then later their behavior or how they show up in school. And so towards the end of getting greater conviction within staff, we have all these means toward that end that include building up knowledge around trauma, brain science, science of learning and development, et cetera. Capacity is another one that comes up often. We work with schools that are stretched super thin in terms of what the adults are doing. We have to think about who's doing what, how they're sharing responsibility in order to make this doable and not something that causes overwhelm for teachers. So yes, we think about these 5 Cs, the conditions, and we'll speak with the schools about it so that they're aware of this as well as they think about how they can both create change and then sustain it over time.

Yeah, amazing. Super powerful. I don't know, why is it always Cs in education? I don't know. It always seems to be words beginning with C, right? But the coalition, I particularly liked that kind of sense of how are those, that those kind of webs of relationship enabling some of the things that, that need to happen. So.

I'll just add one thing on conditions. In the early days of Transcend, the first couple of years, we really focused almost exclusively on the technical design of the school. You know, what does the timetable look like? What's the curriculum? How do we use space? All those kinds of things. And we started to see patterns. We saw Some of the projects that we were working with were just flourishing and really doing incredible things. And honestly, some of them really stalled out or fizzled. And when we asked ourselves what explains the difference between these 2 things, it was the conditions. It was the human conditions. And it was really out of studying the difference between the successful design projects and the ones that were less successful that helped us to derive that theory. Now we actually start with conditions. We say that like the technical design matters, But the conditions are what's gonna make or break it. And so we will literally measure conditions and work with schools to help them to self-assess their conditions and use the state of the conditions as a way to almost help shape what the design journey should look like. So if coalition, for example, is weak, that will influence who do we bring to the table at the design journey? What are the relationship building we need to do? If capacity needs, you know, and correspondingly what's strong and let's build on that as well. And so ultimately the design journey is always trying to attend to 2 things. One is a better technical design And the second thing is nurturing the conditions. We look at them almost like the soil that the design grows out of. If the soil is rich, the design will grow. If the soil is not rich, it doesn't matter how good the seed of the design is. And so we really have to always have that double attention.

Love it. Yeah, I love it. I noticed the soil reference in there. I like that. Amazing. So, and then I'm sure there's probably many different examples of that happening. And as you said, and, you know, I appreciate your reflection, not all of them work, right? Some stall. But one that clearly has really taken root and developed into really something quite special is the Whole Child Model.

Yes.

So I don't know how much of the backstory of that, Cynthia, you'd like to just perhaps tell the story of where it started, how it started. Because I think, I do think that's like an, that's an important piece of it and having it perhaps reflecting on the actual conditions at this, where that started at Van Ness School when you were, what, back in 2015, perhaps you could just, yeah. Talk a little bit about how those things came together and where it's beginning to end up.

Yeah, the school has an interesting origin story. So it had been a school that was closed for many years. It, prior to closing, was in one of the poorest areas of Washington, D.C. and Southeast. And the students that attended the school mostly lived in public housing surrounding the school. When it was reopened 7 years later in 2015, it was After the neighborhood had been redeveloped. And so a school that once served mostly low-income African American students was then serving mixed-income, very diverse community with students from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds and many different political beliefs and many different economic backgrounds. So I was charged with creating a school that could both be responsive to the needs of students who had faced all the trappings of poverty. So food insecurity, community gun violence, often trauma within the household, plus creating a community where students from very different places could come together and have compassion for one another, empathize with one another. And 2015 was about as polarized a time in our country's history as we're experiencing right now.

Hmm.

So that was enormously important. So we started with wanting to create a school experience that would foster connection and belonging amongst students, both for these high-need students who had challenging backgrounds and to connect students across lines of difference. That was our charge at the beginning, and so that was the lens through which we saw school design. Transcend joined me and was incredibly helpful in helping me to think about how we could work with the community to design something with that in mind that would be responsive to the student and the family's needs. And we spoke with stakeholders and we'd asked, you know, if we are successful over these 6 years that we have the kids, what will they be like when they graduate from our school? And that's where we were able to develop what Transcend calls graduate aims. So the family said they wanted the students to be compassionate, be good critical thinkers, to be able to think creatively when solving problems. And so that list helped us to decide how we would design the school. Some of the strategies we learned about in this year-long experience with Transcend, we still use as we're designing something new. So this idea of having listening sessions with families, surveying your community to hear and understand what their experience has been, looking at a student's journey from when they leave the house to come to school throughout the school day until dismissal, conducting empathy interviews with students to understand what the, you would say, end user designing for that end user in mind and understanding how to do that by simply talking to students in a way that we shockingly had never done before. And so through that process came about this model, right? So it includes concrete strategies that we developed, in some cases sort of proactively, to develop that kind of community I just described we wanted to have. And as time went on, and some things responsively, when like a problem arose or a challenge within the school day, we developed a part of the model that was in reaction to that as a solution along the way, using community-based design to figure things like that out as the school community grew.

Amazing. So that kind of iterative thing that, Jeff, you were talking about as responding to, when did it become the Whole Child model, like as such, right? Like, did it, did it take a while to kind of with different pieces that needed to coalesce together and like A year, 2 years in, it became— it felt like a whole model itself?

I would say by 2019, we had a codified model. But continuing even to as recent as last year, we've been adding to it in response to either needs that get surfaced at new schools that we're working with or parts of the model that teachers were using that we actually had not officially codified so that we could share it more easily with school communities. As an example, Movement for Learning. We were reflecting a year and a half ago on how much movement is taking place in our classrooms. Multiple recess periods instead of just one. Movement incorporated into the academic instruction. Movement for transitions. And we just hadn't written it down. So the Movement for Learning Implementation Guide is relatively new, within the last 6 to 8 months. It was something that had been happening that we just hadn't codified. Other things had to get developed because of a problem that arose. So maybe by 2020, 2021, after most of the model was codified, we developed structured recess, which is now one of the most popular parts of the model because recess was so challenging. We had an influx of kids from other schools that were, had some really challenging behaviors. Recess period was often ending in violence. I was spending from 3:30 to 4:30 on the phone with parents explaining what had happened. And so we decided, okay, we've got a group of kids, many of them don't have the skills to play safely. What can we do? If taking away recess as a punishment is absolutely not something we will do, because we know that is incorrect for a young developing body, what's the alternative that can be more focused on teaching and skill building for students? So we developed this approach. Now any school that says, oh my gosh, we have all these challenges at recess, kids are fighting, we can give that as a solution. And it came about after the codified model because we saw a problem that we needed to solve.

Interesting. Can I ask you also about that? Because I read in my research, I read, I think it was an interview you gave where you talked about the need to emphasise the structure amongst parents because initially there was, it sounded as though you were communicating more strongly about the compassionate side and the kind of, you know, those, I hate to say it, like stereotypically seen as the softer side of, you know, the kind of holistic, these kinds of approaches. It's not soft at all, right? It often is seen in that way, but that you had to slightly adapt in relation to, was it parent feedback?

Parents or even teachers that see themselves as more stern disciplinarians in the classroom.

Right. Okay. Okay.

Looked at the orientation we have to students, which is honoring their perspectives, respecting them, showing empathy for them when they're upset, looking at their behavior and not wanting to punish it, but instead wanting to understand it and teach them a different way to behave. Can all be seen as just too warm and fuzzy. And we often have to remind either teachers we work with or families at schools where we work that assertiveness and structure is just as important a part of the model. You will actually fail within the school classroom if you are not very structured and if you have either an overly permissive or overly aggressive voice. So both extremes are not good. What we want is in the middle, and it's about being assertive with students, and it helps them to feel safe. And that's especially students who have uncertainty or have had difficult experiences outside of school. They want a strong, assertive teacher, and children at home want that of their parents. And so we kind of had to dispel this myth of like, no, we are not about just letting children do whatever they want to do in school and catering to their every need. They need to see structure. And then that often enables even some of the independence and autonomy and agency that we also want to cultivate at the same time.

Yeah. Super interesting. Like it's a personal interest of mine of the way that the kind of the structure and agency or, you know, whatever it is, you know, this permissiveness, it often takes on a kind of positive-negative false binary, right? Like the structure is related to control and that's the thing we want to get away from because we want more youth agency and youth voice and engagement. And it's such, I just find such an unhelpful positioning because as you say, and you use the word enabling, right? Like the structure enables. in a really powerful way. And the structure doesn't necessarily equate to control, like the desire for control of a teacher-centered model. And so I just find that as a really interesting tension that's in a lot of this kind of work. So yeah.

I just want to add one thing that I think is brilliant about this. You've talked about this false binary. I think a typical way that people deal with this polarity is on the one hand to say, well, maybe let's be a little less punitive, or on the other hand, be a little bit less permissive. But what Cynthia and the Whole Child Model do is they say, actually, let's be developmental. Let's look at this behavior not as something to either punish or permit, but as a sign that we could teach something here. Let's use structure not to control kids, but actually as a way to develop their skills on knowing how to, how to actually interact in a social way, which is obviously, you know, truly aligned with the whole idea of education. But so in some ways revolutionary when thinking about behavior. Let's actually teach what it could look like to behave this way.

Super interesting. Cynthia, you're going to—

I was just, I think about that so much. We, we do lots and lots of school visits. And I had a couple of teachers that were excellent with creating classroom environments where students are truly having a personalized experience. Lots of left, lots of differentiated instruction centers throughout the room. And lots of different kinds of experiences. And so you might come on a school visit, and the teacher has the students on the rug, and she says, centers, and they repeat back because it's like a call and response. And then you see 25 5-year-olds get up, and within 45 seconds they're around the room. One is in the makerspace, 3 are with the teacher doing a phonics-based instruction, another is in the art center, another is in— And people will say, this is amazing. the kids have such agency and this is such a progressive feeling classroom. But what you don't see is the first 6 weeks of school, the enormous amount of structure and practice and reinforcing of expectations that that teacher had to do that enabled later for her to do very little because kids knew exactly what to do, where to go, how to behave, how to treat one another, how to get the teacher's attention, et cetera. And that it was such a great example of what I mean by The structure enables the autonomy.

But that's interesting too, because then the structure is also a practice. It's something about actually it's an embodied, it's something we do together. And the structure can be a kind of relational scaffold somehow that we embody, right? We enact together in this space. I think that's quite interesting. I've not thought about it like that before.

For sure. That you have the structure, that you're using the clear language and assertive voice that explains the structure, and then that you practice it enough that It creates ease.

Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Love it. So then maybe could you speak to how this is then beginning to show up differently then as it flies the nest, let's say? Clearly you're gonna meet new conditions, right? When you go to Texas or you go to somewhere in Africa or where, as you mentioned, this is showing up now in a lot of different places, but you're meeting different conditions. Clearly they're not the origin conditions of the model being developed. Their kind of arrival condition somehow of a model arriving, which is a different kind of dynamic. So how, like, how is that different as a process when it is adopted by a different school that didn't create it?

Yeah. Well, one, when we first started to share the model with 5 schools, we intentionally made them 5 schools that were very different than the flagship school. So one school, you know, had even greater poverty. 2 of the schools had high English language learner populations. Another school was a bit more affluent. So we were doing that testing at the beginning to think about how the model would need to get refined in different contexts. But then fast forward, you're absolutely right. Texas has a totally different set of challenges than Minneapolis, than rural Alabama and Mississippi, which is one, 2 of our newer regions. And we will often say, this is a model, but it is not a one-size-fits-all model. You are to take this, understand it, and then test and pilot it within your school community so that you can see how it should get tweaked to be most effective within your school context. A lot of that we do through the development of a design team at each school. So the principal, another leader, 3-ish teachers and another person that usually focuses on mental health or behavior. Those 3 teachers will learn the model, test it out in their classroom for 4 to 6 weeks, figure out what needs to tweak about it. And then before that part of the model is introduced to the rest of the school, it's with adaptations. This is going to be even more profound as we work in very different settings. And we've gotten a little bit of a taste of this in recent experiences in both Kenya and South Africa and speaking with leaders across the continent. who are using the model as inspiration and in some cases taking parts of it and using it fairly straightforwardly, and in other cases adapting it beautifully to fit their context. And I don't know, Jeff, would you like to share a couple of the examples from African Leadership Academy of some of the adaptations you've heard about the fellows making with parts of the model?

Yeah, I mean, it's been, it's been really interesting to see how what the model is solving for is universal, even if the ways that that looks are different. You know, so some of it is, you know, physical, just what, what does it even look like physically? And so, you know, in the originating school, there were parts of the room where students could go to self-regulate. And in one of the schools in Africa, they said like, let's find, you know, some banana leaves and give that, you know, create a kind of quiet, cool space for kids to go under, but like very different setup, same purpose, same, you know, same needs as well. We've seen it play out in refugee camps in Uganda and in Kenya and have just quite recently seen one school leader in Africa say, I'm going to build out as elaborated a model for whole teachers as I am for whole children as well, because I know that for my teachers to do what I'm asking them to do, they need the same healing. They need the same regulation. They need the same belonging as well. And so it's been very inspiring to see how people are taking the principles and some of the practices and adapting them.

I love that. I mean, that is sometimes we forget that, right? I mean, of course we want, yeah, we want whole, we want whole children or we have whole children. We want to treat them, you know, in a, in a whole way, but we also want to treat each other in a whole way.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Often forgotten, I think, for sure. And I've had Hatim El-Tayeb on the podcast before from ALA and some of the amazing young people from ALA. Also on the podcast with me. It's just such, I mean, that's an incredible place, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. And we, we're so grateful to partner with them through their AL4Ed program. That's where a number of the examples that I was just describing are connected to.

Oh, brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. And just to, if I can, I was curious as you were talking, Cynthia, about the different contexts, what is it that they're coming to you with? Like, they're clearly looking for an approach or, but I can imagine those questions that they're holding or challenges that they're facing in their context. is quite different, or maybe not actually, I don't want to preempt, but what are the kinds of challenges that people are coming with that results in a conversation about the Whole Child Model?

Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the nuts that have been so hard to crack across our country, the model helps solve indirectly. So one example is attendance and chronic absenteeism. 2 very prevalent issues, big challenges, Many districts, large and small, are facing this, especially after the pandemic.

Sure.

And our schools improve attendance and decrease chronic absenteeism. We don't focus on that explicitly. We focus on sense of belonging and connectedness among students, but that then makes school a more inviting and appealing place where you feel more comfortable, both students and families, and it's a place you want to be. So we increase metrics around attendance. I would say that is one of the challenges that we help solve for that across the board in the states has been an issue. Some schools are really looking to decrease instances of exclusionary discipline, whether they've just been reflective about suspending kids and the missed time, or they're trying to respond to state or district-level mandates about it. You want to stop suspending kids, but you don't know what to do instead. And so they may come to us to say, what's this alternative you have? We have a more teaching-based approach that addresses something egregious that a child has done that might result in an out-of-school suspension, but instead keeps them within the school building. That's another big challenge that schools have brought to us. Teacher mindsets is one that's come up, and that's come up a little bit more in some international settings where we really help schools work with their educators to unpack their own experiences, how they were raised, How they were disciplined. And that all shows up in how you then work with students. So if you had very harsh punishments, corporal punishment, you know, children should be seen, not heard attitude from the adults around you, you're much more likely even subconsciously to have that approach with the students you work with. And so schools that want teachers to have a different way of working with students, but it's deep, deep behavioral work around ways that we've always been for decades of our professional lives. That's where some of the ways that we work with schools to sort of reflect deeply on that, become aware of it, figure out ways to get composure or take a beat or a breath before you engage with students with all of that unpacking in mind. That's been really useful to the schools we've worked with. Would you, Jeff, add to that based on what you've heard the fellows say?

I mean, I think that you touched on this, but I think that one of the things that I would just add is sometimes there is this divide between schools feeling like I need to get academics right versus I need to get wellbeing and social-emotional learning right. And I think, you know, many of the schools that we work with see this as a route to better academic performance and say, even if what I'm focused on is literacy and numeracy, if my kids are traumatized, if my kids are not in their learning brain, there's going to be a ceiling on how far I can get them to learn. Literacy and numeracy. And so even if that's the only thing that you're maximizing for, which is not what we think, but even if that is your situation, a lot of schools are saying this is actually the starting point for readiness.

Yeah, that's a great point, Jeff. And that's a data point that we have improved. And another one that we don't directly work on, but it's, we think, a product of kids feeling safer and being better able to learn in school.

Yeah. Amazing. I mean, it's, it's just, there's so much of an optimization trap. I think I was listening, I was listening to a separate podcast this morning about optimization and it's like, We're kind of, we're often so obsessed with these particular things we want to optimize for and we go direct for that thing. But like there's something really powerful about even just where we started about the conditions and the soil. And like actually a lot of the things that maybe we value in this context, and if, yeah, academics, great, they're really important. They will also grow from the soil too, right?

Exactly.

Just trying to optimize for that, for just for that thing without taking care of the soil is like, Might struggle.

Yeah. If you just try to engineer, you know, some academic outcome and you forget that that's in the context of a person who's in the context of a community, you're gonna go at it in a, in a very technical, narrow way and you might make some measurable gains, but you're not gonna get all nearly all the way there and you're gonna potentially do some damage along the way as well.

No, absolutely. And I mean, maybe just one of the questions I wanted to ask you, just maybe more broadly, with Transcend, with your approach, but also still, you know, related, I think, to some of the things we've been talking about. There's sometimes a kind of tendency I find to think we want a new, you know, we wanna transform education, a lot of this kind of big rhetoric that is around. And then there's a kind of an approach, and then there's a standardizing kind of tendency hidden in there to say, oh, we found a good approach, like let's say a whole child model, and now we wanna impose this on everywhere. Because we think this is the transformative version of the new thing that we want to develop. Because, you know, clearly a bunch of great thinking has gone into it, a bunch of really, you know, committed work and educators and passion and all these things. But there's something really interesting about like what wants to grow in a particular community versus another one could be quite radically different. And it's an interesting— As we have these conversations about transformative education and all these things, there's definitely some commonalities, I think, of developmental things or holistic, relational, often a lot of things that are common. But I just wonder how you think about that kind of idea of some of that bottom-up stuff you were talking about, but the pluralism of actually what wants to grow in this place might be quite different to what wants to grow in this other place.

Yes, absolutely. I'll just say, you know, every community is different, and that's why we don't believe in the top-down model. And as we're doing this work around the world, we're seeing that even more. The diff— you know, the differences country to country are even greater than the differences city to city within the United States. Um, one example is we're working with a, you know, really incredible organization in Kenya called Metis, which does participatory innovation work as well. And a few months ago, Cynthia and our team and I collaborated with Metis to bring together about 65 people in Kenya to say, what do we think about the needs that the Whole Child model are trying to serve and the ways that it's doing that? And there was a lot of resonance, but also to your point, you know, a lot of like, there's some things that are different here as well. And what we decided to do based on the reaction is to spend a year together contextualizing the model, not to say Let's just drop this model in, but let's just say, let's work with a set of school communities for a year and say, what is really needed here? And what are the assets that already exist in different communities in Kenya? And let's create a version of the model that is much more localized. And then let's say, what would it look like to share it and spread it and offer it to other people? But that's not something that you do in a day or even, you know, a week. Like, that is deep work. And that work is going to entail students and families and educators all participating in this and saying, you know what, we already do some of this stuff and here's how we do it. And there's other thing you're not even thinking of. Let's add that in. And this piece won't work. And let's take that piece away. And by the time it's done, it will— I think the underlying principles will very much align to where we started as well. But what those principles look like in action, to your point, will be quite different in ways that are quite exciting to us. And I also think will help us learn and strengthen the model even where it originated as well.

Yeah. Nice. There's kind of feedback loops that go all the way.

Totally. Yeah. This is not one-way transmission. Yeah.

I love it. Learning. Yeah. Cynthia, did you want to add to that?

No, that last point is a great one. Like we are learning so much from students that are involved with the METIS Fellowship, schools that have much harder conditions that we have to figure out, oh, how do we double-click or intensify this one part of the model when it's needed for this school community? But then it helps us to build upon and improve the model itself.

Amazing. I mean, it just strikes me, it's such an interesting tension, isn't it? When you then go to like a district level or a even a country level, right? I'm here in France or UK, Australia, or state level in Australia, or that challenge of governing, in inverted commas, that whole system, right? And what are we saying? Are we saying it should be the same in every single school in this state or in this whole country? Or are we allowing some of that kind of what is needed here very locally to show up within the system. And that feels like a really difficult question for systems of governance and leadership in all sorts of interesting ways. I'm not putting you on the spot to solve that one right now, but it just strikes me there's a connection there because it's a really interesting thing about how do you do that governance in a way that is also responsive. But just maybe just finally to wrap up, where are you at now? I know, Geoff, you've had a collaborative collective book that you put out that's talking about the work that Transcend is doing. You know, just yet, any final thoughts you wanted to share about the work that you're engaged in?

Yeah, I'll maybe I'll say a word about Transcend, and then Cynthia, why don't you say about your vision for the whole— where the Whole Child Model goes as well? On the Transcend side, we are partnering with entities around the world with 2 goals in mind. One is learning, one is sharing. And obviously, as we've been talking about, those 2 things go hand in hand. We learn from what others share. We also share in order to learn as well and to see what lands and what is contextualized. And so, We're working with schools everywhere from Africa to India to the Middle East to Europe, government schools, independent schools, international schools across the board. And we are learning so much and we are finding, I think, growing interest in saying, how do we think differently about design, but how do we do it in a way that honors local communities as well? And so it's been, it's been exciting to be exploring and partnering, and we're interested in doing that with anyone who wants to. Get involved.

Great. And the future of the Whole Child Model, Cynthia, where's it going?

We are so excited that it's going worldwide. It's been truly thrilling to me and to my team to see how much it has resonated in places all over the world, whether it's just seeing how many resources are being utilized all over the world, and now more recently seeing it applied in settings that it could really be useful. That's been super exciting to us. And so we are hoping that we can build on that. And expand into even more communities across not just Africa, but other places as well. And I'm excited around, to come back to your question around systems, another transformation we've had in the last 2 years is from directly partnering with schools to building local capacity through trainers that we work with.

That's interesting.

And that's how we're working in Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina and rural communities and how we will work with our fellows in Kenya, and that will just allow much broader scale and allow us to step away with true capacity built within the community. And it is one strategy towards thinking more systemically about this model, not just school by school.

Beautiful. No, thank you so much. No, it's really inspiring. I love just the kind of arc of starting in the community and then it's this thing that gets created there, but then flies and goes You know, goes elsewhere and sparks other things. And no, it's super inspiring. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you. I think it's a, you know, it's a work in process. It's emergent and it'll be exciting to see how it continues to unfold.

Love it. Yeah. Aren't we all work in progress?

Well said.

Well said.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests With us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog, or on social media, or within your own networks.