Disrupting Accreditation - A Conversation with Peter C. Mott

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

You can see how school is defined. It is an organization with clear structures and hierarchies, expectations, norms, values, and compliance mechanisms. But more and more kids, I think, will tune into it. It is possible to create things, to be a shaper of the world without having to jump through all of these other hoops.

Welcome back to the podcast. It was an honor and a privilege to be able to speak to Peter Mott, a gentle giant of international education who is as inspiring as he is disruptive to the comfortable world of international schooling. From 1980 to 2012, Peter held senior leadership positions in international schools in Switzerland, starting at Tassis and then going on to becoming the headmaster and executive director of the American International School of Zurich. Which became Zurich International School. In 2001, Peter was awarded a Klingenstein Fellowship at the Columbia University Teacher College. In 2012, Peter became the director of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges Commission on International Education. It was during his tenure at NEASC that Peter created the ACE Learning Protocol, which was a major shot in the arm for accreditation organizations as well as for international education generally. Since 2017, Peter has been offering his wisdom and expertise as a consultant with Treetop Visions and Learning Beyond Horizons. You can follow Peter on Twitter @pmott2, and you can find him on LinkedIn @petercmott.

So just to start with, in terms of looking at the development of ACE Learning as an accreditation protocol, what was the inspiration and influences that gave rise to that initially?

Yeah, there were a number of things. It was my own experience as a head of school. It was my own experience with accreditation because I had done a lot of accreditation with existing protocols and even have gone back to schools that had been accredited, finding that actually relatively little has changed. And it was the work of Kevin Bartlett also, that is a progressive thinker, and a good friend of mine, Greg Curtis, who just published a book on Moving Beyond Busy, and both of whom I pulled in early. But really what was the trigger in some ways was my son, Stefan, who went through my school, you know, my international school from pre-K through 12. A brilliant young man, but he was bored out of his mind in school, and he refused to play the kind of assessment games and any games that the school imposed on him and had sort of average grades. I mean, he wrote a novel when he was 12, and his final English grade, I think, was a C+. And he is now more articulate and more knowledgeable He may not know very much about Algebra 2, but he's more knowledgeable about the world, about the challenges in the world, what is needed, and he writes better than most college graduates. And that didn't happen through his schooling.

That was despite school, right?

Yeah, it was despite school. So this unhappiness on my part, I felt that there has to be more to it. I also realized there are probably a lot more kids like Stefan in the same situation, and we're just We're just casting them to the side. We've developed what I was thinking about that the other day, excellent— we talk about differentiating and catering to different needs and interests. No, we have developed sorting mechanisms, not anything to differentiate, to recognize kids' different talents. So, you know, when differentiation means that you have one kid writing sentences, another one matching the words to pictures, and the third one's coloring the letters, and you call that differentiation. Pronunciation. I think that's fraud. It's fraud. And it is still pushing all the kids into the same kind of corner.

I guess it rewards conscientiousness on one level, right? It's like—

and it rewards compliance.

Whatever the game is, as long as you figure out the rules, absolutely, and you play by the rules, you'll kind of win.

And Stef knew the rules, but he wasn't going to play by them. He's now a gamer. He's a professional gamer. He's got— I mean, he's pursuing a career that even I didn't even know existed. Yeah, he's been invited to talk at the school about what that means. Yeah, and yeah, he's not making a ton of money, but he is doing something that he's very happy about. Yeah, I mean, he told me once that he had been bored for 15 years, and he probably didn't mean it quite so absolutely, but the fact is that whenever he was able to sort of bring himself to the game, or what it was, then he flourished. But whenever it was do this, do that, comply with this, finish that. He would find every which way, you know. And yes, his mom and dad were very frustrated with that until I realized that, well, that's not him. And he's going a different way, and I applaud him for having the courage to stand up and say, no, of course not doing this.

And nothing's going to change until people do that, right? But to bring it back to meditation, so So you were frustrated with the impact accreditation was having on—

Well, the lack of it. Including my own school, which had gone through 3 cycles of accreditation. And yeah, it was a lot of work that we all did, and everybody thought the work was great, but not a heck of a lot changed. Yeah, I mean, it was like, yeah, we changed the light bulbs kind of stuff, but we didn't change fundamentally our thinking about what we were doing, why we were doing it, how we should be doing it, that all pretty much stayed the same. And there were lots of reasons for that. I mean, I guess to your culture question of the parents didn't really want anything different, the board didn't want anything different, and even teachers didn't want it to change. They said, "Hey, it worked for us, so why wouldn't it work for them?" They didn't recognize, they didn't understand any necessity or any need for change. They said, "Kids are doing well, they're going to colleges." You know, why are you breaking what's not broken? And I remember having a parent who said to me once when I talked to him about some of my ideas, he said, wonderful ideas, but please, Mr. Mark, could you wait until my kid has graduated? I said, yeah, you see what the irony of this is? If you take that stance, nothing will ever happen.

Absolutely.

I had a really interesting similar experience in Berlin with a parent, you who said to me, you know, we're considering taking our child out of your school because we don't want to be part of the experiment, they called it, right? Exactly. And it's like, well, you know, yeah, your child only goes through grade 7 once or grade 8 once, but at the same time, we have to consider how we're gonna prepare them, and that might involve a bit of change and disruption.

And of course, I mean, one of the arguments that parents always come up with is the universities. Well, you know, if you change all of this and create a new curriculum and you no longer require the kids to do all the stuff, will they get into college? And I understand, in fact I've had this conversation with Kevin Bartlett too, is I have wanted to, and I haven't really been able to, pull some universities into this conversation. I mean, I've always found it profoundly ironic that Project Zero is at Harvard.

Yes, yeah.

And, you know, and the wonderful minds supporting that, David Perkins and so on. And yet that university hasn't changed one bit as far as I can see in the way it looks at kids who come. You know, you've got to have that GPA, you've got to have all those courses, etc., etc., if you want to get in.

So we bring in ACE Learning into the picture as this somehow renewed disruptive force in accreditation.

It was totally disruptive and frankly, as since I've left. What I have heard now is that initially there were some schools that decided to drop the S because they thought it was too out of the box, too complicated, or too demanding, and they went with CIS. Now I understand actually some of the big schools have decided to drop CIS and to go with ACE, which makes me very happy. And, you know, is ACE disruptive? Well, it was disruptive to accreditation disruption as such because it wasn't business as usual. It was also disruptive to NIASC's relationship with CIS.

Of course, yeah.

But they had something totally different, even though I had offered early on to CIS to develop something together, and I was told, "No, CIS will do its own." And that's also the reason why actually we called it what we did. I mean, if you look at ACE, language actually plays a big part in it. We wanted to change the language, so we didn't call it a 9th edition. There was a lot of conversations, discussions about why ACE. And there's several other terms within the protocol, like we don't talk about students, we talk about learners. And by that we mean everybody. We even, we don't use the word school whenever possible, we use learning community instead. Because we do feel that language imprisons, and the moment you use those terms, all those other things come back in. Sometimes we're obsessive about that, but I think if you really want to get out of that frame of mind, you sometimes have to discard— you can't use an antiquated language for something that strives to be very different.

And that kind of mental model of what school is—

yeah, exactly—

it's pretty deep.

It's in every one of us, and I understand where it's coming from. Cultures have an excellent way of adapting themselves to changing conditions and defending. It's almost like an antibiotic that they have. There's that virus, and we're gonna have to find a way of dealing with it and preserving the status quo. And I've seen that in so many different places, even in schools that say that they are progressively minded. I find that the sort of underlying move towards preserving the equilibrium that exists is always there. It's almost as if that's a law of physics.

Yeah, it is, you know.

Yes, we're aiming for an equilibrium. We don't like to have the apple cart upset because that will create chaos and discomfort, which it does and which it's precisely designed to do. Exactly. I mean, I'm not denying that at all. A little bit of chaos, as far as I'm concerned, is the only way to sometimes really produce change in the way you think about them.

So leading in then to shifting away from, and some of the documentation says this explicitly, moving away from school improvement to transformation. But what would you say is the difference and what would be the essence of a transformation? I'm interested in this word generally because in other contexts, with agile transformations in other organizations, there's a lot of people talking about this idea. So in a school, what would you say were the kind of key indicators of a transformation?

Well, the difference between the two to start out with is that improvement means you're inside the box and you're putting new furniture in the box, but you're still in that box. Transformation is actually getting out of that box and completely rethinking that environment and whether you want a box at all. So that was one of my complaints about the accreditation protocol. And yes, it was meant to improve schools, but improving to continue doing what they have always done. So to me, transformation is when schools start asking fundamental questions about why they're there, what they're teaching, how they're teaching it, and also how they're assessing. When they get away from all of these systems that have— that basically define how schools operate. And that will then also have an impact on how they organize themselves as a body. It has an impact on student voice, on who decides what you're supposed to learn and how you're going to learn it. It has an impact on every aspect of it. And unless schools start asking those kinds of questions, they're not transforming transformational. It isn't transformational to add a robotics club after school or even a course in robotics. Great to have a course in robotics, but if schools think they're now transformational, I'm sorry, they are not. They're still following a system where you have a set number of courses, those courses will always be there, and then we add a few things and tweak a few things around the edges, around the edges, and that's it. And unless you get away from that, will never be transformational.

There's a lot of connections in what the ACE language is all about to what is now old language about the learning organization.

Yeah.

In a way, right, from Peter Senge. And what would you say— I mean, you've kind of touched on some of them already, but what are the main things that have meant that that just hasn't been successful? They haven't achieved this idea, because in a way it's not a new idea.

No, it's not. And a lot of companies actually have been much more successful in translating that model into their own culture? Well, I think it goes back to the reason why schools were set up in the first place. They actually weren't set up as learning organizations. They were set up to create a compliant workforce. To create literacy, yes, and to make sure that everybody had the same kind of basic education and you could then slot them into the places where they fit. So schools were never intended to be— no matter how much they now have on their banners critical thinking, independent learning— that is never what schools were designed to do. And so I think while the concept is old, it's a new concept to schools, or I mean, it shouldn't be a new concept to schools, but it requires that people really think about what is this thing thing called school supposed to do. You know, one of the— one of the influences on me, and it goes back to the '70s, was a book by Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society. And of course, deschooling society, in that word in itself, you can see how school is defined. It is an organization with clear structures and hierarchies, expectations, norms, values, and compliance mechanisms. And he wanted to get away from that, of course, on a much larger kind of scale. And that's exactly it. As long as schools remain schools, they're not going to be learning organizations. They're just being training grounds to produce, in some places more than others, compliant citizens who do all the right things and do all the things that we believe are important. For them to do without ever having questioned whether in our times they're still important or whether in our times maybe there are other things that we don't teach, that we don't work with, that the kids don't come in contact with that are far more important. I believe fundamentally it's in the human DNA to be curious and to want to learn, to ask questions and find out about things. And school Schools do it at the, at the, in the early childhood environment, there's a lot of that, but then after that it becomes more and more, no, no, we don't want you to go and explore on your own, we'll tell you what you're supposed to be curious about. So I should also think that both teachers and students will find it a much more stimulating environment if they realize that they are engaged together in in an adventure, in a discovery of things. When a teacher actually does something that he or she doesn't know much about either, rather than continuing to view themselves, teachers, as, well, I know this stuff and now I'm going to pass it on to you.

But I would also say one of the things I struggle with is the economic model within which we're working and the economic argument for why this change is necessary. So a lot of what I hear in the space of, you know, educational kind of thinking around disruption and innovation is often an economic argument for jobs that have never— haven't been created yet, and we need these skills for the workforce, right? And I personally actually think there's something else going on within this, this kind of disruptive faith, actually. It's not necessarily an economic argument, but in a way the economic system is kind of creaking, and I think there's a kind of yearning for something different.

Absolutely.

Not only for an economic reason, right? For something else, like something deeper.

Yeah, I think some of what you're getting at is also— it relates to the question of what is education for? And I know that even when I grew up, there was this sort of view of education as something other than utilitarian. It is something that makes you a better human. It turns you into a civilized and intelligent and articulate individual. And as a result, actually, what schools typically did is they shut themselves off. They became cocoons.

It's true. Hermetically sealed units.

Hermetically sealed units where whatever happened happened only in there. And the connections to the world outside were shunned, actually, because after all, that's the world out there with its economic and financial and political concerns is not what we wanted these kids to be engaged in. And I think it's actually completely wrong. In fact, I believe if you go back to the Greeks and Aristotle, that is not what they wanted either. But we've done it again, and this is the more insidious part of it, is because we didn't really want those kids to be too critical. They are independent thinking because if they are, they might challenge those systems. And now we recognize that, as you say, the systems are creaking. The economic system is creaking. Actually, every system is creaking. And so what are we going to do about this? And unless we create or help raise kids that come with mindsets that don't take everything for granted the way it is and are willing to ask the hard questions. The systems are not going to get any better at all and possibly even worse. So yeah, there is a utilitarian aspect to education now, there better be. And it's not just about, yeah, the kids need to have all of this so that they can do the jobs in the future that are not yet created, but they need those skills in order to deal rationally, sensibly, intelligently empathetically and ethically with a world where all these values are crumbling or have come under severe attack.

Just thinking about the ACE Learning shift within the way that it's structured as an accreditation model, it's definitely moving away from tick box standards and let's make sure we've got the right finished product back to a much bigger focus on the process. So the process of reflection as a community within the school. Absolutely. Of transformation of the school, but also of learning.

And that's the DNA of ACE. Yeah, no question about it.

So, and there's one, one particular thing I think is really interesting is the shift away from from strategic planning to future design, right? And I just love you to talk a little bit about that because I think there's something really important in that difference in the way we think about how we're moving schools.

Yeah, I mean, we can, we can talk a long time about that. I mean, first of all, I think that the strategic planning and the strategic plan— we used to require in accreditation that a school had a strategic plan, and so I would get these massive documents of sometimes up to 150 pages of strategic initiatives, most of which actually ended up being also very much siloed. So there was a strategic plan for finance, there was a strategic plan for teaching and learning, for facilities, and God knows what everything else. And then the whole thing was there. I just saw recently a plan that had 280 actions that were planned for one year.

For one year?

Go on, yeah. And I said, this is useless. There are several problems with that. First of all, strategic planning that's been done, and to some extent this is also again part of the language change that we wanted, the strategic planning tends to be you're in that box and you're looking forward and okay, now where do we want this box to be in 3 years from now? Whereas future design is actually stepping outside of the box out of the box for a minute and envisioning a future that you would like to have and then planning backwards. How do we get out of that box and how do we get there? And it also requires systems thinking, realizing that we can no longer talk about— and this is one of the major changes in ACE. If you remember, the old accreditation protocols had 7 sections and they were nicely separated: leadership, staff, curriculum, operational systems, etc., etc. And they all had their individual committees, accreditation committees working with it. That is not how ACE can work because ACE wants schools to think of themselves as an interconnected network system, and what you do here will affect, or should affect, everything else.

If it doesn't, it will It will in some way, it may not be positive.

Well, exactly, but too often there's even a disconnect. They don't know what they're doing over there in finances and I've got all of these highfalutin plans. So the design thinking mode not only approaches thinking about the future in a backward way as opposed to strategic planning which is just thinking, okay, how do we move this box forward, but it also asks organizations schools in this case, to think of themselves as a tightly interconnected system that where all those moving parts in the system have to move in synchronicity with each other in order for that to happen.

Would you also say that there's a process required as well, that this is an ongoing iterative process?

Absolutely.

Not, not— because that's one of the things I find interesting about the difference is strategic planning somehow is a disconnected activity, gets finished, 280 action items published in a nice glossy book, done, come back in 5 years, let's see whether we've made it, rather than some kind of agile reflective process.

Precisely, I was just gonna say that actually. What the process needs to be is to ensure that the agility of the the organization to adapt itself to circumstances which are constantly changing. I mean, strategic plans remind me a little bit of the 5-year plans in the Soviet Union, which never worked out, because they assume a fixed linear sort of process that you do this, then this will happen, this will happen, this will happen, and not the being able to respond to changing circumstances, to realizing that perhaps something that you have planned actually doesn't make any sense at all.

Absolutely.

It only creates more rigidity rather than liberating you to think openly. And yeah, this design thinking is probably messier than strategic thinking, but that's the world we live in.

Yeah.

It's messy, it's unpredictable, and if you try to impose some kind of a 3-year plan with X number of actions on it, it's not going to work.

No, absolutely. And it generates and requires feedback as well.

Absolutely.

It's like, let's get more of that, more feedback, and then we can respond to that rather than— and this sunk cost fallacy, right, of like, well, we put all this time into this strategic plan, right? We've got to stick to it because we spent 6 months Exactly, producing the document. Yeah, exactly. Well, I paid for this cinema ticket, I'm going to stay in the cinema even though this movie is terrible.

Absolutely right. I mean, I know that a number of schools have already started removing strategic plans and moving to strategic thinking, which is a little more aligned with this design thinking process, although I still believe that the fundamental flaw in it is that you're working from where you are, and now you make— it's an improvement-oriented process rather than a transformation-oriented.

I think it's such a, such a positive move that NIASC has used the accreditation lever, let's say. I mean, it's a bold move, right, to use that and say what we think is the right thing to do to transform schools. We're going to use our power, such as we have it, to help schools with that. What are the other levers, would you say? Because my observations are that accreditation can't do it alone.

No.

And it very quickly gets sucked back into a pretty rigid system.

Absolutely. It's just, it is one very small mechanism. Because I remember, that's actually one of the original sort of incentives for me to to create ACE was because as a head of school coming back from conferences, my head was filled with new ideas, fresh ideas. I often said to myself, I wish there was an outside force that would, you know, sort of kick me in the— Compelling me to do something about it. Could accreditation serve as such a force? And yes, it can, but ultimately its influence is limited because schools can opt not to do that. And the other forces that work against it are these societal, cultural forces that exist no matter where you are. The assumption that education is what it is. But I do believe, and I see it around me, that more and more stuff that gets published, maybe this will complement or strengthen the appeal of the accreditation protocol because people will realize, Well, actually, this is sort of aligned with that kind of thinking.

Yeah.

What I do fear right now is that in many places you have a disconnect between what educationalists tell you what education should look like and policymakers and governments. And that goes back to their obsession with data, the quantifiable stuff, the competition that they're engaged in with other countries. You know, you have to have the best PISA intense results and all of that, all of which works against what we're trying to accomplish with ACE and what others are trying to accomplish with their new frameworks of education. There are tons of these frameworks that are out there now that all pretty much say the same thing, but we're not there yet. And once we get universities into this conversation, they're a big lever. And once they recognize that, well, one of two things could happen. Either they become a lever or they become irrelevant. To put it very bluntly. I mean, I think, for example, in the US, the business model that universities have isn't going to work anyway. Why should I spend $80,000 a year, 4 times for 4 years, not come out with any guarantee of a job but a huge debt? Do I really need this or are there other ways in which I can establish what I can do? Companies want to know what is it, not, not, don't show me your degree but tell me what you can do. You know, the whole notion of bachelor's and master's degrees, I think this is all part of having to rethink of what is it. I mean, those are very convenient little boxes and they've worked for a long time. Just look at high school diploma, bachelor's, master's, doctor's, that sort of That's sort of the road. And we now live in an environment and circumstances and in a world where all of this is no longer— we can't take this for granted that this is going to be there forever. There are so many young entrepreneurs who have not had any college education and who are way ahead of the— we all know the examples of the Bill Gateses and the Steve Jobses of the world. And yes, there are not that many of them, of them. But what it does indicate is, and what more and more kids I think will tune into, is it is possible to create things, to be a maker of things, to be a shaper of the world without having to jump through all of these other hoops.

I mean, it's interesting you mentioned like the measurement issue, I think is still a big one. I mean, because ACE is moving to a lot of, a lot of kind of learning outcomes, learning goals, which are challenging to a measurement mindset. You know, it's difficult to measure empathy or the development of critical thinking. I know people are trying to create mechanisms to do that, but in a way that's—

Well, the question is, why do we have to put a measurement on everything?

Of course.

Why do we have to put a grade on everything? I mean, you can You can start changing schools' cultures by just looking at the assessment systems that you have in place.

Absolutely.

And, you know, when schools say they want risk-takers and so on, they actually make sure, not maliciously, but I think just negligently, their own assessment systems are calculated to make sure that students never become risk-takers. Yeah, of course. Because I need to jump through that hoop, I need to get my good grade, and if I do it differently I won't.

Yeah, right. But the answer is not to just get better at measuring risk-taking or measuring empathy, because that's just an improvement model of, well, let's continue with what we're doing but get better at justifying.

We have to get away from this, you know, data unfortunately means quantifiable data mostly. It very rarely means qualitative data. It means quantifiable data leads to those averages. I mean, you even have it in inspections. Ultimately, it's the very opposite of what Todd Rose wants because schools are given an average grade. You take all of these observations and then you have an average.

You're very good.

And that's who you are. And it doesn't say anything ultimately. I mean, it's just like saying to a student, you're a C student. A student or a B student. It's a meaningless number. It's actually not only meaningless, it's harmful.

But let's— I mean, in terms of ACES's future, there is a tension there in the sense that they have to be able to say, yes, you have met our requirements for accreditation, right? And we're not going to give you a grade, but we're definitely going to say yes or no. So, you know, if you were truly process-oriented and all about just reflection and transformative development, maybe it would be impossible to fail the process. So what is it? I mean, how can you create a standard for passing ACE learning?

That has actually been— that's an issue that has been brought up, is that it's not ACE also compliance-oriented to some extent.

Of course, it's like, how do we pass? So how do we play this ACE game?

Yeah. I mean, I agree with that, and I ideally would like to see ACE as not so much on a pass/fail, but as a developmental— it's a continuum, actually. And we do— the end judgment right now is still pass/fail, but if you look at the individual sections, they're not on that. We do not have 1, 2, 3, 4, where 3 and 4 are fine and 1 and 2 are not. It's evident or not yet evident, or it's developing. So I think of ACE as a mechanism to encourage schools to constantly think about it and to use the learning principles that we have as a means and as a vehicle to structure maybe that kind of thinking. I mean, ACE in itself is, you know, I was just talking about assessment, and in Principle 3, that's the assessment one. I've actually already argued that we need to change that because the moment you have assessment in it, it's another one of those language issues. It sounds like, okay, ABCD or 1 point, 2 point, 3 point, or multiple choice. I said no, it should be called evidence of learning or something like that because I want to get away from this. And the same is true really for the overall judging. Yes, the organization feels it has to make a judgment, but also communicating to the outside world, is this a school you want to send your kids to? But the bar under which I would judge a school is whether it is seriously thinking about these issues and making progress in dealing with those, or whether it is just— you know, there are some schools that just want accreditation because it looks good on the website and it's a marketing tool. And if I feel that, I don't want to engage with that school. I want to see the processes in place. And even if a school does not have, it's not there yet, but it has processes in place that I think, or the organization thinks, will move the school in the direction. You know, will there ever be a school that is completely sort of ACE one? There are very few totally transformational schools. Formational schools in the world right now. I will say that. And I've been asked, you know, do you think that all the schools will become transformational? No, they won't. But it's a journey. Another cliché, perhaps. It is a journey, and some schools will go so far, others will go further. But I don't want to say that unless you make it to the what-if state, we're not going to accredit you.

No, of course.

And we've said we can accredit a school that is in the thinking about it stage on everything. Now, if 5 years from now it's still in the thinking about it stage, then I would have to ask some questions. Why are you still thinking about it? Why has nothing moved? And then we're dealing with a difference. Then I might come to the conclusion, well, they weren't really serious about it, or everything has changed, new management, leadership, maybe they're thinking about it again. The outcome might be different. But I've also said to many schools that, okay, you've gone through the thinking about it, the working on it, and you know, you're at the living it stage. And so what if you, 5 years later, are still at the living it? That's okay. Because realistically, I have to accept that some schools will never be able to, because of those other forces, that I cannot do very much.

Much about.

But at the same time, what I hope is that some schools will get there, and as they do, they will become the disruptors and the exemplars. And as they disrupt, other schools will either realize that, well, unless we start moving in that direction too, we might become irrelevant. So then I think that the momentum to move towards the what-if will be need there will gradually grow.

But I guess we would also want there to be a huge diversity in the landscape of education.

Absolutely.

By that point, right? Because what, what we don't want to promote is the idea that there's a standardized AC school that everyone wants to get to.

Which is precisely why, if you look at the rubrics that we've created in the 'what if' one, There is none. It basically says these are truly transformational schools, but what do they look like? I don't know. They're going to be lots of different ways. What I do know is they won't look like what most schools look like right now. But the last thing we want to do, and that's precisely why we shied away from creating any rubric for that, is— and all the other rubrics, if you look at them closely, are really concerned with processes. More than anything. How much of that process is embedded and has become part of the DNA of that particular school without saying, well, and here is what an A school looks like. Some of it is implicit. If you, if you, if you, if you think about the philosophy behind it, then yeah, some of it is sort of implicit of the kind of areas you want to get to. But it would be wrong for us to have said, well, and then in the end the end product looks like that. Because then what will happen is that somebody would say, okay, so can you develop courses and materials and handbooks, you know, that show us the steps we need to take to get there, package everything, a cookbook, and then we're exactly where we were before.

Exactly.

And that is not what happened. Going out of the box and being disruptive is the very opposite But this is one of my fears about ACE, is that—

and it's my fears about the Agile stuff as well— is that there's a whole lot of, I mean, a lot of discussion in that community about commodification. It becomes an industry, right? You're an Agile coach, you go into an organization to help with transformation, we pay you a load of money, we tick some boxes about what we're doing, but does it make a big impact? It's variable, but there's a huge industry. So my point is that the economic system is so phenomenally good at subsuming these kinds of disruptive forces into its modus operandi.

And I see that danger exists with ASICs. Absolutely, no question about it. And yeah, so yeah, I'm aware of all of those things. And I mean, I know that Kevin Bartlett actually they didn't want us to necessarily come out with it in 2016 because they said, ah, there's still probably, probably need to make tweaks. And I said, Kevin, I want it out because, because yes, we make tweaks, but I actually want to hear what those tweaks should be from the people who are cooking with it.

Of course.

And that's like, we can sit here forever until it's perfect, and it won't be no matter what we do.

Do you prioritize product or process?

Exactly.

It's like, what's the minimum viability. Let's get it out there, see what happens.

It's a prototype, let's get it out there. And yes, I said yeah, we're building the plane while we're flying it still. I think the history of it since then has proven it's the right way to go. And yes, there will be iteration 2 and 3. What I've always said is actually one of the principles of ACE is that nothing is cast in stone. Nothing should be cast in stone. That goes The same goes for the protocol itself. It needs to be agile also. If it isn't, then we'll have ACE2 and ACE3, and we'll once again get into that sort of tweaking kind of mode, which is fine, but it could be that at some point we decide, okay, this also needs to be completely rethought. And I'm perfectly open.

Or maybe the whole notion of accreditation needs to be rethought.

Well, yeah, and actually I proposed that as well. I said we need to really think of how do we make sure that accreditation remains relevant. Do we really need it?

I mean, but surely, surely accreditation was built on the notion of standardization and absolutely quality assurance, right?

Standards and standardization.

That's the point of it.

The question is, what is it there for? And I actually have always said I'm much more interested in accreditation is serving a vehicle for making schools better places than they are right now.

More human environments.

More human environments. And actually sort of kicks into the shin and says, "I want you to think about this." So you're optimistic about the future of ACE? I am. I don't know. Sometimes I am optimistic about the future future of ACE, I'm not sure how optimistic right now I am about the future of education still. Because I still, I see right now more forces that seem to be working against what we believe will lead to the kinds of mindsets and understandings and skills that we want to create. And I see, if anything, right now, in lots of different ways, a little bit of a regression. But I'm an educator, and as an educator, you're fundamentally an optimistic person.

Of course.

Because otherwise, there's no point you being in there. You believe in the— not perfect ability, but you believe it is possible to develop young people, children, into, into people that could make the world a better place. So I have to be optimistic, even as I also see a lot of forces working against it. It will always be the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Yeah, no, you're right, you're right. I could talk to you all day. Yeah, but I've kept you too long.

No, no, no, no, not at all. It was absolutely fascinating. Love the conversation. Me too. Thank you guys very much.

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