Fearless Inquiry - A Conversation with Will Richardson

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

We're spending way, way, way too much time on pretty much irrelevant curriculum that kids are only learning to get a grade and will forget as soon as the test is over and will never use in their lives. And we all know it. We all know it.

Welcome back to the podcast. It's fantastic today to be able to bring you a conversation I had with Will Richardson just before his keynote at the recent re:Learn conference. Will has a huge international reputation now as an instigator and a provocateur, someone who's effectively challenging the traditional thinking about schools. As a former classroom teacher of 22 years, Will now is an author as well as blogger, podcaster, leadership coach, and serial entrepreneur. Last year, he co-founded the Big Questions Institute with Homer Tavanga, which was created to help educators use fearless inquiry to make sense of this complex moment and uncertain future. In 2017, Will was named one of the 100 Global Changemakers in Education by 100.org, and Forbes Forbes named him one of the top 5 edupreneurs to follow. He's given keynote speeches and provided coaching services in over 30 countries and on 6 continents. He's also authored 6 books, most recently The Freedom to Learn, that have sold over 200,000 copies worldwide. He's also given TEDx talks in New York, Melbourne, and most recently in Vancouver. You can follow Will on social media, and please check out the links in the show notes. Hey, Will. Hey, Tim, how are you? I'm good, man. How are you?

Good.

Fantastic. So yeah, I mean, given everything that is going on, this idea of fearless inquiry that you've been using for school leaders and Obviously, there are very big reasons why this is pretty resonant, but maybe I could just give you a bit of a chance to unpack that a little bit, that concept of fearless inquiry and why it is so important right now.

Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Pleasure.

I think that we're at a moment right now where it's becoming more and more clear that the questions we need to be asking are existential, that we can't get away with just asking the kind of day-to-day, what am I doing tomorrow? What am I doing next week types of questions? Because even those questions are dependent upon how we think about the longer, the more meta challenges and opportunities that we have coming up. So, I mean, it's really hard right now when people don't have a lot of bandwidth for this, but we just think that it's crucial right now to at least carve out some space to start thinking about what is the role of school in a world that looks the way it does right now. And not just pandemic related, but I mean, all of the things that are happening, the social justice issues that are happening, the climate issues that are happening, the economic issues that are happening, the technology issues that are absolutely changing our ability to learn and the ways in which we interact with one another and have a huge impact on kind of the, the role of schools in educating kids and educating everyone, actually. So, I mean, they, they cut to the very core, to the fundamentals of our work. And we're just trying to help people build capacity to see the new contexts that the world is throwing at us for our work in schools. And again, those are foundationally shifted ways of thinking about what we do. So it's really difficult work, but I think it's absolutely important right now because the decisions that we make are all based on those, based on the way we see the world. And I think the most obvious example of that is that, you know, even though we did this forced technology shift in most schools, you know, 3, 4, or now 5, 6 months ago, not a lot really changed at the end of the day, right? I mean, it didn't transfer any more agency over to kids. It didn't change the ways that teachers and kids interact. It didn't change much about the curriculum. It didn't change much about the way we grade or assess or any of that stuff. I mean, we just took what we used to do in physical space and tried to cram it into the internet connection that we have. And so on the outside, you know, it's a technical change, but it's, as Heifetz, you know, from Harvard talks about it, it's not an adaptive change. I mean, we haven't really fundamentally done a lot of rethinking about our work. So that's the moment that we see, and that's what we're trying to help people with.

Yeah, I mean, it is a moment. I mean, it certainly feels like that's very important right now, but do you have a sense that people are, I mean, school leaders are carving out the space for those kind of meta questions? Because I mean, that's what it feels like there needs to be a bit of an intentional carving out or prioritizing these questions, because you can be very distracted by the busy work of running a school, right?

I agree, it has to be intentional. And the answer to the first question was though, only some are making or being intentional about it. And look, I get it. I'm not throwing any educational leader under the bus in this moment, right? Because there's just so much going on. Of course. And as we were talking about before, I've been having these conversations with international school heads from around the world now for, we just finished our 36th week this morning, and the things that they are trying to problem solve, the things they're trying to learn through on a regular basis. And there's no, there's no normal, you know, there's, there's no consistency to it. It changes every week. So I totally get that only a few people are willing to just set that aside for a little bit and really begin to think about the core issues. But again, having said that, I don't know how we avoid it. And I do think that the people that don't want to go there, are going to be the ones that feel the most pain actually in the, in the coming years. Because I, my sense of it is, is that whether we like it or not, we're going to move into a very different kind of ecosystem of education, of community, of all of that type of stuff. We have to, if we're going to get through this moment and it's, and you can see it on the fringes, right? I mean, one thing that's been really interesting is that there are hundreds of new kind of school models that are cropping up all over the place. Yeah, it's true. There's no coherence to them. And I think, I actually hope there isn't coherence in the future for them, because I think this is what's gonna happen. I think we need lots of different ways of thinking about what school is.

Yeah.

But it requires us to reconfigure in our heads the experience, what it looks like, what it's supposed to be, and all that kind of thing. It requires us to come to another definition of what it means to be educated, certainly. It requires us to be really intentional about the things that we find most important and most sacred about schools. And I think, you know, a lot of people in the pandemic are starting to realize that curriculum is really not at the top of that list. You know, it's everybody else's expectation. But if you're not going to sacrifice curriculum in this moment, then you are probably causing a lot of mental strife and illness, you know, because there are just other things that are just more important right now. And so there are a lot of schools that are cropping up around those things that are really more important right now, which is kind of cool, but nowhere near scale and nowhere near to the point where they're changing the fundamental narrative around the way we think about what schools should be. So it's going to be a long haul, but that's exciting.

It is, it is exciting. I mean, it's kind of, it's those two dynamics, isn't it? It's the, like, the established players and how intentionally they're being about asking those questions and doing that fearless inquiry. And then, as you say, this this hugely diverse ecosystem around the fringes of all this stuff bubbling up, which is these two different kind of landscapes in a way. Yeah. And it's super interesting. But the other thing that made me think was, you know, if you look at the way that businesses have responded, you know, the businesses that have thrived throughout this are the ones that were already doing that fearless inquiry, being innovative, being agile before the pandemic in a way. And, you know, they're the ones that have actually found that they could pivot and, you know, they can continue to adapt. And I think maybe there's a lesson there for schools as well.

Yeah, my sense of it is that most schools weren't technologically ready for this, right?

Sure.

That's why there was a huge struggle. And maybe that's a good thing that's come out of this, if anything, is that that's accelerated our technological literacy for doing this type of work by 5, maybe 10 years, who knows, right? But I don't think that a lot of schools were culturally ready for it either. I don't think a lot of schools were kind of community ready for it. And that's a bigger problem, I think, right? I can almost get my brain wrapped around why the technology kind of got pushed aside because it's just, you know, it's expensive and it's difficult. It's, you know, it's a different way of thinking about teaching and learning, but the cultural piece of it is what I find really kind of frustrating because we should have been making, putting learner learning at the center all along. We should have been seeing everyone in our community as learners, you know, not teachers, not students. And that's what we have to have right now. So That's a little bit frustrating. And the other thing, too, I find it hard to wrap my brain around is how many things we do in schools where if you go and ask people, why do you do that? They don't have a great answer other than, well, that's the way we've been doing it. It makes no sense to segregate kids by age. If you're putting learning at the center, that makes no sense. It makes no sense to silo out different subjects. It makes no sense to chunk it up into 45 minutes. It makes no sense to— you know what I'm saying, right? I mean, I kind of relate it to all of the things that don't make any sense about the United States election system, which you're in the middle of right now. It makes no sense that you have 50 different states who are doing it 50 different ways, you know what I mean? And that goes to that kind of fearless inquiry, because we're going to have to be able to step back and ask ourselves, why do we do this? It doesn't make any sense if we are really concerned about learning. But those are really difficult questions for people to grasp.

Yeah, it's like that, that's kind of sunk cost fallacy on a just a monumental scale. Like we've 'You know, we've paid for this, we're gonna stick it out. You know, we bought the movie ticket, we're gonna—

we know the movie's terrible, we're gonna stick it out because this is what we chose.' Well, yeah, and again, you know, part of the pressure is if you actually did stuff in schools that made sense, it would fly against the narrative that everyone carries around what schools should be like. If we really said to ourselves, you know, grades are antithetical to learning, we're not going to do them anymore, a lot of people out there would go, 'What happened to the grades? Why aren't— why isn't my kid getting a grade?' You know, it would be this huge kind of earthquake almost. Not just that, but if we said multi-age groups, if we said we're not going to do social studies and English and history and, you know, or chemistry and all those different things, it would be this huge, like, dissonance in the minds of so many people. And they'd be going— parents especially, right? Because we're all kind of products or victims of the system, right? So they'd be like, why aren't we doing these things? And that's just— it just makes it a very heavy lift for people to say, yeah, we're gonna we're going to change it up and we're just going to start really by, by looking and asking what are the conditions that really deep and powerful learning require? And then we're going to put those conditions into everything that we do in school.

Yeah.

Because that doesn't square with the things, the stupid things we've been doing in schools in terms of the conditions that we've been creating for 200 years. So yeah, it's very, very difficult, but you know, again, I just get back to this moment. Where we're in a critical moment, not just in this country, but in the world. And if we don't begin to ask those fundamental questions, not just of ourselves, but with our parents, with our communities, with our students, engaging in very different conversations around what school should be, what an education is, what success is, what achievement is, you know, reframing the language that we use around all of this, then we're not doing ourselves any favors.

In a way that kind of leads on nicely to what I was going to ask you, because I saw your keynote at the IB conference in Vienna 2018, I think. And one of the things you said there at the beginning, which I really enjoyed, was you were quite happy for people to leave that room feeling pretty annoyed at the end of it.

You enjoyed that? I'm glad you enjoyed that. Exactly.

And for sure I did. There were certain things that I did feel a bit annoyed about when I left, but But also one of the things that I wanted to ask you was because of this critical moment that we're in right now, and we know it's essential that there are voices like yours asking these really fearless and tough questions, but have you had a pause for kind of reflection? I think I saw one of your posts that you put out, you know, in terms of what we need right now and what educators need right now. Have you kind of felt that your approach has changed slightly in being that disruptive force, but maybe in a slightly different way as a result of the things that everybody is going through within education right now?

Well, sure. I mean, I think that you have to give this moment the respect that it deserves in terms of its intensity and how exhausted people are right now, and I totally understand that, you know. It's like I said before, I think that just in general in education, we should be just really stepping back and asking all of our kids, of our communities, what do we really need here, and what stuff that we can just cut out and not do for now, right, just to take the pressure off of that. Yeah, but again, the moment is making people uncomfortable, right? Yeah, we're feeling this discomfort because we're seeing a lot of things that just aren't serving kids that we're trying to do right now in this moment. We're just finding a whole bunch of things where we're going, again, why are we doing that? Why do we continue to do that? So the thing we're trying to navigate is how do you use that discomfort in healthy ways? How do you kind of feel this dissonance and yet are able to try to make some sense of it and maybe change what you're doing in your classrooms or in your schools. And again, it's not easy. None of this work is easy, even without the pandemic, right?

Right?

Because I mean, ultimately what I'm trying to say and what Homa and I are trying to say at Big Questions is you have to fundamentally change the way you think about your value, both as systems and institutions and individuals. And that is painful emotional work. I mean, that is like grief work. And so whenever you do it, it's hard. But when you try to do it in the middle of a pandemic, and when you try to do it in the middle of a climate crisis, and when you try to do it in the middle of a social justice upheaval, you know what I'm saying? You know, on some level, you maybe think, well, maybe that's the best time to do it, right? Because it's all just a mess right now. You know, never waste a good pandemic, right? Or never— what's that line, right? Never waste a good crisis. So I don't know, but I do think that we can't put it off. We can't just kick it down the road for 6 months or until we get a vaccine or until we get back to normal or whatever, because we're not going to get back to normal. We don't want to go back to normal. Normal wasn't that great to begin with. I mean, you know, look what it's gotten us, right?

I think there's also something quite interesting, if I can articulate it, in the sense that in a way, in that IB conference, right, you were up there on the stage giving a kind of big provocation to educators to change, right? But in the moment now, we're in this really interesting, much more dialogic kind of space where we need to move away from the idea of a command and control model and those school heads who are trying to just soldier on, on their own to figure this out. But actually we need some more distributed ecosystem of learning everywhere and connected conversations. And perhaps there's something in that. That right now there are a lot more of those connected conversations happening that may actually bubble up some really interesting outcomes that will last a bit longer. I don't know.

So, I mean, just a couple things on that, right? This group that I've been working with for the 6 months or 7 months now, there's a powerful sense of community in that group, right? They actually wanted to do another day, another hour a week coming up with almost a manifesto on what new school should be. And so we're in the middle of that too, the new school principles from AI-E that we're working on as well. So yeah, I think that there's a real sense of community around these conversations that are happening. That particular example though, I think is unique in terms of what I've seen, because again, most of the conversations are again, more technical, right? Kind of getting through it, which isn't a bad thing. Don't get, again, don't get me wrong. It's a great place to start, but the question becomes then, well, how do those evolve into and larger discussions about what school's about. I actually just recorded a keynote for LearnLife that's going to be up next week. And the title is something like, we're not disrupted enough yet to change schools. You know, it's going to take more than a pandemic to do it. And so, you know, again, it is this idea that these issues with schools have been going on much, much longer than the global health crisis that we're in or all the other stuff that's going on. But we just have not been willing to look inward and say, again, why, why do we do the things that we do, and how does that really map to what we know how learning happens? So that's where the real disruption is going to be. Um, it's going to be when we finally just are willing to sit down and go, okay, we need to put all of this on the table, and we absolutely need to rethink it, because it's not sustainable the way the world is moving right now, right? And the systems that we have in place and the institutions that we have in place— and again, schools are one of many institutions that are breaking in lots of different ways. Again, not just because the pandemic, but the internet certainly has sped up a whole bunch of institution breaking, right? When we can communicate and when we can do the things, create and share and do all of that. So yeah, it's made it much more complex, but it's also brought all of the problems and all of the weaknesses into light.

One of the things I wanted to ask you about was your idea of radical acts, because I mean, that connects quite nicely to this because actually, you know, you're quite quite intentionally there, right? Trying to encourage dialogue in a local community about this concept of radical acts. Maybe that you could say a bit more about that.

So with the caveat that when we say radical, what we're really talking about is pulling it up from the root, right? Not— yeah, the word radical has this kind of negative connotation, you know, radicals over there. But what we're talking about is, again, being willing to pull it up from the root and really look at it and reconsider it. So if you go to our site, bigquestions.institute, we have a link up at the top for this thing we call RAGE, R-R-A-G-E. Which is the Random Radical Acts Generator for Education. And pretty much it's a— it's a good acronym— a set of cards, right? But basically what it says is, okay, so take something, uh, that you really— is, is sacred, and then take something that— some part of your system, and then just kind of merge them together. So you get questions like, what if you had radical empathy in your budget? Well, that's kind of— that's kind of an interesting question, right? I mean, that, that's kind of a different way of thinking? What if you had radical kindness in your classroom structures or in your architecture, or, you know what I mean? And I think that many times when we think about change in schools, we don't think of applying those things that are really sacred to us, those adaptive types of questions, right? As much as we do the technical things, right? So, you know, it's, it's not just about radically changing the look of the classroom. It's doing that with kindness. It's doing that with justice. And those are just conversation starters. That's what those are. And we've had a lot of schools that have just used those as ways of getting into some much different conversations. I mean, just that one, you know, what if you had radical kindness in your budget? You know, and go through every budget line item and go, are we being kind in spending this money this way?

I love that. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a kind of more of a paradigmatic shift think about economics. It makes me think of Charles Eisenstein and his, you know, the gift economy, right? I mean, it's like you really want to flip it on its head, then really start thinking, what would the economy look like if it was based on gift rather than scarcity? I mean, that's cool, right? That really makes you think in a different way. Where that goes in terms of a conversation, who knows? But to actually start with that, that's pretty interesting.

He's essay, The Coronation, too. I don't know if you read that one. Yeah, it's fantastic. And the last paragraph, if you're listening right now, go find Charles Eisenstein, Read The Coronation and wait till you get to the last paragraph, which is just like amazing. But yeah, we have to think radically different and radically in the sense again, that we have to put it all on the table right now because I don't think you can argue any longer that if we're just looking at little small pieces of our work and trying to fit some shifts or change into the larger existential shifts that are happening in the world, it's not going to make any difference and it's not going to really change anything at all.

I wanted to ask you also about— you put out a post recently about the infodemic, which I thought was a cool term to kind of nail this concept of, you know, the information abundance that our young people have to deal with, and do they have the competencies, etc., to be able to deal with that. And I just, yeah, I wondered if you could say a bit more about what implications that has also for the way that we do learning.

Yeah, so not my term, but I love that one.

Okay.

So yeah, I mean, and I was saying to someone the other day, I actually think that the infodemic might be the most important problem for us to solve. I think it may be bigger than climate. I think it may be bigger than social justice. I think it may be bigger than politics. And the reason is, is that we can't have engaged, relevant conversations about any of those other things if we can't figure out what's true and what's real, as opposed to what's just made up and fake and really isn't real or true at all. Right. And again, you look at the US right now, we have a huge issue. And, and if you just— it literally, if you just put disinformation in a Google search right now, you will come up with literally hundreds of articles on this every single day. Hundreds of new articles every single day. Because what we're coming to realize right now is that we We cannot agree on what is true. And if we can't agree on what is true, we will not have a democracy. You can't sustain a democracy unless you can agree on fact. And right now we can't. And, you know, it's too late to not be political about this. Our president for the last 4 years has just exacerbated this issue. I mean, the internet in and of itself has made this a problem. Yeah, and we, we in education have not kept up with it at all, not even close. But the president now has just made it a million times worse. And so we are not doing a good job. We're not doing any job really of helping our kids not just even figure out what is true, but engage in conversations with others in respectful, responsible ways that will allow them then to negotiate a sense of understanding, of shared understanding of how the world operates or what is actually happening. So this is a huge problem. Again, you take climate as an example. If we can't agree on the fundamental facts of what's happening in the world, we're never going to solve that crisis. And we don't teach kids that by making it a 3-week unit in the second half of year 8, right? I mean, which is what a lot of schools do. We're going to have the information literacy unit and, you know, we're going to show you how to parse a Google search and, you know, how to go through this, like, crap detection thing, but that's not enough. That's not enough. The problem here is more about community than it is about being able to do the crap test on an internet resource or whatever, but it's about building the capacity as communities to engage again, respectfully and responsibly in these big conversations. And again, it's just so immediate right now. We can't have a conversation about our election. I tweeted out this morning, we have a, a young man who we kind of shuttle back and forth to basketball practice because just he can't get there, whatever reason, right? But he's a junior in high school, and I asked him yesterday, I said, so, you know, the election's over, there's all this mess going on. I said, how have you guys been talking about the election at school? And he just laughed, and he just said, we don't talk about the election in school. He goes, we don't talk about any of that stuff. The teachers are too scared, you know. And it's, it's like there's all this pressure, and I just So how are we going to fix this if the education system can't engage in these conversations? So that's why I think this may be the biggest problem. It may be worse than any of that other stuff, which all of it is really bad on some level, but this one, I don't know how you get to those other things if you don't solve this.

So it's interesting. It was a whole nother level of fear of repercussions or the reprisals of actually talking about a controversial issue, right?

Because we can't separate in this country right now. We can't separate politics and partisanship. That's our problem, right?

Yeah.

Even when you start talking about politics, everybody is, you know, ears up to hear, okay, what do you believe? What's your viewpoint? What worldview do you bring to this conversation? And, you know, I mean, first of all, I don't know how you reduce the sensitivity to that because you can't have conversations about politics totally in a vacuum. I mean, you have to be willing, if you're going to bring those types of conversations into the classroom, to have some debate around those things and to have some discussions. But that's the whole point. Exactly. Have them in a space where we can moderate them, where we can learn from one another, where we can point out, you know, when there's fallacies in thinking, and, or we can ask questions about it, you know what I mean? But instead, it just happens on social media. It just happens in these kind of screaming matches that we get into through all the other media sources that we have. And so we are not preparing children to live in a world where there are people with just opposing sets of facts. Even saying that, you know, the Kellyanne Conway quote from earlier this year, who's in the Trump administration, "Well, we have alternative facts." You just listen to that and you go, "There is no such thing as an alternative fact. It's fact." So that's where this is such a huge issue right now.

But I would also say that it's not, certainly not distinct to the US, right? I mean, you know, you—

No.

Perhaps there's an accentuated moment in the US, but you know, this is the case everywhere, you know, where I live in France, in the UK, you know, all over the world. And actually, I would say even interestingly, I mean, I used to engage a lot with Twitter for education, but I really went off that because it was such a phenomenally polarized space in terms of discussion of learning and education. It was really difficult to have a reasonable conversation about, yeah, let's talk about knowledge and why knowledge is important. Because immediately if you do that, you're positioned on one extreme of the debate. And that's really unhelpful as well, I think.

No doubt. And just to your point that this is happening all around the world. It is, but we have had the poster child for it for the last 4 years, you know what I mean? I think, and that's why this is so in this moment that we're in right, right this second. That's why this is so acute right now. And that's a problem. So this is a huge lift, right? And this is why I come back to the idea that we're spending way, way, way too much time on pretty much irrelevant curriculum that kids are only learning to get a grade and will forget as soon as the test is over and will never use in their lives. And we all know it. We all know it. We all went through it. We all learned quote unquote all this stuff. We all forgot it as soon as the test was over. And now basically, if there's something that you need, you can learn it on your own if you have that disposition, right? And again, let me just be let's be clear, I think we need to help kids make sure they can read, they can write, they can eat, and they need a basic understanding of how the world operates. But so much of what we make kids do in school is just absolutely nuts when the emphasis should be on building these kinds of literacy skills, building these dispositions, making sure they love to learn, being able to problem solve, to collaborate with one another. We just lose so much of that in the service of this bloated curriculum that at the end of the day, no one can make a sane argument around keeping it.

Yeah. It's interesting though, because as soon as you start using those terms, you are off again in the space of something relatively abstract and these kind of 21st century skills that have been around forever and they've, you know, actually no, now it's not fluffy anymore, right? It's not soft skills. It's not fuzzy. It's like this This is essential, urgent stuff that we have to engage with.

But yeah, and almost everyone— I mean, there was a Tom Friedman— woo-hoo— Tom Friedman article in the New York Times today, you know, where he makes— and everybody's been saying this for years— the most important skill is learning how to learn and loving to learn. And, you know, everybody's been giving lip service to that forever. But now we're at a point where everybody's kind of going, oh, yeah. Yeah, you know, I mean, you can't keep up with it anymore. There's no curriculum that prepares you for living in the world right now. And by the way, we, we have the sum of human information in our pockets. We have access to 5 billion potential teachers in our own lives. We have all these technologies. Not everyone has those, and that access issue is a huge concern, right? And it's something that we have to make sure that we try to solve. But then we also have to teach kids how to use that access. And to learn and to create their own solutions to problems that matter to them. That's how you keep engagement up. There was a question on the call this morning, actually, you know, and one of the concerns was going into classrooms and looking at these hybrid room and Zoom environments and all that kind of stuff, you know, the kids just don't seem that engaged. And I go, duh, you know, I mean, that's not rocket science either because engagement is not about teachers making it interesting. Engagement is about agency. Agency. That's how we get engaged, when we have a stake, when we care about it. And that's why actually a lot of the schools that were deeply into problem-based learning, project-based learning, inquiry, all that kind of stuff, those kids have fared much better in this environment because there wasn't so much of a wait for the teacher to give me something to do type of approach. It was like, okay, I got a question, let me go do it, let me report back in, let me make stuff, let me share stuff. And that's learning. That's the way that we learn, right?

And even more deeply than engagement in a way, it's like it goes then into empowerment, right? Because the kids are empowered and they're just off, they're autonomous and they're off and they're doing their thing.

Yeah, so that's one of my favorite interesting words that I don't like though, because empowerment suggests that we have power to give, right? And I don't think we have power to give kids. I think that it's just, again, it's a situation of how do we create conditions for kids to use the power that they innately have? And it does come back to agency. It comes back to how are we giving kids the freedom to self-determine? How are we allowing that to happen? And again, it's a shift in power. It's not power over, but it's power with. That's another one of my favorite sayings.

From Brené. Yeah, gotta love it. Yeah, right?

Yeah, absolutely right. And there was a guy named Seth Kreisberg who wrote a whole book on power in schools a long time ago. But anyway, you're right. The sentiment is correct, but that word is a little a little bit problematic.

Absolutely, no, I take your point definitely. I think, you know, it's not about giving it because then the power is still with the educator, right? I mean, it's about creating conditions and enabling, right? But I would also say I think there is a limit to the conversation around engagement because there's still a slightly passive element of how are you going to engage me as a student asking an educator, right?

That's right. Students are waiting to be engaged, you know what I mean? But, and also just real fast, I mean, personalized is another one of those those words, right? Because personalized learning is something that's done to you. Someone's personalizing it for you, right? The word should be personal. It's personal learning where I have the choice, I have the freedom, I have the agency to pursue things on my own terms and learn in that, in those contexts with the help then of the adult, the teacher, the mentor, you know, whatever else.

Absolutely. So just to finish off, just specifically, obviously, with the Relearn conference happening starting on Monday, you've already mentioned it briefly, that schools aren't yet disrupted enough being the focus of your keynote. Could you say maybe a little bit more about that as we go into the conference?

Yeah. So I think there are 3 parts to this right now. And again, this is in kind of iterative stages, right? But I think the first part is that we have to realize our growing irrelevance. That's number 1. We have to be able to step back and look at, again, the things that we do and ask, why are we doing this? And when I say irrelevance, I don't mean irrelevance to the world. I mean irrelevance to learning. I think that it's almost inarguable these days that schools do not equal learning. Those are two very separate things. And that's why, again, you know, we talked about language a lot. That's why I have such a problem with these phrases like online learning, remote learning, hybrid learning. It's online schooling. It's remote schooling. That's what's happening here. To use the learning word in there assumes that all sorts of things are happening that really probably aren't. So anyway, we have to acknowledge that the work that we do in schools, the systems and the practices that we have are kind of irrelevant to the ways that kids and humans learn. That's number one. Learning is very natural. Schools are unnatural. The second thing is that in order to kind of regain our relevance, I think we have to look at the world as it is today. So we talk about 5 lenses at Big Questions. We have workshops that take leaders through, but we talk about how, you know, right now we have to see the world differently, that we're not just local, uh, our impact is not just local anymore, but that we're all in this together, that our purpose is changing because basically it's about learning now. It's not about schooling, that the change right now That means that there will not be a new normal, that instead we're pretty much in a world of no normal at this point. And it's going to continue to be like that. That basically the stories that we tell about education are changing outside of us and that we're going to have to understand what those new narratives are and begin to bring them in. And then that finally, that power in and of itself is moving from institutions to individuals. And that that has huge implications for the way that we prepare our kids for the world that we're sending them out into. So to recapture or reclaim our relevance, we have to be looking at our work through a 21st century lens, not a 19th century or 20th century lens, which I think is the way we still look at it. And then the third part of it is how do we then maintain that? How do we make sure that we don't get stuck in this particular moment, right? And that we're constantly iterating. So we talk a lot about how do we begin to develop the capacity to see the signs in terms of what's coming at us. I think basically a lot of us struggle with the kinds of shifts that are happening on a micro level and putting them together into seeing them then as larger shifts that are going to have an impact on our work because they don't— many of these things don't happen overnight. They're not huge big waves. They're ripples, but the ripples add up. So it's things like, you know, scenario planning and futures thinking and how do you begin to read the world differently as well. So anyway, that's, that's basically what the keynote talks about very briefly, obviously in about half an hour. And again, that the disruption is going to happen when we we really are willing to get to the foundational big questions that we need to be asking about schools and learning right now.

Yeah, that's such an interesting aspect though, that kind of ability to synthesize and generate understanding, because that, you know, is particularly in this moment, it's so difficult to do that, seeing the wood for the trees in terms of what actually is important, what's going to stick, what's going to last.

And again, I think it's because we're dealing, and not just now, but we always just kind of deal with the day-to-day, but that's where the energy comes from, I think, trying to figure out, so how do we move? How do we continue to evolve and learn through this moment? That's where I think there's a lot of creative energy that's kind of pent up, actually.

Yeah, interesting. Well, it's a real pleasure. Thank you so much. I mean, you know, always an inspiration and a provocation to many people. And I'm definitely not ending this conversation annoyed. I'm feeling totally energized and inspired. So no, thank you. I really appreciate it.

I'm glad I made up for it. Brilliant. All right, Tim. Thanks Santé.

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