FLD Shorts - Episode 1 - Gary Stager

Welcome to Future Learning Design Shorts. Join me, Euan McIntosh, and him, Tim Logan, as we don our intellectual scuba gear, plunge into the educational abyss, and resurface with treasures from the minds of education's finest.

We're going to draw on over 200 hours of archives from the weekly 60-minute conversations I have with educational makers and shakers.

These shorts, for our time-poor friends, will distil and dissect all that wisdom for you before the last sip of your coffee break. So you think you know Gary, and then you don't. And that's what I learned listening to this podcast, that there's a whole bunch of new stuff that comes in. Yeah, straight in, the thing that caught me— we're in the middle of exam season at the moment in Scotland as we record this, with my eldest heading off to her first big exams. And I just thought it was interesting, this idea of no one accuses spectacle wearers of cheating, and yet spectacles give us the ability to do stuff and to make sense of the world. And I think it's always interesting how I have better eyesight in the car than my wife or my daughter when they're not wearing their glasses because my spectacles give me that advantage.

But if I could, that is exactly where Gary's at with technology, right? That is what technology is, is an extension of ourselves. And that's why all this, we started the discussion around AI, but glasses, reading, all of these different things are technologies that we use to enhance our understanding of the world, right?

Yeah, I just thought it was interesting how— so Gary's often painted, or paints himself sometimes as well, as the, you know, the Grinch in the room, the, the one that's gonna, um, be a little bit, I guess, no-tosh, a little bit upfront, a little bit kind of cutting through the nonsense, um, and maybe that kind of brash, uh, way that people think, you know, love or loathe. Um, but what I found really interesting is that He picked up on the fact that technologies in general, but particularly with AI at the moment, everyone in a position of power tends to pick it up on the wrong end. As he put it, they tend to play gotcha, or they look to catch people cheating, and they look to remove anything that might allow people to have a leg up in the world. And he said, you know, if we're engaged in meaningful work that's mutually beneficial, then actually we don't care about all that stuff. It got me thinking about negativity in politics and policy. That how it's much easier to be negative when you think about policy. What's wrong? How can we fix it? We even talk about problem solving inanely in school all the time. And once Gary gets going, the way he describes how technology can be used by a 6th grader in class, it is nothing but a well of optimism and hope. I got the— there was a point where he was talking about because he does work with kids. He actually does model lessons and sits in with kids regularly and has done for decades. He's done it for longer than I've been a teacher. I mean, he knows young people inside out. When he talks about what they're doing with it, even on a podcast, you can see his eyes come alive and you can hear that that's actually where the action is. It's where the real change can happen. And so as a pod, after 50 minutes, I probably left not entirely sure what my next step was as an educator. You know, there's so much going on in that podcast, but one of the things I picked up on was this, um, idea of relentless optimism when we come— when it comes to technology. And those of us who look for the opportunity in each technology are more likely to create positive change with it than the slightly mean negative view that people often take, which is, right, let's shut it down until we know what we're doing with it, rather than saying let's embrace it and see what it can offer us.

That's— I'd say that's Totally true, except he's also being quite deflationary about the hype on the other end, who are people, you know, 'cause there's a lot of people with a load of hype who are saying, oh man, this is gonna change. This is the silver bullet that's gonna change education forever. And Gary's been around the block many times and seen that hype cycle and it never delivers and it never actually changes, right?

I love this thing about the LinkedIn AI experts within like a week of a product launch.

I'd love that. It's so true though. I'd love that. It's so true, right? Because it's like all this, we get super excited, you know, and I'm, I definitely, I'm, a culprit when I get excited about a new idea, but at the same time—

but you don't change your LinkedIn profile to be an expert in it.

Right. True. That is true. Except, you know, you do. And that's one of the things I really value about Gary is that he puts it all back into this context of how do human beings explore their environments? And sometimes they use this tool and sometimes they'll use that tool, but it all the way, all of the time is social learning to try and understand who we are, how we navigate our environment better. And it's not, you know, it's just more of that. And I think he puts that in a really nice frame.

Towards the end, there was a really, um, quite a challenge actually launched, I think, for a lot of the schools that we work with, both in the state sector but also in those international schools. You know, he was taking the mickey a little bit out of people who call themselves AI experts, having, you know, um, just discovered a particular tool or whatever. But he also raised the idea that, you know, that this idea that school has become some kind of training center, even in elementary. So you go to a specialist for that, you go to a specialist for this. And he said, you know, grade— I think he said grade 2 reading specialists should feel just as embarrassed about their job title as the AI expert. Because if you need a reading specialist in an elementary school to get kids excited about reading and capable of reading, maybe there's an issue. More with reading, for instance, right? Um, and I think that this idea— increasingly we see elementary schools beginning to act a little bit more like a middle school or high school. Middle school long ago started to lose the celebration of learning aspect. It's really become boot camp for the hell that is to come in high school, for, uh, certainly in international schools. And in state schools, you see kids being forced into taking more and more choices earlier, earlier, and earlier. You know, what do you want to do when you're older when you're 13? I mean, I was 30 before I had half a clue about what I wanted to do.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Interesting ideas about how— and this is the other thing I do like about Gary, he never offers any advice on how to solve the problem. He definitely lays that at the door of the people whose problem it is. But he has identified something which is uncomfortable, I think, for a lot of people. And for that reason, it's definitely worth a listen.

But I think I would also say, I think that's— I appreciate that. Because he's not preaching, he's not trying to sell a book full of solutions to a problem that he's identified. He's saying fundamentally, this is a human situation. And these, you know, he's challenging people on the role of the teacher. I loved what he was saying about the teacher that's making a field trip out of going to the parking lot so they can get out of school quicker. Yeah. Right. At the end on a Friday, because it's like, what are you interested in as a human being? And I'm, this is to teachers, like, what are you interested in? What, what really lights you up in terms of the things you care about. And maybe it is learning and educating young people, but also maybe it's music or maybe it's, you know, theater or whatever it is. What, what do you do that fires you up? And I think communicating, that's where he's coming from. I think a lot of his energy is about how do we just really inspire kids about life in general. And you're not going to do that by being a reading specialist who's targeting these evidence-based techniques about how to improve reading skills. It's like, well, How do you fire kids up about finding out about the world, right?

I think that brings me to the third thing that just really struck me from this discussion, which was essentially— and the bit where I think Gary's own passion comes out is when he talks about people. Technology is, if it's anything, is about connecting people, I think. And he talks about the role of people, of mentorship. And so I think there's two parts to what you've just said. The first part, what you just said, is Find what sets your heather on fire, what sets you alight as a teacher.

Scottish metaphor.

Scottish metaphors that don't travel. Yeah. But what gets you excited as an educator is really important to know. That's, I think, what the purpose of summer holidays is, to reflect on, like, what switched me on this year and how can I do more of it next year? And then make sure people around you know that that's what you really love doing, because they probably have no idea, right? And they might not enjoy doing it quite so much. And then you start to get more collaboration between people within a school, 'cause they say, "Hey, I know you love teaching this particular thing in this particular way. Do you mind just bashing our classes together and we'll do it together?" So that was the first thing. And the second thing was expertise. You talked about mathematicians and it struck me because, you know, this week, yet another example of academic bullying with these, you know, higher education people who should know better, drawing swords and putting each other down to make themselves look great. And you contrast that with his mathematical mentors, Seymour Papert, John Conway, a couple of others. You know, the Wolfram brothers behind the incredible mathematical calculators, computers, they are some of the most just delightful, charming people to sit down— I'm lucky, I've had dinner a couple of times now with them. In different contexts. At school, I would be the kid who'd say, I'm not really into mathematics, and I stopped it as quickly as I could because it wasn't my shtick. And so I'm not very good at it, I don't think. I have never— in the company of real experts, people who really are comfortable in their subject matter, know what they're talking about, there's a playfulness. And yeah, he brings that out. He says there's this human love for the subject, for the topic. And this was really important. I thought it's something every great educator inherently does but are maybe not aware they're doing it. And so it's worth flagging to reflect on and work out how you do more of it. The playfulness that comes when you know your stuff also means that as an expert, you never make someone else feel stupid. And he said, you know, I have all these mentors— Seymour Papert, um, Conrad Wolfram, John Conway, loads of other people— not one of them made me feel stupid, he said. But I had a lot of teachers who did. Exactly. I guarantee those teachers were not half as expert mathematicians as those guys.

Yeah.

But, you know, nothing beautiful can ever be forced, he said. And I think that that's an interesting provocation to reflect on. Every educator, if you really know your onions, then actually you have this playfulness in your work. If you really know your stuff, you can veer away from the plan, you can listen more to the questions of students, you can cope with that kind of thing. But the other thing is you realize that you don't know it all and that you're quite comfortable with that. And then the final point that he raised, which applies whether you're a mathematics teacher, a football coach, a musician, is we've got to find ways to introduce our kids far more frequently to what greatness feels like. And so, you know, I've got, um, a nephew who is a fantastic footballer. He and his brother are exposed to greatness on a regular basis. They go and see great footballers, and they go to footballing camps with great coaches, not just, um, you know, playing in the park. My own daughter, exposed to amazing jazz musicians who help her become a better jazz musician. You don't get better at jazz by listening to CDs, which is what I had to do as a teenager because didn't have any access to greatness. But, um, something for every international school, every state school, every teacher, coach, mentor— how can you be the person that unlocks the door to help introduce kids to real genuine greatness so they know what it feels like, so they can start aspiring towards it and working hard towards it? In short, it's, um, a great 50-minute-long episode. This particular segment is going to talk about those people because I think the stories from Gary about his people, about the people who inspire him are inspiring for any one of us.

You know, the great thing about scientists like we've been talking about, and I don't profess to be 1 billionth of as smart as Stephen Wolfram, is if he's completely wrong, he will laugh and go and say, oops, and go on to something else. Yeah. And there's this kind of an improvisational quality, even though there's a passion, a great deal of experience and expertise associated with it. I mean, another way of saying it is I wrote this in an essay that ruffled some feathers, but it, it occurred to me once that I had the great good fortune of spending time in the company of some of the world's most important mathematicians. I know Wolfram a little bit. I, I, I spent some time with John Conway and, and Seymour Papert and my friend Brian Silverman. And not once did any of them ever make me feel stupid, but plenty of math teachers did. And my math teachers didn't have the sort of playful human love for the subject that they have for it. Yeah. Papert used to talk a lot about, you know, quoting Einstein, love is a better master than duty, or Xenophon, that nothing beautiful can ever be forced. And I, and also that if you make simple things easy to do, you make complexity possible.

Yeah.

So I think, you know, fundamentally The purpose of school is to introduce children to things they don't yet know they love and to give them a sense of what greatness looks like, feels like, tastes like, so that they can aspire towards that.

Yeah.

And so I think the sort of— I'm fighting against the malaise and mediocrity of I could just wait this out and there'll be a new topic on Monday, as opposed to I can't sleep because this problem is driving me nuts.

Yeah.

And I want to get to the bottom of it. And like I, I mentioned at the beginning, you know, I want to live in a world where kids wake up in the middle of the night with a burning desire to get back to school to work on some project that matters to them. And where their teachers wake up and ask, how do I make this the best 7 hours of a kid's life?

Yeah.

If we're concerned about the viability, future viability of schooling, I don't think there's any alternative to that. We have to identify why did a kid show up? How do they gain greatest benefit from being co-located in the same space at the same time? And, and I feel badly when people are robbed of curiosity and wonder and beauty and joy. And I don't think those are— I, I think it's a uniquely kind of probably American but Western anti-intellectual view of math and science as being sort of cold and, and human. And, you know, there's probably a good reason why so many mathematicians are really gifted musicians. We sort of miss the, the obvious connections that are, that are readily available in front of us, that I, I, I think they, they see a similar abstract beauty and joy and satisfaction across domains.

There's almost a kind of a, an unsaid, or, or sometimes explicitly said assumption that you have to go through the kind of boring trudge of, you know, the, the basics and all these kind of horrendous mediocre terms of just, you know, in order to get to that space where you can— now you can play, now you're a master, now you can kind of be the virtuoso and blah blah, you know.

And we're just robbing kids of all kinds of experiences, you know. There's no field trips, there's no play corner, there's no telephone in the back of the room where you pretended to make conversations, there's no newspapers being delivered, there is no music teachers, there's no drama, the books are being taken off the shelves. I mean, we're— there's a lot of not cool stuff happening that's causing a lot of, you know, terror among teachers. And, sure, and, you know, the two things that have been— I've been thinking a lot about lately is, you know, one, we've turned primary school into some sort of community college or vocational training where, you know, every 15 minutes someone rings a bell and you move on to something else. When I studied to be a primary teacher, you had to learn how to play the piano a little bit, you had to learn how to teach math and music and science and social studies, and hopefully together, and develop manipulatives and design project prompts.

Yeah.

Now you go to the first grade literacy specialist and the second grade math expert as if those are things, right? And if, and if you're a first grade literacy expert, you should be just as embarrassed as putting innovator or AI and education expert in your LinkedIn bio.

Yeah.

That's great. That means you read as well as a 6-year-old does it. Congratulations. And the result of this is connections aren't being made. Those of us who know better need to do better. And if we won't stand between the kids and the madness, who will?

Thanks for joining us, and you can check out the rest of the conversation linked in the episode description. And don't forget to dive into the show notes and get your free weekly email of inspiration from The Provocation, joining thousands of education leaders, innovators, and creative people who want to start their week thinking differently.