Learner-Centred Innovation - A Conversation with Dr. Katie Martin

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Instead of designing for school, let's design for the learners. And when we do that, when we think about specific kids and design for them, our programs get tighter, our connections get tighter, the learning goes deeper, and we really start to see that impact.

Hi again and welcome back. In this week's episode, it was fantastic to be able to speak to Dr. Katie Martin, who is the author of Learner-Centered Innovation as well as the Chief Impact Officer at Altitude Learning. She teaches in the Graduate School of Education at High Tech High and is on the board of Real World Scholars. Dr. Martin has worked in diverse contexts to to learn, research, and support deeper learning for all students. She's served as a middle school English Language Arts teacher, instructional coach, and led the district's new teacher mentoring program. At the university, district, and school level, Katie aspires to create experiences that empower all learners to develop the knowledge, skills, and mindsets to thrive in a changing world. As a mom, she wants her kids to have learning experiences in school that build on their strengths and interests. And as an educator, she is passionate about making sure we do the same for all kids. You can follow Katie on Twitter @KatieMartinEdu or on LinkedIn @KatieMartin.

Hi, Katie.

Hey, Tim.

Hey, how are you doing?

Good, how are you?

Yeah, really well. Well, thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to have you speaking with me today, and I've been really enjoying the book. And if we can just start off, your 'what if' is a big question at the beginning of the book, and it's just kind of a nice theme all the way through. So maybe we could start there. Just why is that such an important and big question for you?

Yeah, very, very happy to start there and glad to be here connecting with you. When, when I think about not just the book, but working with educators, so often we can get stuck— speaking for myself— and, you know, you can get stuck in just the day-to-day and what is what we think we're supposed to do, maintaining the status quo in a way that like, this is what I'm supposed to do for my kids based on my own experience. And when we stop and think, what if we stop and think about different possibilities, it opens us up to be more creative and to really focus on what matters. And I think more this year than ever, people have been really taking stock of what are the things that are most important when I can't do everything that I always could, what are the things that are the most important? How do I make that still show up? And so the relationships, The, you know, social-emotional wellbeing of individuals, those things have continued to be so, so important. And, and so we start to say like, what if we prioritize that? What if we prioritize learners and we really design systems like that? It opens up the creativity and way to think about how we could leverage what's always worked, but do things differently moving forward and forget the things that maybe don't serve us very well.

Yeah. Yeah, nice. It's definitely some prioritization, isn't it? And for you personally, how has that been? Have you had some moments of insight in, in the last 12, 18 months in relation to that? Has it given you a bit of clarity around certain priorities?

Oh, for sure. You know, first and foremost, it's been just my family and spending that time with people who matter the most to me. But also as we think about education and the partners that I've been working with, we've really dialed into, If you only have 1 or 2 hours a day synchronously with your students or virtual, or you only see them 2 days a week, what are the things you want to do? And all, you know, it's, we want to build community, we want to build connection, we want to have that one-on-one relationship and get people talking about their ideas and solving problems. And so not only in my own world, but in education also, it's really helped me prioritize and helped educators prioritize what matters the most.

Yeah. And it's going to be interesting, isn't it, to see what happens after, whatever that means. But as you say, relationships is a big one and it's definitely having it taken away from us, we've really prioritized it again. But I think I agree, it's really brought a sense of clarity that that's such an important central piece of learning, that those relationships.

Right. I mean, I think you could make the case in some ways that social-emotional learning, the relationships, that was what we did, you know, separate from the content, separate from real education. And now we've seen that it's not separate. It is the foundation by which we learn and grow and build those connections. And when we don't have that, we often don't have the purpose and motivation to do the assignments and the activities and really learn the skills that are really important.

No, absolutely. And so then if, when we ask these big what-if questions, obviously you've done a huge amount of work in terms of thinking about where those take us in terms of those inquiries. And so what do you see as the big, shifts, and throughout your book you're talking through them, but in terms of how we can support educators to make some of those important shifts?

I think some of the big shifts, and one of the things that, you know, I talked about in the book is moving from the curriculum and the pacing guides and the standards and letting that be the focus, and instead shifting our focus to who are the learners in front of us, what are those goals, and how do we really design the pedagogy, the instruction, the community to meet those goals, rather than I just have to move through this curriculum and the kids just have to adapt. Adapt instead? How do we adapt the system to the learners? And I just want to point out that oftentimes people think, oh, if we have all this voice and choice for students, the educators don't matter and we just let people do whatever they want. And that's not at all what I'm advocating for. If we have really clear outcomes of what we are trying to achieve that go beyond just your typical metrics of math and language arts and those standardized metrics, but we really broaden those outcomes of the types of learners, the skills, the knowledge, the habits that we really need to develop in individuals, then we start thinking about designing for that. So that's a huge shift, not just implementing the curriculum, but designing the experience and learning to get to those outcomes that we all say we want in our vision statements, mission statements, right? These critical thinkers, collaborators, problem solvers. If those are the things we really want, we have to shift our system to design for those things. And I often say moving from this standardization to personalization, this creating those systems that allow to personalize for each learner, but to do that, I don't believe that it's every educator designing an individual education plan for each student, right? It's not just incumbent on the teacher to do that. That other shift we have to make is from compliance, where kids come to school, they do the work, they turn in the assignments, they move to the next grade. It's really about how do we provide opportunities for more agency for students to think about their goals, navigate their path, connect with different people, get feedback, and the teacher is there to instruct, but also facilitate and collaborate in that journey as well. And that is, that's a huge shift for many people. You know, when teachers will say, but if I'm not teaching, I don't feel as relevant. And instead, you can be so much more relevant to each individual, if they're navigating their path, and you're coaching them. And sometimes you're at the front, as you know, that direct instruction because they need more, and sometimes you're behind just cheering them on because they're moving at their own pace. And so that shift from compliance to agency is really critical. And I think the third really big shift for me is moving from these outcomes, I mentioned it before, of just standardized metrics, our traditional metrics of success, to broadening our definition of success to include the whole child, to leverage strengths, interests, and all of the things that each individual brings. A student once said something that really resonated, stop trying to figure out if I'm smart, I'm smart and start figuring out how I'm smart. And I think that really speaks to that bigger shift of everyone has brilliance. How do we understand it? How do we cultivate it and how do we grow it?

Yeah. Nice. And I think I had this conversation a few times in relation to that difference between individualizing learning and personalizing. And I think that, as you said, that point of agency is key to that because the learners then are bringing themselves into and connecting with the learning in, in that different kind of way that it's about them personalizing it more than it is about the teacher personalizing it for them, right? And it's certainly not the teacher individualizing it for them.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And the other thing I really enjoyed, you're talking about the idea of learning as a process rather than an event, that we're not just looking for products and events in education. Actually, this process orientation is kind of interesting.

Yeah, I mean, when you think of anything, when I ask educators or anybody around the world What is a significant learning experience in your own life? And if you think about a time when you've really learned something deeply, it could be learning to ride a bike. It could be defending your dissertation. It could be giving a big talk. There's many of these events and they rarely are the event, right? The, the learning isn't at the very end when you produce the thing. The learning is the journey when you failed, when you've received feedback, when you've learned from mentors and you've shared and received that critique, when you've just falling on your face and the struggle, those things are not mistakes. They are not things to erase. They are the moments of learning on the journey. And too often in school, this was my experience and many others, it's you made a mistake, fix it, fix it. So you can get an A on the test or you can move to the next grade or finish this unit instead of really celebrating, acknowledging, normalizing that process and how important it is. And so that, that process of learning, is critical in our classrooms, but our professional learning often doesn't model this process. And so educators often are thinking about, well, you know, we create what we experience. So if educators aren't learning in their own journey and aren't able to articulate their learning process, it's not always something that we can translate to the classroom. And so I think that's a critical piece too. It's not just classroom learning, but how do we extend that to educators as well?

Yeah, there's definitely a mirror there, isn't there? The way that we plan and chunk things up into time-boxed events almost. We lose that kind of more lengthy process of journey or, you know, different clichés around it. But that was something else I wanted to also ask you about was the professional development, because you talk about that not really transforming learning, right? I mean, you give, give some nice examples in the book. Why doesn't it transform learning in the way that we've historically correctly done it and how can we adapt it, shift it in order to give educators that sense of that process, that joy of learning again, that perhaps they may have lost somewhere along the way.

Well, in a few ways, I would say that when it doesn't transform learning linked to the same thing in the classroom, professional development is designed by a group of people outside of the classroom to, you know, say, we're gonna teach teachers about this new curriculum. We're gonna bring them all into a room. And, you know, my favorite is when teachers get brought into a room and told about differentiation. And then they're expected to go, you know, do this in the classroom, or they are told, "You have to personalize for all your kids," in a big lecture hall, and they don't have the opportunity to really be met where they are. So, too often, we're telling teachers what to do instead of bringing them into the process, involving them, giving them that agency. They are the ones who are with kids every day, and if we don't create the conditions where teachers have the autonomy the power and the resources to make those choices and to make those changes, it's lip service. So I think that it's, it's about, yes, having that vision and being really clear about where you're trying to go, having those success indicators that align to that, and then providing those resources and then multiple ways of support where teachers can learn from one another. We can open up classrooms. Too often we're so siloed in education, and so teachers never get to see somebody else teach. They never get to get that authentic feedback. Maybe that's not an observation or an evaluation. That's really truly that coaching and guidance. Those are the things that really start to shift practice. For me as an educator, when I was a coach, that's when I started to see the real difference is when we would come together and say, here's what we're trying to achieve. Here are the strategies we want to try out. Now let's go and try them in our classrooms. We are all learners here. We're going to observe one another. We're going to give feedback. And then we're going to look at our student work. We're going to see, did this really move the needle? Did this actually have the impact that we hoped? And when we get in that cycle and do that action research and really make that learning visible, then you start to see the impact on educators. You start to see them changing practice. You see the impact on students. And that's when it becomes that process, right? It becomes a process. It becomes learning instead of an event that I went to and then I go back to my classroom and I have 9 million other things to do and so I forget about it and the binder stays on the shelf and then I go to another meeting or get evaluated and I think about, oh, I have to pretend to do this really quickly. So that's a traditional system instead of actually just creating that learning community of adults as well.

No, that's the reality, isn't it? You want it to be an authentic genuine process and I like to— you talk about these professional learning challenges.

Yes.

That idea of just giving the educator a refresher in a way, like an authentic experience of just choose something that you don't know how to do and you want to learn and go and do it. And whether it's connected to teaching or not, just to key them back into what it feels like for learners.

Yes. It has been so powerful because, you know, we can get in this mindset of I go to professional development I go to my staff meeting, but we're not often clued into this is about learning. This is about growth. It's about compliance. And so when you take people out of that and just say, go learn something and reflect on it. I've had the opportunity to do it with multiple groups in master's classes and different groups. And over the course of 4 or 5 weeks, pick something to learn, write about it. And then the piece is sharing it online. So sharing the journey and people often resist that, but when they do, they start realizing that like, oh my gosh, I'm holding myself accountable for my journey. I'm showing growth. People are giving me feedback, which too often when we learn something, we keep it behind closed doors because we don't want to admit when we're not perfect. And so that journey not only puts them in the seat of a learner, but it exposes them to the resources and the tools to learn that are really critical. And that reflection is often, I can do this in my classroom, right? My favorite thing is when a teacher goes and learns something about running or something seemingly disconnected from the classroom, and then within 2 weeks they've redesigned a whole lesson because that's in the back of the mind of, this is what learning should look like, how can I apply this to my classes? And it's really, really powerful.

Yeah, there's an emotional component to it as well, isn't there? Just that sense of having felt again what that's like, that vulnerability or that success, the joy of actually succeeding and then moving forward, seeing your own growth. Like there's that emotional component that, you know, you can lose in a world of compliance, right?

For sure. You know, the, when we talk about productive struggle too, the thinking about too often we try to shortcut for people and scaffold it because we don't want them to fail and we don't want them to feel bad. And so we do so much for learners instead of letting them go through that process. So that's the other piece too, that educators start to realize, oh, it is okay if they fail. It is okay if they don't get it right on the first time. That's the benefit, not the challenge.

Absolutely. And you talked there a bit about how we know that this is actually having an effect, right? Is this having an impact on learners? And, you know, whether it's the professional learning having an impact on teachers, ultimately for the students, or whether it's in the classroom for students. And I really like the impact framework that you guys have created. And I think that word impact is a big one for me, just because it has all sorts of evidence and evaluative and measurement type connotations, which maybe we can explore but perhaps first you could just say, 'cause yes, we see it in student work, but there's also all this other data out there, data points in all sorts of ways that we might be able to gather to map and evidence impact. Perhaps we would start just describing the framework and then maybe we can dig into some of those a bit more. That would be great.

Yeah, happy to. So our CEO, Devon Vadishka, has worked on this over the last couple years to create the impact framework. Which is made up of agency, collaboration, and problem solving. And so when you think about those three, so much of what we want and what we just talked about already today can be boiled down to those three things. And one of the critiques or, you know, questions, well, how do skills fit in this? And so, but we think a lot about agency and developing expertise. You know, you have to have knowledge and skills to be able to do something with that. And so the expertise and skills are deeply embedded in agency. And that's also knowing yourself. And then the collaboration is being able to use those skills and who you are as an individual to collaborate with others to solve problems that are meaningful and relevant, you know, in your own context and family community, but also globally as well. And that's the problem solving. So you have agency, skills, and expertise, and you are able to collaborate with diverse groups of people and take in and understand diverse thinking and perspectives to be able to solve problems that matter. If we're not doing that in school, what are we doing?

Yeah, absolutely. That should be our core work, right? But I think again, one of the reasons why that isn't always our core work is because sometimes some of those things are difficult to evidence, right? In terms of an intentional change or growth, you know, in that element that we as educators want to have. And I think like, for example, in your agency section, you talk about growth comparisons. And I thought that was interesting in trying to bring together different pieces of data to then show growth. Right. So I don't know what would be some examples of how that might be used.

Yeah. I mean, there's a variety of ways and we're working with different partners on their reporting systems to be more expansive. So too often the grade is a combination of habits and skills and what you produce. And if you brought Kleenex to school, you know, it's this like whole mess of things that happen that gets reduced to a grade or a number. And so we're really looking at how to be expansive and say, okay, we know that we need to grow you as a reader and in fluency and in your numeracy. So we want to look at growth on these metrics. Are you able to do this faster, more efficiently? Are you able to read complex texts? So there are growth comparisons that are fairly traditional that we could use to say, where were you in September and where are you in May? I always think of it in terms of like when I walk into a kindergarten classroom, I think it's the best way to describe it. You see kids drawing in September. They draw a picture of themselves. They write a sentence that's usually a few scratches. And then each month there's a new picture that shows how they draw. It shows their writing. And you see so explicitly their progression as a learner. And so we can do that with these skills. If we identify these skills, we can do that for so many other ways to show that growth, growth as an individual. So like comparing myself against my own growth and progress. There's also benchmarks that we know that kids need to hit at certain intervals and grade levels that we want to be able to compare against. But then also the habits, like what are my own goals? So my goals might be different than yours, and we want to empower individuals to define those goals, to work towards them, to collect evidence of them. But those are 3 different metrics, and being able to disentangle them and collect the evidence that relates is really important.

No, absolutely, and I think obviously a huge part of agency is that ability to set those goals for yourself, right? But also I hear what you're saying loud and clear about that idea of comparing yourself with yourself before, you know, yourself yesterday or in September, because I think so much of what we do is about comparing students to each other or to a mythical average. And actually the power comes when it's like, how much have I grown? How can I show that? How can I hold some of that evidence as a learner to then pull that together into my portfolio? And how can these people around me help you to do that?

Yeah. I mean, there's times when kids will come in and they plateau. So you might have a kid who is above that mythical average, but has not grown at all in a year. Yeah. And you know, what a disservice to that human. And you also have kids who come in and, you know, grow exponentially, but they're still below the mythical average. And so we want to be able to to show that difference and those different profiles of learners, where they're strong, where they have challenges and where their needs are.

Yeah. And it's in a way, it's kind of back to that process or event. It's like, we're not just measuring them on an event, like a standardized test. We're trying to evidence the shift in the process, right? As you say, starting points could be very, very different. And then, because obviously with Attitude Learning, you guys are, you know, working with lots of different contexts, different schools. But you also started out, as I understand it, as OutSchools, right?

Yes.

And I just wondered, because one of the things you say in your book, which really resonates strongly with me, is that innovation is not for a few. It's not just for the kind of the leafy suburbs, the rich kids, the affluent areas. It's critical that we get it for everybody. And I just wondered, with the history of OutSchool and how that kind of grew and was quite a high-profile story in a way, right? In terms of quite a lot of money. Put into it, and then actually what you've learned through that process of seeing how you can scale and support that kind of innovation, either in individual schools, but then also how can we broaden that out to make it more widespread and more accessible and not just that kind of preserve?

Sure, yeah, absolutely. Lots of great lessons. So, you know, the founder, Max Cantilev of AltSchool, grand vision, really thoughtful man, and really wanted to do something very unique unique and different in education. And part of that were the micro schools. And so that's the R&D, like how could we really take what we are learning in the world of work and integrate that into our schools? So, you know, as I joined, the micro schools were in full swing and, and doing a lot of R&D with the technology, but also thinking about the pedagogy and practice and how they fit together, right? Instead of like technology's really cool over here and, you know, pedagogy's over here, really trying to braid those two together in a way that creates the future of what education could be. And so as, as I joined, and we think about that innovation and the great things that they created, that second phase was working with partner schools to take it from the lab schools or the micro schools into districts, charter schools, private schools around the country in different spaces to say, how do we make these learner-centered practices and the technology together something that can support for all kids in all different types of schools based on their communities, based on their vision. And so that has been the greatest privilege to be able to work with our partners across the country to really personalize supports, resources, and partnerships for them based on their needs. And so that is the goal, right? That like we create ideas and resources that scale and work with partners across, across the world and, you know, learn from our other counterparts. How do we really help to make these shifts? How do we normalize them in a way that all kids can learn, not be tested by that mythical average, but have those competency-based assessments and leverage technology and resources to help that? Because it's very complicated for educators to have to manage by themselves. And so where technology can come in and support that and help us gather evidence, help us create these portfolios that go with students that aren't siloed from teacher to teacher, I think those are important innovations that can help with the competency-based shift.

Yeah. And if I could ask, what was the learning around the actual microschool idea? Because there's quite a lot of people, particularly now, I would say, beginning to talk about, you know, pods and microschools as potentially quite an interesting innovation to think about how can we be a bit more agile, have these smaller units of learners together in a locality or connected across the world, whatever, in terms of the size of those or how that worked, what was your learning from how that kind of operated on the ground?

I would say one, timing is everything, you know, because like you said, you know, 2 years ago it was not as much of a necessity. And now you see, wow, we really do these micro schools, how impactful. I think, you know, big learning is these smaller communities, you can be more nimble, you can, help to personalize when you have these smaller schools that really meet the needs of the community. But, you know, creating more central resources, it's, you know, to have the buildings and to create new systems from scratch become very time-consuming, which is why we often have the efficiencies of big districts. And so I think that having them push on each other, micro schools that are part of districts, you know, we see a lot of benefit when we have lab schools or micro schools embedded school systems so they can be the innovation and R&D that scale those practices that aren't quite ready for prime time. So I think that's one of the biggest learnings is they're very beneficial, really helpful to scale and test new ideas and really meet the needs of learners, but embedding them in larger systems that have those efficiencies are really critical.

Yeah, nice sweet spot in the middle somewhere. Yeah, nice. And then just lastly, if I could ask where you, because as you say, I'm obviously not travelled as much in the last 12 months as you've done previously, but just in terms of working with schools virtually and then hopefully again in person soon, where do you feel most optimistic? I mean, where are you seeing some of the positive bright spots emerging, whether it's connected to the pandemic perhaps, or even before that? Where do you see some of the good shifts happening?

All over. I'm so inspired and optimistic. That's part of my just kind of disposition, but I'll go back to the beginning of our conversation that it has forced us to focus on what matters most. And those things about individuals, knowing that not everyone comes to school with the same resources, access, support systems, and just understanding now more so than ever, that our kids are at different places. They have different needs. They have different resources. They have different talents. So creating a system that is standardized does not make sense. It didn't. It hasn't for a long time. And so where we start to see that now is coming out of the pandemic and looking forward, not back, to say, let's go back to normal. I see so many leaders saying, let's take what we've learned. Let's take what's worked and think about how we create the new and better normal. Looking about flexibility, do kids need to be sitting in seats from 8 to 3 every day to make sure they've learned? No. Do we have more opportunities to have some online options, to have some part-day, to do internships, right? We start to see that we can kind of curate this experience for kids in ways that are more personalized rather than bringing everyone to a school building, sitting in the classroom all day, and calling that the learning experience. That's where it happens. And so I'm starting to see experiments that came out of the pandemic, starting to see how they take shape. One of my partners that I just worked with recently in Kentucky, in Logan County, we said, okay, let's take kids that we know their needs have not been met and let's design for them. So thinking about, again, just at the beginning, instead of designing for school, Let's design for the learners. And when we do that, when we think about specific kids and design for them, our programs get tighter, our connections get tighter, the learning goes deeper, and we really start to see that impact. So mentoring programs, community organizations, and really coming together to support learning, not just being school, I think is where we're going. And I'm excited about it.

It's good and it's interesting kind of network connection between communities, as you say, not just a school as a siloed separate thing, but maybe the pandemic has helped to kind of, certainly helped parents to see what's happening within education, but also perhaps break down some of those walls and allow a bit more collaboration across sectors or within communities. Yeah, very good. Well, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and it's great to see you guys keeping going with this work. So brilliant.

Well, thanks Tim. It's been a pleasure to talk to you and we're definitely grateful grateful for the opportunity to keep learning and innovating with our partners.

Brilliant. Thanks, Katie. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.