Metrics and Virtuous Cycles of Learning - A Conversation with Dr. Theo Dawson

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

That's what it felt like, because it's that fire of curiosity, that desire to learn. It seems to me it's like at the core of life. That's the thing that drives us. The only kind of metrics that we should be using ever in education are metrics that are strongly grounded in a deep understanding of how learning happens.

Hi, welcome back to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Logan, and the podcast is brought to you with the support of Notosh. This week's conversation is a fascinating and in-depth look at educational assessment with the amazing Dr. Theo Dawson. Theo is the founder and CEO of Lectica, and since the early 1990s, her research has focused on developing and building an alternative assessment infrastructure and the technologies to support it. Theo received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, and her award-winning dissertation presented a new approach to measuring learning and describing learning pathways. Since then, she has authored numerous articles, book chapters, and papers on issues related to human development in journals such as Cognitive Development, Mind, Brain, and Education, and the European Journal of Developmental Psychology. Theo has run several successful organizations, including Lectica and its predecessor, the Developmental Testing Service. And she's held appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, Hampshire College, the Medical Center at Louisiana State University, and the Graduate School of Education at Harvard. Theo has also acted as consultant to many institutions like the US federal government, Harvard University, the University of Cyprus, and a variety of businesses and schools both in the US and abroad. Thank you, Theo. I really appreciate you joining me on the podcast. It's gonna— I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I think there's so much interesting material in the amazing work you're doing with Lectica. So thank you for joining me, first off.

Thank you. It was— it's lovely to be invited. I think I'm in good company.

Thank you so much. So let's— I'd love to start in your background to some extent, because I personally have the pleasure of living with a midwife and I've lived with a midwife for the last few decades. And I know that you were a midwife in your past before you came into the education space. And I think there's a really interesting connection between the two things. And obviously, you know, there are people who have made that connection, Socrates way back and Rousseau and others. And I just thought that would be an interesting place to start our conversation, just exploring, you know, partly who you are and where you've come from, but also where you see perhaps there might be connections between those ideas of being a midwife, supporting women in this incredible process, and being a teacher, supporting young people or anybody in the incredible process of learning.

Yeah, I think that there's a connection between my experience as a midwife and everything that I do. It was an amazing journey. It was way back in the '70s when there was no such thing as midwifery anymore. And a bunch of young, enthusiastic, hip women decided that we were going to take it on and try to figure out how we could make things better. I didn't start out with the intention of becoming a midwife. I set out with the intention of trying to change the system and ended up working with doctors who did home births and then gradually being trained through that process. So we were with the very initial first step in was working with doctors. And then later I was teaching other women to do the same thing. So it was a community that built up. It was in Ontario, in Canada. And when you're reinventing something and you're doing it right straight from the heart and the gut, I had a baby in the hospital and decided that that was the most inhumane thing that I had ever been through and that we could fix it. It was not something that needed to be the way that it was. And then finding out that, you know, the main thing that's required of a midwife is the willingness to be present and listen. And be attentive. And training my crazy self to do that, but I tend to be a bit of a jackrabbit, training myself to slow down and be present and to listen and to watch and to be patient and to carefully monitor and all of those kinds of things that are involved in midwifery was a big important lesson for me. The other part of it was learning about people. Learning about this kind of fundamental sweetness at the core of us over and over and over again through experience after experience with people from all walks of life with very different lifestyles and belief systems. Some of them pretty darn obnoxious on the face of them. And then seeing when, you know, when challenged by something that's just so deep and so primal. That there's this core in us as human beings that's really worth loving and taking care of and caring about. So that's, that's a big part of it. The other thing that I learned was because we were very community-oriented at the time and we literally, I mean, we had no idea about taking care of ourselves, which is what led to my eventual burnout at the 10-year mark. But we created community and those communities would meet every year, but we would get together every year and people would bring their children that were growing up and and we would have a chance to watch them growing. And I noticed that the children who were going into public schools were losing their love of learning by about age 8. It was gone. And all, you know, if you ask them about school, they would just talk about their grades. You know, it was, they had very little to say about themselves as learners because it wasn't personal anymore. It wasn't, they weren't being driven by it. And To me, and this is, you know, I'm a little bit melodramatic, so, you know, you might want to take this with a grain of salt, but to me that felt like having your birthright ripped out of you. Like, that's what it felt like, because it's that fire of curiosity, that desire to learn. It seems to me it's like at the core of life. That's the thing that drives us, the thing that makes us strive and makes us go. And that mechanism, whatever it was, and I didn't know anything about it at the time, that makes us go. Seemed to be just being snuffed out in these children. So I homeschooled my kids.

Yeah.

Yeah. And, um, through that process, I'm practicing a John Holt approach, just really unschooling them, just providing the environment and the stimulation in the community. I also broke through another set of beliefs that I had about an external person trying to push the process needed to be there for learning to take place. And I noticed that my children were learning robustly and retaining their love of learning and were interested in many things and, and they, you know, and continue to as adults. So that, that little seed was planted. And then I burnt out and went off to do advertising in Los Angeles.

Quite the change. Interesting. Yeah. But it, but just on that point about that person almost kind of intervening in the process and is the kind of the metaphorical You know, teacher as midwife idea was that, and my wife experienced this definitely in working in the NHS in the UK, you know, that when somebody comes in with a biomedical model to intervene in the process, it's like they're taking away the ability from the woman to be giving birth. And they almost talk about it like they're giving birth now, the doctor's giving birth to the child, whether, you know, through those interventions. So they make these metaphorical links between that and, and teaching where it's, you know, that kind of teacher as banker versus teacher as midwife. It's like, are we intervening and just kind of putting stuff in, or are we there as a midwife, kind of sage femme in French, you know, wise woman, kind of drawing things out, right? And I think there's a metaphorical resonance there. And obviously, you know, people talk about that and Carlo Freri and, you know, all of that.

I think that there's a danger here as well though. And I've seen it, this, happen during my lifetime very clearly. And that is the danger is to think, oh, then we just leave them alone and just put them in a field and they're going to be fine. There's this hands off, off, off. People tend to do this. Society swings a pendulum and we go from one extreme to the other. What we need to do is figure out where that balancing point is. And that's the midwifery piece. A good midwife knows when it's time to go to the hospital, knows when it's time for those interventions to take place. It's done by consent when there's a midwife involved, more often than if there's, you know, no midwife involved. But there does come a moment in the teaching process where you're doing hard work.

Absolutely.

But it's not necessarily visible to the outside world. And it's a skill that needs to be learned over time. You can't just send people to a school to learn this. We have to rethink the way that we do teacher education. To provide teachers with the opportunity to be immersed in the practice as they're learning.

So, I mean, I'd love to get into some detail on that with, based on your work since then, but I think I completely agree just on that point about it is a poetic false dichotomy to kind of draw these differences, but I, I'm not intending to draw a, a kind of this, this overly romantic juxtaposition of, you know, the evil intervener. As it were. But I think primarily it's an interesting way just to, to understand where you've come from and then the fact that you are now working so hard within a different system to try and transform the system, but, but by showing what else is possible.

And applying the same principles basically that, you know, that a midwife lives by, a good midwife lives by.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think I, I also speak very strongly on one side because there needs to be a voice for that side.

Yeah.

But I'm also always aware of the dangers of that, and I see it. I see people misinterpreting what I do all the time and seeing it as, you know, we've got this concept called vertical development now. Yeah. You know, it's like one part of learning is more important than the other part.

Absolutely.

And that's not what I'm trying to say. What I'm trying to say is the real goal of education, and I think we can all agree on this, is the development of the human mind. That's what we really want. We want a bunch of great minds. We want people who can think, people who are good-hearted, people who are able to participate in a democratic society, people who take their work seriously and care and make meaning. And we want well-developed minds. And if that's our goal, and if we start there, the educational system is going to look very different from the way that it looks right now. It doesn't mean we throw everything away. We don't, you know, we don't want to throw it all away, but we really need to stop and go, well, we know so much more about the mind now and how it works.

Yeah.

Can that knowledge lead us into a new place, into a new way of thinking about learning? And, you know, I'm not alone.

Very definitely not. Yeah, I'd love to go into that a little bit because the work you did on stages of development, because I think as you were saying about vertical development, I was talking to Lena Rachel Anderson recently about Bildung and, you know, there's a lot more talk about that idea of vertical development. So vertical and horizontal development as a more well-rounded approach.

But there really aren't two types of development. That's the point. That's that pendulum. There aren't two types of learning. You can't do one without the other. They exist side by side. And that the idea was taken from Piaget. Who has been completely misunderstood. And even academics misunderstand him because they never read him.

Yeah. And so does that link with your piece about what is a good education? Because from what I understand it from reading that, you were researching different people's understanding of what a good education might be at different levels of development.

Yes. So being able to say that there's something about development that can be measured is not the same thing as saying there's a separate thing called vertical development.

Yeah.

So that's one thing. And all of the instruments before ours, with the exception of an instrument created by Commons, were very content-based instruments, you know, for measuring development. And so a lot of— because you're, when you're doing something that's very grounded in a particular context and you're working on a very small sample size, even if it's longitudinal, it's a small sample size, that can create confusion about what it is you're measuring. So a metric is— and this is core to my work— when you try to develop a metric, a measure, you're trying to measure some very narrow construct.

Yeah.

Not because you believe it exists independently of everything else.

Of course. Yeah.

But because if you can measure that construct really well, then what it does is it makes the other stuff around it that looks like noise, it kind of cuts through it and lets you start to see things that you wouldn't be able to see ordinarily. So that hierarchical dimension, which we call hierarchical complexity, is really just the increase of networked knowledge in the mind over time. It's— and as that increases, it becomes increasingly abstract, and it increases and becomes more abstract and integrated, and more abstract and integrated, and more abstract and integrated. But that's a continuous process. It's going on inside of us every second of every day. What we learn how to measure is just a little tiny slice of that. So I set out to try to measure just that hierarchical complexity piece. So that I could make better sense of all the other stuff that was going on.

Yeah. And that's what your Lectica scale is, is it?

That's what the Lectica scale is. It's just a measure of that complexity piece. There's two ways you can think about it. It's a measure of the hierarchical complexity of a performance. That's the first thing it is. It's just a performance. So we don't have an idea that the brain is all in one place or anything like that. That was a heuristic device that Piaget developed for his research, not a State in a way the mind is. Um, so we measure the current complexity level of a performance and, and often, you know, we get several of these over time and we can actually look at development over time. But that, that performance is, is giving us insight into the actual developmental trajectory of that person. So of the development of their mind, how their mind has developed over time. It's the system that we use. To be able to determine what level something is at is based upon something we call a developmental dictionary, in which we have placed every concept that we find in words or word units at the lowest developmental level at which it would be possible for it to be really useful. Yeah.

Interesting.

So, so there are, you know, there's 500,000 entries in the dictionary. And so we kind of have this curated taxonomy of meaning, and we look at the performance through the lens of that taxonomy, and then we have an algorithm that decides where on the developmental continuum, just this complexity continuum, nothing else, this performance actually fits. So we're kind of looking at the history because we're looking at a curve that shows the early meanings This is the mid-level meanings, the higher-level meanings. And the curves gradually move to the right as we develop over time, if our minds develop appropriately. If our minds are not allowed to develop appropriately, very weird things happen to that curve that can actually end up stalling development. So we're measuring that, but we're measuring it not because it's an end in itself or because we believe there's something called vertical development, but because it is a tracing of that developmental continuum. And then we look again at those performances. Through other lenses. So now we've got the developmental part. Now we can say, okay, so what are they doing in terms of collaboration? What are they doing in terms of perspective coordination? What are they doing in terms of these variety of things? And so a report from, of one of our assessments can be anything from a report that's really just about where your lexical score is, or it can be a really rich report that talks about a whole bunch of things about the content and where you are in terms of the development of the content itself. That was, that was a lot.

Yeah, no, that's, it's fascinating because I mean, I'm, I'm no psychologist and I know I've heard you talk about Piaget was actually a philosopher in fact, but for me, the, the whole conversation about kind of those stages of development and the ability to measure that robustly, as you say, in, in developing complexity, it feels like, and you, it can, maybe it goes to something you were saying before we started recording that the response from people sometimes is that, is that that doesn't quite fit this kind of natural growth-oriented paradigm. And, you know, because we're kind of measuring it, we're being scientific about it, we're being linear about the fact that this, it grows in this particular way. And all of those things come in, right? As, as responses, not necessarily informed responses, but kind of almost just gut responses. Like it doesn't quite fit in.

How well I know.

Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure.

Yeah. I think that there's, for some people, it's a really sexy idea because people get addicted to the idea that they're going to get higher on that scale.

Of course.

Which I'm afraid is, you know, that's the downside. I mean, that's one of the big downsides of testing. On the other hand, and this is why I got into doing this in the first place, it was very clear to me. I was at UC Berkeley doing my graduate work, my PhD thesis. Just as California was about to launch its first high-stakes assessment. So here I am learning about how learning works and studying moral development and actually needing tools to be able to show the world what I was finding in my research. So I went and I studied psychometrics with the psychometric department. And I'm watching what these guys are doing and I'm thinking, if these become high stakes, our educational system is going to hell in a handbasket. I mean, this is really scary. We're going to have a whole generation of disaffected kids who haven't learned anything because all they're doing is memorizing things. You know, the vast, the majority of them, right, are just not going to be able to be there. And at the same time, and while they were making these with the best of intentions, all those were very nice people who were doing their very best.

Yeah.

We're saying everybody should go to college. We're saying that we should increase the difficulty of what they learn. We should set standards that are really high for all of these students. And I'm like, no, this is going to destroy our country. This is really dangerous to do. How do we combat this? Well, I'm a midwife. Like, how do we combat it? I'm a midwife. I'm going to go and hug the kids. But really, you have to fight fire with fire. The only thing I could think of that could actually really make a difference is figure out how to measure what we really care about. And that's the development of mind. And there's a danger with the kind of assessment that we're making, just as there is with all those other kinds of assessments. We are only measuring one kind of thing. We're just measuring hierarchical complexity. But hierarchical complexity is a better measure of the development of the mind because it— the way our assessments work, it's not like they have to contain any particular content. So we don't care about the particular content that you have. So it allows for diversity. So it's a standardized metric that doesn't create homogeneity. It's designed to allow for a lot of diversity in the way that people grow and develop over time. So yes, it looks linear because it's trying to cut this slice through all of the complexity of learning, but it knows that's what it's doing, and it's doing it in this very careful way where it's saying there's multiple pathways to a good mind, to a healthy mind. The important thing is that you create environments that support the development of that healthy mind rather than environments that are set up to stuff in certain content or, you know, set up to get people to college, which is ridiculous. You know, like so many of us could be so much happier being a carpenter or my, my, one of my daughters is a plumber now because she decided that was more fun than being a scholar. But how many people get the chance to make those decisions when you create an educational system in which You know, basically you have not only not developed minds, but you have disadvantaged minds. You have minds that aren't working properly because they never really had a chance to develop properly. In our very efforts to create a level playing field, we mess them up.

Yeah.

You know, we mess them up and we make them distrust authority and hate us because learning in an environment where all you can do is memorize, they experience that as a kind of torment. You know, that's not fun. It's not healthy. It's not normal. It's not human. We call, talk about human normal environments. That's not human normal. Yeah. Interesting.

No, I totally hear what you're saying. And it makes me think of, is it the Buckminster Fuller quote about building the alternative? Something, what is it about rather than fighting the existing reality, you want to build a new model that makes the existing reality obsolete. And so as you were saying about standardized testing, you know, we have this obsession with testing and accountability and, you know, for some people would argue for, for very good reasons, you know, it's public money. We want to know that it's being spent well. We want to see what the outcomes of that money is. So we want those metrics, but as you say, when they are very, very shallow, superficial, inhumane. You know, insert your own adjective, metrics, then the alternative in that environment is not gonna be just do away with metrics entirely because we need, you know, we, we are in a world where we, we need to demonstrate that there is impact to what we are doing in a way that people will acknowledge and take seriously within a positivist kind of paradigm. And, and therefore to ignore the metrics conversation is is not really possible, right? So it, it just, it made me feel that that's what you were trying to do. And obviously correct me if I'm wrong, but to kind of build an alternative way to do that from within the system that maybe, you know, for some people is challenging on both sides actually of that false dichotomy we were talking about. But people will respond to that differently. Either they don't like testing or they think it's the wrong kind of testing, but we need some kind of accountability measure. To work with.

We do. And, and that is by far from— I mean, one of my goals was to develop the metric, but the idea behind this metric is that the only kind of metrics that we should be using ever in education are metrics that are strongly grounded in a deep understanding of how learning happens. Thus the dictionary. And in order to have a robust understanding, we need to sample from a really broad range of people. And so that's been what we've been doing the last 25 years. We have been sampling from the widest possible range of people across the planet that we can. We're now at the point where we have, you know, something 60,000, 70,000 assessments in our database, including many of the interviews that were done by early developmental scholars I've collected over time. And I've included those. So we go all the way back to 1955. When Kohlberg started his project. And the goal there has been to be inclusive. So the dictionary has been created based upon this wide diversity. And as a consequence, I recently published an article on Medium. We have achieved fairness. We don't have any ethnic bias. We don't have bias by gender. We don't have bias even by first language, that, that all of the different ways that people express particular ideas, we're capturing them as we go and incorporating them into the way that we're doing the scoring. You know, it might be, you might be thinking, well, that's a lot of data. She's got a lot of information. So we're also using those data to understand how ideas develop over time. So my dissertation was like the first instance of doing that method, which I call developmental myiutics, midwifery, developmental midwifery.

Nice. Nice.

So watch what we've done. We've looked, we've looked closely at over 60,000 assessments, like at the content of them. We've mined them to learn everything we can from each one of them. And we've been, we've taken everything we've learned and we've put it into this gigantic database. And now we're using all that stuff that we learned from all of those assessments. And we're feeding that back into creating assessments and also during the process, learning a lot more about how learning works and what works in learning, what works in education. So, so this is not about measurement per se. This is about the relationship between learning and measurement to a great extent, but fundamentally it's grounded in the actual way that people learn. And in that way, we feel like we've been able to produce a measure that is, has a lot more integrity than any other metric that's been created. Because of the hard work. And because it's an open, all of our assessments are open response. Every single assessment that's ever done will then become part of that dictionary, will become part of the evidence base. So over time, I see this as a human trust, something that we hold and that we carry as a, that's why we organize as a nonprofit so that it could be carried as public.

Amazing.

A public thing. So the goal is not the measurement, but the measurement's absolutely essential. And I just want to make a plea right now. Right now, I know that Montessori, for example, is trying to get into public education. I'm so excited about that. Montessori education is pretty well aligned with what we do since we all, we go back to Piaget. I'd love to see that happen, but Montessori schools will not allow their students to be measured. The parents won't allow their kids to be measured in any way, what shape or form. And unfortunately, these really great schools, the kids don't do better on the than an international test. So what happens is you get into the school system, you know, you fight like crazy to get into the system and have a school set up that's a Montessori school, but then the kids don't outperform on the tests. So gradually the enthusiasm diminishes and those schools go away. I've watched it happen again and again and again over the course of my life. I created this assessment, this way of doing assessment, in part so that we could demonstrate what those schools are really doing for our kids. I've had the opportunity to get into maybe that many private schools over this entire time, um, only one of which really exemplified this kind of learning, and its students were 2.5 years ahead by grade 12 and on steeper developmental trajectories than even the best public schools.

I mean, is that Rainbow? Is that Rainbow Community School?

That was a Rainbow Community School. But one is not enough. One is not enough. And unless, unless parents start thinking about the world as a whole and not just their kids and just allow some experimental assessment to happen so that we can collect those data, we're not going to be able to demonstrate that this way. It's not going to happen. And so I've been looking for, you know, since I started doing this project really intensively in about 2002, I've been just looking at no, no, no, no, no. Oh yes, this is very exciting. Nope, parents won't let us. Over and over again. Or, this is very exciting, but I'll lose my job if the kids don't do well. That's another one that I hear all the time. If we just, we just need a handful of schools to say, it's okay, come and do some pre-post testing on our kids, just one year. And, and that, that those data would help us demonstrate to the world that you guys are doing an amazing job and that every kid deserves to have what these kids in the classrooms have.

But what is it, do you think then, maybe just digging into that a little bit, what is the point of resistance there in terms of why parents feel that it would— is it because it's experimental or is it because it, the very act of measuring would be to compromise? Compromise something.

It's very difficult to get parents who have paid for private schools to agree to have their kids tested. It's just really difficult. They don't want their kids experimented on. They don't want their kids tested. It's quite a difficult, difficult thing to do. And the more their pedagogy aligns with ours, the more resistance we get.

Yeah, that's the irony.

Yeah, it's really an ironic position to be in. So we've done all this work. We've created this knowledge base. You know, my big job right now is succession planning. I'm really working hard on succession planning. So that we can get it actually established solidly enough so that it's not vulnerable. One of our strategies is to leverage the workplace. So we actually make our money as a nonprofit through a for-profit that we own that does work in the adult arena. Yeah. And we've been working with institutions for a long time. We've been working for one institution, one business since about 2006. So we've got long relationships established. We've got longitudinal data. And right now we're getting into the recruitment business. So the last couple of years we've been focused on recruitment with the idea that, you know, if we can show the workplace the advantage of being able to measure the development of the mind and figure out how people and roles fit together better, that they can become our champions. Yeah. So it's another entryway. So if we can't get the schools, the good schools on board, maybe we can get business on board. Maybe we can get lobbying, you know, from the workplace community because every employer knows there's an education education crisis. They've really created a big crisis of talent, you know, a reduction in available talent out there. And I was trying to get money from the federal government. I remember applying for a grant from the education branch, and I was told, well, we're sorry, but we can't fund research that involves both assessment and learning because we have grants for assessment and we have grants for learning, but you're going to have to take one out if you want us to consider your application. Education. And I think that the biggest problem with the educational system is that the people making the decisions are not people who understand education.

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

We've democratized it in, in, in a way that means that the person who's a superintendent of schools in an area may know, have never been in a classroom. And even if they have, they might not have been any good. The people who, you know, at the federal level make the big decisions about what's going to happen in the educational system are not real experts in education. So that's one problem. It's just, we're not experts. Second, the average person in Western society doesn't have a sophisticated understanding of education. They have the understanding of education that came from being in a particular kind of system. Look at medical education. It is so draconian. This idea that you torment people, that you deprive them of sleep, that, you know, all of these things have to happen in order to get through and become a doctor. That is replicated because the people who are educated in that system want to have the next generation have that same experience. So there's this deep psychological kind of thing going on that we want other people to have suffer the way we've suffered. I mean, there's so many things going on here.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

That to talk about it as though it's something that can be solved by a new philosophical perspective, I think is extremely naive.

Yeah.

What we have to do is we have to appreciate all of those causes, see all of them, and figure out where the cracks are. So I, you know, I talk about what we're doing as right now is just releasing a bunch of butterflies. That's all we can do. There's no forcing the door. There's no running for president in this work. There's no, you know, no raid on Capitol Hill. Yeah. And, and so we try to just select our butterflies. So in working with the business community, like those are butterflies. We have a course that we teach called Be Calm in Practice, where we're just teaching one person at a time how to learn the way our brain was designed to learn.

Yeah.

And then sending them out into the world, hopefully to teach others. We're getting in where we can, and we're actually in some very interesting places with our assessments and our, and our learning model right now, but it's very, very slow. So. We're, we're just releasing these little butterflies and hoping that some of them will be the butterflies that, you know, cause things to start to move.

Yeah.

This is a butterfly, what we're doing right now.

Yeah. No, you got it. You're, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, the idea itself is not going to do anything. It's the creation, the thing that you kind of give birth to. It's the thing that gets made. Go back to the making.

It's all these adults who've rediscovered how to learn and have found out, oh my God, this is fun. I love this. So compelling.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I mean, just to describe a couple of your butterflies briefly, the virtuous cycle of learning, the VCOL thing you've just mentioned and the idea of robust learning. I mean, in a way it goes back to what you were saying about Piaget assimilation accommodation, right? Could you just briefly describe?

With a little bit of Vygotsky and brain science and a bunch of stuff there, flow research. Well, you know, that midwifery experience again, the babies, watching the babies, and they all learn to walk. And I remember thinking at the time, it's so wild. Like we have, our minds are equipped to be willing to tolerate so much suffering in order for us to learn. And yet what's going on? It's being taken away from us. Like many of these kids are losing it so young in life. And I realized that, you know, people are just taking for granted that that was just part of growing up. But it wasn't happening to all the kids. I knew back then that there had to be something. There had to be some mechanism that was that motivational cycle. And when I got into grad school, lo and behold, I discovered that almost every educational researcher in the last century had discovered this thing, this cycle, but it hadn't been described by anybody but Piaget in a kind of as a cycle. And he hadn't really totally described it as a cycle. Vygotsky had done a bit more to kind of take that into being a real cycle. And so I thought, well, let's just take all of those and just try to come into— bring them into one simple little cycle that you can apply anywhere. And when I was first doing that, I wasn't even thinking about in-the-moment learning necessarily. I was just thinking, let's learn everything this way. And so we started building curriculum that were virtuous cycles and gradually began to realize that ultimately the only learning that was ever taking place was in the moment. That's the only place— that's the only place you can develop any kind of skill is in the practice of the moment. So we then started to play with the idea of in-the-moment learning. That led to us starting to think about skills in a very different way, because the only skills you can practice in the moment are tiny. Like, they're really tiny until you get really sophisticated in something, and then sometimes you've got a whole orchestra you're conducting. Simultaneously. So when I'm writing, I feel like I'm conducting the orchestra. But when you're learning, when you're building a brand new skill, it's so itty bitty little piece that you can actually practice at the moment. So we started to create these things called skill maps. I don't know if you've run into those yet.

I have, yeah.

Those became the backing for the feedback in all of our reports. And then during COVID I started thinking, these are butterflies. And so we released them. We released a bunch of them. To the public in a series of articles. Most popular thing we've ever done.

Interesting.

People grab a hold of those things and some people go, oh, this is so linear. There she goes again, being linear. But then people start to play with them and they start to realize, oh, these are not flat. This is very interesting. And so we, we developed a course around the micro-recalling experience. And I realized that this is something that, that the adult whose mind has not been hijacked naturally does. It's connected to the dopamine-opioid cycle, which we've known for quite a long time, actually. And that's what, why kids learn to walk, you know, because, and, and the interesting and really fun thing about this is it's this balance between discomfort and satisfaction. So, you know, you have to have a certain amount of pain for it to work properly. And in the learning research from the last century, several people, did research where they noticed that. That's interesting. Pain has to be at the right level. So I talk about the balance between pain and success or failure and success being really important. And the best person to decide what that is, is the individual learning in the moment. Right? Yeah. Because I know whether this looks like a juicy thing to go after or it looks terrifying and I want to take baby steps. So now we train people how to do this and, and not just to use the maps we've created, but to create, do their own mapping. Of skills that they want to learn so that they can build skills intentionally in real time as they go through their day. It's the way I've always learned and most learnaholics have always learned really, but making it more intentional and training what we call the active observer, that commenting piece of your brain to perform specific tasks in a structured way. Is also very, very powerful. So we're helping them train the active observer. We're helping them to use the active observer to do things like just observing or noticing when they admire something or noticing how they're feeling in the moment or a variety of things. And, and then put that to work building little component skills. And of course, you never really practicing one skill at a time. So when you're practicing this little piece, some other little piece will get involved.

And yeah.

So that's, that's probably our most successful butterfly so far is the, is the MAPS and, and BIP, which since we started teaching it, we haven't stopped. We've got it continuously running.

The MAPS, the MAPS then populate the assessments, right?

The MAPS kind of, but the MAPS populate the assessments with feedback.

Things like DISCO.

The way that our feedback structure works.

Okay. There's also the DISCO test as well.

The K-12 assessments and adult assessments are exactly the same system.

Ah, okay. I see.

It's just, it's a continuum. So what we were studying development from first speech. So we're studying it all the way across. And as we do research in different age ranges, then we're able to populate the assessments with content. So we've got feedback down to level 10A right now, which is first starts to show up 5th gradish in some populations.

Yeah. Interesting.

So, which is about right because that's about the grade at which students start to be able to write responses that can show us something about what's going on in their minds.

Yeah.

But we need to go lower because there are a lot of college students that we find reasoning in that level now. Wow.

And if I could ask you one more question, just on the, taking that concept of skill, the way you're using it, you're applying that to all aspects of being human? So it's that, I mean, exactly. Okay.

And we make a very, we make a distinction between skill and other kinds of things. So our definition of skill is anything that develops with practice. So it has to be, you have to be able to actually actively practice it. So compassion would not be a skill. Compassion we think of as an emergent property, which is something that emerges out of the practice of a variety of other kinds of skills in the real world. So it's also partly genetic.

Sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Because empathy and compassion are closely related. So, so a lot of things that people call skills right now, we don't call skills. We think it's a disservice to compassion to think of it as a skill.

Well, exactly. I mean, that's one of the reasons I actually was asking the question precisely that is those kind of things that are part of who you are, let's say, as a kind of rough approximation.

But we have, but there's a whole set of practices. That we have that are about self-mastery, for example, or the kinds of skills that you need for collaborative capacity, which if you practice them actively over the course of your lifespan, you will develop more compassion.

Yeah.

You will become a more compassionate person because compassion not only requires, you know, that kind of fundamental empathic response, but it also involves coming to see human beings like I did through my midwifery practice is fundamentally valuable. Fundamentally important, you know, it's to the point of love, but you can't do that unless you learn about people, unless you care about them, unless you're— so you need skills for perspective seeking and you need skills for managing your own self so that you can listen. So there's a whole bunch of skills that are there that need to be developed in order for compassion to grow.

Yeah.

And compassion itself can become more sophisticated as an emergent phenomenon over time.

Yeah. I like the fact that in a way it connects with what we were just saying about the kind of disjunct between these kind of these big ideas like empathy or compassion, and then you just, you know, so you can talk about this idea and then you just go on living, you carry on living. And, but those two things are completely unrelated in many ways. But what you are talking about seems to be a whole load of micro moves that we can make that might make the emergent property of, for example, compassion, more likely to emerge. So you are trying to kind of connect in a kind praxis way, like that full integration of theory and practice in real messy life. How do those two things actually interrelate in much more nuanced and interesting ways? And I think that's one of the dangers of the skill narrative in education is that it's, we don't really understand what the skill, we're talking about collaboration or we're talking about, you know, creative problem solving.

Yeah. Yeah.

But those, these are huge kind of networks of concepts and also networks of skills.

They're networks of skills. Exactly. Yeah.

Things that you can practice, the tiny things that you can practice, that the tiny thing.

And it's the practice that builds the skill. And right now I think that even among the people who want to focus on skills, yeah, it's skills as content. Precisely. So exactly, if you look at critical thinking curricula, you learn the words for all the parts.

Yeah.

And you learn how they're supposed to fit together and what the process what it's supposed to look like, to the point where in one long-term research project that we're doing, every single incoming student believed they were as good a critical thinker as any scientist because they passed the test. Yeah, very few of them could actually do any of the things in practice, in practice, in the assessments, but they believed that they were as good, and therefore they— it was up to them to make the big because they could do it just as well as the scientists who are experts in the field. We saw that happening and unfolding in real life during COVID in a monstrous way. So yeah, it's, it's a way we understand skill that's the important thing. So skill is very important, but the real goal is the development of the mind, and building skill in the micro-moment is the way we develop the mind. When we learn something through practice. Let's just say, you know, we also have this thing called transfer, this idea of transfer. It was really big. I don't know if it's still big in the literature because I haven't been reading, but this idea that, oh, we need to figure out how to get them to transfer this skill that they're learning in the classroom. Well, first of all, they haven't learned the skill. They've only learned the content and the definition and the very narrow idealized circumstances in which it would be applied experimentally, maybe. But in order to turn it into a skill, you need to practice it in a wide variety of contexts. Like, you have to. If you don't, you haven't actually learned it. And you need to learn it through practice because if you don't bring emotion along, if you don't bring social stuff along, if you don't bring the physical along, we can't really, really ever be able to transfer it because it's not going to get deeply enough embedded in the network.

Yeah.

To be available when, you know, the stimulus comes.

Yeah. Interesting.

That might trigger it. So, and it's through practice in multiple contexts. It also gets connected to other ideas. So I'm practicing it over here in the playground. I'm practicing it over here in my classroom. I'm practicing it with my mom and dad. I'm, you know, all those contexts have different emotional valence. They connect different parts of your brain. They connect to other different things. So another idea might be juxtaposed in one situation, but not in another. So it's through that process of skill development that all of the connections get made that form the substrate for what comes next. And that's the thing we're not building. We're not creating the substrate and kids just keep going from year to year to year. And they're not building on, you know, a deeply connected substrate.

And that's what makes it robust. That would be then to your definition of— robust learning, right? Because the, that the end result or the ongoing result of all of those things, the development of that, that kind of really resilient substrate is robustness.

The skills and ideas are so well connected that when the next thing comes along, your brain automatically sees it and starts to connect again. Yeah. And that's the way the brain was designed to learn. That's the way babies learn. As we grow older, we can become more deliberate about the way that our practice and train the brain. For example, one of the big problems that we are all very aware of these days is the biases that we have, or, you know, our brains are loaded with biases because the part of our brain acts a lot like a computer. It just makes associations between things and that causes us to make mistakes. Well, with this practice and making this practice deliberate and conscious, this microvicon practice, we train our active observer to ask whether we really want to remember this this way. Or if there's something else that we actually want to take from this. So we're, we're using that micro moment to actually help wire our unconscious.

Short circuit the bias somehow.

And eventually after many, many repetitions, possibly short circuit.

Exactly. Because I mean, I think the bias has, the bias has great purpose and use value in the way we live, right? Because it biases direct immediately towards something which is relevant to us rather than—

Yes. And in the material world, in the simple social world, it suffices most of the time.

Exactly.

But as we become, we think more complexly, the problems become more complex, we need to reset some of those defaults. And it can be done. I've done it myself. There, I have had automatic responses that I have gradually trained away that don't happen anymore. But most importantly, we need to learn to notice them first. You have to get, you have to train your brain to notice when it's happening. So that, you know, we can start doing that when children are fairly young. Not that I want to push this down too low. I'm not trying to make them smarter faster. I'm trying to develop better minds. But that, you know, when we notice that children are starting to be reflective, we can help them to direct that reflectiveness, just like we would with many other things, help to slightly direct them. So parents need to learn some midwifery, basically. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Come back to where we started. No, this is really interesting. Thank you, Theo. And just on a practical level, for example, the Rainbow Community School, I read your description and case study, and then I was looking at the website of the school and their understanding their curriculum. As you said, it's kind of content agnostic. But the structure and the way that they've taken those ideas and built them into a structure for learning a curriculum in the school, and then you've then seen some really interesting results of the impact of that as it's been measured. I thought it was a really interesting case study and it would just be great to see a lot more of those.

We'd like to have many of those.

I, what I found really interesting about the VCOL idea was the way that you had then said, look at all these different examples of framings that are similar, and we're gonna like, we can pull them all together, like transformative learning from Mezirow, or, you know, all these different ways that other people have tried to conceptualize learning and you, you've kind of bringing them all into the same tent and just saying, you know, they all share a certain sense of this kind of idea of a virtuous cycle. And there are some basic ideas in there that are really shared amongst all of them. I think that's really powerful.

Yeah. And it's really true. If you look closely at almost all of them, you'll see the virtuous cycle in them. It's right there. Exactly. And, and I mean, imagine the ways in which this could also be used to help schools get better and better. Like, Yeah. Imagine a world in which every single student— it doesn't turn out exactly the same. They all turn out different. Like they're all themselves. They all have their own interests and their own skills and they're not all going to grow to the same developmental level. Thank goodness. But where all of their minds have the opportunity to develop optimally. There's a difference there. It's a difference of growing up satisfied, growing up with a sense of, you know, one, one thing that skill practice does over time is it builds legitimately your sense of competence. So you become someone who's more able to handle change because you're more confident that you're going to be agile enough to be able to learn something new if you have to. So a sense of competence, just everybody comes out with a sense of competence, with a sense of meaning, because the meaning becomes in that next thing that's pulling you toward it, you know, that next cool way that you might do this or do that or think about this or think about that. So you become, everybody comes out with a sense of meaning that's just this inherent thing that's just part of them because they're capable of interacting with the world in a richer way. Where we focus on the basic skills that we need as human beings and we're developing them early on. We're not learning to listen when we're in our 40s. We're learning to listen really effectively. While we're still intent upon listening, you know, we're just being encouraged to do that better and better over time. We all become very good at it. Where the social interaction, social experience thing was a very cultivated thing. And it's a part of all the activities that we do. I mean, imagine what the world would be like if people developed in environments like that. It's just, it would be a completely different place. It would be a completely different place than we see today. I hope it's not too late.

Yeah.

Because we've really gotten into some bad places lately.

Exactly. I mean, that's, that's the thing about you can't release the butterflies and then, and then tell them to go some particular place where you want them to land. I mean, you know, you, you have to put the, the butterflies out and then they go where they will, right?

You have to put them out and, and you have to understand too that there's, there's damage done in some quarters that's probably not repairable. Mm-hmm. That we've, we've definitely done some harm to some minds. Over the last 20 years here in this country. And, you know, that's the part of our research that we don't publish.

Yeah, no, of course, of course.

I mean, I think that there are, there's, there's fertile ground out there somewhere.

Sure.

And for the last couple of years, we've been more deliberately making the world know about us because we're, we're ready to scale. So I'm hoping that what you're doing right now is exactly the kind of thing.

Exactly.

That it's going to make Laktika a household word. And then one day, Somebody will go, maybe we do want to participate in trying to show off what we're doing.

Yeah. People are putting so much time and effort into measurement, right? But it's just bad measurement in all sorts of ways. In, in school, I'm talking about primarily. Yeah. In school. Exactly. And we need a lot less of it, but better measurement.

Yes, we need it and we need to do it very carefully.

Yeah.

I have, I have this idea of not letting students ever see their scores, but just to see their curves going up.

Yeah, interesting. But I think that's what my fear is, that we're entering this kind of surveillance capitalism world of measuring in education. Because, you know, it's like, all right, we kind of know these multiple choice things about these basic propositional knowledge is pretty rudimentary. So, okay, we're going to move away from that. So we'll move into understanding creativity, creative problem solving, all the, you know, all the skills, the big skills. And then we're gonna—

Creativity again, another word they're calling a skill.

Well, exactly, exactly. So you're gonna, but you're then gonna create a whole bunch of rubrics. This, I know this is happening in schools all over the world.

Oh no, that's, that's exactly what they do. They create rubrics.

They're creating the rubrics and then they're gonna basically just surveil the young people constantly so that they can measure and capture these moments of skill development at this. And it's pretty rudimentary, but constant surveillance of these kids. So you've got to be careful what you wish for, right? You think it's a good thing to move—

Exactly. It's so challenging.

Yeah.

You want to do enough measurement so that you can determine that the children's minds are developing appropriately. But because we are so, we're so caught up in thinking of knowledge as sitting in boxes, you know, that that's a serious problem. So we really should be looking at the skill maps And we should, we should just have a set of skill maps of all the skills that we want kids to come out of school with. And then the content should exist in the service of building the skills.

Yeah.

Because it doesn't matter what, I mean, one thing I learned from my homeschooling experience is that my kids didn't get a really broad education when they were homeschooled. They just got a sense of competence and that meant that they could go out and learn anything.

Yeah.

So when they wanted to get deeper into math, they were able to go learn that. When they wanted to get deeper into history, they were able to go learn that. They caught up in college in a semester with everybody. Like, we didn't waste their time. We developed their minds, you know, so their minds are ready to go in whatever direction. So we need to create a system that is not focused on, you've got to learn this much science and this subject and this researcher's favorite idea and all of that stuff. It has to be more about, okay, let's take what the kids are interested in as individuals. And let's create communities of learners around that. And the responsibility of the community of learners is to build these skills.

Yeah.

So no matter what they're learning, they're building basic math skills. They're building basic literacy skills. They're building self-mastery skills, social skills.

Yeah.

All, you know, everything is happening at once, no matter what you're studying. Then that, that skill matrix, that mind that comes out of that, having developed those skills. Across different disciplines based upon your deep interests and communities of people who are interested in the same thing you are, that's where we're going to get really beautiful mental development. And there really aren't any schools quite yet that are doing this.

Yeah. And there does seem to be a really persistent idea still from cognitive science or, you know, wherever exactly it comes from, but that skills can only be developed in the context of content. So in order to get—

well, that's true, you do have to have content to develop skills, absolutely. But it doesn't have to be specific content.

But I think that's the point.

It could be, we're going to build a car together this year. That's what we're going to do. We're going to build a car. Well, there's tons of content there, tons of content, but it's all, but it is all learned within the context of building the skills.

But I think the point that gets often made Like Dan Willingham is the, you know, for example, is the person I think of where he talks about, for example, thinking critically, whatever that means, as this massive mega concept that looks very different in the content of science than it does in the content of literature. And therefore to, in order to think critically, whatever that means in general is impossible, but to do it in the context of literature is possible if you've learned sufficient content. And that's what, and that's what I mean, it's a really persistent idea.

But that's true of every single, every single skill, right? So all skills have to be practiced in contexts. Context dictates to a great extent how that skill is going to manifest in that context. So all skills are like that across the board. So we want to ensure that kids have practiced skills in a variety of contexts. The contexts are about the content, right? What's the content that we're operating on? So we say, okay, so every year kids have to be practicing in 3 contexts or 2 contexts. They get to choose.

Yeah, but that's the point, isn't it? Because then you could say the current system is doing exactly that. It's saying, but we're going to choose for you. We're going to give you the context of maths, English, a foreign language, science, history.

And see, this is the problem, because some of those things are skills and some of those things are content. So we're even confused in those. Like, math should be learned all the time in everything. Literacy should be learned all the time in everything. History maybe arguably should also partly be used, you know, like social studies. It should partly also be used. I mean, there's an opportunity in anything you're learning to build skill— skills in all of those areas. So, so when we're thinking about skill, we have to really think about which, which skills are fundamental so that you want to be able to practice them no matter what context you're working in, which skills are more specific to context. Initially in education, you don't have nothing specific. Everything, everything's related to everything. It's a lower level.

Yeah.

But I mean, the important thing is that the children need to be interested. And not that I think that there's certain things that we're more likely to be interested in than others. But if we start out learning in areas of interest, then we develop our learning skills and we develop that sense of competence so that when it comes a time when maybe I need a little bit deeper math than I have right now, I'm not a math phobe because I didn't, wasn't forced to do that before I was ready and interested. I mean, not, or I wasn't forced to do it in context that I didn't find interesting. So I loved doing math when I was building that thing for the car, you know, exactly. But so once we've developed that sense of competence in all of these skill areas that are, you know, every subject that we're doing is targeting this wide range of skills, then we're more adventurous learners and we're more likely to want to learn more different things. So the idea is not to narrow people down, but it's to let them have some control right from the beginning so that we have the opportunity to build up those basic learning skills and the competence to be willing to tackle whatever comes along. And I mean, that's the story of my whole life. Life. You know, I'm a programmer now. I never thought I'd be a programmer. I'm a Scrum Master. You know, I run a whole organization that's Scrum and Agile. There's all kinds of things that, you know, like if you build that substrate, right? If you build the foundations right at the beginning, then by the time that my kids were like 10 years old, they didn't really need me anymore because they already had all the skills they needed to go find the information.

Or find the right person to ask when they need, or find the right people in the community to talk to about it, or ask.

Yeah, so, yeah, so it's such a fundamental, like, let's stop, forget everything we think we know, focus on the development of the mind as the goal. What does it look like? You know, and, and, and our research is certainly telling us that, that it doesn't look like what we're doing right now.

I had a really interesting conversation with Julie Stern for the podcast and she works on, on concepts and conceptual understanding. And I, you know, that's, that's another area I find really interesting because I like her dictionary. Yeah, she would for sure. But I wonder, I also, I also wonder, cause that is content, right? A concept is not a skill or am I wrong there? I don't know.

Yeah. A concept again is emergent, right? So concepts are emergent. You can use a word for a concept and the concept itself is different for everybody.

Yeah, sure.

So, I mean, like this whole business of trying to place a word at a level, we settled on like the lowest level meaning, like the simplest meaning. Yeah. We had to settle there. So the words get put at the level of the simplest meaning that can be associated with them. But over time, every word changes meaning. So words and concepts are not the same thing at all. Yeah. Words, you know, words can stand in for concepts, but we never really know out of context what that word actually means. So the concept itself is emergent and changes over time as we build a more complex network. The meanings really change. And so we get phenomena like, you know, a language that is very metaphor-ridden, you know. So, yeah, you know, so drive is one word that like changes meaning. Yeah, no, it becomes a systems term eventually for people, you know, it's so appreciating that the concept is emergent, just like compassion and other things are emergent, elevates the concept, you know, it, it elevates it beyond the word. It elevates it beyond the Jeopardy level of knowledge.

Yeah, exactly. No, precisely. And that's, that's what I think that people find interesting about that. But I, I think they're still seeing it as content. And I think I've got, you know, potentially I am still seeing it as content, but I like what you're saying that, that there, that it's the concept actually is an emergent property of, of kind of aggregated meanings as you increase in complexity.

And that evolves from practice.

Yeah. Interesting.

So it's through practice that the subtlety, the, the playfulness, the development of ideas. Yeah. Takes place. It's through the insight of the moment of practice. Yeah.

From all different directions and just increasing richness and texture and complexity. And yeah, that's really interesting.

So the kid that's, that's this year, I'm studying Shakespeare, mechanics, and dance.

Yeah.

And they're learning the skills all at the same time. Same, some of the, many of the same skills. Think of the dynamic quality of the skills as they develop over time and the building of the ability to choose which aspects of those skills and which ideas belong in this particular context.

Yeah. And you get a big concept in there, like change, for example, you know, change in mechanics and in Shakespeare and in dance would, would have—

they're so different and yet they're the same.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, it's really rich.

So we're building that, but, and by taking that deeper dive rather than taking a shallow dive, it becomes like bicycle riding type skill. It becomes completely embodied. Set of skills. Then you go the next year and you do prehistory, you know, like you go on to completely different things. The same skills, you're still practicing all of those same skills, but you're doing it in these new contexts. So you're building very rich skills that can be applied across a wide range of things. So totally transferable skills over time, or more easily transferable skills because you've got more places that you can borrow from when you're learning a new application. Plus the deep dive into things, it's not just an opportunity to practice more skill, but that's, there's a development of the mind that has to do with the particular concepts that you've gotten deeper into.

Of course. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's fascinating. Amazing. Thank you.

Well, I had no idea that we would go to the places that we went to.

I know. Nor did I. There you go. You let the butterfly go and you follow where it goes, right? No, I mean, I'd really encourage, I mean, I found it really fascinating to learn about what you do, and I would be really happy to be able to share that with other people. I think it's, there's a really robust base, you know, in terms of the evidence base, to coin a phrase, or, you know, the way that you have thoughtfully developed Lectica. And I think there's some really interesting work there that does need more people to engage with it and more schools to take a serious look at it and think, how can this inform being better, improving the way that we, you know, think about learning and, and achieve that with our young people. So now I really hope that we can get some of that out there.

I certainly hope so. It's been a— it's, it's a big thing to dedicate a big part of your life to, to something.

Yeah, good stuff. Thank you, dear. This is great. 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.