[RE]LEARN Conference Special 1 - Conversations with Yong Zhao, Jennifer Groff, Barack Habumugisha, Rahmatullah Arman and Gahmya Drummond-Bey

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There are ways you absolutely can demonstrate growth in these competencies, but that's all infrastructure that largely hasn't been built yet, and it needs to be built both with researchers but also in the classroom. This is what we see with real kids at these ages, you know, but that's part of what we're hoping to carve that new ground in helping people reimagine what that could even look like.

Welcome back to the podcast. It's great to have you back and it's great to be able to bring you this relearn conference special of the Future Learning Design podcast. There's a fantastic buzz around the relearn conference which started on Monday. Some amazing speakers and a huge amount of energy focused on the future of learning and bringing together an amazing group of passionate and expert learners who were committed to changing the future of learning. And supporting a shift in the education system. Over the next couple of episodes, I'll be bringing you a selection of some of the amazing guests that have been speaking throughout the conference. In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Yong Zhao, the Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas and a professor in educational leadership at the Melbourne Graduate School. Jennifer Groff, who is an educational engineer, designer, and researcher working for the WISE Qatar Foundation Global Innovation Hub. Also, I speak to Barak Habumugisha, who is a passionate learning leader in Kigali, Rwanda, and is setting up the LearnLife Hub in Kigali, the first of its kind in Africa. I also had the great opportunity to speak with Rahmatullah Aman, who is the founder and CEO of Teach for Afghanistan, an incredible youth-led organization doing amazing work with supporting lifelong learning, particularly for girls in Afghanistan. I also speak with Jamia Drummond-Bey, who is a TED speaker and global instructional designer, author, educator, and CEO of Evolve Teacher. You can learn more about the Relearn Festival at relearnfestival.com. And don't forget to check out the Game Changers podcast, which is also providing recaps and other discussions with festival guests.

Yong Zhao.

And there is seem to be, you know, a general view of how education should be done by the leadership and in many ways, and I think they're wrong, of course. But I have not been really paying too much attention to, honestly, governments. I think for the past 30 years, all education reforms by governments have proven one thing, they're wrong. They are fixing the wrong things. If you look at all the government reforms, there are only so many things they can play with. But they don't play with the most important thing. If you look at education, so what can you do, you know, if you wanna do education? So you have a system, you can only improve it. To improve it, what do you do? You say, okay, let's play with the curriculum, which everybody has to learn. So, you know, almost all governments have been saying, well, we have a new society, let's add content. And that's, well, our old content was not tough enough. Let's change the curriculum. Yeah, so they're playing with the curriculum a lot, you know, and curriculum is associated with the testing. So let's add more tests, you know. So we, we want students to learn this, let's test this. And then we have standardized testing in most— in literacy and numeracy. And OECD jumps in with the PISA and all those things. So, but they said, okay, that's not enough. We have to use testing to hold schools and teachers accountable. So we publicize, publish the test results, and then we try to improve teachers. We do a lot of professional development, you know, we learn a lot from PISA to say let's have better teachers who are better graduates from high school. We play with teachers, all that George Bush did, we send them to do more tests, you know, more degrees. And then we hold school leaders accountable. If you don't improve your schools, we'll fire you. We try, so we've been playing with All of those things. Yeah, I'm looking at the system now. Of course, people talk about play with funding, you know, all those things. Yeah, but if you notice one thing, Tim, they don't talk about students. None of the education reforms ever talk about what are we going to do with students. Yeah, what are we going to— no, if you look at reform, nobody says anything about students. But you know, students are the most important factor in learning. Yeah, without learners, you know, unless you change the role of students, unless you make them the, the participating but also owner of learning, you can't change. That's why in over the last 30 years, have you seen education improved? No. Yeah, there's no data showing. Have you seen this, this data of showing students, uh, the so-called achievement gaps closed? No. Actually, I was looking at the U.S. data, NAEP data. You know, it's nothing. You know, just, uh, it's looking into international data, PISA data, and all those data. Nothing has changed.

Yeah.

But we have done so much. Why?

We really have. We're doing a lot.

I mean, one of the things you've spoken about before, I know, is, um, this kind of tyranny of certainty. Maybe this is the thing that makes, that pushes us to keep tweaking and adapting at the edges because we're, we're obsessed with being certain that we're doing the right thing for those students, right? I mean, they are—

Yeah, well, that's actually, Tim, the perhaps one of the most important things that, I mean, you just— what you said is we have this very authoritarian view of education as adults, as someone who has the responsibility to create something, but we forget about really three things about children. One, they are natural-born learners. They want to learn. Two, they are very diverse learners. They're very different.

Yeah.

Three, they're intentional learners, that they act, they think, they're active. So those three things, if you look at how have we ever examined them, you know, I just finished a book which will be published by Corwin. It's called Learners Without Borders. If we don't control our students within the border of a curriculum of a school, of a classroom, then we might have a chance because students, when they pursue what they're good at, what they're passionate about, you don't need to motivate them. You just need to support them.

Yeah, absolutely. I guess the borders and the structures are what we cling to for certainty, right?

Yeah, yeah. Well, because we feel like we're in control.

Exactly.

We used to.

It's an illusion.

Exactly. Don't get me wrong. Like, let's say 100 years ago, you could control. Remember, 100 years, things did not change that fast. You really know. And also, there were not many jobs, just one type of job. You go to the factory, you do it. I mean, really, you could control. And everything else in that entertainment— imagine how many TV channels you had, how many songs, how many music you learned, how many websites you were on. It's massively enlarged, you know. Like in my new book, I'm really trying to say, okay, A learner, technically, you can have your local community, but you can learn online. You can learn online with a lot of people. I don't mean just watching courses. You can interact with a lot more people.

Of course, yeah.

But how many people is going to do it? You don't know. Like, if you go to classroom, most classrooms today, you wouldn't believe— just take China. China is a huge country. Take China as an example. Teachers still dominant. You know, they're teaching 60 students, 50 students, 45 students. But why can't they just teach 10, 5, and let the others run, you know, go learn on their own? We had a, um, we have a show called Silver Lining for Learning. We had, um, 5 kids from Nepal. They're all learning from MOOCs, and they speak beautiful in English. If they're in Nepal, a poor, mountainous, isolated country, learning from MOOCs done by Harvard, by Stanford, Why can't everybody else do it? Because we don't want them to do it.

Jennifer Gruff.

So I'm the first fellow at WISE, focused on innovation there, which has been really great. And so we are in the developing phase. We launched this summer the WISE Innovation Hub, which is essentially meant to be a platform to be a resource and facilitator of deep change for schools that are looking to do that deep change. So our work actually started before COVID we started in January. And so a lot of our work is about how to set up an individual innovation lab inside of a school to act as an engine of R&D, essentially, for them to identify problems or gaps or directions that they want to move into. And then to work with us to study that problem, quickly build prototypes, try them out, pilot them, collect feedback, what's working and what's not, to innovate their way to where they want to go. And so the schools that we currently work with are schools that are that are already very redesigned in their model, and they're looking to continue to engineer their way to where they want to get to and make sure that's working well, or schools that are a bit more on the traditional side, but are trying to do what I call the chasm jump, which is moving from the traditional model to competency-based or mastery-based, which really is like trying to replumb a house, because in order to do that, you have to redo all of the foundational structures that we use in schools. And so those are the schools we work with now. And then of course COVID came along, and all of a sudden, school became innovative. So that's been really fun to watch in a way. I mean, I know this year has been hard in so many ways, but I have to say, for me, who's worked in this space for 20 years, to see the movement in the field has been outstanding because, you know, we are very conservative as a field and don't take a lot of risk. And it's just been great to see the changes that have happened.

Brilliant. Yeah. And have you had— so I can imagine that there would be an attraction of certain schools who are already thinking in quite significantly disruptive and innovative ways reach out to you as a support. Is that the trend, or have you been working with more traditional schools to do the change work as well?

Yeah, so we started under the radar, as any good startup does, you know, really close to home. And we started first with the two very progressive schools that are in Doha, Qatar. One is very young learners, and as I mentioned, it's a very deeply redesigned model already. It's beautiful. Before my time at Wise, I was the Chief Learning Officer of Lumiar Schools, which is an amazing network of innovative schools. And so this school in Doha modeled a lot of their school model off of Lumiar Schools. And so a lot of the work we do with them is about helping them figure out how to continue to scale and to make sure they have evidence that what they're doing is working because it is so non-traditional. The other school we work with in Doha is a secondary STEM academy, and they're much more in the space of having, you know, worried about the traditional assessments, the GCSEs, the A-levels, all of that stuff. And they don't want to be beholden to that anymore, and they're trying to move to mastery-based competency-based, which I'm sure you know is a big trend in the US especially, but globally. And so So now that we're starting to talk more publicly about the work, we are getting a number of schools contacting us that are trying to do that jump. And I think very simply, you know, the OECD put out a beautiful new framework of what the modern competencies are, and it's very comprehensive. It's not very deep yet though, right? It doesn't really go under the hood. And so it's beautiful compass, and I love that metaphor that they use, but how do schools get there? And that's the work that we're trying to fill in.

That's the big question, isn't it? And we, I mean, It's amazing to see the startups like LearnLife and the real amazing development that is happening in that space, but also there are so many schools, I think, crying out to see examples of the transformations, right? Because there are so many people thinking about this and how do we go from here to there? You know, how do we get there? Yeah, as you say, it's a chasm, right?

Exactly. And what's tricky about reform, as we know, or redesign, change, whatever you want to call it, it can't be prescriptive. It can't be top-down and it can't be a cookie cutter. And that's what makes this work harder, but it's also what we believe, you know, it's not that hard either to set up these engines of innovation that we call them inside a school in order to power that forward. And that's what we're doing with the schools we work with.

Amazing. That's so good. And I mean, I just really feel that there's a real strong need for these kinds of agents of support for change in that space. So what's the kind of longer-term vision for the Innovation Hub?

Yeah, great question. So we're continuing to grow. Our plan is to continue to grow the network of schools that we're working with and have a nice diversity of the types of schools that we're working with. So independent, traditional, public, private, and working together to R&D a lot of the core challenges they have, because for schools that are trying to move in this direction, they generally have a lot of the same structural challenges. So how do we design good rubrics? How do we make real competencies out of this? How do we figure out the right set of competencies that we want to work with coordinating things like the A-levels and, you know, IB and the new OECD framework. And that's a personal journey for every school, but it's also the same journey in a way, right? It's the same sort of design journey. Again, it's not cookie cutter, but it's also, they can learn a lot from each other and benefit from the prior work that other schools have done. So we'll continue to expand the network over the next few years, grow the number of schools, share the R&D that they're building together, and then continue to share that outwardly so that other schools can learn from that journey and can also use the great tools that they put good R&D and development into buildings.

Yeah, that's so good.

I love it.

In fact, I was having this exact conversation today about the lack of research base for many of these things, right? I mean, you know, we know this stuff works, you know, it works for kids and it works for the type of educational experience that we want to create. But I, I've always felt there's just a distinct lack of research evidence. I mean, you come back to the cognitive science stuff, which pulls you back into a kind of knowledge-rich traditional space. And it's like, actually, we need a really robust set of evidence for really positive progressive educational models.

Definitely. And, you know, even in the learning engineering field, if you look at that work, which I think is outstanding, it's still, I think, is distinct from this work because they're still looking at the traditional model of education. And I'm not, you know, we never advocate to totally throw out math, literacy, science. We're not saying get rid of the disciplines, but what we're saying is if you use the disciplines to guide the structure of your school, you've already lost your kids, because they don't live in a siloed world. And so everything else, it's all the skills on top of that. And so you really do have to re-engineer what you're doing. And part of the challenge of this work is helping people reframe what is success, what are the outcomes, what is the evidence we're looking for? Is it test scores? I don't think it is. So, and the OECD frameworks, you know, argues that it's not. So we definitely do need to build a collective knowledge base, and we also need to collectively redefine what are the outcomes we're actually looking for.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's also getting comfortable with something a bit more fuzzy than quantitative outcomes, because I think we're, we're still a bit too enamored to what we can measure and what we can count. And actually the transformative competencies in the framework of the OECD, those are not things that you can measure with a stick or a ruler or a—

Not in our traditional way, but that, and that is part of the challenge is also helping people understand, you know, we need to rethink how we capture that data and what does it mean when we do it? How do we make meaning of that? And there there are ways you absolutely can demonstrate growth in these competencies. But that's all infrastructure that largely hasn't been built yet. And it needs to be built both with researchers, but also in the classroom. We can't just have people in a lab deciding what is creativity. And we also— teachers need more support to define that and that feedback loop back to the research. Then this is what we see with real kids at these ages. And that will take time to build. You know, but that's part of what we're hoping to carve that new ground and helping people reimagine what that could even look like.

Barak Abu Mugisha.

Well, I don't know how much you know about LearnLife Kigali, but it is a hybrid co-learning, co-working community operating to support the wider LearnLife vision and the needs of learners in Rwanda. It's, it's basically a hub that is going to be one of its kind, the first in Africa, and so we are very, very happy to be leading the change in education in Africa. And the vision of Landlife Kigali is to be a lighthouse organization leading the educational change in Rwanda, and through this exemplar, the whole of the African continent. One of the biggest things that we are trying to, to do is to establish a self-sustaining learning hub In Rwanda, to bridge the skill gap between high rates of school, college, and university completion and ongoing high levels of unemployment. So we have now lots of high school graduates who are able to finish, but they are not able to continue to university. We also have university graduates who are not able to get jobs. So there is really— we had an issue after the genocide. The only problem was to actually have access to education. Now there is access to education. People are going to school. We have 12 years basic education free of charge. And so that's one of the progresses that Rwanda has done to provide access to education. Now the problem is, how do we support these learners, these learners who have finished school, to actually generate an income? And there have been a lot of projects, a lot of campaigns to help these graduates. Begin and set up enterprises that can help them thrive in communities. But these have been caused by the fact that the education system currently does not provide skills that can help these learners to thrive and begin enterprises. And that's why LandLife Kigali comes in to actually support these graduates or even people who are still in school to have that space, to have that community of learning where they can come and learn a skill, which skill will actually be translated into a job. And, and so aim is to target the capacity of post-secondary, post— or post-tertiary learners to use their knowledge and understandings in enterprising and entrepreneurial ways in order to generate personal or business income. Now, we are able to do this by delivering professional learning face-to-face and remote programs which target different user groups. But beyond that, we also develop modules of learning that target key competencies and skills essential for business and entrepreneurship, including personal communication skills, collaborative capacity and team participation. So Landlife Kigali really includes everyone. It includes whoever wants to learn a skill and, you know, wants to have a purpose in their life. So we are— we hope to be set up in Kigali for the first time, but the need is really high. And we, along the way, we hope to also start these hubs in, in the northern part of Rwanda and in the eastern part of Rwanda and in the southern part of Rwanda. So it's, it's really a mission that we, we have set up. The need is there. People really want to learn and they, they want to actually use the information they acquired from school, put it in practice and put it to good use by developing the skills that can support them.

Brilliant. That's wonderful. So what actual stage of development is the hub at? You're up and running already or it's still in development?

Well, we actually were hoping to launch March this year, but because of the outbreak of COVID-19, we're not able to get running. But we hope that beginning next year we will be starting.

Great. And so that leads on nicely to your session at the ReLearn conferences, specifically on Rwandan education system experience with COVID-19. Maybe you could say a little bit about what you're going to be speaking about in your session.

Yeah, well, I will be, I'll be speaking on the impact of COVID-19, basically on the education sector in Rwanda. Of course, COVID-19 has really impacted a lot of the life of human beings, but I think it has also provided an opportunity for the communities to actually change and act on the education sector because it's no longer about delivering learning into the classroom, but this is the time— this has to actually deliver learning elsewhere. People can learn from wherever they are. They can learn remotely. They can also go into the classroom and learn. So learning has to be about experiences. It shouldn't be about going into classroom because I really imagine that many learners have been able to accumulate their learning ways even when the schools have been closed. So I think it is— you really brought an opportunity for acting on changing education system. There's really hope because everyone sees the needs of changing policies about education going forward. And I think really everyone sees that the system that has been created does not really help learners to actually thrive after they finish school. So we see a big number of graduates who are not able to get jobs. So the government is really seeing that there is a gap, and through this there has been creation of vocational training centers where, where learning is actually based on hands-on skills. And of course, getting into other learning methods, the curriculum has been changed, I think, in 2015 that actually bases on developing competencies for learners. So that they are actually competent graduates who are able to actually compete on the job market. So the policymakers see that this is a need, but we cannot leave it out on them alone. I think it's very important that it's an inclusive thing. It's communities of lawyers, communities of teachers, communities of students. It's a job of everyone to actually stand up and say time is now to change. This education system in a way that actually it supports, it helps, it builds the competencies that people are able to actually be able to earn incomes after they finish school. It presents an opportunity to actually provide learning methods that can support these learners to actually create a job rather than seeking one.

Ramatullah.

Amen. Thank you very much. I'm very much excited to be speaking at this Relearned Festival. I'll be speaking about education inequity. It will be about gender discrimination, specifically to women, and it will be about, based on our experience and the work that we do at Teach for Afghanistan, some of the very unique local approaches that we do take in Afghanistan in a context where women represent over 50% of the population, but when you look at the schools, when you look at the number of people in power and authority, you'll see very few of them really having the ability to decide for themselves. So it will be about the challenges the women face in Afghanistan just because they're women. It's also about so much regular attacks against girls' education, against schools, against women and where over 3.7 million children are out of school, over 60% of them are girls, where cultural beliefs are making it so hard for a girl to get educated, where over 1,000 girls on a daily basis, they drop out of school just because they are girls, just because there are beliefs that they shouldn't be educated. It's a lack of female teachers, that's one of the biggest challenges they face. So there are 80,000 vacant teaching positions, of which over 50,000 are for women and where we really lack women teachers. And according to several local beliefs, people do not want to send their girls to be taught by a male teacher. And due to that, millions of girls are out of schools and parents are not letting their girls to go to school. So what Teach for Afghanistan do, we do hire highly qualified young fellows, young teachers, we send them to schools, majority of whom are women. What we do at Teach for Afghanistan from several levels, we do strengthen our relationship with the communities, because we understand their language, with their own understanding, with their own culture and religious beliefs. We share with them why a girl should be educated. We held sessions— that's also done by us, by our fellows and those who complete these 2 years of fellowship as an alumni who work with these local communities to strengthen relationship and really change this belief and increase awareness about girls' rights and human rights. So that's also another way we tackle the cultural beliefs in that regard. Another big problem is also the security of the school premises, where the schools lack wash facilities, the schools even do lack chairs, desks, or even any school border at all. So that very much puts the children under risk, especially the women who are so much increasingly under attack by acid attacks, by security, by bombs, by gunfires. So women do— people do have fear with their child's life, so they do not send their girls to school, majority of them. So that's another problem we do also. That's the solution again lies within the communities themselves. If the communities take this role to protect the schools, so that's again our strengthened relationship with the communities and also providing security trainings to the fellows we send so they provide this training inside the schools. So they know with their rare resources that they have at hand, how do they protect themselves. And at the same time, it's also strengthening relationship with local security authorities, where we really talk with them and so that they are protecting the schools from all these attacks.

Amazing. What, what incredible work. One of the things I find fascinating about what you were saying was the idea of changing hearts and minds in terms of the parents or some of the male members of the population who are maybe not valuing girl children and valuing education as much. Have you had any specific examples that you can think of where you've been successful in shifting people's mindsets around that?

Thank you very much. Actually, just off a recent story, which was also shared by Malala Fund as well, who supports Shishir Awanis on work in Pervan province. Afsana, one of our students who was in Pervan province, Their parents, once— because she was at 9th grade, the parents had the same belief. Now she, she can read, she can write, so she had to drop out from school. So she was at the verge of dropping out from schools, like it was a time for her to say goodbye. So when the teacher noticed that, a fellow teacher, Avana-san, she did plan a very unique thing, obviously, for the Hiram Initiative. She tried to talk with the parents and all. I think that worked to some level, but she had to do more, and she really organized a kind of a small teaching session where she invited the father of the girl, of Afsana's father, to the classroom. So when the father came, this girl was wearing a burqa completely Islamically. She did also bring her child as well. So she was teaching this Afsana and all other girls. So at the end, Afsana, she asked Afsana also to share some lessons and all those. The father was seeing that her girl is so active and all, but I think that was frozen enough. So what the Alofti from Afghanistan shared was like, see, I am really accepting and appreciating the local cultures. I am wearing scarf. I am educated. I have completed university. I have not become a bad girl. I am not a bad woman. I can also have a family. See, this is my child. I am teaching, and teaching is not a bad thing. And I am able to teach and bring change because I have been allowed to. So if you allow Afsana, your daughter, she will be also educated, and at the same time she can be a good woman, she can have a child, she can be married. So this is how I think this really worked. And Afsana stayed at school, and she's right now— she will be 11th grade. So this was just one example how it's really changing people's mindset. So that also, I think, will have its impact when the father, whenever he will talk with other same-minded people, men. So I think, uh, change will be brought slowly, but Hopefully strongly, slowly but strongly, I think.

And with regards to when you bring in the fellows into the program, are they already trained as educators or are you training them when they come in as graduates?

During the written test interview and recruiting procedures, we ensure we hire those people, those highly qualified people who are committed, who have the general understanding about the education equity, education problems that are Afghanistan, and at the same time they have a solution for them, whatever it is. So they come highly qualified, but at Teach for Afghanistan, to prepare them to go to school as a highly qualified teacher, we do also provide them training. So the training that we provide are 3 types. The first training is of educational pedagogy, so that's overall how do you become a good teacher, teaching curriculum and following that teaching plan and everything. The second training that we provide is of educational psychology, because in a country where facing conflict conflict and war, the children may not be— may be physically in front of you, but mentally not. So how do they prepare students and understand the situation and help students reach their potential? So that's education psychology training. And the third training that we provide is of education management and leadership. That's to prepare them both to become as a good teacher inside school, building relationship at different levels, and that also helps them during their 2 years of fellowship And once they complete this 2 years of fellowship and become a Roam Life, so they are aware of all these and they have, they're packed with all these knowledge and information.

Amazing. One of the challenges is that there's a very traditional idea of what a teacher is, you know, what good teaching looks like. And obviously LearnLife with their learning paradigm is extremely progressive and has all these 27 different new methodologies, different progressive methods. Is that coming into your planning and your training, trying to kind of do something which is more centered around the girls themselves and what they need or what their passions and strengths are?

That's actually at the center of our focus because in Afghanistan, due to all these challenges and problems, the way people look at teachers— I think it's very much similar in most of the third world countries— in Afghanistan as well, the way a teacher is envisioned, it's like a person standing with a stick in his hand. Because that's how we were taught, that's how we looked at our teachers, where it was so much teacher-centered, a teacher just having a book in front of him. That was all about school we knew and we thought of. But our focus at Teach for Afghanistan is very much presenting a very different kind of teachers, a very friendly— creating a friendly environment inside classrooms. So the teachers of Teach for Afghanistan, the fellows, They are trained specifically to represent this new image of a teacher. So when they go, they try their best to not just have one teaching methodology of reading, but at the student-centered classrooms where students have the right to speak, to talk. It's also like teaching them through playing games, different kind of role modeling, and so many different methodologies they try to really represent a new image of a teacher. And also At the same time, that's the only way they can be a good friend to students where they can understand their challenges and solve them. They can understand their students' potential and how to prepare plans for each of them to really reach that potential. So it's a teacher of Varanasi and the focus is all about representing that new image and really changing the people's thinking of the traditional teaching methods. So that means they also held sessions at their school schools, they also— in each school that they teach, there are committees made where students have their student committees where they come with complaints. A single student, if they are beaten, something happens, so they can raise their voice and the teacher can help them. So now students have their voice. They have also prepared committees like students for greenery of school, health committee, sports committee. So much new things are coming up in these schools. With those new image that teacher is not someone you should be afraid of, but you should be a friend of. So that's the new image we are trying to bring on.

That's really wonderful. And just as a final question, is there a way that people can actually support Teacher Afghanistan externally, or, you know, from, from where they are around the world?

Thank you very much. Teacher Afghanistan is being supported by these wonderful people, wonderful organizations, and champions. And since 2016 until today. And it has been all due to their support where Teach for Afghanistan has been able to bring this change into the society context and the different mindset that we are trying to. So at Teach for Afghanistan, we do accept donations from externally as well, internally as well, local funding as well. So they can visit our website where we have specifically mentioned how they can support us. So that's financial support. At the same time, as you know, it's about also resources where schools lack premises resources, we do have accepted that kind of support as well. And also knowledge, information, opportunities for children, students. So in Afghanistan, this is also not very common for children, for schools, where they participate in programs and debates and fun learning practices. But at the global level, especially during the pandemic, something that I saw, the children had opportunity. They were so schools where they would provide such opportunities for children to have their voice, to speak the way I'm speaking right now. So such opportunities as well, that will be great so that we can share to children, they can participate, they can apply. So such support would be also very much highly appreciated where we can share it with our students. They can have this opportunity, they can see that the world is really listening to them and they are also part of the change at a wider Jameer Drummond-Bey.

So yes, this is my third pandemic. I am in Malaysia now, but I'm American. And when I decided to dive into the world of education, I wanted to do just that, like the world of education, not the structure and the systems that I was taught, you know, growing up.. I also wanted to experience what other cultures and countries were doing, what was working, what wasn't, and allow the world to teach me. Originally I thought, okay, I'll do this and then I'll bring this back to the United States. And I started in South Korea because at the time, uh, the United States, uh, Barack Obama, this was in 2009, he lauded South Korea and the education system. You know, in the media we hear, we're constantly told what we should follow, especially as educators, you know? And so I thought, well, what if I go, what if I just go to South Korea and see, you know, is this really true? Does Obama really know what he's asking from us? And so I did. I had no idea what I was doing. It was my first year as an educator. And that's when I experienced my first pandemic. It was the swine flu, H1N1. It was interesting because it was my first pandemic, but it was also my first year teaching, so it was kind of like all I knew, you know, just to figure things out. Yeah, and the masks and students, some attending school, some not attending school, and just trying to figure out ways to make them happy. And also I had my own goal of being taught by the world So my entire process then and now was just watching my students and feeling from the energy that they gave me what worked and what didn't. What I noticed was a lot of my counterparts, educators who came in differently with a mindset of, "This is what I know," were following strategies and systems, you know, and instead of saying, "Okay, well, this isn't working for the kid," it was, "Well, this is what I'm supposed to do." Whereas I didn't have that mindset. And so mine was, okay, this isn't helping you. Okay. What will help you? Do you like this?

Okay.

Is this working? You know, and those strategies over time, uh, the next pandemic started out as an outbreak in 2015. It was the MERS, um, that came from the Middle East and then in South Korea. And then by that time it was my second time around. So I said, okay, I've kind of done this before. But let's see, now there was a shift in digital learning was now a big part of things as well. So then really bringing in online strategies, gamification and things like that, just really trying to engage those students. The students of 2015 are not the students of 2009, you know? And so basically my session is really focused on a lot of these tools and techniques that I've learned over time. Teaching virtually and in the classroom to really keep the students engaged. Because a lot of the things that we don't tend to realize until it's all over are some of the things that are normal when you actually attend school physically that students complain about but really miss when they don't have that. Like the connection, you know, like The conversations when they're at their lockers or walking through the halls, they miss it. For sure. That's how you make friends or, you know, look at someone that you may be interested in. So how do we implement sort of random connection and things like that while also teaching virtually?

Yeah, yeah, brilliant. That's a great question. I always feel this since education ultimately is a really human interaction, right?

Yeah.

And so it's really difficult when you strip all that away and you're just left with screen to screen, you know, Zoom to Zoom, and it's, you know, where does that connection reside when you've—

Absolutely.

You're in that situation.

So yeah, interesting.

I really believe that education hurts. It becomes painful and traumatic when the teachers remain stagnant, but we don't evolve and grow as well. And so that there's a lot of learning and unlearning all the time. What worked for us what was before won't necessarily work now and being excited about that, you know, that really helps us all to grow as a society.

Yeah.

Brilliant.

Because it's always been a big irony for me that people who are learning, learning is their business, right? Learning is their fuel, but actually they don't necessarily always feel like that's for them. It's, you know, the learning is for the students rather than for me as an educator. And yeah, I don't really understand that personally.

Yeah, yeah. I remember when I first started to design curriculums and really push back against different things, different concepts, and different learning styles in different countries. And one of the things that frustrated me most was that I didn't feel like I had a support system with other educators. I felt like I actually bothered the educators around me by being so enthusiastic and outgoing, you know, the more I did, they felt like the more pressure they had. But me, it was just, I was excited about doing it. It was all I wanted to do. And okay, how, what's the other way I could do this? And so for me, I started to study entrepreneurship and just the mindset of entrepreneurs because As an educator, we aren't often applauded to take risks. But when you're an inventor or an entrepreneur, that's literally your goal, is to fail forward. You know, and I really believe that mindset as well, just trying things and, and having that growth mindset of failing forward and teaching that and, and also owning that ourselves really helps us to be okay with making mistakes because you have to make some mistakes in order to really achieve in the end.

No, definitely.

And the system of education historically has been just one of the most highly structured places to work, right? And I think historically as well that that has attracted people who really like structure. Yeah. And that's fine, that's great. You know, that's the way it needed to work. But actually we're getting to a place now, and I totally agree with you, the idea of entrepreneurship is central, right? Not necessarily in business entrepreneurship, but just the mindset and the approach of being an entrepreneur is what we need right now everywhere, just to create value socially and, you know, emotionally and commercially in the end, of course, as well.

Yeah, exactly. And it's, I think it's one that, that we are breaking through faster now than ever, you know, because the systems can't work now because of what's happening in the world. So now, you know, there are questions happening just because we've had to flip things around. I think it's a beautiful thing that we're experiencing now because a lot of the fears have to be tested.

Thank you so much for joining us. Some fantastic learning from all of the guests. You will find contact links and schedule links in the show notes. If you're interested, please do check out the other guests on the Future Learning Design Podcast, where we grapple with similar wicked problems of how to innovate and support change in education.