[RE]LEARN Conference Special 2 - Conversations with Will Richardson, Kirti Diwan, Blessing Akpan, Sandeep Hooda and Christophe Menagé

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

We're in a critical moment, not just in this country, but in the world. If we don't begin to ask those fundamental questions, not just of ourselves, but with our parents, with our communities, with our students, engaging in very different conversations around what school should be, what an education is, what success is, what achievement is, and we're not doing ourselves any favors.

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. In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Will Richardson, one of the keynote speakers at the conference and a phenomenal and energizing serial entrepreneur, leadership coach, podcaster, and blogger who has co-founded the Big Questions Institute with Homer Tavanga. I also speak with Kirti Diwan, who is the Skilling and Capability Lead at Google. And she is a research student and champion of women's diversity, education, and well-being. It was also wonderful to speak with Blessing Akpan, who is an educator and social entrepreneur and the founder of the Innovative Child Network, started in Nigeria but with plans to expand across Africa. Sandy Hooda is a first-generation entrepreneur who has put his vision and passion into the Vega Schools in India in order to ignite the love of learning for students and families that the school serves. Christophe Chris Menager is the founder of e² Educational Ecosystems. Chris is a 100.org ambassador and through e² activates partnerships empowering others to co-create transformative initiatives. 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. Will Richardson.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Well, yeah, and again, you know, part of the pressure is if you actually did stuff in schools that made sense, it would fly against the narrative that everyone carries around what schools should be like. If we really said to ourselves, you know, grades are antithetical to learning, we're not going to do them anymore, a lot of people out there would go, what happened to the grades? Why aren't— why isn't my kid getting a grade? You know, it would be this huge kind of earthquake almost. Not just that, but if we said multi-age groups, if we said, we're not going to do social studies and English and history and, you know, or chemistry and all those different things, it would be this huge, like, dissonance in the minds of so many people. And they'd be going, parents especially, right? Because we're all kind of products or victims of the system, right? So they'd be like, why aren't we doing these things? And that's just, that just makes it a very heavy lift for people to say, yeah, we're gonna we're going to change it up and we're just going to start really by, by looking and asking what are the conditions that really deep and powerful learning require, and then we're going to put those conditions into everything that we do in school. Yeah, because that doesn't square with the things, the stupid things we've been doing in schools in terms of the conditions that we've been creating for 200 years. So yeah, it's very, very difficult, but you know, again, I just get back to this moment where we're in a critical moment, not just in this country, but in the world. And if we don't begin to ask those fundamental questions, not just of ourselves, but with our parents, with our communities, with our students, engaging in very different conversations around what school should be, what an education is, what success is, what achievement is, you know, reframing the language that we use around all of this, then we're not doing ourselves any favors.

Karti Dewan.

I work as a Skilling and Capability Lead, right? And in my current role, I'm obviously helping people learn and grow, do better in their careers, and I love that. I'm also a big champion of women's diversity, education, and well-being, and supporting women and the small businesses that they run has always been an area of passion. So, you know, while I was thinking about just where we are today in education and learning and where ideally we can be, I realized that, you know, the entire focus of remote and online learning has been on adult education and ongoing learning, you know, as a part of our jobs and not necessarily until the pandemic. I think we thought of early education switching to, you know, without us being prepared as a world to this whole, you know, online and remote setup. So, you know, there's that. And then on the other hand, we have longer lifespans, people are, you know, living longer, thanks to all the medical science out there. But what that also means is aging populations who are not necessarily working because our retirement ages haven't really changed in the workforce. So There's also a question of how do we enable elderly schools, right? Because there is a lot of potential in the elderly being engaged. You know, not all of them may require livelihood if they have enough savings, but many of them may to sustain this, you know, average age of 90 years old. And then there is a lot you can do remotely in terms of just, you know, sustaining your livelihood as well. But then you There's no way you cannot not learn to be able to do that. So lifelong learning really is the key to elderly schooling, so to say, as well. Traditionally, all of this has been probably happening with blackboards and especially with early education until now. And I thought, you know, why not think of learning for all ages, for all abilities? As something to do which is online, real-time, experiential, social, and personalized, which enables learning with a latte than sitting in front of a blackboard. So my talk is essentially, you know, focused on 3 stories. And like I said, I really believe in women empowerment. So in India, we are currently at a situation where our literacy rate for women is at a good 70-80%. Despite that, the percentage of women employed in the workforce is less than 25%. And what that means is lifelong learning and remote learning becomes even more critical for women to, you know, get back to the workforce and be there through their, you know, old age. So my story starts with 3 women. So the first one is about a young girl she has a disability, she can't hear, which is where I want to reimagine our online early education as something that is available for children with all abilities. In developing countries, public government schools may not always have specialized teaching and learning aids. And, you know, children may just land up in regular schools, but they may not actually land up learning in front of that blackboard. So for somebody who is hard of hearing, How can AR/VR technology become an experiential online learning experience with closed captioning and/or sign language where children are able to imagine the world out there, you know, sitting right at home or wherever they are? But essentially, it's, it's much better than a teacher who's not necessarily trained in sign language teaching a child with a hearing disability. My second story is about another woman who's probably a mid- career entrepreneur, and until the pandemic, her business is probably offline, and she's happy with the way it's going. There is a lot of walk-in customers, and then we've seen this shift in e-commerce where suddenly everything shifts online. But where is the time for her to go back to school and learn how to, you know, set up a website, set up a checkout on the website, and then how to market all of that to her existing and new customers? So my reimagination here on online learning is how can we make it more real-time and social for somebody like her where, you know, she could just post like we do on social media with her questions or, you know, seeking guidance. And then there is this whole network of people out there who can support as a peer-to-peer learning network. So she doesn't have to really go into a classroom to learn all this. She can probably just do it online with a great network of peer mentors, so to say.. And my third story, like I said, is about this aging woman who's 70, retired, and now wants to sustain her livelihood or, you know, spend more time giving back to the community by studying more about nutrition and wellness and become a coach. But again, she is probably so old that she is not really tech savvy because she's not used technology as a way to learn before. And in India, definitely we don't have elderly schools like maybe in China we do. So there's no school she can go to. So again, then, you know, the blackboard is out of the equation, but then what does online learning look for somebody like her who's not tech savvy? And then I started reimagining how, you know, a personalized streaming experience, almost like watching a TV series, would work for somebody like her. So she could have a series of videos she could watch on nutrition and wellness, have a simulation of coaching of some sort, the way we play our games, video games., and that completes her certification as a coach. So, you know, really, I mean, there's only one thing that is common about all these stories is that all these women want to learn, no matter what situation, age, or ability they are, right? And as a community of educators, innovators, caregivers, policymakers, and learners, I really want to support these women in what they want.. And that can happen only if we reimagine how we are teaching and learning today for all the needs and all the abilities, which is not true. And of course, I mean, I'm a realist, I know there are real challenges like accessibility of technology, its affordability, especially in a developing country like India. But for a minute, if we assume that, you know, those challenges are taken care of, because there is work happening in that direction. There is nothing stopping us from reimagining this world and, you know, making that online learning so easy and experiential, social, and personalized that it enables learning with a latte and not with a blackboard.

Fantastic. That is absolutely wonderful. One of the things that's so nice is that often these conversations become very abstract very quickly, and creating a very personal picture, as you have just done, about these three women is a really powerful vehicle, because, you know, there are very real human needs that we need to serve with this reimagination.

Exactly.

And the second thing that I was thinking was that we very often will focus on the barriers. It kind of prevents us from reimagining, but because we think, well, this, you know, there is a digital divide, we know that, and it's a very real thing in developing countries.

Very real, yes.

And sometimes that stops us from actually reimagining what could be. Yeah, fantastic. Wow.

Of course, the recent situation makes us think even more in how broken things are when it comes to education, and we really need to fix that. But who then is really responsible for fixing it, right? And I don't think there is any one agent. More and more makes me validate my own thinking that it's time for the academia, the industry, and by industry I mean the business or the enterprise and the policymakers to come together, collaborate on, you know, some of these innovations and next-generation thinking to make it happen. Where I think the change agent lies in the individual themselves is to realize that there is probably only so much that can happen with the blackboard in the classroom. And there needs to be a shift in the mindset of the individual as well, and how they can continue to embrace, adopt, and, you know, continue to learn from from the early education to the elderly schooling as a self-determined, self-paced, and lifelong learning approach.

Blessing Akpan.

The Innovative Child Network is a nonprofit organization and it's youth-led. It focuses on mentorship and training for students between the ages of 6 to 16 years. So basically our mission is raising innovative kids through skill-based learning. We understand how engaging students in activities other than their normal school activities could affect academic performance. So that is basically what we do. And in the 21st century, we understand that young people need to gain skills that will help them live in this age, help them become employable. And the best time to start learning the skills is at a very young age. So that is what Innovative Child Network does. We train children on different skill areas of their choice. And while it's a network, is that it comprises different children from different backgrounds who have different skills coming together, learn from each other have their skills showcased and also get to be mentored to get to the level they really want to be. The network is built on inclusivity to give access to different students despite their economic background. We understand that economic inequality has posed lots of challenges, especially in education, that there is, um, there is a lot of gaps between the elites and children who are schooling in low-income communities. The network was launched in September 2019, and in 2020, when the pandemic started in Nigeria and students would not be in school, we migrated to online classes where we host digital training sessions for students in areas such as web development, Scratch programming, public speaking, creative writing. And it's so amazing to realize how much children have learned within the space of few months.

Yeah, very interesting. Could you tell me a little bit about the mentors? Who is doing the mentoring as part of the network? Do you have your older students?

Okay, the mentors are educators and undergraduate students who are undergoing education programs or who have passions and interest in mentoring other young people. So we have mentors in different fields, mentors who are web developers, who are good in public speaking, right, and writing and other skill areas the children are interested in going into. So basically mentors are drawn from a pool of educators, undergraduates who are experts in these skill areas.

Fantastic.

And what was it that gave you the inspiration to set up initially? I mean, is it something Was there a need you could see in your community there?

Yes, the need I saw was a lack of mentorship for students, you know, especially students who attend community schools, public schools. They have little or no supervision for their academic works, and most times, to some extent, they have families, but maybe they are not really paying attention to their academic work. And generally how they are growing. And then I realized how much potential is in a child, how creative a child is. In my communities, you see a child coming up with creative tools, making things out of nothing, being creative with artworks. And before you know it, the child stops doing that thing because there is not enough encouragement and maybe a training to get the child's knowledge to another level. So that inspired me to come up with a network where a child could receive mentorship in the skill area that she shows interest in, continue giving the child encouragement, provide support in terms of resources, materials, communities to enable the child keep growing in that path.

Yeah, amazing.

You know, what we do is with the Students Don't Just Learn but they also come up to be facilitators themselves, teaching their fellow students, teaching their fellow mentees. So these students coming up to lead learning, uh, it was like expressing that learning outcome that makes us feel like we're doing something right.

Absolutely.

My topic for the Relend Festival, the reimagining synchronous and asynchronous delivery for low-income communities. So it's basically what we are doing at the Innovative Child network, especially during this period that COVID-19 has presented us with a new reality. So to make sure that our learning is inclusive and also make room for the millions of students who are not able to have access to steady internet connection, uh, the materials, and seem to be excluded at some point.

Sandeep Hooda.

I'm an entrepreneur. I don't have an education background, so I'm still really learning. I took a sabbatical many years ago, exited all my businesses. I didn't want to do what I was doing, and I traveled around the world for a couple of years. And during this period, I came across some absolutely phenomenal schools, High Tech High being one of them and several other schools. And then I met my co-founder, Dr. Stephen Edwards, who is one of the most highly regarded people in PBL, problem-based learning. We define it as problem-based learning. I know some people do it as project-based learning. So we started India's first school without classrooms. We went whole hog, you know, completely the other end of the spectrum. We are a PBL school. Our goal really was not just to start a school, it was to create an agent of change.

Brilliant.

And I think we've been successful to some extent. We have lots of people coming to see what we are doing.

Fantastic. When did you set up?

2016.

Okay.

Yes, we've had a good few years. I think we've been lucky because a lot of schools that go to this level of extreme generally tend to struggle a bit to get their messaging across and so on. But I think we are at a very exciting time. You know, I always say that there's a right time for everything and. And I think the time for this has come and I think it's going to be further impacted by the pandemic. I was sharing with somebody the other day that this is— I was at an event, speaking at an event, and the interviewer told me, he said, you know, we are watching this strange movie called pandemic. And I said, no, I don't think it's a movie. I think it's a preview. The movies, the couple of movies are yet to come. And the one big movie we are probably going to see is massive job loss as a result of climate change, as well as a result of— they call it the march of technology, but I think it's going to be the conquest of technology. And these two movies are, you know, they're being prepared, they're being blockbuster movies.

Yeah.

So we need to really prepare for those. Yes.

Brilliant.

So that's really our goal.

That's fantastic. And what would you say you've learned in— because this, you know, it's a big thing to take on to become an agent of change in that space. And have there been things that have been quite surprising that you've learned as a process?

So there were pleasant surprises and there were difficult surprises. I think the first pleasant surprise was that a lot of parents are now really very open to something different. In fact, 99% of our parents come from the corporate sector, and when we ask them why they chose us, they usually share how difficult it is for them to hire people, and they have to interview 50, 60, 70, 80 people. And then barely they find 1 or 2, and even those 1 or 2, there's a 50% chance of them succeeding in their role. So that's how difficult it is, you know, and I personally believe that's the biggest hook, Tim. It's the biggest hook in the world to do what we are setting out to do. Then the challenge, which is the flip side of this, is that even progressive parents who sign on, they then start finding this very confusing because they wonder how this will dovetail with test scores. And how it's going to fit. The favorite sort of question is that when will the learning happen? So again, we believe, and right or wrong, I don't know, we believe that the most progressive liberal schools in the world have kind of gone too extreme to say— it's a bit— the analogy is the liberal of the world today versus the conservative of the world, and both are at their extremes and not willing to listen to each other or talk to each other. The same things kind of happened with liberal schools where they've said that we don't really care about the test, hell with it, which we know, we believe wasn't a very good decision because if we are talking about real-world learning, the exam or the test is also as important and that needs to be factored. So we kind of took the middle path here. And I think it's a good thing we did that.

Is very much in a way it's fear-based, the mindset of many parents because it's, it's about will my child be okay? I have to calculate that this risk to put my child into this school is going to pay off down the line, the success of their child in the future, because ultimately that's what we want as parents, right? Kind of segues quite nicely that your session is actually on parenting, right, at the ReLearn conference. What kind of brought you to that realization that that was the thing you wanted to share?

So really for us it was you know, what we are setting out to do is very heavily dependent on the mindset of the parent because at the end of the day, the customer is the parent, the product is the child. And therefore, I think in order for Progressive Schools and the education transformation that we're talking about, for it to be truly successful, I think we need to strike at the heart of mindset of the parent. And if we can have multiple conversations with parents around the changing world, the conquest of technology, global warming and its future effects, and how companies, professionals in the real world who are truly successful today are the ones who are innovative, are the ones who are finding new and better ways of doing things, are the ones who are lateral thinkers, out-of-box thinkers. I mean, we are seeing it today. I mean, if you just see March, the pandemic hit, and today we are in November. Just look at the last 6 months, the most successful organizations in the world are actually also coincidentally the most innovative organizations, the ones who have pivoted very quickly. And therefore, the context really is everything, and this is the context. The context is happening in front of our eyes, and if we can have multiple conversations with parents and we can change their mindset, and there's no better time and method to change their mindset than to talk about the context, what we're experiencing today. So that's why we chose to focus on the parenting for, for a different world, for a new world. So our tagline at the school is Children of a New World. What we are setting out to do is we are creating children of a new world, and in order to create the children of the new world, we need to parent for a new world as well. You know, I'm kind of a bit done to death with 21st century skills. Not that there's no value in them, there's a lot of value in them, but I like to kind of approach it slightly differently. If we just simply look at all the skills that were the most important skills, have always been the most important skills, what I found was that they are the same skills that continue to be the most important skills, and I call them timeless skills. And these timeless skills are the skills that machines of yesterday, today, and tomorrow will not be able to deal with. What are they? The first is the ability to think in original terms. Machines cannot think laterally. I think our children, we need to teach them to think laterally. So all the conversations we need to have with them and all those things need to revolve around that. So, you know, that's one sort of one bucket. The second bucket is the ability for our children to be resilient, to deal with failure, to deal with problems, because guess what, that's what we are going through today. And being resilient was as important 5,000 years ago as it is important today and as it will be important tomorrow. So question is, how do you get that mindset? And I think there, there are a lot of Asian philosophy, the roots of Asian philosophy has some very unusual, interesting lessons that are actually different from what the Western philosophers have talked about. Not to say that the Western philosophers, what they've said doesn't have value, of course it does. But I think there's this very interesting Asian piece to it to build a resilient mindset. So that's the second bucket. The third bucket obviously is the ability to motivate yourself, inspire yourself, inspire people around you, you know, make people around yourself successful. I think the old notions of leadership are history of being able to operate in a command-control model, which by the way, other than the army, the schools are great at even today. But if you really look at, talk to Sundar Pichai of Google or Satya Nadella of Microsoft, his greatest challenge is, hey, how do I get everybody in the organization to turn entrepreneurial? And guess what, you can't do that unless you empower. And guess what, you can't empower unless you are not command control. So, you know, again, this is a timeless skill. This was a skill that was the greatest leaders of many centuries ago and greatest leaders of tomorrow will have. And the fourth bucket broadly is just kindness, you know, simple good values. If you're kind, if you're empathetic, if you care for your community, environment, people around you, it's actually a really good long-term strategy too. So these are timeless skills and then of course, this is the what. And the why is the context, and this is the what, and then the how is the third piece of how we could do that as parents. And for the how, I think the biggest move we could make is to look for a school that provides different kind of education. And then of course, there are many things we can do at home.

Christophe Monaget.

I've had I've worked in different sectors and different industries and I've had varying degrees of empowerment and agency. And what I really noticed was that the context where I had been really encouraged and not given permission, but actually it was an unspoken autonomy. It was just, it was an expectation almost that you would go and you would find opportunities and you would create new possibilities. Whenever that was my context, I was as happy as a pig in mud.

Nice.

And so I started to ask myself, you know, if that's not the case in every school, how can I then create an environment for myself where I can flourish in those conditions and surround myself in those conditions which nourish my meaning and my purpose? Because I really believe that education, at the end of the day, for it to be powerful, it needs to come from a place of being very deeply seated in who we are and what we believe and I always have a wry smile when I read that education isn't values-laden. I can't see how you could possibly approach education from a completely impartial and non-values basis. And you can imagine that as a politics teacher, that can be quite controversial to say that, but on the flip side, if you make it as a known quantity to the kids and encourage them to challenge you, it then opens the door for some really rich learning because you know, you then role model the fact that your way is not the right way. You role model the fact that you're willing to listen to a different argument.

Yeah.

And you role model how to construct that argument in a rational way. So eSquared was born from this notion that if I wasn't able to find a context that really nurtured my need for learning, I was going to create that context. And so in the last sort of 18 months, I've been doing a lot of reading like you do, and a lot of listening listening to podcasts like you do and, you know, sitting down quietly with some friends, maybe around a fire with a nice beverage or something, and just sort of reflecting on the bigger things in life and the things that are meaningful. And as I started to piece those things together, I thought to myself, well, what if I can create a context and a platform whereby I can somehow contribute? And if that contribution is around giving advocacy and voice and connecting those people who do create the change, those people who do question, and then not only question, but— and you sort of pointed this out earlier— is take that talk and that questioning and put it into practice and make impactful change.

That's brilliant. And it's interesting, that whole notion of bringing your full self into learning or into work, into your professional context, because that that's so often not encouraged, right? In the old traditional environment of being, you know, you have to be professional and you, you know, it's all quite rules-based and it's quite cold in a way, you know, in that sense of you end up trying to ignore the parts of yourself that you would like to bring, but actually they don't feel appropriate because they're getting, you know, the very rigid norms of the workplace or the classroom removing a huge chunk of who we are as human beings, right?

Absolutely, couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, linking back to what we were just saying, how education and learning is what we are and what we do. For me, Innovate Square, that model illustrates what I believe the purpose of education is. And so I don't believe that the purpose of education is to get kids to remember what date Nazi Germany took power. And, you know, I believe that the purpose of education is to help kids understand the conditions that led to that sort of event, how we might learn from that sort of event, and foresee and forecast and predict how we might avoid a repeat of that sort of event. And that's where it shows a movement down those lower echelons of, you know, Bloom's taxonomy and Maslow's hierarchy of needs, how those two intertwine, leading from that traditional paradigm of everything being very linear and fixed and rational all the way through to the higher echelons and the higher order thinking and even something as esoteric as the notion of presencing. What is my position in society? What is my purpose and why am I here? And I think you just mentioned before how schools are expected or institutions are a bit cold and regimented and I think that's a function of the era from which they came where the rational mind— Mark Manson talks about the observing and the rational mind where everything is structured and can be explained, you know. And yet science, which can be explained and which is based on facts, science evolves. Everything evolves. Our awareness, our understanding, and our knowledge evolves over time. And so I sort of feel that at the moment we've moved from a rational mind era into this emotional mind phase. Where whether it's by virtue of our context and what's happening in our world or whether it's by virtue of just time, we're now giving a bit more credence to some of the more intangible things like, you know, Ken Robinson talks about the 7 senses. He didn't base his work on only the 5 senses of the tangible things of sight, sound, touch, taste, and so on. He actually spoke very deliberately about the balance between all those things, you know, as a 7th sense and obviously intuition as a 6th sense.. And I've seen that work in practice in an educational context, you know, living with kids 24/7 for 11 years in a residential living environment. If I only focused on the 5 senses, I reckon the kids would be, they'd be okay, but I don't think they thrive or flourish. But when you really bring in those 2 other elusive senses of intuition and balance, how do you make them feel?

Are they heard?

You know, when you walk into a good restaurant, Tim, and you just everything's in place, you know you're going to have a good time, there's the right plants, the right color, the right music, the waiter or the waitress is just delightful, the food's amazing, the company is great, and it's something that you can't explain, you just know it in your gut. Yeah, I think, you know, there's been a lot of research at the moment around the gut being, you know, our second biggest brain, and I think there's a lot to be said around that, listening to our guts and helping kids to listen to their guts.

Definitely. It's also very much counter to the measurement mindset though as well, isn't it? Because of course if you know, isn't it just, if we talk measurement and we talk accountability and we talk structured systems to prove that we are doing a good job as educators, we get into a quite a murky space when we start talking about such ways of knowing as intuition or ideas around presencing and that's a real deep challenge to the policymakers and the decision makers within education.

I'd really like to unpack that more with you because, you know, we talked before about the wisdom around the old adages that we rely on and that's passed down through the generations. And one that really always comes to my mind is, you know, the old saying that at the moment we're valuing that which we measure when we should be measuring that which we value. And if we really just pull that apart a little bit, it comes down to what makes us tick. And I can understand the place for accountability, I can understand the need for good governance, I can understand, you know, the conditions that led to a requirement for all those frameworks and all those regulations. However, I think there's a really— again, going back to that Seven Senses of Ken Robinson— I think there's a really important role to be played around balance and intuition in that, and that doesn't mean diminishing the importance of those other systems and processes. It just means holding them very deliberately and consciously in the way in which we interact with our students and, you know, and each other. And I also particularly like to, whenever those arguments of the system doesn't allow for this, or, you know, that would be a risky activity to do with the kids because we're relying on measurement, or, you know, they're not passing their exams and they're they're failing according to these exams and so on, I always like to then use the argument of metrics to promote an alternative view. And so what I mean by that is if I looked at student disengagement rates, they're going through the roof and have done for the last 15, 20 years. If I looked at teacher attrition rates, they're going through the roof. If I looked at mental health issues with young people, the incidence is rising exponentially, and I don't believe it's only because of of better diagnosis. I think there's other external factors that, you know, that play into that. And, you know, PISA standards in Australia falling for the last decade. So by every measure, the system isn't working.

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.