Redefining Smart - A Conversation with Thom Markham

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

We're really moving into terrain here that cannot be explained by our current cognitive hypothesis, which really goes back to the '60s and is really a mechanical view. The transformation is really about moving from curriculum to people. That I think, that's to me in a nutshell, is what we're trying to do.

Hi again and welcome back to the podcast. It's a great pleasure to be able to bring you my conversation today with Tom Markham, considered to be one of the founding fathers of project-based learning. Tom is an educator by trade, a positive psychologist by training, and a global entrepreneur dedicated to expanding educator mindsets in service of a positive future. In 2015, Tom founded PBL Global, a worldwide partner-based organization offering online courses and on-site professional learning. As an author, Tom's previous books include several bestsellers on project-based learning, including Project-Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert Tools for Innovation and Inquiry for K-12 Educators. In 2015, he also published Redefining SMART: Awakening Students' Power to Reimagine Their World. You can contact Tom with the links in the show notes, on email, or on social media.

Hello, Tim.

Hey, Tom, how are you?

I'm doing good.

Great. If I could just maybe set the scene with this question from your book. So you wrote this amazing book, Redefining Smart, and one of the things that it talks about is the why behind educational transformation. And there's a lot of talk about educational transformation, particularly now, but I just would love to ask you first, what for you specifically, what's your kind of why in terms of educational transformation? Like, where do you see it being most necessary?

Well, I've always been a, what might be called a person-centered educator, in which the curriculum was always secondary to me to what's going on with the person, how they're developing themselves. So in a way, the world has now caught up to some of my thinking. So I'm very happy about all this discussion about transformation because the transformation is really about moving from curriculum to people. That I think, that's to me in a nutshell is what we're trying to do, where it's not the external knowledge, which also we're trying to, we don't abandon that entirely, but the core learning is about who you are and how you're going to behave in the world and what kind of skills are you going to bring to the table and what kinds of attitudes and strengths you develop in yourself. So character becomes pretty essential in this world. And that to me is what the transformation's about. And it's not being driven by educators, it's being driven by the world. Because if you look at everything that's going on, virtually institutions and organizations are breaking down in favor of people taking charge of whatever their activities are, whether it's using an Uber instead of taxis or on-demand services of some kind. Everything is now becoming far more personal. And I think that's what's driving the conversation around transformation because we realize as educators, we've gotta adapt from a very organization institution heavy industry to more of a personalized agile industry.

Totally agree. Yeah. Interesting. And where do you see then the role of PBL in that? Because obviously like a lot of these things, PBL has been around for a long, long time. Right. But is it now coming into its own as, you know, important factor in that, those transformations?

Yeah, it is. Yeah. There's really two answers to that question for me. PBL has been around since really the '70s when it was somewhat popular, much better developed in the late '90s. And into the early 2000s, but virtually everywhere, anywhere in the world, we got stuck on standards and sort of a scientific view of how education should be rolled out, which meant that PBL was not as popular as it should have been early on because it's more of a human development process rather than academic development process. And because we've had this kind of movement where we're really moving towards personalized forms of education, and what we're seeing also is sort of an accompanying trend, which is a lessening of standards and curriculum and certification.

Yeah.

Then PBL becomes the method and the way to do that. So PBL sort of languished for a while, if you will. And at one point, I worked for the Buck Institute for Education, PBL Works, which is sort of a leading PBL organization. And we used to sit and say, you know, we've got to design this right, because at some point in time, it's going to take off when conditions are right. And the conditions now are suddenly right. They've been ripe for a few years, but now have been accelerated by remote learning and shifts as a result of COVID and so forth. So PBL, that's the reason that it's exploding and accelerating because we're looking, to my mind, for human development process that still answers the academic challenge. In other words, you still have to learn things and know things. But as I like to say, we're now working on a value-added proposition where you not only know, you're able to do things. Which traditional school doesn't necessarily teach you. So that's, I think, why PBL is becoming popular. But at the core of it for me is that something not completely recognized even within the PBL movement or by people who do project-based learning is it is really is a human development process. It relies on the same set of conditions under which human beings normally learn. PBL is just a human development challenge method that you learn by posing an authentic challenge to learners. They engage in some sort of solution finding or design thinking or problem attacking process. They figure out their best solution and then they share it. That's all PBL is. And that just fits so well with the way of the world. That's why PBL, as I also say, is actually a career readiness method because that's how people function in the world today and work.

Yeah, and yeah, I mean, increasingly so, that kind of project management cycle and the ability for people to independently or collaboratively navigate that complex process, you know, with naughty wicked problems is—

Yeah, that's an interesting point, you know, that you just said independently and collaboratively, because you have to be able to do both.

Yeah, interesting. And even, you know, there's a long history of PBL, but I still think there are a lot of misconceptions around about what it is and what it and maybe what it isn't, and that you've kind of touched on some of those already. But for example, in mid-2000s, there was an article by Kirschner, Swallow, and Clark about minimal guidance during instruction and how it just doesn't work, right? So this, you know, and I saw that got a lot of traction for years. People were referring to this article that basically that was kind of proof that these minimal guidance methods like PBL and like inquiry-based learning just simply didn't work. And therefore, you know, that was that. We could draw a line under that move on, right? And clearly they were missing something, right? But at the heart of it for me was like a real misunderstanding perhaps of what the PBL is about.

Well, I think that is one of the big misconceptions. I'm familiar with the literature you're talking about for sure, and actually agree with it to some extent. PBL is not Montessori. PBL is not coming in and deciding which station you want to work at today and what's going to please you. It's not that at all. Now, I would say when you look at the gaps, some of that is still going on. That's one gap. So people think it's discovery learning. It's not discovery learning. Uh, they also tend to see it as just another way to cover academic material, not to develop people, but just a kind of a cool and engaging way to fool students into getting more engaged than they would be otherwise.

Yeah.

So they use it as an, as another academic method, not realizing the depth. Of what's required. Then there's some other myths that kind of accompany this, which is some students can do it, some students can't. That's not true. Any student can do project-based learning. There's some thoughts that it's not very applicable to certain subjects like maths or so forth, and it's— that's clearly, it's a little more tricky to apply it in maths, but I've seen it done. It can be done quite well. But I think really the biggest sort of gap that we face is that we haven't really come to grips with what it means to be a facilitator of an inquiry process. And as a teacher/coach/facilitator, setting up what I call a deep structure that actually provides a lot of guidance in a project for students, at the same time allowing maximum voice choice and freedom, that's what we face and what a really good PBL teacher is able to do. They're actually imposing a sort of an invisible structure, if you will. So I've been in PBL classes. I remember walking into, I think it was a 3rd or 4th grade class a couple years ago, and, you know, it just hummed. It was just humming. You can tell when that's happening. Teacher's off to one side. She's at her desk. She's answering a few questions from students who are coming up, having a few conversations. The rest of the students are working in teams scattered around the room diligently. No side conversations, totally engrossed. So when you get that kind of situation, that's what I call a humming classroom. And there's a vibe there that you can feel. And that happens because you have a deep structure. The deep structure, first of all, begins with training the students in expectations that they can do this work and it's worth doing. And then they start to just, I guess their human quality just takes over and they do what we naturally do when we're engaged in something that's useful and interesting to us. And focus and concentrate. And they were doing that. The teacher had it set up so they, the students primarily would answer their own questions from each other when they could. If they couldn't figure it out, then they go to the teacher.

Great.

But she had a whole, there was an invisible structure there. And it probably all began with her relationship to the students, one of mutual respect, communication, what I call the channel of trust. And when you have that, then you have the teacher as sort of facilitator/coach/co-learner. Students are teaching one another, so they're sort of co-teachers. And then that deep structure takes over and projects run themselves with none of the— I shouldn't say with none, but many fewer of the traditional controls and disciplinary methods we use to enforce learning in the classroom, which is usually a fear-based system and a punishment-based system. You just don't get that in a really high-functioning PBL classroom because you have helped students identify and activate that internal locus of control.

I love that idea of the invisible structure because I think that is what isn't seen, obviously by definition it's invisible, but you know, when real masters of PBL, they've done all of that pre-work before in all sorts of ways, right? As you say, supporting the students or designing the structure and the framework that they're going to be using and that's just not seen to the outside novice eye, and it looks like minimal guidance.

Yes, it does.

But it doesn't—

That's where they missed it. That's where, Tim, I think they missed it. Yeah. Is they equated minimal guidance really working from an old frame. Where's the verbal, visible set of rules posted on the classroom wall that tells you how you're supposed to do things? And where's the direct instruction that tells you exactly what you're going to learn when you're supposed to learn it? So yes, so that they didn't really move into what I would call this whole new world of it. Let's call it invisibility in which so much of what we're doing is coming from places within ourselves that we don't fully understand. Persistence, curiosity. I mean, I'm sorry, we just don't, we don't quite have explanations for all those. And so we're really working in that realm now and trying to figure out how to set up the conditions under which the best behavior emerges.

Brilliant. I mean, that segues quite nicely, I guess, into that you mentioned the idea of this kind of psychological dimension and all of these qualities and attributes that you're talking about clearly are connected to psychology. And as you say, things that we don't necessarily fully understand yet, but you personally are also a trained mind-body psychologist, right? So I just, I would love to just move into that space a little bit more, because I think that is a really big part of what's going on now with this shift in education. I know lots of questions around that in terms of the challenges that that poses for educators who've never really had any background in psychology training, or— but where do you see the role for psychology generally? I mean, perhaps it's in training, but also in, in the way that education is moving.

Well, I'm, um, an outlier, Tim. Psychology is a big sprawling field and a good portion of psychology is driven by cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology and sort of what an attempt to be highly scientific about the field. As a matter of fact, there's a lot of departments of psychology in the United States at universities that have renamed themselves departments of psychological science. So one of the objections I have to all of this is I don't believe in the cognitive model. I don't believe that just tracking neuronal connections into the limbic system, so-called, which is also an doubt whether that system exists, tells us exactly where intention is and says nothing about the mind. I wrote a blog about 2 months ago called Where in Our Mind Is the Word Cat, C-A-T. We can't even figure out where we store the word cat. So I'm not going to accept this inference we understand everything about the brain and mind. I don't think we do. And I think a lot of, to me, when I say mind-body, I believe in intention and there's some, actually, if you really press me on it, I'm more of an energy psychologist. I believe that there's a certain energy that sort of motivates us. We're talking more and more about that, but I believe we'd be much better to talk about the brain as a quantum dynamic organ driven by energies, trying to figure out what that emotional energy is that turns people into being more curious or persistent or whatever they are. So that to me is part of what the shift is. Now we're not, we're in the very early stages of that. And I'm hoping that I live long enough that I can say a lot more about it. But honestly, we're really moving into terrain here that cannot be explained by our current cognitive hypothesis, which really goes back to the '60s and is really a mechanical view. I'm not at all convinced of the mechanical view. There's something to people that's different, and I think we're being pushed in that direction. Eventually we're going to have to come to terms with that because I say Tell me where empathy comes from. Where does that come from? I mean, why are some people empathetic and others not? How do we develop it? We can recognize it when we see it. Yeah, but what spurs it internally?

Yeah, it's such fascinating stuff. And I mean, for me personally, I don't have any kind of educational training in psychology, but clearly as an educator, this is what we deal with every day. This is our kind of substance in terms, as you say, empathy and all of these kind of competencies that are coming more and more to the fore now as vital human competencies when the knowledge is so accessible in other forms and automation is moving apace, then, you know, clearly the things that we bring to the table as humans are those human qualities. And as educators, we need to understand them, but they are, they're still kind of black boxes that we haven't quite got inside yet. We—

it just bothers me a little bit, Tim, and I think every educator should be bothered. We say, well, we're just going to improve the minds of young people. What is the mind? I mean, we're dealing with terms we have zero understanding. And it just seems to me, first step is a little humility and say, well, we're not quite sure what we're dealing with, but we think we're dealing with something called a mind. We don't know where it comes from. That might be a good step. You know, they say that the first step to change is awareness. So maybe some sort of awareness, like we don't have all the answers might be helpful for us to dig a little deeper into what we're doing. And I think we're going to be, as I say, confronted with that, really.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's a relatively safe space to stay within the cognitive domain, right? Because we do understand that a little bit more perhaps in the cognitive architecture and memory and things. And if we stay in that safe space, then we're OK. But if we start straying into this fuzzy space of where is the mind and how do we develop empathy and—

You know, Tim, it's not really even safe space in a way. So if you look at cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, yes, they can pretty much identify the parts of the brain that might be responsible for short-term memory of a small list of facts.

Yeah, that doesn't speak to the kinds of skills that people exhibit today at all.

So, all right, let's dive into this knotty question then about intelligence, because, you know, your, your book is called Redefining Smart, and you talk about this idea that educators should let go of IQ, of student IQ as a concept that influences teaching methods in any way. So what are the issues that have been caused by the way that we've conceptualized intelligence? And then the flip side of that, what are the implications for a more of a holistic notion of of intelligence that we might use?

Well, I think as we entered the industrial age, whenever we date that, maybe 1880 or whatever it might have been, we needed an industrial view of the brain in order to figure out an educational system that would prepare students for that industrial era. And so we needed a good scientific hook, and so we came up with the notion of IQ, which is a function of this factor called G, the G factor in the brain, which is really just a statistical artefact, it's not a real thing. And we decided that we would call this your intelligence quotients and that would be the measure of our intelligence. It was a very handy tool. And of course, we know that this is exactly where we got terms like moron from and idiot. These were once accepted scientific terms and they designated how low or how high your IQ was. Now we can see what's happened to those terms over time. So when I look at IQ, first of all, I should, let me say this, you know, psychologists have abandoned IQ basically. Now educators have not entirely, but they are behind the times. Psychologists have given up trying to measure intelligence. They really don't have a good measure. What they really do now is instead of IQ is they really look at intelligence as behavior that is successful within the environment. So if you look at successful behavior now, it's different from what it used to be. So intelligence changes with the times and with culture. And there's a great example. In 1905, when they began to administer IQ tests, one of the questions on an IQ test was, what is the relationship between dogs and rabbits? Now, if you answered today as, let's say, your average 12-year-old who's had a bit of biology, you would say, well, dogs and rabbits are both mammals, and you'd be correct. That would be the correct answer. In 1905, the correct answer was dogs chase rabbits. That's the relationship. So you can see that IQ is a function of academic environment. Yeah. And what we consider intelligence is really responding to the academic mastery of categorizing the world in different ways, which is what academics, particularly in science, tries to do.

And a cultural context as well.

Yeah, sure.

Cultural context. So very Western. And I think psychologists have generally recognized really not an appropriate tool. And the sort of accompanying problem is that IQ is so intertwined with personality and with, as you say, culture and behavior that they can't disentangle all this to say what makes a person intelligent. Or not. But if you look at what IQ did to us, IQ in a way is fundamental to the curriculum and way it's taught in many ways. Yeah, you give students a certain set of facts or concepts, then you give a test, and if the students on the test are able to return those facts and concepts in some way that is reasonably similar to the way you taught them, we consider them to be smart.

Yeah.

'Cause he got a good score on the test. And we can see that that in today's world is just not a really a good standard. It's not a good enough standard to have for what is intelligence. So again, this is, we're on the edge, I think, of trying to figure this out. It's probably gonna be, take us the rest of the 21st century to get a good grip on this, but we are sort of reinventing, I think, the notion of what we see as intelligent behavior and intelligent people and redefine it. And you could be, I mean, you could redefine it in many ways. You could say that it's not very intelligent to consider yourself to be an isolator. A human being in a world that needs to collaborate in order to survive.

Yeah.

So maybe a sign of intelligence is your ability to collaborate and your willingness and your desire. That's what's— that's all in transition. And that is part of this transformation that you and I are seeing across the globe in terms of questioning. But you see it all over.

I mean, you see it in terms of the, for example, the cultural sensitivity that people are starting to exhibit towards one another and the appreciation of different ways of being and different ways of thinking. I mean, Howard Gardner himself has said that multiple intelligences doesn't really hold any water.

He doesn't think much of his own theory.

Really? Interesting.

I mean, it did help us sort of identify that there are different aspects to intelligence. And we can definitely see that some people have a musical intelligence, for example. They just take the music or understand it or it fits. So we see that. People have different aspects to intelligence, but I feel certain about, well, there's two things I see, Tim. First of all, we're going to have to extend this to the body and not think that it's just everything happens from the neck up. The body has intelligent mechanisms. The heart has 100,000 neurons. I've just been reading about the gut, the intestines, the huge number of neurons in there, which really regulate your processes, which actually regulates your thinking. I'm, I'm do a lot of work in what I call heart-brain dynamics. And it's very clear that the heart is able to, through a series of energetic hormonal and nervous impulses, which goes up to the vagal nerve, which is a big nerve that goes from up the spine into the hindbrain, that affects brain function, clarity, executive functioning. So a whole intelligence is really a whole body intelligence. But the thing that's also beginning to interest me a lot, really always has, but there's more coming, is social neuroscience where we're actually finding that the outer culture is changing brain function. We're entering a period of global growth mindset, which is not going to be individual. It's going to be collaborative and global and collective as a growth mindset, because we can see as you sit there, here I'm about 8,000 miles away, we all got these impulses and electromagnetic things that are zooming right through our brain as we talk to one another. And that's changing how we see each other and how we collaborate. And they're showing in social neuroscience changes in the brain. So we're on the verge of social intelligence because this collaboration is becoming so dense that we're just— I mean, nobody— you don't know what you know from what I know from where we got it.

Yeah.

Now I'm going to repeat something tomorrow that I learned from you and I'd say, oh, I know this. How did I know this? I talked to Tim Logan.

Yeah. I really feel that strongly, partly from having these conversations for the podcast. And I kind of think, oh, you know, where did I get that from? Who did I— who was I discussing that with? And yeah, the origins of the idea you've just completely lost.

I think that's a fantastic development.

Very interesting.

That takes me more— that relates back to the mind-body conversation we had a couple of minutes ago.

Yeah.

The mind is greater than the brain and the body. And I think we are going to discover eventually that our minds are interacting at some energetic level, which really isn't— sounds a little wild, but how different is that really from cell phone towers and how cell phone information is transmitted?

But I mean, these are phenomenal implications for the way in which we do education. It just— every time it comes back to me, it's like, Wow, this— we've really got to— if we're talking about embodied learning and just all of the stuff that we've just been talking about, this isn't just dropping PBL into a traditional structure of a school, right?

Yeah, no, I'm with you. PBL is actually— well, I've said many times, I put it in my preface to my book in 2012 on PBL— PBL is just a term that will get us far enough to figure out what's going on. Eventually it's going to disappear because we're going to come up with better terminology. Right now it offers a pretty good frame for getting us into that space and talking about it, but at some point we're going to go deeper and discover something else. And you can already see that people are thinking about, well, how does PBL integrate with design thinking, integrate with Genius Hours, and the whole purpose-driven project-based world that we're seeing unfold in the remote environments. We're seeing kids do awesome work. It'll take a while to work out vocabulary, and we'll probably be highly confused for Yeah, a few years, but yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a bit of an initiative fatigue, isn't it?

I mean, I, I feel that, that kind of makerspace, Genius Hour, or these, you know, they're all like as though they're this, this boundary that you can kind of wrap around this particular thing that you might do or drop into a school. And actually, they're all very much connected into the same kind of space of investigation, inquiry, student-led, motivated, engaged, you know, all the things we've been discussing.

I totally agree. I'd actually— I argue in favor of what you're saying all the time. Let's, you know, I cringe when I see, well, people ask, what's the difference between project-based learning and problem-based learning or challenge-based learning or place-based learning?

Yeah.

And I say nothing. It's all the same thing. It's all, as you say, investigation around something meaningful, inquiry, figuring out solutions, observing, Yeah. Thinking, solving, it's all the same thing. I understand that we need, you know, we're highly dependent on naming things in order to understand them. So that's probably necessary, but I definitely argue like you do is that there's a vision out there that'll be sort of a unified vision of how this all takes place.

Yeah.

And it's really starts how you personally take your journey in life and how you learn. And that's, I don't know what we'll call it. Maybe we'll call it personal learning at some point.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah, very nice. Well, thank you, Tom. I mean, it's a real privilege actually to be able to get into this stuff with you. Like, I mean, there's a, there's a depth there to all of these things that we're discussing which is— will take years and years to dig into. You can't do it in half an hour. But no, I really appreciate your time.

That's really good. I appreciate the invitation, Tim. It's fun. All right, thank you.

Thanks.

Have a great day.

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