Reviving a Lifeless Curriculum - A Conversation with Heidi Hayes Jacobs

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

When we have students engage on personal inquiry on an emerging specific life experience that's connected to them, the idea is it isn't pre-written. You can't project a phenomena-based curriculum. It is counterintuitive.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. It was really a special opportunity for me this week to be able to speak with Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, who is a wonderfully wise and thoughtfully innovative, internationally recognized education leader and author. Heidi is known particularly for her work in curriculum innovation, including some remarkable work on school design and developing 21st century approaches to teaching and learning. Heidi is the president of Curriculum Designers Incorporated, and Executive Director of the Curriculum Mapping Institute. She works as an educational consultant supporting schools and districts from K-12 on curriculum reform, instructional strategy, and strategic planning. Heidi taught at the Teachers College in Columbia University, New York, and there was the co-founder of the Hollingworth Center supporting innovative teacher education. Heidi has written many game-changing books, most particularly and recently Bold Moves for Schools: How We Create Remarkable Learning Environments. Which she co-authored with Dr. Marie Alcock. Most recently, Heidi has been collaborating with Allison Zamuda and has launched the transform.curriculum21.com initiative in order to support learners and teacher leaders adapting to the demands of the COVID pandemic, which will also develop into a forthcoming book. You can reach out to Heidi on Twitter @HeidiHazeJacob or on LinkedIn @HeidiHazeJacobs, and you'll find contacts and other resource links in the show notes.

Hi Heidi, nice to see you.

I'm happy to join you, thank you very much.

I would love to just start with what is a pretty big question, but obviously talking now mid-corona, certainly not post yet, but who knows. There's a lot of talk about transformation within education and One of the things I love about your work is your framing of this contemporary, classical, and antiquated within bold moves. So just the idea of, you know, what do we cut out? What do we cut back? What do we consolidate? And what do we create? And I just would love to hear firstly your thoughts on where is your head at right now in terms of those things? What are the things we should be cutting out and cutting back? And then where do you see a need for consolidation and then creation of something new?

I appreciate the question because you're right, it's the most unsettling experience I think we've ever had because it's also global. And so it is a tough one and we're making a lot of decisions. So there's the choices now and there's also going to be the choices post-pandemic because we will be shifted, things will have changed, they're already changing. And so what governs those decisions is pedagogy. And you reference in, from the Bold Moves for Schools book, which I co-authored with the wonderful Maria Elkhart, we wrote about three fundamental clusters of pedagogy. And to anyone listening, I think, I hope that this will resonate for you because what you see is no matter what a mission is in a school, no matter what standards they choose, or even programs, formal programs, above everything is the actual belief people act on about their relationship to the learner. So we cluster these around three. The first we would cluster as antiquated. So what is that role? Oh, I'm dispenser and the learner is the receptacle. It's really a one-way street. And maybe the teacher actually likes the kids, but that's not really the purpose of education. And here's one danger now. So I'll take each of these in reference to right now, to keep in the context of your question. If that's the case, then it's coverage. I just got to get through this. And pre-pandemic, we know that approach is still alive and well, but the danger has been during this kind of triage battlefield feeling, we got to scramble and make it work. Let's just keep them busy. And we lose learners that way. So antiquated is something that we want to cut and we want to cut out curriculum that's dated and purposeless and make choices. The second cluster is what we call classical, and anything classical is timeless. So if I were to ask you, Tim, and I'm going to put you on the spot for a moment. Yeah. I want you to think of— I want you to think about a great work of literature that you love from the past.

Yeah.

It still holds up for you. Could you give me an example?

Steinbeck comes to mind, many of them, Grapes of Wrath or Mice and Men.

Exactly. All right, why? Why do they still hold up? Because they still have meaning. You know, great works of the past still are timely. Anything timeless is timely, but not all literature was great. There's a lot of stuff that hasn't stood up. So similarly in classical pedagogy, it's the, the role of the teacher is a classic role. Mentor. There's the mentee, the learner, guide, facilitator, coach, and yeah, sometimes direct instruction. That's purposeful. That's good. When do you sit on the sidelines? When do you let the kids take That we're keeping. And correspondingly, there is classic curriculum. There are great foundational pieces and they need to be taught for engagement, not coverage. So when we look at the curriculum, the question is, what do we keep? And we keep what is important, what has merit, what is engaging. And that's what distinguishes it from antiquated. But, but here's the interesting thing, then there is a new kind of learner. And we need pedagogy that's contemporary. And that has to answer to the question of what do we create? And to me, one of the things that I think is particularly helpful and kind of now intersects with your original question about what's unique now, what do we have to think about now, is we have a new kind of learner because we have new types of learning platforms. We literally have students who can reach in their pocket, as we well know, and play a game with a kid in China, or India or in France or wherever, from any other point in the world, they're flooded with all kinds of information. And what has COVID has made crystal clear is we rely on those new roles. So here's what's interesting. If we look at pedagogy now, not just as what curriculum do we choose, but what roles do our learners need and what curriculum and learning experiences follow, what types of grouping follows, what types of schedules follow, we have a refreshed look at what to create. So we have students that need to be self-navigators. I would put that at the top of the food chain right now in the schools I'm working with in different parts of the world. And this has become pretty universal. We're relying on our students to be more self-managerial, more self-evaluative. We want our learners to be digital citizens. And I would argue most kids are not digitally literate, but have digital access. There's a big difference between access and literacy.

Absolutely.

We need media critics. We need media makers that are quality media makers, not just, you know, throw up a smartphone, make a movie and throw it on YouTube or TikTok or whatever. Global ambassadors, innovative designers. So with those roles in mind, that means we have to hit a refresh look at teaching and learning and provide more opportunities to cultivate those skills.

And maybe that feeds into my next question, which was thinking about those goals, but kind of larger, higher level goals, which you've been calling future forward learning goals. But maybe you could just say a little bit more about that.

Yeah, I think that's important because an organization, a system, an ecosystem, which is what a school is, needs to begin to make those choices now about what the learning goals will be. And Alison Zamuta and I have done quite a bit of writing over the last 6, 7 months, as you know, about how to cope with and practically make determinations about what to cut, keep, create moving forward. And what we see is if you're in a learning organization that has a mission statement, learning goals, that's fresh, that is informed by right now, as opposed to something that you could have seen 30 years ago, which then we didn't have the same kind of learner roles. If we have those future forward goals that directly inform whether you've got a vertical curriculum team, K through 12, looking at a humanities program, whether you're dealing with a STEM group with 9th and 10th graders in an upper school or high school, whatever group you're looking at, those goals become operational and help inform what are you going to cut, keep, create, because we can't keep adding to teaching and learning. We have to make choices. And so we, we see these as a specific type of language that is fresh, not just cut and paste. I, I, I have some real concerns about some of the ways people are framing missions and lofty aspirations. When I hear schools saying these are the 5 or 6 broad, very broad skill sets or categories, they're categories and they really are hard to become actionable.

Yeah.

And I don't think they reflect the depth or the detail of what modern learners need. So when I see someone say, we want our students to be critical thinkers, I'm like, yes, of course we do. But it doesn't really reflect what that begins to look like until we move it into being a media critic, contextualizing it more. Someone says they want students to be problem solvers, that can be very passive. It could be that you're the teacher and I'm the student, Tim, you give me a problem to solve, that's— I'm solving your problem, as opposed to maybe seeking. Yeah, that's an interesting verb, seeking contemporary and relevant, more phenomena-based types of challenges.

Yeah.

And knowing how to carry out and conduct that work for innovative solutions. The point here is the words matter. And then when we take those and run the filter through what our planning is, it really can have quite an impact.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I would say even more than that though, it's not just semantics. So obviously the word "masher," I would totally agree, but I think there's a lot of semantics and wordsmithing that happens around these things. But actually, if there isn't the kind of detailed, fine-grained conceptual understanding of exactly what these big broad categories mean, then it becomes very difficult to see what and think what they might look like in practice in a classroom with a teacher with a group of students or, you know, wherever you are and doing your learning. It's challenging if you haven't got that level of clarity about what it is you're precisely trying to leave with these young people or create for them in terms of impacts or future forward learning goals or whatever it is you actually decide to call them as a category.

I agree. I think that's beautifully put. In fact, it's, it's interesting because I am someone who, I really value fresh language. I think it forces us to think through the concept. But what I like about what you just said is could be translated into a prompt that's actually very simple, very straightforward. Yeah, that I use a lot with schools. And that is, okay, what will it look like? So if we are attempting to have a global ambassador, What will it look like in that third grade class? What will it look like in their interaction, say, using Flipgrid?

Yeah.

When they connect with another class in another part of the, of the world, sharing their stories about COVID right now. The, the point here is it really does come down to activating the engagement of learners in a contemporary way. You mentioned Diane and Allison, and I know you've had Greg on your program and I really loved their book, Learning Personalized. And I would say one of the things about that that is important here is we need to be more student-facing in the design of our work and move towards more, to use their phraseology, more progressively student-driven types of engagement too. Otherwise we're back to the antiquated, which is I'm just going to get through this puppy. I'm getting through chapter 3. I don't even know what chapter 3 is about. Exactly.

But you mentioned there also the idea of phenomena-based. And I think that's also a really interesting phrase. Maybe you could just talk a little bit more about what that means in terms of how we would situate learning experiences within a phenomena-based framework.

Sure. Let me just share too, over the last year I've been working with Allison. We're working on a new book and for both of us, it seems a natural outgrowth of our work, her work in particular on Student at the Center.

Yeah.

She's done with Bena Kallick, the work I mentioned just a moment ago on personalized learning.

Yeah.

And the work I've been doing on Bold Moves, but as you know, my career and especially in the area of curriculum has been on seeing curriculum evolving and concepts evolving. And right now, one of the things we're looking at are some fresher takes on models on the fact that we think that too many templates and tools are tyrannical almost. They're too— it almost seems like the points to fill out the form. And at the same time, we want to take a really deep take on phenomena-based learning. And we see it as a kind of a flow. When I actually think about phenomena, I'm almost thinking if I might use the word a mashup. I would mash up Oxford and Webster's Dictionary in a way. Oxford talks about phenomena as being— let me see— an observable and impressive, which I think is interesting, factor event, right, if not an exceptional one, right? And Webster talks about known through the senses and susceptible to examination. And so I think the word is emergent. That's been a lot of writing about it. Next Gen Science Standards in the States have really espoused phenomena-based, but it isn't only a science or STEM-oriented concept. And having done some research and travel to Finland and seeing this is a country where they do have a requirement now where students need to have a phenomena-based learning experience. I think what it is, is it's basically having, when we have students engage on definite inquiry, personal inquiry, could be collaborative for that matter. On an emerging— it has to be emergent, it has to be right now— specific life experience that's connected to them. Now, it can be connected to them personally, to their inner world, but it could also be external to them but have an impact. For example, COVID is 100% that way.

Of course.

And I mean, or it could be, say, I live in California, and if I lived in California, I'd be very concerned about wildfires.

Yeah, yeah.

I might also be interested to see how they deal with those in Australia. It could be a first grader needing to tell a story to the class about an experience they're having at home. The idea is it isn't pre-written. You can't project a phenomena-based curriculum. It is counterintuitive. So to me, it— the question is, how do we wrap our heads around it so it isn't frivolous, where it has merit?

Yeah.

How do we shape it? How do we get them involved? And we've been doing a lot of thinking and writing. We're quite excited about this new book, which right now has no title, We'll let it emerge.

Let it emerge. Exactly.

Yeah.

That's great. So interesting. I mean, what you were saying there about the evolving curriculum and then actually with phenomena-based, you're evolving the curriculum to being to the point where it evolves within the moment of the learning. And there's some challenges there for sure, in terms of, as you say, trying to provide some degree of structure and, and guidance for the learners and, you know, clarity about what the role of the educators are in that. And there's some very interesting questions that that throws up.

Yes, it does. And to be clear, and this is very important to me, what we're looking at isn't to say we're suddenly saying you toss everything to the wind at all. No, I think in fact what's missing in a lot of curriculum that's gone stale, it's calcified, it's boring. And everybody knows it, is that it lacks life. And curriculum can breathe. I mean, you know, you certainly want students to know about the story of where they're from, the origins of the country or places where they're from. That's a story worth telling. But it also— we can also fuse some of the elements of phenomena-based into the telling of classical. Remember, we want to keep it.

Yeah, yeah.

If it's working, we keep it. So The best of writing process, which starts with the youngest of our learners. Students tell true stories. They tell their stories. Yeah, that's emergent, you know. So there's sort of a fusion. We're looking at beefing up and tweaking the quality of the classical. You're absolutely right. Yeah, but, but also looking at how does— how to share it in a way that's more streamlined. I love that word. Yeah, streamlining isn't cutting out. Streamlining is improving the design. And then also looking at this question, which we've been really wrapping our heads around and, and engaged in looking at how to give more form and clarity to phenomena-based learning. So it isn't just drifting around.

Brilliant. Yeah, that's great. But also I think there's some important engagement with the cutting out though, because I think that's one of the issues that we've had with the evolution of the curriculum is we keep adding more and more and more. And yeah, and actually at a certain point we do need to say, and you, you clearly are saying this within your work, is we need to be brave and courageous and actually say maybe we don't need that anymore. And you know, there will be some, some heated discussions, I'm sure, in, in teacher lounges around the world about what we should cut, but actually that conversation needs to be had.

That's right. The other thing too is the difference between filler and how teachers actually spend their time with their learners when they are on site. That's coming front and center because in order to have an online program, and especially it's been crystal clear with younger learners, so I certainly think with, with older learners too, is you can't do it all. Yeah, no, you have to cut back. When I was in Finland with Allison, Marie, and Bena, I think we were there about 2 years ago, uh, it was an amazing experience. One of the things we learned is that when they made their major shift in education policy, which began late '80s, early '90s, and then has been sustained they cut out a lot of curriculum and they really thought, you know, we use the word essential a lot, essential questions. And the Latin of that is to distill to the core is essi in Latin means to be. It's like, do we really need to be pummeling kids in front of a class with a lot of information that's drive-by? Couldn't we, now that they have more online, couldn't we have some of that background information done in a different way so that when we are in class with others. The social possibilities seem to me to have emerged. That's one thing COVID has crystallized is where can students self-navigate what really matters most, what constitutes trivia versus meaningful detail. And yeah, I do want those debates to happen. You know, I totally agree.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's definitely put a value question onto it, you know, where's the high-value items that we need to be doing in person as a human interaction and where's the other stuff that they can do in a more self- navigating way. Your, your work with Allison recently has been just fantastic in relation to the specific COVID situation that people have found themselves in with home learning and distance learning, etc. And you've launched this transform.curriculum21.com initiative. Maybe you could just say a little bit more about what was it specifically, what were you trying to do there with that platform?

You know, it was, it was organic. It came out of a strange situation back in March. District that reached out to me was the New Haven Public Schools. And I've had the good fortune of working with them for 4 or 5 years now. And they are a major urban district in the Northeast. And one of their big questions is everybody's flipping over now to remote learning. And we want to really improve the communication with home and school. In a way, all of us need to take the remote out of remote learning. Remote is distant on an island. And what became very clear to me was the audience had changed, that we were now writing curriculum, not for ourselves in these sometimes overly tedious templates, But we needed to communicate directly to parents and kids. We needed to change our language and our format. I started, I started talking about this with Allison, who I was working on with the book, and she was finding a lot of the same things. And we began saying people are really concerned about how they're going to proceed. And we began writing. We posted a blog. It got a big response. We interviewed some folks in Hong Kong. At the Hong Kong International School, and David Loveland, who's the head of the high school there, shared with us that back in November 2019, their schools had suddenly closed down because of demonstrations.

Yeah.

And they were thrust into a very difficult situation, and they were doing very well with the COVID crisis because what they did is they set up a crisis management team. They said, if this ever happens again, We'll be agile, ready to go. We're going to change our PD. We're going to work on students as self-navigators. They thought it would be more protests. It was COVID.

Yeah.

And we thought, how do we take the lessons learned? How can we help? So out of that, we began posting. We got a very big response. We were approached by some of the international school organizations. And in particular, we want to thank Tri Association of Central America, Mexico, Caribbean. Also the Association of Schools in South America. And we started to run a series of webinars, lots of interest, and we crafted this series. And that led to our beginning to frame the website as a resource and as a forum. And it's really fascinating because we really all don't know how long it's going. And there's some new problems emerging, one of which I want to share with you in a minute. Don't, don't let me finish. I'll share this one with you, um, about the long view. Yeah.

And it's one of the things I've also really appreciated about the response to the pandemic has been how much almost opening up of, you know, really incredible people who are sharing their knowledge and wisdom that they've accumulated now in a much more kind of open source way. And that's been a really great phenomenon. Just to then to move on. I was aware that you've done a lot of work on, and obviously in Bold Moves, there's a lot of work there on learning space design. I just wondered, has the pandemic and the idea of the way that it's challenged our notions of space and where we learn, has that generated any other insights for you in terms of learning space? And once people do get back into their schools, what, you know, what are the kind of big questions that they should be asking and answering?

I appreciate that. I've had a fascination with the, the structural nest in which school resides, and I think there are four structures. And they intersect. So we will make open learning spaces, 'cause that's your question, but I think that's not quite sufficient. I think it's also the way people manage time, asynchronous and asynchronous, and schedules, how students are grouped, and then also the grouping of the adults, the professionals, because we can, you can have a beautiful learning space. If you have an old schedule, isolated kids, and siloed teachers, you're not gonna get anything. Okay. So the one thing that's been fascinating for me, and I first wrote about this in Curriculum 21, which I wrote about 10 years ago. And, and that got a lot of attention, that particular chapter on learning spaces. And I was— I had always been fascinated with architecture and began to reference the work of a number of great people. And, and certainly Percussionaire and Randy Fielding are among those. And I began to look at those, really study the impact of space on learning. Also, the impact of furniture is a very important piece, and furniture can become part of how flexible spaces can be utilized in a whole array of way. What you realize is that the old model of school, really antiquated, is designed for coverage. It is like a cell. It really is. As Prakash calls them, cells and bells. Literally, it's like a training model. And I am not going to say here, because I've, I've been a classroom teacher for many years in the past, you know, I admire, I have seen some great teachers in those rooms, but it really is inhibiting and it's counterintuitive to the types of more flexible spaces we want to see with learners and having seen the brilliance in which teachers can take their curriculum and start to think differently, it opens it up. So if I look at more fluid spaces, more atrium spaces, alcoves for kids who are struggling, I teach better. I teach differently. The space becomes invitational. I actually think it expands a teaching repertoire. It really does. And it's funny, I was on a call yesterday with an architectural team that is in the final stages of an RFP to a school district that's about to choose what they're going to build by 2025. And the one thing I've learned about this is the decisions people make on new design, they're going to live with them for 25, 30 years. And there's a very easy tendency to go back to what we've already known. But when you've seen the power and how kids take to these buildings like ducks to water. They know just what to do with them. I have to say that to me, the future is now and moving forward. Are you hearing energy in my voice? Because guess what? It's legit. It is legit. And the long view is that schools are going to have budgets hit with COVID It may make some slowdowns on what will happen in terms of new design. But I think the way we group learners and the way learners can work more independently ultimately may get us to stop, step back and go, how do we use spaces differently? I know people are doing more outdoor learning and that's a good thing.

Yeah.

You know, as long as the weather holds up, whatever part of the world you're in. I think that there's, as you mentioned beautifully a little while ago, Tim, I would say the word maybe I would use is there's more educator generosity. It was like you were saying, people are sharing. I think there's more collaboration and teaming. I think that's going to stick. I'm hopeful that will happen, but there's no guarantee. But I think we should have our eye on the post-pandemic world.

Yeah, definitely. And I think also the notion of space has been extended.

Yes.

People's notion of space has really shifted and that the boundaries between the virtual and the physical have really blurred, you know, to the point where you get to the end of the day of Zoom calls and it's really difficult to be back in your physical life, but it is a really— it's a great opportunity.

I mentioned to you earlier that I wanted to share one anecdote about this. It seems like the right time. This is a cautionary tale. I was recently on a video call preparing to do some work with a very good school in a beautiful, more rural part of the United States, and They are a school where 97% of the students are now back in the classroom, 'cause there's so few cases and things are going pretty well, except what's starting to happen, and this administrator is very concerned, what's starting to happen is teachers are slipping back to almost not only old habits, but the worst of the old habits because they now, they have them back. And the students were actually working quite well in terms of managing themselves and self-navigation. And the red flags are flying.

Yeah.

And I think that in fact, the way the spaces are being used is slipping. The second piece is something I think you're right on about. And that is the way we're talking about physical space has a counterpart with virtual space. There's different types of virtual spaces. And that definitely is juxtaposed with asynchronous and synchronous time. As well as students using their home as a learning space. You know, some families only have a couple laptops or even one if they're lucky, or a tablet, and they got a lot of kids. There's a larger question here. And, and also, what is the value? What have been some of the pluses that we don't want to lose in these Zoom rooms? Maybe there's some ways for us to reimagine the way we do our refreshed look at, at laying out teaching and learning. One thing that Alice and I produced about the structural configurations in relationship to the three scenarios, let me explain. Schools have found this very helpful and parents, they found, have found it helpful. That if we take the way space is being used, both physical and virtual, we take schedules, both synchronous and asynchronous, we take grouping, both institutional, meaning whether your kids are in grade levels or multi-grade, instructional, and personnel configurations. We looked at choices and options and adaptations for both the onsite, hybrid, and home learning. And so you can see what the adaptations need to be. It's been a good reference tool, very practical. I think that might be something of value to some of your listeners.

Yeah.

I'll share that in the show notes. That would be amazing.

Thank you.

Great.

And just one of the things that we've been talking about, but not quite talking about, is the ability of teacher leaders to adapt to this new scenario. And I know that you do a lot of work with new educators, with teacher trainees, through your professional development work all over the world, but where do you think there's implications then for those kinds of teacher training programs and teacher education initiatives about how that will shift and change? As a result of the COVID learnings?

Yes, of course. I really appreciate the question. I think that there's an important point to be made here that I would suggest people maybe take a look at and consider. You know, we started off in our discussion today, Tim Logan, looking at the roles of learners. What we wrote about in Bold Moves, we had a whole chapter devoted to this, is a new type of, quote, job description, a professional description with corresponding roles for the teacher.

Yeah.

You know, we, we've tended to think of PD in the past as take a series of courses. Some are more relevant and valuable than others, as opposed to rather taking the same approach we're talking about learners now, more personalized, more empowering, more contemporary, that the contemporary role of the new teacher is corresponding. Teachers need to be better at self-navigation and self-directed learning. Teachers need to be more digitally literate. Teachers need to be better at media making and being media critics, being innovative designers in their projects that they work on with their kids and on the curriculum. Teachers need to be better global ambassadors, more mindful contributors. And, and we definitely want to see our teachers being agents for their profession. And if the role shift, then there's corresponding programmatic shifts. That I think are emerging as well. I did some work a few years ago for the Higher Education Commission of the State of New York. And as you know, I've, I taught for years at Columbia University and occasionally go in and have a chance to work on a project there. And I prize and value what the university and college experience can be, but they too are going through a major hit.

Absolutely.

And shift with COVID And I think One of the things we will see is a determination about what types of learning experiences can be acquired and cultivated virtually, and those that really require onsite work and certainly placements and internships. But to me, the shift really will need to be more on the roles. And when I work with professional development programs, which is primarily what I do, whether it's a state ed department, uh, one of these international organizations with the school, You know, we're looking at what's it going to look like when we take those future forward learning goals, but what is it the teachers need to make that transition as opposed to saying, here's what we, we just think the students need to do. We need to be fair and thoughtful with staff. I would tell you the one thing that probably I hear from teachers and from the leadership teams I work with, curriculum instruction leaders, heads of PD, really valued is feedback. And purposeful feedback from peers or from coaches on the design of their work in order to translate what it looks like in, in the learner's work. I think a lot of teachers feel isolated right now, and I think we need a great deal of support, but purposeful collaborative feedback and a look towards potential skill sets to help support the self-navigated learner. How do I design a phenomena-based learning experience? That's a very rich type of PD. How do I help my students create better media? How do I do it myself?

It's also, there's an interesting parallel there with the kind of antiquated coverage idea that then also transfers into our PD models. I mean, talking about delivery and input, which has been for so long the emphasis, but yes, you're absolutely right. It's that collaborative exchange where you get that conversation and the shared feedback and reflection about how we can improve and develop, whereas that's not necessarily been the DNA of the design of PD programs in the past.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. I, uh, I'm reminded that in fact, on a whole other level, there's also the possibility for us to think about that for leadership. Yeah, I have a colleague who is working right now on her dissertation. She is a superintendent of schools out of the Wisconsin area And what she's doing is she's taking these roles and she's been working them through on what they look like for the heads of schools, the superintendents. In other words, it's a whole system. It isn't, it isn't like, oh, okay, this is good for the kids. Or, okay, we just want our teachers to do it. And it's also working much more as a collaborative entity, if that makes sense. Um, the whole ecosystem.

It's that systems thinking. We can't imagine that we can tweak one part of the system and expect the rest of the system not to change in an unexpected way or need to change in a way.

Just say the other thought on this one, because this isn't pie in the sky stuff. This stuff is really going on. You know, if schools really take on those future forward learning goals and they start to say, what does it look like? What roles do I need to develop? We're in it together. You, you do see, you really do see environments begin to shift. And pre-COVID, there was some exciting things I was seeing that just, oh, they made me feel good for kids. Uh, and seeing the changes in learning environments that, that I think might in fact even be more informed. There'll be an awareness. We'll see how this story unfolds. I think we're all learning a lot. So I think that's a good thing.

That's true. Absolutely. Definitely. But it's also a great thing to hear your positivity and energy about the things that you were seeing even before COVID Yes, I guess I've been reading a lot of Winston Churchill again.

I don't know, right now the guy is my man right now. And you know, he was a positive realist and it was always real. And so I think we build on our strengths, but I think this is a chance to hit the reset button. I think we really need it.

Yeah, yeah, for sure we do. And it's getting the balance right, isn't it? We've got to bring some positivity into the change, but there's a lot that needs to change for sure. I was talking to another colleague the other day and it's, you know, this phrase, if not now, then when, you know, that exactly. That is on everybody's lips right now. So, well, thank you so much, Heidi. I mean, it's such a pleasure talking to you. I really enjoyed it.

You know, I don't know what, for what it's worth, I know we're on other sides of the world right now, but I actually felt this was a pleasure. I felt like I was actually sitting down having a hot coffee with you and really enjoyed the exchange. You're a wonderful interviewer and a great listener, and you really got got me thinking. So thanks for the invitation, and best to you and all your listeners. Amazing.

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