Taking adolescents seriously - A Conversation with Chris Balme

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

What a cool thing for a young person to hear. It's like, I'm not supposed to be perfectly figured out at any point, really. I will ask better and better questions. I'm not just asking, how do I become popular? Or how do I get the best grades? I've started asking more interesting questions. It's like, who am I in this space? Or what can I bring to this space? What am I truly driven to learn about?

Welcome back to this week's episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. For new parents and early years educators, there's a wealth of guidance and support for how to understand what's happening for our babies and toddlers. But when it comes to the stories we tell about adolescence, an equally important period of significant change, sometimes it's more just get your head down and get through it. As millions of young people all over the world make the big transition to middle school, I was very curious to learn from one of the real experts of not not only of the patterns of change and development at this time, but also of how to create educational environments that really take these young people seriously. Chris Balm is an education leader, writer, and school founder passionate about helping young people discover more of their human potential. He's the author of Finding the Magic in Middle School: Tapping into the Power and Potential of the Middle School Years. Chris currently serves as the founding principal at Hakuba International School. He's also the founder and director of ArgoNet, an online advisory program for middle schoolers around the world. Prior to this, Chris co-founded and served as head of school at Millennium School, a highly successful lab school in San Francisco.

Thank you, Chris. It's an absolute pleasure to be able to have this conversation. It's been a while in the making and I'm super happy to manage to finally get it.

Thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.

So as we've just been comparing notes off air, we both have the privilege of having an 11-year-old child who's just making the big step up to middle school. I've got a couple of others. You've got a couple of others as well, have you? Yes. Of different ages. So it's all, you know, so there's a bit of parenting that I'd love to come onto because I think, you know, that's a big part of the thing we're going to talk about. But also just the idea of these middle years. They've always, you know, as a teacher, I was always drawn to teaching the middle years because they always felt like the forgotten years, right? Somehow the kind of grade 6, grade 7, grade 8, bit awkward. No one really wants to teach them. It's not the upper end where things get more interesting academically. It's not the kind of cute younger ones. I always found it fascinating age. And I was, I loved finding your book recently, Finding the Magic in Middle School. Brilliant overview of this whole space. So no, super excited to talk about it, but maybe, yeah, maybe we can start with that. Why do you think there is that kind of the negative associations, the low expectations, this just kind of this strange thing that goes on when, when they just begin to hit adolescence?

It is so strange. It's such a paradox that, you know, we know from the neuroscience that there are these two peak times in our whole lives of brain growth. And one of them is early childhood and the other is adolescence. And early childhood has become enshrined, you know, rightfully so, as this incredibly precious formative time, you know, to pour resources into it. So great. But then the other major time, our best advice is, you know, just try to get through it. It's going to be— summing up our societal history. It's like, wow, we could probably do better than that.

Exactly. Knuckle down, get through it. My goodness, it's going to be painful. Hope you're not too traumatized.

Like, wow, that's That's the best advice you can offer? I think we could probably do better. And so, you know, the genesis of the book, and to answer your question, is that, you know, the early childhood years are actually also quite tricky to parent through. But the reason we can do it is we have developmental maps. We understand that when your toddler suddenly starts saying no to everything, you know, they haven't become possessed. They're going through a stage. It's predictable, in fact, and it's end predictable, and you can be nimble with it. Well, fast forward to the middle school years, we often don't have those developmental maps. And so when your child does very predictable things, like more or less showing peers are all that matters and they want to push away from parents, we're not as ready for it. And so we take it personally and we react and we end up in unnecessary conflict, essentially, whether parents or teachers, frankly. So the whole idea of the book is to give a developmental map because the research is there. It's just not widely known.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I guess, I mean, my caveat on that would be the map is not the territory, right? And that there's nothing like actually having your own, yes, your own 11-year-old or teaching a class, you know? But I think what you're saying is, is important that there is a body of research that perhaps isn't as widely understood as the early years, right? And, and I think that's definitely what you are bringing out in the book. So yeah, could you talk just a little bit about that idea of the kind of what's some of the other things that are going on at that peak brain growth kind of moment?

Yeah, I think the key thing, you know, as we were talking about off the air, is that, you know, you are getting access to tremendous new mental hardware. And in particular, you're becoming a social being in a way that you never were before middle school. So, you know, the elementary schooler that brings their pet snail to school, you know, it's just sincerely unconcerned about what that does for their social reputation because probably it's just purely positive. But the same child a couple years later is going to be thinking really carefully and often holding themselves back. And what that means, just one of a million examples, is that their social radar is working now.

Yeah.

And that's a brain change caused by puberty or the lead-up toward puberty. And it means that almost the same as what we see as adults, they're picking up. But they don't have the cycles yet. They haven't gone through enough processing and practice to make sense of all that information. So they pick up that someone has a slightly funny expression on their face that doesn't match their words, and they know something is up. But without experience, it would natural to kind of catastrophize and think, well, it's probably about me, I probably messed up, this is the end of my social life, or whatever it might be. You know, we are a little steadier as adults, but they're just getting access to that. So, so much of what kind of opens up in middle school is about, now I have a much more powerful brain and I'm getting much more information about the rest of the world. How do I make sense of all that? And unfortunately, sometimes, you know, classic schools don't actually offer any guidance for that. You're just kind of left to your own, which is why middle school can feel so terrible.

Yeah.

But if you do support it, whether as a parent or a teacher, you can help kids with these kind of foundational developmental tasks.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And no, love to get into the detail there, but I guess, yeah, as a parent you feel it, them pulling away, right? That side of it where you're experiencing less interest in you and the home life and actually much more outward looking and they're going off exploring, right? To find the social. And there's a line, I loved in the book was, middle school is about nothing less than discovering who you are and what you can do in a social world. And it's like, it, it, that really captured it for me. It's like, how do we support them in those moments, right? In those years where they're really, they're out, they want to explore, but they're not quite physically, emotionally, or psychologically ready to be doing that fully on their own, but they're pulling, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

I, I think the first step in that is managing what's happening inside us as the parents.

Yeah.

Because first, we're likely take it personally and be like, well, what have I done? How come all of a sudden I'm clueless? And no, like, you can flip the script on that and say, like, they've accumulated so much influence from me, and now through the wisdom of evolution, you know, they are interested in learning what other people do. Your influence is still primary, and that's unquestioned. The other thing we can do sometimes, I think, is we underestimate them. And there's a, a neurological effect I talk about in the book called the anchoring effect, which simply means that we tend to value early information more than later information about a person or a thing. So what that means for parents is, you know, we've seen them since birth. We knew when they were— we wouldn't let them have a, you know, visit with friends without adult supervision, let alone walking across town. And even if we think we're catching up with them, we're still a bit anchored on who they used to be.

Yeah.

And what's comfortable for us is probably underestimating them, which to a middle schooler, as to an adult, would feel like you don't trust them. Yeah. And that can create a lot of conflict that doesn't have to be there. It doesn't mean you get full privilege to do anything, but a little bit outside your own comfort zone can be helpful.

There was a really interesting thing I saw the other day about the, I think it was a study about 8-year-olds and the reduction in the space that they are allowed to explore and as a distance from their home and how much that had reduced over decades. So there's definitely an anchoring effect of who we knew them to be and us holding onto that. But at the same time, I guess there's also these outside influences of whether they're legitimate or not. I'm not, you know, sometimes they are, but about fear of exploring or fear of the outside world or yeah, I guess different dynamics at play, but very much.

And there's that research from Peter Gray and others in the US about how childhood independence during the tween and teen years has been declining for decades, right?

Okay.

With increase in mental health problems during the teen years that, yeah, if all of your life is managed for you, that doesn't do good things for us at exactly the time when we're becoming much smarter, much, much more aware and able to test our new social insight.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I hear what you're saying about the kind of the conflict that it can create. Obviously having lived through it, I've got an 11-year-old, a 13-year-old, and a 15-year-old. So, you know, I mean, we've been going through some stuff for a while, but I'd love to ask about the 3 drives that you then talk about because like trying to meet them rather than create adversarial cultures around them, as you talk about. And I think that's incredibly challenging to do as an emotional parent, right? And teacher for sure. But yeah, perhaps you could just talk about this. So belonging, achievement, and authenticity.

Yeah. And maybe just the bigger picture around it to start to frame it is, you know, I think with younger kids, we're used to being the boss or, you know, in school settings where, you know, we have content and we are instructing. And as they get older, bigger, smarter, more sophisticated in every way, you know, the boss mode is not always ideal. You don't want to leave it because there are times when that's really necessary. But how do you shift from just worrying about, as a teacher, say, the content, or a boss kind of controlling schedules, say, to thinking about conditions? And that's kind of the lead-in to those 3 developmental pieces. So how do I set the conditions so they can do their developmental work? As I can't do it for them, I can't create for them a great friend group, but my choices will make it easier or harder for them to have great friends, for example. Yeah. So, so briefly, yeah, those, those 3 stages. So it starts with belonging. And that's— there's such an abundance of research now that that is kind of ground zero for a good journey through adolescence, frankly, adolescence onward through adult life.

Yeah.

And that for middle schoolers in particular, the need for belonging, it's not kind of an abstract thing, that it's felt physically. If you feel unwelcome, like there's no one here who likes me, you know, everyone else has got their group, but I don't, it feels physically unsafe. To a lot of adolescents. You can imagine no one's learning to their full capacity when they feel that almost physical threat.

Yeah.

But the other side of that to say is belonging doesn't mean being popular or having a vast group of close friends. It could be one close friend or a small group, just to feel like, you know, when I walk into school or wherever I'm spending my day, there's someone who's a peer who is glad that I'm there and they're consistently welcoming. So that's kind of that first stage. And there's a lot that happens at this stage where I think it can be triggering for us as parents, as in that quest for belonging, sometimes kids will be willing to kind of twin themselves with someone else and copy their clothes, the hair, the music, you know, whatever it is. And I think we can see that as one of the clearest signals that this is what they're working on. They are looking to belong. And they're doing this in a childlike way or thinking I have to copy someone to belong. But if that's a stage they go through, it's actually, it can be healthy. The trick is not to get stuck in it. So that's kind of the starting point. And then At some point, they move on to the next stage, which is termed achievement. And that means like they've become a little more sophisticated now. So they realize, I can belong in more than one group. And, you know, when I'm hanging out with my theater friends, I bring out certain sides of myself. And when I'm hanging out on the basketball court, I bring out other sides of myself. And that's— they're learning that you can code switch, there are different rules. And that's a real mental leap, because now they're not stuck just trying to copy one correct way of being, but they can be more playful and they want to win to show, whatever it is, whether popularity, sports, or grades. And then very briefly, then I'll stop, you know, the last stage is called authenticity. And that's where at some point adolescents start questioning the game they're in. And this is a really fun stage I think all of us see at some point as parents, which is, you know, they might ask like, "Why do grades actually matter again? Like, why am I doing this?" Or, "Oh, the popularity thing, I don't care as much anymore," whatever it is for them. They'll start to question. And that's a beautiful moment because they're starting to— hopefully they've internalized that they can belong, that they can achieve, and they're wondering, what game do I want to try to win? What game is worth playing?

Yeah, interesting. And how much of that is a sequential journey? I mean, how much are they— because, you know, obviously you see it in your own kids, obviously different things will come up at different times. You know, I've got my youngest is particularly questioning in, you know, thinks in a quite a meta way and quite critical and asks very different questions to my two older children. So yeah, just interesting how you see that broadly, some patterns across with this sequential.

I think it's more cyclical probably that, you know, we go through those sequences in different places and we keep going through them. So even as an adult, you know, maybe you move to a new town or new job and you probably go back to that original, you know, do I belong here question?, but it's not as intense once you've been through it a few times.

Yeah.

So you move to your fourth job, you're not questioning your whole worth as a person. Hopefully, if in those first few weeks you'll steady yourself, but an adolescent hasn't been through those cycles or not that many of them. So they show up middle school day one or the next grade and they are questioning perhaps their whole self-worth. So that's, we're trying to make it easier for them to find belonging and to have spaces to process those questions so that they don't get kind of swept away Sure.

Yeah, that's interesting actually, cuz it makes me think very much of, you know, working in international schools and you see, I mean, I remember it really vividly when I first moved to Paris to work in an international school there and just how phenomenally quickly these young people that knew into the school had potentially, you know, had only been in the country a week or two with a really what seemed like a very solid base of their own self. Understanding, able to develop these connections with people, and it didn't seem inauthentic, right? It didn't. It was like, wow, how quickly does that— I was totally impressed.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, that's a good sign for the school that there was enough social space that they could pursue that track. Some schools, I think, fill up schedules so much there's not a lot of time for that, but clearly something was going well there.

Yeah, no, I think, I think that's a fair point, that there of, yeah, quite a generative culture in that school. I think, I think there still is. But yeah, there was definitely something just to your point of they had clearly done this before, right? It wasn't their first rodeo, right? They, they'd moved to a new place and I think there's, there's just so much importance, as you say, of just learning through the experience of doing it, right? And then doing it again and you're like, oh, there's a little bit more familiarity next time with, ah, this feels a little bit like this. Maybe this is the moment where I'm like, you know, questioning or start, starting to feel a bit unsure.

Yeah, you know, a metaphor that I like for us adults, I think, to empathize with this is, you know, if we're trying to empathize with what is it like to have your social radar turned on and to try to make sense of that, especially the first time, would be what if us as adults walked into an adult space like work and we discovered that all of a sudden we could read everyone's mind? And not only could we read it, but we could just hear it. We couldn't really turn it off. I think that's a similar feeling, you know, a little bit dramatized, but similar feeling to what adolescents have, where all of a sudden this information that was already there is now yours to make sense of. And you're picking up all of this, you know, we're reading everyone's mind trying to figure out what does this mean about me now? How do I exist here now that I know people are thinking about me and there are groups and there are— there's all this unspoken politics. And as you're saying, with maybe kids who've been through several international school transitions, they've already maybe had a few cycles where they've walked into the room and read the minds. And for some kids haven't had that, middle school is the first time. So that's that kind of being blown back by all this information.

No, absolutely. And yeah, I'd love to, to ask you just in terms of as a teacher in a middle school, 'cause it's easy to reflect on the parenting aspect of it, but then there's also the receiving context, right? If you are like our children have just gone with their big rucksacks up to middle school and you know, what is it, what are some of the moves that teachers might make actually to honor those three drives? Perhaps a lot of them are doing it anyway, but like as you say, where are the spaces that you create a little bit more to honor those things that are needed at that point.

Yeah, the first piece of advice I always give with teachers or parents is the importance of being weird, just to humanize these spaces. And I think sometimes, you know, adolescents walk into a space or new middle school and the teachers feel distant, not from anyone's— no ill intention, just the system can kind of set us in those roles.

Yeah.

And the teachers feel like my job is to be calm and collected at all times, authoritative. But that calm and collected is actually not not honest. And middle schoolers are smart enough now to know, but they may not know why. So when you're around a bunch of adults who are strangely calm and collected, it actually is not a very safe space because there's a lot happening behind those masks. I just know there is, but I don't know why, because they may not have insight at that level. So I think being weird is tremendously valuable. And by being weird, I just mean being honest, because we're all very weird. Every human ever has been weird. Yeah, meaning quirky. Yeah.

Yeah. It's funny because just today I was, I went to pick up August, my youngest, from middle school because he, you know, he hasn't quite figured his way home yet on his bike on his own. So I was picking him up and we were cycling back and he saw two of the members of staff from his primary school, right, which is nearby. And he, you know, gave him a wave and big smile and whatever. And then we were talking on the way back after that and he really reflected that he hadn't realized how nice they were. Until he'd now gone to middle school, cuz now they were all cold and they weren't being so nice. And it's, it was just, it was exactly that. It was just like he is experiencing a bunch of adults in a new space who are also experiencing something, right? It's their first week of term. They're trying to deal with a whole new intake of, you know, in a big school. And there's a lot of kind of invisible games going on, right? Of power and control and asserting yourself, teachers and young people, and he just, you know, can't quite read that. Yeah, exactly. Today I lived that thing you were just talking about.

Yeah, there's kind of a hallmark, I think, of middle school development is that they become high perceivers but not yet skillful interpreters. So they can perceive all this stuff now, all these insights are coming quickly, but the interpretation just takes time to develop.

That's good. Yeah, I like that.

We're more human, it's easier to interpret us when we're being Yeah.

And it's also that I had a question about authenticity, the third one you talk about there, because I read a piece earlier on today about, because I've always struggled with the concept of authenticity and this idea that you would be, you've just got to figure out who you are and be your true self. And it's like, well, I'm not, I certainly haven't figured that one out.

Yeah.

You know, where is that? Maybe I'm a bit different in certain contexts and I am a bit inconsistent and maybe that's okay. You know, I contain multitudes as someone said once. You know, so it's, and being received in a space where people are being more human and a bit weird, like you say, just a bit quirky, it allows for some of that shifting and moving, which I think is really useful. 'Cause on the flip side, some, some people might get to a point when they're thinking, well, I still have questions, I still don't know who I am, but I should, I should know who I am by now. I'm like 15 years old or whatever. So there's, there's a questioning of that as well. I think that is like holding that lightly somehow.

Yeah, and I think that's part of the weirdness actually, of the positive weirdness, is showing that, yeah, I'm a 40-something, I'm still not sure exactly who I am, and I know some things now, but there's a lot of unexplored territory.

Yeah.

What a cool thing for a young person to hear. It's like, I'm not supposed to be perfectly figured out at any point, really. Yeah. I will ask better and better questions. I think that's the real essence of that authenticity stage is I'm not just asking, how do I become popular or How do I get the best grades? I've started asking a more interesting question, which is like, who am I in this space? Or what can I bring to this space? What am I truly, you know, driven to learn about? Those are better questions.

They are very much better questions. I love those questions. That's really good. And so, all right, so clearly you've lived it as a parent, you've lived it as an educator, you know, written the book on it, but you've also been working in loads of really interesting spaces where you are, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I think really trying to shift what middle school can be in order to receive young people in some of these ways. And it's, you know, not just encouraging the staff to all be weird on day one. It's like, so I'd love to talk to you a bit about Millennium and Hakuba and the places where you have been trying to implement some of these ideas in a slightly more systematic way. So perhaps you could, yeah, just speak to what are some of the moves that the, from a school design perspective or from a curriculum perspective maybe, or just some of the elements you might want to put in place when you're thinking about taking these middle school years much more seriously in these drives you've talked about?

Thank you. I love this question. I will try to keep my answer brief because I can't talk about it. There are so many ways to make middle schools better. They're very, very stuck, you know, and, and there's different routes forward. You don't have to entirely reinvent a school, but there's small steps. So one of them I think is adding pieces or a whole of advisory type work, which in the US there's this odd situation where most middle schools here have a period called advisory, but also So 99% would readily say they have no idea what to do at that time. And it's kind of this distant afterthought. But what it could be and where it's practiced really well, and schools like Millennium and Akubai, I think, do a great job of this, is this is a space where you feel unconditional belonging as a kid. It's a group that's stable, ideally over years, maybe your whole middle school journey, same group. And it's a group where you get to process what you're feeling and how you're relating. Because those things are fundamental to what you're learning, to success as an adult, but they're often barely spoken to the rest of the school. So if nothing else, and this could be a club, there are other ways to weave it in, to have a space where you, you're with a group of peers and you can talk about, how do I handle the stress of this test coming up? Or what do I do when someone has a crush on me and I'm feeling awkward around them? You know, whatever it is that you could actually— this blows my mind still having done this, like you could talk about that. There are books for that. Wow. But it turns out there are, and you don't have to just, you know, luck into figuring something out. You can talk about it.

So can I, before we go to number 2, I'd love to, if I can just ask you the point about age mixing, because I don't want to go too far off, off into this, but I am curious because I think it's an important one that I hear different people approaching differently, right? It's like one of the very often criticized moves of the industrial schooling system is to put everybody in this batch of the year that they were born, right? And expect them to just move through. But actually what you're saying there is also something around common experiences of a peer group where they're growing together. And I had Viv White on the podcast this week and she talks about the same thing in Australia at Big Picture Learning Schools where they, they actually think that's a really important important thing is to have the young people of similar ages going through the same kinds of things at similar kinds of times so that they can be that support for each other. So yeah, I don't— I just wanted to get your take on that.

Generally, I think being with same-age peers makes about as much sense for kids as it does for us as adults. If I told you all of your close friends must be exactly the same age as you, that would be a bummer. So I have close friends that are not exactly the same age. Yeah, so I think it's limiting. But I think the, the reason why it might make sense in advisory is that if the system is still designed that way and they've got major milestones like shifting to high school that are based on age, that does create some commonality of experience.

Yeah.

So it's kind of working with it rather than fighting it. Sure. Even in an ideal world wouldn't work that way.

So, so what would be the flip side of that, where you see the benefits of non-age mixing from a developmental perspective, not just a learning perspective?

I mean, I think one of the interesting things about middle school— any middle school teacher knows this, you know— in one middle school classroom you have like 50 developmental stages happening. That's true. You've got kids who really look like they're high schoolers, kids who look like they should still be in elementary school, and mentally too, the same distinction. So I think in an ideal world, kids, when there is social safety and some flexibility with their time, will find their people. They'll find who they want to play with or hang out with, who is at the right stage for that. And if there's social safety, then they'll also be able to shift. And, you know, this is the best friend this year, but now they're kind of staying interested in playing with Legos, and I want to talk about girls, whatever it is. And now there's someone else I can talk to if there's that flexibility.

Yeah.

And schools sometimes restrict us a little bit too much in that.

I think that's really insightful because I, I think there's also quite a lot of pressure we put on those individual people in the rooms, right? When actually what you are referring to there is there's such a role that the context and the culture in the school plays to enable the moving. So it's not just that you are of this age, you have to be, and you are stuck now and you people just connect or don't, but that's just it. Or, you know, there's these other, we're gonna put you with people you're not of age with or have little in common with. Actually, there's something else going on when there's a culture of, as you say, safety where they can move and find their place, find their way. And that might, that'll change perhaps during the year or during the week or, but it's, it can't underestimate the role of the, the leadership and the, the creation of the conditions in which that stuff happens. Right.

Right. And that where I, I love how you said it cuz the, the safety is not actually the end goal. The, the safety is the precondition so that you can be brave. And that bravery might be walking across the cafeteria and sitting down with a totally different group of kids. You need enough safety that you could do that. You might discover someone who's your next best friend.

Yeah, absolutely. But you also don't create the safety by mandating it in a policy or, you know, right? It's like the safety is an emergent property of the interactions of the humans in the space, right?

Precisely.

Yeah.

Precisely.

So sorry, I'd love to, yeah, if you want to pick up the next way you might do some of this work in schools. Yeah.

And this is a similar, this number 2 will be similar in that it's not just something you can mandate, but it emerges when the conditions are right. And that is for high student agency. So a lot of middle schools and high schools run aground when kids begin to realize that they have no meaningful say over any aspect of this. You know, student government chooses the color of the balloons, but it's not nothing more than that. And when they feel like, that's just plain unfair because I'm smart enough to make more decisions, even if not all of them. And schools often, and parents frankly, we, you know, we can get pretty scared of real student agency. What if they choose to, you know, not take that class that we think is essential? Or, you know, if there's a student government with real power, what if they, you know, change the school schedule or something like that? But I think, you know, what I'm learning, especially with the work in Hakuba, where we're— we've created a kind of a town hall process where students have a lot of democratic decision-making power, but with all the complexity that comes with that. They've got to debate each other and accept amendments and kind of build support and not randomly propose things that people aren't ready for, they buy in so much more, like any of us would when we have a say. And I think sometimes, and I feel like I've made this mistake in the past, like progressive educators who can create amazing cool projects and all of that are still actually creating very adult-centric spaces where sometimes students don't have much say over anything. So I think middle schoolers deserve it, and when they have more say they are much more engaged. They show what they really are, which are very motivated humans. When they're resentful and resistant, that means there's nothing here for them.

And I mean, I just hear all those three that you talked about, belonging, achievement, and authenticity in that because they come into a space where they're taken seriously, right? Taken seriously to have a perspective. Respected. So it's much more likely that they will feel that they belong in that space, but also that they can achieve and then, you know, express some things that are authentic to themselves in that space. So yeah, definitely enables those things.

Yeah, I think taking those seriously just sums up so much of what's in your book, which is, you know, I think it's hard for, for us as parents or teachers where we see such a range of maturity even in just one kid. You know, we have a deep heart-to-heart conversation one minute and fart jokes the next minute, and it's hard to know how to calibrate and which human relating to. But I think a deeper truth is that all of us are like that, and all of us want to be treated for our highest level of maturity. We don't want people to default to thinking, you know, we're all about the fart jokes, even though we are sometimes.

Yeah, absolutely, we certainly are. But, but it's also a— again, it comes back to that experience of learning the responsivity of knowing when the jokes are appropriate and where, where the tone of the space is very much not that. And it's, it's a much more mature moment to show up in a different way, right? And it's again, that whole set of skills about understanding context and what's going on here and the vibe and the atmosphere and the body language and responding in a way that somehow meets that is, that's a whole thing, right?

It's a whole thing. I think you get into even bigger conversations here about how we think we're supposed to be serious and purposeful during the day and then we go to the bar to unwind or something. Let's not separate those things.

No, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And perhaps we could talk about the role of the teacher, cuz I, I also, you know, obviously in the book you cover that in really important ways and you talk about them as wise guides for a heroic journey, which I, I like that. That's a good phrase. A Lord of the Rings type of phrase, right? Yeah.

Couldn't resist.

But it's, you know, there's something, something going on there. So perhaps, yeah, perhaps you could speak to how do you perhaps reframe the role of a teacher in those middle years?

Yeah, or a role of a parent too.

Right, sure.

The purpose of that metaphor is to try to help us feel into it. So, you know, I think some of this is in the book that if you imagine you were going on a wilderness journey over, you know, beautiful and maybe somewhat dangerous terrain, to think about basically who would you hire to go with you? And I think this is a really useful exercise for parents and teachers of middle schoolers of, you know, how would you literally write that job description? Would you hire a traditional teacher, you know, who might be wanting to instruct you every step of the way Or could you imagine a different role, a guide who is still authoritative, you know, they know the terrain, they're going to aggressively stop you if you're about to walk off of a cliff. But the rest of the time, they're more by your side. And they might be pointing things out, they're enjoying it with you, they're listening. That's more what adolescents deserve, because their journey is heroic, you know, the feeling of just hard sometimes for us to remember, I think, you know, to wake up and your body is doing different things and your emotions are way more colorful and your social world is dynamic. And that is a heroic journey, is you're not in control, you're kind of sucked into it. So no one hires a boss to take with them on an adventure, you know, you hire a guide.

Yeah, no, it's true. And I really appreciate what you're saying about the kind of commonalities, and it comes up again and again throughout the book, but the, the teacher-parent thing. And I just want— yeah, wanted if, was it a surprise to you having written the book as an educator? You know, obviously we've been talking about schools and school design, et cetera, but actually I've seen, you know, you've been on many podcasts about parenting and you've kind of been pulled into a space perhaps where, yeah, you're, you know, giving advice to parents of adolescents. Was that something that surprised you or was it kind of an expected thing as you took on this topic?

It was a total blind spot, honestly. When I started First School of Millennium, I had a 1-year-old. I was pretty far from the experience of parenting an and, and I was so focused on the student experience that we wanted to create that I honestly kind of forgot about the parent experience. Yeah, one of the biggest mistakes of the first year was that we didn't accompany parents. We just put so much thought into what happened in the building, and we figured parents are— they'll figure it out. And we made just the same mistake that you criticize others are doing with middle schoolers. So I really realized, you know, back to what I was saying at the beginning, parents need some maps. You know, we need some maps for this territory, otherwise it's quite scary. And your kids are changing in ways that no one controlling, not them, not you. And if you don't know what's going on, it starts to feel quite terrifying.

Yeah.

But if you, if you do know what's going on, and you recognize the stages coming up, and you have honest spaces where other parents can talk about it too, that same spirit of advisory we parents really need to make sense of this intense experience, then we're in it together, and we're less reactive. So it's become a bigger and bigger focus. And, and frankly, so fun, because as my own journey, you know, now I'm there as a middle school parents, and you know, it's not for the faint of heart. And even knowing a lot about it, it doesn't make it all easy. It's good to have others.

Exactly. Your wife asking you about— you're the guy that wrote the book. Yeah, yeah.

Me asking myself, you know, the answers are not all there.

It's— yeah, no, absolutely. But one of the things I really appreciate about that, and it comes— it's just coming up for me more and more at the moment, and partly as, as people are questioning some of these, like I hope deeply questioning these concepts like school and formal education in the way that it's been set up. And you mentioned earlier about how artificially we set up these divisions and boundaries between what it means to be a parent versus a teacher. And we've professionalized teaching and we've kind of, it feels to me like it's all educational work in the broadest sense of what education is about in terms of paideia and raising children. And trying to bring these young humans up in the best possible way. And we don't really know what we're doing, but we're all trying to muddle through together, you know? And to an extent, that's what education is about, right? It's about raising balanced humans in a way that, you know, where they can become persons in a community of persons, for example, right? It's, you know, it's, it feels to me to be very similar kind of work. And I, so I love the fact that you are having those conversations together. Together. It's good.

It feels essential to me because, yeah, we're all in this completely together. And both parents and teachers tend to have pressures that can, can pull them away from the heart of it. You know, parents are fear that we're losing them or losing touch. And teachers, often it's the fear of the next stage of, we've got to get them ready for high school, so there's no time to be kind and touchy-feely. And yeah, and both of those are unnecessary. But if we're just processing it on our own, isolated, You know, we might kind of fall prey to that kind of pressure.

Yeah. And so often that specter of the next thing looming dictates or influences so heavily the choices you make now. I mean, you know, choices even though you're making about which middle school to send them to often is very, very heavily influenced by considerations of, I mean, in France, you know, way up into beyond 18, you know, really significant influences of which university you or Grande École you want them to go to. You know, it's such a specter of fear around some of these conversations that really limit then what we do now in this kind of present moment of trying to nurture these humans. It's a strange funnel that we've created, right?

It really is. And I've taught my kids this, and I'm not sure if I should have or not, but we often talk about, you know, when someone justifies what they're doing because they're getting you ready for the next grade or next stage, you should immediately be suspicious. They're not a bad person, but that's not a good reason to do something. Not always, at least. It's an overused reason, put it that way.

Yeah. And it doesn't seem to speak to those drives that, as you said, are pretty human drives, right? Of belonging, achievement, and authenticity. It's like showing up now in this space. Maybe achievement is more speaking to that, perhaps, but it seems to ignore a lot of what it it means now to be trying to be together or to learn together now and the importance of that versus, as you say, just some instrumental preparation for some future state that we, who knows, you may never get there, right? Right.

Or you may reinvent it if you're given freedom to. And middle school is just the ultimate example of that. I mean, it's literally in the name. It's defined as in-between spaces. And we're so confused about what to do with it that we're constantly saying, well, I just, I don't know I'm supposed to relate to your emotions right now, so just buckle down because we got high school around the corner. We allow ourselves to override our better instincts.

Yeah, it's so true. But then I would also say some of the most interesting things happen in the in-between spaces, right?

Exactly, exactly. I think it is glorious for that. I mean, it is that time where each day you're making incredible leaps mentally, emotionally, every single way. And you'll, you'll never grow that fast again from for the rest of your life.

Yeah.

Really, it should be savored and, and celebrated and not, you know, treated as we currently do.

Yeah. No, absolutely. No, thank you. I so appreciate you sharing about it and, and the book is, I absolutely recommend the book to parents and teachers likewise. And there's a ton of stuff I'd love to talk to you about maybe next time about your background in, in building schools like this successfully and all, you know, all of the big challenges that we hold, these creative tensions that we hold between authority and creative imagination, all these different things where we have to really make very intentional choices as we build schools. So maybe that's part 2. But yeah, no, thank you, Chris. Absolutely lovely.

Oh, huge pleasure. And in the spirit of better questions, thank you for all those beautiful questions.

Absolutely. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media or within your own networks.