Transformational Learning - A Conversation with Greg Curtis

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

When I look at transformation, I'm thinking that transformation of school is a byproduct of seeking and committing to positive transformation in our students. I believe that we need to identify these things because they're not the same as other learning goals, and they really become key performance indicators for your strategic work.

Welcome back to the podcast. Today I'm speaking with Greg Curtis, who is an author and education consultant specializing in transformational learning. Greg has been working with schools all around the world for 27 years in various roles as technology director, curriculum and professional learning director, and strategic consultant. Greg is the author of 3 books. Most recently Moving Beyond Busy: Focusing School Change on Why, What, and How, Leading Modern Learning: A Blueprint for Vision-Driven Schools, which he wrote with Jay McTighe in 2015, and Learning Personalized: The Evolution of the Contemporary Classroom, which he co-authored with Allison Zamuda and Diane Ulman. Greg's recent work has been with the Mastery Transcript Consortium, supporting their work to develop an alternative to the high school GPA-focused transcript. In a similar vein, Greg has also He also created a software solution called Learning Board that supports schools making the shift to a focus on transformational learning. You can connect with Greg on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or via email, and all the links are in the show notes.

How you doing?

How are things?

Good.

All right, so just to start with then, with your, your latest book with the headline title being Moving Beyond Busy, why you think, why did you choose that title, and what is it right now that you see is necessary about doing something different in terms of the way that we're working in schools?

Well, I chose the title because every, and I mentioned this early in the book, pretty much every school or district that I go to especially from teachers, I get the comment that this is the busiest place they've ever worked. And aside, you know, from the fact that not every place can be the busiest place in the world, the core of that was obvious, is that something is making people feel this way. And I never really thought it was the amount of work that people were being asked to do. I always thought it was the type of work that they were being asked to do, that it wasn't connected that it ping-ponged around from this initiative to that initiative that wasn't sustained. So all these things make it to be kind of busywork, and especially in light of the last, you know, 15 years of the number of innovations that come out and implementations that schools undertake seem to be growing. This is an issue with the education industry, is that everyone's got an idea, of course, and everyone's idea is the best one, and you know, I'll put myself in that category, but the fact is that things become made into a product or something that needs to be sold and advocated for. And, you know, whoever does the best sales job gets that school to do these things. And so there's so many innovations and they're micro pieces. They're not systemic.

They don't spread. Yeah. Interesting. So in terms of change management, could you just maybe talk a little bit about what effective change management might look like in this different approach?

Sure.

Yeah.

And, and I often call it change leadership too, because, you know, management is a little bit of a reactionary sort of line-based thing, but But, you know, these are adaptive changes. They're not technical changes that require, you know, more direct top-down implementation, whereas adaptive tends to be more nuanced in the types of shifts that you're looking for.

Cultural shifts, somehow.

Cultural shifts, mindsets, identity, belief systems. And so the types of changes that we're looking at are different from types of changes that schools have faced in the past. It's much less about implementation, which is a technical issue where you lay out, we do training for teachers, we buy the resources, we blah, blah, blah, and we implement it. It's not that kind of a thing because we have to tilt the environment towards success in the shifts that we want to undertake. And a lot of the shifts when we look at school change in a systemic way, in a transformational way, there are multiple shifts. All happening and they're all intertwined and they're happening simultaneously. So looking at how to lead environments like that creates different challenges for leaders.

Absolutely.

You know, often involving, you know, putting cultural flags to indicate how you're going to shift the culture from one existing culture to a desired culture, to making sure your communication grows and moves and doesn't just stop with communicating the what and telling people stuff, but it actually takes into account the social-emotional messages that you want people to receive from those. And complexity theory is sort of a hobby horse of mine in terms of helping to understand how we massage environments so that the desired properties emerge, as opposed to driving the environment towards a goal-centered end.

Yeah. So with the mission and the vision statements being that why, Right?

The why also comes from, you know, why those elements of mission and vision statements, you know, are they anchored in what our kids are truly going to need in their future? So going back even to why learn, there are some interesting questions out there now in terms of, you know, some people think we might be moving towards a jobless society. If that's the case, what's the purpose of education? You know, why go to school? You know, those— there's lots of whys. But you're right, the mission and vision should be the core of the why and, you know, help to transfer to the what. So it's not just why the school exists, but what is it that the school believes is most important for kids.

No, for sure. And it is interesting, that purpose element of the why of education, which is a huge topic. But one of your statements in the book is that, that those— the vision, mission and vision statements compartmentalize the ideals while we go back to the real work of teaching and learning. And that tends to happen in the classic kind of mission and vision as the poster on the wall rather than something lived in the culture and the environment. I mean, maybe it's because these are such big ideals, but why do you think there has been that kind of disassociation between those two things?

Well, I think also it's a little cynical for me to say that, and I understand that because people are going to go, 'Wait, wait, we believe in our mission and vision,' and I think that schools do.

Yeah.

Um, and they point to them with great pride, but the level to which they're operationalized is often lacking. So one need only look at the mission and vision on one hand and then the report card on the other hand to be able to see the gaps between our sort of ideals and our practicalities. So I always wanted to make a piece of software where you could take little phrases like global citizen and change the world and put it into a sausage maker and crank it up.

Generic mission creator. Yeah. Yeah, but one of the ironies, I think, and I've been through this process many times with schools, is that with all of your best intentions, you really try to distill the kind of DNA of that school and connect it to the context and all of the things that you think are really unique to that particular place. And then you try to create it and craft it really carefully, like you say, into a mission or a vision statement. And actually, when you read it at the end, quite often it sounds very generic.

Yeah.

Right? Because these are big ideas that are huge and kind of transferable ideas that could apply in all sorts of places. So you end up with this kind of slightly strange outcome, which seems like you could have just created it with a sausage maker, right?

Yeah. And we all sort of brush our hands when we're done with the statement and say, there, it's done, as if saying it were the same as making it so. And we sort of feel, wow, that reads really good. And we put it up on the screen. And I've seen schools take a year and a half to do them with all kinds of consultations. And it's not that that's not important, but if you don't act upon it, if you don't find a way to operationalize it, then what's the sense? It becomes a marketing phrase, and this is why, you know, often with schools, that my suggestion is do the impacts first, right? Identify equals for learning first, and then your mission should reflect that. And in a way, your mission could be as simple as, you know, at School XYZ, we want to help create kids who are bing bing bing bing bing. It's not as flowery, but at least you can point to what that means and also evidence as to whether or not you're achieving it.

No, absolutely. And I mean, just one of the huge values actually in that whole thing is the process, right? The dialogue that you create with the community in terms of building some clarity around those ideas, whatever the learning goals or the mission, the vision, whatever. The outcome is not necessarily the most important thing from my experience.

No, I agree. The process is there. I just think the process, much like strategic planning process, is something that leads us to the same spot almost every time. And again, then we get into the busyness of trying to chase those things with little to show for it at the other end other than what we've always had in traditional schooling.

So, absolutely. So, so for you then, that's where your impact would fit in, in terms of reconnecting that kind of disconnect between those higher ideals and the real work of teaching and learning. Is that right?

Yeah, for me it's a simple idea, but when you put it at the forefront, it changes the direction of things. It also brings a focus and a clarity and a discipline to that work. So yes, to me, impacts articulate what the mission is about. Impacts give you something towards which to plan your strategic actions.

Yeah.

So, you know, in strategic work, we often go into it in the traditional sense and do a SWOT analysis and do a gap and do this and do that, do umpteen surveys, and then we go about trying to fix the gaps gaps that we've identified, as opposed to identifying your longer-term goals for learning and then backwards designing from there. Okay, what are the best approaches to try to deliver on those? How will we know? What are the metrics that we're going to use? So it is sort of bridges the gap in those, in that area, but brings a focus, brings a discipline, brings a level of accountability in terms of being able to look at evidence of learning as being, you know, the root of our community focus on those goals and on success, and it shifts the narrative.

People who are not familiar with the concept of impact, how would you differentiate an impact from other kind of outcomes that have been traditionally associated with school?

Yeah, and this is where, you know, I've taken some hits because I use another word. Yeah, of course. Classing education needs is another word. Is it more jargon, right?

Yeah.

The notion is though that, that I believe that we need to identify these things because they're not the same as other learning goals. So impacts to me are long-term in nature, they're transformational, they're what we often want our students to become because they're often the transdisciplinary kinds of goals that we see, like global-mindedness or self-directed learner. They're not cumulative in the same way. They need to be performance-based, so kids need to be able to demonstrate them and we need to be able to have evidence of that that we can provide feedback on. They span subject areas and grade levels, and they really become one of the key performance indicators for your strategic work. So whether it's 21st Century Skills or Habits of Mind or this or that, there's a lot of them out there. I'm not saying that they're different from those. I'm bringing them together because they're often more than 21st Century Skills and they're often more than Habits of Mind. They span cognitive areas and dispositional areas. And I advocate for selecting a few, articulating them well, breaking them down, and understanding what they're supposed to look like at different developmental stages and programming around them, making sure that they become part of your curriculum development, part of, you know, as Perkins says, moving beyond content means to me that we move towards providing tools and strategies for kids in order to improve. So they're not just sort of by osmosis. Kids don't become self-directed learners just because I give them a project with a choice on it.

Yeah.

We need to make sure that we're providing them with tools and strategies to become so. So that's a long way of saying that, that I don't care what they're, what they're called, but I do believe that there is a category of learning that if taken to the level that I talk about in articulating it and delivering on them and having metrics for them, creates a really different focus and a different landscape.

Yes. Yeah, I think, you know, you speak to any educator about why they do their job and people would fully get behind this notion that the reason we work and are passionate about our jobs is because we want to help the children we support to become better X, right? Better people, better citizens, better communicators, whatever. So there will be, I'm sure, a huge amount of support for these ideas. And like you say, they have been around for a long time in different guises, under different headings, if you like. But one of the things I like is the idea of the performance element. Because how can you see, how can you see evidence that we are having this impact? Well, first thing we need to be able to do is identify what it is we're looking for, right? Can we articulate that?

Yeah. No, I agree. And this is one, again, one of the things that differentiate it, because as you say, no one's going to say these things are bad, but we often just assume that kids will get these by osmosis. And we don't do that with math. We don't do it with, with history. So why would we do that with these things? Just assume that innately they will develop because of the experiences we get. So what I advocate for is I break them down in a bit of a hierarchy, not unlike you might do with a subject area. So let's say it's the great one of global mindedness. So it might be, we break down global mindedness into systems thinking, cultural literacy, empathy, and global awareness, which is a common set. So we break those and I call those performance areas because we need to bring a level of specificity to it so that we're talking about the same thing rather than just having global minded up there, which is a huge term. What are what are the attributes of a globally minded person? And those will span both disposition, dispositions like empathy, but also cognitive skills like systems thinking. So they'll bring those together, and then underneath those, for bands of grades, they develop performance indicators. So a continuum of the types of things that we would expect to observe from students who are demonstrating those elements at a level we desire. So they're not standards, they're exemplars more in a way, because I don't want to buttonhole things into, you know, here are the 5 things a kid needs to to demonstrate in order to be considered empathetic, but they do allow us, as you say, to get our look-fors. What are we, what are we looking for? It brings an intentionality to it because right away we say, well, what sort of learning experiences and tasks, we'll say, that do I need to bring into my curriculum in order for students to both develop and demonstrate these things? So you can't develop systems thinking If you're never asked to engage independently in complex tasks that involve, you know, complexity theory and multiple systems and so on and so forth, you can't really develop empathy without being involved in problem-solving experiences that mean that you have to be able to assess the effect of a problem on different stakeholders. So by doing those sorts of things, it drives change backwards through the system. So often do work with schools and teachers on, okay, what are the implications? You know, if our premise is that we want to capture evidence of student performance and growth in these areas alongside academics, and we want to do so intentionally, what are the implications for assessment? What does that mean for the way we communicate learning through our report cards, right? What does that mean for student engagement in their own communication of their progress and growth, you know, if self-directed learning is one of our impacts? So it leads to all kinds of, uh, really good conversations about how we, in some ways systematize, but in other ways bring sort of harmony to the environment where all the parts are playing well together.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's, I mean, this word transformational, I mean, you used it in regards to the kind of transformational learning that we want for the students, but in a way it's also potentially quite transformational way of thinking about the organizational design or the organizational process in terms of the school as a whole.

Yeah. And it gives it focus. This is what I like. It's not just, we're going to transform. Into what? Into a 21st century school. That doesn't often work. And you know, how are we gonna do that? We're gonna give every kid a laptop. So this gives it a focus and a purpose.

Yeah, no, absolutely. It's an interesting word that I see a lot now though, this idea of transformational change or, you know, transformative competencies from the OECD or transformative accreditation. But it is an attractive term that we throw around quite a bit. How would you articulate what actually that word means in terms of transformational learning. How is it different for people to kind of approach? I think that's quite an important aspect if we're going to use the term because it's around a lot at the moment and it's—

yeah, it is, it is not always clear. No, it's not. And it's often applied to the organization and I think it simply replaced the word reform. So I'm not a big fan of organizationally driven sort of things, because again, I've seen them create a lot of busyness without a great deal of result. So when I look at transformation, I'm thinking that transformation of school is a byproduct of seeking and committing to positive transformation in our students.

Yeah. Nice. Yeah.

Right. So it comes about through our commitment to helping kids in really substantial ways that will affect their, their lives well beyond school and commit to those things that we want to help them to become in a positive way and do so intentionally rather than, you know, some kids are just empathetic and some kids aren't, some kids have resilience, some kids don't. And as I say, if we seek that, the implications and the transformational ripples with good change leadership should spread across the organizational environment. That's where I think it is different, because when we go to transform our schools, what we often do is change our delivery method, and that's not Same, because we haven't changed our goals.

No, no, exactly. Or if we go even one step further, which is again one of the things I really enjoy about your work, is to really see it through and then think about how are we then measuring, which is a tainted term in itself, but how are we assessing or how are we evaluating, how are we evidencing the end product? Because that's also one of the issues. Like you say, the report card looks nothing like the mission and vision statement. So we keep on measuring the things that apparently we really value while we keep saying that we value these important high-level transformational impact.

You know, you're completely right. We've done all this work always on assessment. We need to have different types of assessments and we need to assess this. But our reporting is the same. We haven't changed our goals for learning. So if you haven't changed your goals for learning, why would I as a teacher change the ways in which I gather evidence on that?

Of course. Also because of the accountability built into the system. You know, people are smart and they, you know, they realize, well, what am I going to be held accountable for in terms of my outcomes as an educator with these young people?

Exactly. If the criteria for success haven't changed, why would I change the way I do things? And again, that's not a cynical thing. It's just the way that systems work and the organic nature of systems is that they will not just change because something says change.

One of the challenges I think I also see out there is people are not yet confident in trusting how they might actually evidence learning in terms of these impacts, right? Because it's a much more qualitative space. As soon as you start talking about development of empathy or the development of systems thinking, this is a new kind of discussion to start talking about. How would we evidence evidence that we had intentionally impacted on a young person's level of empathy? How do we, how do we measure that? Right. In that sense. So that's, that's also a huge topic where there still needs to be a lot of work done, I would say.

I would think so. And I think, again, you know, this is non-binary stuff. We can't say you got it right, you got it wrong.

Yeah. Right.

But at the same time, education's dealt with qualitative feedback subjective grading forever. You know, as a teacher of writing, how do you give kids feedback on their writing without it being qualitative? You know, unless my feedback is based only on the number of spelling mistakes they get. But as a writing teacher and coach, you have to do that. How do you do it in phys ed and social studies and reading a student's arguments on this without it being subjective? So it's kind of a ruse in some ways, I think.

It is.

Something we pull up. Well, you can't possibly do this. The other thing is you is the word measure, right? Well, we can't measure in the same ways that we measure a student's height or the number of times they did an algorithm correctly or incorrectly. There's no 100% in empathy. So we have to look at them differently. Then what I've advocated for is just a different way in which to provide qualitative feedback. Qualitative research is a valid form of scientific inquiry. Yeah, right.

Of course.

And it's used all the time and it drives a lot of things. So why can't we learn from that as to how people will take things like anecdotal narrative and so on and be able to code these in terms of what they're looking for. We've already done that through our continuum. We know what we're looking for, yeah, and performance indicators that are pitched at the right level for their— for the right developmental stage and so on, and be able to say the level to which a student demonstrated that, which is where I like to bring in these scales. Just to— again, another word, but they are really scales to me because their purpose is to provide a a way to give that level to which feedback.

Yeah, of course, some kind of continuum on which someone would position themselves or someone else might give feedback to position someone else.

And we do that with standards-based grading, scale or rubric. And we have the standards which tell us what to look for. Presumably we have something to look at and then we put them on that continuum of the level to which we believe that's there. So I don't think it's as difficult as people say. I advocate for giving kids feedback on specific incidents, specific pieces of evidence, which they demonstrated those, those pieces so that we have actually evidence behind it and then we get it from multiple sources. So from students themselves, from, you know, coaches and job placements or service learning, whatever it might be, as well as, you know, keeping a consistent sort of set of scales across subject areas and grade levels so they're getting it from lots of places. To me, that's one of the best ways to do it is, is to have a volume of evidence that kind of triangulates itself in some ways.

Yeah, interesting.

It moderates, I guess that's probably a better way of putting it, moderates itself. And again, our purpose for feedback is not to provide grades to crunch into a report card or a transcript. Our purpose of feedback is to provide information, right, observations to kids as to their progression towards a desired level of performance.

And that's the other thing about these transformational learning goals. These are not things that are going to end as soon as they hit graduation day. I mean, these are lifelong pursuits to continue developing compassion or empathy or global mindedness.

And they're not exit criteria either. No. The need for standardization is gone, right? We don't want to need to crank kids out who look, sound the same, have had the same experiences, have been measured on the same yardsticks, and so on. But we need kids who can grow into the best versions of themselves.

Definitely. And just to focus in on how you've created the Learning Board then to, to kind of bring a lot of this stuff together, because that's obviously also a challenge for schools is to bring all this data together, maybe into one place or, you know, to be able to work with it and then really see it in a way to, you know, communicate it back to students, to parents, to to other kind of agencies who are looking in and, you know, obviously wanting to quality assure what's happening in the school. So what's your idea behind the learning board in terms of being able to do that?

Yeah, there's lots of ideas and it stems from, you know, as I mentioned, I was a tech director before. I'm an English teacher by trade, but I stumbled into technology in the '90s when there weren't a lot of people doing it. And as we, you know, I often hear assessment is something that we do to students So working on that with Learning Board is, you know, finding ways to again bring the academics alongside the impacts, finding ways to systematize some of the interpretation of the evidence, so capture but also systematize the interpretation of it. So when I talk about scales, you know, I have students use the same version of scales as teachers do, so they have something to have conversations about. Might change the language into I can statements and so forth for younger kids, which the system will read and put the right language, so it's engaging in the evidence But ultimately that data, that evidence is most importantly for the student themselves. Should be.

It should be, right? In terms of the way that we've always thought about it is we're creating data to prove something to someone else rather than just empowering the student with here's some, you know, this is your data, this is your evidence. How do you own it? How do you reflect on it? How do you continue to grow from that?

Well, and, and, you know, goal setting or portfolios, you know, there was a— there became a fatigue there because it didn't result in anything for them.

Yeah, yeah.

So, but to me, if goal setting and portfolios become a part of student reporting that's honored on report cards and transcripts, then there's a benefit to doing so. Yeah, you know, so closing the loop, right? Yeah, exactly. Or the thing I'm working on now with Learning Board is I want to create a project and I'm a student and I say I want to investigate this area, here's what I want to do, I think I can demonstrate these things from the discipline of science and I can demonstrate these things from systems thinking and so on, and within the system I'm able to put stuff together and connect with a mentor to get that going, and I want to do an action plan. What do I already know that will help me with this? What don't I know? How am I going to learn it? When am I going to learn it? From whom? You know, and set milestones up, that in itself, that process contributes to developing self-directed learning skills. It is a tool and a strategy given them to do so. So you embed the goals you seek within the work that you— that you're investing.

Nice. So in terms of— because I know you were, you were involved with Peter Mott in development of ACE Learning, and, you know, using accreditation as one of the forms that a kind of a lever to support this whole process. Are you feeling optimistic now about how things are going to go from here? And you know, what are the other levers that you might be able to use to move this forward?

I do feel optimistic because, you know, schools who contact me are schools who want to do something substantial, and I, you know, I take heart from that. I think accreditation, things like ACE, are an important part of it, to prompt the discussion, the dialogue about what are we really after here and how do we move from compliance to collaborating on transformation. I think those pieces are really important. I also work with the Mastery Transcript Consortium in the States, and that's a big push to push through changes like how we do that output of learning and how we make sure that it's not just grades and courses and SATs. So I'm finding organizations also understanding the systems approach to this rather than if we just change assessment, you know, they might go in like Mastery Transcript at the thin edge of the wedge, you know, with transcripts, but their goal is to use that to break a logjam to again push a change in a transformation upstream where that logjam is. So I'm noticing that too, which I think is a smarter way to go about it rather than individually trying to pick apart practice.

Great. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your time. This is very fascinating stuff and there's no clear, easy answers to it. And it's definitely—

no, and that's what makes it interesting. Exactly. Because again, this is the difference between complicated and complex and technical and adaptive is, is there's— it's not a matter of turning screws, you know, a little bit here and there, which is what, you know, there's a book in the past called, you know, Tinkering Our Way to Oblivion. And I think that's largely what we've done. And as I say, organizations taking a systemic approach kind of indicates to me that, that yeah, we do understand now that turning a bolt here and a screw there and adjusting a spring here is not going to lead to anything, that we have to rethink.

Yeah, right. That's just, just busy work that we need to move beyond, right? To come back to where we started. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much, Greg. I really appreciate your time.

No worries. Thanks, Tim Logan.

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