With Julie Williamson

Available April 14, 2026

Leadership sometimes feels like a lonely job with lots of competing tasks, but few clear guideposts. Even with the most meticulous planning, we often know conceptually what needs to happen, but falter in articulating how all the pieces will come together. Author, strategist, and consultant/coach Julie Williamson joins host Debra Wilson to talk about the challenges and opportunities of leadership, and what it means to make “how” matter in our work.

Guest: Julie Williamson

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Changing how you lead means changing some deeply embedded habits about how you're showing up together as a leadership team. How you, as the head of the organization, how you're behaving and what you're doing in the organization to drive the strategy forward. If you're not transforming how you lead, you will not transform your organization, no matter how good the strategy is.” (7:31)
• “The hard things that you want to work on, whether you're a CEO or a head of school, the hard things you want to work on is how do we be in better service to our students, to our families, to our customers, whatever that looks like for you. You don't want the hard things that you're working on to be, got to go wrangle the board again, or I've got to go convince my team that this is the right direction to go. Right? That's not what you want to spend your time on. And that will cause turnovers.” (27:11)
• “So if a leader is feeling a real sense of anxiety or trepidation about meeting with the board in any way, in my mind, the board is failing. Because you should be creating an environment where whether it's good news or bad news, that person feels confident that they have a group of people who are there to support their success and that they are going to partner with them and hold them accountable, yes. You know, challenge them, yes, push them, yes, but make them feel small or make them feel anxious or make them feel unworthy of the role? No.” (31:53)

Related Episodes: Episode 77; 67; 65; 38; 25

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With Guybe Slangen and Jennifer Cherney

Available April 7, 2026

As independent schools strive to ever expand their impact on their communities and the world, what creative models exist to help them achieve their public purpose? On this episode of New View EDU, host Morva McDonald invites Guybe Slangen of Horizons National to speak about the innovative summer programming the organization designs in collaboration with schools nationwide, expanding equity, access, and community spirit. They are also joined by Jennifer Cherney of the Gateway School in New York City, one of the local partners who can speak to the school experience of working with this unique model.

Guests: Guybe Slangen and Jennifer Cherney

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “You don't have to look far to the same headlines now, that we are still a divided nation. Opportunity is not equal for everybody. And then you put that in the context of these independent schools that are all mission driven. And every independent school, regardless of the context or the setting or the history, has, in their mission statement, some version of civic engagement, social impact, global citizenship, 21st century skills, you name it. I mean, that is what independent schools do. It's not just about educating the students while they are within the campus of that independent schools. No, you're setting them up for life, and also to be change makers in the greater community.” (12:19)
• “People really want to feel like they are part of the collective, that it's not just, and there is this old notion that, okay, if you're raising money for an independent school, you have people there that have deep pockets, you don't need my contribution. This is the kind of initiative that brings people to your door. Let's say I want to be able to contribute. I don't have $100,000 to give to you, but I do have something and I want to contribute. I want to be part of something.” (17:32)
• “We have a host of public school teachers, charter school teachers who obviously are coming into our program. They're more familiar with serving this population. Maybe they actually teach those same students during the school year. They're also seeing the benefits of this, you know, where it's smaller classrooms. There's more hands-on experience, with assistants, with literacy instructors, you know, and they're able to really kind of roll up their sleeves and focus in ways that unfortunately they just can't during the school year. So that's kind of also giving them this kind of renewed energy, renewed creativity, renewed sense of purpose.” (34:05)

Related Episodes: 85; 77; 74; 73; 69; 15

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With George Suttles

Available March 31, 2026

In a time of constant uncertainty, planning for the future of a school community can feel like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Big picture strategy and mission dominate our aspirations, but it’s the day-to-day tactical decisions that carry immediate weight. George Suttles of the Commonfund Institute joins New View EDU guest host and NAIS Vice President of Strategy, Ann Snyder, to share his insights on how financial planning can seamlessly blend the aspirational and the practical, securing the future legacies of our schools through careful stewardship of resources.

Guest: George Suttles

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I'd also be remiss if I didn't, if we didn't have this conversation in the context of the times we're in, right? And so I think a lot of institutions and independent schools aren't shielded from this, are navigating uncertainty and turbulence, both persistent and emergent. And so when I say that, I mean, you know, independent schools have been trying to wrap their arms around persistent challenges that we've been having conversations about for years.” (8:11)
• “Don't make the mistake of siloing the endowment management work with the finance committee or the investment committee without including other school leadership, right? So you mentioned the advancement office, you know, the fundraising development team, they should have a strategic seat at the table, right? Because think about it, they're going to be one of, if not, they're going to be one of, if not the most important, lever or partner that you need to engage with to grow the endowment, right? Because we're going to invest this pool of capital for long-term growth and the markets are going to do what they do, but you're also going to need to equip the advancement team with information and narrative storytelling capability around what possibilities the endowment is going to create for the institution.” (20:05)
• “So when I think about endowment building sparking a culture of philanthropy, I immediately began to think about, right, it's about legacy. It's about securing the future of an institution we all care about. And that can be connected to legacy planning as it pertains to bequests and other vehicles. So I was like, right. Like if you're not having those legacy gift conversations already, that actually might be a nice entree into beginning to have them.” (36:04)

Related Episodes: 74; 57; 38; 20; 9

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available March 24, 2026

Is conflict always something to be avoided? Amanda Ripley and Hélène Biandudi Hofer, journalists and trained conflict mediators, are on a mission to answer that question, and to help shift both narratives and practices around how we recognize and engage with conflict in our everyday lives. They sit down with Morva McDonald to reflect on the stories we tell, how conflict shapes everything from our news cycle to our relationships, and why we all need to develop new skills to help us move towards healthier forms of resolution. 

Guests: Amanda Ripley and Hélène Biandudi Hofer

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “So with good conflict, we might have these conversations where our emotions are all over the map, but at least we're experiencing them, than just stuck in this loop of, you know, feeling revenge and wanting revenge and deep anger. But there are these flashes of surprise and good conflict when we're having these good conflict conversations. There are these moments of clarity, opportunities for humor. Who would have thought that potentially that could happen, but there are sparks of that. There's this openness to, that I mentioned, to hearing the other side. So our emotions kind of go on this roller coaster ride, but we get to a place of understanding and it's understanding something on a deeper level about ourselves, about the other person, or about the situation that we're facing.” (12:29)
• “One of the things that we work with people to identify in that map are these four fire starters, which are things that tend to really distort conflict and make things go sideways very quickly. And so one is humiliation. And another is conflict entrepreneurs. These are people who exploit and inflame conflict for their own ends. And then corruption. So when institutions aren't trusted, whether they should be or not, that's another kind of trip wire into high conflict. And then false binaries or splitting, kind of when you separate people into two camps, good and evil. So you see that in how we talk about people, right?” (17:46)
• “Oftentimes with conflict entrepreneurs, there is some kind of internal pain that just has not been dealt with, right? And they are spreading that internal pain around and around and around. And I think, to this idea of, well, my gosh, they're so destructive. How in the world do we even think about managing them? I think just recognizing first that there is some deep pain there that they are not aware of, that's a helpful first step in thinking about developing a plan to manage them.” (23:32)

Related Episodes: 80; 78; 77; 66; 64; 62

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available January 22, 2026

What if we could unlock the secret to a life of deep connection and purpose? That’s the premise of Jennifer Wallace’s new book, Mattering. In this special live edition of New View EDU, recorded on January 15, 2026, Jennifer shares everything she has learned about the importance of mattering with NAIS President Debra Wilson.

Guest: Jennifer Wallace

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Researchers who study it say that after the drive for food and shelter, it is the drive, the motivation to matter, that shapes human behavior for better or for worse. So when we feel like we matter, we show up fully, we engage, we connect, we contribute. When we are made to feel like we don't matter, we can either turn against ourselves, become anxious, depressed, turn to substances to try to alleviate the pain, or lash out in anger, right? Road rage, online attacks, political extremes, these are desperate attempts to say, oh, I don't matter? I'll show you I matter.” (10:03)
• “Something like 70% of the workforce, employees are reporting feeling disengaged. The way I view disengagement through the lens of mattering is that when we feel, as individual workers, like we don't matter, for whatever reason that is, it's a painful feeling. It releases these painful neurochemicals in our brains, and to stop that, if we don't feel like we have a voice or agency, to stop it, is to disengage. That's the coping strategy that we employ.” (16:40)
• “And so what I argue in the book to leaders, again, not just school leaders, to anybody, is that mattering at work is critical. If we want to support, if we know that children's resilience rests on the resilience of the adults in their lives, and we know that adults spend the majority of their waking hours in the workplace. If we can go and make adults feel like they matter at work, that is how we can bring caregivers and parents home to their kids as their best selves, sturdy adults, so that they could act as the first responders to those kids' struggles. You cannot do it if you are constantly beaten down at your job. You cannot show up as your best self.” (52:19)

Related Episodes: 79; 78; 77; 72; 60; 54; 51

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With Jeff Selingo

Available November 18, 2025

What is a “Dream School?” Almost since the college admissions process began, students have had ideas about where they dream they’ll end up after high school, and increasingly, those “dream schools” have existed on a very short list of what we think of as prestigious, name-brand institutions. But what if we’re wrong about that list? What if everything we think we know about the factors that make a college great has been misguided? Higher education expert Jeff Selingo joins host Debra Wilson for a frank discussion of what needs to change in our approach to college admissions, and his new book, Dream School.

Guest: Jeff Selingo

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I want to bring back some normalcy to high school so that not everything is about, not everything you do is about getting into college and into the right college, that you're doing things because you want to challenge yourself. You enjoy them, you want to try new things out…There's so much pressure around me to apply to a certain set of schools, and I wanna change that conversation.” (6:08)
• “The November 1 deadlines, the October 15th deadlines now, even earlier deadlines, has just moved up the entire college search process now really into the junior year. And then now what used to happen in the junior year is happening in the sophomore year. So you're not even getting through half of high school without really thinking about college.” (11:33)
• “I mean, the big unknown here, Debra, is the role of AI in the job market. What are the jobs of the future really going to be and what are they going to need? What are the skill sets they're going to need? It was pretty certain over the last 10 years that we've seen, one of the reasons why liberal arts colleges have kind of gone out of favor is because we've seen a huge shift in majors to the business and STEM because parents thought that's where the jobs were…Now parents are asking, huh, what is the, now what's the next major? And by the way, maybe this brings the liberal arts back into vogue and maybe the liberal arts institutions with their ability to have a mix of problem solving and communication and critical thinking and bring in hands-on learning to that, that might bring them back in a way that we didn't quite expect.” (34:14)

Related Episodes: 76; 74; 63; 44; 36; 29; 22

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With Peter Nilsson

Available November 11, 2025

Right now, it may feel as though AI has changed everything about education. It has, says Peter Nilsson – but it has also changed nothing. That’s the paradox at the core of his forthcoming co-authored book, Irreplaceable: How AI Changes Everything and Nothing about Teaching and Learning. He sits down with host Morva McDonald to share what has actually changed, what hasn’t, and how his work using technology to bolster innovation in education has led him to this place.

Guest: Peter Nilsson

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Unlike medicine and unlike law, education is diverse in the way that it is applied in different classrooms. There isn't only one way to teach the Great Gatsby. There isn't only one way to teach Beloved. In fact, every classroom should be different in the way that it engages it because every classroom has different students. So while knowledge on Wikipedia compiles everybody's contributions to the page on physics compiled to one page, curriculum does the opposite. Curriculum doesn't compile. It disaggregates. It diversifies.” (5:22)
• “It's impossible to expect every teacher, every school, even to be able to develop the wisest, most effective responses to every change. That's just not how innovation happens. What happens is people all across networks figure out small little things. And the more those small little things can share across the network, the more any individual node on the network can have the most comprehensive, high quality, effective response to that thing.” (16:52)
• “Students now can do more, so much more than they ever could do before. Every student having something like this vision of an AI tutor is a game changer for so many reasons. But nonetheless, students will still need time. They will still need help. They will still need practice. They will still struggle to ask the right question. They will still come in confused about something. They will still need teachers to help them build confidence. Everything is changing in terms of how we do this on a human, individual level where we're interacting with a machine that is more and more like a human, but nothing is changing in that the messiness of our own human learning remains.” (22:31)

Related Episodes: 71, 69, 68, 49, 45, 31

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New View EDU will return next week with a new episode on How AI Changes Everything and Nothing, with guest Peter Nilsson.

Related Resources:

• Member Voices Podcast
• AI Resources for Schools and Educators
• Recent Episodes of New View EDU

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With Kenji Yoshino

Available October 28, 2025

In this time of rapidly evolving law and opinion around terms like diversity, equity, and inclusion, what is the work of school leaders who believe in building stronger, more connected, more inclusive communities? Legal scholar and author Kenji Yoshino is the author of a forthcoming book called How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America. He joins host Morva McDonald to talk about the legal precedents of the past, the shifting culture of the present, and the strategies that can secure the future of equitable practice.

Guests: Kenji Yoshino

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I think lawyers are actually terrible at lots of things, but we're actually rather good at saying, yes, we disagree, but you're not my enemy, right? You're my debate opponent, and you're actually my friend on the other side. And so let's actually behave as if, let's carry ourselves in that way and let the best ideas win.”
• “I think that the younger generation has a greater understanding not of who they are, but, or not just of who they are, but also the skills that are going to be needed for us to survive, much less thrive, in a multicultural society that is much more global, much more diverse. And so the capacity to speak across difference, to work across difference, to bond across difference is going to be a critical skill for us going forward. And that's the set of skills that are embodied within DEI.”
• “So the question I always ask is like, it's really easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and to get blown back and forth as the pendulum swings back and forth, right? But rather than doing that, like just sit in your values and think five years from now, who will I want to have been in this moment when everyone was telling me like cave or do this or do that? Like what is the kind of values based decision that I can make here that will make me proud of myself five years from now, rather than proud of myself tomorrow or proud of myself next week?”

Related Episodes: 77; 66; 64; 62; 37; 30; 17; 7

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop

Available October 21, 2025

Why do so many students seem to lose their love of learning when they reach adolescence? Is there something about the way we approach school for this age group that leads to greater disengagement and apathy? And how can we change our systems, and the ways we relate to teens both in and out of school, to help support their development and flourishing? Authors Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop join host Debra Wilson to talk about their book The Disengaged Teen, and what they recommend to parents and educators in the age of rapidly evolving AI.

Guests: Jenny West Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We also heard a lot that it was, parents often figured out things weren't going well when it really kind of blew up. So engagement is a continuum. And some of the behaviors we see early on that we can kind of shrug our shoulders and say, that's just, you know, teens being teens, right? To sort of bring that negative construct in. And some of it is, for sure. Like I don't want to freak out parents unnecessarily, but sometimes seeing those behaviors continuously and not digging into them then was like, kids get to a point where they're telling themselves, there's no point. I'm not going to try at anything. And it's because they failed a test and didn't want to tell anyone or didn't know how to ask for help.” (15:31)
• “We argue in the book that we need to make a shift from what we call the age of achievement, where through no fault of anybody inside the system, virtually every education system around the world, just how it has been designed from eons ago, is about ranking and sorting. Otherwise, we wouldn't have grades. Do you know what I mean? We wouldn't have that. That is the core. The purpose really was, ages ago, of funneling up into higher ed. How do you select? And so we're saying we are definitely seeing the strains on that design.” (31:24)

Related Episodes:76; 71; 63; 60; 59; 51; 40; 31

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Available October 14, 2025

“What does it mean to be a self-actualizing, fully integrated, socially contextualized human being in this new world order? And how would we design opportunities…to help a young person develop not just what they know now, but to potentiate in ways that change who they could become?”

Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang returns to New View EDU to share the work she and her team at USC CANDLE are doing to answer these, and other, deeply provocative questions about the science of teaching and learning. Her new research hones in on a specific type of cognitive process, which she terms “transcendent thinking.” And as Mary Helen explains during this conversation with Debra Wilson, transcendent thinking may be the key to unlocking long-term developmental outcomes for students.

Guest: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “So what we have here is this incredible suggestion that when kids dispositionally engage with complex, curious, deep thinking about big ideas. Not only are they deeply engaged by that, but they are physically and functionally growing their capacity to think in ways that over time produces a neural substrate that supports wellbeing. So we're actually growing a robust brain that enables us to be well, to manage in relationships, and to feel good in our own skin and to develop identities that transcend that are about big ideas and purpose and values.” (18:21)
• “What we show is that teaching well is not more work, it's different work. It's work in which you really engage with the thought patterns, what it feels like for these students to be thinking. What are their emotions about here? Are they having emotions about, you know, the amazing power of right triangles to help us, you know, sort of understand the geometry of the world and how powerful it feels to really engage in that kind of mathematical thinking? Or are they having emotions about, yay, I did it, I'm done. Or, boo, I didn't, and now I'm freaking out because I'm going to flunk, right? Because when the emotions are mainly about those outcomes, what we're finding is that the school is not promotive of development in the same way. It may be promoting quote unquote learning, maybe, but in the service of what? What are you going to use that learning for?” (33:33)

Related Episodes: 75; 72; 69; 59; 58; 47; 35

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With Jason Craige Harris

Available October 7, 2025

At a time when conflict and polarization feel like an unrelenting fact of life, how can we build stronger, kinder school communities where everyone feels seen, known, and valued? That’s one of the pervasive questions facing school leaders right now, and one that Jason Craige Harris is ready to help us answer. He joins Morva McDonald for a conversation about refocusing our leadership practices to center human dignity, and why he feels that reframe is so vital to our continued wellbeing.

Guest: Jason Craige Harris

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We have to engage in a bit of a listening tour to hear how people are experiencing their cultural reality.  And one of the reasons why is because our brains are storytelling factories. And in the absence of information given to us, whenever we detect gaps, we create, right? We fill it with our own sort of assumptions. And those assumptions, I'm not saying they're automatically wrong, but they're not automatically right most of the time.” (6:58)
• “For a long time in my work, I framed things in terms of what I was against. Like I had a really clear idea of like, I don't want exclusion. I don't want assimilation. I don't want violence. I'm not even sure I really want tolerance. And so my whole imagination was defined by being anti- forces that were debilitating and dehumanizing. And at some point I realized, gosh, like, I'm not sure I've spent much time trying to thickly describe the world that I want, like what I'm fighting for versus what I'm fighting against...Let's just say that if exclusion somehow disappears, if racism disappears, if whatever -ism it is disappears, then will we no longer have purpose?” (19:15)
• “I worry that some of our school communities, because of the desire to avoid controversy and division, and the complexities that come with grappling with challenging human issues, like the desire to avoid crisis, then leads some toward a kind of superficial peace, a sort of superficial consensus.” (25:16)

Related Episodes: 67; 66; 64; 37; 30; 15; 13

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With George Abalekpor and Eleanor Daugherty

Available September 30, 2025

As educators, we are always focused on ways to help our students thrive as they move through the K-12 experience and beyond. But often, we inadvertently frame adolescence as a period characterized by problems and challenges, rather than a developmental moment that can be inherently powerful and positive. How do we reframe how we think about adolescence, how we build the student experience for teens, and how we can focus on the work we are doing to ensure that our students transition from our schools to higher education with a full sense of their own agency? George Abalekpor and Eleanor Daugherty of Georgetown University join host Debra Wilson to share their wisdom.

Guests: George Abalekpor and Eleanor Daugherty

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I will forever remember this student who said, ‘You keep asking me how I am, and then you correct my tone of voice.’ And just this idea of, we need to get over ourselves. If we want to truly and authentically connect and create scholarship and practice that is meaningful for today's adolescent, we need to listen a bit more and abandon a little bit the watch your tone of voice, young lady. Those little corrective behaviors are actually stifling the presence, the authentic presence of adolescents.” (22:05)
• “So youth, I think more than anything, they want to feel as though their schooling matters. They want to feel that they are getting a sense of meaning and purpose in their education. And I think to tie it all together, I think co-creation is an answer to that solution. It's something that I think is tangible, can be honestly pretty easily developed in all educational spaces, and it allows for meaning because when you give youth an opportunity to be active participants in not just affecting policies, but affecting policies that specifically impact them and communities that they're involved in, there's automatically a sense of purpose that is attached to that.” (34:42)

Related Episodes: 75; 70; 67; 60; 59; 51; 40; 22

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available May 13, 2025

Are we, as educators, trying to create the best human versions of AI…or the best humans? That’s a central question Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen asks when she thinks about the future of education. Drawing upon her bestselling book, The Future of Smart, she joins host Debra Wilson for a discussion about human-centered liberatory education, what schools need to do differently to set kids up for an ambiguous and uncertain future, and how she views topics like agency, curriculum, and technology in light of human development.

Guest: Ulcca Hansen

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We've organized kids' time in school and outside of school in ways that don't give them a chance to do what they need to be doing to develop during adolescence in healthy ways. And we see that. Our adolescents aren't doing well, they're anxious, they're depressed, they're turning that into self harm or risky behaviors. And so we add SEL into our schools when actually what we need to do is foundationally change, right, how we allow them to spend their time.” (8:34)
• “What I hear from kids is, oh my God, you keep telling me that I'm supposed to do this like boring stuff that I have no interest in so I can graduate and go to college and then I can live my life. And what they are saying is, I want to live my life now. There are things I care deeply about, some of them existential and some of them not. And that's what I want to sink my teeth into. And in fact, developmentally, that is exactly the moment when they need to be doing it, and not do what we have been doing to them, which has led to this new thing called the quarter life crisis, which is you have 25 year olds saying that they feel purposeless and that they feel unmoored and really kind of unhappy with their lives.” (26:41)
• “In some ways it's about how well does this person know themself, and have they actually done the work to be good enough friends with themselves and their own story and their own journey, that they can hold space for another person to come to them as their self and not immediately go into a tailspin, right? And really that's what this kind of education requires, is that, not that you're a perfect educator or guide, but rather that when you meet somebody who says something to you that might be hurtful or lashes out at you or questions you, that your immediate reaction is not to fight back and close in, but rather to be like, I'm okay. Like, let's go there, right? Because that is the kind of relationship that you're gonna have when you're doing this kind of work.” (34:38)

Related Episodes: 74, 72, 60, 58, 53, 51, 40, 35, 32, 29

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available May 6, 2025

How do we measure learning? It’s a question that plagues educators, as a rapidly changing landscape keeps us scrambling to catch up with evolving technologies, ever-expanding content, and the need to blend real-world experiences with tried and true curriculum. For over 100 years, part of our answer to the problem of measurement has been the Carnegie unit. And now, the Vice President for Educational Transformation at the Carnegie Foundation says that answer needs to change.

Guest: Diego Arambula

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “So we believe that to make this move towards this new architecture, there's going to need to be a set of scalable tools to support this work. And often, there's a way for an independent school to solve a problem that directly meets the needs of their students today, but is not replicable unless you have student to teacher ratios of one to 10, or unless you've got this kind of funding or unless, or unless, or unless. And what might it look like to not live in a world of scarcity, but rather to live into this world of abundance, but to think about it through a lens of, huh, and what would it look like to share this?” (18:05)
• “Counselors are pushing that because they see what universities are asking for. And universities, in an ever-growing effort to get students who are truly prepared, ask for more. And right now, the only way to ask for more is to ask for more time. Because the Carnegie unit has conflated time and learning, the only way for a student to be more prepared for college is to spend more time earning more credits. And if we can't unlock those two, we're going to continue to put more pressure on young people.” (27:55)
• “It's an invitation to say, we'd love to partner with independent systems who are moving really fast towards some of these to say, can we be learning in these places about efforts to do this kind of work? And if any of that learning can then roll up so that the shared learning Carnegie is bringing is from public systems, from independent systems, in red states and blue states, in big cities and in rural areas, we just think that will continue to let us speak into what at the end of the day is a somewhat silent American consensus that we want the same thing for our kids, and that right now we're not getting it, and that it's possible.” (32:07)

Related Episodes:  69, 65, 56, 53, 51, 46, 43, 36,29

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available April 29, 2025

Educators understand that not all learners need the same things to thrive. But it’s not always easy to discover what each student truly needs to help them learn and grow to their greatest potential. That’s why Nancy Weinstein created Mindprint Learning, a company devoted to zeroing in on each student’s specific learning needs, so parents and educators can help empower kids to take charge of their educational journey. Nancy sits down with Debra Wilson, along with Sumner McCallie of the McCallie School in Tennessee, to share how Mindprint works with schools.

Guests: Nancy Weinstein and Sumner McCallie

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We all know when students aren't learning, they can't articulate why they're not learning. They behave in a certain way. Some of them pull back, some of them are disruptive, some of them sort of, you know, kind of shelter in place, if you will, and hide their emotions. And as parents and teachers, we can't always figure out what that is. But if we can know this is a kid who's struggling to focus, or struggling to remember what they learned, or struggling to learn in some contexts but not others, well then we know exactly what to do. We have great teachers, but if they're playing a guessing game for all the kids, it's just impossible to do. But with the data, it is so eminently possible and makes such a difference in so many kids' lives.” (6:47)
• “In fact, great teaching involves recognizing we have a lot of different type of learners in our class, right? I mean, that's how that works. But for a student himself or herself, themselves, to say I have agency here. I actually have an ability to take what's being given to me, in whatever format is being given to me, and begin to maneuver myself and maneuver the content into a way that I can best absorb it, or into a way I can best remember it and process it. That's pretty powerful.” (20:33)

Related Episodes: 69, 63, 60, 58, 57, 52, 40, 23

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available April 22, 2025

What does happiness have to do with achieving excellence and success? Do happy students learn more deeply and go on to more fulfilling careers and lives? Most educators understand the intrinsic connection between emotional well-being and deep learning, but “happiness” doesn’t tend to show up on our classroom rubrics. Dan Lerner, author, performance coach, and professor of the famous NYU class “The Science of Happiness” sits down with host Morva McDonald to share why we might want to rethink the value of positivity.

Guest: Dan Lerner

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “So there is certainly an element, genetic element, component, of happiness, right? For folks listening out there, try to think of someone who you always think of as, that person's always a little gloomier than other folks, right? And that is the way that some people are sort of set. Think about it like a thermostat, right? They are set to a certain number…But a considerable amount of how we experience positive emotion is through rightly directed effort.” (9:23)
• “Positive emotions come in lots of different shapes and colors. When we look at the research on positive emotions, we research different positive emotions separately. Hope is researched differently than joy. It's researched differently than pride. It's researched differently than love. It's researched differently than calm or tranquility or peace. So being able to go in and allowing someone to express what they're excited about, what they're looking forward to, and then getting into, all right, so what are the challenges? Means we have potentially primed our colleagues or our direct reports or whoever we're meeting with to be operating in a different way.” (14:17)
• “Let's say your coach is standing next to you as you drag that bag of boulders or your teacher is standing next to you as you're taking the really hard math test. Are they saying you suck, you suck, you're never gonna do it? Or are they saying, you know, you are doing great. I believe in you. I know we can get this done. When you're done with that workout session, do you go home and stare at the ceiling? Is that effective? Or do you go talk to another teammate and you're like, man, that was tough, you know, it's worth it. And I'm so glad you're here to have the conversation with.” (26:13)

Related Episodes: 66, 60, 59, 51, 42, 40, 35, 22

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available April 15, 2025

AI continues to be one of the hottest topics in education right now. Should we be using it? Should we allow students to use it? When, where, and how does it fit into our schools and our vision for the future of education? Yet despite all the chatter, the fact remains that AI is so new and so fast-moving that we don’t have a lot of evidence or research upon which to base our decisions. That’s a problem Chris Agnew and the Generative AI Hub at Stanford’s SCALE Initiative are trying to address.

Guest: Chris Agnew

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I would say AI in schools is a week by week, month by month, as far as how fast the technology is changing, how fast take up is changing. And so it is something that school leaders need to keep front of mind and be actively talking about, even though they can't be expected to know the answers. Because here's the great secret. Right now, nobody knows the answers. Even the heads of the largest LLMs are building tools that they don't know where that will lead. And we need to face it head on.” (12:21)
• “I hope we all know that technology is not a thing in its own right. Technology we should be adopting as a tool to do X or to do Y, but we're not just adopting technology for technology's sake. AI is the same. And so determining, okay, AI is this tool. What are we thinking about what we want to apply this to?” (15:23)
• “I feel like we're at the precipice of the opportunity to make this choice or go down a more, say, dystopian or technology for technology's sake path. Right now we have this technology, when you apply it to education in schools and specifically you take AI with this very new powerful technology. You can use it to optimize a currently flawed system, or use it to completely reimagine what's possible.” (27:22)

Related Episodes: 68; 49; 45; 32; 31; 28

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available April 8, 2025

Educators are well aware that relationships are central to the work we do in schools. We know that how connected we are to our students, and how connected they feel to their communities, makes a big difference in how well they’re able to learn and develop. We also know that as they leave our schools and go out into the world, their ability to relate to others, understand social nuances, and navigate everything from collegial relationships to friendships to dating will have an impact on their success and their well-being. But what is our role in helping them develop those interpersonal skills? How deeply involved should schools be in educating students around different types of relationships, and how should we be thinking about the messages students may be absorbing from the school environment? Health educator Shafia Zaloom sits down with Debra Wilson to untangle the tricky dynamics.

Guest: Shafia Zaloom

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We all need spaces free of judgment, ultimatums, and assumptions to share with open honesty, right? Like think that's really important and shame in particular, which is what a lot of judgment leads to. And so as adults, taking care of, with our own peers, what we need to work through so that we can be present in a nonjudgmental way. And to get really curious and ask strategic questions of kids that let them be the experts of their own experience.” (21:40)
• “This stuff was coming up outside of the classroom, and we know this, right? It's happening everywhere, typically during transition. So like the in-betweens, it's happening when your kids are walking in a line and waiting outside the gym to go to P.E. It's happening when they're waiting in line to wash their hands before they go to the lunchroom. It's happening during recess when there's, you know, a random game of tag going on and it's girls up against boys…It's happening in the in-betweens, and it's people who aren't trained to teach this in a classroom necessarily. It's not the school counselors who are in their office doing one-to-one support.” (36:05)

Related Episodes: 63, 59, 51, 35, 32, 28

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available April 1, 2025

Professional development is an important part of educational leadership, but not all professional development opportunities are equally effective. When we’re seeking to improve teaching and learning outcomes in our schools, are we developing classrooms or cultures? Siloes or collaborative communities? Guests Elham Kazemi and Jessica Calabrese, co-authors of Learning Together: Organizing Schools for Teacher and Student Learning, join host Morva McDonald to share how they worked together on a novel practice that built community, improved student outcomes, and changed how both teachers and learners thought about their work.

Guests: Jessica Calabrese and Elham Kazemi

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We think about what it is that we want to try with students, but then all of us go into the classroom together. Instead of going separately into our own individual spaces, we collaboratively go into one space where we know the kids, where we're invested in their learning, and try to learn with them. So we'll pose the tasks. We'll think with the kids. We'll tell the kids that we're there to try something out and learn from the children themselves. And we pause when we need to make sense of what to do next or something that we see that we didn't anticipate, that now we can take advantage of because our real children are there with us.” (7:52)
• “We have to redefine our identity as teachers, that my job isn't to get kids to do things. I can get you to do things, but you are not left with something new in your understanding when I walk away. So if I'm truly teaching you to be a learner, like we talk a lot about teach the reader, not the book. Teach the mathematician, not the math. And it takes a lot of reassurance from leaders for teachers to believe it's okay to do that, that I am not being judged by what I can get kids to do, things in a moment or on a day of a test. And I find myself saying that a lot of like, we're growing children, not test scores.” (37:51)

Related Episodes: 67, 58, 49, 45, 32,19

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available March 25, 2025

AI and other technological advances are moving at an almost incomprehensible speed right now, and schools have to adjust. Some are leaning out, with phone bans and efforts to make the school day as low-tech as possible. Others are cautiously leaning in, adopting new technologies, and trying to strike a comfortable balance. And then there are the school leaders who are leaping ahead, with a vision to embrace technological innovation as a vibrant cornerstone of their plans for the future. Jalaj Desai is one of those visionary heads of school, and he’s joining NAIS President Debra Wilson to share how he’s using AI to transform Saddle River Day School.

Guest: Jalaj Desai

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “And that's the beauty of our school. We don't really worry about what did not work. We try different things. And if it doesn't work, it's OK and move on. We teach our kids the same exact thing. Don't get stuck up with what didn't work. We kind of evaluate the situation, see why it didn't work, and then simply move on.” (6:49)
• “We are still a typical independent school. Our teachers are still human beings and they love what they do. They love to teach. So when there is a doubt, it's because they want to make sure that what we're doing is right by the kids and by them, right?...But we are determined to, as a school, to do this, right? AI is here to stay. So sooner we get on board, as a whole community, as a whole faculty, it's much better for all our kids.” (18:59)
• “Some dreams you let go, right? In terms of because it doesn't work out, there are clear signals to do that. Some dreams you keep going because it's going to take time. It's going to, you gotta be patient. You need to go through a lot of stuff, especially when a school  is going through so many different cool things and changes. You just have to make sure your resources are divided correctly.” (26:04)

Related Episodes: 49, 46, 45, 31, 26, 19

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available November 12, 2024

We most often focus on how we are educating our students. But how are we also educating our leaders, across every level of our schools? Debra Wilson sits down with three educational leadership experts from top programs at Columbia, UPenn, and Vanderbilt to talk about the importance of listening in developing the leaders of the future, and how we can help them grow the skills and capacities to meet the evolving challenges of our times.

Guests: Nicole Furlonge, Carrie Grimes, and Steve Piltch

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “So for me, listening, building people's capacity and understanding around listening as

a giving audience, as something that you do not because you agree with someone, but because you are giving them the dignity of space to articulate what is on their mind and heart. For me, that is both urgent work, it is important work, but it's also quite joyful work.” (10:51)

• “Since the pandemic, we've seen every year that there's one quote, ‘crisis’ after another. You know, you can talk about Gaza, you can talk about the potential of issues with the election, you can talk about almost everything. It used to be that those things were the exception rather than the rule. And I, for one…don't believe that's ever going to happen again. I mean, we're going to find different ways to deal with the issues, but I don't believe you're going to go through a year without something happening outside the realm of your school that's going to have direct impact in one way or another. That even if you're able to take what I'm going to call an unbiased perspective on what happens, you're going to have to deal with the wellbeing of your community around the given issues.” (17:16)
• “The research behind this is really powerful, that leaders who carve out intentional time– as little as five minutes a day– will experience more integration and balance in their leadership, better self-regulation in terms of their responsiveness, enhanced self-awareness, improved relationships at work, inner calm and peace. And so I think it's the idea here of just start small. And setting aside a small amount of time every day for mindfulness can have, in the aggregate, a significant impact not only on your own well-being, whether you're leading in a classroom full of first graders that are bouncing off the walls, or you're in the head's office.” (35:50)

Related Episodes: 65, 62, 50, 42, 25, 20, 15, 5, 3

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available November 5, 2024

How good are people? How much can you trust your neighbors? How much do you agree with others on fundamental values and ideals that are important to you? Sometimes it can feel like the answers to these questions skew towards the negative. But author and researcher Jamil Zaki says we’d be surprised by the reality. He sits down with Morva McDonald to talk about his book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, and what his findings mean for everyone, especially school leaders, right now.

Guest: Jamil Zaki

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “One, during the hardest time in many people's lives, during one of the greatest disasters of the century, people didn't respond to this adversity by falling apart and focusing on themselves. They came together and found ways to help one another, which is so remarkably beautiful. But then second, most people ignored this global avalanche of human kindness, which is the sadder surprise, that our minds are tuned away from goodness even when it's all around us.” (3:17)
• “Having an assumption about people, even if it's a gloomy assumption, is very comfortable. You get to maybe not have faith in people, but have faith in your assumptions. Letting go of that faith and saying, I don't know what the world is like necessarily. I don't know what the future holds. I don't know what this person is like, is uncomfortable. But it's that courage to be humble about what we know and what we don't know that is the beginning of learning.” (13:54)
• “One, we as a country are far less divided than we think we are. I am in no way here minimizing real extremism, real political violence and real risk to human rights in this country. I think we're in a very scary time. But if you look at what people actually want, even their views on different issues, we're much closer together than I think the media and even politicians want us to realize that we are. We are being told the story of extreme division when reality is that we are divided, but not that much, and that there are many things that we have in common in terms of our values and what we want.” (31:19)

Related Episodes: 64, 62, 54, 44, 37, 32, 17, 15

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Social-emotional learning and student wellbeing are increasingly showing up as priorities for schools. But what if research could prove that looking out for the emotional components of teaching and learning aren’t just important for mental health, but actually essential for academic growth? That’s the central premise of Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s research, and she’s ready to make the case that emotions are vitally linked to our ability to learn.

Guest: Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “The whole rest of the brain, the deeper thinking, the emotion regulation, the engaging with other people, the social meaning making, the sense of self. All of these kinds of very basic systems that are fundamental to being a good human are not predicted by, or even associated with, IQ. They are predicted by this, this what we're calling transcendent thinking… So how do we get kids to think that way?” (9:50)
• “It's literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about information for which you have no emotional reason or context to engage.” (12:09)
• “We're not installing information into a person like a squirrel, like, stashing away its nuts, right? What we're doing is inviting a person to engage actively with an orchestrated set of materials and content in a way that will help facilitate them naturally coming to realize what matters there, and the power of those tools for understanding something important about ideas and the world.”  (21:12)

Related Episodes: 32, 18, 16, 5, 3

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available October 22, 2024

Being a school leader is a complex job, and it has only grown in its scope and challenges in recent years. How can we develop our capacities as reflective changemakers, dynamic leaders, and future-focused thinkers in a culture that often demands we be reactive rather than proactive? Carla Silver, Executive Director of Leadership + Design, has been partnering with schools for over 15 years to help create cultures of learning and foster human-centered design thinking. She sits down with host Morva McDonald to discuss her views on leadership and where schools are headed.

Guest: Carla Silver

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Really since the internet, things are changing so rapidly. And teaching and learning is having to change to keep up with those technological changes. So change is just rapid. And so that means that school leaders have to be way more flexible. They have to be way more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. You throw in things like a global pandemic, and the second thing I think that's happening is that heads of schools, and school leaders in general, are being asked to respond to so many external events in ways that they hadn't in the past.” (9:21)
• “We don't necessarily define ‘leader’ as someone who necessarily has positional authority. I mean, obviously that's the most common definition. You think about someone who has a position or a title, but some of the most effective leaders that we work with… they're actually classroom teachers and they don't necessarily want to leave the classroom. They actually want to influence change from that position. And so I think it's really important to think about the fact that when we talk about leaders, we think about anyone who's really trying to mobilize other people to make change, to manage adaptive work, adaptive challenges.” (15:22)
• “One of the things we really try to help leaders of all different backgrounds and genders and race and ethnicities think about is, how do they lead with their own signature presence? Which is, what are the things that they, where they naturally feel really gifted and in the flow and how do they amplify those qualities and be attentive to them instead of trying to necessarily come from a deficit model of leadership, where I'm not good at this or I'm not good at that, but rather where are you naturally really gifted as a leader, and how do you build more of that in your life?” (22:25)

Related Episodes:  64, 56, 42, 38, 25, 20, 9, 5

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available October 15, 2024

Navigating polarities and fostering respectful dialogue are responsibilities that weigh heavy on many school leaders right now. How, in the current social and political climate, can we build bridges of cooperation rather than creating further barriers that divide us? How can we create space for people to voice ideas and opinions while balancing our very real obligations to nurture student safety and wellbeing? Eboo Patel, author and Director of Interfaith America, sits down with NAIS President Debra Wilson to talk about his work on the role of pluralism in schools.

Guest: Eboo Patel

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Diversity is a treasure. Identity is a source of pride, not a status of victimization. Cooperation is better than division. Faith is a bridge. Everybody's a contributor.” (4:49)
• “It is an exercise of citizenship in a diverse democracy to come to know something about your fellow citizens who are from different identities, including different political parties, including different regions of the world, and from different intellectual frameworks and maybe of different values. I mean, you know, did I think diversity was just the differences I liked?” (16:00)
• “If there's anything that a school should be, it should be a place that is immune to the kind of ideologies that shut down the conversation. I want to quote John Courtney Murray again. I think it's so powerful. He says, civilization is living and talking together. That is the definition of civilization. And the definition of the barbarian is the person who shuts down the conversation. And the introduction of ideologies that shut down conversations about, for example, how people from different identities should relate to one another.” (21:41)
• “If you're United Airlines, and you're hiring a graduate from Embry Riddle aeronautical university, you are pretty sure that person can fly a plane. If I hire a graduate from The Lab School or Latin School or Parker, these are elite independent schools in my city of Chicago, what should I be confident that graduate can do? And I think a head of school should say, my graduate can navigate pluralism.” (25:12)

Related Episodes: 37, 30, 29, 22, 17, 7, 4

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In honor of the departure of our original New View EDU host Tim Fish after 60 episodes, we’re pausing to share one of his favorite episodes of the podcast. Tim delighted in speaking with students, and was especially enthusiastic about this interview with two students from One Stone School in Boise, Idaho. We hope you’ll enjoy revisiting this episode with us. Stay tuned for our return to new programming next week, when Debra Wilson sits down with Eboo Patel of Interfaith America.

Guests: Ella Cornett and Mackenzie Link

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “To go back to the question of what should school be, I feel like learners and students should come out of school with that sense of purpose. And that's, that really resonates with me because I feel like that's what I want out of school. I wanna leave school and kind of know what I wanna do and who I wanna be in the world.” (21:39)
• “I would describe my stress...less so stress. I would call it ambition. Like, I think the weight of ambition sits heavy on my shoulders because I strive for the, like, the next best thing I wanna keep doing. I wanna keep going, I wanna keep pushing. And One Stone really allows me to do that and empowers me to do that.” (26:24)
• “It's that pushing students, the healthy balance of pushing students. And this is where great coaching comes in. And great mentorship is, you do have to find the thing that students care about and relate it, everything that you're doing, to that. And then we're in the home stretch.” (29:57)
• “It's easy if you let it be easy, in the sense that if you don't want to grow, if you don't try to grow, you won't. Just like a student in public school that doesn't try, they won't get a good GPA. But that's not the motivation here. The motivation here for us is to grow. So if a student doesn't want to grow, how can they?” (39:44)

Related Episodes: 36, 34, 27, 23, 18

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available October 1, 2024

Resilience is a hot topic in education. We wonder whether our students display enough of it, how we can help them build it, and whether resilience alone is enough to help kids thrive in an increasingly demanding and uncertain world. But what if we need to expand our thinking beyond building resilience in individuals, and start considering a systems-based approach instead? That’s what Megan Kennedy is exploring with her team at the UW Resilience Lab.

Guest: Megan Kennedy

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “These skills and mindsets have a primary kind of effect on their own ability to cope with stress and cope, like have some resilience, both individual resilience and to build sort of team or organizational resilience in the work. Because oftentimes I'll teach these groups to organizations as a whole. For example, an entire school or college, or to a full team, so that they're learning these skills and mindsets in community. And then that gets reinforced in their like team meetings and in their relationships. And if you can imagine that to scale, all of a sudden, you have all these schools and colleges across campus that have learned these skills and mindsets in community, and then that grows.” (16:54)
• “We could still maybe explore this concept of how do we not just spiral up the social and emotional learning from kindergarten to 12th grade, but how do we actually extend that into the university? So what's happening in the K -12 system helps support students as they transition into college. And what we are teaching in college is really building off the skills and mindsets that the students have been learning kind of all the way up. So I've spent some time in my career really interested in a collective impact approach. How do we work together around common issues and be working in a really aligned and coordinated way? So this idea of having the K-12 system and the university system more seamless around social emotional learning is, I think, a really interesting and cool opportunity.” (24:29)

“I don't suggest that that's an easy thing. Collective impact never is. But I think that on the table would be a lot of conversations about the competitive nature of things. And it's interesting that we're in a time where the need to be collaborative and work across differences and come to the table and be able to manage our emotions when we have different perspectives and different ideas, because the issues are really challenging, is more important than ever.” (30:57)

Related Episodes: 60, 59, 51, 48, 29, 22, 19, 3

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you had an RV full of gas and the opportunity to spend months traveling anywhere you wanted to go, what journeys would you take? It sounds like some sort of icebreaker question, but for Grant Lichtman, it was a passion project that became the Wisdom Road. He traveled North America in search of perspectives, traditions, and knowledge our society is in danger of losing, and he’s sharing his experience with New View EDU host Debra Wilson.

Guest: Grant Lichtman

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “There was also something about the idea that we in America must still share some strong and powerful things that we agree on, or we wouldn't probably still be a country that has hung together well. And yet we know we're existing in a time of incredible divisiveness. And could I find the reasons for that by talking with people, not the people we hear from all the time on the evening news or our social influencers or our social media feed, but just regular folks?” (6:08)
• “Let me tell you, it only took a week or two and shedding that responsibility, or shedding that feeling, that I needed to get my point across, that I needed to somehow debate people, was one of the great releases of my entire life…To be in a situation where my only role was to say, no matter what people told me, my only role was to say, thank you so much. And could you tell me more about that? Or can we explore more why you think that?…I was not in a position of having to do what I'd done my whole life, which is defend or argue or debate or any of that stuff.” (18:10)
• “I believe there is nothing more important for educators to focus on than teaching ourselves and our students, not in one class your freshman year in high school, but deeply embedding into our system of education, how to go about having and maintaining civility and civil conversations and civil discourse with the quote unquote ‘other.’” (33:01)
• Related Episodes:  55, 50, 46, 37, 32, 24, 17,15, 9, 4

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the past six seasons, Tim Fish has been the voice of New View EDU. Now that he has departed from his role at NAIS to start his own firm, NAIS President Debra Wilson and Vice President of Leadership and Governance Morva McDonald will be taking the reins. But first, Debra sits down with Tim to reflect on his sixty episodes of the podcast, what he’s learned from his long career working in education, and what he thinks may be next for independent schools.

Guest: Tim Fish

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “When flow is present, when those things are present, when you have agency, when you care, like it's actually really good for self-efficacy and it lowers depression and it gives you more self-worth and it makes you like, so all like those good things we want about wellbeing, they happen when we're in this environment. And so for me, it's this thinking about, as school leaders, how do we design the environment, how do we create the context for these things we want to see with young people to emerge? That's what I'm really interested in.” (7:23)
• “In my head, I almost think about AI as a time machine. And I don't mean something that transports us to the past or the future. I mean something that manufactures time. So we think about it, It's the number one thing. For all my career, 30 plus years, whenever we talk about, wouldn't it be great if we could do this, this, or this? Yeah, but I don't have any time. I have no time. Give me more time and I'll be able to do that. Well, I'm like, AI can actually give us more time.” (21:58)
• “My sense is that parents are often stuck in something I call old excellence…And I think that in the age of AI, in the age of where we are and just everything going on, I don't think old excellence has the relevance it has. But I also find that parents don't imagine or ask for new excellence that's highly engaged, based in wellbeing, high agency, teacher as an architect and designer, more get out of the way... we have to help the parents walk across the bridge from old excellence to new excellence.” (27:55)

Related Episodes: 60, 59, 56, 52, 47, 45, 40, 35, 33, 31, 23, 21

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most schools envision helping students grow in their agency, independence, and self-reliance. How to do that is a hotly contested topic with no easy answers. But while the majority of students are trying to build those skills within settings that are also grappling with issues like technology use and the difficulties of providing meaningful opportunities outside the classroom, there are some schools where learning self-reliance happens in a wholly different way. Two students from Midland School in California join New View EDU to share their experiences with a no-tech, nature-based campus where growing your own food and heating your own living quarters are just part of a normal school day.

Guests: Ayanna Hopkins-Zelada and River Peace

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I think that everyone is taking care of each other and you get to decide what the environment you live in looks like. And you really get to know what a person, who that person truly is when you see how they take care of the people around them. And there's that deeper level of connection…with someone when you see who they truly are when they're taking care of, not only themselves, but the people around them.” (8:41)
• “And my ability to navigate conflict with my peers and also with faculty, or with other peers and faculty in whatever situation, has been really solidified because Midland, from your freshman year, is very intentional about making sure that you develop the skills to maintain relationships with people and how to navigate all aspects of having a relationship with someone or a group of people, and maintaining the responsibilities that you have as an individual in a community. Which also extends to, you know, your ability to know when to ask for help and know when you are overworked or need a minute and to be able to advocate for yourself.” (18:06)
• “Something that I notice the most at Midland is historical passion. Since Midland was founded, everyone that's gone to Midland and worked at Midland has had passion for it and cared about the place that they are stepping foot on. So having that passion from the very first construction of the place, of the school, I think that's key to having somewhere as magical as Midland.” (23:23)
• “I think it's one of the most special things about how students and faculty interact at Midland, is that you have a relationship in and out of the classroom. Our faculty know you very well outside of the classroom, and that translates really well into them becoming a teacher for you academically and not, outside of the classroom. And I think it's an advantage that Midland students have that a lot of other students don't have, where our teachers are able to see us as whole people outside of the classroom rather than just students in a classroom.” (34:58)

Related Episodes: 53, 51, 50, 40,15, 11, 8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Now more than ever, schools are focused on supporting student mental health. With rates of anxiety and depression on the rise among teens, we know we need to design environments that help foster adolescent wellbeing. But are wellbeing programs working as intended? What are we getting right – and getting wrong – about the emotional lives of teenagers? Dr. Lisa Damour has the answers.

Guest: Dr. Lisa Damour

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Schools are working against this broad cultural discourse that holds at the center the idea that discomfort is bad. And so as long as we're not challenging that idea, we're gonna be dealing with a lot of one-on-one conversations trying to convince people that this is really all okay. So I would both have schools get out on their front foot about reframing this appropriately. Mental health is not about feeling good and school is supposed to be stressful, and we are built to help your kid handle that.” (13:39)
• “There are a lot of people who age without actually working themselves through the maturity that is required for a healthy adulthood, right? Who aren't thinking about risk in very smart ways. They're thinking about whether they're going to get caught, not whether they're going to get hurt or hurt somebody else. They are not taking responsibility for their actions. They don't actually have a particularly good work ethic, right? So you can age into adulthood, but not really be as mature as you should be.” (31:09)
• “When I have seen adults really harm their relationship with a kid, and usually this is parent-child, but it can happen in a school, it's when the teenager says, you know what, you assigned this to us last week, or you said you were gonna pick me up and you forgot, and the adult denies or defends, right? When the adult flexes, we have all the authority, we will flex our authority if we want to. If the teenager is right and the adult is wrong and the adult doesn't own it, that relationship has hit a really rough patch.” (37:02)

Related Episodes: 54, 51, 48, 35, 32,15, 8, 3

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What would it look like if a school went “all in” on training teachers to become experts in the neuroscience behind learning? Saint Andrews Episcopal School did just that, and in the process, created the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, dedicated to helping educators everywhere unlock the power of Mind Brain Education.

Guest: Glenn Whitman

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Look, we have vocabulary quizzes for kids in every discipline. Why can't we sort of have that for the adult learners in our school? And the fact is, we went after this research around collective teacher efficacy. The idea is that if we have some common language, common frameworks, common North stars, or mountaintops, or drivers that we're all moving towards, then that might make us collectively more effective for all our student population.” (16:45)
• “I'll get on my horse for one second about homework. You know, we have our kids, we are privileged to have our kids for eight or more hours a day in all our schools, especially when they get to high school, right? I once had an AP history student ask if we were violating child labor laws because then they still had to go home and do two more hours of homework. I thought that was interesting.” (26:43)
• “I can ask the AI for an early draft. I can edit it around. And look, every kid can get immediate feedback too, using these tools, right? Now, you're right though. Learning happens when you think hard. And generationally, I think our kids don't want to think as hard as we, maybe we were willing, and maybe we were foolish, but we know learning doesn't stick unless you think hard about things you're either intaking or doing or building or pondering. And again, I think that's going to be a little, a healthy tension point to figure out.” (34:21)
• “The teacher of the future has to do a better job working the room and working among the students. I still see too many times, when I'm in schools, students working independently, and teachers retreating to their laptop and missing– This is the best time to ask deeper questions, to see what kid, is it sticking or working. So I think more and more, you know, working the room and moving amongst kids, as opposed to being in the front of the room. So I think teachers, I'm just going to say heads of school, a new line item budget should be better shoes for teachers.” (39:01)

Related Episodes: 53, 49, 47, 45, 35, 31, 18

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What’s the difference between the job to be done by a Milky Way bar, and the job to be done by a Snickers bar? And what does that have to do with schools? As it turns out, a lot, according to Bob Moesta. The author, professor, innovator, and founder of the Re-Wired Group comes to New View EDU to outline how reframing our thinking about the jobs to be done by our schools can transform everything about the way we approach hiring, retention, admissions, and student engagement.

Guest: Bob Moesta

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “What we don't realize is people have natural abilities that they're really, really good at, and they actually have things they suck at. And nine times out of 10, they tell people, oh, you got to get better at this thing because you suck at it. But when you make somebody better at creativity, you actually ruin them for the structure, which they're really good at. They're actually interdependent.” (8:21)
• “Nobody randomly shows up at a school and says, oh yeah, I want to join. I want to be part of your school. There's a set of causes behind it. But what happens is we ask them at a very pablum level, a very, oh, it's because of the facilities you have, your facilities are great. Or Oh my gosh, the teachers are so pedigree. It's like, but that's not why they're doing it. They're doing it because their child is falling behind. They're doing it because their child is literally not ready for the next level. They're doing it because they want their kids to have broader experiences. And so you start to realize, it's about their child and their relationship with their child that they're actually buying your school for.” (13:55)
• “The thing is, we can't predict the future without actually understanding the past. And so what happens is, we're literally asking them questions like, so what would you like in a new school? And it's like, they're just making it up. They don't know. And so part of this is why we talk, we start by talking to parents who already came, because they had to have the push, they had to have the pull, they had the anxieties, they made the trade-offs. Now I have a frame to understand, because for every one parent who made it, there's 10, 100, 1000 behind them who want to make it, but haven't figured it out.” (34:33)

Related Episodes: 36, 25, 24, 20, 18, 5, 1

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How many of us have taken a history class? What about a class on the future? Or a class on how to navigate ambiguity? These are the kinds of educational experiences Lisa Kay Solomon urges us to design for our students, as we prepare them for an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. 

Guest: Lisa Kay Solomon

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I'll start off and talk about futures thinking and I'll say, so how many people here have taken a class in history? And everybody raises their hand. There's probably some historians, probably teachers of history. Everyone's like, yes, of course I did. And then I'll say, well, how many people here have taken a class in futures? Zero, zero hands, zero. And maybe one person that took like a workshop or something. And then I say, well, which one of those can you influence? And it's like, oh, mic drop.” (8:54)
• “You gotta practice the stuff that you're gonna need in life. And unfortunately, so much of our K-12 system is based on rewarding things that are knowable, that are performable, that are easily measurable. You know, show me the scale on ambiguity. Show me the person that's like, oh, you got an A in ambiguity, crushed it. We don't have a great vocabulary for it. We don't have a great practice ground for it. So I think about this a lot, because you don't want the first time someone comes head to head with a high stakes, high uncertainty, highly ambiguous situation to be when it matters most. You want them to have done the practice steps along the way, the scaffolding in the safe environment.” (14:11)
• “You have a really important meeting and you've cleared it on everyone's schedule. People have flown in. They know it's important. And so because it's an important meeting, you go to the important board room that has the big oak table and the leather chairs and no windows and you got the PowerPoint set up. And yes, it's structured, but we have to remember there are human beings walking into that room, and our brains take a look at those signals: big oak table, leather chairs, no windows. And they think status, power, be right, be smart. They're not thinking, be open, be imaginative, be generative, right?” (29:15)
• 
  

Related Episodes: 47, 38, 31, 26, 17, 12, 9, 7, 4

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Create Bravely. That’s the mantra of dynamic twin brothers Peter and Paul Reynolds. Together, they have built a life of service to others through creativity, as authors, illustrators, designers, educators, bookstore owners, and digital media executives. They share their passion for inspiring others and helping people of all ages find their path in life through creativity, kindness, and what they call “hard fun.”

Guests: Paul and Peter Reynolds

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We're big believers that yes, school, learning does happen in school a lot of times, and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes things happen in schools that are sort of counter to the mission. You may have the most important question in your mind, but I think that number one on the list is a really powerful question. It's only three words. Who are you?” (7:04)
• “We've seen, sadly, tragic results where kids just think, I don't measure up. I don't even measure up to my own version of who I think I'm supposed to be. So actually, you're not supposed to be anything other than who you're meant to be. And our job is to make sure that you get there no matter what...I think that learning is self-design. We're creating ourselves every single day.” (18:47)
• “You know, kind kids are our kind of kids. And kind adults are our kind of adults. And, you know, sadly, that's something that, that fabric, that civic fabric has been fraying, you know, in the last, you know, almost decade. And we have to, that's one of the things we have to all work on collectively. If we can do that with our kids in schools and our colleagues, then, you know, that will move the world to a better place, for sure.” (28:29)
• “So, you know, our first answer may be right. Yes, the sky can be blue. But your second answer is going to be more interesting. Your third, your fourth, your fifth. And you can even have, you know, wrong answers. And we, of course, we always say wrong-ish, because it always leads to finding a new discovery…When we do that deep dive, the answers get more and more interesting. And so that is with life. You know, if you only give something just a cursory think, you may even get sort of a correct answer, but if you really do that deep dive, it's going to get really, really interesting.” (38:12)

Related Episodes: 51, 50, 44, 42,17,11, 6, 4

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wellbeing. Engagement. Belonging. These three values are the “trifecta” of attributes for healthy and productive learning, according to Denise Pope. But how do we design learning environments that put the focus on that trifecta, without diminishing the educational achievement, challenge, and rigor we believe our students deserve? Denise, the co-founder of Challenge Success, returns to New View EDU to help host Tim Fish unravel the tricky issues around creating climates of care in our classrooms while also upholding academic standards.

Guest: Dr. Denise Pope

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “When you throw kids into groups for group learning, I think there's an assumption that they know how to do that well, and they don't. And, you know, even my kids will say, Oh my gosh, don't tell people to do more group work! I get stuck with the slackers, or I hate that because, you know, this person's not pulling their weight and I have to do all the work, or whatever. Right. We have to actively teach how to work in community.” (8:54)
• “And here's the thing, we undervalue students, we underestimate students, and we infantilize them. And then we're surprised when they get out that they can't do things, right? That's on us. That is on us.” (21:14)
• “Grades are heavily related to cheating, right? You don't cheat when you're doing a project that you're really excited about. When you're putting on a play, when you're putting out a yearbook edition, when you are studying a new move in a dance class or on a football team, you're not thinking about a grade. That’s not why people do things.” (24:57)

Related Episodes: 52, 48, 43, 40, 35, 31, 19, 16, 8

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Knowing what we now know, we can no longer do what we now do. To do so is educational malpractice.” That provocative statement is one of the principles that guides Sam Chaltain through his work redesigning education for the modern era. In this episode of New View EDU, Sam asks listeners to consider how the world has changed since our school system was designed, and what educational “sacred cows” we need to dispense with to help school keep pace with the rapid evolution of society.

Guest: Sam Chaltain

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “The focus needs to be rendered down to the essence of who. Who is this unique individual? What are their unique interests, passions, and potential contributions to the world and to the people they come in contact with? And how can we set conditions that help that person answer the only question that matters, right? Which is: Of all the things I can do with my one precious life, what must I do?” (10:27)
• “The goal and the primary measure of health of a living system is disequilibrium, not equilibrium, right? The moment a pond establishes equilibrium, it gets covered in kind of green mushy muck. It's that constant delicate balance, the dance of all of these different, you know, contributing factors that allows for its ultimate and optimal health. And so too is it with us. Therefore, we have a different way and a different frame for how we can think about this thing that for the last 100 years we've called school.” (18:06)
• “All of our design work is in service of the answers to those questions. How do we, how do we unleash even more powerfully the things that are already powerful here? And how do we make possible the things that are not yet possible? And usually what that leads to is a space that is, that is flexible, that is adaptable, that is permeable, that has the ability…that doesn't look like the way that schools have looked.” (34:36)

Related Episodes: 47, 45, 44, 32, 21, 15, 2

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We know we need to work at redesigning our schools to reflect the future our students will inhabit. Issues of mental health, well-being, mattering, and social-emotional growth are emerging as vitally important challenges to solve – to say nothing of the continued need to provide a high-quality, rigorous, and academically sound educational environment. But while we may understand why an overhaul of our practices is essential to success, the big question remains: How? Globally renowned educational thought leader Jay McTighe returns to New View EDU to help provide some of the answers.

Guest: Jay McTighe

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We need to be preparing today's students to be able to navigate a world in which knowledge continues to expand, lifelong learning will be a requirement for success. We have to be able to deal with change, including unpredictable changes, and rote learning of factual information is an insufficient preparation. To summarize, a modern education should prepare students to be able to apply their learning effectively and appropriately, not only to the known, but to the unknown.” (3:50)
• “I've often wondered how many kids, let's say football players, would go out, work out in the weight room off season and punish themselves with a blocking play if they weren't trying to improve for the Saturday, Friday night, Saturday's game, or how many swimmers would endure grueling interval workouts if they weren't trying to improve their times. Too often, I think, teachers, as you noted, and often students don't know what the game is. And teachers, to be a little harsh, sometimes act as if their job is to cover the playbook play-by-play, as opposed to preparing players for the game.” (16:11)
• “Those skills of self-assessment, reflection, and goal-setting, are to me underpinning skills of self-directed learners. But if the student is the passive recipient waiting for the teacher to tell them how they did or what they need to do, you're never developing self-directedness. It has to be done by design, and it can be.” (36:21)

Related Episodes:  49, 45, 38, 31, 23, Bonus Episode

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We all want our students to excel. In many ways, schools are set up to foster achievement – to help students reach their potential, strive for great things, and move on to successful next steps after graduation. But as Jennifer Wallace shares in her book Never Enough, focusing on achievement can create a culture that quickly becomes toxic to kids. Where do we cross the line, and what can we do about it?

Guests: Jennifer Wallace and Debra Wilson

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Unfortunately, in our modern society, we get a lot of false alarms. You know, we get the threat when our kid doesn't make the team or doesn't get the invite to the Friday night party that there is something, you know, an alarm going off in our head, but it's really just a bagel burning. The whole house isn't going down.” (9:54)
• “When I asked the young students how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement, ‘I feel like I matter for who I am at my core, not by what I achieve’ a surprising 25% of students either agreed a little or not at all, meaning that one in four students thought that it was their performance, not who they were as a person, that mattered most to their parents.” (19:56)
• “I was listening to a speaker at a conference a bit ago…he was actually talking about successful teams, basically, what makes an extraordinary team. And he was talking about competitiveness, but not competitive with each other, but for each other for a common purpose….When you start building in project-based learning, and particularly if you can harness and teach kids how to harness that power of being collectively competitive for a common cause, for a common purpose, and to start mapping that with what we want them to learn, I just think that's an incredibly powerful piece of the equation.” (40:23)

Related Episodes: 48, 43, 40, 35, 29, 22, 13

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you had the opportunity to step away from your day-to-day life for six weeks, what would you do with that time? Where would you go? And what lessons would you bring back with you, when the time came to return to your daily routine? School leader Briel Schmitz reflects on her sabbatical journey along the Camino de Santiago, and how taking that time away from work has influenced her whole school community.

Guest: Briel Schmitz

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I think you have to say what you need and want. And if you don't say what you need and want, then you're not going to get that back. So that's the first thing. And the next thing is that when a person like myself, who has a big personality in an organization, has been here for a long time, leaves, it allows everyone else the opportunity to grow into a space that they couldn't before.” (14:36)
• “I was thinking about what it felt like to be a beginner. What it felt like to be doing something that was difficult, what it felt like to maybe not be the best person at this, because I'm at a point in my career where I've had some success and I know what it feels like to be good at things, and I know the things I'm good at. And to really put myself in a position where I wasn't the best at this. What do I do in that moment? How do I respond to that?” (24:32)
• “I think it takes a lot of energy to say no. It's fun to say yes, in the sense of you're building something, you're creating something, it's something new, and saying yes is important, but I think our schools may benefit from some clarity that allows it to be more possible to say no. Like that's not actually a part of what we do, and that it gives you more time and space to do the things that you're saying yes to.” (35:01)

Related Episodes: 42, 38, 25, 20, 13

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In an age of educator burnout and high turnover rates, what keeps veteran teachers motivated to stay in the classroom? This episode of New View EDU explores how rapidly changing technologies have provided a constant source of inspiration and innovation for two educators. Howard Levin and Stacey Roshan have both transformed their practice through exploration of the opportunities technology provides to both teachers and learners, and used that spark as fuel for careers defined by both longevity and creativity.

Guests: Howard Levin and Stacey Roshan

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “But to me, the preparation is really about ensuring that they have skills and confidence to navigate life with resilience and empathy, that they're critical thinkers, that they're effective communicators and active contributors to their communities. And as a math teacher, I always say that teaching math is the easy part. My most important role is helping students learn how to learn, embrace a growth mindset, take ownership of their learning, and just encouraging a love for the process of learning, I think is so critical.” (11:04)
• “I really believe that these are very new categories in today's world. In the world that I grew up in, the focus was, and in many places still today, the focus is on really good teaching, really good absorption, all kinds of techniques and tricks to get information to stick with students. And we're living in a completely different world right now. We're at our fingertips with a quick breath of our own speech, that information is just everywhere. And so I think it's a huge challenge for independent schools to really embrace and really look at how different the world is for our students and the future students.” (14:53)

Related Episodes: 45, 40, 35, 31, 28,18,13

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re accustomed to thinking of anxiety as something undesirable. But what if anxiety could actually be an effective tool, teaching us how to take appropriate risks, manage setbacks, and build resilience? That’s the premise of Dr. Tracy Dennis Tiwary’s book Future Tense: Why Anxiety is Good for You Even Though it Feels Bad.

Guest: Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Anxiety is apprehension about the uncertain future. So what that means is that when we're anxious, we're not actually in the moment. We're actually becoming mental time travelers into the future. And what anxiety both signals and helps us do really effectively, is picture that future. There is potential threat or peril. That is, you know, that's why it feels bad. We're kind of sitting up and paying attention. But at the same time, when we're anxious, there is also still positive possibility.” (6:22)
• “You don't go from zero to a hundred.You start with little 10 pound weights. And it's the same for this emotional endurance. We have to think of not psychological or mental health so much as mental fitness. I just think it sets us up, when it comes especially to anxiety and major anxiety disorders, major depressive disorder, substance use disorders or these kinds of struggles. Let's think about fitness, because we can build these skills for people, we can help them. But you don't do it by going from zero to 100.” (17:57)
• “Part of, I think, the gift and the problem of the parenting space right now, if I may say, is that we have this sort of parenting advice industrial complex, right? Where I feel that, as wonderful as the advice out there is, it's created this culture in which we feel like we have to check off 100 out of 100 boxes on the good parenting checklist. And if we don't, we're a bad parent, we're letting down our kid.” (29:06)
• 
  

Related Episodes: 47, 35,  19, 18, 16, 11, 5, 3

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We all want to help prepare students for the future. In an unpredictable and fast-changing world, does designing school for future-ready minds mean embracing every technological innovation and new idea that comes our way? Or are there lessons from the past that may still be relevant in a technological revolution? Dr. Shimi Kang has the neuroscientific evidence to help us decide.

Guest: Dr. Shimi Kang

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “You know, people talk all about how do we motivate kids? Well, first of all, there's no such thing as an unmotivated kid. But if you're sleep deprived, stressed, over burnt out from over scheduling, you're not going to be motivated. If you're disconnected on social media, or not, or hyper competitive and don't have a sense of meaningful connection, you're not going to be motivated because the biggest motivation comes from a sense of contribution and being needed.” (12:00)
• “Neuroplasticity is a complex word, six syllables, but I believe it's the word for hope because what it means is we can always change, we can always learn, we can always grow, we can always do better. Humans are gifted with this idea, this concept of neuroplasticity, till the moment we die. And that's really important.” (33:32)
• “Where focus goes, neurons grow. Let's say you want to change your classroom to a more future ready classroom…There might be resistance, you know, from kids or parents or admin. And that's normal, because if I back up a bit, the psychology of change, in any given moment, there's only about 20, 30% of people in what's called action state of change. They are ready. The rest of the population is in pre-contemplation or contemplation. Because change, by definition, is a change, it's different!” (34:33)
• 
  

Related Episodes: 40, 35,  31,  28, 18, 16, 11, 3

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We have more opportunities to learn and grow as part of a global network than ever before. But in a sea of technological solutions, what stands out most as the core of building those networks? Humanity. That’s what Michael Nachbar leans into every day with his work at Global Online Academy.

Guest: Michael Nachbar

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Imagine that you are competing, but to support that person so that they can shine and do the best that they can and what that says about the other people in the room.” (8:08)
• “We've seen an explosion over the past few years in competency-based learning, right? Thinking about mindsets and skills for students. I think we're hearing and seeing schools doing that for faculty now…Thinking about what are the mindsets and skill sets that teachers need to be practicing, demonstrating and learning while they're employees at a particular school…Imagine the conversation that you're interviewing for a job at a school, and the school is saying, you know, teachers here practice these skills all the time, and we will help you develop those while you're employed here.” (12:09)
• “That drives so much for me of what I hope for kids, that like, getting kids to be passionate about something. And there's so many things that they feel like they have to do that it's part of a puzzle that they need to solve rather than, you know, taking classes and having access to courses and topics that, like, light them up and excite them and get them interested in learning and curious.” (22:57)

Related Episodes: 42, 38, 36, 31, 25, 24, 20, 14

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you think of the term “blended learning,” do you think of a hybrid or remote learning plan, perhaps in a format that became familiar during the COVID pandemic? That’s the impression many educators and school leaders have of blended learning, but as Catlin Tucker’s work demonstrates, blended learning is so much more than just splitting education into “onscreen” and “in person.” It may, in fact, be the solution we need to prepare our classrooms for the future.

Guest: Dr. Catlin Tucker

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Reserve that teacher-led instructional time for small differentiated group experiences, where we can be much more targeted and thoughtful about the vocabulary we use, the text we choose, the problems and prompts we present, the scaffolds we supply…If teachers are still trapped at the front of the room, feeling like my job is to transfer information, there's no time and space to really position students at the center, give them more responsibility and let them engage in the messy work that is learning.” (13:32)
• “ I try to put myself now as an adult in the seat of some of these students, where they spend seven hours a day at school, and they don't get to make a single decision about how they learn, what they learn, what they create to demonstrate their learning. Like that is not a space that most kids wanna be in. And it shouldn't surprise anybody that a huge, I wanna say it's over 70% of students were, report like negative feelings with school. And it's things like anxiety, being tired and bored, like that's where we're keeping them all day. It's heartbreaking.” (30:50)
• “I want teachers to rediscover, if they're not feeling it right now, their joy in this work, and there's so many, it's a, it's a challenging profession. It is complex and multifaceted. And for me, I want teachers to realize that now that we have literally limitless access to information and resources in our classroom, that we are allowed to reimagine our role.” (41:55)

Related Episodes: 40,  31,  28, 26, 23, 20, 3, Bonus

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Hustle culture” has become synonymous with trying to cram more into a day, emphasizing productivity over humanity, and valuing achievement over wellbeing. But what if there was a kind of hustle that upended all of those values, and instead, focused on becoming the most centered and fulfilled version of yourself? A kind of hustle that prioritizes inner work, understanding who you are as a person and a community member, and asks how you can bring your greatest gifts to bear on the world? That, according to sam seidel and Olatunde Sobomehin, is Creative Hustle.

Guests: sam seidel and Olatunde Sobomehin

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I think that one of the things that Tunde and I connected on very early in our, our friendship, colleagueship, was how much better we, we believe our own lives are, how much richer they are, and how much more we've been able to do in the world by being able to move between parts of our society that are often really segregated…And how can we open that up for more people? Because too often folks are, are, are just kept really separate by some of those boundaries and the walls. So how do we make those boundaries, those borders more permeable?” (6:15)
• “Capture the biggest way that you could think, right? What are my principles? What moves me? What grounds me? What am I gonna hold onto in the moments of transition, in the, in the difficult moments, the challenging moments, and the moments that are really tempting for me to kind of steer left or right, what's gonna really be my anchor?” (23:11)
• “We've just been sent from one period, to the next, to the next, year after year. And then all of a sudden we're supposed to have a framework for making these big decisions. And we're out in the world and we need to have a network. We need to know what principles are guiding our decisions. We need to have built these resilient practices. But that hasn't been asked of us up to that point really, or invited.” (30:54)

Related Episodes: 40, 37, 23,19,15, 8, 2

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Chris Lehmann worked in a school that matched his vision of education by about 75% – and that other 25%, he says, was what gave him “license to dream.” What would you dream of if you had the opportunity to design a school from scratch? The founder of Educon, the Science Leadership Academy, and Inquiry Schools talks with host Tim Fish about his quest to create a fully inquiry-driven, human-centered learning model where citizenship and science shape the direction of the school. 

Guest: Chris Lehmann

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I want their heads full of thought. I want them to have the wisdom to apply those thoughts in meaningful ways. I want them to have the passion to push through when the world tells 'em it cannot be done. And I want them to be kind because I think we need more of that in the world.” (15:49)
• “We don't give anyone else agency, right? We as human beings, you have agency because you are a human, because you are alive, as do I. Now lots of institutions in our society, school being primary among them, take away agency. But what actually we try to do is not give students agency, but help them unlock their own.” (23:10)
• “If a high school science education does not help students understand fundamentally that the way in which they live their lives, the products they buy, the kind of house they build or live in, you know, the way they use power, the car they drive, that all of these things have a profound impact on our world, right? Then you have failed children. Because the ability to apply a scientific lens to the choices we make every day as human beings is a fundamental part of being a citizen.” (26:51)

Related Episodes: 35, 32, 31, 28, 16,17, 4

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Human relationships first. Academic study and arts training are co-curricular. Environment matters. Relentlessly make space for the things that matter most. Compliance is not the same thing as magic. Process matters and so does product. These are just a few of the ideas Jason Patera is obsessed with, which he brings daily to his work as the head of the Chicago Academy for the Arts.

Guest: Jason Patera

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Pretty much all you need to do at any time to change someone's life is decide to do it. That's it, right? It's not the facilities that changes someone's life. It's not the mission statement that changes someone's life. It's not the curriculum, it's the people. Right. And most of the time, all we have to do, especially with young people, you meet them where they're at, and, and you have this power to, to help transform their entire life.” (7:02)
• “What I promise to them is that I'm never going to be some random jerk in a suit who you've only met the day you've done something bad. And you're a teenager, so you're going to do something dumb. When that happens and we have to have a conversation about it, I endeavor for that to be our 40th conversation. So as we have to navigate this thing, we're doing it based on a human relationship and not one of the title that I have or the role that you play in the school.” (19:54)
• “Most of what we think are our limits are, are illusions, for ourselves personally, and for our communities. And a habit we can get into as school leaders is to fall into the trap that school is somehow already defined, and learning is somehow already defined, and procedures are somehow already defined. And we need to figure those out and do them, when in fact we have tremendous power to just decide what it's going to be.” (41:26)

Related Episodes: 40, 36, 34, 32, 27,15, 6

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During the summer of 2023, longtime NAIS President Donna Orem retired, and new President Debra Wilson stepped into the role. In this first school year of Debra’s tenure, she sits down with Tim Fish to introduce herself to the NAIS community and share her personal journey with independent schools.

Guest: Debra Wilson

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Context really matters. There is that…do people feel known and seen? And when I, when I say that, it's not just the kids, but it's the individual staff members, it's the parents. Like, what message are they receiving all of the time? And that really leads to greater connectivity. And it tends to lead to happier encounters.” (20:18)
• “One of the things I talk about with education, we adults can mess around with us all we want. Every kid's only got one shot at it. So, you know, if they have a bad teacher placement three years in a row, they're 50% behind their peers. Like that's, I mean, that's, that's just research. Like that's, there's just numbers. And so we don't really have time to play around with this, so like, how do we hold those things really sacred?” (25:34)
• “You want good, smart, thoughtful, solid people doing good, smart, solid, thoughtful work. Bright shiny objects, like, they can, they can jump you right off the tracks...that kind of traditional, basic, not so sexy, like, we just, we're gonna do really good work day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, is what you're going for most of the time.” (36:23)

Related Episodes: 39, 31, 25, 14, 13

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Noni Thomas López, Head of School, The Gordon School 

This episode is a re-broadcast of an archival episode from our friends at the NAIS Member Voices podcast. The original episode and show notes can be found on the Member Voices Season 5 page.

In the second episode of our three-part miniseries on Cultivating Diverse and Inclusive Communities, our guest is Noni Thomas López, head of the Gordon School (RI). She talks about how becoming a more diverse and inclusive school is like peeling an onion, the importance of finding opportunity in discomfort, and why battling misinformation keeps her up at night.

Relevant Resources:

• Independent School magazine: Independent Spirit: Noni Thomas López
• NAIS New View EDU Podcast: Episode 7: Schools for Diversity and Designing Inclusive Futures
• NAIS Legal Tip: Consider Anti-Bias Handbook Policies
• Video: Equity and Inclusion: Bringing About Systemic Change from the Inside Out
• Independent Ideas Blog: The Pandemic of Misinformation
• Learn more about this episode’s sponsor, Carney, Sandoe & Associates, by visiting its website.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In four seasons of New View EDU, we’ve talked a lot about what students need to thrive. In this episode, we’re going straight to the source. Host Tim Fish sits down with Ella Cornett and Mackenzie Link, high school students from One Stone School in Boise, Idaho, to get their real world perspectives on everything from classes and schedules to life lessons on failure, accountability, passion, purpose, and more.

Guests: Ella Cornett and Mackenzie Link

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “To go back to the question of what should school be, I feel like learners and students should come out of school with that sense of purpose. And that's, that really resonates with me because I feel like that's what I want out of school. I wanna leave school and kind of know what I wanna do and who I wanna be in the world.” (21:39)
• “I would describe my stress...less so stress. I would call it ambition. Like, I think the weight of ambition sits heavy on my shoulders because I strive for the, like, the next best thing I wanna keep doing. I wanna keep going, I wanna keep pushing. And One Stone really allows me to do that and empowers me to do that.” (26:24)
• “It's that pushing students, the healthy balance of pushing students. And this is where great coaching comes in. And great mentorship is, you do have to find the thing that students care about and relate it, everything that you're doing, to that. And then we're in the home stretch.” (29:57)
• “It's easy if you let it be easy, in the sense that if you don't want to grow, if you don't try to grow, you won't. Just like a student in public school that doesn't try, they won't get a good GPA. But that's not the motivation here. The motivation here for us is to grow. So if a student doesn't want to grow, how can they?” (39:44)

Related Episodes: 36, 34, 27, 23, 18

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After a long and distinguished tenure as the President of NAIS, Donna Orem is retiring in the Spring of 2023. Throughout her career, she’s seen the independent school landscape, and education in general, change dramatically. As Donna prepares to depart NAIS, what lessons has she learned? How has her career in education changed her? What wisdom can she pass along to her successor and to everyone working in schools right now?

Guest: Donna Orem

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I think another thing that I've learned from this is that there is a role that we each have to play in a learning community, and that is assuming good intent. Because it's very easy, particularly when you get into these conversations around highly charged issues, to assume that there are two sides or three sides to the issues. And people get pitted against one another. And I have learned to step back and to say, you know what? Chances are we wanna get to the same place, but we have a different way to get there.” (7:03)
• “But I remember at some point a family writing a letter to the head of school saying, you know, we've had two children at this school and they have thrived, but we've come to the point where we can no longer afford the tuition…That was the most painful letter. And it was just so symptomatic, I think, of what families were feeling. So I hope we can get beyond that one day so that, you know, when a family has that experience, they are not forced to make that impossibly hard decision.” (19:57)
• “I think balancing all those relationships has become our biggest challenge as an organization. And, you know, how do you ensure that you see that diversity, you recognize that diversity, and you develop programs and services to meet leaders where they are? Because you know, that one size fits all just does not work anymore. I don't know that it ever did.” (35:53)

Related Episodes: 25, 20, 14, 10, 1  

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Planning for the future of our schools isn’t easy. In recent years, we’ve seen firsthand how even the best-laid plans can go badly awry, and schools have been left grappling with issues that no one could have predicted. So how can we continue to embrace strategy and future thinking in a way that allows us to not only make plans, but execute on them, in the midst of an ever-changing landscape?

Guest: Dr. Jim Honan

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “As we move forward, it's that sense of connection among team members, among various people in various roles, be it teachers or staff members, et cetera. And then creating that sense of connectivity and belonging to show people there's some common purpose in the work. So sure. Call it what you will, playing well with others or understanding what the people in your organization need to do their best work and you being attuned to that. That's a team sport.” (7:27)
• “I'm not a big fan of chasing bright shiny objects. I think the caveat in the innovation space is we're not, I told my teams this, we're not just gonna do this cuz it looks cool. That, wouldn't it be neat if we did this? It probably would be, and that would be awesome. We haven't done it before. It would be cool and neat, but on the other hand, it's not driven by some educational purpose.” (11:10)
• “Occasionally someone will say, you know, have you ever seen a mission like this? Isn't this unique? And with deep respect, the answer is, there's like ten other places who say they're doing that. So that can't be the uniqueness. I think there's this added expectation and burden, if you will, in independent schools, on the point you made, to really be crisp and clear about that. This is what's distinctive about us, and this is how we're gonna execute on it. And we have data to show that we execute on that unique, call it what you will, mission or value proposition.” (24:51)

Related Episodes: 36, 29, 25, 14, 9

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Schools are first and foremost communities of people. When we plan for the future of those communities, how can we do so in a way that takes into account the dignity of every human being? How does strategy intersect with who we are and who we aspire to be? Dr. Beth-Sarah Wright’s Dignity Lens challenges schools to look at themselves with clear eyes and identify the gap between who we say we are, and who we truly want to become.

Guest: Dr. Beth-Sarah Wright

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “People make up these communities, people do. And people have emotions. People have these gut feelings, especially around some sort of challenge they might be having as a community. You know, we have these things. That's the explosive part. It's a very sensitive part. So the adaptive challenges are, they reside in that very messy, emotional, that part of us where we are gonna experience some loss.” (6:35)
• “What is in our founding DNA? Who are we? And that is just information… We can look back on our history and we can surface all sorts of things about who we are, when we were founded, why we were founded, or what we've come to be or all of that. But all of that is important. It's nothing to be, to throw away. It's nothing to discard. It's something. All of it is important and we need to be able to parse through that.” (11:27)
• “Caught up in all of that is some sort of fear. And really at the root of that is dignity. One might feel, you know, violated. A dignity violation. But hold on. But my voice is not being heard here. Or I, I just don't understand. I don't get it. I, whatever it may be, I don't, you know. I think at the root of that is loss. And we can look at that even at a national scale. We can look at that all over. We can see it in our communities. That's part of progress, making progress.” (19:33)
• “We have lots of stories that can be told, and that's very important too. We have this level of experiences, people sharing their experiences…and then there is the sort of raw data that we can actually gather from our community. And sometimes just depending on what community we're talking with, some people might be very intimidated by getting data. Data can be overwhelming and, and scary, and sometimes what I try to say to people is, well, you know that stories are the currency for dignity.” (27:36)

Related Episodes: 32, 30, 15, 7

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No one can deny that the events of 2020 changed education in America, and arguably, worldwide. But three years after COVID closed schools, what is the actual state of our educational system? What lessons did we really learn, and what mistakes have we made? What opportunity lies ahead for transformation? Michael Horn returns to New View EDU to share the findings from his new book about education after the pandemic, From Reopen to Reinvent.

Guest: Michael Horn

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “And I did not want this to be a book that just says, oh yeah, we poorly serve low income kids, but you know Michael's mom in Montgomery County, you're okay, right? I want Michael's mom in Montgomery County to be like, oh. You mean what I thought is rigorous is not in fact rigorous? You mean what I thought is unleashing his potential is actually hurting his sense of growth mindset and not preparing him for the executive function skills that he's gonna need in the world of work, and is just causing him to sit there trying to compete on a very narrow metric of success and not figure out his purpose in life? Oh, I don't want that. And I hope everyone walks away from it and says, Wow. This is not like a ‘some’ problem. This is everyone. We can be doing better.” (14:46)
• “And then the part that I would require then comes back to where you started, which is to me the habits of success. Curiosity, executive function, agency, growth mindset, grit, perseverance, a sense of self-efficacy and self-esteem. A sense of attachment. Like those things I would say are the baseline. And I wouldn't call them social emotional learning, although that's a common phrase for them…I think some of the fights that we have in communities right now are, they're like, you know, there's truly some like weird stuff being pedaled under each of those monikers, but I don't know any parent that doesn't want their kids to be curious about the world.” (25:09)
• “We framed schools for kids as this zero sum experience. I win. I get the seat in the precious college, you lose. You don't. Or I, you know, you get the A, I got the C. We're doling out scarcity. And I want us to shift to a positive sum system where the goal is not for you to beat me on some narrow yardstick, but instead for you to be the best version of Tim Fish that there is, to be the most unique version of you that has a place to contribute in the world.” (39:58)

Related Episodes: 29, 27, 14, 10, 8, 1

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Social-emotional learning and student wellbeing are increasingly showing up as priorities for schools. But what if research could prove that looking out for the emotional components of teaching and learning aren’t just important for mental health, but actually essential for academic growth? That’s the central premise of Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s research, and she’s ready to make the case that emotions are vitally linked to our ability to learn.

Guest: Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “The whole rest of the brain, the deeper thinking, the emotion regulation, the engaging with other people, the social meaning making, the sense of self. All of these kinds of very basic systems that are fundamental to being a good human are not predicted by, or even associated with, IQ. They are predicted by this, this what we're calling transcendent thinking… So how do we get kids to think that way?” (9:50)
• “It's literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about information for which you have no emotional reason or context to engage.” (12:09)
• “We're not installing information into a person like a squirrel, like, stashing away its nuts, right? What we're doing is inviting a person to engage actively with an orchestrated set of materials and content in a way that will help facilitate them naturally coming to realize what matters there, and the power of those tools for understanding something important about ideas and the world.”  (21:12)

Related Episodes: 32, 18, 16, 5, 3

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What if offering to work on a few projects with a homeschooled student sparked the idea to partner with a school? And what if then, groups of students started asking to make that project-based learning model their entire high school experience? That’s what happened when Saeed Arida, a PhD student in the Architecture department at MIT, tried running a design studio with a handful of kids. The result was NuVu, a unique studio education model that’s catching on worldwide.

Guest: Saeed Arida

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

“I have not figured out exactly why this happens, but their expectation is that when they are working on this idea, is that you give them only the technical feedback. They don't want you to talk about the conceptual framing of the idea. My explanation for this is that, you know, in our kind of traditional schooling system, the only thing that we give the students is content. We never really talk about ideas and their ideas, and it feels very personal and vulnerable.” (8:47)

• “To assume that they're gonna, like, you know, by the end of the four years that they're gonna learn everything that is, that's being kind of taught in these textbooks, it's not gonna happen..there are a lot of studies about these subjects and like after six months, basically a lot of the kids fail on them anyway. A lot of that info is not sticking anyway. You know, so it's like, why are we committing to this idea that we need to learn all of that stuff in four years? If at the end of the day none of the, like, not, or a big part of it is not sticking.” (31:27)
• “For me, it still does not really address the central question whether this tool is ultimately helping the students or not, which is for me why we are doing-- like there, there is no reason to do any tracking or an assessment unless it becomes a really empowering tool that would help the students kind of grow.” (41:28)

Related Episodes: 31, 29, 27, 26, 21, 6

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Orly Friedman was in the fifth grade when she read the book that changed her life. The story, about a child who floundered in traditional school environments but thrived in an unconventional setting, inspired Orly to dream of opening her own non-traditional school one day. In this episode, she shares her successful journey as the founder of Red Bridge School, an innovative educational setting for young learners that centers around student agency and autonomy.

Guest: Orly Friedman

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “If you think about traditional grade levels, they are very passive for the student. So you sit in a seat for 180 days and you move on to the next grade level when you show up in September and there's basically nothing you have to do to make that happen. … And so if you want to flip that and turn it into a system that supports agency, then you need to put the promotion process in the hands of the students.” (11:49)
• “We are really teaching students how to know themselves well enough and develop the habits of self-advocacy to be successful in any environment. … And so I don't worry who their teacher will be in the future or what happens if they go to another school, because they know themselves well enough and they have enough experience going through that learning cycle and setting goals for themselves and making a plan and working through it that they're gonna be successful anywhere. And really I think that is the result of what we're doing, that we're creating more flexible learners.” (28:28)
• “I think the thing that is a bit scary also about this kind of a model is, if you are going to give students agency over their success and ownership over their success, you also have to be willing to do that for their failures. And so sometimes you have to give students enough space for them not to be successful.” (36:24)

Related Episodes: 23, 21,15,13, 3

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Trust Kids. That’s the takeaway from public school educator-turned nonprofit founder Chris McNutt, whose work at the Human Restoration Project aims to revolutionize teacher and student wellbeing. What would schools look like if we designed an educational system around trust? How could student agency and teacher creativity become pillars of a progressive, future-focused education? And how do we get there?

Guest: Chris McNutt

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “So much of teaching the teacher has become seeing teachers as technicians, right. It's become, how can I tell teachers exactly what to do and keep firm control over the sequential pace of the curriculum? And as a result, that's how many teachers see their own classrooms…many teachers and teaching curriculums look at cognitive science and they go, oh, well it says right here that if you give kids X number of questions and talk to them for X amount of time, that is like, the perfect amount of time to talk to them about this concept. Therefore, let's do that over and over again until they improve their test scores.” (14:23)
• “No one's coming to save us. That top down reforms from government organizations or from districts rarely lead to any type of solution. In fact, they often lead to more problems than they attempt to solve. For example, someone might come in and offer a new set of standards for us to look at and analyze and incorporate into our classrooms, which has happened, I felt like when I was teaching, every two years, there was some kind of new initiative to push for. And ultimately nothing changed, and it burnt a lot of people out.” (24:49)
• “If I walk into the room and think that kids are gonna try to get away with something, I'm gonna start pushing toward more carceral practices. I'm gonna ban things. I'm gonna tell kids what they can and can't do. And that's what leads us to schools where kids aren't allowed to talk in the hallway, or they're not allowed to have water bottles in classrooms, and these ridiculous things that I would never wanna subject another person to at all.” (45:08)

Related Episodes: 27, 23, 19, 11, 2022 Bonus Episode, 7

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The hottest conversation in education right now revolves around ChatGPT. What is it, how is it being used, and what does it mean for our traditional systems of teaching and learning? Season Four of New View EDU begins with a discussion about the rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence and the impact ChatGPT and other AI innovations will have on the future of schools.

Guests: Christina Lewellen and Paul Turnbull

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Where does ChatGPT show up in this conversation? Where do I show up in the conversation and what's my voice? Because schools should be about voice, right? Especially student voice. So that's the thing I like the most, we're, we're sort of keeping that North star in place, you know, what's best for students and how do we help the helpers.” (18:23)

• “I understand that a lot of schools, as they're dealing with ChatGPT, are making sure that teachers are kind of coming at it and saying, this is a tool. I am not forcing you to use it. I'm not advocating that you use it, but if you do use it, you need to understand the implications of using it. Because at the end of the day, while that account can be deleted, sort of like we all had to teach our students about social media, you know, you can delete your account, but that doesn't mean the content that you put there is gone.” (23:47)

• “This is a big change agent in our schools. it is time to take a brief moment to reflect on what that means, because rather than being afraid of what it means, I think looking at the opportunities that it brings to really weave technology into how we accomplish our missions, there's some cool opportunity, especially for the schools that have been a little hesitant to, to, you know, bring that into their world. It's time. There's not, there's no ostrich situation, head in the sand situation that's gonna let us get out of this. We, we're gonna have to think about it and be proactive.” (41:42)

Related Episodes: #28, #26, #21, #12, #7

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Schools exist to help prepare students for the future. But in a society that prides itself on equality, how can we create equitable schools that prepare students to enter a world where inclusion is crucial? And how does focusing on the wellbeing of our school communities go hand-in-hand with building inclusive environments? In this episode of New View EDU, two school heads with deep expertise in DEI work join host Tim Fish and special co-host Caroline Blackwell for a conversation about equity, wellbeing, and the future of inclusion efforts in independent schools.

Guests: Kalyan Balaven and Dr. Jessie Barrie

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We compete in speech and debate, we compete in sports. We can compete in all these different ways, but we can't compete in inclusion cuz when we compete in inclusion, that's exclusion by nature.” (6:29)

• “I think the nature of this work is so foundational to everything we're trying to accomplish, whether it's, you know, student academic outcomes, whether it's, you know, student social-emotional health and wellness throughout the day. That the only way to really effectively do equity work is to ensure that it's embedded in the foundational documents, philosophies, values of your school, and in every element of how you lens everything, from assessment to book selections, to hiring practices, to evaluation practices.” (8:41)

• “Oftentimes you'll find students at schools. You actually find them on the brochure. You'll find 'em on the website, because they represent some sort of visible diversity. And if you really interview some students…who are visual representations of difference at a school and say, Did you take full advantage of it? Did you, did you participate in that outdoor ed program? Did you go on that international trip? Did you go on the college visits and the college tours? And the answers that we get back are not the answers we wanna see. That's not inclusion. Inclusion is all those students thriving and finding a way for themselves, to see themselves in the mission of the school as achieving those things that are the promise of the school in relationship to the world they're entering.” (16:15)

• “The first definition of discriminate is to differentiate, to distinguish, to discern, to see difference between each other. Seeing difference is not a bad thing, inherently. The bad thing is when a school, and I imagine, imagine the school has a view of all the students, and in the view shared of all the students, certain students are getting lost.” (22:16)

• “We can only learn by opening our hearts and opening our ears to the experience of others and to the realization that we never will truly be able to understand the experience of others. All we can do is have the gift of someone's trust to share with us their experience, and to be able to try and listen really intently to that experience and look for the opportunities within our own biases, within our own defensive reactions for growth.” (39:53)

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Much of the work of K-12 schools is focused on getting students to the “next step,” which, for many of them, is college readiness. But increasingly, it feels like we’re not working on college readiness so much as we’re working on college admissions. Preparing kids to successfully apply to college, in the hyper-competitive admissions landscape, is almost a full-time job of its own. What should schools be doing to help students with college (and college application) readiness? When we focus on gaining admission to selective schools, what are we missing in the K-12 experience? And what do colleges actually want K-12 educators to know?

Guests: Jeff Selingo and Dr. Adam Weinberg

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “More selective institutions like Denison and others that are really trying to decide between applicants. They're looking for that difference. They're, they cherish what is rare. And increasingly, to be honest with you, what is rare are those students who are not over-curated, over-programmed. I feel like, especially because of social media now, we have to curate our lives to be perfect. And we see this manifest itself in applications.” (11:41)
• “I think there's so much about the college application process that... forces is too strong a word. That shapes the high school experience of too many students, where they're not able to do either one of those, right? They're not able to ask who they want to be because they're too busy asking, What do I need to be to get into the college of my choice? And the second is, we're so worried that if they experience any bit of failure, they won't get into good college, that we're not giving them the space to learn that actually failure's the only way to develop the kind of resiliency you're gonna need to be successful in life.” (17:41)
• “ I think this is where advising comes in and helping students understand-- and maybe this is where there's a role for K through 12, because I think every student should graduate from high school understanding what kind of learner they are. So that when they do go to college, they're making those better choices. You know, am I a better visual learner? You know, how do I read, you know, should I do online? Should I do hybrid, whatever it might be, so that when they get to college, they're making those choices in a better way.” (33:00)
• “I think one thing that we could be and should be doing with students during their junior, senior years, at least level setting expectations so they don't arrive at college assuming that everything's gonna be perfect and they're gonna be happy all the time…And don't make the mistake when you're, have that moment of unhappiness, that moment of not sure you can make it, of looking around and assuming that everybody else is doing great and you're not.” (35:28)
•  “This may be our last chance, or one of our last chances, where we have a community of people, similar in age, together in one place. And we should be preparing them, K through 12 and higher ed, for that moment afterwards, where they are going to be in communities, at school board meetings, in in, in community associations, and volunteer organizations. And they're going to have to have these very tough debates and they're gonna have to do it in person using those facts.” (43:35)

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Technology has certainly changed the face of education in recent years. In some ways, it’s even become vital to the way we “do school” – especially in times when virtual classrooms have been the only way for students and teachers to stay connected. But tech also comes with significant downsides. Digital distractions, socializing on screens,  and the sneaky costs of 24/7 connectivity are changing our brains. As educators and parents struggle to find the balance between the benefits of technology and the dark side of devices, what does the research show?

Guest: Dr. Shimi Kang

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “The problem though, with the phones and tech, other than other addictions, is this whole idea of abstinence, being away from it is impossible, because tech is embedded. It's like air. We cannot live without it. It's, and in fact, if we teach children that it's a bad thing, I feel they'll be significantly disadvantaged…I say, we are dealing with the fire of our time. There was a moment when our ancestors learned to harness the power of fire. Those who did it well went further and farther than ever before. Those who didn't got burnt and burnt down the village. And that's exactly where we are with tech.” (11:26)
• “I don't know any 12 year old, Tim, or any 14 year old, that can check Snapchat or Instagram in the hallway and then walk into a math or chemistry class and focus. There's just no way that the brain can switch like that. So all these amazing teachers and this great curriculum is gonna be delivered to distracted kids if we don't get the phones out of the hallways, outta the lunch rooms.” (18:10)
• “Sitting is the new smoking. Kids are sitting a really long time. Even this crouched posture that we see all over our schools over a laptop or phone, that's a very stressful posture. That flexion of the spine. Our nervous system is like, why are you crouching in a cave? Is there a hurricane? Is there a predator? And it'll fire cortisol, the stress hormone, just based on that crouched posture that we're seeing everywhere.” (27:06)
• “When you see the idea of scrolling, the attention span is changing in less than a second, right? And the max we're kind of seeing attention being held is like three seconds. So that in itself, our brain is having to reprocess that…Even the YouTube video, if you're watching the same video, it's extremely fast paced. You know, these tubers are talking fast. They have imaging coming in, there's popups happening. So the distraction. And that's where we're seeing poor difficulty with focus, with concentration. Kids can't sustain it.” (32:12)
• “Conspiracy theories and extreme views are actually flight behaviors, right? I'm gonna think about how the world is flat, not what's happening in my household or, or how I'm gonna deal with this stress. So when we're stressed, when our children are sleep deprived because they're in too many activities, or it's, you know, they have to write their SATs or whatever it is, you know, we're stressing them out in whatever way, or they're on their devices too much, they're just cycling through anxiety, irritability, and distraction. And so many kids are cycling through that constantly.” (41:11)

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As the world continues to rapidly evolve, so do the skills students need to be successful in the future. Educational models that revolve around seat time, content memorization, and age-based pacing are starting to fade into the past. But what should replace them? One idea that’s gaining traction is the concept of mastery. On this episode of New View EDU, Julia Griffin joins host Tim Fish to share how she and a team of innovative educators have launched the Mastery School at Hawken – an alternative learning experience within a well-established independent high school.

Guest: Julia Griffin

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “A system organizes itself around the highest goal. And that highest goal, in what I'll call traditional school, is really that everybody learns the same things at about the same time. And as a Mastery learning School, what we've taken as our goal, our highest goal is maximizing the individual growth of every student. And when you take that as your goal, then the systems that you end up building look really different.” (2:48)
• “What we find is that students, and anyone who's worked with high school students knows this to be true, students know when something is real and when something has been invented by the teacher. They can, like, smell the difference from a mile away.” (8:19)
• “I'm someone who's been in schools for my whole career, for people who come through schools in their whole career, there really is this phenomenon of the traditional school muscle memory that you have to fight against. Because the rhythms of teaching, if you've been teaching for a while, there are things that you mostly subconsciously have very likely learned how to do, that are kind of wrapped around the traditional paradigm that we were talking about before. And so it really does require kind of radical humility and openness and interest in learning how to do something different.” (15:47)
• “Because we weren't just, you know, expanding and adding a campus, but we were really trying to build a new model of school and wanted to say that, part of what's really challenging there is, if you're building a new model, by implication, whether you say it or not, you think that there's something that could be improved about the old model. And that's actually kind of a little bit of a daring thing to say.” (33:49)
• “I think that young people are capable of so much more than school tends to give them credit for. They're ready. You know, high school students are ready to, they're ready to be working on things that are real. They're ready to do things and see them actually get implemented and make an impact. And man, designing a school and figuring out how to build a school that can center that is really hard. And there's a lot that we haven't figured out yet. But that to me is like, the school that young people deserve.” (43:47)

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After COVID forced schools all over the world to dive headlong into experiments with online learning, most educators are delighted to have the chance to return to in-person classrooms. But what if the answer to a number of challenges in education – equity, access, student agency, efficiency – actually lies in going more deeply into the virtual realm? The founder of the world’s first Virtual Reality Charter School believes that may be the way forward for schools.

Guest: Adam Mangana

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “I really wanna make ambulatory learning great again…Here's my crazy idea. I think two of the greatest teachers that have ever lived on earth, Socrates and Jesus, they neither read nor wrote, right? They didn't know how to read. They didn't know how to write, but yet they are revered as two of our greatest teachers.” (6:40)
• “Alexander would not have been great if it weren't for Aristotle walking alongside him.” (11:34)
• “You can literally enter the avatar of somebody that has a completely different skin complexion, different life story, and be perceived in that simulation as that person. So you're walking a mile in someone else's avatar and you're able to perceive the world from their perspective.” (16:56)
• “The negative externality is, as people are winning in this new web three space, if we don't provide access, you're gonna see, I think, rises in fundamentalism. And you see this in every industrial Revolution. Right? If you look at, we're in a fourth industrial revolution, if you track every industrial revolution, you have people who respond-- for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction-- you have people who respond in the opposite direction. So it's critical to me, as we're thinking about how this is evolving, that access is at the front of our minds.” (21:37)
• “There's gonna be a tri-brid deal where you're gonna start to see schools partnering together and capturing families that are moving around the world and having a world class education. And I think part of that bridge between the physical geography will be this virtual, immersive virtual campus that they can touch while they're in that space.” (30:32)
• “We lost a generation of children. Some, we don't even know where they are. Others, we've seen rises in mental health issues…I mentioned Aristotle and Alexander the Great. The relationship is at the center. And if we can create that relationship and that sense of connection and accountability with our students and with our teacher, I think that will allow for teachers to be valued again in our society.” (41:43)

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As our schools and communities have undergone swift and often unpredictable transformations in recent years, leadership has also changed. What worked before may not be what schools need now. Our ideas about the characteristics of leadership, who owns the title of “leader,” and how leadership gets distributed are evolving rapidly to keep up with a culture of constant change. What does it mean to be the kind of leader who can adapt and build strong schools now and into the future?

Guests: Nicole Furlonge and Donna Orem

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “Leadership is not necessarily a specific role. It's not specifically a way of being, it's really being authentic about what your purpose is, having a vision that takes you there, and really bringing other people along with you. And I don't think that leadership is positional in the way that historically we've seen it, because in any type of organization or even any kind of community, different people can be leaders at different times, and we need different people to be leaders at different times.” (6:00)
• “I think parents, in engaging in education, are trying to find this polarity between protecting their children and preparing their children. And I think it is creating some difficulties today, because obviously as parents, we wanna protect our children, but we also have to prepare them for a world that is much different than when we were children. Understanding that polarity is not a choice. It's a both and. We have to both protect children, and we have to prepare them at the same time.” (14:29)
• “What I saw COVID do and what I saw COVID call on leaders to do, is to really think about how is that community bigger than the people that walk through your doors every day? How is it bigger, even, than the alumni who still call you their Alma mater, your, their home, their learning, their learning home?” (20:24)
• “I do think that there was a need…for leaders to think about how they could find in their school communities, those spaces that they could rely on, that they could trust to sort of engage in that deep leadership that we were just talking about earlier. That you didn't have to be a solo leader and that other people could lead. So whether it was, you know, the teacher that was getting on zoom and being the face of the school in our students' homes or, you know, when we come back to schools, the ways in which we recognize that everyone at every level of the school is, is a leader and touches the lives of students as they learn.” (27:16)
• “But if they can also then demonstrate and model what it looks like to lead through listening, then that becomes something that the whole community understands they have permission to do. To tune in, to pay attention, to be present, so that we understand both what our strengths are, and I think this is even more important, that we understand where our growth edges are. Cause I do think the propensity is to highlight what our strengths are at the expense of being able to grow in different ways.” (33:03)

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In an increasingly connected world, what can school leaders learn from their counterparts across the globe? The events of the past few years have affected schools in every country, not just the U.S., and highlighted the fact that when it comes to our hopes, dreams, and challenges in education, we’re probably more alike than we are different from one another. On this episode of New View EDU, two dynamic leaders from the international independent school community share their perspectives on the past, present, and future of our schools.

Guests: Kelly Borg and Maddy Hewitt

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “We've learned that we can work at pace, and that perfect is the enemy of good. Is that the saying? You know, where, where we go okay, well, it's not quite right, but we've gotta do it by tomorrow. So we're gonna do it like this. And so having the confidence to say, you know what, it's not laminated, it's not framed with a purple border. It's not, it's not beautiful. In fact, it's not even close to pretty, but we are gonna do it. And it will work.” (17:54)
• “You know, repurposing education at this time, ensuring the education is fit for purpose, which is always to ensure human flourishing and human development. It's, that's been forever, but we're no longer living in the industrial age. We're living in the post industrial age where we're no longer building a society for consuming things. We're building a society for preserving and sustaining and regenerating things.” (22:11)
• “We've had such massive interruption to our ways of life and the opportunity to reflect on that move from education as serving a really pragmatic, even economic purpose, to being fundamentally intrinsic, you know, being about human fulfillment. We've only gotta look around the world to see that so many of the issues we're facing right now in this moment, they require international cooperation.” (25:25)
• “We need to weave into a modern learning design, to modern curriculums, we need to weave in those other pieces that are going to allow students to flourish. And that includes social emotional awareness. And that includes inclusion and understanding intercultural realities and working for a culture where there is belonging for all on the planet, because we are interconnected and we all need to flourish in order for the planet to flourish and for, you know, humans to develop well and also to have economies that flourish, and there need to be new regenerative economies.” (32:30)
• “I really hope that education continues to traverse down this path of getting back to its intrinsic purpose around human fulfillment, around wellbeing, and that we continue to move away from this focus on how good is this student, to how is this student good?” (46:14)

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What would school look like if we designed education based on the belief that every child is a genius who can change the world? What if we put learning into the hands of the student instead of the teacher? What if our instructional models included less “instruction” and more time guiding kids to finding their own answers and inspirations? These are just some of the starting points for today’s discussion, and for the work that Tyler Thigpen does on a daily basis.

Guest: Tyler Thigpen

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “We believe that there's a connection between developing strong character and, you know, being able to shoulder the responsibility for your own learning. And so, you know, there, the learners are given opportunities to make rules and to learn how to follow those and to hold one another accountable and responsible for those rules and in doing so, you know, practice good, strong character.” (8:25)
• “You know, wherever there's something that teachers or adults have typically done in a school setting that we think learners can do, you know, we'll step back and we'll let them do it. And it will take a while and it will be messy, but it's, you know, what neuroscientists call productive struggle. That's really missing from a lot of teacher-led classrooms in our country today.” (12:16)
• “And of course they have so much choice and they have to experience the natural consequences of those choices. And that's very powerful. I mean, them experiencing the natural consequences, positive or negative, of their choices is maybe the most powerful instructor, you know, in the building. It, you know, the more so than what any caring adult, you know, provides for them.” (15:19)
• “We are sort of agnostic to how fast or slow they're going. That's one of the beautiful things about a self-paced environment. You can go as fast or slow as you want. We typically find learners go faster on average, and most of our learners do, you know, are above grade level, you know, as evidenced by norm referenced tests nationally, but we're okay with 'em going slow too. Cause sometimes that's okay. And, hopefully, that kind of environment that embraces that being behind, being on track, being ahead, whatever, you know, helps them flourish a little bit more. And appreciates the unique differences of every young person.” (20:13)
• “I think a real great critique of self-directed learning, if you don't know anything about it, you just hear the idea. It's like, oh, that's, that's pretty self-centered for kids. It's like, oh, just let them do whatever they want to do…And so we included a definition of self-directed learning that has young people on the hook for the other. For helping others, for finding a calling, you know that will in fact change their communities and change the world.” (37:58)

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Since the beginning of the New View EDU podcast, we’ve been asking guests to help us answer the question: “What is the purpose of education?” Now we’re expanding our search for answers into the realm of higher education. What’s the purpose of college? Is it just to get a foot in the door of a competitive job market, or is there something greater to be gained from higher ed? 

Guest: Wendy Fischman

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “We devised a concept, a new concept, called higher education capital. And as you said, this is what we believe should be the goal of college for students, is to build and amplify higher education capital. Briefly, higher education capital is the ability to attend, analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate on important issues. So it's what you used in planning for and facilitating this podcast. It's what I used in preparing for the questions that I thought you were going to ask me…that’s what we call higher education capital.” (6:47)
• “We hope and expect that students who go to college will have the opportunity to develop and increase their own HED cap. And actually, students and parents should demand it. That's what they should be choosing colleges on. That's what they should be asking about. Rather than tout dining halls and schools' private islands, we wish that schools would promote their ability to increase HED cap.” (10:17)
• “Just a word about mental health on the college campus. While some students did talk about severe issues, including bipolar disorder or suicide or major depression, the majority of students talked about mental health issues as they relate to performing well, doing well, getting A's, and the anxiety about not performing and compiling the best possible profile when they graduate in order to get the job.” (24:26)
• “Today high school has become more of an exercise about preparing students to get into college, rather than preparing them for the college experience…We need to find ways in the high school experience and even maybe earlier, to incorporate these kinds of essential questions in our conversations with students, and also in our college counseling, so that they don't just form this very transactional view about college.” (31:13)
• “I think at early stages, we should be helping students to understand that their goal is not about getting into the most selective college, because sometimes it may not make a difference. It's about finding the college that speaks to the student's goals, what they wanna get out of it.” (34:26)

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What if Elon Musk approached you one day and asked you to create a school? How would you approach the design of a radically different educational environment founded in the shadow of SpaceX and intended to provide deeper learning for the children of some of the most innovative thinkers in the world? That was the starting point for Josh Dahn.

Guest: Josh Dahn

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “Kindness is actually the word that we lead with. Like, we are always looking for just kind kids…We really wanna ground it in, in kindness and your ability to work well with others. I mean, the phrase we use in Synthesis is super collaborators. That's really the thing that we've always been looking for. Someone who is, yeah, there's your own individual path, but you make other people better and are, are interested in other people and wanna bring out their voices, not just your own.” (11:03)
• “I have to say, I'm not always disciplined on this message because sometimes I get carried away when you start thinking about, really, a bad time that a lot of kids have in school in the name of things that frankly, I don't think in the light of day, you can justify. Like how we spend time with kids. I think there are some things that are absolutely unacceptable.” (28:43)
• “The north star is how does this help us create a generation or cultivate a generation of super collaborators? Like how can we imbue in these kids something that we ourselves did not get and probably still now do not have, which is the ability to sort of surrender yourself to a team and to be authentic in who you are, and vulnerable, but also strong and in like what you believe? And I think part of that is through reflection and it's a really hard thing to do.” (34:26)
• “When it comes to education, I think a lot of people tend to want the same thing. I, I don't think that many people going, you know, thinking about their education that they went through are like, I want a carbon copy of that thing. What, you know, whether that's the horrors of middle school or the, you know, long days of geometry or whatever that is. I think that we all are, are sort of predisposed to openness, to something a bit different…I mean, we've done a class at Astra Nova over the years in magic. Oh, not because I think this is Hogwarts, but because I think it's interesting to question the assumption that because a class is called, I don't know, chemistry, that therefore, that thing is inherently more valuable than some other experience for the development of a child.” (39:10)

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You can learn more about Member Voices and access related NAIS resources from each episode by visiting nais.org/membervoices. You can also keep an eye on that page for new podcast episodes, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to automatically receive a new podcast episode in your feed each month. 

Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for the next season of New View EDU, coming in Fall 2022!

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We often focus on the student experience in our schools, which is a critical issue needing constant attention. But our school communities also include adults—the faculty and staff who work to make the student experience worthwhile. With the post-pandemic workforce shifting dramatically in all sectors, what can school leaders learn about transforming systems and practices to retain excellent teachers? How can we model leadership that supports and centers the well-being of faculty and staff? And how can we ensure that our schools are desirable workplaces where professionals can thrive and feel valued?

Guests: Crissy Caceres, Brett Jacobsen, Doreen Kelly

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “I think it will force our industry to create great clarity around our why. We're not able to be all things to all people. And I think the clearer we are with our missions, we'll have great clarity about who chooses to work in our environment, who chooses to study in our environment.” (10:19)
• “So rather than have an assumptive stance of what we believe to be true, I think that our leadership has to center ourselves with humility, to understand that we haven't had all of the right answers. And that perhaps, by the continuation of existing practices and systems, we have actually enabled a culture that hasn't optimized what healthy and whole existence in our schools look like. But our colleagues know the answers. And so I believe that this is a matter of connectivity. An honest reflection about not just what we've done well, but quite critically, what we have not.” (12:32)
• “We say we honor the worth and integrity of every individual in a variety of phrases in our mission. And so this moment that we're facing now is about going beyond our aspiration and acting upon the very things that cause families to invest resources and time into partnering in the world of parenting with their children and our schools. And so it's time to face the commitment that we have made all along and consider the ways in which we have to rethink the way that we've acted upon those missions.” (27:35)
• “The students are watching. All of the time. What a worthy call as leaders to care deeply about the people who…are truly at mission central, focused in on the kid. It is gifted work to be focused in on the people who are focusing on the kids as well.” (27:41)
• “You don't rise to your goals. You fall to your systems, whether those systems be good or bad, you're going to fall to those systems. And so what systems are we falling to? And that part of that is how healthy is your team and how aligned is your team.” (31:09)
• “Bridges have been essential to the modern world. They have helped define us. Bridges are connectors. They deal with proximity, where we become more proximate to each other because the bridge has been built. … What voices are we not hearing from? Bridges allow us to do that. And yet bridges have guard rails. Because they protect us. They help us make hopefully wiser decisions…we need more bridge builders.” (48:18)

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We’re all familiar with the stories of people who became wildly successful after failing dozens of times to reach their goals. But what if those “inspirational” failure stories are the wrong ones to share? What if we’re defining success and failure the wrong way to begin with? And how do our own expectations of how things “should” be influence our perceptions of what learning, growth, and success actually look like?

Guest: Laura McBain

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “And I think the purpose now is actually education … should be the thing that allows every person in this world to not only be a part of the world, but shape the world in which they want to live in, which means designing new career paths, new industries, and really allowing them to see, to be fully, fully realized as an individual, as a human and as a contributor to society.” (3:27)
• “We don't teach them how to learn through failure. Because we're so focused on getting the outcome, the grade, the project right, that we don't just sit with the moments of those, what we call those favorite moments of failure, which are the ones that changed you. They may not be the one that got that next job where they made you become the startup of that big company … but they have changed you. And they changed your DNA, the fabric of who you are and how you approach the world. They show up as an integrated part of your own humanity.” (9:32)
• “Students have textbooks that give them the answers. They can Google the answers. Like there's, nationally, no new content that they're actually trying to learn, essentially, that's not actually already out there. They're expected. This is why we see massive cheating scandals. We see students disengaging in textbooks. We see people looking up the answers in the back of the book, because they're expecting the right answer. And that right answer already exists. The answer's already there. So there's nothing, there's no new learning there, I think.” (17:44)
• “I don't believe you can separate content from emotions. We are emotional human beings. So the idea that feeling and learning are actually quite separate, if I don't feel a lot of how I'm learning, is actually not true. We get excited … we get really passionate. We're laughing. We're alert. That's an emotion. And so how do we have a space in our classrooms to just have students express their emotions, not just from a mental health perspective, which is important, but also how do they feel about the content they're learning?” (23:56)
• “You and I, as adults, if we were asked to do the same thing over and over and over again and persist through it, and it didn't unlock any interest or curiosity in us, you and I would say … no, I'm not doing that. And then we wonder why our young people are disengaged or … act up in classrooms. Their curiosity is being stamped out. And then we get mad at them for actually not doing the thing, but we're asking them to do something that probably could feel like torture, you know?” (38:19)

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Schools are workplaces – not only for students, but for the faculty and staff who provide the learning environment in a school community. Are we truly designing our schools to be great workplaces for everyone? What does research about neuroscience and the human experience teach us about the qualities of truly productive, inclusive, desirable places to work and learn? And do we truly understand what it means to bring equity to a community through the way we design our environments, systems and policies for the benefit of all?

Guest: Camille Inge

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “Feeling respected, feeling that you're trusted, that you have the ability to make choices, that you can take on creative pursuits, that you can have a voice that you can feel like you matter and have a sense of self in that place. And then that they're flexible. And agile, you know, that we can keep up with the pace of change, that we can listen, learn, adapt in a timely manner. So integrity, diversity, inclusion and empowerment, flexibility.” (10:17)
• “I mean, downtime is something that we're talking about a lot now, as something that we've neglected and that's so core to us being able to regenerate and be able to refuel, is this intentional creation of space where there's no goal. To just be able to mind wander and just be. I mean, it's relatively mindful. And we don't have a lot of space for that and it's negatively stigmatized, but in a place like kindergarten, it seems quite core to it…those things should be maintained throughout the whole human experience.” (13:34)
• “Likely if we're not actively including, we're probably accidentally excluding, cause it's a lot easier to go about our daily lives focused from a first person perspective rather than considering the perspectives of others, that platinum rule.” (38:53)
• “And at least thinking at the highest level of abstraction, do we, do we believe in the same things? Do we want the best for our students? Yes, of course. That's common ground. How do we get there? We might differ on that, but at least we can agree, yes, we want the best for our students, for our community. And starting there can be a really inclusive behavior before assuming that someone has ill intentions. We all probably would say we have the best intentions. So let's give each other the benefit of the doubt as well and work from there.” (40:44)

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What if each of us believed we had the power to make change happen in civic life—and felt we had the responsibility to try? That’s the premise behind Eric Liu’s Citizen University, and the starting point for this New View EDU discussion on power literacy, changemaking, and civic agency in schools. How did the study of “civics” become a boring, drill-and-kill topic? When and why did we stop treating civic literacy as a relevant, necessary skill for students to learn? And how can we reclaim a sense of civic responsibility, citizenship, and future agency in our school communities?

Guest: Eric Liu

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “And as I've said in many contexts, power is like fire or physics. It just is. It’s there. And though it can be put to bad uses, that fact doesn't absolve us of the responsibility to think of what good uses it could be put to.” (3:22)
• “You know, the purpose of schooling is not just to create good workers or good employees or people who can compete in the global economy as, as has become the dominant refrain of justification for schooling and especially public schooling. But fundamentally it is to create citizens, people capable of self-government. And that was certainly the case for universal compulsory public education.” (7:16)
• “If you want to teach civics, you have to teach the arguments. You have to show young people the ways in which, from the beginning and to this day, we are perpetually contesting several sets of tensions, between Liberty and equality, between a strong national government and local control, between federalism and anti federalism, between the Pluribus part of our national motto and the Unum part of our national motto. Right? And these tensions are never meant to be resolved finally, one direction or the other…The tension that we are always in is the argument. And the point of American civic life isn't right now to have fewer arguments, it's to have less stupid ones.” (20:23)
• “Education is not all critical thinking and SEL. You got to have some raw material about which you are thinking critically. And we have to have some common facts around which we can have emotional intelligence, right? And I think schools, public and private over the last two generations, have failed our country, have failed our democratic experiment, in providing that core knowledge.” (34:09)

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What’s the difference between educating students for the future, and simply “doing school?” Are we designing school communities that foster the development of better adults, or are we clinging to old ideas about content and rigor that no longer serve us well? And what role do parental expectations, higher ed, and societal pressure play in the decisions we make about how schools function?

Guest: Denise Pope

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “Rigor is not the same thing as load…What I see with schools, it's exactly what you're seeing. They say, academic excellence, academic excellence. That's what our parents are sending their kids here for. And that's what we say we're going to promote. And academic excellence can very much be in the definition that, that you and I just set out, around critical thinking, around the skills they need, around teamwork, around cooperation, around weighing really challenging issues. And they need to see that that is not just piling on more stuff. And it's not the traditional way that they've been teaching, which is scary. Change is scary.” (10:10)
• “We're hearing I want my kid to be happy. I want them to be healthy. I want them to be fulfilled. I want them to go on to, you know, be independent and go to college and get a job. And what they say they want for success is not necessarily translated to their kids. So when we ask the kids how they define success, it's often money, grades, test scores, college, popularity.” (16:47)
• “The parents have to do their jobs, but the school has to do their job too. And that's one of the main things we talk to schools about. Less is more. What's going on with your schedule, what's going on with your homework policy. What's going on with the fact that they have to take so many classes at a time, or so many advanced placement or honors things happening at the time, right? Less is more.” (25:34)
• “You've got to fix the relationships happening at school first and foremost. You've got to make sure that kids are sleeping, that they have room for mental health, that they are not going, you know, 24-7 like chickens with their heads cut off. And then when you've created that space of belonging and health and safety, let's go to the next step on Maslow's hierarchy.” (39:09)

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After the many challenges of the past two years, how healthy are our school communities? How attuned are we to the lessons we can learn from the people and influences around us? How can we approach learning with gentleness, curiosity, care, and a sense of wonder? And what do mushrooms have to do with any of it?

Guest: Michelle King

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

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In This Episode:

• “Winter is the hardening of the ground. So this is a time of reflection. This is a time of restoration. This is the time of withdrawal. In our culture, we treat everything like spring, go, go, go, grow, grow, grow. But you don't get the incredible brilliance of the flowers of spring without the hardening of the ground in winter.“ (3:59)
• “And I think about students who taught me so many life lessons, who are, who also had a sense of wonder, but they, these things can not be quantified or contained on a standardized test, but that wasn't a standardized being. That was a very complex and beautiful being that showed me the world.” (14:38)
• “How many spaces do you walk in, and you're like, as you're more than enough as you are? You know, a lot of times we come into spaces and it's like, especially teacher PD, is oriented around the idea that you don't have enough. You're not enough.” (20:19)
• “I remember reading a piece years ago that said busy-ness is another form of laziness. And I was like, what? I'm American. Busy is a currency, you know? But what's called for is connection, real connection. And to have that kind of connection requires trust. Trust, community, all these things are living concepts. They are not like, okay, we got trust in, you know, on Wednesday. And we're good for the rest of our lives. It is a living entity, just like community is a living entity.” (23:50)
• “I think one of the things as humans that we really want to be is to be seen. And another way to say that is to be loved. Is to be seen in our full complexity. I think that's when we come alive, I think we can inspire and teach people from that place of being fully seen.” (28:17)
• “We all have a part of stardust. And you think like, look at that. That's amazing. That being over there, even as complicated and challenging as they might be in this moment, that's a wonder. And I think to have that kind of a delight, and if we can't find it, I feel like we are not doing right, what it means to be lovers of life.” (38:09)

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Independent schools are inherently mission-driven. What would happen if we focused on becoming purpose-driven instead? How would we define our purpose, and how could we allow our schools and our communities to be changed through purpose-driven leadership? What challenges could we meet, and how would our schools be positioned to positively impact the future of society?

Guests: John Gulla and Donna Orem

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

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In This Episode:

• “Once we do start to talk, we realize there is a lot that we don't know about each other. I also think compounding this, and there's been a lot of research on this, is that probably for the last 40 to 50 years, trust in core institutions has been declining. And that's not just education, but it's all the core institutions that make up the fabric of our society.” (10:44)
• “Schools—meaning really elementary, secondary, college, universities—are often the places where we come into the most intimate connection with those who are unlike us. And it's a result of that otherness, that lack of familiarity that causes the disagreements that, I regret, in today's world seem to require, on the behalf of all sides, success defined only as winning the argument and not in coming to a deeper understanding of how others might think.” (14:03)
• “Of the literally thousands and thousands of teachers I've had conversations with on behalf of the foundation, I don't know anyone who went into the profession so that they could make a more effective widget for the global capitalist system. That's just not what I think motivates people at their core.” (19:49)
• “I think that we've had for too long this industrial model of education with children progressing through schools in age cohorts, in quanta of classes, taught the same material from often the same text by a single teacher, without the differentiation that can come as schools reconceive the way in which they will go about this work. And part of what's necessary, if my dream for education were to come to fruition, would be, you know, 10,000 different flowers blooming of different types of schools, that will ultimately make it a lot more difficult for parents to define in their terms, the right school for their child, because it will require them to really know who their children are to decide what is the right school for their child.”  (26:18)
• “I think as we also know through brain research, the connections between mental health and physical health and academic outcomes, you know, that we create schools where mental and physical health are really at the center of what we do, that we understand where children and adults are situated, and we understand very specifically what each one of them needs to be whole mentally, to be whole physically. Because I think once we are able to do that, you know, we are taking those rocks out of the way for students and adults to achieve anything. But we have the means now to do that, I think we have more of the understanding to do that.” (35:53)

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We’re used to working and teaching in hierarchical structures, where power flows from the top down. But what would happen if, instead of maintaining power at the top, leaders gave power away to others? How could sharing power change the way we work, the way we relate to others, and the way we approach problem-solving? And what would schools look like if everyone was part of a constellation of contributors?

Guest: Matthew Barzun

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “The problem with power sharing is it, because so much of us are in this pyramid mindset, it's sort of like, well, if I have 10 units and we share it, I guess I'll have five and you have five now. But what all these amazing leaders who inspired me realized was no, no, no, power isn't a finite thing, like something you mine in Western or Eastern Kentucky, like coal. It is something, it is infinite, and you make it. And you make it with other people sitting around a table, virtual or real. And it all begins with giving away power.” (14:28)
• “Diversity and division. They have the same root, ‘div’. So what they love most and fear most has something to do with separateness. And so that, you know, now we see where it ends with the constellation. I was like, so they want to stand out as an individual like me, but they don't want to stand out so much that they're lonely. Right? So they want to stand out and fit in. And then I was like, boy, do we have a good image for that in the form of a constellation. Stand out, be special and form something special to you. Easy to say, hard to do.” (30:57)
• “We want freedom together. And not some mushy compromise, right? Half freedom, half together. Freedom with and through one another…the hard part was how could we figure out how to be free together? Thirteen separate colonies. And we did a constitution and we, you know what I mean, all that kind of stuff. And we had a motto for it: From Many One. And we had an image that was supposed to go⁠—remember, he named that ship the USS Constellation. We had an image that's supposed to go with that motto.” (43:37)
• “It cannot be isolated to the teacher or to the student or to the comedian or to the thing. It's this mutuality, it's this interdependence. It's the invisible. When someone shows you Orion's Belt, right? The lines aren't there, you have to imagine them. And then once you've seen them, you can't unsee them. And so that, I think, is what's going on here, that if we can find those connections, pass them onto the next generation, they will be alive and not be able to unsee them and be able to build useful, much more powerful things together than we could on our own.” (47:25)

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We know what it means to teach history. But what does it mean to teach the future? Ruth Wylie applies imagination and critical thinking to big questions about science, technology, artificial intelligence, and what it means to shape the futures we want to see.

Guest: Ruth Wylie

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

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In This Episode:

• “I think that even, you know, at maybe the most basic, but also perhaps some of the most profound, is to start to think about how to get futures thinking and foresight anticipation into our K-12 curriculum. So starting to encourage our young people to think about what are possible futures for themselves, but also getting away from the individual level and looking about what are possible futures for our communities, for our countries, for our world.” (5:44)
• “So when we're talking about futures, it's also about reflecting on our histories, our past, the indigenous knowledge. It's reflecting on what's happening today. And then it's about thinking about futures. So again, it's not about just creating a brand new course and hiring brand new teachers, but it's about creating a culture of futures thinking and embedding that into our everyday classroom practice.” (8:29)
• “And so we need to also be thinking about how we're building technologies to address equity, to address people across different lifespans, different spectrums. And I think it's really important again, that if we're going to be making decisions that have larger community, global, national impacts, we need to make sure that people from all of those different spheres are at the table when designing those technologies and thinking about the implications.” (18:50)
• “Agency is a construct that we talk a lot about at the center, and about how do we develop agency and shift that mindset away from ‘the future is going to be unveiled at the next press conference or it's being done by folks in white lab coats,’ and we really take and empower people to realize that they have agency over their future.” (27:48)

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Societies depend on our ability to “play well together.” That concept is at the heart of Jill Vialet’s revolutionary work. But at a time when there are so many perceived threats to our well-being from external forces, how can we convince leaders of the importance of play? And what unique value does play bring to our schools and communities?

Guest: Jill Vialet

Resources and Expanded Show Notes

Full Transcript

In This Episode:

• “We're not totally comfortable with silly. We are a culture that, you know, in many ways, still very much buys into sort of the Horatio Alger myth about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and, you know, it's diligence and hard work that's going to overcome obstacles..I just think teachers and people in schools are in a really difficult position.” (6:04)
• “I think one of the things that play tells us over and over again is, given the right sort of stepping stones to achieve that, kids are capable of quite rigorous negotiation and compromise and insight around how to take care of each other. So often, I would say, better than their adult counterparts.” (16:25)
• “I think our kids are amazing. And, and they are capable of so much and we need them so desperately to find their own agency and leadership. Like the very future of our planet is, is depending on their ability to do a better job than we have done. And so I feel like trust your gut, they can do it.” (19:45)
• “ I think American democracy has always been an experiment. Some aspects maybe need to be rethought. We've gotten a little sclerotic in our willingness to be innovative in democracy. But again, a playfulness, a willingness to experiment, a sort of-- an openness to tapping creativity and how we do it. Like, and again, it's like, think about, if you are an educator listening, about the kids. If you think about kids playing, their ability to self handicap, like Jill and Tim, you switch sides. Like that's a pretty nuanced human interaction. Or like, Ooh, this rule is not working. Let's, let's change it up so that, like, this is the boundary instead. Like that spontaneous sort of re-imagining of how we work together, that's what's needed for us to navigate this moment.” (24:38)
• “I guess I'm hoping that we come to recognize that actually the education of our youngest citizens is foundational to our ability to navigate the current challenges we seek, whether that's climate or misinformation or all the myriad things that are worrisome in this moment. That ultimately educating our young people well, it's, it's the only hope that we will actually address any of these challenges. But to do that, you need humans who are cared for as well.” (34:25)

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What is the goal of modern education, and are we designing our schools and practices properly to help us meet that goal? That’s the central question of this episode with Jay McTighe, who provides a detailed road map to help educators navigate the answers. What should a school’s mission statement actually include? What is the most productive and meaningful structure for “professional development” days? And what are we missing when we focus on covering content instead of designing our classrooms for deeper learning?

Guest: JayMcTighe

Resource List:

• Jay’s website: Follow his work and keep up with Jay’s latest news and thought leadership. 
• Understanding by Design: Delve into the framework Jay developed with Grant Wiggins to help provide a planning process and structure for schools.
• Books by Jay: Add Jay’s published works to your reading list.
• Jay’s articles on ACSD: Read Jay’s writings on topics like “For School Leaders, Reviewing Isolated Lessons isn’t Enough,” “Assessing Deeper Learning After a Year of Change,” and more.
• What is Understanding by Design? Watch a video interview with Jay as he breaks down the key concepts of the framework.
• A Conversation on Assessment: Jay joins Carol Ann Tomlinson and Dylan Wiliam for a recorded webinar on assessment practices.

Full Transcript

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This episode shares the story of Logan Bowlds, Head of School at Stratford Academy, who talks about what it was like to be appointed head of school at age 29, how he got to this point in his career so quickly, and how he finds balance with two young kids at home.

The episode was released July 1, 2019, when Logan was a brand new head of school. Member Voices also recently aired a 3-episode miniseries taking a closer look at the transition to headship.

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Guests: Ashley Harper, Wakefield School; Lisa Waller, Berkeley Carroll School; Luthern Williams, New Roads School

Resource List:

Wakefield School: Learn more about Ashley’s school community in The Plains, VA.

Berkeley Carroll School: Explore Lisa Waller’s school community in Brooklyn, NY.

New Roads School: Get acquainted with Luthern’s school community in Santa Monica, CA.

Entry on New Roads’ Innovation on Hundred.org: Take a deeper dive into the innovative practices supporting the liberation of human potential at New Roads.

In This Episode:

“If I was to center education around three principles in the future, it needs to center on knowing yourself, seeking to understand others, and finding your purpose. I think those are the three most important elements of education.” (5:12)

“And so for me, I think the role of education has to be now foundationally to provide a foundation for well-being—and, you know, as the basis for liberating human potential, in all of its forms, and helping the kids understand how to function in a variety of contexts. And sometimes when they don't have the skill, to create the skill, that they need to improve upon our condition and to serve the common good.” (9:08)

“I always say in a school, there is no one who is not an educator. Everyone in the school is an educator, and that's the sort of position and posture that everyone should take.” (17:57)

“When the pandemic hit, we were doing all of this work, and good work, and we were moving forward and I was proud of what we were doing, but I felt like in many ways we were taking very incremental moves. And something bold had happened and incremental moves weren't going to make it. And so in that moment, I said...I want you to do what's right for the students in your estimation. We have 48 hours for you to pivot from one style of learning to another style of learning for our students. And I trust you.” (19:18)

“We have to move to having the drummer's instinct. And that is an urge not to lead people, but to be part of it in rhythm with others. And I think that that's a piece of what each of the heads have said, is that we have grown and learned so much by letting go of those instincts, by being vulnerable, by being humble. And so, if I have a huge hope for the future for leaders, it's that we all adopt the drummer's instinct.” (23:54)

Full Transcript

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In many ways, school leadership is immediate, present-focused work. Leaders must respond to constantly changing daily circumstances, external pressures, and influences. Never has this immediacy been more clear than the past 18 months, when school leaders have had to constantly adapt and react with real urgency to shifting guidelines, precautions, and safety concerns while continuing to provide a valuable educational experience. But all this quick, reactive decision-making can lead us to neglect long-term thinking—the kind of deliberative planning and forecasting that allows us to create sustainable, nurturing systems that will serve not just today’s students, but the students of the future.

In this episode—in the temporary absence of co-host Tim Fish—Lisa Kay Solomon sits down with Roman Krznaric to dig deeply into the concept of being a “good ancestor.” Roman, a public philosopher, bestselling author, and founder of the world’s first empathy museum, explains how the good ancestor framework can be a foundational guiding principle for school leaders. Starting from the place of asking what legacy our present-day decisions will leave for future generations, Roman traces good ancestor thinking from indigenous cultures to present-day innovations in Canada and Japan. He shares how grounding futures thinking in a deep understanding of empathy can lead people to make radically different choices than they would make under other conditions. And he makes the argument that the way we approach strategic planning may not actually be very future-focused at all.

Roman challenges us to make the future both real and felt by bringing future generations into the room. He examines embodied practices like role play and costuming as ways to envision the future as part of our present communities. Roman also raises the question of approaching long-term thinking as community-building: Why are we able to expand our ideas about impact to people who live at a geographic distance from us, but not to people who will live in our own locations years from now? How will we be remembered by those future residents, and how can our current decision-making have a positive impact on their lives? Roman makes the case that schools are already inherently a long-term setting, providing educational foundations that will serve students 10 or 20 years down the road. But what innovations might we create if we started to think farther into the future, beyond 20 years, and design our schools for generations ahead? And what potential might we unlock in our students right now by starting to teach them to look up from the instant gratification of their curated worlds, and think about the worlds they want their children to inhabit?

Some of the key questions Lisa explores in this interview include:

• How can school leaders not only take a longer-term view, but communicate that stance clearly to their key stakeholders—parents, the board, alumni, etc.?
• Although our brains are vulnerable to short-term distractions, The Good Ancestor also makes the case that we’re hardwired for long-term thinking. What’s the difference between our marshmallow brains and our acorn brains, and how do we train ourselves—and our students—to be more attuned to acorn thinking?
• How can we practice the kind of long-term, good ancestor thinking that ensures our school community’s values are sustained and upheld through future generations? And how does this kind of thinking impact the way we design and plan for priorities like capital campaigns?
• Can good ancestor thinking help leaders to design truly diverse, collaborative conversations that invite multiple perspectives, rather than designing conversations that subtly seek buy-in to decisions that have already been made?
• How can we use good ancestor thinking and long-term perspective taking to inform our study of history? Can we begin to teach students to examine events both backward and forward—with consideration for how history informs what is happening in the present, and will inform the future?