Joanne McEachen on Contributive Learning

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast, where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host, Jessica, and this month we’re focusing on Difference Making, the subject of a new book that launched this week by Tom VanDark and Emily Leabtag. This episode, we’re pleased to speak with Joanne McKeechin, the founder and CEO of The

Learner First, about her new book. The welcome to her new book promises that all of your students can learn to contribute to add to the world in all manners of ways. When they do, then no matter their plans or pursuits, they’ll have what they need to find success.

Her book, The Depth-Failed Detectives and the Great Education Crisis, a guide to Contributive Learning in Schools, is a story for educators, parents, and students about using your powers, a.k.a. what you’re learning, for good. It can help you discover what it takes to contribute and how to make well-being, meaning, and fulfillment the ultimate outcomes of all that you do.

Schools can commit to Contributive Learning so that all students learn how to add to the world. Let’s listen in to her conversation with Tom. Well, Joanne McKeechin, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Yes, lovely to be here with you, Tom.

It’s great to have you join. Thanks for joining from New Zealand. Joanne, I want to jump straight in and I want to talk about your email signature, which is, I think, the most remarkable email signature that I’ve ever received. I noticed it in our last correspondence, but it says, meaning and fulfillment is the new

wealth, and contribution is the only way to earn it. Where did that come from? Well, I think it’s come from the fact that I’ve been working with children for the last sort of 34, 35 years and listening to them and watching them. They don’t want money anymore.

They don’t want the trappings of wealth anymore. They want us to support each other and they want a better world. I think my observations over time have led me to that conclusion. Every time I work with kids, they don’t want the same things as what I wanted when I was growing up.

I think you and I probably were led to believe that if we did the 40-hour week and we worked hard, we would have this retirement that would lead us to this great world, but it didn’t work out like that. So working with kids, they’ve sort of told me and they’ve taught me this. They’ve taught me that they want a better world, and that means that we contribute to

each other’s life and we make it a better place. So for me, the new wealth has nothing to do with positions and ownership of things. It’s actually how much do we contribute to each other and how much do we contribute to humanity, and that’s the new wealth that they’re looking for. So for me, it just sort of evolved over time.

I love that sentiment. The idea of contribution, how do you think about that? What does that include? What does that mean to you? Well, I think for me, it’s about the outcomes.

I’ve done a lot of work and whole system change with countries all over the world, and I think for me, the outcomes of the world really, everywhere I go, people are looking for a self-understanding, knowing who you are, how you fit into the world, and how you can contribute to humanity. And the next one’s really around connection.

How do you connect yourself, each other, your family, the world around you, and your purpose for life, knowledge? What knowledge do you need to know yourself and what you want to do to be the best person you can be, and then sort of the competencies to be alive and that kind of thing. And so it’s really sort of, once you sort of figure that out, then that’s really about

how you can contribute. And at the moment, we sort of tell kids that if you do this pathway and you get all this knowledge stuffed into your head, then you can become this. But actually, not everybody wants to become this. So it’s really, once you figure out how you can contribute, then everybody can contribute.

So everybody feels good about what they can contribute, rather than us saying, that’s what you should look like or that’s what success looks like. So contribution was a word that my co-author Matt Kane came up with when we were sort of really sort of nutting out what does it look like when we figure out how do we succeed and how do we look at look like success in the world today.

And he’s the one who came up with the word contribution, so I give him full credit for that. Well, I love that term. I was afraid in my own writing of using that term that people were thinking in the US in terms of donating to a charity in contribution, but you’re really talking about making the

world better, right? Yeah. Yeah. I’m talking about when we add to the world. It’s, you know, so often we think about, I’ve often thought about how people go in to say

they want to go into schools and fix them. So they want to go in and go into the school gates and go in and fix them up and clean them up and sort them out and make them a better place. Whereas I talk about, let’s get out of the school gates and go and contribute to the society that we live in.

If we go outside and we contribute and we do things with our communities and we fix the problems that are actually real life ones with our people who are alive and well now and do things and contribute to actually what’s going on in the world, that’s what’s going to help us survive. That’s what’s going to help us heal as a world.

That’s what’s going to make us a better world if we actually do the things that are real. And it’s only by contribution that we can do that. And I know that I feel better when I’m doing something that’s helping somebody else. If I’m doing something that’s only about me, me, me, me, me, I’m only going to feel good for a short period of time.

When I contribute and do something that’s going to help somebody else, I know that that feeling of happiness and gratitude lasts a lot longer. Durand, your new book, instead of an introduction, has a welcome which I love. But it begins by saying all of your students can learn to contribute to add to the world in all manner of ways.

When they do, then no matter their plans or pursuits, they’ll have what they need to find real success. I thought that was a beautiful opening sentiment. How did you make that discovery? You said it was just through working with schools.

Anything else that you can add? Because it’s a beautiful thought. Yeah, I think it’s, I think when I was principal of my second school, we created this afternoon or the day called electives. And this was way, way back.

I mean, I’m talking, you know, a long time ago because I’m old now. And it was, I was watching when teachers were able to teach something that they were really passionate about and when kids were able to elect and choose something that they could join in with. And this was such a long time ago.

And what I noticed is that the kids came to school every day. The teachers were excited. And I would almost see the kids in school, it would almost bounce. There was this energy that would just like, the kids would come in, the teacher would come in and there was this bouncing feeling and there was nobody ill on those days.

There was no absenteeism. There was nothing that would go wrong on those days. And I noticed that and I thought, there’s something going on here. What is this about when we start to teach in this way, when we start to do things in this way, that there was nothing was impossible.

Kids would make, move heaven and earth to make things happen. Teachers would move heaven and earth to make things happen. So I figured out that if somebody really wanted to do something, they would find a way to make it happen. And that’s the same for us all.

So if we really want something, we’ll find out how to do it. If we really want to be a space adventurer, we will find a way to make it happen. If we really want to be a chef, we will find a way to make it happen. And if we allow each of our students to really uncover what is their great passion or what they really want to do, we can help them to make that happen.

But if we tell them they all have to be one thing, we’re never going to help them make that happen. We’ll only make the ones who really want to be that happen. But the rest we just forget about and they feel like they can’t contribute and they haven’t got anything good about them. But if we let everybody find what they want to do, then there’s that huge passion

as unleashed across the whole school and across the whole system and then across the whole world. We love that idea. We called it the new superpower. I guess you call it Contributive Learning. Is that it?

Yeah, that’s the name of the quote. But I love that sense that as a result of Contributive Learning, they’ll have what they need to find real success. So you grew up in New Zealand. Yes, that’s right.

And close to the University of… what is it? Waikato? Waikato, yes, pronounced Waikato. Yes, that’s where I grew up. Born and bred here in New Zealand.

And so you went to school close to home? Yes, I was born and born in the South Island of New Zealand and I’m part Maori, so I have strong links to Waitaha, Nati Muamoi and Ngai Tahu. Which means I traced myself back to the 16th century here in New Zealand and have a very strong affinity to First Nations and people of Indigenous descent.

So I think a lot of my work is definitely coloured on the viewpoint of that we all can contribute, that we all have a place in this world and that we all have value to add. And I think a lot of my work through education has been coloured definitely by that viewpoint. Joanne, you’ve written a number of books and I think they all indicate a really strong sense of purpose, a focus on measuring what matters.

Do you think you developed those in your years leading to schools in New Zealand? I think so because what I understand is that if you measure what matters, then people will focus on what matters. We can spend all our time pretending that we’re differentiating and pretending that we’re designing for students and their needs.

And then we get to the point of differentiation and then we have this brick wall and we pretend that we’re still doing the right thing for kids. But so as far as I’m concerned, unless we change what we measure, unless we change how we assess, we’re just playing around the edges and just incurring. So for me, unless we change how we assess and unless we change what we measure, then we’re

just playing. And it really does make no difference. So for me, unless we change that and unless we really are going to differentiate all the way through to assessment, then there’s no point doing any system change whatsoever because we’re not valuing what we say.

Now every single system change I’ve ever done with any group of people anywhere in the world, everybody talks about what they value and usually that’s around relationships, it’s around empathy, it’s around looking forward, it’s around thinking about changing what we measure and let’s describe now what success looks like in today’s world and let’s measure that.

Then we can start to see a system shift. And I guess the only other thing I would say with that is that we’re brave enough to say that if children can show us what they know in their way, is that it can show us what they know in their way. And that’s what we’re going to do.

And that’s what we’re going to do. And that’s what we’re going to do. We’re brave enough to say that if children can show us what they know in their way, is that acceptable for us as adults. That’s the really big system shift that I’m looking for and that’s how we really get equity.

So for me measurement counts for the biggest lever we have for change or lever, if I say it with the American accent. So you know I think I’m talking about a relationship break up. You have two books on that subject of measuring what matters. The first was 2015, Making the Important Measurable and then in 2018, Measuring Human Return.

So maybe you could bring this to life with a bit of an example. In the U.S., we’ve been quite preoccupied with these end of year standardized tests of reading and mathematics. When you talk about making the important measurable, what would be on your dashboard of important things to measure?

Maybe add a little color on the ways in which you would hope those things would be measured. I would think that I would always see that there would be some sort of standardized tests as part of that at this point. I think until we get to the stage where we’re sophisticated enough to understand how to measure in different ways, I always think that there needs to be some standardized tests. The way I would describe it the best way, Tom, would be to say, if you go to the doctor and you run in,

you drop your bag, you throw everything around the floor and everything spills out everywhere and you can’t find a car park and you’re 10 minutes late, they take your blood pressure and it’s likely to be high. But I would say to you straight away, you need to open out surgery tomorrow based on that one indicator. What they say is let’s have a range of different tests and then let’s synthesize that and make a decision based on all those different data points. So for me, what I’m looking for is a range of different pieces of assessment before I make any judgment and I would also say that there has to be self-assessment in that too.

So my range of data points that I would be looking for would be, is there some self-assessment? Has the child actually had an opportunity to say what they know first? So firstly, am I given equitable opportunity for a child to say, have they had a chance to show me what they know? Secondly, has there been some peer assessment? Has there been some opportunity to discuss this across my peer group? Have we come to some moderate judgment across, is this acceptable across, are we saying same sorts of things?

Then there might be an opportunity for some parent assessment or some discussion there. There might be some opportunity for a practical example. There might be some opportunity for some design work. There might be some summative work. There might be some formative work along the way. But what I’m really saying is that there has to be multiple points of assessments before we make any judgment.

At the moment, by making only one judgment based on a test, it’s like saying, going to a mechanic and saying, oh, I can hear a little tap, tap, tap sound. The mechanic saying to you, right, you need a whole new motor. Would you believe them straight away? No, you’d want some more evidence first. So we’re making these horrific judgments based on one point of data. So we want a lot more evidence before we make decisions about a child’s life.

So for me, it’s having qualitative, quantitative, and a range of different assessments. And then the most important point for me, though, is the synthesis of that. Saying all of these pieces of information together, what are they trying to tell me? Not just one piece, but a lot. So some people talk about that as triangulation. I talk about that as synthesis.

And then it’s not necessarily putting all the different pieces of weight on watch piece, but it’s just humanising it. Saying, what does this all mean together? So some people, you might talk about using AI to do that. At this point, we’ve got to get a whole range of different pieces of data before we can sort of go to that stage. I know you’re sort of studying some investigative work and that, which is pretty exciting for me to hear that.

Joanne, you’ve had the opportunity to publish several books with Michael Fullen. We just had Michael on podcasts a couple of weeks ago. I’m curious how you would describe the elements of deep learning. And maybe you could add a little color commentary on what it’s like to write with Michael. Does he actually get in and do the heavy lifting or is he more of a color commentary kind of co-contributor?

Michael’s an amazing man. He’s got a huge amount of experience across a wide range of areas. So I think to be able to work with him has been a real honour and a privilege. And I think to sort of see the depth that he can go to because he’s had to work across a whole range of different systems. So I think his wisdom is deep and across a whole range of areas.

So I think what I brought to that team was the ability to sort of think across the writing of the tools. Because that’s the way I think about how do you describe success? And if you’re wanting to describe success, how would you do that? So that’s kind of my strength. His is around the leadership and being able to think about it.

How would that look across the whole system? So for me, I think we were able to connect in a way that was together. I mean, everybody works, everybody has their strength. And I think for me, like I think, you know, we’ve talked about that before. It’s that in a network and in a team, we all bring our strengths.

And I think that’s one of the things I’m very focused on now is that there’s no one single person who holds the answer to any success now. It’s every single person has to contribute what their strength is. And if we all do that, then we’re going to be successful. If we all try to do it one person or one leader now, it doesn’t work. It’s all of us in this together to try and create the answers for the future.

And that’s sort of, I talk about the collective cognition, where all of our minds together have been working. But now I’m definitely moving toward the collective consciousness where we’ve got the hearts and minds together. We were trying to figure this out because we need more than just our heads to work this through. We’ve got to actually work with our hearts as well. When you and Michael talk about deep learning, what does that mean? What does that look like?

Well, we’ve talked about it as that students being really competent in the world, being able to use the success and being able to sort of really be effective in the world and being able to display and use those competencies to be a successful person. And, you know, we’ve talked about that using those inoculates them against sort of mental health issues as they grow older. And so being able to be successful in the world is a really, you know, being able to be using knowledge, using the ability to be creative, using the skills of a critical thinker, being able to be in the world today rather than just having academic knowledge and not knowing how to access that.

So I sort of talk about the competencies as learning in return, being able to access knowledge to be able to do those kinds of things. So for me, deep learning and deeper learning is really about being able to use what you know to be able to return it to the world. Let’s take a quick look at your new book. It’s super interesting. It’s called The Deaf Spale Detective and the Great Education Crisis, a Guide to Contributive Learning in Schools. Why did you choose a novel format? Well, there’s two reasons I chose a novel format. One of them was because I really liked my iceberg as melting by John Cotter.

And when I was a manager back in the Ministry of Education, well, a decade or so ago, I used to use that with my own teams because it was a novel way of actually getting people to understand their own character and to think about what they were contributing to a team. And so that really affected me as a manager and a leader myself. So I really kind of wanted one way of helping schools to really figure out how could they do this work. The second one was that I know that with measuring human return, it’s a really deep and dense book. There’s a lot of information in there and there’s a lot of unpacking to do. And I know that, you know, I kind of describe that as a really chewy book. So it’s going to take people a long time.

I sort of say it’s going to take people, it’s an eight years worth of reading book because there’s a lot of work. It’s going to take a long time for people to unpack that. But it’s worth doing if you really want to make the change because it’s a long period of time to take change for system. So this is the one, if you want to do this with your staff in a staff reading situation and an easier way to break yourself into it in a little bit more light-hearted way. But it also takes you to the seriousness of how we can do the change. But it also gives you the idea that kids actually can take a lead role in this change and that we can do this.

There’s possibilities that Israel, it can happen in a different way of attacking it and coming into it from the lens of through the eyes of the kids, through the eyes of some of our teachers who sometimes get a little bit stubborn and some of us sometimes might want to look at it from a different viewpoint. So you very cleverly worked in a five phase change process into the story. So I’d love to just recap those really quickly. The first two points, phase number one is start with yourself. Who are we really? And number two is pinpoint your purpose. Why are we here?

So why is it important for a team to start with that idea of who are we and why are we here? Well first of all, who are we is often forgotten. We sometimes just gloss over that because we think we know each other. But I can tell you Tom, every time I do a session with people and I say, you know who are you, and then I say, you know who are you really? And you go to that next step, who are you really, really? And you discover who we are, it’s quite different. And so like I have a series of questions that we ask people and they actually start to really get to know each other because we often ask the kids stuff about themselves.

We don’t really get to know each other as to who we really are. So let’s get rid of the pretence and let’s get to know each other really for who we truly are. So let’s figure out who we are at an individual level, at a school level, and at a classroom level and as a community. Then so figuring it out first of all, who are we really? And then so what are we really doing here? What do you really want out of this? Why would we be doing this? What’s the whole point? And actually sort of being really honest about it. So what am I doing here as a teacher? What am I doing here as a learner? What am I doing here as a school?

And what’s the point of this? And actually really being honest about it and no garbage anymore. Like so if we’re going to be here, why should we be doing this? And let’s get rid of all the stuff we don’t want to be doing and let’s not pretend anymore. So I call it radical honesty and just no more garbage. Let’s get done. If we’re going to help these kids, how are we going to do it? I love that. Schools are, they’re strange and wonderful entities in that they’re, I think of them as sedimentary. They’re sort of inherited layers of policies and traditions. And unless we just say, let’s pause and ask this question, who are we and why are we here?

You don’t really unpack those layers. And so I love the fact that you start with what are unusual questions, right? Of identity and purpose. And then the next two questions are dive into outcomes. What do we want and plot your position? Where are we now? Why dive into outcomes? Well, it’s a thing. A lot of us, we think we know where we’re going and actually what do you really want? So we say that, it’s like what I said earlier, we say this is what we want. We say that we want to have happy kids.

We say that we want to have a good, healthy society. We say that we want to have, every parent says they want their kids to be happy at school, yet we go and measure maths. We say that we want to have healthy wellbeing for our teachers, yet we go and then we do performance management on them. We say that we do want this, but then we go and do something else. So what do I say? So what do you actually really want and what does success look like now? So then that’s what we’re going to measure. That’s how we’re going to do it. So actually, what do you really want? And then the next part of that is, so where are we now? Let’s plot our position. So what are the actual true results?

So often I’ll look at a country’s results and I’ll say so here’s your academic results. Here they’re going up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Sneaking up 1% at a time or half a percent at a time. And let’s say we look at your mental health results, let’s look at your suicide rates, they’re going up, up, up, up, up, up. There’s your mental health, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, look, they’re climbing and they’re meting in the middle. And just generally in most countries, that’s what’s happening and we’re spending more and more on education, trying to squeeze up.

squeeze up more and more on mental health. So we’re climbing together beautifully. We’re having this lovely big kaleidoscope of crashing. So let’s face the results and say exactly where we are and what do we want to do about it?

So let’s again, let’s be honest. All right, the next phase is that you invite teams to commit to contribution. So what does that look like? Why?

Well, it’s a really interesting question. That’s enough. I’ve just been interviewed by actually four different governments to sort of talk about how does whole system change where we’re working?

You know, my biggest answer, Tom, now, is I say, no longer will I let a leader just tick the box and sign a piece of paper and say, yes, you can go ahead and work with my country or you can work with my system or you can work with my team.

I say, you have to be there present. You have to buy in. You have to be a part of this. And the reason is this is now very personal. This is about personal commitment.

And I’m saying, I have to personally commit. I have to personally be there, so do you. And it’s about the leader. It’s no longer. So like one country asked me, so how do we get everyone involved

and forgetting that, you know, a bank to pay for it or somebody to pay for it? I said, well, I don’t even want, I don’t want anybody there who’s not personally going to be engaged and actually involved in this.

So when we talk about creating a change team, it’s the parents who are going to be there. It’s the kids. It’s the teachers. It’s the community.

And we want personal engagement. This is about our lives. This isn’t just about a process anymore. This is about people’s real lives now. And so we used to just do this as a job.

We used to just do this as this is how we’re going to make things happen. So this is about commitment, about real life change. So unless we have people who are really going to do this and really do it properly and actually commit to contribute

to changing real lives, then we’re not interested, I’m not interested in working with them and nobody should be anymore. And it’s a long term process. It is a, it’s a beautiful, quick read.

It’s fun. It’s funny. It’s touching. It’s called the depth fail detectives in a great education crisis,

a guide to contributed learning in schools. Everybody should buy it now, read it together as a team. Joanne, let me close with a couple other questions. Tell us what Karenga is. Why are you doing that?

Karenga is a global organization and we’re working with multiple countries, in fact, up to 70 countries now, where we are an alliance, where we’re looking at, how do we challenge every government,

or every organization, or every school, everywhere across the world, to shift their focus of education from the sole acquisition of knowledge to the much broader set of outcomes

around social and emotional learning in life schools. So we’re looking at sort of four areas, where we’re spending time in advocacy. We’re looking at how do we actually help everybody understand the importance of that.

The other one is creating a connected community, where we’re sharing ideas and learning from each other. So what works in one country might not work so well in another country, but why or why not? We’re looking at how do we share implementation ideas,

how do we get those ideas across the world, and then how do we sort of share the implementation support and research. So far we’ve connected with major organizations around the world.

We have 70 people on our steering committee now. We’re based out of Austria, and it’s a huge organization, and we encourage everybody to join us because we’re gathering momentum.

And what we’re seeing happen is that we’re hearing the voices from countries we haven’t heard from. One of the things we know, Tom, is that those of us in the Western world, we haven’t always got it right

when it comes to social and emotional learning, and some of our other countries and some of our other cultures have got some really humongous gems that we can learn from and share.

And that’s what we’re starting to do. So we’re hosting conferences every month. We’re hosting social and emotional learning workshops, and we’re hearing voices that we wanna hear from that we may not have understood from before,

and that’s creating a huge momentum globally. And it’s karanga as a Maori word, and it means a call out from the heart or a call out from the soul to welcome you, to say we’re all welcome to do this work together.

And it’s a global call for us all to unite, to work from a point of understanding and unity that this is about a global calling for us all to change how we’re educating our children to create a better world for everybody.

No, it’s a great organization. It’s to find it online. It’s k-a-r-a-n-g-a.org. Joanne, where can people find you online? They can find me at joanne at thelearnerfirst.com.

You might wanna say it because my accent doesn’t usually do a very good job at saying it, so it’s a learner. And also on Twitter at thelearnerfirst. That’s right, or just at joanne.

That’s great. Joanne, I wanna close with this beautiful sentiment that you’ve mentioned today. We are what we add. It’s a beautiful sentiment.

How could people incorporate that idea into their school? I think if everybody would just consider that every day if you tried to add something to somebody else’s life rather than subtract. I think that’s one of the things I try to do every day

is like how can I add something to somebody else’s life? And every time I do, just consider how that makes you feel. And if that helps the way you are, then consider what you could do for somebody else every day.

And if we’re adding to everybody’s life, then that creates a better world. So my challenge to the world is just add to the life of somebody else every day rather than subtract. That’s a beautiful thought.

Thank you so much for the books that you’ve written. We appreciate your global contribution, Joanne. It’s been delightful having you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us. It’s been a real pleasure.

We have a fantastic day. A big thanks to Joanne for joining us from New Zealand. She mentioned writing several books with Michael Fulin. If you missed him on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, check out episode 277 on leading in a culture of change.

We’ve got it linked in the show notes and on the blog. This week, Tom’s newest book co-authored by Emily Liebtag launched and is now available for purchase. Difference making at the heart of learning explores new learning priorities centered around

making a difference and a framework based on the 25 most important issues of our time. We know that students learn more when they feel a sense of purpose. With adults to help guide them, they’ll be ready

to make a difference and shape the world to come. We’ve got the book linked in the show notes so you can learn more about it and maybe get yourself a copy. We’ll have more episodes to explore

difference making this month as well. That’s it for today listeners, but before you go, don’t forget to rate and review the podcast. And as always, thanks for tuning in. For the Getting Smart podcast, this is Jessica signing off.