Chris McNutt on the Power of Empathy Interviews

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia talks with Chris McNutt of Human Restoration Project about how empathy interviews can help schools move beyond traditional surveys and toward more meaningful, student-centered change. The conversation explores Polaris, a platform designed to gather and analyze qualitative student voice data at scale, and highlights how districts are using these insights to strengthen belonging, improve inclusion, and redesign learning experiences. From student agency and Portrait of a Graduate work to ethical questions around AI and data privacy, this episode offers a compelling look at how schools can listen better—and act with greater clarity and trust.

Outline

• (00:00) Introduction
• (07:11) Introducing Polaris
• (18:10) Student Agency & Action
• (30:02) AI Ethics & Data Privacy
• (35:33) Building a Broader Movement

Introduction

Mason Pashia: You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. Years ago, deep in the pandemic years, we had Erin Lyn Rob on the podcast, along with some amazing students who were sharing about their 100 Days of Conversation project.

This was a project that was super exciting, and it basically empowered young people to host community conversations about belonging and how school makes them feel and how communities make them feel. And all of these conversations were showcased in a really unique visual, qualitative and narrative format, and I was just so fired up.

Honestly, I’ve been thinking about it ever since. And today I get to be joined by Chris McNutt, a repeat podcast guest in a different capacity, to really talk about kind of what’s under the hood of projects like this and how we can replicate them more and more in the future. So we’re talking about empathy interview work that he’s leading with the Human Restoration Project, and I’m really excited to dig in.

Chris, thanks for being here.

Chris McNutt: Hey, thanks, Mason. So stoked to talk about this.

Mason Pashia: It’s not every day I get to talk to someone after I’ve already been warm with them for about an hour, because we had a meeting right before this.

So this is exciting, and it’s good that I don’t have to do any of that icebreaking. But despite having just heard from you, I actually have no idea how you got started specifically in this empathy interview work. How did you find your way to empathy interviews?

Chris McNutt: I’ll tell you what’s weird. That example you just brought up actually was our introduction to the work.

Mason Pashia: Huzzah.

Chris McNutt: Erin and I co-constructed 100 Days of Conversations. This was during COVID. It was aimed at informing what would be the next administration on where we should go with reimagining classrooms. So it wasn’t explicitly policy-focused. It was more so, if we were redesigning school, what could that look like? And then spur conversations toward how states could adjust, etc. So we worked with, I’m forgetting off the top of my head how many different organizations this was, but it was over 100 different organizations from across the United States and a few abroad, developed this really quasi-qualitative method to have Zoom interviews conducted by young people with their peers, multi-state, multi-school, during COVID.

And it was wild. We had a lot of assistants. We had multiple different students assist us on the project. We still have the website up if you go to 100 Days of Conversations and check it out. And we found basically a need for more conversation just like that. We learned a lot from kids about how they were dissatisfied with how engaged they were in the classroom, but also all of them had these pockets of teachers and peers doing really awesome work, and there’s a lot to be gleaned and learned from those stories. So we started there. Erin was instrumental in a lot of our qualitative framework that we use. And since then, six years later, we’ve conducted empathy interviews now with over 10,000 students, and really, easily over 200 districts at this point, both in the United States and then we also just opened up HRP Australia, which is our Australian wing of the organization, who’s also doing empathy interviews.

So it’s been quite the journey.

Mason Pashia: It’s quite the journey, I know. And you were talking about this before we got rolling, but something that you love specifically about qualitative reporting and data collection, and I do too, is that you can find your way into these places that otherwise would not have been asked about, right? You actually get this pretty radical context, which sets the whole narrative and conversation in motion.

It’s something I love about the projects that you’ve been leading, is that you really put the student at the center too. So not only is it qualitative, but it’s an authentic conversation, which I think we miss a lot as people who are collecting data. I’m curious what you’ve learned about hosting an authentic conversation over this time, whether that be digital and maybe less faces and places or in-person ones.

Chris McNutt: I definitely prefer the in-person ones. We try to lean toward those if and when possible, just because it’s way less awkward. But I will say, I mean, potentially we start off by just defining what an empathy interview is.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: An empathy interview is a conversation usually 20 to 30 minutes long. Sometimes we’ll go for an hour. It depends on the age group, number of questions and just people’s comfort level with it, to learn something about anything, which is hyper-broad.

We’ve done empathy interviews about engagement, motivation and well-being at school. We’ve done them about IEP inclusion and 504 status. We’re working potentially on a grant right now about food injustice and food servicing, and how do we have access to food. And our goal through those conversations, which are recorded and anonymized, is to figure out what folks are saying and really get into the details beyond a one-through-five answer. Most districts, most schools, most organizations have survey data that they collect, where they’ll see three out of five folks are interested in this thing, or two out of five folks don’t like this thing. And we have to make a lot of assumptions about why that’s a two out of five or three out of five, and also have a lot of, in my opinion, very annoying conversations about trend data, where it’s like, “Oh, we’re at a 2.4 instead of a 2.2.” And frankly, that trend might not even have been a real trend. It could’ve just been a slight difference in how people felt that day.

Mason Pashia: Right.

Chris McNutt: When we have an empathy interview, we’re recording dialogue over that entire 20- to 30-minute time frame and pulling out sentences, identifying what folks are saying, theming those conversations and going from there.

So the question that you were asking, what we’ve really learned is, one, kids are transparent, honest, trustworthy and good at having conversations like this.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: We basically don’t do any empathy interviews where adults lead those conversations. Kids are just talking about whatever’s presented in front of them. They’re introduced by saying, “Hey, this is feedback for the school. We value your opinion. Let’s see what you have to say.” And more often than not, kids take those conversations very seriously. I think sometimes they’re a little too understanding of schools. I’ll have kids say, “I know we have to take a test every single Friday, but I wish maybe it was every other week,” not recognizing that potentially we don’t have to have those tests.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: So yeah, kids are able to have these conversations, and if you just give them the platform to have them, they impress you.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that’s my experience with kids too. It’s, “Let’s redesign school. What would you change?” And they’re like, “Maybe instead of five-minute passing periods, we do 10-minute passing periods.” And you’re like, “Okay. Okay. So you’re very understanding of this system right now.”

So to better do… I think a lot of people are probably familiar with at least the sentiment of an empathy interview, partially because they’re our audience, but partially because it’s also existed under different names, like focus groups or as the first wave of the empathy step in a design thinking process.

Or this has come up a lot of different times. But what I think you all are doing in a pretty radically different way, aside from this authentic piece that we were just talking about, is you’ve built a platform to basically do this at scale in a way that acknowledges a lot of the challenges that come with specifically youth data, but also just the friction of scheduling and rolling it out and having all the results in one place and making sense of the results in a way that’s mobilizing rather than debilitating, for lack of a better word.

Introducing Polaris

Mason Pashia: Tell us a little bit about the tool that you’ve built to make this happen. I’m going to put some stuff in the show notes that are maybe some of the GIFs from your website or videos just so people can actually visualize it, because I think that helps. But talk to us about Polaris.

Chris McNutt: Of course. So in a nutshell, Polaris Education is a tool that makes the process of having empathy interviews much easier and allows for more human-to-human connection, more conversations to occur and listening to a broader audience. So if you’re rolling out an empathy interview, the major pain point isn’t the conversation itself, it’s all of the logistical steps that surround this.

Because the second that you’re like, “Oh, I want to listen to what all the kids at our school have to say,” you then quickly realize, well, how are they going to record it? If kids are on Chromebooks, there isn’t an easy way to record all those conversations and collect them. How are they going to store those recordings?

Are they going to take the recordings home? And then that’s problematic. They could play the data, etc. And then once you collect all the conversations, you now have 100 transcripts, and you’re going to have to go through transcript by transcript and identify what information matters. And we’ve done that for four or five years now without a tool like Polaris, and it takes weeks, if not months, to comb through that data.

It’s very expensive. And you also have the potential bias baked in, right? I know that what we’re doing is neutral, but a district might say, “Well, you only chose that because this is something that you all care about.” Polaris Education is a tool that automates some of that process, and by automating it, it actually allows you to have more conversations with kids because you can do more quicker. And the idea behind Polaris is that you identify as a district or as a school, and potentially with kids, something that you want to focus on. I gave those examples before about IEP status, food injustice. We’re working right now with a district that’s designing a new school. It’s like architectural data.

How do we get feedback to the architecture team about what we want to see? You brainstorm three to five questions, give or take, about what you want to ask kids. Hand that over to kids, and they log into Polaris, and they use a recording tool to have that conversation. That recording is pretty neat because it allows for some things you typically couldn’t do. It has automatic translation, so everyone can participate. It has the consent process baked in. We capture student voice. If they don’t want their voice to be heard, we can anonymize it upon their request. They just check a little box. We ensure that folks who don’t want to participate have alternative activities baked right into the platform. And it’s relatively easy to roll out. We often work with districts and tell them, “Do this in an English class all day,” or, “Do this in your advisory period,” wherever it makes sense. And again, it takes 20, 30 minutes. And I always get this feedback like, “Well, what if the room is loud?” In our experience, even on a Chromebook, it captures quite well.

You can see the waveform on the thing. You’re going to be okay.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: So from there, the fancy part of this is that we have built essentially a framework for analyzing that data and outputting what we call a listening report, where we’re identifying key themes, strengths and challenges, embedding research, all of it linked back to what students actually said. So you get an analysis of all of those key points, and you have the citation.

You can listen to a kid explain why maybe the homework policy could be improved or why they really like their science class. That social and emotional connection is really powerful. I could say more, but I’ll pause.

Mason Pashia: No, it is super powerful, and I love the bias toward action that it has implicitly. It’s recommending some next steps, it’s mapping that to tons of research. It’s connecting the quotes from the students to continue to build this qualitative urgency, like this localized urgency of hearing it in their own words why they need it.

I’m curious. I’m going to zoom back out a little bit because something that I’m kind of obsessed with, our listeners know this, is that it’s just so hard to build things in the world. Not necessarily software anymore, that has a thing that’s easier with AI. But building a road or adding a power line in a community is incredibly hard, and I think we’ve lived for about 20 years through a period of making it harder and harder. And now if you want to go get information, I feel like there’s almost this attached expectation that it will actually stop it or delay it from happening.

If I am a city leader and I want to go interview my community about something, you know the people that show up are going to be angry about it. You know that this probably will delay you a few years or make you hire another three consultants to figure out a new way. There’s something about gathering information that is disarming and it is kind of delaying.

What about this tool makes that not true? I guess, is that different in education? Is that different in the way that you have this bias toward action that I alluded to? I’m just so fascinated by this double bind of like you want the community involved, and the second you involve them, it makes it way harder and maybe you don’t do it anymore.

Chris McNutt: That’s a totally fair question, and I think what I’ll say is that nearly every district has a data team, like a data PLC, an administrative team that spends maybe monthly meetings, quarterly meetings, some of them are weekly, reviewing student data trends. So they pull up their Excel graphs, they determine a bunch of numbers, they run some algorithms.

They might have a person whose job it is to review all that information. And I’m not saying that those data trends don’t matter. But time after time, when I have conversations with those data teams showing them Polaris, they tell me nothing ever gets done in these meetings. Every single time the meeting ends, it’s, “Well, we need to look at more data next week.”

There’s no bias toward action whatsoever because when you look at those numbers, you have to make a lot of assumptions about what those numbers say. I see that our science curriculum was rated by kids at a 3.5 out of 5 next year. Does that mean it’s good? Does that mean it’s OK?

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: It doesn’t mean anything. And our entire idea is that, well, if you want to find that out, why don’t you just ask them what they think about the science curriculum, and then we can figure out what is going well and not so well and make a much more informed decision. So in my opinion, it actually speeds up those data conversations because it isn’t like schools don’t collect data.

We’ve been collecting data for a very long time. But the idea of collecting qualitative data relatively quickly is a new category that hasn’t really existed before.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

I think that’s totally true. One other thing that you know that I am passionate about and excited about the potential for Polaris in this way is how we actually make the students own the data in a way that serves them directly. I think our goal… I think the way it sounds like Polaris is currently set up is that students offer their experience to the system leaders.

The system leaders essentially evaluate that, map it alongside a bunch of research and then can decide what to do with it. I think there’s a lot of potential for students having a student-facing dashboard that’s, “Oh, these are the things that we demanded and have not yet been met. How can I hold them accountable?”

You’ve got some really great examples, and I’d love to hear some of what it looks like for students to present this data, to actually own it, deliver it and communicate it. I want to spend a little time just thinking about what it means once the student has offered data, once it has been synthesized, how they can keep using it, and really taking advantage of the fact that they suddenly have this ability to garner consensus as a collective in a way that they really haven’t before.

So how can we equip them with that?

Chris McNutt: There are so many different ways to go with that.

Mason Pashia: I know.

Chris McNutt: I’ll start with just one example. So we just wrapped up the year with a district in West Michigan, who was using this data to examine that IEP 504 status that I mentioned. And amongst the district, they had student facilitators identified who were trained in doing empathy interviews formally. So to back up for a second, when we use Polaris with districts, we give them the option. You can just roll it out and see what happens and see how folks participate, or we can train a group of student facilitators whose job it is to host the conversations with their peers. I think there’s pros and cons to both. This group chose to do student facilitators, and that student facilitator group also was tasked with analyzing that data. So after we co-constructed questions about engagement rates, we came in halfway through the year. We have this system where we can print off a bunch of flashcards about all the student quotes. Essentially what they’re doing is they’re doing a Polaris report, but manually. They’re manually going through and coding all of these things. And for the first two hours, it goes really well, and then the last two hours, they’re like, “How much longer do we need to do this?”

Mason Pashia: Oh, yeah.

Chris McNutt: Because we’re talking about 2,000 data points.

Mason Pashia: I know, I witnessed this recently, yes.

Chris McNutt: We try to make it a little bit better, but ultimately, sorting data is sorting data.

Mason Pashia: OK.

Chris McNutt: Then, toward the end of that workshop, they come up with action steps, and those action steps are meant to directly inform district leaders on what their peers said to them in those conversations. Each one of those students presented to the board and had a formal board meeting. They talked about budget. They talked about how we can transform pedagogy and PD. I met with them just a few weeks ago, where they were presenting to a group on… it was like the IEP coordinator group about how not everybody feels included, and this is exactly what we should be doing.

These are very critical conversations being led by young people. And I say to district leaders, sometimes potentially too late, that if you’re doing empathy interview work, you really are walking yourself up to a cliff because you just had kids talk for 30 minutes about what they care about and why it matters to them. If you don’t do anything with that data, they’re going to hate you. They’re going to never offer up their ideas ever again.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: They’re still going to fill out a survey at the end of the year. Kids are used to this, and frankly, when I talk to kids, they tell me they don’t think anything actually gets used from those.

Mason Pashia: Of course.

Chris McNutt: But if we’re having an intensive conversation where we brought up all these ideas and we feel like that loop hasn’t been filled, or closed, well, we’re going to need to figure that out because that’s not good. Now, on a more proactive, positive lens, if the loop does get closed and we open up, let’s say, next school year by addressing the student body and saying, “Hey, those conversations you had last year, here are some things that we’re doing.

We’re going to implement some new policies.” Maybe it is passing time. I don’t know. And we’re going to have that conversation. Now that kids have seen that loop closed, one, they are more likely, and the research on qualitative data supports this, they are more likely to make that policy successful. Even if they don’t necessarily entirely agree with that policy, because their voice was a part of crafting it, they’re with you in partnership on making it happen.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: Then the second time you have an empathy interview, you can get more specific and we can critique, refine, figure out what we’re going to do with that policy or that curriculum or that thing. And because Polaris is relatively automated, we support districts in doing at minimum four of these a year. So the idea is that you’re constantly in dialogue with the students at your school figuring out things that you can do next.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Student Agency & Action

Mason Pashia: I love that iterative design flow. I’m curious about a few different aspects of this. One of them is just that communication from the leadership, right? Once they’ve decided, what are some examples of a district or school that you’ve seen do this really well, especially both communicating to the students, but also the families?

Because oftentimes that is a key part of this whole conversation, who often gets left out or communicated to in a way that is easy to miss, doesn’t totally make sense. So I’d love just a tangible example of communication, of transparency and, “Hey, we’re trying new things.”

Chris McNutt: I gotta shout out Warren.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: They may or may not be on a future podcast or doing something with y’all. I try to shout them out to everybody, so they might be everywhere by the time this comes out.

Mason Pashia: That’d be huge.

Chris McNutt: Warren Schools is a district in southeast Ohio, out in the middle of nowhere.

It’s like a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the nearest airport, and someone there has really embraced doing empathy interview work. And in the last two school years now, they have interviewed, with a group of about 30 students, not only every single student in the high school and in the middle school, they’ve interviewed all the elementary school kids, the staff, the administrators and a pretty solid group of family members within that empathy interview process.

Mason Pashia: Wow.

Chris McNutt: So looking at the logistics really quickly, how do we inform families? We do opt-out forms. We make sure that folks know what’s going on. But then we encourage districts to invite families into interviews themselves. Not necessarily the student-to-student dialogue, because I think there’s a lot of value in them having their time to share, but for family conversations, often led by a student facilitator. And we saw this at Warren. The things that teachers and community members care about are often the exact same things that students care about, said in slightly different ways. For example, the need for more hands-on education, the need for more internships and place-based mechanisms to get kids out of the classroom was something that everyone agreed with. No one knew how to get started. And this empathy interview process was enough to develop a social-emotional connection. We could listen to people talk about that need. We felt more comfortable with making those changes. It seemed like everybody was on board, so they just did it. Last school year, they implemented Flex Fridays where basically all upperclassmen get to go do internships off-site, do hands-on activities. Lowerclassmen do student-led clubs and activities that interest them from their teachers. And I have to really highlight, that’s in one year. It’s not like they integrated a pilot program or tested it out with a grade level. They changed their entire master schedule in the span of one summer, rolled it out to pretty resounding success. That same district sent their kids to MIT about the work that they’re doing, and then recently flew them out to LA for the Student Power Summit, where they were talking with adults about the work that they’re doing and why it matters to them. They’re using Polaris as a tool, but really the people leading this work and actually making the change are students in partnership with some adult facilitators.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that’s a super powerful example. And something you told me previously is that within Warren, they also have their students lead PD quarterly for the teachers, which is such a cool way to kind of keep them agentic, keep them in everybody’s mind and also to make sure that, again, it is authentic feedback, authentic leadership.

So I really love that.

Chris McNutt: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: This is an example of this, but have you seen other districts… and I know Polaris is still young. You’ve been doing this work for a long time, but Polaris in its current capacity is a little bit newer. Have you seen this result in a student task force or something, that it’s actually the students’ job to manage the transformation from the ground up in a way that’s, “Hey, the accountability check.

It’s been two months, and like you said, you’re going to do this thing”? Different than maybe a student on the school board or different than just a kind of token student voice panel, but I’m curious about that.

Chris McNutt: So we work with a collective of schools in Ohio. It’s about 10 districts now. I think it’s expanding up to 20 next year. And many of those districts have a specific student group for empathy interviews. It’s separate from their typical student advisory council. And the reason for that is that we tell districts that your student facilitators should not just be your stereotypical all-A student that’s invited to the student governance board. Sadly, many of them still do that, but we try not to. We want a representative group because oftentimes the kid who is inside your classroom is the very sociable one. It’s the one… they’re the ones that want to make change. They are the kid who, when I was a teacher, you would convert them, and then once they got onto your side, they were like the most amazing kid.

They would lead that.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: If you can get them on board and they feel like they can make a difference in their school, you’re going to get honest, transparent feedback, and they’re going to be able to relate to other students, and they’re going to be that accountability partner. So the Polaris work is young in terms of that accountability.

We have seen as a result of those student listening groups, kids will reach out to us. I’ve gotten emails from kids telling me, I won’t name names for districts, but they’ve told me, “Our district isn’t using the data. Can you get in contact with them because we’ve had no success?”

Mason Pashia: It’s like a bat signal. Vigilante Chris coming in.

Chris McNutt: And that’s awesome.

I’m happy. It’s a very awkward email to send out to folks. “Hey, we need to have a conversation about this.” But kids have told us in these conversations on the recorded line, we’ll ask a question like, “What’s been the most empowering experience you’ve had at school this year?” They’ll tell us the recording is the thing that they’re doing right now, because it’s really powerful to be listened to. And just like I had that example before of walking up to the edge of a cliff, kids who are the student facilitators have even more stake in all of this. If they feel like they’re not being listened to, they just had conversations with 100 people. They want to know what’s happening with that data. You’re equipping kids with the tools to do this work. Of course, they’re going to demand action.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. I really like that. I’m going to reach out after this to see if we can have one of those student empathy interview teams on the pod, because I would love to just ask them a bunch of questions about empowerment and where they feel stuck and where they feel mobilized. There’s a ton of potential for tools like this.

I think in past conversations on the podcast, I’ve talked about a similar need for communities, a similar need for city councils, a similar need for so many kind of education-adjacent bodies to get buy-in from their community, to unpack it in a way that makes sense and then to be able to deliver upon it in a way that is visible primarily.

I think there’s also a lot of potential within just the confines of the Polaris tool itself to actually use this qualitative storytelling as a rich data point. So I spend a lot of time thinking about learner wallets and credentials, and how do you make an experience verified, quote unquote, either in validation of durable skills or to better just show that this thing that I did where I demonstrated critical thinking, it’s actually transferable to another environment.

Maybe I wrote a song, and maybe that’s not directly transferable to songwriting, but maybe it is directly transferable to cooking in a kitchen or something. It’s like combining elements in a way. What potential do you see for this collection of qualitative story as an appendage to something, making it more valuable, like a credential, like a badge?

And how are you guys either doing that already in pilots or just thinking about growing that muscle, developing that muscle long term?

Chris McNutt: Yeah.

What’s cool about this work is that the foundation’s there, so building off from that idea of data collection, audio collection and transferring it into various remixed reporting is not too much of a stretch. So right now we were just awarded a subgrant from the Boston Museum of Science, who conducts these design challenges and after-school programs around the Boston area, and they measure as part of that NGSS durable skills.

So they’re looking at things like creativity, collaboration, etc., but they don’t necessarily have a means of assessing what it means to be creative. That’s a hyper-subjective thing.

Mason Pashia: So hard.

Chris McNutt: It is a subjective thing.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: Our goal is to use Polaris as a means to have kids first off complete the design challenge in-app. So it has interactives, you can move things around. Think of it like your end-of-unit test, but done on the platform in a group. And the entire time that you’re working in that group, it’s being recorded. So in addition to the things that you’re literally writing in the app or filling out or manipulating, we’re also listening to what you’re saying.

How are you collaborating together? And we’re looking at things like five minutes in, did your group give up and say, “Well, this is the best we’re going to do,” and you never iterate on it? Or did you ask questions in that conversation that were interesting that would lead to iterating on that design?

Did you get into an argument? Who knows. And using that to feed into that framework on here are challenges that we’re facing within that durable-skills framework, and here’s where we’re going. And then from there, looking at longitudinal data. If we do that test in Q1, and then we go through that program all the way through Q4 and do a similar design challenge, how has that changed over time?

Are they richer dialogues? Are we getting better designs? We even have the means now to do… since they’re submitting the design in-platform, we can see what were the most common designs that people came up with for, say, water filtration, which is the one that we’re working on right now. Is it the really easy one where you just put it through like sandpaper or whatever and it gets filtered?

I don’t know if that’s the right thing, but whatever it is. Or are you making something that’s much more intense, where it has oxidation processes or whatever? And how has that changed over time? So the short answer is yes. We’re also looking at SEL tools for guidance counselors, because we know that quantitative data in SEL can be, I don’t know if problematic is the right word, but kids have told us many times, many occasions, that as soon as they get an SEL survey, if they say that they’re doing a one out of five, they’re going to get called down to the guidance counselor.

So they always put a three out of five, even though they might not be doing that great. So how can we use empathy interviews as a mechanism to have kids talk about how they’re feeling and get holistic assessments for guidance counselors, as well as CTE and career tech? How can we use this as a better tool for the 100-question career tech survey that personally, when I was in school, once I got to question 25, I just hit a bunch of random things, and it said I should be like a mortician or whatever because I didn’t care. So yeah. Yeah, a lot of opportunities there.

Mason Pashia: That’s funny. I’ve actually met someone recently whose kid just took the CTE thing, and they got a mortician also. So I think we are going to have an influx in preparation for baby boomers in the future.

That is funny. I think, yeah, that’s super exciting, that potential.

There’s so much need, especially as all these states are rolling out these mandated or highly encouraged work-based learning programs, these internships, and it’s really hard to track the quality of them. And you can set a set of standards like a 60-hour internship, but two 60-hour internships are not created equally.

Those are very different experiences. We’ve written about this as far as a framework for evaluating experiences, and basically they need to have high learner agency, high complexity, high autonomy and high contribution. And those are essentially the criteria that if you move them along, that actually helps in the design of an experience, the evaluation of the experience and maybe most importantly, the storytelling of an experience.

If you, the learner, know this is the criteria my experience has been built upon, you can better speak to those aspects in a way that’s appealing to future employers or admissions officers or any of those people. Something that I noticed… so I recently did a somewhat similar project. Did not use Polaris because I was doing it a little bit before this was a public launch.

But I was conducting empathy, or having learners conduct empathy interviews, processing the data. It was really interesting, really great, also kind of toward developing a new school. I ran into a few technical snafus, and I’m curious how you all are thinking about this. So one, the learner response to AI was very negative.

The fact that the tool was going to be using AI with their responses, they were like, “Pass.” And I was like, “Actually, it’s human in the loop. You’re doing the highlighting. You’re doing a lot of the sense-making.” Then they warmed up a little bit. But I’m curious…

AI Ethics & Data Privacy

Mason Pashia: …how you interface with that.

And two, there was a phone ban. My initial instinct, which was I’m going to record the conversations with phones, they were all like, “Oh, I’m not going to do this after hours,” so, “No.”

Chris McNutt: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: I can’t do it in school. How are you… it feels like you’re mounting this really interesting initiative at the same time as you have this tech developing and eroding at the exact same time in front of you, especially in school environments.

Maybe it’s generational. Maybe it’ll change with the next crop of high schoolers who just are using AI without knowing they are. But how do you think about making technology feel ethical, feel accessible and invitational, rather than this extractive kind of surveillance thing that I think a lot of people are worried about?

Chris McNutt: This is something that we care about a lot, and I don’t blame them at all. As someone who is also very much an AI skeptic, I totally get it. To address the second part of that question, the easiest part is just to say Polaris works on all platforms: mobile, tablet, web. It’s all good.

It’s web-based, so it makes things a lot easier. In terms of the AI question, I think it is totally valid for young people, adults, etc., to have their initial response be, “It’s an AI product, I don’t want to use it.” We understand the environmental impact. We understand how data is trained on folks.

It’s owned by massive multinational corporations, and in the defense industry as well, which is very problematic. There are a lot of things to be said about the AI industry. At the same time, I also recognize that there are a lot of really transformative use cases for AI in qualitative research that existed prior to the invention of ChatGPT. There’s been research in qualitative AI use dating back decades, but especially in the last 10 years, that we utilize within our software in addition to some AI tools. So as we’re addressing ethics, there’s a few different things that we’re looking at. First off, we don’t train on any kid’s data. It doesn’t get trained on by an AI agent.

We’re very picky about what data providers we use and how we use them. We don’t sell any data. We can’t sell data. We even have written into our nonprofit charter that if… I don’t think this is going to happen, but if we were to sell or be like an OpenAI situation where we suddenly are not a nonprofit, we delete all data automatically inside of our charter.

So data’s all safe and protected. We’re also very choosy about how we go about presenting AI data. There is a human in the loop, but we do not have AI interface with kids. I personally am very skeptical of various AI tools where kids are chatting with a chatbot about student work. I think that is possible, but I don’t know if we’re there yet, frankly. So I worry about that. Our tools are reports that are generated that our team then reviews and handcrafts from there. You’re not generating your own report on a whim and hoping that it works. It’s a little bit more nuanced than that. We also host everything on environmentally sustainable servers, so we do our best to offset, recognizing that frankly a lot of that is due to the training of the AI, not necessarily the use of it.

Chris McNutt: You do your best with the tools that you’re given. I will say if we were to compare the amount of time and energy cost it would take for us to manually go on our computers and highlight 30,000 data points or whatever that we’re doing with Polaris, it would be roughly equivalent, if not way more, than anything that the AI agent is doing for this synthesis.

So I feel like in many ways it does offset. However, we also are very upfront with kids about opting into this tool. We had a third-party organization review our privacy policy, and we got one of the top rankings because kids don’t have to participate. It is very frank with you: “This is how your data is used.

It’s one, two, three.” You don’t have to read a giant terms and conditions thing. If you don’t want to do it, just hit no, and we’re just going to give you an assignment that doesn’t go anywhere, and you can do that instead. And I am perfectly OK if 50% of them said, “I don’t want to do it.” The goal is to build that trust with them so they don’t feel bad, because I do think it can be transformative, but it’s complicated.

Mason Pashia: It is, yeah. And that was not trying to be a gotcha question at all. I think that I love hearing you kind of grapple through it, but the messaging to particularly youth about AI, I think, is a very nuanced topic, because it is kind of rightfully rejected and at arm’s length.

It’s new, it’s scary, it is held by a lot of powerful people who have a lot of questionable maneuvers in the world. But I…

Chris McNutt: One thing I would add too really quickly to that is that there also is a lot of AI slop.

Mason Pashia: So much.

Chris McNutt: In ed tech, when you walk around a showroom floor, this is a little bit of shade, there are so many companies embracing AI which are essentially just like ChatGPT reskins. It’s just, “Oh, we got a new chatbot and it does X, Y and Z.”

And all they’ve done is they’ve just taken a ChatGPT prompt, put a couple paragraphs in front of it and said, “You’re an AI tutor,” and hope that it works.

I think that, one, that’s not sustainable for those organizations because people are going to quickly realize, “I can just do this using Gemini or Claude or whatever.

I don’t need this.”

Mason Pashia: Right.

Chris McNutt: But two, as I alluded to before with kids, it’s so easy to get around those prompts and start asking weird questions of AI. I also worry about AI psychosis, how folks treat AI use. I do think teachers need formal training in how these tools work and how you synthesize them.

We actually have a critical AI handbook on our website that’s free, that folks can download that gets into which types of activities can you do in professional development, as well as model with kids on safe, ethical use cases, and deciding whether or not they should be using these tools at all.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Building a Broader Movement

Mason Pashia: I’m also going to add a link to a report on your site about where quantitative data fails us. I think that’s a really interesting starting place for this journey into empathy interviews and trying to get this rolling in your district. I want to… this is an extension of the privacy comment, but something I’m always thinking about is:

So many districts across the country are dealing with similar problems. I think fundamentally every community has their own set of priorities, their own set of kind of localized responses that are necessary, and at the same time, as a sector, we do ourselves a disservice to not share learnings, to not make that a more cohesive transformation effort rather than just these pockets of innovation, which I think we’ve all seen for years.

That’s fundamentally the impetus behind Getting Smart existing. It’s to try and find things that are beautiful and next generation, in maybe the most generous sense of that term, and shepherd everyone else toward that space. How do you think about making these stories public, whether that be the actual transformation or even some of the things the learners are saying, and how can we use that data that you’re collecting to actually force this collective movement, beyond just Polaris having a partnership with every district in America, which would be great.

I would not fight that at all. But also, it would be really cool if the students led a movement on school redesign, and Polaris was one of the tools in their tool belt that was like, “We’ve got receipts of why this needs to happen.”

Chris McNutt: I’ll answer that in a roundabout way, but I’m getting to what you’re talking about. Part of the reason why we started doing empathy interviews is that when we would come in and work with districts, they would tell us, “Oh, we already have a PBL coach,” because we do a lot of PBL coaching.

Or, “We already work with an organization that specializes in portfolio-based assessment.” And we would come in and say, “Cool, we’re here to help bolster that. We’re not in competition with the other organization. We’re just here to help.” That’s an incredibly difficult sales pitch, FYI, because why would I go through all of the effort of building out an entirely new contract, an entirely new system with you if I already have people in-house that are willing to do it, potentially that we’ve already hired to be full-time in our district? We started doing empathy interviews because it’s completely neutral. You come in, you’re just gathering data, and you on your own volition with your own agency are going to discover pain points that you have. And maybe you reach out to HRP because you want assistance there. Maybe you reach out to your in-house staff and tell them, “Hey, this is what the data’s showing us.

How can you help us do those things?” I personally think that’s such a sustainable model because there is no one telling you what to do. You are completely in control of your own destiny, and therefore it’s much easier to introduce something like Polaris to a district because we are not telling you one way or another what to do with the data. In terms of your point surrounding building a larger community and making that publicly shareable, I think that’s the first step, recognizing that people are not being forced into a collective. No one is telling them, “You are now a part of this new 50-school agency.” From doing a bunch of those, it takes a year at minimum to just convince people they should even be there. And that’s really hard. By having these empathy interview conversations, I think you can start figuring out what to do next and then invite them into those larger conversations about what this looks like in different regions of the state or the country. We are working this upcoming year toward publicly shareable links with some caveats.

Districts will opt into it, and so will students. So there’ll be like an additional checkbox like, “Can we share your voice publicly? If not, we’ll anonymize it. We won’t share it at all.” Just making sure that we are not sharing anything that no one wants to have shared. And that publicly shareable link will look different than the report the district gets.

We handcraft all the reports, but the publicly shareable link will be more infographics, more celebratory. It’ll be less like, “Hey, your district really has a problem with bullying.” I just feel like I don’t know if districts want to have that data out there.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: But of course, we’ll work with districts to determine what makes most sense for a dashboard and what we’re tracking.

A space that we’ve had a lot of interest in surrounding that is Portrait of a Graduate. So the strengths and challenges that we have in Portrait of a Graduate and sharing that with our community, and then showing longitudinal data on our dashboard on what we’re focusing on and why. It has the added benefit then of being able to share with your community, “Hey, we need more community partners.

Here’s our data. How can you help us?” So I don’t know if that answers your question directly, but that’s what we’re exploring.

Mason Pashia: No, it does.

Chris McNutt: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, it starts to. I still think there’s an interesting student-facing side to this that I want to keep riffing with you on at some point, because I think that’s just a super fun interest. I would just be so curious if they would use it. I think it is a useful tool, and my constant thing that I think I’ve mentioned ad nauseam is just, students feel able to mobilize and solve the climate crisis.

There is not any student-led school redesign effort. So there is something that makes existential climate dread feel more tangible to them than redesigning school in a way that is breathtaking. There’s something that we do that… and I’ve been asking a lot of young people about this, and sometimes they say it’s that school has…

there’s too many proximate symbols of school to them. Their teacher is somebody that they care about, and they don’t want to offend them by going and saying, “School sucks. It doesn’t do what I need it to do.” And so they don’t want to offend somebody. Whereas with climate, you’re kind of like, it’s all big business.

It’s all these things that you maybe don’t have a person that you know representing the challenge. But I just think that there’s a really interesting case to be made for how do we help them start that movement and do that in a way that does not make the district confront their own demise on the cliff’s edge too hard?

Chris McNutt: We want them to all stay a part of the system and be intergenerationally designing together and want to make sure it also just doesn’t become data that the district holds. Yeah, I think this is twofold, right?

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: One part is just that school is such a non-agentic space for such a long period of time for, I would say, the majority of people, that the idea of changing it is so far out of their purview that there’s no point in even trying. It’s being almost nostalgized, right?

Where you rationalize the bad things that happen at school and it becomes a fond memory. So when you go back to your families and they say, “Oh, that’s just how school is. You’ll learn to love it. I remember this thing that happened,” or whatever. And that’s problematic, but also part of this work is, well, you can do things differently, but you need someone to take the first action to demonstrate what’s different.

And that’s true across the board of any major system across the United States and abroad, not just education. The second piece surrounding student governance at a global level or a state level, country level, what we want to do is seek out partners that want to do that. So HRP is less in the space of we’re going to become the national student council organization and more in the space of, hey, we’re going to make really cool tools for your organization or your initiative that you’re doing, and we can tailor it to whatever it is that you need because the foundation’s there.

As long as you want to listen to people, we’ll help you make cool reports that make sense for your community. Something that’s not available yet, but will be in the near-ish future, is an organizational UX. So rather than our team making the reports, you all make the reports. And then you have complete control from end to end on what that looks like.

And I think that’ll just be yet another tool that folks can dive into.

Mason Pashia: Nice.

I’m curious about how you do this in a way that also builds demand for innovative learning models. Technically, we’re entering this weird time where school choice is exploding because of a number of legislative actions in a way that in some ways could incentivize the development of innovative models, and it could create…

I think at its best, if you take that argument all the way to the best possible scenario, it makes a competitive marketplace that raises the floor. Every school gets better because they feel the need to compete. They find a way to share resources, etc. I think at its worst, we all kind of know what that means.

It means public systems lose all the money. It means the establishment of all these private and microschools with no semblance of what fact is, and everybody has a different idea of education and learning. We’re entering a time where public schools are going to have to start marketing. Private schools are going to have marketing.

The best way to market your school is to have students saying really positive things about your school, and in some ways, you’re probably collecting at least some of that data. And I’m sure that when you ask students about school, it’s not always rosy, but they are saying things that are positive some of the time.

And so I’m curious if you’ve put any thought or possibility index into how can we use some of this stuff to actually drive demand for schools rather than to just redesign them and reshape them from the inside.

Chris McNutt: A few points there. Part of it just starts with the process itself in terms of what questions you ask in order to elicit responses that will lead to someone reimagining something. We do a lot of work with districts to ensure that the types of questions are not solely baseline things like, “What’s one thing that you’d change about school and why?” If you ask a question like that, it’ll get back to that earlier point of, “Well, I want to move passing time from five to 10 minutes.” There’s not enough meat on the bone to move toward reimagining something because we don’t know what we don’t know. Kids haven’t been likely trained in pedagogy. They have no idea…

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Chris McNutt: …what could be project-based learning at school. They might not even know what that could look like. So it’s not really on them to figure that out. Our questions tend to lean on things like, “Can you tell me a story about a time where you were most excited to be at school, in any year that you were at school?”

And a lot of kids will explain to us a time in third grade where they went on a field trip, or a time in middle school where they made a museum exhibit and they got to display it at their local museum. Those teachers and students may have no idea that what we’re talking about there is experiential education, a concept that’s been around in progressive ed for over a century now and arguably more. But because we know that, and because our report is based on educational research articles and a database that’s up to snuff, we’re able to pull that out. So here’s all of these powerful learning experiences. If 75% of them lean this way, hey, this is something that we should be focused on, and it helps us move away from the existing paradigm of just doing simple things better, shifting systemic thinking, which is a huge part of our organizational ethos long prior to Polaris.

Mason Pashia: I think that is right on from a kind of recalibration of how a school is designed, right? But I think there’s also this piece that if that’s shared by a high schooler, and I’m a middle schooler and I hear that, that’s a really rich marketing asset to hear these stories of learners.

Chris McNutt: Yeah, yeah.

Mason Pashia: I’m just curious if there’s a way to repurpose some of this content in that landscape. And I think that was probably part two of your answer, but yeah.

Chris McNutt: Yeah. So from a marketing component, it didn’t necessarily come up with our pilot of Polaris. So for context, there are 11 districts in the pilot of Polaris that have happened the last few months. Our empathy interview process, again, has existed for a much longer time. And for districts that have worked with us for especially longer than a year or two, I’ll preface by saying your first empathy interview tends to be the most critical because you’re telling kids, “Hey, this is anonymous.

Share what your thoughts are.” The first time, it’s just human nature. When you’re asked to explain anything… I think about this all the time. When I talk to teachers, I’m like, “Imagine that you were sharing feedback to your administrator, and it was anonymous for the first time.” It’s going to be brutal. But that second and third time, you’re going to get a lot more, again, nuanced gray area, a lot of positive experiences that are being shared. And up until this point, up until Polaris, we’ve worked directly with those students, because we know who they are. And we’ve sent out stuff like, “Hey, this district is really keen on the things that you said about this school.

Do you mind if they share it in the school newspaper or that they share it publicly?” We’ve had those success stories where folks have used empathy interviews as a mechanism to broadcast what’s positive about school. The next step now, as we were talking about with that publicly shareable link, is that if you’re opting into your voice being shared publicly to begin with, we could pull out more of that marketing language and use that to talk about why it matters that you’re there.

The last thing I’ll add on this is that this is a product really in many ways aimed at public schools. Our organization has always been hyper-public-education focused. I’m a former public school teacher, our co-founder is as well, and therefore it’s priced at a public school level, not at a private school level.

Perfectly happy to work with private schools if folks want to reach out. It’s just that we’re aiming for folks out in rural Ohio to be able to work with us.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, which is super exciting about what you’re doing. I think there’s a… it’s very accessible in that way. Something I… just that came to mind as we were talking about this, this idea of making it public, either the findings or the share-outs. I interviewed the team behind What Could Bowling Green Be on the podcast.

Chris McNutt: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: I don’t know if you’re familiar with that project, but it was a visioning project for the year 2050 in Bowling Green, and so they used similar kind of consensus tools. They used, I think, Google’s Jigsaw API to basically collect a bunch of, “This is what I would want for Bowling Green,” and then they actually had people do this upvote situation that basically, the algorithm optimized for consensus rather than difference, and it pooled all these ideas.

But the way that they shared out the findings, I think the announcement was they had a local public school journalism department create a newspaper about Bowling Green 2050. They basically wrote a whole issue of the paper from the perspective of that day in 2050 in Bowling Green, and then they dropped it at every person’s front door in a way that’s… and I love that as a method of communication. You had mentioned to me prior to this conversation that one of the outputs of Polaris is going to be these scenarios that it will draft.

Chris McNutt: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: And I think that it would be so cool if something that came out of this was basically the equivalent of a newspaper in the world that you’ve imagined, on every doorstep, to just get the community to be like, “Oh, neat.”

So there… I think that piece is underrated. Essentially, having the conversations is great, and I’m not trying to yes-and this product too hard after only being out for so long, but I really think that would be a fun pilot to try, is like, how do you now communicate all this publicly to your community and to the rest of the world in a way that feels inclusive and urgent and exciting?

Chris McNutt: Yeah.

You just gave us a new idea, which is… so we’re shifting toward… a lot of the focus of this year is how do we move impact into action? So how do we… we have a data report. I think it’s super rich, super nuanced, really cool. But a lot of districts still are going to struggle with answering the question, “OK, what do we do with this data?”

Mason Pashia: Of course.

Chris McNutt: Therefore, we’re creating a variety of resources that are based on your report on where you could go next. And one of those, which you were just talking about, is the vignettes feature, where we’re generating hypothetical students and telling their story throughout the day. So like a day in the life of Mason, who in this case is not a real student, but is based on that thematic data, with guiding questions in a professional development PLC that we would talk about that student and how we could address their needs, their concerns or celebrate what’s going well.

Likewise, something that you just shared would be really cool is, you could generate a list of action steps and simply have people figure out, “Well, where should we go next?” and have them vote on it in-app. We’re developing a variety of interactive things to do with professional development, where teachers, primarily aimed at an adult audience, could determine, OK, you have this data, how do you play with it, mess with it?

Something that we didn’t really talk about was the report is structured in a way based on best principles when it comes to qualitative data analysis, which is it’s meant to be hyper-interactive and modular. When you’re viewing the report, all of the data that is summarized at the top is the first step. As you scroll down, there’s all of these different clickable components that are nested inside nested. You can go as far in as you want and get an absolute ton of information, or you can stay broad and just get that two-page overview. The problem with existing data reports is that oftentimes you’ll get like a 50-page paper, and most people have no idea where to start.

And when we get overwhelmed, we tend to just not do it. So we’re identifying report styles of presenting this info that are very digestible and can lead toward that cultural shift, because that is the point of all of this.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. Super exciting. I’ve been guilty of getting one of those reports and doing nothing with it, so I’m sure that a lot of other people have as well. Chris, I could probably talk about this all day, but I’m going to let you have some of your day back because you’ve spent a lot of time with me. Where can people go to either find out more, try and run this within their own district and keep up to date with what you’re doing?

Chris McNutt: Yeah. So they can go to polariseducation.ai and/or go to our organization website, humanrestorationproject.org. That has links to all of those Polaris Education things. I’ll close by saying our pricing is entirely transparent, which I think is very different than most ed-tech companies. We just put it right on the website so people know what they’re signing up for. You get four reports a year, over whatever it is that you want in your district. It’s $1.50 a student, priced at the level of the school or the level of the district. So you kind of know exactly what you’re signing up for. If that’s something that interests you, you can sign up via our website for the newsletter, as well as there’s contact information, all those things on there, to get in touch.

Mason Pashia: Fantastic. I’m super excited to see what comes out next, and I’m going to keep an eye on it for sure. So Chris, thank you so much for being here.

Chris McNutt: Awesome. Thanks, Mason. Appreciate it.

Guest Bio

Chris McNutt

Chris McNutt is the co-founder and executive director of Human Restoration Project, a nonprofit organization focused on student engagement, well-being, and motivation. His work centers on realizing systems-based change, examining how progressive pedagogical shifts (e.g. PBL, ungrading) reimagine school to best suit the needs of students and teachers alike. He was a public high school digital media & design educator who focused on experiential learning, portfolio-driven assessment, and community involvement.

Links

• Chris McNutt’s LinkedIn
• Human Restoration Project Podcast
• Human Restoration Project Website
• Organization Overview