20 Years Later, a Former Advisor Asks His Old Students What Stuck | Andrew Frishman on The Advisory

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia talks with Andrew Frishman (co-executive director of Big Picture Learning and host of The Advisory), Natasha Luigui (a Met alum from the Class of 2006), and Daniela Moraes (a current student at Met High School in Providence) about what stays with students long after graduation. The conversation covers why “outcomes” should mean more than test scores, what advisory and exhibitions look like at the Met, and how a model built on relationships can last across a whole network of schools.

Read the Transcript

Introduction

Mason Pashia: You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. Today, I’m joined by three amazing guests who are associated with a new podcast called The Advisory. One of them is Andrew Frishman, co-CEO of Big Picture Learning and the host of this new show. Additionally, we have Natasha Luigui, an alum of the Met Class of 2006, which is thematically relevant to the show, and Daniela Moraes, a current student at Met High School in Providence. Thank you so much for being here, guys.

Daniela Moraes: Thank you.

Natasha Luigui: Thank you for having us.

Andrew Frishman: Thanks, Mason.

Favorite Learning Experiences

Mason Pashia: Of course, absolutely. All right, our first question, which I’m taking from my colleague Nate, who always asks this first question, and I’ve come to love it. What is your favorite learning experience? But because this whole thing is around advisory and navigation, I want it to be an experience that you chose to have. So maybe among an array of options, you chose this experience. Andrew, let’s start with you. What is one of these that comes to mind?

Andrew Frishman: Yeah. So first, Mason, thanks so much for having us here. I think the place I’ll start is that when I was in my first year of high school, I was really excited about the possibility of taking a biology class. But then the class was, I don’t know, kind of dry and very much in the classroom.

And the reason I’d always been excited about biology was because I’d grown up spending lots of time playing in streams and creeks and rivers and lakes and playing in the mud by the side of the ocean. And I found out that the Woods Hole National Marine Fisheries Service Aquarium was hosting volunteer interns. So I went and volunteered over the summer between my ninth and tenth grade year at the aquarium, and really got to explore this passion I had for marine biology. And they were like, “Yeah, you’re gonna get to do the seal talk.” And I was like, “I quit.” And they’re like, “What do you mean you quit?” And I was like, “I do not wanna do public speaking. I don’t wanna get up in front of anybody. That sounds like the scariest thing in the world.”

But I had an amazing mentor who helped guide me through the whole process. I carried the bucket of fish, and then I welcomed people, and then I eventually fed the seals, and then I eventually got to a place where I could give the whole seal talk. And so that was a really amazing way for me to get over my fear of public speaking and pursue something I was really passionate about. So yeah, that stayed with me.

Mason Pashia: Awesome. I love it. Very cool, the seal talk. Natasha or Daniela, do you want to go next?

Andrew Frishman: I’ll give you a taste of it if you want. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Woods Hole National Marine Fisheries Service Aquarium. I’d like to introduce you to our two harbor seals, Cecil and Skeezix. We’re feeding them frozen Atlantic sea…” All right, I’ll stop. But that was 35 years ago, and I still remember it.

Mason Pashia: I think otherwise that would’ve been pretty perfect. That’s really great. I get to swim with the seals up here a lot in Seattle, so I’m very partial to a seal talk. Okay, Natasha, I’m seeing you looking ready. What was your experience?

Natasha Luigui: I guess I’m always ready. For me, I would say my favorite learning experiences are ones where I can apply them to real life. So I come from the Met, and it’s difficult not to look at things the way the Met taught me. Going into ninth grade, I thought I wanted to be a schoolteacher, and I learned really quickly that’s not what I wanted to do. Being able to find that out early on was one of my favorite learning experiences. And then trying something else, like trying different things. So I tried barbering, I tried fashion designing. I tried so many different things until I finally realized I wanted to be in healthcare, which is where I ultimately ended up.

So I learn best by doing, reflecting, and then trying again. If I mess up on something, I try again a different way. I don’t necessarily want someone to just tell me how something works. I want to experience it for myself. I think that’s probably one of the reasons why the Met approach works so well with me. I learn better while doing. So you can’t just tell me and show me, “This is a good job or a good thing to do.” I need to be able to do it myself and see if it’s actually something that’s gonna work for me, because what works for one doesn’t work for all. I hope that answered the question.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, no, that’s great. Daniela, how about you? What was a memorable learning experience for you that you chose to have?

Daniela Moraes: Something I specifically love about learning at the Met is my advisor, Becky. We hold these things called circles. I remember in freshman year, I found them a little bit weird, but they’re also pretty fun, because that was the way I sort of got to know the rest of my classmates and the rest of my peers.

Because my advisory is sort of split, so normally advisories are the same grade, but Becky specifically chooses for it to be a mixed-grade advisory, and we’re all girls as well. While I was a freshman, we had juniors, so we had upperclassmen to show us what work was going to be like when we were juniors. And the rest of us freshmen were always laughing, because every single time we had a circle, our seniors would cry, or our juniors at that time would cry. And then when we got to that point, our freshmen found us weird, because then we would start crying, because we all bonded over certain things.

So I think that’s just one of my favorite things, that we always have these circles, and we always get to know each other a little bit better. Today, we just had a circle, and we were talking about different experiences that molded us into the people that we are now, and that’s just one of my favorite things about the advisory in general.

Why Reconnect With the Class of 2006

Mason Pashia: That’s so cool. I love that. Andrew, I want to start with this show. What was the spark that actually drove you to reconnect with this Class of 2006? What questions were you trying to answer, or what were you trying to spotlight?

Andrew Frishman: Yeah, that’s a great question. First, you’ve had a chance to talk some with Natasha, and so you can tell, any chance I get to connect with her and the amazing other students in the advisory is a lovely thing. But if the question is “Why now?” the simple answer is it’s been twenty years. These were young people who I met when they were fourteen or fifteen years old, and they’re approaching the age of forty. And I realized there was this opportunity to not just tell some success story about them, because I like to brag about them a whole bunch, but really to go back and ask, “What actually stuck? What mattered? What didn’t? And what do you remember differently than I do?”

I think part of where that comes from also is that far too often in education, people use the word outcomes, and they use that word to describe a tenth or eleventh grade English or math score. That’s not really an outcome. When you graduate high school, that’s not really an outcome. I’m really more interested in what young people are becoming five or ten or twenty years later. And the opportunity to reconnect with them and then to record those conversations and work with Sam Brown, who’s just an incredible audio producer, to help them and their stories really get elevated, was just… it’s really an honor and a privilege to get to be a part of it.

Communicating Outcomes to Families

Mason Pashia: That’s really cool. I was gonna save this question for later, but you invoked the word “outcome,” so I have a curiosity. Something I’ve been trying to figure out for the last few years is that there are so many innovative schools that do not necessarily have a wait list. So there’s this idea of supply and demand, and I think Getting Smart and Big Picture in a lot of places have been in the business of supply, which is providing these learning models to families that are innovative and different. And we see in a lot of places across the country, not speaking for Big Picture necessarily, that there’s not a long queue to get into that school.

So there’s some failure to communicate outcomes to families, or a failure from families’ perspective to understand how these outcomes are useful. I’m curious how the Met has gone about solving this challenge. If you have non-traditional outcomes, they sometimes are pretty tough to communicate in the narratives we’re all used to. So what has that journey looked like?

Andrew Frishman: Wow, you went right for it, Mason. I thought we were having some warm-up, get-to-know-each-other questions, but you’re going straight to the big ones. I’ll share a little, but then I’d actually be really interested to hear, I think Natasha will have a unique perspective because she’s not only an alum, but also a parent. And so thinking about how and why she made the decision with her children to go to the Met, I think, is interesting. And I’d also love to hear Daniela’s story of how and why she and her family chose the Met. But I’ll pull back to the macro, to the system.

The first place that I would start, I think, is that there’s a piece of almost confirmation bias. And what I mean by that is a lot of adults walk around and feel like, “I went to that school and I turned out okay. I’m okay. So my kids can go there, and they’ll be okay too.” So there’s a bunch of inertia and this sort of feeling of “Hey, I should sort of do what everybody else is doing.” And I think what often causes people to go looking for some alternative is that they have to have some level of dissatisfaction with what’s already going on. And so what I’ve been seeing right now is the rise of everything from AI and technology to what’s happening politically to what’s happening across our communities. There are more and more students and families who are really dissatisfied with a lot of the existing conventional, traditional approaches. And so I am seeing a pretty significant increase in that kind of, quote-unquote, demand.

I’d also share that it’s really hard. The systems and the choices that students and families are and aren’t offered are often really indirect. The decision to offer a school like a Big Picture Learning school in a district isn’t made by students and families. It’s often made by pretty distant administrators. And so I’d point to this, which maybe puts a date and time on this: yesterday, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a really powerful piece in The New York Times about her own process of trying to navigate the education system for her own daughter. It’s something that even the folks who are the most deeply immersed in the history and current state of the education system find really difficult to navigate.

And I guess I’ll just close by saying that I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m committed to the public education system. Both my children have been in public school all the way through. I don’t feel like everything that’s going on in the Cambridge Public School system is perfect. There are a lot of things I’d like to change about it. There are a lot of things I’d like to make more Big Picture-like, honestly. What I’ve tried to do is complement my kids’ experience in school with experiences outside of school that do enable them to develop relationships, to explore their interests, to go try out hands-on things and figure out what they do and don’t want to do. And the challenge is, I think a lot of families don’t necessarily have that either knowledge or ability or resources to do that. So I’m pretty committed to trying to help make sure that schools like the Met are available to a much wider set of people. But as I mentioned, I’d be really interested to hear… We’re glad to hear your follow-up, but I’m interested to hear Natasha’s choice.

Why Daniela and Natasha Chose the Met

Mason Pashia: But I am glad that I clumsily started with the end, because I think that in some ways that is mimetic of the experience that everybody has with a school, right? You pick a school without knowing what the school’s gonna be like in most cases. So I think I might actually start with Daniela, because I want to know, Daniela, why you and your family chose the Met. And then Natasha, I want to come to you, because there is that multi-generation approach of choosing it and then kind of choosing it again. So, Daniela, do you know why you and your family chose the Met for you?

Daniela Moraes: So my older sister, Daidin, actually graduated from the Met in 2016. So it’s been ten years since she graduated. Part of the reason why I went to the Met is because I went to a Catholic private middle school, which is very different from the Met. And I didn’t get into the bigger Catholic private schools because I couldn’t afford it. My family is low income. I only have one parent. I’m first generation. It’s very hard for me to get into schools like that. And I missed the deadline for public schools as well, so I was at this spot where I didn’t know what school to go to. So I applied to the Met, and I got wait-listed. And then it was August, and school was about to start, and I didn’t have a high school to go to.

And so my mom got her things, and she drove to the Met. She goes, “Is there anything you can do for her?” And a week later, I got into Becky’s advisory, and it’s basically just changed my life.

Mason Pashia: I love it. Another multi-generational story and another 10-year interval anniversary. That’s very fun.

First Impressions of Advisory

Mason Pashia: Daniela, what was your first impression of advisory? Aside from seeing the juniors crying, what were you noticing that you remember?

Daniela Moraes: So in my autobiography in freshman year, Becky gave us an assignment so we don’t forget what our first day at the Met was like. That was one of our first assignments, to write about our first day at the Met. All I wrote was, “I hate it here.” I didn’t like it. I was like, “I hate this. I hate everyone here.” And then January, that’s when things started to change. In October, I got my first internship at the lieutenant governor’s office, and I was like, “Wow, I really like this. The lieutenant governor is super cool. I love my mentor. I love the people I’m working with. I love the State House. I love the red velvet muffins that they sell in the cafe.” It was one of my favorite things.

Mason Pashia: Now the truth comes out.

Daniela Moraes: I was sad. And so I was liking that, but then with the whole thing with my classmates, I was like, “Oh, these juniors are super weird for crying all the time during circles. I don’t really like that I don’t have classes.” And then around January is when I really started getting along with the rest of my classmates, and I was like, “These people are so cool. They have such interesting stories. And they understand me. They also have dreams. They’re not just, ‘Oh, I just came to the Met.’ They have dreams as well. They want to be nurses. They want to be nurse practitioners. Some of them don’t know what they want to be, but they know they want a career in STEM or something like that.” And so I got to know them, and that’s sort of why I started loving the Met. And by the time I was a junior and now a senior, I love it here. I wouldn’t change it.

Mason Pashia: That’s awesome. I had a very similar experience when I was five, going to a Montessori pre-K and just sobbing the whole time. I was like, “I hate it here. What have you done?” So I ended up going somewhere else, a different Montessori school, and it was great. But, Natasha, how about you? What made you originally choose to go to the Met, and then you chose to do it again? Tell me about that.

Natasha Luigui: So my original choice, I chose to go to the Met because it was a non-traditional school. The main highlight for me… I think staff and students from the Met came to my middle school. They came to the auditorium to speak about the Met and its approach. And the highlight for me was there’s no classes, there’s no tests, you’re out of school two days a week to learn the things that you want to learn. But in my head I’m like, “Okay, no classes, no tests, no real teachers. I wanna see what this school is all about.”

So when I told my mom about it, she was just like, “Hmm.” She’s like, “I have to go to this open house, because this doesn’t sound like a good school to go to right now.” So we went to the open house, and once we went through the open house, she was interested. She was like, “Okay, this sounds like a decent idea. We’ll see how it goes.” So I went through the Summer Infusion. Really liked the Summer Infusion, because every year in the summer students have an opportunity to meet their advisors and meet other students before the school year starts. It’s like a three-day thing, so we did that. It was good to get the nerves away a little bit, because I was really nervous about entering high school. It’s a new environment, it’s new people. So being able to do the Summer Infusion helped a little bit.

But then after that, I kind of had the same mindset as Daniela mentioned, like, “I don’t wanna be here.” Like, “I’m bored,” and all this other stuff. Andrew knows, I didn’t wanna do anything, but I wanted to do everything at the same time, so it was just a lot. I didn’t know where I was in life. And now as a parent, I see that and I try to explain it to my kids, too. “I was there, trust me.” “No, you don’t understand. You’re not the same as me.” And I’m like, “I probably was worse than you.” When it comes to not knowing what I wanted to do and giving my advisor a hard time, or the other adults a hard time, not that much, because there were other students that were harder, but I definitely didn’t know in the moment.

But now, going through it, I have a different perspective as an adult, as someone who has a career, and as a parent of, okay, what do I think would be a good school for my child who was having a difficult time in a traditional school setting, having to sit for long periods of time in a classroom? And even now, he’s a sophomore, and we’re having some difficulties there with the Met approach and explaining it. So his biggest thing, all it boils down to is, “I just don’t wanna do exhibitions.” And it’s like, “So you’re having this whole hissy fit, and it’s just because of the exhibitions. How can we make it work for you so that you’re not having a hard time with the exhibitions? You can talk about the things that you like, you don’t like, what you learned, what you feel like you didn’t learn from this experience. You have that opportunity to do that here at the school. And you’re able to have that one-on-one time with your advisor.”

In a traditional school, they’re not gonna pull you from the 30 kids that they have, even more, because they change different classes, so it’s a lot more students they have to deal with, and you don’t get that same one-on-one time as you do at the Met. So yeah, it’s a lot of different things.

What an Exhibition Is

Mason Pashia: For our listeners who don’t know what an exhibition is, will you tell them what an exhibition is?

Natasha Luigui: An exhibition, I think it’s trimesters, maybe three times a year, students basically present the work that they’ve learned, things that they’ve learned through their internship in the real world, where they currently are in their learning, the things that they wanna learn in the future. So it’s just basically a presentation of your work. Think of it as a report card, but something that you can present from real-world experiences.

Andrew Frishman: If I can add on, what makes an exhibition unique is that the student is presenting in part to maybe their peers, some older or younger students in the school, and their advisor, sort of their teacher, but also often their parents and family members, and often their mentors from their internship sites. And so getting up to speak to a whole community of people who know and care about you and your learning, and who can both give you some congratulations and approval, but also ask you some really pretty tough questions and often give you very pointed, constructive feedback about how to get better.

So I feel for JD a little bit and Sasha. It’s not necessarily meant to be a really easy experience. And I do believe that sometimes, if you’re a little uncomfortable, you can do some really good learning. That’s usually a sign that you care a lot about it. But I don’t know. Daniela, you’re probably still in the middle of it. What’s it like giving an exhibition? What’s your experience been?

Daniela Moraes: I’m very iffy on exhibitions. At first I kind of like it. It’s better than taking a test at the end of a semester. But there’s some things to the exhibition, like especially explaining why some of my work isn’t done or why it’s turned in late in front of my parents is not my favorite thing. But I also do… It’s like how the principal of my building, Peter, says it: “It’s a time for you to show off. Just show off everything that you’ve done. You can be a little cocky about it. You’ve done all these things. You’ve done this incredible internship. You’ve done all these projects. You wrote that research paper. You passed QR,” which is math. “You did all these great things. It’s time for you to show that off.”

And I really like that part, because in the end, like Andrew said, you have your underclassmen there, and some of them do get inspired by the work that you’ve done. And it sort of shows them, “Well, what if instead of this I actually really do wanna do this?” And I’ve seen that in some cases, and some people on exhibition feedback forms, they’ll be like, “You’ve inspired me.” And I’ve seen those classmates change from music to politics just because they went to my exhibition.

Mason Pashia: The classic music-to-politics pipeline. It’s everywhere. What you’re saying makes me think of… I spend a lot of time thinking about helping learners communicate essentially what they’re good at into new contexts, whether that be workforce or admissions or something. And so I’m always thinking about this fact that young people are generally really good at telling their story, curating experiences through Instagram or even Snapchat or these other things. But the story they’re telling and curating is just for one audience, and it’s for their peers. And the second you ask them to change that to a new audience, it’s like, “Who are you? You’re talking to employers now, not students.” They’re like, “Oh, I have no idea how to do that.”

And so there’s this really beautiful thing about presenting to all those different kinds of thresholds of people, where you distill into your most raw form, where maybe you’re a little self-deprecating because you’re around your peers, and maybe you’re flexing a little more because you’re in front of the staff. And maybe you’re a little bit more cozy or something because your parents are there. Or that’s way weirder because your parents are there. But I think it’s really interesting to think about messaging that hits all of them, which does feel actually like modeling what real life feels like.

We don’t really exist in isolation very much as adults, and workplaces are increasingly like, “Oh, you can show up as a whole person,” and regardless of how true that may or may not be, depending on where you are. But I think that’s really interesting, so I love that. Thanks for digging into those exhibitions a bit more. Exactly, Natasha, like code switching in real life. Threw that in the chat, listeners.

Preparing for What’s Next

Mason Pashia: Natasha, I wanna come back to you around how you take this exhibition, and specifically this graduation time, and use that to navigate what’s next. So at Getting Smart, we’re thinking a lot about how you equip parents to assist in advisory, whether that’s because the system at the school is really holistic or whether that’s because the school does not have a really great advisory system built in. How did your experience at the Met prepare you to be an advisor to your own kids today in navigating what’s next?

Natasha Luigui: I think for me, a lot of it has to do with the relationships that I’ve built with my advisor, with my advisees, with the other adults in my life, whether it’s a mentor or the principal, and just everyone knowing what my interests are or knowing people. So I always say that it’s all about who you know, because I used to hear that a lot back then, and I never understood it until I got surrounded by a lot of well-known people and got into really good rooms and things like that. So it literally is all in who you know. I teach that to my kids. I’m like, “Where is it that you want to go? Where is it that you see yourself? You need to find where those people are.” The people who are leading those spaces, those are the spaces you wanna get into. Even if it’s the janitor that cleans that office, you wanna get to know who that janitor is. Do they know who the leader is? Like I said, I kinda go on a tangent. I don’t even know… So I think that some of the outcomes of the advisory and the Met aren’t necessarily things that you recognize going toward graduation or even at graduation. Looking back, we constantly were learning about how to communicate, how to advocate for ourselves, how to reflect when we were doing journal entries, how to interact with adults. As teenagers it feels very nerve-wracking, but now as an adult, it’s like, I learned all this stuff in high school, so I feel a little bit more confident speaking to leaders, and also talking about our interests and our present learning.

So, for example, when I was mentioning the exhibitions, it’s a really good example, because right now my children hate exhibition. Well, only one of them. My daughter is a little bit more confident now because she’s a senior. But my son as a sophomore, he gets really anxious every time exhibitions are approaching. So I try to explain it to him like, “You love music, you love sports. You’re starting to learn and research different meals that’ll help you be healthier. That research, you can add to your exhibition as part of something that you’re learning. Even though it’s on your own, add it to your learning plan, because you are learning and you are researching things. You are learning about the healthy foods and the different…” Because he gets a lot of cramps during football or basketball. So just learning the different things like that and how he can teach his peers about the things that he’s learning. I tell him to think of it as a conversation. The same conversation that you’re having with me about the things that you’re learning, you just do it in front of people that it might benefit. Health benefits everyone. Health and wellness benefits everyone. And how music also helps with your mental health, you can speak about that as well.

So it all boils down to relationships, having conversations, communicating. So the parents just being really involved and understanding who your child is and what their interests are in the moment, because it can change tomorrow. And I know that from my experience as a student, and also as a parent, because it’s like, “Well, you liked that yesterday.” And it’s like, “Yeah, well, I don’t like that today.” So…

Mason Pashia: And how can you start to constellate those experiences, right? Your interest might change Wednesday to Thursday, but there’s probably something between those two that is held constant. You’re suddenly interested in computers and then you’re interested in architecture, and maybe you just care about how things are built. You’re just like, “I wanna understand how things go together.”

Something you said I really love, Natasha, is that you just need to say a lot about what you like and care about. And that’s how I’ve gotten every job I’ve ever gotten: caring deeply about a random thing, meeting a random person who also cared about it, and then we just sustained connection long enough for there to be an opportunity. That’s so much of getting a job. And so knowing yourself and being loud about yourself is a really good way to navigate the world. And I’m really glad to hear the Met is instilling that in people through exhibition or otherwise.

Natasha Luigui: Yeah, and I would also like to add thinking about transferable skills. As students, what did you learn from this? What did you learn at the daycare that you can transfer over to the barber shop? It could be communication. It could be the soft skills that you learned. So each experience that I had, even though they don’t seem like the same thing, you can learn something that will transfer over to leadership down the line, which a lot of those little experiences transferred over to my current job.

Internships and Following Your Interests

Mason Pashia: Love it. Daniela, how did that work for you? It sounds like you fell into an internship early that was pretty aligned to what you wanna do now. But how have your interests honed over time toward this thing that you’re interested in?

Daniela Moraes: So I’ve always sort of known… a lot of my internships have changed. Not really, actually. What am I saying? My internships have sort of stayed in this circle of politics and law, but my interests are different from that. Obviously I do wanna be a lawyer, I do wanna be a politician at some point, but there’s also small things I like. I like to draw, I like to sing, I like the theater. And so I do different activities like that. But with internships, my first internship I got pretty easily, because my advisor already had that connection. One of her old seniors had been in that internship for a couple of months. And so when I was like, “Well, I wanna do politics,” she was like, “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”

And then she got me that internship for at least a shadow day with the lieutenant governor’s office. And when I liked it, I got that internship. And then literally on my shadow day, I met my mentor now, Rob Rock, the deputy secretary of state. And I was like, “This guy’s awesome.” And I met the Secretary of State, Secretary Amore. Once again, he’s awesome. He’s incredible. And so I got that connection. So the next year when I was looking for an internship, I told Becky, “Becky, I wanna be in the secretary of state’s office.” And I loved it, because I got introduced to voting. I knew voting was a really cool thing. Always go vote November 3rd.

Mason Pashia: Hard plug for voting on the podcast, yes.

Daniela Moraes: Yes, it’s your civic duty. But I always knew about voting. My mom did her citizenship, and that was one of the things she was most interested in. She was like, “Well, as a citizen, I get to vote.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s a really cool thing.” And when I was at the Secretary of State’s office my first couple of months, it was the election year, and I was basically assembling all these mail voting ballots and all that stuff. I was cutting all those “I Voted” stickers and organizing all these ballots. I got to see what was on the ballots, even though I wasn’t voting. But I got to see the behind the scenes of, well, people are like, “Okay, voting is this thing, but what do you actually do?” And I’m like, “This is what you actually do.” It’s all these people sort of stressed because, well, we have to get these ballots to this certain city because only we print them. And then, well, this person just registered to vote. Now we have to mail this to this city hall so they can be officially registered over there. So I got to see that background, and that’s sort of where my interest in voting came from.

And the Secretary of State here, he really focuses on civics, and he was a history teacher in East Providence. And so when he became Secretary of State, one of the things that he really prioritized was that civics is something that every student should be learning. And so now it’s a law in Rhode Island for you to learn civics from eighth grade to 12th. It’s a graduation requirement. And I’m so glad that’s a thing, because people don’t know the three branches of government, and it’s something that’s so simple. And so I’m so glad Secretary Amore put that out, because I ended up learning that I really, really do love civics. I love when my advisor had civic lessons for us, because, well, I’m a pro at this. And I got to take on that leadership and be like, “Well, actually, this is what you do.” And that’s how it is most of the time when we’re doing history lessons, because I give tours at the State House now, so I know a lot of Rhode Island history as well. So we’ll go into this early colonial era, and I’ll be like, “Well, actually, this happened, Becky.” So that’s…

Mason Pashia: Oh, that’s awesome. That’s so cool. Thank you for sharing.

Daniela Moraes: I went off.

Mason Pashia: But thank you. That’s a great share and super accurate. And such powerful examples of real-world learning. All of those are so hands-on, and they are really an inversion, as Andrew just dropped in the chat, this inversion of who’s the teacher and who’s the student. It’s really exciting to invite people into that meaningful work.

Sustaining Advisory Across a System

Mason Pashia: Andrew, I wanna bring you in. There’s so much in this conversation that is seemingly dependent upon the individual, like Becky, who’s been mentioned a few times, these different advisors or these different people who are able to facilitate this journey. And while that is a personalized pursuit often, in a system, it’s really dangerous and hard, if those people leave, to sustain that level of change and impact. It can be a really tricky thing to make sure that that is always going on. So how do you at Big Picture, and you can distill that down to the Met if that makes more sense, try to sustain that impactful role across this large system and changing politics and changing roles and changing people and everything? I would love to hear how you think about it.

Andrew Frishman: Yeah, I’ll share a few thoughts and maybe some feelings as well. I think it’s part of the question that you asked, which you hadn’t quite asked me, which is: Why did I come to the Met? So I’ll share a little bit of background. I had taught for five years in much more conventional schools, and I had taught science and some math and biology. And I had a real passion and interest in biology, and I thought everybody else should too. But what I found was that after my fourth or fifth year, where I’d have thirty kids at a time march through the classroom four times a day, it was sort of like, “It’s the Andrew Frishman show featuring biology today.” You know, I could do that pretty well and get kids sort of interested, but it was really my interest. It wasn’t necessarily theirs.

And so I tried to find some little experiments. I tried to help young people… I was supposed to be teaching anatomy and physiology, and I had a real interest in neuroscience, and I knew lots of kids were interested in how their own brain works. And so I said, “All right, we’re gonna do an ‘interview a neuroscientist’ project.” And every kid could find somebody who did something related to the brain. And one kid went off and interviewed a person who worked with Alzheimer’s patients because their grandmother had Alzheimer’s. Another kid’s uncle was a substance abuse addict and was trying to understand addiction. A third kid, his mom was always on him to wear a helmet when he went skateboarding, so he went to learn about concussions. And the kids came back super fired up and excited, right? And I was like, “Oh my God, this thing when young people get really electrified about something they’re interested in, that really matters.”

So my time as an advisor at the Met, while there are a lot of parts to the job and the role, part of the job description was really just to help young people explore the things they’re interested in and help them get opportunities to pursue that. And that made me want to keep coming back. I was lucky enough, as Natasha mentioned, to be her advisor and be an advisor for four years. And I happily would have kept coming back and being an advisor, looping around. In fact, we mentioned Becky, who’s Daniela’s advisor. I was there with Becky twenty-four years ago. She has been there over twenty-five years, cycling through with loops. And that’s really not uncommon. There are tons of advisors who get to the Met and then loop repeatedly, four years after four years after four years.

Then, because I’m in a long-term relationship that has turned into my marriage, I moved to California and helped grow the Big Picture school in Sacramento, and then moved on into leadership in Big Picture. But the place that I would start on the sustainability side is that I think educators really wanna do that. The reason that educators get into the work is that they care about young people. They care about their learning. They always talk about wanting to see that moment when the light bulb goes off. And in conventional schools, I’d have a handful of those every month. And at the Met, I had multiple instances of that every day. It was a different level of excitement. And, to Daniela’s point, I was going sometimes to the Capitol Building, and sometimes to a daycare, and sometimes to a hospital, and sometimes to an architecture firm.

And so most teachers spend so much of their time, just like their students, kind of bottled up in one classroom, not really understanding what it is that most adults are doing in the workplace. And a couple of days a week, I was going around to all these different workplaces and getting to learn along with all of my students. Something that you alluded to, talking about becoming the expert: I usually found that if my students had been at an internship for a couple of weeks, if they didn’t know more than I did about that topic, there was something going wrong. And that almost never happened, right? It’s a very different understanding. Instead of, as an educator, my job is to know everything and pour this knowledge into the kids’ heads, and then they spit it back on a test, and then a couple weeks later, we move on to something else. No, no, no. My goal is to help you become an expert in this so that you can educate me and all the other students in this advisory. That is a very different base-level assumption about what learning is, individually and collectively.

So, all right. I don’t know if I fully answered your question, so I have one other piece on the sustainability side. One thing I’ll point out is that as Big Picture Learning, we did help to launch the Met, but we don’t own or operate it. The Met is its full, complete, own autonomous entity, and our goal is not to do the heavy lifting and weights for each of the schools. There are now more than a hundred and forty schools in the Big Picture network across the United States and another hundred in eleven countries around the world. We don’t own or operate any of those. We don’t have formal authority over them. We don’t put resources into them, and we don’t extract resources out of them. What we do is work with the leadership, work with the educators there on how to implement these kinds of practices. And by and large, when people do that, they really enjoy it. They feel a really deep sense of satisfaction, and they get to see not only their students, but then, in rare, joyful cases, their alumni out there thriving and flourishing in a world that continues to be really uncertain.

So, to your question, I think the biggest challenges to the sustainability mostly come purely externally. A lot of the existing education system is just not set up to really fully understand what’s going on in those schools, and so it can get caught in the crossfire around accountability and standardized test metrics and enrollment and funding and staffing, and it can be tied up a little more in the tactical and logistical. And that’s where our network, I think, really comes in. The schools learn a lot individually and then connect with each other and share a lot of best practices and solutions. So yeah.

What Listeners Might Take Away

Mason Pashia: Awesome. Thank you. Okay, I wanna make sure we get a few more minutes on The Advisory, the show, before we wrap up today. So I wanna do a quick wraparound to each of you, and I wanna hear what’s something that you hope listeners of that show take away? What is an outcome for the listeners of The Advisory that you would like to see? Natasha, do you feel ready to speak first to that one?

Natasha Luigui: Sure. For me, I think one of the outcomes that I would like to see with the podcast is just having school leaders and administrators try something different, and not worry so much about tests and things. Because students, they’ll learn how to take a test, but how can they teach back something? How can they teach you something that they’ve learned? Because that’s much harder than taking a test. Teaching someone something that I’ve learned is way more difficult than preparing for a test that I can kind of con my way through. Like in The Advisory podcast, Noam was conning his way through school until he got to the Met, and he actually had to put some thought into the things that he was learning. And it turned out to be good. He’s doing really well for himself.

So yeah, it would just be building the relationships with your students. Try to get to know the student as a whole, not just what they can produce in their scores and things like that. Because for someone who has ADHD or any other learning disability, maybe they can verbally and visually show you. They might have a hard time with the things on paper, but they can show you better than they can prove on paper. Someone like me. It’s just really focus on the student as a whole and not so much on the scores.

Mason Pashia: That’s great. Daniela, how about you?

Daniela Moraes: Something I hope people take away from this is that when I explain to someone I go to the Met, they’re like, “Oh, what is that?” I explain the Met to them, and they’re like, “So you do nothing all day. You sit in a classroom, stare at a screen, and you do nothing all day.” And I go, “Well, not exactly. I do work.” And they’re like, “What exactly are you doing?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s a little bit complex.” And so I hope that when people listen to The Advisory, they’ll finally understand what the Met actually is, instead of me just going, “Well, I just sit in the classroom all day.” Because it’s not just that. There’s a lot of things to the advisory that are hard to explain. You just have to be there. The Advisory does a good job at that.

Mason Pashia: It’s a great blurb, the Met. You gotta be there. Andrew, how about you?

Andrew Frishman: Yeah, so I appreciate so much what Natasha and Daniela just shared. I think one of the big things, and apologies if I’ve mentioned this before, is that education just keeps using the word outcomes to describe what’s happening in tenth or eleventh grade, or whether you graduate high school or college. And I really feel like we’ve gotta look much more longitudinally. We’ve gotta look over a longer span. What we really care about is helping young people thrive and flourish in an increasingly turbulent and uncertain world. And particularly, I think, at a moment when artificial intelligence is pushing into a lot of the things and the skills that most conventional schools ask, I hope it will ask people, what does it really mean to be human? What are the things that really matter? And I think a lot of that is about your ability to interact with other people and forge deep relationships, your ability to understand who you are and advocate for that, and your ability to develop some skills that you can then put into practice out in the world.

So I’m hoping that people get a glimpse of that. I hope that people have a good time enjoying it. I think there are elements of The Advisory, Class of 2006 podcast that feel a little nostalgic and a little bit of throwback. There are elements of it that feel a little like reality TV. Like, whoa, they lived through what? What’s going on? And there are parts of it, I won’t do any spoilers, that are really joyful, and I think will get people in the feels. And there are some parts of it that are really hard and really intense and about some of the realities that we all are walking through in the world. So yeah, I hope that people really enjoy it and get inspired. And I think, to Natasha’s point, that they get curious and they ask some questions. Like, does everything really have to be the way that it is? What could it be like if it was different? So those would be some of the main things that I think about.

But I’ll add one last thing. The last thing is that I really hope that folks in other schools and education systems will reach out to their alumni, people who graduated five years, ten years, twenty years ago, and ask them to come back in and talk about their experiences and what really mattered for them in school. That’s the kind of feedback loop that I think the education system is sorely lacking right now.

Mason Pashia: I think that’s really awesome, and something I care a lot about at Getting Smart is how do we tell the story of process rather than product, right? Because we can’t wait 20 years, and that’s something I’ve always appreciated about Big Picture and the Met, that you’re learning out loud constantly, and you’re sharing what you’re learning, and you’re sharing stories from the field. But then you also do these really big celebrations that actually do that longitudinal analysis and demonstration. So that’s super cool. Thanks for sharing that. Listeners, you can find that podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find out more at classof2006.org, or by going to any of your RSS feeds, Spotify, Apple, anything. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

News From Rhode Island

Mason Pashia: Speaking of outcomes, Daniela, I hear there actually is some exciting news from the state of Rhode Island, maybe breaking news. What is that news?

Daniela Moraes: So just Wednesday I got awarded the National Secretary of State’s award, the John Lewis Leadership Award, which is a civic leadership award, and I was very, very shocked. I’m still kind of processing it. I tell it to my friends, like, I was just on a call with my best friend JJ, and I was telling him this because I hadn’t told him yet, and he’s like, “Damn, that’s huge.” And I’m like, “Is it?” It’s still kind of processing.

The way I got the award was kind of funny. I had to go to the bathroom during my internship, and when I come back I see the Secretary of State waiting for me. And I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m fired. I’m so fired.” And then he’s like, “You know, all the work that you’ve done here, we’re all so grateful.” And I was like, “I really am fired. What did I do?” And then he was like, “Which is why I’m so honored to give you this award.” And I’m like, “I’m not fired?” So it was really, really shocking, still kind of processing it. But I’m very, very honored to receive it, especially since it’s an award that normally 20-year-olds get. And so I’m very happy to be a 17-year-old getting this award.

Mason Pashia: It’s so cool.

Andrew Frishman: If I can just share, if you get to listen to The Advisory, you’ll hear Daniela actually giving some of the tours of the State House, of the Capitol Building. And I think that, you know, to Daniela’s point, some people are like, “What is it you do at the Met? You’re just sitting around on the computer?” Well, no. What Daniela was doing was at the State Capitol Building, touring other high school students and middle school students and elementary students around and telling them how their state government works and how they can work to make things better. So when I hear about John Lewis, and I know he urged a lot of people to go get in good trouble, I’m grateful that Daniela’s getting in good trouble and helping a lot of other people get into it too.

Mason Pashia: That’s awesome. And grateful that the Met is helping a lot of people get into good trouble, it sounds like, for 20 years running now. That’s so exciting. All right, Andrew, Daniela, and Natasha, thank you so much for joining me today. And everyone, I highly recommend you go check out The Advisory wherever you listen.

Resources

• The Advisory Podcast (available wherever you listen to podcasts)
• Andrew’s LinkedIn
• Big Picture Learning
• The Met High School