Jeanine Collins on State Transformation and the Center for the Future of Learning

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Jeanine Collins, co-founder and Chief Impact Officer of the Center for the Future of Learning joins to share how Nevada is transforming its education system through bold partnerships, learner-centered design, and the arts. This episode dives into her journey from classroom teaching to leading statewide initiatives that redefine success for students through the Portrait of a Learner. Jeanine discusses the power of arts in education, how intermediary organizations can bridge policy and practice, and the importance of building collective action to drive systemic change. Tune in to explore how Nevada is fostering meaningful, interactive learning experiences that empower students to thrive in their communities and beyond.

Outline

• (00:00) Early Career and Education
• (04:14) Transition to Education Policy
• (06:54) Founding the Center for the Future of Learning
• (12:22) Youth Engagement and Innovation
• (14:53) Values-Driven Leadership
• (20:08) Building Networks and Future Vision

Early Career and Education

Rebecca Midles: You are listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Rebecca Midles, and welcome to the Innovation Road Trip podcast series. We’re exploring how states are driving transformation through bold policies, grassroots coalitions, and cross-sector partnerships. I’ve been thinking a lot about the connective tissue of educational change—those organizations that work as intermediaries to bridge policy and practice. We’ve talked with incredible leaders from foundations and member-driven coalitions, and today we’re with a repeat guest who’s not just building an organization but a movement. She’s doing it through incredible partnerships in her home state of Nevada.

I’m joined today by my friend and a fearless innovator, Jeanine Collins, co-founder and chief impact officer of the Center for the Future of Learning. Welcome, Jeanine.

Jeanine Collins: Thanks, Rebecca.

Rebecca Midles: It feels like we’ve known each other forever. Your career trajectory has been so dynamic—a lifetime of leadership packed into just a handful of years. What I’ve always admired is that you don’t default to a traditional route. You find the most effective path, bringing people along and building a movement. It’s been an honor to witness. Can you bring our listeners into a bit of this wild journey, this wild trajectory?

Jeanine Collins: I think this story probably begins as a graduate student at Bard College, which is where I earned my Master of Arts in teaching history. I had an undergraduate degree in history, and I’ve had a lifetime as a young artist—musician and dancer—which is why I chose Bard’s MAT program. I have an incredible mother who was a fantastic educator and fueled within me the belief that education was not just critically important but could be a space of real transformation. I wanted to find a program that I felt was seeking to cultivate within educators their ability to change the system.

Bard, for me, was that place. The tiny little liberal arts college continues now, but it was the first year of their MAT program. What I have noticed, Rebecca, is that I tend to show up where people are doing things for the first time. They called us their “robust guinea pigs.” Since then, I feel like I’ve been creating experiences for robust guinea pigs because things aren’t perfect when you start, but there’s a lot of passion, dreaming, and iteration. That experience at Bard gave me the foundation to be an action researcher—something I often say, a researching practitioner. Although I completed my master’s in history, it made me realize that I actually wanted to be a dance teacher. That is where I felt I could pull both the academic knowledge and ideas I was grappling with into a unique space of self-expression, exploration, and creativity.

I saw the lack of constraints in an elective classroom, which I felt was what I needed to be the kind of teacher or systems pusher I wanted to be. So, I came back to my home state of Nevada and taught in the Clark County School District for 13 years as a dance educator with young high school students. I worked to create experiences, relationships, and environments where young people were challenged to develop a way of seeing—a point of view in the world. Dance became the intersection of who they were as humans and in their bodies, but also with their minds and what they were learning in school.

We had so much fun together. I loved it. I think we created a lot of great art together, and we thought a lot about the creative process. Somewhere toward the end of my teaching career, I felt there was a larger impact I was hoping to make. I didn’t feel like the classroom was going to be the place for it, so I stepped out.

Transition to Education Policy

Jeanine Collins: I did some reflecting and had the opportunity to step back in closer to when I met you. I found myself as the executive director of a small education policy nonprofit in Nevada called Nevada Succeeds. At the time I stepped into that organization, they had incredible relationships with leaders across the state and were exploring what might be important to do next to really move Nevada forward, learning from high-performing systems research. We brought a little bit of design thinking magic to that conversation. Then we had the challenge of the pandemic, and all of that mixed together brought our organization to partner with your organization at that time to explore really innovative learning that was happening across the world—in Singapore and across the United States.

Rebecca Midles: It was an amazing time.

Jeanine Collins: It was so fun. Through that process, we brought educators together from across our state in a space of learning. We brought systems leaders—at the time, our state superintendent Joan Ebert and many others across different layers of the system—together to ask, “What is happening? What is possible?” We saw something that felt so simple but was at the cutting edge of the trend. The country we were studying, Singapore, and other innovative systems were redefining success in a broader way. Educators in our work thought it made so much sense—it was long overdue. Our state superintendent and the state of Nevada said, “Let’s go after building a portrait of a learner. Let’s really talk with our community about what these mindsets and skills need to be, and let’s think about what we need to do to reorient our system so that we’re actually creating the enabling conditions for young people to become collaborators through the way they’re engaging in math, to become critical thinkers because of the way they’re unpacking ideas in their science classrooms.” That learning is alive, visible, relevant, and exciting.

That set me on the trajectory ever since. We’ve been doing partnership work with state partners and national organizations that have supported competency-based learning approaches and learner-centered systems redesign. We did that work together inside an organization called At Extraordinary, which sat inside Teach for America Nevada. They housed the work and created the support systems so that we could do this great work across our community and state.

Shorts Content

Founding the Center for the Future of Learning

Jeanine Collins: Just this past year—actually almost a year ago to the date—our team spun out of what became At Extraordinary into the Center for the Future of Learning to really focus full-time on this vision of creating a future that is full of possibility when it comes to learning. We aim to help shepherd the relationships with community, policy, and practice that are necessary to advance what we haven’t built yet and what we are building on.

Rebecca Midles: I’m hearing a couple of things. I’m hearing how important the performance learning piece that you started at—but also strongly believe in—has really shown up in a unique way. I think as a leader, you keep that front and center. You’re also sharing that you’ve been in a couple of different roles for intermediary work at a state level, and I feel like all of those pieces stacked together have really led you to some unique ways that you’ve navigated that. I hope that surfaces as we continue talking more about this because I do want to circle back. The dance that you and Andy and others did on your team with students for that—it was one of those experiences that I’ll never forget. Can you talk a little bit about that? That was very powerful, and I know it’s available online somewhere where people could watch it. I think it’s on YouTube somewhere.

Jeanine Collins: You know, fast forward—we’re the team at At Extraordinary that now became the Center for the Future of Learning team. We helped build this statewide process to envision a portrait of a Nevada learner. Then, very quickly after that, in October, we launched the Nevada Future of Learning Network. The experience you’re talking about—yes, Andy on my team, who shares very similar values around co-design and co-production—we went and worked with a group of dancers at one of the schools here locally. We did a series of engagements with them to unpack what the vision of the portrait was, to help them find their own physicalizations of these ideas, and then to create movement.

We strung it together into a story that really looked at what school has felt like and has been and what it could feel like and become. The arts are just so powerful because they cut through everything. Especially, I think, dance is so powerful because it’s so human, so visceral, and the feeling is valid in a way that sometimes I think the way we show up and talk about schools and think about learning can feel a little like the feeling part doesn’t matter as much as the head part does.

Rebecca Midles: Yes, 2D, right?

Jeanine Collins: Yes, and I just feel like the head and the heart and all of it goes together. We’re all these whole human beings, and the arts just make that real. These young people did such an incredible job showcasing that story through their own choreography. We helped shape it, and it was the entry point for everyone to get into the network launch. They were welcomed into this space, watched this dance, and were opened up into what felt like a carnival.

Rebecca Midles: It was immersive. It was interactive. I mean, the dancers pulled people who were listening in. The metaphor of the whole experience—it was unlike anything I’ve seen. I’ve been in this work since the late 1990s, just to give away my age. But to be able to experience that and see that and have that run by students for people coming in to learn more about the work you’re doing—I’ll never forget it. I encourage people to find that, and we’ll put a link in the show notes if we can.

Jeanine Collins: I love it because this work really is about empowering people—learners—to have these meaningful, interactive experiences that build connection, help them make sense of what they’re learning, and ultimately help people see how they can contribute to make a difference in their communities. If you can feel that, then you just cut through the talking of, “Are we really going to do this?” It’s like, “Hi, it’s here.” We try to figure out ways to show up in that experience, whether they’re in small conversations or in large events like you saw.

Rebecca Midles: Let’s circle back to the Center for the Future of Learning where you are now. Like you said, it’s been an evolution, and you have a lot of team members. There’s a commitment there about building, as I’m hearing you talk, building a movement through collective power. Can you share a story about how bringing diverse groups together—like educators do a really great job with young people and community leaders—led to an unexpected solution or a breakthrough partnership that maybe you weren’t expecting but was part of the process?

Youth Engagement and Innovation

Jeanine Collins: This past summer, one of the things I’m really excited about is an experience my colleagues Andy and Sean led with our youth. They’re called Future Skaters, so they’re really creating the landscape of the future with their dreaming and their actions. That experience was about bringing them together to envision the values they have around what school can be, how they can have different kinds of learning relationships, experiences, and environments that build off the things that are fueling to them. But also, how do we start to scale those things and create systems that ensure that’s accessible to all kids and all families?

One of the activities they did was produce an almanac for the future of learning. It’s so great, right? When you create some prompts, create some collaboration, and bring in some incredible designers. I love it. We’ve got to put this in the notes.

It’s just this beautiful piece. They talked to community members throughout this process as part of their learning, but they also engaged each other and their perspectives to create something that really pushes our thinking on what a school day feels like, what kinds of experiences they might be able to have all over the world in a day because of how they learn. I think that when we create the space to dream a little bit—not just to respond to the current state of affairs—we can get to some pretty bold ideas really quickly. That’s why I think we value young people so much. We have some incredible young people who continue to be on our team as our youth innovation associates.

They bring their expertise, their perspective, and that sense of possibility at a moment in their lives where they’re really trying to figure out what comes next and what they do. We’ve got to stay alive in that tension with the work we’re doing because sometimes we’re doing this work for years and years, but it’s for young people to transition into that point where they’re going to keep learning and building forever. How are we taking that school experience and really making sure that we’re pushing on what that can be for this moment and for the next moment? That almanac is something I’m so proud of that everyone created together. It’s fun, funny, and all the things that we believe the future can be.

Rebecca Midles: I agree. You’re expressing, I think, the culture of the organization that you lead—not just the young people. I think that permeates throughout your organization. That leads me to ask you a question about organizational values, not personal agendas, which I think you’ve done a great job with. How do you keep that the driving force behind partnerships you build? Maybe another way of saying that is: What does being ego-free in this work really mean to you? What are ways that, as people are listening, they can be thinking about that, particularly in reference to the roles that intermediaries play?

You know, we are in a field that has a lot of competition right now for funding. How do you keep the values of your organization at the center in this landscape?

Values-Driven Leadership

Jeanine Collins: I think one of the great things about the folks on our team is that we’re really design thinkers and human-centered design thinkers at heart. What does that mean to us? It means that we place a really high priority on context, first and foremost. When we think about the context, we’re not thinking about ourselves. We’re thinking about the community, the diversity of the community, and those who are least served by the way things are currently operating. Because we’re rooted in a constant state of empathy, it keeps everything very clear.

We’re not more concerned about doing a thing than solving the problem or redefining the problem in a way that is solutions-oriented. We’re constantly questioning, analyzing, wondering, and sensing. For example, we might notice that something isn’t landing for people the way we thought it would. Then we ask, “Is it the words? Is it something else?” We’re in those conversations so often, and the work is so adaptive as a result. I think that makes the work feel authentic to people.

If we’re talking about our portrait of a learner, which is now two and a half years old, I love that a young person from our community sketched it out as a result of community conversations. I love that there are these questions on it. Systems go through leadership changes and new folks, and it’s not like we did it and it’s done. There’s no definition of “done.” I think there’s an infinite mindset on the work that keeps us out of ego as well.

When we notice new leaders coming in or schools that haven’t jumped into the work yet, we ask, “Is it not accessible? How do we need to talk about this differently? Does it feel like all the things you should be doing anyway?” Then we think about what that means and how we can help talk about it. There’s no one way to meet everybody. We’re still so steeped in responding to where people are that we’re just moving based on that. Yes, we have goals and strategies to employ those goals, but we’re really loose on how we do it to make sure it’s responding to the questions our community constantly has.

Rebecca Midles: What I’m hearing you talk about is the tightness around values and purpose but an openness—kind of that tight-loose idea—and that openness to be responsive. You’ve been in spaces where there are a lot of others also doing similar work, and you’ve been able to really build collective action by being, I think, value-driven and ego-free in service of the work in a way that is noteworthy. You’re going to continue to do that in the new organization. I was just thinking about all those people who are falling off in this world of competition with funding drying up. In this competitive world, we have some people who are merging, and we have different organizations working together. I’ve just seen you navigate that in a really thoughtful way.

Jeanine Collins: Our perspective is that we are always excited to partner with folks who bring expertise, ideas, and value to a conversation that we don’t have. It’s not really about us. I think we see ourselves as the convener—the folks who can draw from the best of what’s around and the best of who’s around to make something better. One of our goals is to work with the best, brightest, and smartest people so that we get better along the way.

Rebecca Midles: I think that is what I hope people are hearing too. A local grassroots, state-run intermediary of people who live there, who will be living there past these initiatives, who will reap the benefits of this work—navigating that path, bringing in people from outside of the state if they want, but recognizing how that impacts and really being the voice, I think, of that state piece. That’s what we’re capturing as we go through some of these interviews with foundation-led work and member-driven coalition work. There’s a common theme of having people who live there, whose kids are in the schools there, who grew up there. Just having that kind of commitment—that natural filtering, if you will, of what this looks like five years from now.

I appreciate that bias toward action, that can-do attitude that you said the students have, and I think you have, the organization has, and how you’ve used that to navigate this work. Let’s think about the big idea and dreams that you were talking about. What are ones that, in your experience, you know—a big dream that came to fruition in reality, which was really exciting? Maybe one that, if you want to, you can decide if you want to share one from the past, one you’re on the cusp of, or one that you’re focused on for the future.

Building Networks and Future Vision

Jeanine Collins: One of the reasons I was so excited to embark on this work of helping build a state vision for the future of learning was the part that comes after it, which is a network to bring it to life or to realize that vision. In my own learning experiences as an educator, I found that being in spaces with others—where we could really unpack what our learning looked like, analyze student work, ask deep questions, challenge our assumptions, and be open to shifting the way we saw things—was so powerful. Breaking down those barriers of isolation and building community were transformative.

I came to that work as a Critical Friends Group coach, and if I’m really honest, that experience of becoming a CFG coach was probably, right after Bard College, the thing that gave me the tools to show up and scaffold questions that change the way we think, create spaces that are inspiring and possibility-filled. The network is building. For example, the work that the folks in White Pine County are doing in northern Nevada right now with their vision of a portrait—which they call the Portrait of a Leader—is incredible. Their learning continuum of skills aligned to that portrait, their learning model with such clarity around what those learning experiences are going to sound like and feel like for both teachers and students, and the work they’re doing to badge those competencies and showcase them with portfolios—that’s all work that wasn’t underway when our work was starting. Bravo to the folks at White Pine!

They have come through this, they are leading, and they are starting to connect. I was just up in Douglas County yesterday, and those incredible leaders have been doing learner-centered work for over six years. Their learning model is so beautiful and clear, and everybody is hungry to learn and connect with each other in deeper ways to advance. It’s so exciting. The state superintendent who led this work is now the Clark County School District Superintendent, Joan Ebert, and they are really leaning in right now. As she’s new there, they’re in this year of learning, discovering, and exploring what a portrait actually means to them.

There’s such power in this emergent space of people building models of things that are just the best ideas we can come up with—ideas that are empowering, where young people have a sense of agency, and we can see it. They can start sharing with each other: “This is why this worked,” “This is why this didn’t work,” “This is what we learned.” That is the learning process, and it is fun. That’s the thing I knew I wanted to help build. Just like this work, it’s adaptive. You’re not doing the same thing every year in a network because the challenges that people in the work are facing are shifting as they advance.

Being able to really see where people are at—we’re in the process of that. We did one-on-ones with our superintendents over the past month, starting to think about how they’re collaborating and connecting around issues that are important to them and how that dovetails with all of these things. It’s just such a great, rich space of learning. To me, whether it’s just a conversation in a room or it’s the public exhibition where we’re all learning from each other, those are all the layers of the work that I think are just so fun.

Rebecca Midles: I love that you surfaced stories from the field and highlighted examples. It’s so wonderful to always put the practitioners who are doing this important work day to day at the center of the storytelling as well. I also appreciate the coherence piece you talked about with systems change. I heard the why, I heard the what, I heard the how with the learning model, and I heard about the for whom with the credentialing, which we believe to be really important for coherent systems change—and just the energy around it. Thank you so much.

Your work that you’re doing with your organization and the teams you’re partnering with illustrates how intermediary organizations can drive change at a state level. You’re not just building solutions—you’ve shared that—but you’re also building a movement through powerful partnerships. Thank you for sharing your story and for being a part of this series.

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Guest Bio

Jeanine Collins

Jeanine is the CEO of Center for the Future of Learning and formerly was the Chief Innovation Officer at ed.Xtraordinary, an education innovation unit inside Teach for America Nevada that works with educators, youth, and community to reinvent learning. Since 2022, the team has partnered with the Nevada Department of Education to build a statewide Portrait of a Learner and launch the Nevada Future of Learning Network to support deeper and joyful learning relationships, experiences, and environments across school and community contexts. Previously, she served as the Executive Director for Nevada Succeeds, a Nevada-based education policy nonprofit. She has been a public high school performing arts educator, Critical Friends Group Coach, university instructor, and learning design consultant. Her most transformative role continues to be mom to Michael and Julia.

Links

• Watch the full video here
• Nevada Portrait of a Learner
• Jeanine Collins Linkedin
• Previous podcast with Jeanine on Nevada Succeeds
• Center for the Future of Learning