Jennifer. D. Klein and Kapono Ciotti on Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion

This episode of the Getting Smart podcast is part of our new Pathways campaign. What is something you used to think that you’ve changed your mind about? It’s time for us to do that with all things learning. Previous Getting Smart campaigns have laid the groundwork of networks, place, purpose, and innovation. Our latest effort, the new Pathways campaign, will serve as a catalyst for an unbundling education

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Backslash, New Pathways. Jennifer, what is student protagonistism, or you might say in South America, protagonistism? Well, this term is actually fairly commonly in use across Latin America. This idea of protagonistism comes from the same root as our word protagonist, right? The star of a show or the main actor in a play.

And it’s used fairly consistently in Latin American education to describe the student role in the classroom, right? A sort of constructivist mentality about the student as protagonist in their learning process. We became obsessed with the term, to be honest with you. I haven’t seen a ton of schools in Latin America that necessarily manage the level of protagonistism that we envision, because within the landscape model, we are imagining that protagonistism is the highest form of student voice and agency possible.

But yeah, that basic idea is, you know, the student is the central actor in their own education, and they shouldn’t feel like victims of their experiences so much as the lead actors of their own experiences. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Van Der Rook, and today I’m joined by Jennifer Klein and Capone Oziati. Together, they’re authors of a great new book.

Their new book is the Landscape Model of Learning, Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion. Jennifer and Capone, welcome. Thanks for having us. It’s nice to be here. Capone, are you dialing in from Egypt?

I am. I am currently finishing my tenure as the director ahead of school at the American International School in Egypt, and it’s been a really neat adventure being here and supporting this school moving in this direction. Capone, you’ve also led schools in Hawaii? I have.

I actually, it’s interesting, you know, Jennifer led in to our conversation earlier talking about protagonistism. And I think one of the things that drew Jennifer and I together as co-authors was our experience as students. So I grew up in Hawaii, and I was fortunate enough to attend a small, old, 150-year-old progressive ed school, a dewy and progressive ed school, happiest place on earth, and got to go to school being the preta- I had no clue why kids in the movies were trying to cut school, ever, until I left that school and realized that,

oh, school does kind of suck. But until I left, school certainly did not suck. And I know Jennifer and I had really similar experiences. So, yeah, I went to school in Hawaii as a student and had my first headship there as well at a fairly medium-sized progressive ed charter school. Jennifer, I think those of us that come to school leadership either had a really bad experience or really good experience.

It sounds like you had a pretty progressive experience in school as well. Yes, I did. I am really, I feel very fortunate that my parents went against the flow and against the norms of their times. They were both Swarthmore graduates, actually. So they had a bit of that, you know, progressive ed themselves, but they made the choice when they realized that I was a rather different thinker,

whose ideas could easily get quashed in a traditional setting. They chose very student-centered environments for me. So I went to a small private elementary school for the first years of my education outside of Philadelphia called the School in Rose Valley. And then when we moved to Colorado, I became an open school kid. And it’s pretty amazing to be able to say, for example, that the first time I ever received a letter or number grade was in university.

I’m grateful that learning was about something other than the currency of assessment growing up. And so, yeah, very happy experiences and, you know, some challenging ones as well when I went out into the slightly more traditional universities and got my higher education, discovered some of the failings too of some of those early progressive systems. I mean, we’ve had the good fortune in the last 10 years to work with quite a few international schools and people that teach and lead in international schools are a wonderful, interesting breed that develop a unique sense of global competence.

Have you, you’ve obviously experienced that, right? I have. I think, you know, this is my second time in international schools. I taught in Senegal, West Africa for a year when I was still in university and then came back out into Egypt, you know, now much later in my career. It is, it’s really interesting.

I think personally, I’ll tell you a really quick story. You know, I always get asked from teachers that I’m interviewing trying to come to Egypt or family members and friends. You know, is it safe? What is it like there? You’ll get the call.

I heard that something happened in Iran. I heard that something happened in, you know, wherever it is. And having that experience of being in part of the world that is much more connected is much smaller. Yet seeing how big the world really is, our students here, our parents come to me and ask me, is sending our kid to the United States safe for university? Perceived in safety, insecurity and danger is the second reason why our families don’t send their kids to the United States besides the cost of higher education here.

So it’s certainly been eye-opening to be part of this global community. How did you guys connect and start working on this model, Jennifer? Well, Capona and I have actually known each other for quite a long time through the People of Color conference run by the National Association of Independent Schools. Pardon me. And we had run, it starts with Maya attending a design thinking workshop that he put on a pre-conference workshop and Maya approaching him very brazenly at the end and saying,

you and I need to know each other and we need to work on something about the intersections between project-based learning and design thinking. That following year we ran a workshop on design thinking and project-based learning. The year after that we did a workshop on the intersection between those two pedagogies and intercultural competence and culturally responsive education. And that’s actually the conference at which we had our realization about this potential topic. We were actually having a drink after our workshop and I think I was the one who was railing about this tendency among people I respect a great deal in education to make access the goal for all students.

We want to ensure access. And I was pretty pissed off to be honest with you and I was kind of ranting a bit about why access was such a stupid bar that that would not be the right standard that why are we satisfied with the students simply being in the classroom and having access to the material. Why aren’t we framing education as a journey toward the highest level of success possible for every single student and allow that success potentially even to look different, right? And so that’s where it begins and we put on a conference session the following year based on those ideas and really started to build out the thinking and that’s where the birth of the book begins. I love that and I really appreciate the collaboration that the two of you have formed.

The frame for this book is called the landscape model and it has three elements to it and I’d love to have you both unpack this a little bit because it’s really an interesting framing. Having published a book a couple years ago called Place Based Learning with the idea of a school being rooted in a sense of place. You guys have really taken that to the next level and your three elements of the landscape model are ecosystem horizon and path. So Capona would love to have you describe that ecosystem element first. What does that include and then why is it important for a teacher and a teacher leader to understand the ecosystem as it relates to each individual learner?

I actually was just talking to a group of teachers this morning about the importance of understanding the ecosystem and I guess the boldest and most simplest way at the same time to explain it is that students don’t come to us as a blank slate. They don’t come to us as an empty vessel. They are not cars that we stuff full of baggage for a road trip. They come to us with their own context. They come to us with their own prior learning.

In terms like prior learning we as educators are exposed to all the time but it’s a lot richer than that. Maybe more complex, maybe more complicated but I think Jennifer and I look at it as richer. Students come to us with their own cultural backgrounds. They come to us with different languages spoken at home. They come to us with different experiences.

Jennifer and I had wonderful elementary experiences. I had a very traditional middle school and high school experience that shaped me into university in different ways than my peers might have been. We have different socioeconomic backgrounds, racial backgrounds, religious backgrounds and all of that plays a role in who I am as a learner. The first element asks us to understand that. Understand all of it? No.

But make sure that in our classrooms and in our learnings we make room and we make time to understand what kids bring to the landscape as individuals. It also asks us to acknowledge that we as educators bring our own backgrounds to the landscape and that all interacts with each other like a good ecosystem would. Jennifer, anything you want to add to that and the way you think about the ecosystem and how teachers and teacher leaders need to really understand the ecosystem of their learners? Well, I think we’ve so often assumed that if students are all the same age that they’re all going to be starting from the same starting point. When we first framed this idea of the landscape it was in counter to the image that we both feel is so prevalent in education and that’s the racetrack, which Capona made reference to just now.

That feeling that they’re all lined up at the same starting point, right? The kids are theoretically going to reach the same ending point, right? But we all know as educators that it doesn’t work the way that we think it does because kids aren’t cars and they’re not something assembled on a factory line either, right? So this idea of really, I mean if we want to be culturally responsive, if we want to be able to make the learning journey personal and appropriate to allow for the extraordinary success of every single child in the room, then we have to know who they are first, right? So there’s a starting point there that’s really, really important that’s around not just gathering information on a questionnaire, but really getting to know who these kids are and where they are in terms of their zone of proximal development and really, yeah, really understanding who they are so that we can be responsive to who they are. So I love the attention that you pay to the ecosystem and the knowledge of the ecosystem so you can create a safe place, a chance of belonging.

I’m recording this here from Western Washington among some of the most diverse zip codes in America and I think about the schools in our neighborhood here serve kids speaking 100 languages and coming from all over the world. And so teachers here really do need to be very conscious of the ecosystem that kids bring to school with them. Capone, the next section is on the horizon. It’s a beautiful discussion of how we create and express student learning goals, but describe your sense of how schools should create and describe student learning aspirations. So, you know, I think the most poignant explanation of it, we lean on Yang Zhao and his jagged profile.

The idea that, you know, the kid that’s going to go to Juilliard really should have a different profile than the kid that’s going to MIT, should have a different profile than the kid who you want to be the expert mechanic of your car and the grower of our food and the explorer of space. They all should have a different profile. It is not wrong to want all of our kids to have a well rounded experience, but certainly, you know, the myth of the well rounded kid has been blown out of the water already. And if we’re all trying to create cookie cutter kids, I mean, we’re definitely going after the wrong goal here. So if we know that every kid has different strengths and that that’s okay, and we help kids define their own horizon, then we’re doing best by kids.

And then we’re doing best by society. I think Jennifer, I’d love it if you could talk about the horizon line and our connections there. I want to add Jennifer, the equity issue because I buy the jagged profile and really appreciate learner differences and path differences, right? That different paths require different sort of outcomes. Jennifer, how do you square that with equity?

Well, to be honest with you, I would say it is the most equitable to make sure that every single student feels valued and honored for the horizon they’re working toward, right? In a lot of schools, we have baggage that comes along, for example, with the idea that a student might go on to a trade school instead of a four year university, for example. That’s seen in many circles as a failure of the school to get them to where they’re supposed to be able to go. Rather than recognizing what the student wants to do is continue the plumbing business of their family, and that’s what they’re passionate about, and that’s where their talents lie. That we celebrate and honor that pathway, right?

That horizon. And I think it’s so, from my perspective, equity is built into everything that we’re trying to design here, right? Because it’s seeing the human for who they are as an individual and what matters to them and what they’re capable of and what their culture and family believes is important. And I want to add then too a little bit about what Capone was hinting at with the horizon. Just to mention, we pulled that particular term from the work of Sarah Lewis in the book The Rise.

And this idea of when she posits the idea of a horizon, she actually even says that success isn’t even the right word, that mastery is what we’re searching for. But that the horizon is very much like you would see a horizon on the salt flats anywhere in the world where there are salt flats, or if you’re out on a ship in the water with no land visible. It’s a horizon that’s constantly receding as we’re moving toward it, which is not an image designed necessarily to frustrate students, right? Or learners, but to recognize that there are infinite possibilities and that what success looks like for one student isn’t necessarily the same thing that success looks like for another student. I will go back to the equity thing though too, Tom, and clarify.

Of course, for this to really work, all students need to have an infinite sense of their own possibility, right? Not feel limited by the implicit bias of the educators working with them, not be pulled back. We share the stories of students and famous people who, Mae Jemison is the example that we use in the introduction. Someone who was told by her kindergarten teacher when she declared she wanted to be a scientist was told by her kindergarten teacher, oh no, sweetie, you should become a nurse. Those are the moments where somebody with the personality and strength of self that Mae Jemison had didn’t get knocked off her course, right?

She refused to take that answer from her kindergarten teacher. But how many millions of young people are made to believe at some point in their education that their aspirations are not appropriate ones? That’s where I think the biggest equity challenges lie. I appreciate that. And I guess I’m personally struggling to embrace this set of ideas as we work this through in our new pathways campaign.

It felt much easier, Jennifer, 20 years ago when I was among the leaders of the All Kids College Ready movement, because that was kind of an easy way to express an equity goal. But now that we’re taking a much more nuanced, much more student-centered approach, it still feels like we need equity vigilance to be more flexible in the way that we express aspirations. And to make sure that we just don’t resegregate schools into students on college-bound tracks and other students on a trade track, that vigilance about being open to every student’s greatness, however that is expressed. I don’t think we’ve, one, we haven’t wrestled the systemic racism out of the system that we have.

And two, I think you’re advocating for a more nuanced approach that we still have to understand how we create equity safeguards to make sure that we’re really helping every kid explore every possible future. It does. I’ll tell you a short version of a story we have in the book. I’m from Hawaii. I have Native Hawaiian heritage.

And I’ll skip the setup of the story. You can read that in the book. But we tell a story about this girl in a rural community of Native Samoan background who has aspirations to become a doctor and has an opportunity to do a job shadow. And through, as the story develops, it’s come to known that the girl’s mom is what’s actually the barrier, not the girl not getting her work done, which the teacher assumes at the time. And the teacher and the girl’s mom have a conversation.

And the teacher explains to the girl’s mom, what an amazing opportunity this is. A girl in a rural community of Mormon religion of Samoan background, what an opportunity for her to become a doctor. And the mom pauses the teacher and says, that sounds like success to you. But to me, that sounds like my daughter going to medical school on the mainland, of which she’s guaranteed to be doing her residency on the Sabbath. There’s not a lot of Mormon Samoan men in medical school.

Most likely she’s going to get her job in some hospital in the mainland and not come back. What it sounds like to me is that she’s going to be ripped apart from our multi-generational household. Her kids aren’t going to learn the Samoan language. They’re not going to learn Samoan culture. They’re not going to have access to three and four generations of our family.

And they’re going to not know their God and religion, which is core to them and their beliefs. It does not sound like success to me. That actually sounds like a horrible existence. And I don’t want that for my daughter. So I told that story for a while, feeling really bad because the girl didn’t go on the job shadow.

And it wasn’t until later in my life as an educator that I realized the nuance that you’re talking about, Tom, that it really doesn’t matter what I wanted for the girl. I wasn’t able to, me and my friend who was a teacher, we weren’t able to help her navigate the different horizons that she could go to on her own. She wasn’t the protagonist in the story. Her mom was and the teacher was. So how do we help kids help navigate their own equity, give them that control and power to do so, and clear the landscape around them a little bit so they can do that.

Because there are barriers that we need to, that systemic stuff that we need to work on. It’s really complicated it is. And I think you hit it on the nose when you said it’s the nuance and the demands that we actually think and work about it rather than apply a simple framework. We do these three things and equity is dealt with. Yay.

All kids get into college. It ends up being much more complicated than that in real life. Yeah, I appreciate that. Capone, you reminded me of our friends in Cajon Valley, East San Diego County where students go through 54 career immersive experiences and then reflect on their strengths, interests and values. And so they keep recalibrating possible futures and keep checking on their own horizon.

So that feels like a really equitable approach where every student has the opportunity to explore possible futures to reflect on who they are, what they’re good at, what they care about, and to set their own horizon. That does feel like an equitable approach. Jennifer, you do a beautiful job of saying after you’ve done that, then it’s about creating or co-creating a pathway with every learner. So I loved that idea of co-creating, co-authoring both experiences and a learning journey. Is that how you think about pathways?

Absolutely so. And this one, each of our elements hinges on a myth, right? And in this case, it’s the myth of standardization, right? We have this myth that everybody must learn exactly the same things and that standardizing the outcomes will be effective for everyone. And the truth is that humans are not standard, period, right?

We just aren’t. We’re human beings. We’re complex. We’re messy from our birth to our passing. And so this idea of creating an environment in which there is space for multiple pathways is really core.

I think we’re not envisioning you’ve got a class of 30 students and you need to have 30 different pathways. We’re talking about employing pedagogies like Project Based Learning that allow students to create and form and work within working groups that are focused with people who have the same interests, right? With people who are thinking in similar, if slightly different ways so that we can create these multiple pathways. I still find myself really questioning standards as a concept at the same time that I recognize that there are certain things that we’ve decided all students need to know and know how to do. I think we’ve leaned way more on content than we’ve needed to.

And so that particular section of the book is really focused on shifting a little bit away from content and toward conceptual thinking. So that in an example that Capone offered in the book, you know, a unit or a project on interdependence that was originally supposed to be interdependence in society when the bees move into the playground and nobody wants to talk about society anymore. They just want to understand the bees. We leverage those interests, right? And we allow the pathway to change.

We’re still headed toward the same kinds of big concept learning, but we’re allowing those student interests to jump in. And I think, too, it’s important when we say the word interest. I know a lot of more conservative or traditional teachers think that means that you’ve got one kid doing a project on dinosaurs and another project doing a project on princesses. And how will we make sure that they all get all the same learning? Well, we’re not talking about that necessarily, but we are talking about leveraging that kid’s interest in it, figuring out how to weave dinosaurs and that passion in in a way that makes the learning meaningful so that they’re as successful as possible.

So we really appreciate the pathway with student as protagonist theme. Capone, you also talked about inclusive prosperity and rightful presence. What are those terms? Yeah, I actually would love Jennifer tells the story the best where it came from. She’s got she’s got a really good approach to this. Jennifer, can you take this one on?

Sure, I’m glad to. Thanks. So to start with inclusive prosperity, that term came from a it’s actually from the world of investment banking. And it has something to do with the distribution of profits that I couldn’t possibly explain for you. Nor do I need to. But it was used by one of our interview subjects, a former head of currently head of school at the millennial school in San Francisco, who at the time that he used the phrase in connection to education was a leader at the graded school in Brazil.

And what he said was that this idea of inclusive prosperity takes us further in our thinking than just the word inclusion. You know, we’ve seen a quite an evolution of these these terms in connection to multicultural responsiveness over the years. The word diversity suggested that we had a variety of students present, but very much like access it didn’t necessarily offer us a roadmap for what it meant to include to you know what are we supposed to do now that they’re all here, right. Then we move toward the term inclusion, but there were some power challenges in that term, right, because it suggests that the teacher owns the right to include or not. The school owns the right to include or not, which meant that the power was still all in the hands of teachers whereas when we move to inclusive prosperity.

It suggests that when I succeed you succeed right and when all of us succeed there’s there’s something there’s something communal about the term as well right so it brings us all together in this idea of all of us having the ability to prosper in the way that we need to. The other term was rightful presence and that one actually came from some really fascinating work around the connections between how sanctuary cities have been run and schools and so rightful presence is a term again that comes from some place outside of education it was a term used to analyze the extent to which sanctuary cities in the United States were actually ensuring full rights and full humanity to refugees who came into their communities and immigrants in general who came into their communities so we really liked the work of tan and Barton on applying this to education What does it look like when we stop thinking about who has the right to include whom and we start focusing instead on the basic inherent right of every human to be in the classroom to be seen in all of their messy complexity and to be the protagonists of their own learning experiences. Thank you.

Those terms remind me of we call it mutuality and maybe a sense of belonging. Both remind me of EL schools the expeditionary learning and I appreciate that Ron Berger wrote the forward to your book because he really believes in these ideas of inclusive prosperity and rightful presence. Capone let’s let’s start a quick course through the the eight guiding principles that really flesh out your landscape model the the first one is that it’s not a race. The school shouldn’t be set up like a racetrack. Yeah Jennifer Jennifer started on that a second ago and it is if it were true it would be easier as a teacher if your kids started on the same line on September 1 and the flag waved and we moved kids neatly through the race course you know and at the end of the time of the race we could measure how far kids got along if that were true but it’s not true kids don’t start in the

same spot. The reality is much more like a landscape some kids are stuck in the bog over there some kids are far across the landscape some kids are up on a hill with a better view of the whole thing. Some kids haven’t even shown up yet because they’re still moving to school or there’s something that’s happening at home. So this idea that we start as the schools set up that metaphor for us as educators it would be easier if it were true and we don’t want to let go of it because if it were true would be so nice to run our classes like that it’s just it’s not true. And so therefore if we start from the metaphor of the landscape we actually are much more efficient that we need to acknowledge a kid start in different places and other paths are going to be different.

But if we are our shepherds of this and we can like Jennifer said we can clump them it’s not about 30 individual races going on. And Jennifer the second one’s closely related that we have to meet kids where they are and we have to pay attention to their their zone of development right. Absolutely you know I think the concept of the zone of proximal development has been relegated to special education and most educational contexts as a very useful tool for them in particular but not necessarily for everybody. And you know when I asked teacher audiences how many of you have been trained in using this it’s generally like three or four hands that go up tops and it’s usually people who had some sort of specialization in special education at some point. So when we think of the zone of proximal development as a tool for everyone it’s all about understanding what a child is able to do with significant support with minimal support without potentially without support so that we’re constantly providing the appropriate level of challenge for every single student.

I can’t even I can’t over emphasize how many times we have heard both heard stories of students who felt stuck their entire education right who never really felt successful because they were always behind on the racetrack. And the number of students who over the years have said that they never felt seen for their talents. Never felt recognized for who they were and what they were capable of right so I think all of that leads to this idea of yeah every child should be getting an appropriate level of challenge for who they are and what they can do right now and where we’re trying to go. And Jennifer because you talked about inclusive prosperity it’s interesting that you take that and connect it to the next getting principle which is an asset based approach and relationship building so make the link for us from inclusive prosperity to asset based and relationship based.

Well students generally I mean humans generally grow more effectively and are willing to take on higher challenges and try harder things when we feel seen and recognized and understood right and so this idea of being able to to really move in the directions that make sense for me you know to see students through that asset lens that every student be able to say their adults in this community who believe in me and who see me for who I am and what I’m capable of. I mean I really think when we when we move away from education as a transactional thing and toward education as a relational thing we had a boss years ago who would always say when you have a relationship with kids you can teach them anything. And I know I for example was a terrible failure at pre algebra did manage to weasel my way out of a great deal of mathematics but one of my high school principal and the founder of the open school actually insisted I was capable of doing calculus and it was largely because he saw me for all the things I was good at that he was able to motivate me to be decent at something that was obviously generally very hard for me so I think relationships are at the core of every child prospering.

Capone the fourth one is is huge but headline for us student centered education practices. So I think this actually you’re right it is humongous and yet it’s so simple and core of the students at the center of their learning learning is going to be really good and I think it actually touches on a lot of the work getting smart has done if you look at your portfolio everything I would say in getting smart portfolio places the student at the very center of their learning. You know headline for that PBL PBL good PBL high quality PBL puts kids at the center of their learning but it doesn’t have to be as big as PBL. It’s it’s it’s student voice and choice and pushing it and saying alright so students students have agency and they are the main actor of their education. Jennifer wanted to let’s do five and six together critical pedagogy and and being purposeful and vigilant those are they’re related but.

Well it’s actually yeah it’s actually purposeful and vigorous actually. So critical pedagogy is at the core of what we’re talking about because it really we have to be able to do this work well and to do it equitably as you’ve suggested. We have to be willing to recognize that many many forms of education as they exist right now do not serve all of our population right and that the way we have generally formed education has been based on whatever culture is in the majority right. Whatever dominant class if you will is making decisions about education but it doesn’t necessarily always take into account the needs of individuals in other contexts so I think this I it really starts from this idea of making sure we’re paying a deep deep attention to when we are basing our decisions on just a dominant theory that’s out there rather than looking at the kids around us looking at the kids in front of us. This is part of why play space learning is so deeply connected to what we’re talking about to write because critical pedagogy really asks us to notice and to respond to the needs of the kids right in front of us.

The the other piece of what you’re talking about the next the next principle is this idea of learning being purposeful and vigorous and I want to make a really important distinction there between vigor and rigor which is the term that we use so often for education right. Rigor is actually you know it has to do with flex in flexibility and stiffness it’s what happens to the body after death. It’s something that is very stiff and firm and unmovable right and it’s been a very favorite word in education for a long time but from our perspective that’s a it’s a real mistake. Kids can tell the difference between a rigorous education and a vigorous one so that shift toward the word vigor allows us to recognize that when kids bring their whole selves to their learning and when they engage with energy and enthusiasm from a place of life and thought and who they really are that extraordinary things happen and I have to give credit to the founder of open school for that distinction. I didn’t come up with that myself.

It was something that was said to me enough times in my teens that it became a central philosophy of education. All right. Seven is personalized learning but I love that your definition of it is is beautiful and purposeful and talks about students co designing the pathway of learning. Capone I want you to take us out with number eight that educators need to believe in every student. Yeah.

So let me let me combine seven and eight a little bit around personalized learning can still happen in schools that that demand from us as educators more traditional measures and then that we would like every educator to really embrace this optimism and hope. So Jennifer Jennifer just wrote a blog for getting smart and part of that story is is about how hard it is to be an educator today. It is super hard. The burdens put on us to do so many things. We got to get the test scores up and the behavior and by the way there’s two more kids coming into your class and try to do some project based learning.

It seems like a lot. It really and it is a lot. And I guess what we’re saying here and what the book tries to give tools for is this idea that we can still meet these traditional measures in schools that force us to and do do learning that’s more personalized and the way to do that I think is number eight that we we maintain a sense of hope and optimism that we enter into this work with all of the the bright spots of the future. I’m executive director of what school could be and we have two theories of change. One is small steps to big change and the other is celebration and innovation over compliance and I would say that’s what we’re articulating here that even in a system that is more compliance based that they’re small steps that we can take now.

We don’t need to re re engineer the entire battleship. We can just go out on a little sortie in a little dingy boat and do our little thing and come back and celebration and innovation over compliance. If we enter into this celebrating our small steps celebrating the small steps for kids the small steps for us as educators the work will be successful. Capona that’s I wanted to end with a quick discussion of entry points and strategies for for school transformation. A teacher leader is reading this and leading a relatively traditional school.

What do they do. Where do they start. How would you recommend they put this book into into action into practice. Well I’m going to give a plug directly to the book that Jennifer and I put a lot of thought into that as far as what this arc of implementing it in an existing school might be. You know we were talking earlier before we started recording just about how cool it would be to start a school from scratch with this model. I think Jennifer and I have fantasies about that every other day. But certainly if you’re in a school right now what we put put together in the book what that arc or that map might look like.

A lot of it starts with like I said small steps to big change you don’t need the entire system to change in each of the elements. The ecosystem the horizon and the pathway we suggest things that we can do now for example one of the simplest things we can do right now in the ecosystem or some journaling activities. It might sound really silly or it might sound overly simplistic but we give some examples of how journaling can be a really powerful way to embed. Embed understanding your students into a unit structure that you might be asked to do by your your department chair or might be forced to do by your school. So the book has very manageable strategies that are that are possible to do in your class right now.

Capone I did appreciate the first table in that first chapter has really specific examples of learning experiences that focus on the ecosystem the horizon and the and the pathway. So the book does its full of tips whether you’re a teacher or or a teacher leader or a community leader. Jennifer what would you add in terms of advice on where to start what to do to implement the landscape model. Well I’m going to go ahead and let myself head toward the political end of this conversation and mention you know one of the things that we were highly aware of as we were writing it is that there are a lot of places where teachers may not feel they have the freedom to try these strategies and existing systems and that’s part of why we wove in that idea of courage. It does take courage to do right by the kids in front of you rather than to be compliant to systems that already exist.

And I you know I will continue to go back to the to the models of open school and say I really think we can do both. I think we can satisfy the needs of the traditional systems that have already been built but do it inside our classrooms and inside our school houses in a way that really meets the needs of kids. So I think that’s really what we’re talking about when we’re saying that it requires courage is that we we have to you know just because the state or the district or the country federal law tells us it’s supposed to look like X if I’ve got a room full of Y’s then I should I should respond to their needs. We’ve been talking to Jennifer Klein and Capone Oceari that their authors of the landscape model of learning designing student centered experiences for cognitive and cultural inclusion. As we wrap things up I want to give both of you a chance to to give a shout out for somebody that’s been really influential for you and maybe recently as you were putting together this book but who were one or two of the folks that that were really instrumental.

I’ll start. We mentioned a bunch of people in the start of the book so if I if I don’t mention anybody here. There’s a bunch of y’all in the in the beginning of the book you can go look for your names. But you know Dr. Robert G. Peters my kindergarten principle was essential in me becoming who I am as an educator. It is not an overstatement to say everything you learned you learned in kindergarten. He’s still my mentor we just texted the other day and his guidance of me and the way I think about education has been in for me I’ve already mentioned Arnie Langberg who is the founder of the open school but I want to mention Judith Bannon we quote from one of her more recent books. In in that last principle actually this idea of teaching with optimism right and recognizing that we we make a deal with the future right we sign a contract with the future to do the best we can by the kids in our in our classrooms. Judith has been a major inspiration for me she was the reason that I tried being ahead because she believed that I was capable of it. There were things that I was very good at and things I definitely didn’t love about being ahead so I I’ve learned a lot I actually had breakfast with her a couple weeks ago and she was a little disappointed that I was saying I’m not sure I’m going back to a headship.

But she certainly inspired me to to believe in my own voice and my own ideas about education and to let go of that imposter syndrome of nobody else thinks the same way I do and but and to recognize that the ideas that I bring to the table have value because they’re precisely because they’re different. So I’m very grateful to Judith Bannon for for a great a lot of mentorship over. Well go to Amazon or go to Solution Tree and buy a copy of the landscape model of learning. Is there any other place say people can go to learn more about you and your work. Yes I run a website called principled learning strategies that’s principled learning.org as in to have principles not to be a principal in terms of the spelling. Obviously puns run in my family line a little bit and and there’s a lot more information about the book there. There’s information about my first book as well and there’s information on Capono and me and other members of the team.

So yeah thrilled to offer whatever feedback people need and always excited to have the opportunity to talk to people about the book and help them make this kind of work happen in their schools. Thanks Jennifer. Anything you’d add Capono. Yeah we’re doing a lot of this work in this journey on what school could be our digital network for discussing things like this. So feel free to come join us there we have a bunch of events coming up with school could be dot org would be a wonderful place you can connect with me there and other educators who are talking about this kind of work. Jennifer Klein and Capono C.O.D.

Authors of great new book the landscape model of learning thanks for being with us. Thanks for having us Tom. Yes thank you it’s been a pleasure. Thanks to Mason Pasha for making this possible for the whole Getting Smart crew that allows us to do this every week in till we see you next time keep leading keep learning and keep innovating for equity. Thanks for tuning into the Getting Smart podcast today. We want this podcast to be actionable and insightful and a great way to learn about what’s next in learning.

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