Joe Erpelding on Magical Schools and Thrively

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host, Jessica, and today we’re talking with Joe Erpelding, a passionate educator and leader who is in the business of transforming schools and students’ lives. Joe served as a principal in Poway Unified School District for a number of years before making his way to Design 39 where he was able to create a magical, one-of-a-kind

school experience for every learner. He is now transitioning to support the team at Thrively, a tool for helping learners understand their strengths, purpose, and passion. Let’s listen in as Tom and Joe talk about what makes Design 39 a magical place to be, why design thinking matters, and what Thrively can do for education. Hey, Joe Erpelding. Welcome to the Getting Smart podcast.

Tom, it’s always a pleasure to have a conversation with you. Joe, it’s such a treat to have you on. You’ve been principal at the Design 39 campus there in Poway for, is it five years now? Yeah, just finished up five years at Design 39. And Joe, I have told many different audiences that it is my favorite K school on the planet.

I find the place absolutely magical. Why is that? Why does it feel so good when you walk onto campus? I think you would realize right away it’s about people. And so how do you get the best out of people? And I know we’ll talk probably a little bit about our learning experience designers. That’s our teachers. So how do you empower creativity within them? And ultimately

creating agency, because what you’ll see is that students aren’t walking in lines. They’re walking with each other and creating conversation. So it’s really about people and bringing community together around that shared vision. Yeah. The first thing that you sense, I mean, it’s a spectacular campus, first of all. And I love how the campus, many of the classrooms have a vista across San Diego County to the

mountain. So it’s visually stunning. And a lot of the campuses is open and airy with connected learning spaces. But once you get over that initial visual shock of how beautiful it is, you just have very quickly the sense that it’s a real positive place for children and adults to hang out. So I love the culture you’ve created there. Yeah, definitely. It’s more than a pretty building. It’s definitely about what we can

create. So it’s not necessarily the walls, but what happens inside of the walls. Joe, Design 39 is one of those places on the planet where the building really does reflect the program. Where you do like, it’s like at High Tech High where you walk in and you sense a beautiful sense of coherence, sort of from mission to learning experiences, to staffing and structures, to even the facilities. So I want to unpack some parts of that.

Let’s start with just how you and your colleagues have described what learners should know and be able to do at Design 39. How do you think about learning goals? Yeah, you’re so kind to talk about that’s what it looks like when you walk on the campus and just for your listeners. It didn’t start that way. I think it’s really critical to understand that it takes a lot of hard work when we talk about, you know, when you have your why, that’s

your inspiration, but your how is your perspiration. And so creating that context didn’t happen right away. We needed to understand who our identity was. People were telling us that you’re the no homework school, you’re the do whatever you want school, you’re the duct tape and cardboard school. So having to understand and unpack like actually we are a learner centered lab school, and that gave us the permission to be really thoughtful in our design and creativity and

bringing that whole system together. But that took that took probably two years just to define who we are and who we wanted to become. I think that was a critical first step, Tom, in allowing us to be creative and navigate that with a district because as the 39th school in the district, they’re not all in that design process. We’re part of a public school. And so navigating with the teachers union and writing a memorandum of understanding that allows us to

work differently, having our parents who come basically as a commuter school from seven different community schools and coming into one and creating a culture around that to having the students just ultimately showcase themselves that every aspect of their day is a learning experience. So we try to move away from school to what learning can be. So yeah. So how do you express your learning goals?

Perfect. Thanks for getting me focused back. So we really look at competency based learning. What helped us in that journey was partnering with education reimagined and spaces like getting smart to be inspired by others who are doing this work. Education reimagined gave us that context of knowledge, skills and dispositions. And so really looking at that from a holistic view, and that helped us to start to unpack the we call it steps, not grades. So allowing to have

steps of learning and kids can then have goals within those. And then within that, you’ll see every morning, 745 to 845, our teachers are in design studios, our learning experience designers. And the design is just a fancy name for a space where we have a scrum board. And on top of that scrum board is this interdisciplinary space where we can have our, our STEM and our humanities and how they can co create around an essential question.

Joe, when I described design 39, I always talk about design thinking. What does that mean to you? So how and where do you practice design thinking? Yeah, interesting. I was at the D school. So we were inspired by others to inspire our work. So the D school up at Stanford. So some early iterations from that. And then I was walking in a kindergarten classroom. After coming from the D school, they had a $4,000 like

innovation session on design thinking. And I walked into a kindergarten classroom, but it was the same design thinking process. They’re talking about toy design. So design thinking happens all the way out the big, the basic level of kindergarten. And at the heart of it is empathizing and understanding. Because you really want to get at the heart of what the need is of your user. That’s evolved for us to now where we’re talking about community based design.

Where it’s that human centered design, but really community based design. It’s not about walking a mile in someone’s shoes. It’s about walking a mile with them and co creating and designing together. So that’s kind of how we’re evolving. But it definitely starts at the youngest levels at D 39. Joe, let’s try to give people a couple of visual sort of pictures. If we walked into your primary grades, what would you see there? So first of all, you have a couple pictures

of learner experience. Yeah, what you’d notice right away is that the walls are pretty empty of a lot of purchased materials. It’s very stark purposefully because students get distracted by everything that’s on the wall. So it allows them to really center on what’s happening in the room. And it’s actually co created. So we have tables that are whiteboard tables. Everything’s movable because it’s not who owns the space. We all own the space. They’re not called classrooms. They’re

learning spaces. So the tables are movable, it based off of the needs. So the tables can flip out of the way. You’ll see vertical boards because we feel that learning happens when you’re on your feet. It’s very social. You’ll see that social interactions, very collaborative. Everything is done in a space of how we’re working together in our daytime. We probably call that cheating. We call it learning, where the smartest person in the room is the room. And so how do you leverage

the room and the space around you? And then from there, you would see experiences, even today, when kids are wearing masks and having to sit six feet apart. They’re still in that collaborative ecosystem because we leverage it where if you’re having to get taught at home, we can leverage that because you’re collaborating on my computer, but I’m also collaborating with you at home. So we’re bringing everybody into this space that we’re feeling united.

You have a lot of big double classrooms and you have a lot of common space. And so when I visit Design 39, they’ll often see two or three students that are out in a hallway or in a nook. Sometimes when you go into the double classroom, you’ll see a note about where they are. Right. So you really use a lot of different learning spaces in the building. I’ve also noticed in the last couple of times that I’ve been there, different kinds of seating,

hard and soft and high and low. So lots of options about where and how you’re situated as a learner. Right. Yeah, I was, I’m sitting here and my wife’s kind of virtual space. So she also teaches on campus. And I asked her because she’s a pretty typical teacher in a good way. And I said, what was the thing that helped you pivot your practice the most getting into it? She said, I had flexible seating. That allowed me to like think about my learning different, how and where kids sit

and how and they interact in that space. And so giving those students the agency just on the design of the classroom. And so that was one of our early iterations at Design 39 was allowing for a variety of seating spaces and environments and not just insight, but also outside. What do you have access to? So yeah, definitely the environment, the big E plays into the big L for learning. Let’s move up to the intermediate grades. I think the last time I was there, there was a crazy,

cool, kind of a robotic STEM learning thing happening. It was like a giant learning party. Is that a rare thing or is that? I love how you describe it. Yeah, a learning party. I’m gonna steal that, Tom. Yeah, we try to have learning parties. We call them peak moments. You’ve seen other books about just creating those peak moments and the Heath brothers. And that’s what we’re not trying to create those Disneyland moments, but really it’s a learning party. And it’s tied to some

content, obviously. We have no business being in business if kids can’t read and write, right? So it’s not just duct tape and cardboard. I think that was the really attention of coming through those knowledge skills and dispositions. But it’s, you know, we have, we’re talking about what happened in third grade, they were doing maybe the egg drop. But how does that tie to inertia in eighth grade? Because they can connect those peak moments back. And then you have an eighth grade teacher

who’s driving his van in the front looking at velocity and kids are taking, you know, tracking the data and the timing and they’re like timing each other and, you know, are teaching with this crash dumb crash helmet, you know, on. So yeah, it’s just really, I love the way you describe it, Tom. It’s like a learning party all the time. So this leads me to ask about the role of a teacher at Design 39. You actually call on learning experience designers. Your description of different

age band teachers working together reminds me of the last time I was in your teacher’s lounge. You had a beautiful map, kind of a thematic map of the year. And I saw two teachers of talking about how experiences we’re going to mesh over time and conceptually. We’ll talk about the role of these learning experience designers at Design 39. It’s not such a great way to call it though, a learning experience designer. Like you’re creating

these experiences for them to like take away for their life to make an impact. And that’s what connects back to our kind of our mission is that having life ready thought leaders who elevate humanity. So about that’s kind of the core mission of Design 39 is that in order to have students be thought leaders, they have to have experiences that allow them to showcase their learning and their leadership so that they can ultimately pivot in life and create impact. And so to do that,

you have to have a high collaborative model. And you have to have a sense of like where we’re trying to go with those experiences. And so that’s why it’s so critical that we have that time every morning 7.45 to 8.45. So we pulled out away and we doubled down on this idea of collaboration. So there’s no IEP meetings, no staff meetings, no just that’s the space that they’re in and the whole systems in this collaboration. So having that scope and sequence and then looking at it from

like a cohort model is that it allows us to have that approach that not just horizontally but also vertically that we can do that planning. And that’s really, really critical to have these micro teams that I can count on every day but to have the bigger team that I’m kind of connecting to that we can create these peak moments that ultimately link as a whole unit. So yeah, it’s pretty powerful the work that we have with so we have that content map that allows us to kind of stay

focused. Joe, you’ve had almost two decades of school leadership now really culminating with this experience at Design 39. How do you think about the role of a school head? Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind, Tom, and it’s a great question, is I think of the whole piece as you’re the culture captain. So you’re looking at how do all these pieces come together and then you’re pulling them together because we can have the greatest strategy but as we know it’ll

get eaten if our culture is not continually being fostered. So that means like for me, I don’t have a principal’s office. And if I don’t have a principal’s office then I’m not spending time on my email. Well, I come in really early to do that and create a space for that but the rest of time is interacting with students and teachers and getting into the space and being nosy. Literally, you walk in at any time, I recently took a camera, it was the first day of on-campus learning, just

took a camera around, hey, what does it look like? And that’s just how natural it is because the culture is just around this collaboration and sharing. So that sense is that you could create this space where the whole system is just a learning organism that allows for each one of us to get better at our craft and practice. So I say the role of the principal is really around creating that culture of how might we. I love that. We sometimes think about a school head as the chief

decider. But I think because you practice design thinking, I see you not only incorporate design thinking into the work of learners but really incorporating it into your leadership style. Maybe you could describe a difficult challenge that your community went through or an opportunity that you’ve gone through and how you approach that with your community. I think a good one that just pops up, I’m like, what am I going to focus on? But the one that

comes up is racial justice. And it was a really tough one for us, Tom. Two years back, we had multiple incidents, probably three in a row, where our African-American boys and girls were called the N-word. And that just hit me at the core and our parents from those of those students said, what are you going to do about it? Exactly, what are we going to do about it? So we had to double down on this whole idea of racial justice. So we started with just,

we called them the small and mighty. We pulled in all of our African-American Black families, said, okay, how do we create the small and mighty team? Then leverage that resource to build then with our community. And we started with our teachers, our learning experience designers. And it wasn’t the answers that were after we said, what’s the right questions we need to be thinking about? And so we had this whole question board. And then from that, that built out to opportunities

to get into the classrooms. So then they had this opportunity to talk with all of the students. And then the students had agency within that space. And then that built out ultimately, Tom, to where the small and mighty team presented to the entirety of all the principals in Poway Unified, all 39 principals plus district and superintendent. That then built out to policy change at the district level. So where they started out, create some policy changes. Whereas the last thing we’re

working on right now is a whole racial justice design challenge for all of PUSD. And that started because we said, what are we going to do about it? That’s a beautiful example. Joe, you know how much I love school visits. I love to visit Design 39 and other schools. I used to visit a 100 schools a year because it was the primary way that I learned. And the last time you and I talked about school visits, you said, yes, and I continue to visit schools, but I’ve also started visiting

businesses to understand the work context, the global context that we face. I thought that was such an interesting learning strategy for a school leader. Maybe you could just talk about your sort of leading your own learning as a school head. Yeah, I was just I was smiling there for a second because I remember our very first visit many years back. And you’re asking me how many how many schools I visit. I’m like, who’s the kind of a cool guy? He’s very humble. So who are you,

Tom? And what do you do to come to find out you’re this Gates Foundation guy and a superintendent? So yeah, it’s your humility is also the piece that resonated with me, Tom. And I think that’s when you kind of roll back to the principal role is the sense of vulnerability and humility and having the agency to move in action. So when it comes to like thinking outside of yourself and where can you get inspiration from? Obviously, it’s from other schools and in your space and in

your ecosystem. But it’s also from business. So we call it Project Beep Beep. It’s kind of a funny internal name because you get we got everybody in a van. And you know, when you get in the van, you put it in reverse beep, beep, we don’t want to go backwards, we want to go forward. So we call it feed forward. So we’re gonna go feed our soul. And it’s not the trainer of trainer models, it’s everybody gets access, everybody gets in the vans. And it’s what context are you looking at trying

to be inspired by. And so they go everywhere from WD 40 to into it to Google to to even like Vista Innovation Academy to the D school last year. And so we’ve been saving up money to go to Finland. And unfortunately, COVID came. That’s actually where we’re like just being inspired by people. And and that’s the humility that we don’t have have the answers. We just have a lot of questions. I love the spirit of learning that that you’ve helped to cultivate there. So

I so appreciated when the when the pandemic hit, I got an early email from you that just said, how how might we how might we create a conversation that would help create a new path forward that would sort of lean into the crisis and make not only the best of it in the short run, but but try to help make the best of it in in the long run. So I so appreciated your your facilitative, convening leadership. Maybe you could talk a little bit about putting

together a new way forward. I just wanted to hang out with some cool people, Tom. I think that was really it. You know, I want to hang out with Tom and I want to go hang out with Kelly at Education Imagine and Devon at Altitude Learning and you know, Big Picture Learning. Underneath that, though, like you said, it’s that’s how might we so maybe a little bit of context Tom for that is when we’re in chaos, I don’t know if you’ve been surfing or swimming and you get in a wave and it

just overtakes you and you can’t pick your head up and you’re like, and you and it just that’s chaos. That’s what it’s felt like with so many people across every industry. And so what we do do in that space is we try to get to simplicity, like get everybody like on that calm and like I can breathe. It sounds great. You live in that space too long. It’s a soul sucking space. And what I mean by that is what did we get into education for is to be creative is to inspire. And that’s what you know,

God bless, you know, Sir Ken Robinson is schools killing creativity. And that’s the space that we don’t want to see anymore. So how do we inspire our teachers and all of us to be in that more complex space of creativity? So we have to get out of simplicity. And that’s kind of scary. And so that’s called change. And so how do we navigate through change? But in order to do that, you can’t do it by yourself. You have to have other people and other thought partners. And so

so that’s kind of the Genesis we’re in that simplicity more getting out of the chaos and say like, what can we do with it? How might we? And so then, you know, partnering with you, Tom, and getting smart and education, imagined and altitude learning. And that was the inspiration is like, okay, let’s start the conversation. And the team says, how about a new way forward? Well, what a beautiful kind of message. And so it’s just bringing that convening those thought partners

together. And now we’re in that a year later, we’re still talking. So we still like each other. And that’s because we’re creating and reinventing. And the way we describe it at D 39 is the future is the place we create. Beautiful. And speaking of a new way forward, a few weeks ago, I got a note for you that that you’re on a new path forward that you you have a new scaled impact strategy, you’re joining the team at Thriveley. Thank you. Tell us about the Thriveley app and

how you use it as the design 39 and what you’re what you’re hoping to do by joining that exciting team. Yes, I have two boys. So I have a second year in college and junior. And we constantly talk about like discovering who you are. And kind of taking this opportunity to reinvent myself and like show that for my boys, you know, at 50 years old, you can still reinvent yourself. And and I think that’s part of it is just rediscovering and having new opportunities. So when you free

yourself of some of those confines, you can really be inventive. And so Thriveley is a product that I’ve used personally, there’s probably two or three that I could say are very learner centered altitude learning and thrive.com. And it’s because Thriveley is about I would describe it as discovering your inner genius. And then the little joeism on that would be to to impact the soul of humanity. Like, that sounds okay, right, Tom. So like impacting the soul of humanity. So how does that

happen? Well, just how I describe it, how I use it with our students is COVID happens. Our kids are disconnected. Brand new students come into our ecosystem. How do they feel belonging? So I said, hey, let’s use Thriveley, we’re gonna use Thriveley’s project tool. First thing we’re gonna do is you’re going to take the strengths assessment. So not what’s wrong with you, but what’s wrong with you. So who are you as a student? Can you imagine this, right? We get to actually know the kids

before they come into our classrooms. And what are their strengths, interests and values. Then you take that strengths. And then what the kids did is that, Hey, could we do something with that data? Yeah, awesome. Here’s the data. And they started to create these micro meetups based off of their interests and their strengths. And then so then we have this project tool, then now the students said, Hey, we have an equity team, I have a superpower purpose team, because the electives

have been kind of dismantled. So how do we create electives from the students perspective? And so that’s the beauty of it. And one of the challenges I’ve seen with multiple products is kids are still being described by their GPA and their SAT scores. So what if and how might we create students based off of a learner profile? And so that’s the neat thing about privately is that you can create these, you know, from a goal setting to the highlights of a student that can happen at school or at home,

badging in terms of their competency, and then showcasing their learner profile over time. And so that’s the energy around that I see some great synergy in the space of, you know, the book that you shared with me, Tom with crew, with advisory. So just, and what’s the why is belonging and connection and giving feed forward to kids? It’s a really exciting product. And we do love how it helps kids figure out who they are and what they’re good at, what they care about. What’s the

age span that people ought to think about privately for? Yeah, we’re happy to say that it goes from kindergarten through 12th grade. I say right now, I think a really beautiful sweet spot is the, from four to probably 10th grade. I think there’s a really neat space in there. We’re also finding and discovering that our senior exhibitions for students, like if they’re, as they’re progressing through and they’re capturing their highlights over time, that it

really creates a powerful senior exhibition as well. So there’s a feature in privately called Sparks. How does that ignite curiosity? Yeah, as students go through and discover their interests and strengths, Sparks pop up to showcase hundreds of different spaces that students can get into from agricultural design to computer science. And it starts to like uncover and unpack these Sparks and inspirations for like, I might be interested in that. And that’s usually what it

is. Like, hey, you give kids a pathway and they’re like, they, they, they self discover and they become the Pokemon expert, but how do they discover other things they might be interested in? And so this gives them a, a lens and kind of opens up their eyes to other areas with some inspirational videos. I love that. How does Thriveley promote social justice or awareness of and, and strengths to promote social justice? Yeah, so this is kind of the interesting piece, as I mentioned before,

the racial justice challenge. And so what that whole piece is to leverage changing how we describe Black History Month and starting to put in like relevant and current thought partners and speakers. And then inside that, the Thriveley project tool set, the project based learning tool set allows the students then have access to that design, then ultimately create a thoughtful outcome to a challenge that they have either in their classroom or in their community, and then create social impact.

Yeah, there’s lessons in there, Tom, specifically around racial justice. So if a teacher just wants to say, what can I provide my kids with? There’s racial justice lessons in there. It sounds like there’s a number of ways that teachers could use Thriveley. They could use it in a, in a classroom setting, in elementary. It sounds like you could use it in an advisory setting in secondary school, probably several different classes that you could bring it into.

Yeah, to use the project based learning. Are there any other use cases you’d want to describe? Yeah, thanks, Tom, for asking. One recently, I was working with a district here locally. And they’re saying we don’t know where a thousand of our students are right now in virtual learning. Massive problem. We see that across the nation, right? And why? It’s because there’s not a connection or a belonging or someone who’s an

ally and advocate for me. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken our own students at Design Third 9 in Poway Unified and said, okay, we have identified our sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, our kids who were totally disconnected. So what we did is we started with an empathy interview by leveraging the Thriveley platform. And so we empathize with who they are as a learner. And we connected our counselor with them. So now our counselor has feet forward with them and can now provide

supports with that student. We also bring them on campus so that we can follow up with them. And then they can have another avenue for success. But it started with understanding who they are. So like I had a specific interview with a seventh grade girl and she said, I really like service. I said, yeah, I see that out of your Thriveley profile. What’s something that you want to do with that? I’d really like to go and create an opportunity for the homeless in our local community.

So Tom, here’s an interesting piece. So I ran the data and we talk about like, what are the strengths of our students? We often wonder, do they have grit? Our most struggling students, when we ran the data, their number one skill set is perseverance. So how do we leverage their perseverance to make change? One of the things that we noticed in the data and Thriveley of our students were struggling is the thing that’s missing is executive functioning, which is really around analytic skills. So how do

we then leverage and then inside of Thriveley are 20 different lessons on leveraging analytic skills. So if we start to like actually understand kids beyond like, are they good at math or science? What is it that’s underneath that that’s keeping them from being good at math or science? What are your hopes for joining the Thriveley team? What would you like to accomplish over the next two years? Yeah, I think looking at Thriveley as a space for a learner-centered platform

that allows students to get access to high quality lessons, but also this opportunity for us to connect with other thought partners. Similar to what we’ve done, Tom, with a new way forward. So how do we leverage each of these particular products that has probably, we call them superpowers within their ecosystems, but what if we started to work together in a more really thoughtful way and not be disconnected but allies within this ecosystem of changing to learner-centered?

And that also is going to come with helping to shape policy because we could have this whole learner-centered movement and income standard-based testing again. So how do we work with policy and and working with the new administration? So having this influence around a bigger ecosystem and that’s only going to happen because working together. We’re super excited to see what you helped the Thriveley team do. To find out more about Thriveley, they can go to Thriveley.com.

Is that right? Yeah, Thriveley.com. If I do online. Yeah, erpelding.info, so erp, eld, ing.info. Great, and we’ve talked about Design 39. What’s the where can they go to find out more about that? Thank you, Tom. Design39campus.com. Great, Joe, it’s been such a gift getting to know you and visiting. Thank you so much for allowing me to bring hundreds of people to your campus. You and your learning experience designers have been such wonderful learning hosts. We

deeply appreciate the magical school that you’ve created and the way that you have shared it with the world. And it takes a team. Tom, I have one thing for you. It’s a big hug. It’s a big hug for you. I hope you took that. Thank you, Joe. I don’t know if you’ve gotten a virtual hug like that before. I haven’t. No, that’s my first. You’ve been, I think, America’s most thoughtful school principal. We really appreciate your 20 years of school leadership, and we’re just really looking forward

to your next chapter. It’s going to be exciting to watch you be able to really expand your impact all across America and around the world. So congrats on your tenure at Design 39 and best wishes in your new chapter, Joe. I hope you just keep picking up my phone call, Tom. Call me soon. All right. Thanks for joining. Thank you, Tom. It’s a pleasure to always be with you. A big thanks to Joe for joining us today. For more conversations with Joe, check out Episode 95,

Leadership for School Progress in Poway Unified. We have it linked here in the show notes, as well as on the blog at GettingSmart.com. All right. That’s it for today, listeners. Be sure to hit subscribe so you don’t miss out on any future episodes. Thanks for tuning in for the Getting Smart podcast. This is Jessica signing off.