Podcast: Julia Freeland Fisher and Mahnaz Charania on Social Relationships and Networks

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host, Jessica, and I’m excited to bring you today’s episode with Julia Freeland-Fisher and Dr. Manaz Chirania. Julia is the director of education research at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

She’s also the author of the 2018 book Who You Know? Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students’ Networks. She’s joined today by Dr. Manaz Chirania, a senior research fellow at the Christensen Institute and co-author with Julia of an important new paper, The Missing Metrics, emerging practices for measuring students’ relationships and networks.

They think measuring social capital might be just as important as reading in math scores. Let’s listen in as they talk to Tom about how social capital needs to be taken into account when addressing equity, access, and more. Hey Julia Freeland-Fisher, welcome back to the Getting Smart podcast. Thanks, Tom.

Great to be here. It’s great to have you. And you’re joined by Manaz Chirania. Is that right? Sure, Ania.

Thanks for having me. Ania, I’m sorry. Glad to have you. Manaz, you grew up in Dallas and then you traveled far to Austin for a psychology degree. Is that right?

That is right. That is right. You grew up in a family where you didn’t go too far off away from your roots to get college access. So why, I’m curious why you chose, you did your PhD closer to home though in Arlington

and why experimental social psychology? Actually, no one’s really asked me that before. I took a statistics class in undergrad where I became fascinated by the power of data and studying and influencing human behavior. And that is actually what triggered my interest in psychology and I realized that actually

being in the data space, I needed to get a higher degree and I pursued my PhD in that topic. And where did the interest in education came? Because after you graduated, you spent about six years there in Atlanta working both with Fulton schools and in a non-profit.

So when and how did you make the connected education? So I started my career as a behavioral scientist in HIV-AIDS prevention at the CDC and at one point I was actually studying health and equities and partnering across institutions and working with the Department of Ed to bring more whole child initiatives in place and that’s what sparked my interest in education.

And I left CDC to then join Fulton County schools because at that time they were looking to develop a research and evaluation portfolio. Did you work with Helene Gale at the CDC? Not directly but because I was in the HIV-AIDS division. So Helene was at CDC for 20 years.

You were probably at CDC right after Helene who at the time was running CARE International. She was on our podcast last week. So fascinating background. Julia, it’s so good to have you on again. We’re celebrating your extension of your 2018 book Who You Know.

You described in some detail in our last podcast the journey there but if you could recap how you went from the important early work that you and Michael Horne were doing around blended learning, how did you get from there to social capital as an important focal point for your work? Yeah, absolutely.

So I think when I joined the Institute, which was literally seven years ago just to date myself, I look as old as I look on the Zoom call. I joined the Institute, we were focused on the rise of online and blended learning. It’s something pre-COVID-19 that continues to be studied but that is now front and center for the entire country if not world.

That was exciting to me. I had started my career at New School’s Venture Fund when ed tech was still like a, it wasn’t even a category really. Solcon was just like in a room making videos. So I was excited to trace this rise of ed tech but as I looked at that market, we kept

seeing examples of content delivery assessment and productivity tools and ironically not very many communication and connection tools even though at the same time the ed tech was on the rise, social media and digital communications had obviously flooded our working world and our social lives. And so I wanted to understand why weren’t we talking about technology to connect and

on the flip side, if you think about some of the chronic challenges in education, particularly in sort of leveling the playing field and access to opportunity, well there’s a robust and ever sort of tortured conversation about achievement gaps. If you look at the data behind opportunity gaps, we know that in fact, and that’s made half of jobs come through social connections.

And so if we really care about tackling opportunity gaps, yes, let’s talk about skills and competencies but let’s not ignore the fact that networks matter too. And so it was really the confluence of the potential for technology to connect as a sort of disruptive innovation in the field in addition to what I saw as like a missing or sort of a blind spot in the access and equity conversation.

Yeah, super important insight, one that we continue to appreciate. Manaz, I’m curious what interests you about this topic. So I joined this work because I wanted to learn more with Julia and build with her. Social capital is something I personally experience advantages of and disadvantages of. So I know that it’s something very real and can change the trajectory of a young person

and whether they not only access college but experience the levels of social economic mobility. So many students experience. And so for me, given my measurement background, because I fundamentally believe we can’t really know for making a difference unless we’re tracking it. I wanted to be part of influencing and expanding what I knew mattered about social capital.

Julia, we’re talking in the middle of a global pandemic. Strange, strange year. As you think about the 2020 epilogue to who you know, what’s the outline of that epilogue? What would you add to the book today? Yeah, absolutely.

So I’ll name one thing that I would have added like the day after the book published. Tom, I think you once said to me that like even once you’ve turned in the initial manuscript, you already like hate the book and want to move on when you’re writing something. So I had a version of that experience. I think one, so there’s three parts of the epilogue.

Part one is that I think I was a little bit naive or there was some hubris around creating a straw man that sort of schools aren’t doing this. Schools are not focused on building student social capital. And I think although that’s true, if you look at sort of a lot of vision statements and strategies and certainly the metrics to Manasa’s point by which we measure progress, I don’t

think I did enough justice to the fact that schools are in fact building social capital day in, day out. The problem is we actually don’t have any way to detect how much of that they’re doing, how well they’re doing it and how equitably they’re doing it. And so we’re sort of in some ways shooting in the dark and as much as I want to talk

about all the cool innovations that I think could expand student access to social capital, if we take this sort of technocrat assumption of like we’re at baseline zero, then we might innovate in the wrong direction and we might wipe out really promising stuff that’s happening at schools already. So that’s part one of the epilogue.

Part two, I think in the current climate around COVID-19 and the fact that we now all have to connect virtually in some form or fashion in a way that was not the case before, I think I would double click on what we were very compelled by in our research, which is that technologies were not designed to be surrogates for caring relationships or to be platforms that could offer surrogates for caring relationships.

So a big a-ha that we had doing the research originally in the book was technology or ed tech has a competitive advantage when it comes to diversifying our networks and reaching out to new people we might not otherwise meet, but we were in no way arguing that all relationships should be technologically mediated, particularly given the importance of caring relationships for healthy to use development.

So watching everything play out right now, as much as I think that we’re going to make important strides in sort of improving our ability to form relationships online, I actually am most encouraged by the school districts and systems and post-secondary institutions that are trying to find out, figure out creative ways to still bring people together in person in small groups to forge caring relationships and use technology as again a sort of supplement

to diversify and expand networks. Last part of the F-Log, I did not write a chapter about race and it was a very conscious decision at the time. I had sort of a complex that this is not my area of expertise and I felt as though I would sort of try and do a treatment of it that would not be good enough, but the fact

of the matter is that our networks are deeply segregated and that was part of the animating force behind me wanting to write this book, but I didn’t take it all the way. So I think if there’s one book that I am pointing to more and more, I’ll hold it up since I know we’re on video, this comes out of the mentoring world. It’s called Critical Mentoring.

It’s by Tori Weister, Weaston-Surton. The mentoring world has a lot to teach us about how to think about youth-adult connections, particularly across lines of difference, including race and class. And I think that for this work to not just be relevant moving forward, that sounds gross and pandering, but to be as powerful as it could be moving forward, we are trying to

integrate race more deliberately in our work on this topic. So those are the three, not so, I mean it would be a totally different book, let’s be honest. But those are the three big buckets. No, I totally appreciate that. Great context matters.

You really couldn’t write that book on social capital without dealing with race today. And for very similar reasons, when we wrote The Power of Place, which came out the day that the WHO declared COVID a global pandemic, we had attempted to deal with the inequities around the way kids experience place, but like you now find it quite inadequate. So I really appreciate those epilogue thoughts.

I want to jump into this new paper that you just released recently where you tried to put a measurement framework, a really comprehensive measurement framework behind this. Is this, Manaz, did you really develop this framework or is this a collaborative, where did it come from? What’s the backstory?

So as Julie and I really thought about what enable schools and systems to design for social capital deliberately and from an equity lens, it was really important for us to take lessons learned from the ground up. So we take a very practical measurement approach, which by chance also happens to be an approach David Yeager of UT Austin has done a lot of work around, which articulates the value

of collecting data for continuous improvement versus accountability and taking lessons learned both from research and from practice. And so that’s what we did in developing this four dimensional framework. We drew on practices identified across post-secondary K-12 and workforce programs and started to recognize these four clusters of areas where data was being pulled up to get a better sense

of to which social capital was getting better. Manaz, I really appreciate the impulse is really to come at this from a continuous improvement standpoint. And that’s so important because that allows you to do a couple of things, right? I think to use a set of proxy measures and to be iterative in your approach, right?

To use stuff that isn’t great, but it’s an early indicator and number two, when you get a better indicator, you can swap it out. Does that sound right? Is that you really, you wouldn’t have that luxury in an accountability system, but in a sort of a continuous improvement system, you can use cruder measures and take a more

iterative approach. Is that a summary? Yeah, that’s 100% right. And if I may, Tom, I want to give you a quick example. When I was at Fulton County, I was there during the time when blended was actually released

and the entire country was shifting towards personalized learning. There were all these examples of what it looked like in implementation mode and in practice, but districts had very little tools at their disposal to understand if they were actually doing this in the right and best way. And we recognize this early on for social capital that there is a lot of early innovators

doing important work, a lot of other organizations wanting to do this, but not really knowing how they would track if they’re doing this equitably. So measurement, if we can integrate that while schools and systems are designing, we can accelerate the pace at which they support students. If that makes sense.

So yes, iteration is a core component of what we hope schools will do as they adopt these dimensions over time. All right, let’s take a quick spin through the four measures that you talk about in the paper. Let me summarize them really quickly.

Quality relationship, quantity relationship, structure of networks and the ability to mobilize those relationships. Julia, how do you measure the quantity of relationships? Is that the easiest of the list? Yeah, it gives me a softball, Tom.

So I think, I actually think this is really important for especially our K-12 audience, but it’s also in post-secondary as well. I think quantity describes itself, but this is essentially counting the number of relationships at students’ disposal. We emphasize the importance of though, not just thinking about your strongest, most

caring, enduring relationships, which is sometimes the mindset we get into when we talk about young people. It’s sort of inherited from the world of mentoring that you have like one or two people you really depend on. We know from lived experience that that’s not all that a network is composed of.

It also includes our what sociologists call weak ties, our sort of near cointances. And we also know that Mark Granavette, our researcher from Stanford coined the term back in the 70s. We think of the strength of weak ties because our weak ties can actually contain new information opportunities.

So when we think about enumerating the number of connections at a student’s disposal, we’re really pushing in this report to say like, don’t short-script yourself when you come up with that list of who are students. No, think sort of broadly about not just their most caring relationships, but a broad sort of web around them.

And track that over time to understand are their networks hopefully in fact growing over the course of an intervention or an educational experience where you’re connecting them with people, but where you may not know whether that relationship actually sticks. So concrete example, write these internship-based learning programs that you’ve been tracking for years.

Put students into work environments where they are coming into contact with a bunch of people, and then pre and post what does a student’s network look like just in terms of sheer size. It could be a really powerful indicator for whether programs are actually embedding those students into true communities of practice in those workplaces or if they’re hanging out in a corner filing, answering telephones and not interacting with anyone.

So would this include the number of linking connections that you have? Yeah, so that’s one of the ways that some of the programs we looked at are actually tracking this. Braven, which is a program that works with underrepresented low-income and first generation college students, literally track the number of linking connections.

They have a benchmark around Menazkar-Givs-I-Rang encouraging students to have at least 50 linking connections over the course of their program. Again with this, I guess just to sort of step back for a second, the other reason why this matters is sort of not over-depending on a single mentoring relationship as being the one that’s going to open a door to opportunity.

So those of us who have navigated to job search know that it’s in part numbers game. So LinkedIn is one tool. Menaz, maybe you could briefly describe Trovit, which is a tool for younger students actually, but with some similar capabilities. Yeah, Trovit is great and they do multiple things and address multiple dimensions, but

it’s a digital portfolio, for example, Compsi High School, which is a charter high school in the Northeast, actually leverages them to one, build an awareness among their high school students on the importance of social capital and relationships, but then visibly track the professional relationships they come in contact with so they can actually see that grow over time and take that with them as they move on beyond the high school

so that they can now cultivate those relationships on their own. That’s great. I wonder if Inblaze may do that as well from Big Picture. Yeah, so Inblaze has over, they’ve considered, they have a sort of integration with LinkedIn that only goes in one direction right now, where they encourage students to have LinkedIn

profiles and also solicit endorsements from their work site mentors and supervisors on LinkedIn. I think the long term dream though, you’re correct, Tom, is to sort of think more broadly about, I guess, interoperability among these tools. So I love this category.

It’s hard to, it might be hard if you set a goal to have 50 or 100 community LinkedIn connections for this, not to become a bit of a counting exercise. I guess some of the other categories, like the second one that we’ll talk about, are sort of a counter balance. Manaz, how do you get at the quality of relationships?

What’s that about? Yeah, so quality is really what’s going to drive whether these relationships last over time. And it’s the extent to which that relationship is actually meeting the different needs of that student.

So we can put all these relationships in front of the student, but if that person isn’t actually responsive to their relational or developmental needs, that relationship probably is not going to last very long. So the question is, what kind of data can we capture from the student and or the adult that helps us ensure our schools and systems that there is a real match and satisfaction

and a sense of connection between the two individuals that we’re putting together? So for example, ASU Local does this really well where they actually ask students questions over time to ensure, are they feeling comfortable? Are they feeling connected? Are they feeling supported to make sure that if that’s not happening, that relationship

is not going to yield the results and supports that we want for the students? Yeah, I love that example. So for our listeners, Arizona State has started in Los Angeles, a network of these ASU Local sort of little pop up, which you might think is odd for a big online university. But I think they recognize the power of relationships that having having a personal advisory

relationship is super important. And then encouraging the development of these sort of networks is really important to persistence and then transition to employment. So I thought that was a neat example. Yeah, can I just chime in here for one more thing on quality that I think when Oz and

I really appreciated that this is like in some ways the biggest bucket and the most mysterious one of like, how do you measure the quality of relationships? Right? We’re experiencing them constantly and they’re sort of these ever shifting hard to pin down phenomena.

But again, this is a place where education, I think would be wise to borrow from fields like youth development and mentorship. Because there’s also a body of research around trying to measure both the developmental support that a relationship provides a young person and what’s called the instrumental support. So the notion that someone actually gave me a resource or opened a door for me.

And again, we don’t see a lot of these in education systems right now being used necessarily, but we point in the report to, for example, our partners at the Search Institute who have the developmental relationships framework and are developing some really exciting surveys to gauge that. And again, examples from the mentorship space on how to ask questions about the sorts of

instrumental supports. And someone introduced you to a colleague or recommend you for a job. Like let’s actually get at that level of data and not stop at just sort of the warm and fuzzy feelings that we sometimes default to when we talk about relationships in education. I appreciate that.

And let me note that the end of your paper has a great appendix that has a set of examples, both the sort of questions that get at a topic like the quality relationships and then a list of institutional examples. So your paper really does a nice job of trying to make this as real as possible. Manaz, talk about the structure of networks.

How do you get at that? Yeah, this one is really fascinating and it’s very challenging too because we can easily get locked into just the people we know and increase the quantity within these circles, these homogeneous circles that we have. But the real value is to ensure that students know a variety of people and to recognize

how those people are connected to each other so that if you can visualize it, we have students accessing multiple nodes of heterogeneous groups that can then speak to their diverse needs and interests and passions. And that means exposing students to people of different backgrounds, expertise and insights. For example, like Compsi, I’ve given that example.

I particularly like, like there’s this one company called XSCL Labs. Julia, correct me if I’m wrong and understanding what they do. But what I like about them is they do show a huge value for social-emotional learning, but they also recognize that that is only as valuable as putting actual relationships within students’ reach.

And so they offer students this network mapping activity through this nomination survey to ensure that students have access to diverse peer networks that they can then learn and grow from and with. But to be provocative for a second here, XSCL’s tool, it’s a friendship nomination survey, the sort of sociological and technical term for it, where you have students actually enumerating

who they are close to in their classroom. This can be a lightning rod issue for parents, right? It can sound like we’re running sort of like data-driven popularity contests in classrooms. So I actually think it’s an area where we think, we put forth in the report that if you’re not paying attention to the structure of these networks, kids could be falling through

the cracks. But where to sort of move this work forward, there has to be an understanding of the why, right? It’s not just to understand who students know and then not act upon that data. It’s actually to say, now that we’ve seen that, let’s think about heterogeneous grouping.

Think about different ways to put students on projects together to try and cross-pollinate friendship, not just sort of have a popularity contest, which I think is just something to keep in mind across the board of none of those I think Minnaz and I are suggesting is data collection for the sake of data collection because it could be very fraught very quickly. This podcast is sponsored by TEL’s Micro Collegiate Academy.

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Scholarships are available. I appreciate that. So that is both a teacher being aware of those issues, but it’s also useful to have measurement tools, probably a set of smart tools that are tracking this that can nudge a teacher to say, this is happening in your classroom, in part based on the nature of

the tasks that you’re constructing. Be thoughtful in the next several rounds of the groups that you construct. That’s a helpful prompt. Manaz, the last category is the ability to mobilize relationships. That seems super important and also quite gnarly to measure.

How do you get at that? Yeah, I mean this is extremely important. Again, putting relationships within reach isn’t enough. Students need to have the skill set and the mind sense to be able to activate these relationships over time when there isn’t an adult overseeing them or when they’re no longer in that school

or college where someone’s been facilitating for them. This is the students ability to seek out help when they need and activate relationships based on their needs and interests. One of the things I wanted to point out actually that undergirds all of these, going back to structure a little bit too, I apologize, is this topic of diversity.

To make sure students are confident in accessing and activating relationships with people who are different from them or maybe working in different spaces or different environments. That’s going to take some concerted effort to make sure they’re practicing that while they’re in our schools and post-secondary systems and then being able to take those relationships with them.

I’m really interested in the subject of helping young people tell their story, right, of who they’re becoming and both what they have accomplished, what they’ve overcome, with whom they’ve connected. I think of a variety of ways that young people could do that. Traditionally we’ve relied on a transcript to communicate that story which is really crappy summary.

It’s a list of courses you took in the grade that you got right in. The portfolios are another way to give examples, artifacts of products that you’ve produced. Sometimes there’s a story of connection associated with them. Some people are thinking about extended transcripts that include new forms of evidence both formal and informal.

As you think about those strategies, where does this information show up? In what ways, both formal and informal, might a young person leaving high school or leaving college utilize this information to tell an employer or another institution of learning about who they are and about their aspirations? I’ll take a stab at that and Minnaz maybe add.

I mentioned Trove it and I bring it up again not to endorse a single portfolio company, but because I think Tom, part of what you’re getting at, there’s two layers of this. There’s what’s the most holistic but digestible portrait of myself that I can show the world, which is both a design challenge and I would argue an assessment or diagnostic challenge. Then there’s, if we come at this more from the social capital lens, I may have even mentioned

this on our last podcast, but there’s the fact that Elliot Washer from Big Picture Learning always reminds me of, which is it’s not just what you know and who you know, it’s who knows what you know. What I’m really excited about as people embark on measurement, it’s not just showing a more high resolution portrait of students networks, but connecting that to the academic side of

the house. What Trove it does, that we think is really smart, is it shows students’ experiences and the mentors or adults or even peers that worked alongside them in those experiences. So you’re actually, it’s not dissimilar to LinkedIn, but you’re connecting the what and the who in a structure like that.

I think that to me is where the magic can happen. The second thing I’d say though is that I may be less excited about the sort of transcript play and more excited about how are we arming students with ways to keep track of and mobilize their networks over time themselves. So like as you’ve talked about over the years, owning their own data.

And the reason why that’s really important that Menaz keeps alluding to is the fact that your social capital is a reservoir of resources you carry with you throughout your life. So the more that we can arm students with a digital Rolodex or a backpack of connections, whatever metaphor we use, the better we are future-proofing them, if that makes sense. The better we’re setting them up for frankly all the uncertainty that we’re facing as like

a nation and a world right now. I don’t know, I’m curious Tom on your thoughts there though, if you’ve seen examples of portfolios that get the south side right. So Menaz in your hometown of Dallas, Dallas County, there’s a startup called Greenlight Credentials that’s been working with Dallas County Promise and that’s an example of a

cool digital transcript and extended transcript and on it on what I would call a page two, the additional information, there’s a list of five people that have been influential in your life. So that’s sort of your five that are like the core to your network. I can imagine adding to that a link to your LinkedIn profile and the number of LinkedIn

connections that you have and you can imagine adding a couple different more proxy measures for the type and size sort of distribution, maybe the geo-distribution of your network. One reason I find that so attractive is that Greenlight now permissions, it allows young people to permission their data to North Texas learning institutions and so they can receive an inbound notice of acceptance just based on a data extract that they pulled from that

learner’s profile and they can do the same thing with an employer and an employer can query your data if they’ve been permissioned and they can give you an interview or an internship or even a job offer based on your profile. So I like the idea of giving young people the ownership of a transcript where they can add this relationship data that you’ve been describing and then permission it to people

to whom it might be of interest. So I think that’s one interesting development. Yeah, and I think to take that one step further into our sort of theory of change, not to sound jargon-y, I think I would also hope that we’re looking at that data in aggregate at the level of the institution to understand how much of that was inherited versus deliberately

brokered, which is like one of the reasons why Minnaz and I embarked on this measurement journey in the first place is like, yes, these are individual attributes for students, but it’s the institution sort of taking on the responsibility to look at this data and think about how can we better hopefully build these networks and more equitably that I think will be powerful.

Yeah, I want to go back to your earlier, what would the way Minnaz described this as really being about continuous improvement and Julia, the way you described it about owning your own data. I think the most valuable thing here might be is that as part of an advisory relationship, if you have an advisor that’s helping a young person understand the quality, the quantity

of your relationships, the nature of your network and your ability to mobilize them, if you’re having that conversation with your advisor every week through high school and college, it’s imprinting that this is an important part of my personal development, not just the grades that I’m getting in class, but that these relationships in quantity and quality are really important to who I am becoming.

That sort of continuous improvement, self growth feels like the most important aspect of these metrics. Minnaz is it sound right? Yeah, I absolutely love what you’re saying. And if I could rewind back and be into high school, something you said really made me

think how amazing would it be if every high school student could graduate with advisors who can then guide them. We still have students coming into college not yet knowing how to draft an email for an opportunity because we need to carry those relationships with them over time so that they can actually achieve socioeconomic mobility and not just pass a class or come out with

a degree. And I think it’s this longer term thinking that we want to help schools do more intentionally through measurement and capturing insightful data. I love that. I want to wrap up with this difficult challenge that this all sounds great, but it seems like

really even more challenging than it would have been in this middle of a global pandemic. How in the world do we help kids build their network now? So I’ll say Minnaz and I just wrote a piece in the 74 that, well, they titled it differently as you know that happens. But like the gist of it is you can’t have a roadmap without a relationship map.

So we actually think that we’re entering a period of time where our institutions don’t know who their students know. They will be less equipped to manage the coming year. And that for the first time, that has to bridge formal and informal connections, right? Because the teacher of record alone is not going to be a sufficient support for a K-12

student. The sort of once a semester advisor in college is not necessarily going to ensure retention. And so I think some of the, in some ways more rudimentary practices like relationship mapping that we call out in this measurement brief could be really powerful tools going into the year to come.

So that’s in terms of like the institutional level. I think I’m maybe somewhat encouraged, and I don’t say this to sound polyan-ish. I’m not one of these like, oh, the pandemic is going to help us accelerate disruption people even though that may or may not be happening. I’m encouraged by the fact that some of the organizations we’ve looked at like ClimbHire,

which is a workforce development organization, Career Village, which is an online career networking and advice site, Nefris, which ports industry experts into classrooms. All of them have seen an immense surge in virtual volunteerism. And that may sound, again, sort of just sort of like a nice to have. But part of the premise of this work since day one has been getting outsiders involved

in the project of school. And I think we’re entering a year where more of those outsiders could be connected virtually to students and we should take advantage of it. Manaz, I guess I just wondered if you wanted to close with a few words of advice. I’ll give you both a shot at this.

If you’re a high school principal or a counselor or if you’re a college counselor, where to start? Yeah, this is a really overwhelming time for all educators and even parents. I have two kids in elementary school and one in middle and it’s a whirlwind of an experience line and I know our teachers are working extremely hard, our principals are working very hard

and I imagine they’re going to spend the first few days trying to reconnect with these students. Job number one, right? And there’s two paper and pencil tools like relationship mapping tools from making caring common projects for example, where they could just identify who is this child with at home when they’re not here that we can connect with to ensure they do not get disconnected,

that we can communicate with and support them through this immediate need right now, I think could go a very long way. And then as capacity improves, start recognizing where the supports are coming, where the needs are for the student and building that reservoir of relationships over time. But that immediate mapping could go a long way through this year and beyond.

It’s great. Julia, any other words of advice? Yeah, maybe I’ll just give a shout out to something I heard about last week but that echoes some of the work we’re seeing across groups that are really focused on building social capital.

It links back, Tom, to your idea of students telling their story and I think a lot of thinking you’ve done over the years on student’s sense of purpose, which is sort of a buzzword. Who students are, what their identity is and what their goals are. I was just on a webinar last week with a woman named Lydia Martinez from Springfield Public Schools and they had a really cool series of summer projects that were sort of project-based

learning but assignments where students could describe their identity and their goals and it was serving two purposes. It was a set of summer school assignments but they were actually going to take those assignments, the work products to the teachers who had a batch of incoming students they had never met and the sort of result of those projects was going to be a first cut at getting to

know their students. There’s something really powerful there of like let’s combine what we know of the sort of best of the best of purpose driven project-based learning and use those for teachers to get to know their students on the front end. It just felt like a really elegant solution to what feels like Manaz said an incredibly

daunting exercise. I’d point you guys listeners to NXU which is a group out of New York City that’s actually scaling sort of purpose driven exploration in addition to Springfield Public Schools and Tom I’m sure you know a million others who are doing cool stuff in that area but maybe a good way to kick off a weird year.

Do you Manaz, do you have a sense that these emerging metrics might be just as important as your reading and math score? Personally yes, 100%. I think we have powerful metrics around accountability and we need to add these in there not just as inputs to academic achievement but to make sure we are setting our students up for long

term success and that needs to start now with math with literacy. I have that sense that this stuff is hard to measure but your networks, who’s in them feels like it at least as important as any traditional measure that we have. So I really appreciate the work that you’re doing. It’s difficult and challenging both technically and politically to wade into the space but

I appreciate the spirit and thoughtfulness with which you guys have approached the work. Julia thanks for leading this effort. Co-leading with Manaz but thank you Tom for having me back and spotlighting this issue and excited to keep chatting about it. Read who you know and check out this paper.

We’ll include it in the show notes. Julia Freeland Fisher thanks for being on again and thanks for introducing us to Manaz Sharania, terrific co-author. Thanks for your work. We appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you. A big thanks to Julia and Manaz for joining us today. For more on social capital see episodes 165 our 2018 interview with Julia on Who You Know. We have it linked here in the show notes as well as on the blog.

All right that’s it for today listeners. Be sure to hit subscribe before you go so you don’t miss out on any future episodes. Thanks for tuning in for the Getting Smart podcast. This is Jessica signing off.