Town Hall Recap: Desiging for Learning Differences Changes Everything

Mason Pashia: Thank you to Education Reimagined for helping put this thing together with me. This is really rooted in a lot of their recent research and conversations, as well as some of the things we talk a lot about at Getting Smart — how creating powerful learning for all is creating powerful learning for all.

It’s a way to actually include everyone in the act of radical learning. So I just wanted to welcome our guests today. We have Wesley Stevens, who’s a student at Lafayette Big Picture High School. You’ll be seeing all their little faces on the grid here in just a few minutes. We’ve got Susan Hart, principal at Lafayette Big Picture High School.

We have Stephanie Moltion, who’s Wesley’s parent at Lafayette Big Picture High School. And then we also have Lindsay Ogawa, who has led a lot of this EdRe work. And I’m really excited to kind of co-facilitate, but really just follow her lead today. So Lindsay, hello.

Lindsy Ogawa: Well, thank you, Mason, and the entire Getting Smart team for having us. Thank you to everyone who’s in this room making a difference, who cares deeply about young people and their well-being.

It’s great to be here this morning. Over the past ten years or so, Education Reimagined has had a really great opportunity to visit hundreds of schools and other types of learning environments across the country. One of the many things that we just kept observing or noticing in speaking with young people is that there are so many learners with learning differences — like ADHD or dyslexia — who’ve grown up believing that there’s something fundamentally wrong with them.

So today we’re asking: what if education doesn’t need to fix young people? And what happens when education is designed for learners and for learning differences? That was the context and the starting point for this research study. In partnership with the Oak Foundation, we brought together sixteen educators who have a wide range of personal and professional backgrounds and relationships to learning differences, to help connect practice to research, but also practice to policy — which is driven by this research question that’s on the screen.

How do learner-centered environments work with youth with learning differences? When we talk about learner-centered education — you hear us talk about it a lot — it’s Education Reimagined’s bread and butter. It’s really the kind of education where every learner feels known, where they can explore their passions.

They’re deep in relationships with other mentors or peers far beyond a school building, and learning is happening in virtual spaces but also out in the world. And it’s Education Reimagined’s goal for that kind of education to be available for every single child in the United States.

Here are some of our learning partners. These were some of the people who were in the community of practice, and we’re serious when we wanna be, but we also know how to have some fun. I know some of the learning partners are here with us. If you all just wanna say hi in the chat or drop an emoji or something.

I got Chris. Seen a few of you.

Great. Thanks for being here.

And so in addition to a literature review published by Kara Schonfeld — our lead researcher on this project — as well as a few dozen interviews that we did with sites, these were the three sites that we actually visited and studied. Of course, we have the Lafayette Big Picture team.

They’re a public school within a school, part of the Big Picture Learning Network right outside of Syracuse, New York. We also have Avalon School, which is a public charter middle and high school in St. Paul, Minnesota. And then last but not least, Norris School District, which is a public district right outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

But really, they serve learners from across the state of Wisconsin. Maybe the one thing I would really just want to highlight is that when choosing the sites we wanted to visit, it was important for us to visit sites with a pretty mixed and diverse population of learners — those who had IEPs and 504s and those that didn’t — while still serving a pretty significant population of youth with IEPs and 504s.

You know, across the site visits and across the conversations that we had, something that really got illuminated was this foundational philosophy. It’s this question: How are you smart? Not, how smart are you? I’m gonna sit with that and let it soak in, because it sounds really simple, but it’s the kind of mindset that really shifts everything.

It shifts not only the modalities of learning, but also the culture of the environment. Susan Hart was actually the person — when we first entered Lafayette Big Picture, we were around a room in a circle, and she was sharing an overview of Lafayette. At the very end, she said, “I bet you can’t tell who has learning differences, and I bet you can’t tell which staff are the special education staff.”

And she was right. We couldn’t tell, because in large part, instead of working in silos, young people and adults felt responsible for each other. They were talking about and reflecting on their own strengths. They were highlighting and elevating the strengths of their peers. What became very apparent is that these sites were designed to illuminate those strengths and the brilliance of everyone.

Some of the things that we saw were a lot of strength-based approaches. Learner profiles — which I think are becoming more popular in environments, which is great — one educator talked about it as like an IEP on steroids, in large part because every learner has one. And rather than just focusing on academic goals, it really aimed to paint a picture of who learners are: their strengths, their personal and academic goals, experiences that were happening in their lives, as well as their needs.

These profiles were constantly revisited and evolved with learners. We also saw educators who were relating to behaviors as a type of language, or as communicating unmet needs. So rather than jumping to conclusions or punitive consequences, educators were really getting curious about what was going on with their learners.

Why did something maybe feel a little bit off? Paired with that, a lot of educators already had really deep relationships with their learners and had a sense of maybe what was going on behind the scenes. I kind of alluded to this one earlier, but there was a lot of team collaboration. I think in special education in particular, so many educators will talk about how isolating that kind of work is.

But in these environments, collaboration was really integrated. There were both intentional moments of collaboration — Norris, I think, has daily team meetings, and each day has a topic they wanna dig into. But there was also just a culture of collaboration: people tapping in and out, saying, “Hey, they just needed a quick break,” sharing about what they’re learning. This was both for the learners as well as the staff.

And then, of course, there were a lot of family partnerships. This looked different from site to site, but one pretty consistent throughline is that families were consistently describing a sense of relief from being invited in as partners to support their child. Their phones weren’t blowing up with negative news every other day.

They also didn’t expect to have all of the answers. They really were being invited as thought partners, as people that they could lean on — and they knew that they had their child’s best interests in mind.

And then the impacts — the impacts were pretty huge. We saw learners who were building their identity and their agency. Really developing the ability to speak up for themselves, share what was working, and offer suggestions for other ways when it wasn’t. Learners were developing foundational life and academic skills. Yes, they’re developing things like reading comprehension and writing and math, but oftentimes it was done in a relevant context, and it was going far beyond just those academics. One of the stories that I loved was a learner who was working with an accountant as his mentor, and the project required him to develop and apply math competence for pricing and materials.

But above that — or next to that — he was also developing time management and persistence when he got feedback. Another learner talked about a project where he was developing conflict resolution in a work environment where he was interning. And then lastly, we saw learners expanding the possibilities for their future.

Over and over again, we heard stories from young people who said that when they first joined, they didn’t really know what their interests were. They didn’t really see a path forward for them. And when they left, they felt confident. Maybe they didn’t know exactly what they wanted to do, but they could see a direction.

And that confidence was not unfounded. It was backed by their own experiences that really illuminated for them that they are capable. They also had multiple people in their lives who knew that they were capable and were speaking about that growth. One of my favorites was when we were able to speak with an alum — a recent graduate — who was about to enter a carpentry fellowship. He shared kind of what I mentioned earlier.

He didn’t have friends when he first joined. He didn’t know what his interests were. He wasn’t really feeling great about where his life was heading. And over time, he discovered an interest in music. At some point his guitar broke, and he taught himself how to fix it. That caught the attention of his peers, and his peers began asking him to fix instruments or other things, and that turned into a side business.

He was just reflecting on how, in two or three pretty short years, he realized that he was capable of so much more than when he had first started.

And the last thing I’ll say is — I talked about the impacts on learners, but I think what we really noticed is that there were rippling impacts on everyone who engaged with learners: from their peers to educators who were, at least in these environments, choosing to stay in the profession and at these sites for sometimes ten or twenty years.

Families, community partners, graduates who just talked about the difference that this education and this environment made on them.

And with that — that’s enough of me yapping. So let’s hear from the Lafayette Big Picture team. Wes, are you ready?

Wesley Stevens: Yeah.

Lindsy Ogawa: Okay. Share screen. So these are some of the projects that you’ve done, and they’re great examples of your learner-centric experience. Can you tell us about them and what you learned?

Wesley Stevens: Yeah. So in the first picture, we have one of my internships where I wanted to learn more about mechanics just for personal use — which is what I love about Big Picture, ’cause it’s an internship-based school, so it actually gave me the opportunity to do that. In that photo, we have my friend Colby Fisher’s dirt bike and my friend Jesse, who was also part of it, and we actually helped clean and replace some of the stuff on his dirt bike to get ready for a race.

And in the second picture, it’s more of a voluntary project of mine where I helped veterans. I served chili for them — that right there is for the Kyle Snyder Foundation, and his mom is dedicated to giving back to veterans. You can see all the drinks and snacks on the other side of the table. Basically, they give out supplies to veterans and just help them throughout Thanksgiving and the holidays and stuff, which is pretty awesome.

**So yeah.

Lindsy Ogawa**: Thanks. Some of the things you touched on when we were talking earlier were being exposed to new interests. You were like, “I don’t know anything about motorbikes or dirt bikes, I don’t know anything about the mechanics of stuff,” but it was interesting, and you pursued it. You also touched on community service, and I think embedded in one of the projects too, you talked about financial literacy and entrepreneurship.

I’m curious — you’re about to graduate. Forgot to mention that you’re a senior. How did that learning, or noticing what you’ve learned about yourself, feed into what’s next for you? And how did your experiences at Lafayette Big Picture shape some of those plans?

Wesley Stevens: I think that it helped me decide on what I wanted to do after high school. I realized mechanics wasn’t for me, and I also realized that culinary wasn’t really for me. So I actually got to pick up an electrician class over here at Big Picture. I just love how all the internships and opportunities that Big Picture has provided to me have prepared me for the real world, and I’ll actually be able to settle on a career and pick one for what I wanna do for the rest of my life.

Lindsy Ogawa: Yeah, and just reemphasizing how important it is to also discover what you don’t like as well. You talked a lot too about just wanting to make sure that whatever career path you pursued, it was really hands-on — and about trying on a lot of different kinds of projects in your life.

Thank you, Wes. Susan, if we could turn to you — building on what we just learned from Wes, what impact does this kind of learning have on you or for your educators?

Susan Hart: Sure. I think we need to go back to the quote about it’s not how smart you are, but how you are smart. That feeds us as educators here every day — looking for the things, noticing the strengths that haven’t been recognized yet.

It’s our job to be observing and questioning and digging into those things. It’s also really important for us to build relationships with our students to make sure that they know they belong here, so they can become comfortable enough to take risks and explore, because it is a big risk to try something you don’t know — and then also have the strength to say, “No, I don’t really like that, and we need to find something else.”

Lindsy Ogawa: Right. And Susan, I think we should probably also mention that Lafayette Big Picture — your founding — I think Lafayette Big Picture’s been around for 17 years. Is it 18?

Susan Hart: It is 18 years, yeah.

Lindsy Ogawa: Eighteen. And over that time, you’ve built a really robust pool of community partnerships.

So the relationships are going not just within or amongst learners and educators, but also to the broader community. I’m wondering, how do partnerships with the community impact what’s possible for learners? And maybe also, how are community partners being impacted by learners at Lafayette?

Susan Hart: That’s a great question, because we had our mentor celebration yesterday where we served lunch to our mentors as a thank you, and we consistently heard back from them: “No, thank you for the experience” — which was a great exchange. Our community partners are our most valuable resources, and they are the experts.

They help us generate ideas and projects and advice and excitement, and that’s really what gets our students engaged in the work. We think about them as the base of this work. And as for what’s possible — anything’s possible. We go out into the community and look for the person that’s passionate about something a student says they’re curious about, and we cast a wide net to try to find out what is possible.

Lindsy Ogawa: Yeah. One of the things I loved when we visited Lafayette Big Picture was it was both taking learners out into the community and bringing the community into the building. Someone even built — was it a water-generated computer or something? With community partners. It really struck us that if there was a barrier, you found a way to work around it, and you made relevant, meaningful learning for young people essentially mandatory. It was essential to everything that they did.

So Steph, we’d love to hear from you. How has the experience at Lafayette Big Picture changed things for you as a parent — both at home and in how you see Wes and his future?

Stephanie Moltion: It definitely has decreased the frustration that Wesley and I both used to have. When you take a child who has different learning styles and put them in a traditional classroom, it’s frustrating not only for the parent and the child, but the teacher as well.

They don’t have the extra resources or the support to be able to move around and get the extra help students may need. So taking him out of that environment and putting him in Big Picture, where he can learn at his own pace and make his needs known, really helped a lot.

As a parent, I worried — is he going to sit in a traditional classroom and just kind of check out and graduate not knowing everything he’s supposed to know? That was a fear of mine. Now that he has gone through Big Picture and is about to graduate, his self-esteem has increased because he’s been able to do internships.

He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t like. He’s been able to take college tours, experience different trades, and learn real-life skills — like grocery shopping, accounting, all that kind of thing. And the second he walks out of Big Picture and into an internship, he’s also networking, and that’s really important.

So it’s definitely been a game-changer for him and myself.

Lindsy Ogawa: Thanks, Steph.

Stephanie Moltion: Yeah.

Lindsy Ogawa: When we asked questions from folks as they were registering, there were a lot of “How do you do this?” So I’m curious to hear from you — what are one or two things that Lafayette Big Picture did for you, or does for you as a parent, that were most helpful?

Stephanie Moltion: I feel like the communication has been great — not only about his strengths or what has been needed, but also about any struggles or anything that needs to be altered, or what he might not like as far as internships. It has also helped with problem-solving and encouraging responsibility and increased self-esteem, which also plays a role at home.

So it takes the stress off of everybody — myself, him, teachers, like I said earlier. I don’t feel like he’s a child that’s going to be left behind or just pushed along in school. He’s actually leaving with not only the knowledge he’s supposed to have, but sets of skills that he learned at Big Picture.

Lindsy Ogawa: I love that, yeah. Sets of skills — and also the social capital and relationships. And Wes, just one more thing. I remember you also shared, “I learned that I love to work. I’m not scared of hard work.”

And so no matter what you do, you’ll take that with you. So thank you, Wes, Susan, and Steph, and I’ll turn it back to Mason.

Mason Pashia: Hello. All right, we got a couple questions coming in from the chat, so I wanna address those. I think they’re both for you, Wes — popular guy. Okay, first one.

Share something that you’ve learned about yourself that you absolutely don’t want to forget.

Wesley Stevens: Oh, man.

Speaker: It’s a tough one…

Wesley Stevens: Yeah. Well, first, I learned that I cannot sit still. I need to keep busy. I also learned that I am very — I’ll say adventurous, curious about many different things.

I mean, I’m not very scared to try new things. I’m kind of excited for it. And once I find something I really like, I’m really passionate about it. So yeah, just one thing I like to better myself by.

Mason Pashia: I love that. Definitely hold onto that. All right, we got another one in the chat for you. So this one is: of all your skills and your strengths in this moment, as you’re coming up on graduation — which, premature congratulations — what are your top two or three?

What are the things that you feel most confident about as a skill? Maybe doing stuff with your hands, which you alluded to in that last answer, but maybe another one or two.

Wesley Stevens: I’d say one of the skills that I think are really important to me is my financial skills. That’s helped me out a lot, and I know it’ll help me out a lot in the future.

I’d also say my social skills grew a lot more. Before I came to Big Picture, I wasn’t really talkative to many people. With the out-in-the-world experiences from internships, I feel like it pushed me to actually use my words and speak about what I’m actually thinking and my own opinion.

I also feel that it’s just helped me make a lot more friends and it’s been a great way to connect with people. So I’d say my social skills. Yeah.

Mason Pashia: That’s so great. Confidence — I love confidence as an outcome. I think that’s such a powerful one to use as a metric of how somebody’s feeling.

Okay, we got another question. This one is for both Sue and Wes. We wanna hear a little bit more about the advisory model at Lafayette Big Picture. Sue, if you wanna describe it a little bit, and then Wes, we’d love to hear your own experience of that and maybe a couple of things that you felt were particularly impactful for you.

Susan Hart: Sure. Our advisory model is a cohort of students that enter school together in grade nine, and they travel together — the same students and adults — all the way to graduation. They build a tight community, just like a family. Sometimes we have to repair relationships, and we’re always building relationships.

But that layer of support becomes another one of those relationships, another one of those connections.

Wesley Stevens: Yeah. I just wanna start by saying that one of the reasons I came to Big Picture was because of my advisor, Scotty. He reached out to me during a really rough time, made me feel comfortable, helped me with my decision, and basically just gave me a second chance.

Honestly, over the past four or five years that I’ve been here, he’s been like a father to me in many ways. He’s helped me outside of school, he’s helped me on the football field, in the classroom. Even times when I was immature and wasn’t really the best to him, he still stuck by my side and helped me out.

Mason Pashia: That’s powerful. Thank you for sharing, Wes. I’m gonna keep you all up on the screen because we’re definitely gonna come back, but I wanna invite a couple other voices into this space too. So Chris from Norris and Tim from Avalon — I’m gonna bring you guys in, and would love to hear if any of this resonates with what you all have been experiencing in your own environments and what you’ve built.

Chris, do you wanna maybe start us off?

Kristofer Koneazney: For sure. Yeah. We have — I don’t know if we stole it or not — but we have been using the advisory model as well. We found that our learners also really benefit from the close connection it forms between the staff and the learner.

It makes a big difference to them to realize that they are really important to somebody, to one person. So I think it’s likely, Susan, that we stole it. We appreciate it. But yeah, our kids are truly benefiting from that. When it comes to using that model to get out in the community — you have a person that you can lean back on and just go, “Hey, I’m struggling with this. How can I get through this?” You don’t have to feel alone doing it.

I can recall as a young person, it was like, “Go get a job,” and I just went and got a job. But if I could have skipped some of the hurdles or some of the pain that I went through, that would’ve made it more accessible and I would’ve felt more supported. I really can see how that would’ve helped me to be in a better place as a young person.

And I didn’t have some of the challenges that some of our learners that we work with every day have. So… Tim, what about you?

Tim Quealy: Yeah. Afternoon, everybody. I’m also covering the front desk, as many people in schools are doing, so I apologize. I mean, I thought so many parts of all three of our schools resonated across, which was so fun to be a part of.

Some things I’ve already heard today that resonate: the relationship-first part is huge in what we do. At Avalon School, we also have an advisory model — a cohort — and those students actually stay with that advisor for the duration of their high school or middle school experience.

We find that the relationship is the number one driver of everything we do. That teacher — and the other teachers who work with students — are always valuing who students are, what their home culture looks like, what they themselves wanna do, and what their strengths are.

We find that as the baseline, that really allows for success as we go forward. When I visited the other two schools, I saw that all over the place. I think the other thing that stands out in that piece is the agency and student voice that it gives students, because we actually have somebody who can know a student and support them, and that actually gives them the voice to go and follow their own passions.

“Hey, you wanna explore being an electrician? I can help you do that, and I’ve got the power to do that.” Yeah, it was such a great experience to spend the year getting to know the other schools and the other members of our cohort. It was fantastic. Good to see you again.

Mason Pashia: Thanks, Tim and Chris.

We have another question in the chat, and this could be for any of y’all who are leading schools. This is from Chris McNutt, and it’s kind of an infrastructure question. It’s about how do you keep track of these people? So often there’s one person at the school who holds all the relationships, and then if they leave or something happens, the relationships go away as well.

So how are you keeping an orbit of these mentors and off-site locations close, holding them core to what you do, and making sure that everyone’s successful in partnership and has a match?

Kristofer Koneazney: Yeah. On Norris’ end, we have something called Norris Connects, and it’s an online feature where you can go in and click on all the partners we’ve worked with, see who has worked with them, what services they’ve offered, when did we work with them, and how close are they? Things are really linked all over the place so you can search — okay, I’m looking for someone in, as Tim mentioned, being an electrician. How many electricians are on there, and where can we make a connection?

I think the other thing — and I think Susan could really echo this — is you hire the right people, because then you don’t have to track everything. When we have this overarching person kind of going, “I have my hands all over everything,” I think the best thing you can do is hire the right people, make sure they hold the same vision as you, and then trust that they’re doing the right thing. The trust is built every time you do a basic check-in and go, “How are things going?”

And you really get the information you’re looking for, or you see that those relationships and connections are being made without you having any real hands-on part of it. I think that’s been a key thing that I saw at all the places we went — the employees are keyed in.

They believe in this process. They believe in this system and model. So you don’t really have to stay on top of someone who already would rather be doing it — probably better than you envisioned it to begin with.

Susan Hart: I’m also always looking for a candidate, an employee that has lots of other interests other than just teaching. First, they need to like kids more than content, but they also need to be interested in a lot of other things.

That way, I know that they’re curious — and that they’re learners, too.

Tim Quealy: I think the only thing I would echo there — we also developed our own tool to track community experts, just like Big Picture and Norris have. Because we found we had very little turnover. We had many teachers at the school for twenty years, and that was working for a while because those teachers just knew everything.

And then we had a little bit of turnover, and to sustain that culture, we actually learned we have to write all this stuff down to share across teachers. You can’t just depend on that institutional knowledge. It has to be written somewhere so we can share it, and so that the experience a kid gets doesn’t depend on what advisor they’re attached to.

How can we share all that knowledge across the whole school has been a challenge that we’ve tried to figure out.

Mason Pashia: That’s great. Okay, I’m gonna call in another voice here. Aurora with EALA — I wanna pull you in real quick. What about the stories that have been shared so far are resonating with the work you’re doing at EALA, or what are you learning from this particular research?

Aurora Dreger: Thanks. It’s been fantastic to listen in and to work with Lindsay. I put some links in the chat before and introduced myself. My name is Aurora Dreger. I’m the project director of EALA — the Educating All Learners Alliance. We’re all about creating resources and building community for students who learn differently: students with disabilities, anybody who’s had a barrier to their learning.

Education Reimagined and Getting Smart, and many people in this room — as I’m looking around, you’ve all been partners or are in the EALA universe somehow. And if you’re not, I’ll put my email in the chat so that you can follow up with me later to learn more.

But the heart of your question is what’s resonating, and what came to light during these conversations. For one thing, it was very reaffirming. It reaffirmed this idea that you shovel the ramp first, not the stairs, right? When you design for folks with different needs, when you design for the margins, you are making things better for everybody. Learner variability and learner differentiation is not an add-on — it’s built in intrinsically.

So that’s kind of a non-starter at EALA, and for many of us here. That’s where our work begins and what we’re focused on. But the power in that — what I saw and heard in these stories — is that when students can see themselves in their learning, when students have a say in their learning and in their path, engagement skyrockets.

I’m a product of the New York City public school system. I’ve taught in the New York City public school system. I’m lucky — I had wonderful experiences and I was privileged enough to be in the right neighborhoods. Not everybody has access to these kinds of programs. The fact that these schools are public and are open to everybody, and are breaking down traditionally instituted barriers around income, neighborhood, and learners with IEPs — that’s significant.

Oftentimes, we see only certain kinds of kids get to go to schools that prioritize this learner-centered education. That’s my experience as a New York City student and educator. So it’s really just affirming to see this work, and enlightening to hear from students how important it is to have that buy-in, that input.

What an incredible way to understand who you are and what you’re interested in, rather than the traditional route — going to college for four years and then realizing, “I don’t wanna do this,” or, “This isn’t for me.” But anyway, Wesley — you brought up a couple of great revelations.

Okay, I tried this, wasn’t for me. I tried that, it wasn’t really for me. Oh, but then I found this. So great that you were able to find that in high school, because a lot of us as adults took a lot longer to get there. I just think all I can really stress here is the importance of these types of schools, this type of thinking, these types of leaders, and the work that we can do as partners to elevate and spread the word.

Designing for differences is not a burden — it’s actually the kickstarter for real creativity and innovation in teaching. I think we could make such big differences if we adopted that mindset: that difference is not a burden.

It’s actually a strength for catalyzing innovation. So I’ll pause there.

Mason Pashia: Thanks, Aurora. That’s really great. I wanna acknowledge — what you said about Wesley recognizing what he doesn’t like, or that he didn’t like an experience — that also is so representative of the culture that Lafayette has created.

To give you the distance from something to say, “I did that and I didn’t like it,” is actually a kind of sneaky amount of agency. Like, to not just be on this conveyor belt and be like, “Oh, this happened, and that’s just what it feels like” — to actually be able to get the arm’s length to say that.

So I just wanted to allude to that subtle culture tucked in there as well. I wanna pause for a second. We got a bunch of questions before this event, and I’m gonna try to string some of them together and let our emergent panel address them. At Getting Smart, we think a lot about learning innovation — specifically systems transformation — and we’re thinking a lot about levers, like what levers you can pull to make change.

So far, we’ve spent a lot of time talking primarily about the human levers, right? This is about building relationships, getting mentors involved, creating this kind of human infrastructure, which is beautiful and wonderful. And we had a lot of questions about the non-human levers.

Things like the learning model, the scheduling, learning environments. I’m curious — maybe we go back through the folks who are running these systems and hear about a lever that you’ve pulled that is not a human lever, that has had a positive impact on your learners.

That could be a schedule, a learning model, the way you’ve designed spaces, or created a more welcoming physical environment — tying back to our architecture poem at the beginning. I’d just love to hear some of those from you, or something I didn’t mention.

Scott Bain: I think I could speak to that a little bit. My name’s Scott Bain. I spent twenty-five years at the Jefferson County Open School in Lakewood, Colorado. I was part of this research project, and meeting everyone involved in the process was fantastic — but the commonality that I felt, this kinship with the people in leadership roles, was around how you figure out the workarounds.

Like, we’re successful at running schools of this kind not because policy supports it. In fact, most of the time you’re swimming against the tide when it comes to state policies, district policies, et cetera, in the public sector. And there was this commonality with Susan and other leaders like Tim around: what are your workarounds?

How do you figure out how to make this work? Because it’s what’s best for kids — it’s not what’s best for the system. A practical example might be: in Colorado, it’s all about seat time, right? Learning is calculated by how many hours the student spends in a seat in front of a teacher. That’s clearly not a good measure of learning.

So figuring out tools to get the system to accept apprenticeships, internships, and community service projects — where they’re out in the community doing the work — to count as education. Using things like work-study credits that have been around for a while and adapting those documents so that they can support unpaid learning experiences like internships and what have you.

That’s just one example, but there are so many of those where there’s a common need to figure out the workarounds — where you can still be compliant with what the system demands of you, while not letting that interfere with the students’ opportunities. Tearing down the barriers is basically what it boils down to.

Mason Pashia: That’s great. Thanks, Scott. Shout out Jeffco Open School — we love them.

Tim Quealy: I would quickly add, if that’s all right. I think exactly what Scott’s saying — exploiting flexibilities or gray area in state law — has actually worked pretty well. You’re not breaking any laws, but you’re looking at: well, what is defined and what actually isn’t?

There are a lot of assumptions in there that say you actually can’t do this — but actually you can, and you can do it right now. You don’t need policy changes. So being clever there. And I think the two levers that we pull as best we can — our main pedagogical approach is project-based learning.

On the one hand, that allows a lot of student agency and direction. But it also frees things up — if a student can get any of the required state standards through a project, and we work with them to do that, it also frees up teachers from this giant orchestrated curriculum map. Because I don’t need to provide X standard to X student at this given time in this progression — they can find that standard on their own.

So project-based learning has allowed us to really open up a lot of other avenues at the same time. I think that goes unsaid sometimes, or it’s unrecognized, that those two things can be linked. So as a language arts teacher, I can actually say, “Hey, I’ve got 30 kids that are really interested in this thing.

Let’s design a class and dive in,” and I don’t need to worry about a four-year progression that somebody above me set. That actually is really great. And the other related one is giving your own teachers power and agency within their own practice to make decisions that are best for kids. At Avalon, we call that teacher power.

There are a lot of other ways to talk about it, but I think the more agency you can give teaching staff — those are the folks working directly with the kids, and they can make decisions with the kids. I think that actually holds up pretty well in our twenty-five years.

Mason Pashia: Thanks, Tim. Chris or Sue, anything you wanna add to those comments from Scott and Tim?

Kristofer Koneazney: I guess I would just say that the part about getting around barriers really resonated, and we’d had a lot of deep conversation about that when we were at each of the places — just like, we’re working against the system to do the right thing for kids, which is really interesting.

And the fact that it’s sort of being allowed to happen is wonderful, because there are many things that suggest people would have fought harder than they did to make this not happen. I think something that we do at Norris that is really important and kind of aligned with this is we change our framework pretty much every year — sometimes more than once a year — because of the frequency of turnover, because of the learners we have who are sometimes placed here for very short times, or you know, we have to react to the learner that comes to us.

We have to say, “What do you need?” And if we maintain the same learning framework — where you come in and sit for X amount of time, or you’re in a space for X amount of time, or you have access to these tools for X amount of time — that only works if we have the same exact learners. So we have to iterate constantly to be ready to deal with the needs of the learners in front of us.

I think just that understanding — that historically, learners have to fit into a box, and if they don’t fit into the box, they’re not good learners — the box has to change pretty constantly to fit the learners.

Mason Pashia: That’s a really powerful share, Chris. Thanks for saying that.

I think that is underrated — coming back to these things. You spend so much time on something, and then you do have to keep iterating. It’s always gonna be new people, an uncertain future. I think a lot of us are experiencing changes in our community right now, et cetera. So stay nimble, stay agile, and the work is never done — but it’s on the way, right?

It’s progressing. So, all right, Lindsay, I think I’m gonna go back to you here. We’ve got a couple minutes left, so maybe just share what folks can expect next from you all, what they can do to get involved. I’m gonna share my screen again real quick. And again, thank you for all of this — and to the emergent panel here.

I really appreciate y’all willing to make your voices heard and show up. All right, we get a look at Wes doing great things again briefly.

Okay. So take us away, Lindsay.

Lindsy Ogawa: Yeah. So thanks, everyone. Just in closing — we ask: what’s one word for how you wanna approach learning differences moving forward? While you’re there, feel free to check out the Learning Differences briefs. It captures the policy approaches and the impacts that we were able to study and touched on during this event.

And then also feel free to sign up for our newsletter, Voyager, where there are a lot more stories — which include learning differences, but also systems and stories from the field. And of course, feel free to reach out to us. I can drop my email in the chat.

Mason Pashia: Outstanding. I just wanna express gratitude again for both the panel and Education Reimagined for making this one possible.

Wesley and staff, thank you so much for coming. I think it’s really beautiful and profound that both the panel that you all were a part of, and this event — it was important to include all of the people involved in a learner’s life: the parent, the school leader, and the student.

I just think that’s a really rare experience on some of these live events, and that’s kind of what got me excited about this event to begin with. Really grateful to bring all those folks together expressing a common care for Wes — and for learners everywhere. Everyone, I hope you have a great rest of your week.

Links

• Michael Pollan: The Mystery of Consciousness — On Being Podcast
• Avalon School
• Lafayette Big Picture School
• Norris School District
• Norris School District Learning Differences — Education Reimagined
• Learning Differences Research — Education Reimagined
• Big Picture Learning Network
• Assessment and Credentialing Beyond Report Cards: What’s the IBPLC? — Education Reimagined
• Imblaze
• Educating All Learners Alliance
• Educating All Learners Alliance — LinkedIn
• The “Two Loops” Theory — Josh Reppun on Substack
• Teacher Powered Schools
• Learning Differences: Policies & Conditions — Education Reimagined