Curiosity, Community, and Educational Transformation with Jeff Wetzler S9E4 (124)
What if the key to transformative leadership lies not in having answers, but in asking the right questions?
How can embracing curiosity over certainty revolutionize our approach to education and organizational growth?
📘 Episode Summary
In this episode, Jeff Wetzler delves into the transformative power of asking questions and how it can unlock hidden wisdom within organizations and educational systems. He introduces the “Ask Approach,” a five-step method designed to foster deeper understanding and innovation by tapping into the insights of those around us. Jeff shares personal anecdotes and professional experiences that highlight the importance of curiosity, psychological safety, and active listening in leadership and learning. Listeners will gain practical tools to enhance their decision-making processes, build stronger relationships, and drive meaningful change in their communities.
About Jeff Wetzler
Jeff Wetzler is an expert in learning and human potential, with over 25 years of experience spanning business and education. He is the co-founder and former co-CEO of Transcend, a nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming learning environments through human-centered design and innovation. Prior to Transcend, Jeff served as Chief Learning Officer at Teach For America and worked as a management consultant at Monitor Group, advising Fortune 500 companies. He holds a Doctorate in Adult Learning and Leadership from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s in Psychology from Brown University. Jeff is also the author of Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs in Leadership and Life.
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[Transcript Auto-generated]
Louka Parry (00:08)
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Learning Future podcast. I'm your host, Louka Parry, and you know, gosh, it's been a really interesting couple of months. At the end of 2024, this super democracy year, just such an enormous shifts across our world in terms of, you know, what the emerging future might become and implications for international bodies. So we continue to pay attention to that for you, of course.
If you're in the Southern Hemisphere, this is a new school year and I hope it's begun beautifully. And for those of in the Northern Hemisphere, well, life continues onwards in school. Today, we have a wonderful guest who's going to talk about his work at Transcend and also a newly published book, Extraordinary Learning for All. His name is Jeff Wetzler and he is the co-founder of Transcend. Jeff has spent a decade in senior leadership roles at Teach for America.
which is a national nonprofit dedicated to educational opportunities for children. Before that, he worked at Monitor Group, an international consulting firm where he advised executives on strategy, adult learning and organizational development. Jeff is no stranger to the world of authorship. He's also authored another book called Ask, tap into the hidden wisdom of people around you for unexpected breakthroughs in leadership and life. And Jeff has been a founding board member of leadership prep charter schools and served on the boards of uncommon schools in New York City.
and the National Academy of Advanced Teacher Education. Most recently, he served as board chair of New Classrooms Innovation Partners. Jeff, thanks so much for being with us.
Jeff Wetzler (01:32)
Luca, it's so great to be with you.
Louka Parry (01:34)
It just, feels really good. Like down, down here in Australia, you know, it's kids are going back to school this week as we record this podcast and we have this wonderful long summer here as you do, course, in the Northern hemisphere in July and August. so, you know, sometimes we talk about summer melts and we talk about, we're to kind of get back into work mode, even as adults. and a lot of the conversations we have on this podcast is about learning. And so my first question to you before we drop into the book and some of the
Jeff Wetzler (01:56)
Yes.
Louka Parry (01:59)
the wonderful work I've heard of about Transcend is what have you been learning most recently? What's something that you've been kind of grappling with or you've found the texture of quite interesting?
Jeff Wetzler (02:04)
Yeah.
Well, honestly, I've been thinking a lot about the topic of curiosity. And curiosity has so much to do with learning. And I have been thinking both about the ways in which schools, as they are designed, stamp out curiosity in young people. And the research is just so stark. If you compare the levels of curiosity when kids are four years old versus eight years old versus 10 years old, I mean, it's just a precipitous drop off.
But even curiosity at home versus at school, so much less at school as well in terms of question asking. And so I kind of believe that curiosity is one of the most important things that we need to keep alive, especially given all the challenges that we face in our world these days. I mean, we're only going to solve them if our young people are truly curious and innovative. And yet the very way that we operate stamps out. So I've been thinking a lot about that topic and I've been thinking also about what does it take for any one of us?
Louka Parry (02:34)
Mmm.
Mmm.
Jeff Wetzler (03:02)
to reawaken our own curiosity. There's so much to feel judgmental about or righteous about or polarized about or whatever else. so it's something I'm really thinking about a lot this year.
Louka Parry (03:12)
It's, it's a, it's kind of very resonant with some of the work that we do as well, Jeff, this idea of being fully like a fully human education. I was thinking about, know, you, you see someone that a young child that's learning powerfully and they're fully alive. There's something about it. I so dropped in, we call it, you know, in psychology literature, be it flow, you know, be it kind of lost in the, in the moment. There's something about crafting those experiences in education, which can kind of cultivate.
Jeff Wetzler (03:18)
Yes.
Yes.
Louka Parry (03:39)
curiosity. But I like the way you framed it. Like, it's almost like protecting. How do we protect curiosity? Because you know, it's kind of an innate human skill. I should do it. Yeah.
Jeff Wetzler (03:40)
Yes.
Yeah, because I do think it's exactly, it's a natural state. kids
and all of us really, I think, are driven to be in that state. And it's often the environments that take us out of it. And those environments have a design. And we can think differently about that design, too.
Louka Parry (03:58)
Mmm.
Awesome. Take us into that world, Geoff, because this idea, know, the schools, the mass education system was designed deliberately for an industrializing society. Fabulous. No longer fit for purpose, as many of us around the world would agree. And I guess the tension, of course, you know, millions of hardworking educators that are sometimes lost in this system that are pushing against some of the walls and also really changing young people's lives every day. And so there's the...
Jeff Wetzler (04:07)
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes.
Louka Parry (04:25)
kind of there's the heart space and then there's of course the kind of system conditions which we need to attack pretty directly. tell us a bit from all of your work across the United States, but these are kind of global ideas. Why do you think these systems have been so slow to embrace educational change or ways to cultivate things like curiosity?
Jeff Wetzler (04:45)
Yeah, I think there's a whole bunch of different reasons. And for a long time, you know, as I helped to start schools and sat on the board of schools that functioned in the industrial model of education, and, and did so really well. And to your point, you know, change the lives and give good opportunities to kids. I would be pushing to say we could do it differently. We could do it better. And it felt for a long time, like no one was listening to me. and I got really frustrated.
And then I realized something, which is that no one had the time to listen because one of the very features of the industrial factory model of school is that everyone is grinding so fast and so hard and making the most of every minute that there's actually no time to step back and be curious and say, why are we doing it this way? And what might be a different way to do it? And no time to do the innovation design work.
Louka Parry (05:14)
Interesting.
Jeff Wetzler (05:35)
that we see in so many other industries when people actually do carve off space to be thinking in differently and asking questions and investing in that kind of R &D. And so one of the most, I think, pernicious, dangerous features of this mass education industrial model is that it's self-sealing. It keeps itself in place because it keeps everyone so busy doing the thing that they're doing that there's no space for curiosity.
Louka Parry (05:52)
Interesting.
Jeff Wetzler (05:58)
Not to mention the shutting down of curiosity that slowly happens over time when you just get yourself stuck in this model of delivery and getting the right answer as opposed to really leading into inquiry. I'm curious how does that resonate with you and your experience?
Louka Parry (06:09)
Yeah.
Massively. mean, even as an educator myself, we're having worked in schools and in Aboriginal schools, in Australia in particular, you this idea of deep time and deep listening were very much features of that culture. And in such a way where I felt quite frustrated because I thought, oh, we've got to get these things done, you know, with my kind of Western mindset. But yeah, is something about
you know, a system that can perpetuate itself and therefore will kind of reject any intervention or intrusion that threatens its existence of, of, and, know, lot of my, my query, Jeff, and through our work is around mental models. It's actually trying to get down to the model of belief. Why do we believe that this is the way it goes? And I want to put something to you and then see where you take it. And one thing that I grapple with quite often is that we use the words time poor in schools all the time.
And I think it's problematic to do so, even if it's a felt reality, because we're not time poor, we're time rich. And then it's how we choose to deploy our time. But to kind of really grapple that we actually have choice in agency, even if it has consequences, if you're too agentic, you'll probably get fired in some of the schools around the world. So there's this really interesting reframe of, okay, if we have this many hours in a day with these wonderful young people, what might we do?
Jeff Wetzler (07:20)
Yes.
Louka Parry (07:28)
and again, to carve space off. So what's your kind of perspective on that?
Jeff Wetzler (07:32)
So many thoughts. Yeah, I I love your point because if you were to add up the number of hours in a day and in a week and in a month and in a year and in 12 or 13 years of a kid's education, I mean, you are extremely rich in terms of the amount of time that's an incredible canvas that a young child and their educators can paint an education on. And yet, to your point,
Louka Parry (07:50)
Hmm.
Jeff Wetzler (07:55)
I think the felt reality, the lived reality for so many young people and educators is that there is no choice over any bit of the time. mean, if you take a kid and you bring them to most schools and you count the amount of choices that they have in the day, it's very small. And I think so many educators would say the same. mean, and certainly at least in the States, there are many, many places where an educator literally has to be on this page.
Louka Parry (08:04)
Yeah.
Mm. Yeah.
Jeff Wetzler (08:22)
at this moment, at this minute, if someone walks in the door and I can see why the felt experience actually is true. There really is not a lot of choice. And to your point about mental models, think one of the things, this mainstream industrial model of education embeds so many assumptions about what learning is, what's the role of the student, what's the role of the teacher.
Louka Parry (08:45)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Wetzler (08:47)
What does it mean to demonstrate mastery? What does it mean to know? mean, just layers upon layers of assumptions. And because so many of us ourselves went to school in that model, and our teachers went to school in that model, and our parents went to school in that model, those mental models are deep inside us. it's almost impossible to even see all of the mental models that we ourselves carry about what education is. And then,
Louka Parry (08:56)
Yeah.
Mmm.
Jeff Wetzler (09:14)
reproduce and impose upon our schools and our systems and our young people just because they live in our heads. And so I do believe a lot of this reimagination work and this design work, and we take this on ourselves as well, is about noticing those models and challenging those models as well. I mean, can tell you some of the ways that we even do that too.
Louka Parry (09:20)
you
I'd love, I'd love you to take us into something tangible. Cause if you're a teacher listening to this, you'd probably nodding your head furiously. And then it's like, yes. And what, what might I do about it? Jeff, like how do we do that within the constraints of the system? Or do you have to push outside them? Like give us some of the kind of tactical ways that we can reimagine or, or listen better sometimes to, to our young people.
Jeff Wetzler (09:52)
Yeah, yeah, I do.
So at transcend we subscribe to and then this book wrote about a methodology for rethinking education that we call community based design. And it starts from the premise that this is not something that can be imposed top down on a community for multiple reasons. One is communities are unique. And so there is no single thing that will fit every community, but also
Louka Parry (10:16)
Mmm.
Jeff Wetzler (10:17)
communities deserve to be empowered in thinking about what they want for their own education. so imposing a top-down model, I think, is inherently problematic and oppressive in those kinds of ways. At the same time, we also think it's problematic to just leave everything on the shoulders of already busy educators, already busy students, already busy families, and just say, go figure it out yourselves. Because as we've said, there's no time for that.
And so community-based design tries to be a third way. It tries to be a way that honors and follows the inherent agency and power that already exists in young people, in educators, in families, in community leaders, in community organizations, but also equip them and support them with a process and with a set of knowledge and ideas and models that they can put to work to really go after their own vision for education.
And so it starts by bringing people together and it starts by listening and really listening to young people. And so we have a whole set of methodologies that we call conversations with kids as well as metrics and survey instruments and things like that to really understand many different dimensions of young people's experience. How relevant is school feeling to them? How affirmed do they feel in terms of who they are? How challenged do they feel? Do they feel like they belong? 10 different dimensions. But when we
Louka Parry (11:06)
Mmm.
That's good.
Jeff Wetzler (11:32)
often will encourage and support educators to just sit down with a young person. You know, what in the design world is called like empathy work, as you know, that, know, it's, incredible to me. The number of times I've heard teachers and sometimes veteran teachers say to me, you know, I've been teaching for 25 years and I've never just sat down with a student for 45 minutes and ask them about their experience and what they told me. I cannot unhear.
Louka Parry (11:56)
Mmm.
Jeff Wetzler (12:00)
I can't unhear what they said about how they don't feel like they fit in or that they're being bullied or literally how boring it is. And then we sometimes ask them to just shadow the student for the day or even for a half a day and what people see, what we forget as adults, how hard it can be, how poorly used kids' time often can be.
Louka Parry (12:00)
Yeah, well.
Jeff Wetzler (12:22)
Those are some of the starting points. But then we do some fun exercises like we will show pictures of transportation 100 years ago, transportation 50 years ago, transportation today, health care, communications, et cetera, and how vastly it's changed. And then we'll take a picture of a classroom and we will say to groups of students and educators and families, think about these three pictures. I want you to list how many features
Louka Parry (12:44)
Mm.
Jeff Wetzler (12:46)
that are unchanged from 100 years ago to 50 years ago today that can you define? Can you identify? sometimes people are in groups and they make it kind of a fun competition. And people can identify 50, 100, 200 things that literally are completely unchanged. And then we take a look at it. But look how different the world is and how different things are needed to be. So those are some of the starting exercises just to begin to even surface.
Louka Parry (13:01)
Wow. Wow.
Mmm.
Jeff Wetzler (13:14)
things we take for granted and there's the beginning of looking at mental models.
Louka Parry (13:19)
love that. I really love it. This community-based design model, I mean there is something about
It's actually a quote that I can never unhear from Dylan William. And he says, schools are places where children go to watch adults work really hard. And I've just always reflected on that thinking from our own practice. And in some ways, it's because we care so much. But that also can kind of be the greatest barrier for us. And so I guess my question is, what barriers, in terms of those mental models, like when you get through that process, and of course, I'm sure it continues to evolve and needs to be reinforced in this idea.
Where do you find the greatest shifts for the student experience or the workplace culture for the children and the adults themselves?
Jeff Wetzler (13:59)
Yeah. So over the years at transcend, we have developed a model that we call, leaps for extraordinary learning. and these represent the 10 most important shifts in young people's experiences that we, that both learning science says matters that matter as we look at where the world is going and that we have heard from, you know, hundreds of communities across the country really matter to them. so, you know, one of the most.
Louka Parry (14:11)
Love that. Yeah.
Jeff Wetzler (14:23)
important shifts is a shift from passive compliance to active self-direction. From kids being essentially told everything about what to do, what to know, how to demonstrate their knowledge, where to sit, you know, all the way to kids being in charge of their own learning. Another shift is just the very, very simple shift of irrelevance to relevance. School feeling like I'm being told this just in case one day to something I need right now.
Louka Parry (14:42)
you
Jeff Wetzler (14:49)
to actually do and accomplish something that I care about. And, you know, I can go through all 10 and these are the 10 that we also measure as well. But I, you know, one other one that I'll just mention is, you know, more at the level of social and emotional wellbeing, but just a shift of feeling like I have to assimilate to fit in if I'm going to belong here, regardless of who I am to a shift of like, no, I'm part of a community.
Louka Parry (14:53)
Mmm.
Jeff Wetzler (15:13)
that has kindness and compassion and connects to everyone. And I have a place here and a valued member of the community. So those are three examples of the 10 experience shifts that we deeply believe really matter. And it's not always possible to immediately get all 10. And so a lot of times, communities will say, I want to start with these two, or I want to start with these three. And we will actually literally assess or measure.
Louka Parry (15:19)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Wetzler (15:34)
by asking them young people's experiences before, during, and after pilots that they might try of redesigning different parts of the experience.
Louka Parry (15:38)
Mmm.
fantastic. I love the idea of the 10 leaps. Yeah, and the leapfrogging that might be needed, you know, there's the kind of the small incrementalism, which in some ways might be the distraction of improving the old structure, rather than transforming it. I'm really curious about I'm really curious about this tension, Jeff. And we've talked about this on this podcast previously with wonderful academics, researchers, and educators.
Jeff Wetzler (15:46)
That's right, exactly.
Exactly.
Louka Parry (16:04)
It's like the tension between improvement, science and transformation. And so how do you square that circle? Because often people say we need an education revolution. And then of course the government will pick up that language and then, you know, in our case in Australia, you know, have a digital education revolution. Everyone got a laptop, but didn't necessarily equate to very much outside of that. versus just, you know, do the work and do it incrementally.
How do you think about improvement versus transformation? And are they even a dichotomy?
Jeff Wetzler (16:33)
Yeah, think that they are and they aren't. So maybe I'll say the ways in which I think they are and the ways in which they don't have to be. The ways in which I think they are a dichotomy or they are fundamentally different things is that if what you're trying to do is take the current model of education, which has a relatively narrowly defined set of goals and ultimately is about sorting and ranking and I would say
Louka Parry (16:37)
Cool. Good hedge, mate. Good hedge.
Jeff Wetzler (16:59)
reproducing the current society that it is part of and incrementally improving the efficiency and effectiveness by which you deliver that model itself. That's a very different thing than transforming towards a very different purpose, which is truly to support every young person to live out their full potential to thrive and to contribute to the world around them. And I would say that.
much of the many reform efforts that we have seen, at least in the United States, and I personally have been part of in years past, have been more in the first camp, have been more in the camp of incremental improvements. And not to say that those don't matter because those can, you know, teaching more kids to read, teaching kids to do better, you that's, know, A, that's really hard to do. and B it's, know, it can be life-changing as well. ⁓ but I think, but, that's a different thing than really re-imagining.
Louka Parry (17:37)
Yeah, great.
Hmm.
Jeff Wetzler (17:49)
Everything from the purpose to the aims to the experiences to the design Of a a system that I think is what the 21st century calls for So that in that regard I do think that they are fundamentally different the way in which I think that those that they are that they are also the same Is that if you set your sights on this other purpose this 21st century this transformative purpose? the process of incrementally getting there
Louka Parry (17:57)
you
Jeff Wetzler (18:13)
can actually feel and be a lot like cycles of improvement science. And so even in our community design process, we use a cycle of envisioning something, building it, testing it, learning towards it. But it's what it's pointing towards. It's the sort of like orientation and the aim that it's pointing towards that makes the difference. And I will say, even a decade ago when we started Transcend,
Louka Parry (18:28)
Yes.
Jeff Wetzler (18:36)
I think we were really starting with this sort of starting with a naive premise of like, no, no, no, we got to re we got to reinvent it all tomorrow. We've got to change everything all at once. And if it's not, then it's just more like incrementalism. And we realized very quickly that maybe you can do that if it's a totally brand new school. And occasionally, you get that type of thing. But if you're actually working with a school with real teachers and real students, et cetera, you're going to pilot your way there. You're going to take this chunk of the experience, and you're going to test it and pilot it, cetera, and you're going to refine it. You're going to stack on the next one and
and continue to use those cycles, including cycles of gathering evidence and so on. And multiple years later, you'll look back and say, this is a radically different set of experiences than we've had. But in any given moment, you're going through those cycles. So how does that land with you?
Louka Parry (19:18)
That's yeah, fantastic.
mean, I've, I've often, I've often thought about the false dichotomies that we have in education that we can, we form camp, I mean, in society, honestly, Jeff, and it's like, you this or that? And, know, the both and construction is just so powerful to become post-jewelers, you know, it's not this or that it's this through that.
Jeff Wetzler (19:25)
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
When we name,
exactly, totally. And there's this idea in spiral dynamics and other traditions of transcend and include. And so when we picked the name for the organization transcend, our intent was transcend and include, but that was clunky as a name to say for an organization. But that's kind of what we believe is like there are really important things that have come before, including in the current model. Let's include those and build upon them.
Louka Parry (19:39)
Yeah.
Yeah.
and include. Yeah.
Yes. Yep.
Jeff Wetzler (20:03)
but not get limited by them.
Louka Parry (20:04)
That's fantastic. I didn't know about the spiral dynamics link, but that makes a lot of sense, honestly, like the whole long that kind of encapsulates all the growth before it, as organic growth does, of course. And the organic metaphor is one that we're obsessed by. so just as the regenerative frame is so much more powerful than the mechanistic one for our work in education, think. A question about, it's kind of just like the Overton window, you know, like if we're four years out from COVID and...
Jeff Wetzler (20:12)
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Yes.
Yes, totally.
Louka Parry (20:30)
such incredible disruption in education and in many other industries, but we'll stick to education. know, huge disruption, schools closed, social distancing, all these kind of very strange time, Jeff. And I think there was a hope that had emerged in some of the educational circles about this might be a moment where we really need to rethink and reimagine and then perhaps transcend or evolve or push through beyond. Where do think we landed with that?
You know, AI, one could make the case that AI is a similar type of disruption, especially to assessment models and the way that we try to track progress in schools if we're using in high school in particular. How do you reflect on these kind of big disruptions and how we seize them for positive progress more powerfully perhaps?
Jeff Wetzler (21:15)
Yeah. So I think that the story is still being written and, we are collectively writing the story. I think if you take a narrow view, well, right when COVID happened, the demand for transcend support with communities who want to reimagine, skyrocketed. And I, I w I wasn't sure what was going to happen, whether we were even going to exist or who knows what, but I was, you know, and it was because so many people saw.
what's not working. they, but they also saw how fast we can change if we need to change. And, and, that was very encouraging. I think we then in the, in the couple of years since then saw all of the, trauma and pain and challenges that in the wake of COVID, that fell on schools. so schools, at least in the United States, I think have been really, challenged and working hard to recover.
which has been somewhat intentioned with the, how do we reinvent along the way? I would say some schools were able to do that. And also many families and students said there's a better way. We wanna go off and do that better way as well. And we're seeing that going on too. But I do think we also saw the resilience of this industrial model despite something as big as COVID. But I think if we kind of like expand our aperture.
Louka Parry (22:19)
you
Jeff Wetzler (22:24)
to say maybe it's not a three or four year view, maybe it's a five to 10 to 15 year view. And we think, okay, COVID and AI and whoever, who knows what else, et cetera. I still feel quite hopeful that the number of things that are shaking up the system have the potential. And even just when we look at the rate of penetration of AI in schools, it's staggering and also the potential of what it can be doing. so.
I think we're, I think we're just in the midst of a very interesting time right now. and it is really up to all of us to say, are we going to kind of keep our heads down and go back? Or are we going to say what's possible here and sort of lean forward into this.
Louka Parry (22:51)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, that's so good. It's like, you've really just picked up like a Maslow quote for me, Jeff, as well. It's like, know, like, Cho, we have to choose, we can either courageously go forward towards growth, or we can cheaper to listen to go back towards safety. You know, this, you know, there really is only forward if we, if we choose to do it powerfully.
Jeff Wetzler (23:06)
What's that?
There's only forward. It's just a question of how
we're gonna do it, what rate we're gonna do it, are we gonna be charting our own destiny or is it gonna happen to us? But I do believe that.
Louka Parry (23:23)
Yeah, yeah.
I'd love to hear like a, for our listeners, know, often they're in schools, the context is Queen always. I'd love to that. Just take us on this, like a journey of one of the schools from the Transcend network that you've worked with, you know, like maybe a surprising story, you know, what happened when you started with this school and where did, where have they ended up and how, how do they continue to grow? Just to map it out for us.
Jeff Wetzler (23:46)
Yeah, I think I'll share one that we Chronicle in the book so that if your listeners want to go deeper they can they can go deeper but Probably eight or nine years ago. We started working with a school in Washington DC Called Van Ness Elementary School led by an incredible principal at the time named Cynthia Robinson Rivers and Cynthia had the opportunity to
Louka Parry (23:52)
Yeah, right.
Mm-hmm.
Try it then.
Jeff Wetzler (24:10)
Re-opened that school that after it had been shut down and it was in a diverse neighborhood of Washington DC and It started as a pre-k kindergarten and first grade school then every year it would add a new grade To you know to go all the way up through elementary school And as it started to have students enroll in the school it had students enroll in the school that had been Expelled from other schools if you can believe it even as young as kindergarten and first grade. I don't know if that happens
Louka Parry (24:33)
Interesting.
Wow.
Jeff Wetzler (24:37)
anywhere else in the United States. But,
Louka Parry (24:38)
Really?
Jeff Wetzler (24:39)
you know, it's quite a thing. And Cynthia's philosophy was, I'm not expelling kids from my school. I'm here to serve all students. And yet the students were coming to school and she was able to see the behaviors that may have gotten them expelled in other places. And so this was just as the design process was going. as I mentioned, you know, one of the early phases of design work is empathy.
is shadowing students, listening, talking, what's going on. And another principle I would say is designing for your extreme user. So the user that is least well-served today. And so here we had some extreme users of school that were not being well-served and a prime opportunity to really do deep empathy work. And so Cynthia and her team listened and shadowed and visited and very quickly realized that the cause of the extreme behavior
Louka Parry (25:08)
Mm.
Jeff Wetzler (25:25)
was that students were carrying a lot of trauma to school. And so they were showing up in school in their survival brain, not in their learning brain. And that insight framed the design challenge, which was how can we as quickly as possible support students who are showing up in their survival brain to shift into their executive brain? What are all the things that need to be designed in order for that to happen?
And so Cynthia and her team went deep into the learning science and the science of child development and so on. And really imagine a model that literally started from the moment a student walks to school, walks in the door of school and in the classroom. What are the greetings? How can students have agency over what kind of greeting do they get? Do they get a high five? Do they get a fist bump? Do they get a hug? You know, those kinds of things all the way to even just the, if you go, if you were to walk into this school.
you would feel like you're walking into a spa in terms of the smells, in terms of the soothing sounds, in terms of all of the things that start to calm the nervous system, all the way down to practices of mindfulness and teaching students to identify their own emotions and regulate their emotions, all the way to the even pedagogical practices, like more hands-on, maker space-based learning and so on.
Louka Parry (26:21)
Wow. Uh-huh.
Jeff Wetzler (26:40)
So they were, they designed this just incredible model that they ultimately called the whole child model that was getting such strong results that a number of other schools in DC started to visit and say, what's going on here? Can we adopt this? so that, you know, after a while, the design journey shifted from being, you know, about building and testing each aspect of the model to be strong at the Van Ness elementary school to begin to codify that so that it could be shared with other schools.
Louka Parry (27:05)
Hmm.
Jeff Wetzler (27:08)
not just the technical practices, but also the teacher mindsets and all of the deeper understanding of children that goes into that model as well. And to the point where now they are sharing and spreading that model across the country, where more and more schools are able to be implementing these holistic educational practices. they've also put it all open source and the
District of Columbia, Washington, DC, is using that as part of their professional development, et cetera. does that help in terms of an example of a story?
Louka Parry (27:36)
It's so heartwarming. I'm just, I could just imagine the environment walking into the environment. couldn't get past the kind of day spa. It's just so interesting, isn't it? Cause it's the re-imagination, even the front office of the
Sometimes it's not reimagined at all. It's what an office should look like. It's got a poster, it's got a lovely receptionist, but it can be completely reimagined for...
Jeff Wetzler (27:53)
Totally.
can be completely imagined. also
we have another partner that we've worked with over the years, Lindsay Unified, who has imagined it such to say that every single adult in that system, whether you're working in the front office or you're mowing the lawn because you're the groundskeeper or you're the teacher, whatever you are, you are an educator of young people and that those learners are yours. And that's a radically different notion than the conventional way of looking at things.
Louka Parry (28:15)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
It's so good, the cultural aspect, the organizational culture aspect. And then, know, the beautiful story of the stone workers, you and the one, you you walk past one, you what are you doing? I said, I'm carving stone, I'm hammering stone. And the next person says, well, what are you doing? And they say, well, I'm building the cathedral. And it's this idea of like being part of something larger than yourself. You know, this idea of, yeah, transcending one's own, you know, self-actualizing, yes, but in only an order.
Jeff Wetzler (28:24)
Yes. Yes.
Yes.
Louka Parry (28:48)
to kind of collectively actualize or to self transcend. It's really powerful. Yeah.
Jeff Wetzler (28:50)
It's true. It's one of my favorite stories. to your point about mental
models, it doesn't cost anything. The bricklayer who's seeing themselves building a cathedral is doing the exact same work, getting paid the exact same amount. But the leadership that they bring to it is fundamentally different.
Louka Parry (29:08)
Yeah, yeah, I really find that powerful to think about. Jeff, while we're on this kind of whole person piece, know, one of the, I guess one of the hypotheses that I function on as an education futurist and an education strategist is that into this new era, we're going to be less, I'm less endeared by the transhumanist movement than perhaps I once was as a techno optimist formerly. I'm far more deep humanist now.
Jeff Wetzler (29:12)
Me too.
Louka Parry (29:34)
You know, like meta modernists, I'm more around how does, how do these technological suites and tools and kind of these God like resources that we'll be able to access, how do they serve like what it means to be human as as a fully human being. Um, and so you talked a little bit about the model there, the beautiful model from Banness, um, which was, know, the whole, whole person, um, the whole being, you know,
How do you square, how do we bring together the false dichotomy that is we're learning now and now we're doing well being or welfare, you know, as the old language would say, how do we bring together the social emotional pieces alongside the academic ones? and in all the examples, yeah.
Jeff Wetzler (30:16)
It's another, yeah,
no, totally. And I think it's another good example of what is typically seen as a dichotomy. That's a false dichotomy as if people don't have identities or emotions when they're learning math or when they're reading a book. Because we are all whole people, integrated people. I think the best school models and the best educators know how to...
Louka Parry (30:35)
Hmm.
Jeff Wetzler (30:39)
Well, understand that the science of learning says that people's identities need to be safe and affirmed in order for them to do that work. And that doing that work also can be an act of developing a greater sense of self, a greater sense of self-confidence of setting a challenge to say, I never thought I could do this. And then reflecting on the process of what were you afraid of and how did you get over that? And what did you do, et cetera. And so models that actually bring those things together that gauge
people in doing that hard work. I mean, I'll give you just another example. There's a, I was just referencing this community, Lindsay Unified, that has shifted away from the time-based model of education towards a mastery-based model of education where young people would say, you know, not that I'm a second grader or I'm a third grader, but this is my age. This is my level of reading. This is my level of math. And I know that as, you know, however hard I work, that is what pace I'm going to pick.
Louka Parry (31:19)
inches.
Jeff Wetzler (31:30)
progress. doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that I have to sit in a class and learn or not learn or whatever else. But what they've done that I think is so beautiful in their community is that students will not just say I'm in it for myself. They say and I'm not leaving my friends behind as well. It's it's it's a it's a model of I'm going to progress academically because we are going to progress academically. And that culture of that that we're in it together is I think is a.
Louka Parry (31:46)
Wow.
Jeff Wetzler (31:53)
An amazing example of the integration of academic progress, but also community progress as well. One other place that we've had the opportunity to work with in New Jersey is a school called St. Benedict's Prep. And their motto, stemming from the Benedictine order, is whatever hurts my brother or sister hurts me.
So it's an entire model of we're taking care of each other. And they, you know, they use experiential education and hiking and all that kind of stuff, but also to say literally we're responsible for each other's academic progress too. And so students run the school and they run, you know, they, they handle discipline, they challenge each other, they push each other, they look after each other. So those are some examples of how I've seen it come together in some inspiring ways.
Louka Parry (32:36)
they're absolutely inspiring ways, Jeff, because, and use this language, which I love as well, you know, when you expand your aperture, and then when we expand our aperture, we're realizing this more and more through the cutting edge of science, especially in physics. You know, nothing is separate. The concept of an individual actually is a complete falsehood. We are all deeply integrated into systems and systems of systems and this kind of systemic thinking.
I think it's just such a beautiful, it represented so beautifully in that example you gave, you know, you know, there's the saying goes, you are another me, which is kind of pretty profound way or, or how you begin this book, I have to say, which is one of my favorite quotes as well. And how are the children? Which is this daily Messiah greeting, as you've referenced it, it's just, it shows like what we care about at a societal level and even at kind of an organizational community level.
Jeff Wetzler (33:19)
Yes.
Yes.
Louka Parry (33:23)
It just feels like deeply inspiring work you're engaged in at Transcend. I feel it's fun.
Jeff Wetzler (33:27)
Thank you. Thank you. are grateful to do it and
we're learning. I every day I love this quote by Alan Bouton, which says, if you're not embarrassed by who you were last year, you're not learning fast enough. one of our values that transcend is called perpetual beta. So we just see ourselves as constantly works in progress. And every year we look back and we say, I can't believe we believed that. I can't believe we knew that. I can't believe that's what we thought.
Louka Parry (33:40)
that's...
Jeff Wetzler (33:52)
And so I think and hope that in five years or 10 years, we'll look back at this book and say, my God, that was so naive. But it's the best we've learned so far.
Louka Parry (34:01)
You know, and if we knew what was going to happen in 10 years, the kind of the encounters of life wouldn't have any real meaning. You know, this idea that the ego, we might try to control the outcome, but of course it's always delusional at some point. know, it's all we can do is do our best work and then step back. And that's the only path to serenity to, you know, quote the Dow. He was on this flow now with the Land of Atomic, one of my favorite authors too, Jeff.
Jeff Wetzler (34:16)
Yes, yes.
Louka Parry (34:27)
On this futures piece, I would love you actually to map out like a 2035 preferred future. You a lot of our work is trying to step schools out of the tactical or even the strategic process, the three year cycle into a system level evolution and begin there and then come backwards. I'm sure you would use a similar model at Transcend as the book outlines with the blueprints. So if you were to map us out 2035 for education in the United States and the impact of Transcend, like what...
What do you hope that reality is that we've learned across that 10 year span?
Jeff Wetzler (34:59)
I think the first thing I would say is that this isn't the, we can't replace a hundred year old model with another static model. and so the first thing that we would hope is true is that in 2035, just to take that number, every community is a work in process. Every community is saying, what's next and what have we learned and where are going? And.
If that, there was only one thing we could change and, and, and that was our definition of success, it would be that every community is on this journey. And that doesn't mean that their models will be the same or that where the, far they've gotten. But right now far too many communities are, are not even started the journey and are in a static place. And so if we could equip communities, and this is what we're trying to do to say, we need the resources, we need the mindsets, we need the culture, we need the conviction to be doing this ongoing work.
Louka Parry (35:28)
Hmm.
Mm.
Jeff Wetzler (35:48)
They will be sensing what's going on in the environment. They will be taking in whatever's happening with AI or the, or climate or any number of different things and, and, and putting their young people and their educators and their families at the center to be driving it forward. I could certainly speculate on what might be some aspects of their designs and things like that. But to me, what's most important is how are they building this muscle, and building this habit of continuously learning and continuously changing.
Louka Parry (36:10)
I find that really powerful, like the meta learning, meta cognition, you know, how, how reflexive, how reflective can we be? I mean, for me, it's, it's our capacity to learn and to grow. And so I want to ask you a challenging question too, Jeff, of course, not briefed, which is, how do you, how do you hope you are different as a human being and as an education leader of this work?
Jeff Wetzler (36:22)
Yes. Yes.
I I would say on my own, I mean, at some level I would give the same answer to about myself as I would about communities, which is that just as I hope every community is being a constant learning, being a constant change agent for themselves, I hope that for myself as well. And while I like to think that I am someone who likes to learn, I have a lot more learning how to learn.
Louka Parry (36:51)
Hmm.
Jeff Wetzler (36:58)
That's why when you, when you said to me earlier, you know, what am I learning to me, to me, the, the, the skill, the value, the characteristic of curiosity is the thing that I want to be better at myself. because if I have that, especially as the world changes faster and faster, to me, that's the greatest saving grace, the greatest thing that's going to give me a chance to be learning at the rate to keep up and maybe even lead in some helpful way.
Louka Parry (36:59)
Hmm.
That's a beautiful answer, Jeff. and I have to say, just as someone's only spent an hour with you today, I think your curiosity is just so it's, it just oozes out of you. It's fantastic. And, know, to be, to be curious, to be humble or confidently humble to to, I have something to say and yet I have so much to learn. It's like a beautiful tension as well. which I love. And I think throughout this entire book that, that
you, Ailon and Jenny have put together, Extraordinary Learning for All, How Communities Design Schools Where Everyone Thrives. It's a pretty good flag in the sand, I have to say. It's really tangible as well. And so anyone that's in a community that's ready to move beyond that industrial kind of era or feels a bit stuck, I really do commend this book. And of course, the great foreword from Jeffrey Canada as well, which is just, know.
Another fantastic, curious educator. He's done some incredible work in the US.
Jeff Wetzler (38:10)
Absolutely. Someone we've learned
so much from. I will say, Transcend's roots are in the United States, but I now have the opportunity. Last year I stepped out of the co-CEO role. So Ailan is running the organization and I'm doing something called Transcend Labs, which is essentially our space to be curious about how else might we be pursuing our mission. And one of the things at the top of my list that I'm working on for Transcend Labs.
is expanding our aperture beyond the United States to the rest of the world as well. And so if there are schools and educators that we can be learning from, we want to do a better job than we've done in the past learning from that. And similarly, if there's ways in which what we're doing can offer any contribution, we want to be open to that too. So it's timely to be thinking beyond the United States.
Louka Parry (38:53)
Yeah. Yeah. The networking to the mesh work of it all, you know, it's all connected. So connected. Jeff. ⁓ I've really enjoyed this conversation. yeah, I know the work I think really speaks for itself, but the leadership of an organization really matters too. thank you so much for your time, Jeff. I have a final question for you, which is what is of all the work that you continue to do and your time as in education and governance, what is.
Jeff Wetzler (38:56)
Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.
Me as well.
Thank you, Luca.
Louka Parry (39:20)
What is the take home message you would like to resonate in the minds of listeners from our conversation today?
Jeff Wetzler (39:25)
think if I could leave with one message, it would be listen to our young people. may not be experts in the science of reading or this kind of pedagogy, but they are experts in their own experience. They are more connected to the trends of where the world is going than any of us is. And anytime I'm in a design session, they have the best ideas.
They know where to go. And so I would say if we can be really centering, maybe to expand the question and how are the children, but also when, what can we learn from the children? I feel like we're in good hands.
Louka Parry (39:47)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, beautiful. And what can we learn from children? Jeff, what a fantastic way to start my day here in Australia. Thank you for joining us. 100%. Yeah, man, all the best with the work at Transcend and beyond.
Jeff Wetzler (40:06)
and a great way to end my day here in New York. So thank you.
Thank you, same to you. Look forward to keeping in touch and continuing the conversation.
Louka Parry (40:17)
I'd love that. Colleagues today, we've been having a wonderful conversation with Jeff Wetzler. He's co-author of this great book, Extraordinary Learning for All, How Communities Design Schools Where Everyone Thrives. He's formerly been the co-CEO of Transcend, a wonderful nonprofit in the United States, but now leads Transcend Labs and is really staying deeply curious about how we support communities to thrive. Thanks for listening to the Learning Future podcast. I'm your host, Luke O'Parry. We'll hear from you soon.
