Read the full transcript of Episode 75 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen, author of the bestselling book The Future of Smart, joining host Debra P. Wilson. They discuss human-centered liberatory education, what schools should do differently to prepare students for an uncertain future, and how she views topics like agency, curriculum, and technology in light of human development.
Debra Wilson: Hello, friends. Welcome back to New View EDU! I’m so excited, because we get to have a future-focused conversation today.
Today we have Ulcca Joshi Hansen, who’s a futurist and author of the award-winning book The Future of Smart. Her work is focused on helping communities, leaders and families think more expansively about human potential at a moment of profound social and technological change, which is something we are all obviously navigating here in the independent school sector. And I’m just excited to see what she’s going to bring to the table for us. So here we go with our conversation.
Excellent, Ulcca, thank you so much for being here today.
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: It's great to be here, Debra. Happy to see you.
Debra Wilson: Happy to see you too. I'm going to start us off just where I usually start us off, which is, would you share a little bit about your journey to getting to where you are right now? I mean, I love that you're a futurist. I would always love to be a futurist. I have no idea how one gets there. So if you could just share a little bit about your journey.
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: Thanks, no, I appreciate that. Well, a couple things I always say to people, just because they are a really core part of who I am and how I show up in my work. So the first is that I'm a third culture kid, which for international folks will make sense, but we're people who kind of had parents who grew up in one cultural context, we grew up in another, and then at some point we lived in other cultural spaces. And so we just navigate this complexity of being in different places.
For me, that meant that I lived in a lot of different places growing up. I studied in a lot of different places. And it's a big part of how I see the world. It gave me a chance to see how things are done outside of the suburban New Jersey bubble that I lived in and went to school in. Got to see like in Germany, right? That you could go to high school and have students take different pathways. Got to see a lot of people and meet a lot of people who live lives that maybe didn't meet the traditional notions of success that we often circle around these days. Like you go to college, you go to graduate school. And I think a lot of the skills that I developed came out of those experiences.
So I had a, you know, I was able to develop a sense of agency really early on. And so that agency shaped, I think also how I engaged in my own education, that I was curious about stuff.
And so if a teacher gave us a research project, I would be like, hey, can I do it on extrasensory perception? Because that's what I'm reading right now and I'm really interested. And people laugh when I tell them I was really into extrasensory perception, but I read my way through the zero to 100 sections of the library and it got me really interested in the human brain and how little we knew about the human brain. And so by the time I was 13, I was really interested in the science that was coming out around MRIs. And in high school, I failed geometry two quarters in a row, but we got to do a project on anything we wanted. And I did fractal geometry, which is really related to the work I do in dynamic systems.
So all of this is kind of how I saw learning. It happened everywhere, all the time. I got to drive it. When I went to college, I was a philosophy major, but I was also studying early childhood elementary and special education. And I was shadowing all of my old teachers, like as many of them as I could. And what was interesting about shadowing teachers who had been in this field for a long time is that I think they had absorbed the idea that children are human beings and that their job was to meet those children as human beings. And so I just, I remember a couple of them having moments in their classrooms where I was like, my gosh, you're letting that kid sleep. Like, why? And I would ask them afterwards and you know, one of them looked at me over her like spect-- you know, her glasses on her nose and she was like, he knows that I love him and that I care about him, and every kid in my class knows. And so, no, I'm not worried that I'm going to lose control of my class if I let him do that because that's what he needs and the kids know that.
So that's kind of how I went into my time as a teacher in Newark, New Jersey after I graduated, being a teacher. And I wanted to be an educator because I felt like, you know, we keep trying to fix problems in the world. And it occurred to me that maybe if we like, helped create different human beings who would shape a different kind of world, maybe we wouldn't have to, you know, like fix all the downstream problems.
So that's kind of my educational journey. And just to kind of close out, nobody plans to be a futurist. I think you fall into it. And you fall into it because you realize that what you're doing, and the cocktail party conversations you're having where people's eyes glaze over, is that you're actually having these conversations that are about these ideas and these things that sit way out there. And you realize that's your happy space. And you realize what you're doing is actually looking for patterns and trends that help us kind of peer over the horizon about where the world is going and what does that mean for what we're doing right now. And certainly that has a huge impact on how I think about education.
Debra Wilson: That's just awesome. We here at New View EDU, one of the purposes of this podcast is to sort of acknowledge, like, this is a time of huge change and opportunity for schools. And it sounds like your career has sort of taken you on a path to see some of that and see some examples from our sector.
What are you seeing, like right now, and sort of looking down the road, that makes it imperative for us to be thinking about education differently?
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: I mean, when we talk about, everyone's like, well, the world is changing and we need to change education. I kind of look back and I'm like, well, what hasn't changed that shouldn't be impacting how we do education?
It's very popular for us to kind of talk about how our current education system has been around for 100, 120 years, which is actually not true. In my book, I spend some time talking about the kind of roots of the traditional education system that we have today. And really it's grounded in about 400 years ago, right? During the Industrial Revolution and all of the intelligentsia, I guess, that sort of came up around that. And so just in terms of our understanding of who young people are, about human development and why kind of prenatal to age 25 is not just any time in the human life. It's this incredibly important formative period.
And yet we have the roots of our education system in a time where people thought that kids were small adults. They kind of thought that they were empty vessels with a little bit of like, sin in them, and that what we needed to do was pour into them content knowledge and ideas about how to be a good person in a sort of religious framing of what that meant. We knew what the world looked like. It was going to be factories. And so we figured, OK, we know what kids need to know. So let's get them out of here. And in the book, I talk about a framework where I kind of divide schools or talk about schools in three buckets of how they orient themselves to their work.
And the first bucket is the conventional approach, which is really your factory, your modern day factory model. And most of the folks I imagine who are listening to this podcast, right? We all agree that that does not work. And we know that. And the second bucket I talk about is whole child kind of innovative reform, where we kind of bolt things on, but we haven't foundationally questioned the underlying assumptions of the education system, right? That our job is to create kids for a workforce that may or may not be the one that exists. That, you know, kids aren't really agents of their own learning and don't have the capacity to do that. And so what we do is we bolt on things that try to mitigate the harms of an approach to education that doesn't match what young people need.
So the idea, let's say, of grouping kids by age and saying, hey, we have grade level content standards that we're going to teach you and we're going to judge you based on how well you do. Well, that has no basis in kind of reality, because every six-year-old or eight-year-old or 10-year-old is not the same and there's no reason to think that they should be learning about or ready to learn about the same things. And so now we get them tested, and we say they have learning differences and we give them an IEP or a 504. When actually what would make a lot more sense is to put kids into multi-age classrooms where they could sort of move at their own pace through content that was appropriate to where they are, right?
We've organized kids' time in school and outside of school in ways that don't give them a chance to do what they need to be doing to develop during adolescence in healthy ways. And we see that. Our adolescents aren't doing well, they're anxious, they're depressed, they're turning that into self harm or risky behaviors. And so we add SEL into our schools when actually what we need to do is foundationally change, right, how we allow them to spend their time.
So I think, this is why I kind of talk about the third bucket, which is human centered liberatory, which I think at its heart says young people are capable. Each young person has kind of unique potential that we need to unfold, and the work of education is to do that. And that's not going to look the same for every child. And it's organized in ways that really reflect what young people need in early childhood, in middle childhood, elementary, in late childhood, middle school, and then in early adolescence. And I've had the benefit of being able to see at this point, hundreds of schools that do that kind of work. And I just think when you walk in and you talk to the young people, it's easy to go, wow, those kids are extraordinary. But they're not extraordinary in that I think if every kid had the chance to do that or have that kind of education, they would actually all be able to reach their potential.
And so when we have technologies that can mimic and replicate a lot of the things that we thought of as the core human capabilities that we focused on in schools, I think we need to ask ourselves whether what we're trying to do is create the best human versions of AI or whether we're trying to create the best human beings. And I think it's the latter. And I think these human-centered, liberatory schools, many of which have existed for 150 years, they used to be counter-cultural, but now they are exactly what we need young people to have to be prepared for the world that they're going into.
Debra Wilson: So when you go to a school, like what are the hallmarks of that? Like what are you talking with kids about? So when you get, you know, it's, interacting with students is always the best, right? Like if I can get seniors after they've, like, made their college choices to give me a campus tour, I'm in every single time because they'll tell me all kinds of stuff. Like, so when you go to campus, like what are you looking for? Like what do you, what does this look and sound like? When you think about like, this is really where a school should be right now. What are you looking for or what are the kids telling you?
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: Yeah. So in the intro to the book, I use the word feel, and I know that's frustrating, but there is actually, and any of us, any of us who spend time in schools, right. And even if you're a school leader, you know, when you walk into a particular teacher's classroom, there is a feel there that is different. So I will say that first and foremost. So I'm often just like in my gut kind of, but I think how that manifests, it's a couple of things.
I think you see a real difference in the kind of relationships that exist in that space. So first of all, you actually see young people, and often what I do is I park myself in the lunchroom first. And I'm always really curious, but if young people will come and sit at the table with me, or they will talk to me before I talk to them, even if they're middle schoolers, that I'm always sort of like, wow, these kids are there and they see me not as this weird intrusion on like the space that they need to be, but they're presuming as an adult.
But I think I see that in classrooms, I see adults who have created a space that feels much more like a youth development organization, like a summer camp or like an outward bound where it's, yes, I am the adult in the room, but we are co-equal in this learning process. And so you see and hear adults, I think being human, being vulnerable, sometimes saying, I don't know, sometimes asking the kids questions back. So there's this texture to the relationship where you can see that there is a mutual respect and a mutual ability to be real and to be authentic. So that's the first thing that I feel.
The second is when I talk to young people and I ask them what they're doing and why, they can tell me. And often, right, in the types of schools that I'm working in, when they tell me what they're doing, it is not, I'm taking the following five classes or AP classes. They are often talking to me about, like in high school, internships that they are doing or projects that they're doing that are independent. But even in sort of first, second, third grade, you know, kids are sort of like, yeah, so we are doing this project. And if I ask them why, they will say, well, you know, because, you know, we had a conversation and like, we were really curious about this. And so Ms. So-and-so, you know, helped us think about how we could do this project.
And so you see the students being kind of drivers and agents of their learning and they can talk about their learning. I see lots of evidence of students being the ones to be sort of moving things along. So it's not the teacher who's saying you have to do this. It's the, probably the quintessential example of this is a Montessori classroom for folks who have walked into a really strong Montessori program. But what the educator has done is prepared the environment in terms of norms, in terms of kids knowing kind of what the expectations are, et cetera, and then opens it and lets them be driving. And so I'm seeing a lot of student-led kind of work, and it's not always quiet, and the teacher is not in the front of the room. And what I see the adults doing in the room are sitting there and advising.
And then the last thing I'll say, and Debra, there's so much more I could, right? But is that I see kids with autonomy and agency. So I see them walking in the hallways without passes. I see them sitting and doing their work in certain places, and if I ask them why, they're just like, well, this is what I need. And so what I'm getting in there is this sense of kids who have agency, and that's not voice and choice. It's like, really agency and agentic behavior. I see them being socially embedded into a community where they are seen as valuable and as assets in their learning. And then in many cases, what I see is that we've expanded this concept of where learning happens. And it's not in classrooms, it's actually in the world.
And so what you're seeing in the school is a reflection of open-walled learning. And at the most extreme examples, you will see kids getting credit for things they are doing outside. I did this badge in scouting. I worked on this project at my church. I was interested in this course, and so I kind of did it after school. And the school will say, great, let's give you credit for that, because we care about these competencies and we're going to map it. So those are some of the things that I look for. And it's what differentiates, I think, that bolting on of, Hey, we're doing a project. And so we're doing project-based learning. Or, hey, we're giving kids agency. We're giving them some choices about what they do. It distinguishes between that and this really leaning into that in a powerful way.
Debra Wilson: So how do you help schools, when you and I spoke a few weeks ago, we were talking about just sort of, you know, this time of incredible transition. And so I know there are school leaders listening to us and they're like, yeah, that's really well and good, but I also have like, market realities, right? So when my husband and I first toured a Montessori school, where my kids ultimately ended up attending, he was breathing into a brown paper bag because he's like, this doesn't look anything like what I experienced. I had a Montessori preschool experience and then a kindergarten experience. And I had been to a number of Montessori schools, so I'd at least seen it before. He was like, how do we know that they're doing well or whatever? I know a lot of schools hit this market reality.
How are you helping schools sort of think about those transitions or, you know, thinking about their market realities, but also recognizing what they're seeing as educators and what students need in the years ahead?
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: Yeah. And look, I think that tension has always been there. I think many educators have always been aware that what sometimes parents are wanting us to do are not in line with what we know about what's best for students. I do think parent education is a really big part of this. I think educator education is a big part of this. I mean, my funny response is therapy, right?
I mean, a lot of this is about helping adults to kind of really go deep and sort of say, you know, this feels risky, and is that about me or is it about my kid or, you know, the students? I also think there's a difference for school leaders in terms of elementary and the lower school years, the middle school years and the high school years. So let me sort of break that down.
I think there is a lot more permission in elementary school and the lower years for schools to do this kind of thing. I think most parents understand that in those years, right, kids need this broad education. It's OK to be kind of letting them do things that don't feel maybe as academically rigorous. So I actually think in elementary, there is a lot more permission, even in the markets that we work in, for schools to do things differently. And I think to be able to frame them and really help people, parents understand, look, developmentally, here's what's happening between birth and eight and then between eight and 11 in terms of where kids are.
And I think if we can do a good job of mapping out, I always think about this like bingo board that we could make for parents, which is like, really what you want is you want your kids to be able to like, you know, communicate. We want them to be able to engage in literacy in different ways, speaking and reading and writing. We want them to know their numbers. We want them, but if you could make that visible to parents and kind of say, OK, and through our projects, right, all the things we're doing or a kid driven project, or even you at home and your child out in the world, let's tick these off together, right? I think that would help parents a ton.
So then in middle school, again, being a little bit like, facetious here, but I think for most parents, it is such a hard time that if they felt like their kids were sort of emotionally engaged and feeling like they were OK, I think there would actually be more permission. And the irony is that I think in middle school, right now, the vast majority of schools do exactly the opposite of what we should do, which is middle schoolers are not small high school students. We should not be leaning hard into more rigorous academics. This is actually the age where we should be backing off a little bit and saying to them, hey, let's help you understand what's happening. Let's lean into cognitive skill development, helping you be metacognitive about yourself, right? And really answering your question, why should I care? And really allowing you to drive it because if you care about it, you will do work there. And I think for parents who kind of see that shift, that's what I've seen is when they can see how their kids are engaging, see what the social dynamics become, I think that that kind of gets parents a little bit more on board.
And then in high school, what I would say, and this will depend on where a school leader is, but I actually think in the private and independent sector, especially, you all have a lot of standing to be able to do things differently because many of you have relationships and are known entities, right, for higher education. And if you were to be having conversations, and this is what's happening in a number of the schools that I'm working with, very candid conversations with colleges to say, here's what we're changing and why. What I hear when I talk to college admissions officers is, yes, please. We want more students. Like we don't need 15 APs. If a kid has done two or three, they've ticked a box there. What we want is evidence that young people are doing things and can talk about their learning and are doing it at a high level, which is not about the content.
And so I think if we can be transparent with higher education, transparent with parents, and the other thing I always say is, you know, creating a transcript for college, that's a translation problem. I don't think we should stop that from letting us do the work that is the right work to do for students because we know it's what they need. And then at the back end, you translate it. And that's what a lot of the schools that I work with who are in the public sector do. They're doing amazing work with kids. And at the end of it, there's a transcript. And it gives kind of, it maybe doesn't have as many AP classes, you know, or IB curriculum, because some of those are varied, but they can do both.
I also think this is not an all or nothing. Right? For me, it's like, what small thing could you do to shift and give students a place during their experience with you, where they have agency and where you are asking them the question, what do you do when no one's telling you what to do? And if you could have that time, what would you do with it? And to really mentor and bring them along. Just, there's a moral imperative here and I will say it that strongly, which is what we are doing in school that looks, when we're doing stuff that looks like it did 20 years ago, we are literally putting kids on a path to a world that is not going to exist when they get there. And I think we have to really ask ourselves whether we're going to allow our own discomfort and our own concern about, I don't know, even higher education, stop us from doing things that are the things that kids need. And that they're telling us, I think, through their disengagement, through their sort of mental health and anxiety, they're telling us they need something different. And as educators, I think most of us went in because we want to do work with and for young people that is in their service. And so I think it's a moment to really kind of do that deep questioning.
Debra Wilson: I love that. You've got my brain kind of bouncing around in like five different directions, but I'm going to actually start with my first one because something about that thread reminded me of law school. You know, you and I both went to law school, and I thought law school was an interesting journey. And I actually loved being in law school, because once I figured out it wasn't about the content but about the process of learning—and they don't tell you that, right? I mean like your first year professors, they all get up there and whatever their thing is, is the thing. But what you realize after a while is it doesn't actually have anything to do really with what you're studying. I mean the content is important, but it's how have you taught yourself to learn the law?
Like, do you think that's where we're going with content and education? I mean, again, you I mean, you referenced back 20 years, right? So pre, I believe that's pre-iPhone, right? I think pre-iPhone, pre, certainly pre-AI or at least AI as we understand it right now, or generative AI.
How are you thinking about that content piece? Because it sounds like that's sort of what you're leaning into a bit in terms of how we're working with kids and how we're teaching them to own their own learning. But is that sort of how you're thinking about at least some content too?
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: Yeah. So again, I think it's helpful in this case to kind of break it up between elementary, middle and high school, roughly, right? That I think, between kind of birth and, you know, eight, nine, 10, there's foundational content that you need just to kind of understand how the world works so that you can kind of keep learning.
So when I talk about it, I say, I think it's probably right that during elementary, the elementary years, there's probably going to be more similarity in the content that we cover for all students because what we want them to do is to kind of understand and have this broad picture about how the world works. But I'm an elementary school teacher and I can teach you math, science, English, history through dinosaurs or trucks or unicorns, right? I can sort of get you engaged in all of these things, and kids' brains at that age, they are asking these big questions. And so regardless of what you give them, I think they're going to continually expand it to kind of help them answer this question. How does the world work?
And then as you get into middle and high school, I think we have to be OK with the idea that there is going to be less similar content for all students and that we actually, this is when we have to sort of move towards these large competencies. And I think the next generation science standards are interesting in this, right? They took science content and said, here are these big ideas, like how does life reproduce? Right? How do we, how does it organize itself? And those are big questions. But inside of that, there's a lot of freedom for a kid to be like, I'm super interested in reptiles, or I'm really interested, right, in how human societies kind of organize themselves.
So I like big picture learning as a high school and middle school model, because one of the things that they do is they talk about these kinds of broad competencies. So they say, quantitative reasoning, empirical reasoning, social reasoning, professional qualities, communication. But instead of quantitative reasoning, what they say is, hey, you know, for a student who has tried a lot of things and is sort of more interested in starting up their own business and whatever, then quantitative reasoning might actually be accounting. And it might be, you know, statistics. Whereas a kid who's like, you know, I really think I want to go and study medicine or engineering. Great. Pre-calculus and calculus are good for you.
So I think we've got to be a little bit flexible, but the reality is that content has been, you know, Buckminster Fuller had that formula or whatever. And at least five years ago, knowledge was doubling every 13 hours. And at this point, right, we can't keep up with knowledge and knowledge is changing, right? Like we now know there aren't three states of matter. There's not even four. I think there's five. So I think we have to be OK with this idea that every kid is not going to cover the same content and that it's OK for us to invite them to say, what are you interested in at this moment, like especially in middle school? And that might not be the same thing as it's going to be in a year from now, and that's OK.
And especially as they get into high school, I think, you know, as adults, we have this kind of idea, well, it's too early, kids don't know, kids don't know. What I hear from kids is, oh my God, you keep telling me that I'm supposed to do this like boring stuff that I have no interest in so I can graduate and go to college and then I can live my life. And what they are saying is, I want to live my life now. There are things I care deeply about, some of them existential and some of them not. And that's what I want to sink my teeth into. And in fact, developmentally, that is exactly the moment when they need to be doing it, and not do what we have been doing to them, which has led to this new thing called the quarter life crisis, which is you have 25 year olds saying that they feel purposeless and that they feel unmoored and really kind of unhappy with their lives.
So yeah, hopefully that answers your question, but kids have to think about something. So of course content matters. Right? But every kid doesn't have to do the same content. And then imagine this, Debra, right. Then you do exhibitions of learning and you have every kid who's studying something that they really care about, share it with everyone else. And so all of a sudden kids are hearing from each other about stuff that their peers really care about. And all of a sudden their world is expanded from like, you know, one topic to 25 or 50.
So I think, you know, and this is where I think this mindset shift is so important, because when we're sitting in our existing mindset around education, it's very hard to imagine something different. But when we shift mindsets, new things become possible that, you know, we couldn't, wouldn't have occurred to us if we're sitting inside the confines of the box that we've currently put ourselves in. And I think that's where it's really helpful to go and visit other schools and see how they do it. Not to say that we're going to do this exact same thing, but to be inspired to say the world doesn't fall apart.
Kids actually are phenomenally amazing when you give them the opportunity to be, and they rise to the occasion. And that we can see how, this is where I think it's really interesting. A lot of adults will go, yeah, that's the kid I would want to hire as a business owner or as a leader. It's not the kid who really can't look at me or answer any questions or like seems to have absolutely no passion or interest in what they did.
Debra Wilson: I love that. You're reminding me, I was at a conference and I was listening to a futurist. She focused mostly on technology. And one of the things she said was, she said, you're never going to catch up again on technology. Like you can just put it down now, so you might as well know what's useful and interesting to you, because you're never going to know everything. And maybe we have reached that tipping point to some degree with education generally.
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: I think that's right. I don't think there's any way for us to, in any good faith or with a straight face, be able to say that we have a sense of exactly the content, the knowledge, even the skills, right, specific skills that young people need. What we do know is that they need these kind of human capabilities, dispositions, mindsets, and broad skills, right?
Skills like the ability to be flexible and to deal with ambiguity, skills like the ability to communicate. But the specifics of those things are going to change. And I think people like Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who are doing research now on what we know about the adolescent brain and how certain types of thinking grow the brain in ways that are associated with success in early adulthood, right? That kind of thinking is not the shallow thinking that is about covering a lot of content. It's the deep thinking that allows you to say, I care about this thing, and I'm going to go deep with it and grapple with it and wrestle with it. And as I do that, I'm going to encounter the unknown and the unexpected, and sometimes I'm not going to know the answer. And so I have to deal with the fact that I don't know the answer. And it's those skills that I think young people need.
And one of the questions I get a lot is, yes, yes, yes, but we have to teach kids how to use technology in school. And so we add another course or another thing that we're going to do.
First of all, you can't keep doing more. You have to take something off the table. And if we were to do a very real and honest analysis about what is most important to take off the table so that we can do the work that's critical at this time period for kids, I think what would fall off is that content stuff. And I think it would actually be some of our focus on like, having technology as the vehicle for learning all the time.
And you're seeing this, like in Silicon Valley and the people who do tech, like when you interview them, they're sending their kids to low tech schools. Because frankly, as the adults, we're keeping up, and the kids should be teaching us about technology. So they know how to use it. What they need is time and space to kind of like, grapple with the complexity of like, how do I know whether something is true or not? How do I think about what the incentive might've been to get this answer or this response from a certain place versus another, right?
And that doesn't always require technology. In fact, I think oftentimes it's better if we don't. I was just reading this thing over the weekend from the Academy of Medicine that's talking about how just engaging with the internet and technology is having an impact on our ability to pay attention, our ability to kind of engage in social cognition, right? All of these things that actually you're going to do better if we're not having devices and Google Classroom or…
You know, my kids have to log on to like eight or nine different apps all the time. I'm like, can we please give them paper and pencil?
Debra Wilson: Right, right. Just to, I mean, it's actually, it's a joy of doing a podcast like this, when you can just have a conversation. You know, we're all torn in so many different directions all the time, and that setting aside time and space to actually process and engage on a singular thing is pretty amazing.
So you're talking about a mindset shift and just thinking about how we change our models and really look at the fundamentals of education. When you think about schools hiring for that, what are you hearing them talk and think about or what are you thinking about on that front? Because it's a very different model in a lot of ways than what we've been thinking about. And I always tell schools, you know, are ideally, it doesn't always work this way, but ideally you are hiring today for five to 10 years from now, right?
So, you know, when you're a school leader and you're thinking about your, if you're thinking about making some of these shifts, right? What is that skillset? What are those teachers like?
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: Yeah. It's interesting because when I, cause this was exactly the question I asked a lot of those kind of third bucket human centered schools. They are often hiring people who may not be traditional educators. Many of them come in with a youth development background. So they are people who may have worked in summer camps or outward bound or adventure programming, but they have been put into environments where the assumption is like the opposite of school, which is you come here, and we as the adults are in charge and we're going to take you through, and instead are people who have worked inside of organizations and programs that say, actually, our job is to create an environment here and an experience here where you are going to have the opportunity to engage in activity that is going to develop you well, right? So that youth development lens.
So I think that is often, so I would be looking for activities like that, or things that demonstrate that people have done that kind of work, even if it was like being a counselor back in college. But like, I'd probe like, so what was that experience like for you? Like, how did it feel when a student, you know, or when a young person kind of pushed back on you? How did you, so that to me, that idea that I as an adult don't know, am not the expert, and actually I'm going to be standing on the side with you and walking along with you on the journey, that I think is one of the biggest things that I would be looking for as a school leader and really digging into what was that experience like for you.
And the other way to think about that is, I kind of joked about therapy, but in some ways it's about how well does this person know themself, and have they actually done the work to be good enough friends with themselves and their own story and their own journey, that they can hold space for another person to come to them as their self and not immediately go into a tailspin, right? And really that's what this kind of education requires, is that, not that you're a perfect educator or guide, but rather that when you meet somebody who says something to you that might be hurtful or lashes out at you or questions you, that your immediate reaction is not to fight back and close in, but rather to be like, I'm OK. Like, let's go there, right? Because that is the kind of relationship that you're going to have when you're doing this kind of work.
And then I'm always sort of curious, like what do people remember as their most impactful learning experiences? Where did that happen? And what are they going to be bringing in from that? Because when you ask that question, no one says that it was like, memorizing modern European history facts. It was always about that teacher or that coach or that counselor, right, who sort of did something. And I think like hearing somebody talk about the ways in which that was powerful for them and how they think about that in relationship to their own work and sort of giving evidence that they're— because a lot of people might not be there yet with the skills, but I think if they're open to that mindset, then the world is your oyster in terms of how you can create a professional learning community, or a community in which you can build something different.
So I think that's the other question I always ask for schools is, don’t take 15 things you're going to do. There are some structural pieces and design choices you can make. But you can only focus on so much at one time. And so I just think being thoughtful about that is important.
Debra Wilson
OK, so let's pretend you're a head of school, right? And let's put you in the middle bucket, right? So it's not necessarily a super traditional school, but you're certainly not in your third bucket. And you have to choose three things.
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: Yep. OK.
Debra Wilson: What would the three things be?
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: So let's say I'm a K-12 or an early childhood through 12 school. I would first of all say to elementary and early childhood, you are actually one unit, and your job is not to have a kid finish second grade or third grade. It's to make sure that by the time they leave fifth grade or sixth grade, whenever you end, that student has all of the things that they need to kind of move into the next level.
And I would work with our faculty to really think about the broad competencies, knowledge and skills that we need all the way through, and then have rubrics and sort of, you know, really visible, one adult facing and one student facing, of like, what does it look like for you to have actually mastered and developed these skills? And I would be like, trying to move that division into a place where it's like, yeah, we're going to record where a student is, or we're going to have the student be owning that. We're going to give parents this information so parents are also aware of it and can tell us when the kids have it. So I would really move all of the divisions to saying, I'm not a grade level teacher. I am a this age band teacher, and then have the competencies, the skills, mindsets, metacognitive skills that we want and really be clear on what the progression is on that.
So that's the first thing I would do, which I'm not saying is like easy, but I think that is where I would focus people's things, because I think in the process of doing that, you're changing the rules of the system, you're changing the kind of incentives of the system, and that's going to help you kind of push mindsets. And then as part of that, I would also kind of have end things, like maybe it's a portfolio process or a passage process, where you are allowing the student to capture multiple years of growth and learning, reflect on it.
The second thing I think is like, I think this going low tech and really leaning into how are we using the time together. I think about cognition, right? We have a lot of brain-based cognition focus in our world. And there are these three other kinds of cognition, embodied cognition, the idea that our bodies are thinking and that being aware of our bodies really helps us to kind of understand what we know. Embodied, situational cognition is the second, which is our environment drives our learning, and then distributed, which is we think differently when we’re with other people.
And I would go low tech and really say, how are we creating more opportunities to engage in these other three kinds of cognition? And the reason is, AI can't do that because AI doesn't have biological bodies and doesn't engage with us as biological entities. And so I think, really thinking about the time that we have our kids in school with us, and how are we making space for these other kinds of, how are we teaching kids to be aware of what is happening in their bodies and to kind of short circuit sometimes the fight or flight mode to be able to come back into your kind of your brain where you can think differently? How are we engaging in conversations, hard conversations around complex topics with our peers and using those skills about not immediately going into like, defensive angry mode when you hear something you don't like? How are we thinking about using our environment as part of our learning?
So I think I would do an audit of, in what ways does our curriculum and the way we're doing education right now fit into brain-based learning that is like, just content, content, content, versus these other kinds of cognition and really shift the balance on that.
Then the other is, I think, being very explicit about teaching both young people and parents, because it's surprising to me how little parents know and how little young people know about everything we have learned about human development, identity development, how deep learning happens, the kinds of experiences that allow that. And I think being very intentional around the kind of teaching of that, because I think that's part of agency for young people, is to say, here's what's happening right now. Here's how the world may be coming at you and here's why. And let's help you be the person to kind of start making decisions about, do you want your attention hijacked by the app and the whatever? And I think as kids kind of know it and understand it, there's a lot more they will be willing to do to kind of step up and do something different.
And then if I can just tack on one other thing, it's normalized gap years. I just think we need to normalize the idea that like, you know, every kid is not ready. In fact, I would say most kids are not ready to jump straight into four more years of it. And that actually giving them a chance to be out in the world, spreading their wings, testing their limits a little bit in productive ways, like actually is an important gift we can give them. And what's really exciting is that it's not the world you and I grew up in, where if you didn't go to college right after high school, that was it. You weren't likely to go back. There are so many on and off ramps now into programs and learning and certificates and degrees and whatever that I think normalizing this idea of a gap year or gap period after high school, I think that would have a push down effect on so many things for schools, even going down into middle and elementary.
Debra Wilson: I love it. I love it. I love it. We are out of time, but thank you so much for being on New View EDU with us. This has been such an interesting conversation, and I just appreciate you sharing these insights with us today.
Ulcca Joshi Hansen: Thanks, Debra. It was great to be with you.