Read the full transcript of Episode 32 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features a discussion about designing education systems around trust, student agency, and teacher creativity. Host Tim Fish is joined by public school educator-turned nonprofit founder Chris McNutt, whose work at the Human Restoration Project aims to revolutionize teacher and student well-being.
Tim Fish: How do we create the schools our students need? How do we ensure that school is preparing them for their future and not our past? You know, that’s one of the guiding questions that has motivated me for my entire career. For a long time I was looking for the answer, the one thing that would help us create those schools, and what I found was that there is no one thing. In fact, we have to think about school design as a system. We have to think about schools as a system. We have to think about how each element can be intentionally designed.
Well, one of the most important resources in that system is the teacher, and in today’s episode, we’re going to talk to a teacher—a teacher who journeyed to create his own version of transformative learning for his students, and now has gone on to create a nonprofit focused on partnering and collaborating with educators around the world to ensure that the schools we design are the schools our students need. Let’s get started with the next episode of New View EDU.
Chris McNutt is co-founder and executive director of Human Restoration Project, a nonprofit organization focused on young people and educator wellbeing and engagement. He is a former digital design and social studies teacher, and focuses his work on purpose finding, community engagement, and systems-based thinking.
Chris, we are so excited to welcome you to New View EDU today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Chris McNutt:Yeah. Thanks Tim. Appreciate the invite.
Tim Fish: You know, I'm interested, Chris, like your journey from teacher to now, co-founder of Human Restoration Project. Tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you end up here?
Chris McNutt: Yeah. So I, I started off, as you just said, as a social studies teacher. I taught at a public magnet school out in Springfield, Ohio, which is like 45 minutes west of Columbus. Later on I taught digital design and I got really baked into the progressive education movement. Early on I was fortunate in my master's program, I had a professor that introduced us to a lot of critical pedagogy.
So bell hooks and Paulo Freire, those types of folks, as well as folks like Alfie Kohn and those that are embedded more in progressive education circles typically. And to be honest, when I first started teaching, I didn't understand any of those things. I, I kind of went through the motions. Yeah, I, I just, I remember I started teaching my first year and I had this, I think it was like this salmon-colored sheet of paper and it had like maybe 50 different activities on it. And it was like, think, pair, share or gallery walk, like that kind of stuff. And I thought I was the coolest teacher on the planet because every day I would spend two or three hours planning this elaborate lesson where every 10 minutes we swap something on that salmon sheet of paper.
And it was a lot of work, and I thought it was neat. And I remember my second, maybe third year teaching, walking into one of my friend's classrooms who was covering the Industrial Revolution, which is at least in our curriculum, a month or two of content. It was a really big deal. And she asked a question like, what is the industrial revolution?
And no one knew. Not, not one person.
Tim Fish: Is this after the month?
Chris McNutt: This is after the, this is a year later. No one, no one knew anything. What it was, where it happened, what was important about it? Nothing at all. And I walked out of that room frustrated and honestly, almost having an existential crisis, because those first few years teaching are hard for everyone. And you spend, I remember a lot of late nights with a lot of pizza and beer. Cause I was, it was, it was a lot. And I, I didn't really know what to do. I was like, well, man, I'm putting all this effort into it. No one's really remembering any of this stuff. Why am I even doing this? And it occurred to me, maybe I should look back to some of the stuff I did in college.
And I started going back through bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress, which is my favorite education book. And I realized that nothing I was doing had anything to do with what she was talking about. I got lost in the sauce of education. Kind of like re-imagination, if you will.
So I started changing things up. I remember I walked into my government class that I was teaching and I said, let's just throw out what we're going to do today. Let's just start making a curriculum together. And I turned that pendulum the entire other way, to the point where it was a little chaotic.
But it was fun and I enjoyed doing it. And over time, I, I adopted more and more of those systemic changes and I enjoyed what I was doing more, the kids enjoyed what they were doing more, and just seemed like it made a lot of sense. It was common sense. If you give kids more control about what they're doing, if you lessen the impact of things like grades and tests, and focus more on learning in general, people in general are happier.
And then in 2018 I started doing work through Human Restoration Project, which is an organization I founded to focus on providing progressive education resources on those systemic shifts. And then 2020, a couple years later, we incorporated as a nonprofit to focus on doing stuff like this.
So we host our own podcast. We also have writings, free resources, a research database, professional development, all sorts of different kinds of things to talk about progressive education in the modern era. This would be resources aimed at both private and public schools with an emphasis on public education and ensuring that all teachers can do this type of work.
Tim Fish: Yeah. So I love it, man. And I had exactly the same kind of evolution. I taught fourth grade right out of college and I've said on previous episodes, I thought, at that time I thought my philosophy of education was, if I'm talking they must be learning. So the more talking I do, the more learning they do.
I also think, and I hear from you, which clearly was not the right philosophy of education to have as a teacher. But I also thought that there was this notion that it was all up to me, that I had to design everything, right? I remember doing a hands-on science unit. I remember thinking that great teaching is about creating this tray where everything the students need is already there. And all the, everything's pre-measured. We were doing a thing on, on liquids, so we were looking at density of liquids and how we, if we added salt to water, we would get, increase the density and eventually, da da da da da. And so I thought my job is to like, measure out all the salt and little cups and have everything completely ready to go so that it's very easy for them to follow along and they won't make any sort of errors.
And that notion of me staying at school till 9:00 PM measuring out salt in little cups, right? I thought that's what great teaching looks like, because I am ensuring success of my lesson. And what I was missing was that notion of experimentation. The notion of literally just giving students the box of salt and water and saying, discover what you can about density.
Chris McNutt: Exactly.
Tim Fish: Right. And instead I was like, oh, I don't want to give kids a box of salt. There could be salt all over the floor. You know, this could, they could spill the salt. So all that notion, all that thinking was impacting the design of the learning experience and downstream, what they ended up learning about density, or as you said, what they didn't end up learning about density or the industrial revolution or you know, any other topic that we're talking about.
Right? And so, I'm so curious. If you were to think about what your big aha was, if you were to take a bumper sticker of your aha that you could stick on the back of your car when you made that 180 degree turn, what would your bumper sticker say, do you think?
Chris McNutt: I don't know if I could summarize it into a bumper sticker, but I, but I do know the exact moment where I knew that this stuff was working and that I wasn't a crazy person. Which, to the outside world, this is going to sound like I was. I remember when I shifted my curriculum and I threw it out and I had the kids co-design what we were going to do. I went really radical. I remember we, we had this classroom that had this giant window on the side so you could see in, just so it sounds like I'm not breaking some kind of rule here. And I remember I said, OK, design a curriculum. I don't care what's in it. Just tell me what you want to learn about.
I'm going to leave and come back in 40 minutes and write it up on the board and we'll just talk about it. And I left. And every now and then I kind of peek in, make sure, you know, nothing terrible is going on. And when I walked back in, the kids had developed this massive list of everything from like, life skills, like changing a tire and paying taxes, that kind of stuff, to typical government stuff. And then there was some weird stuff on there, like there was, let's talk about dystopias and let's talk about science fiction. And I was, and I was sitting there. What if we do like a futuristic government together and we like, make this like, you know, like weird, like Galaxy Brain, 400 years in the future, what does the government look like?
And we did. In that class, in that class alone, we made this, this weird framework where kids would propose changes to like this galactic constitution. And randomly we had a council of like life skill coaches that on Fridays, every now and then, we went outside and changed a tire on a car. Because for some reason, 400 years in the future, that's still going on. That's besides the point. And it was weird, like kids would come in like dressed up as aliens. It was bizarre and playful. And this is with ninth-graders, keep you in mind. But it was fun. Like I enjoyed coming to work every single day and doing those lessons and the kids controlled it. They knew what they wanted to come in and talk about, and I did very little planning outside of the initial, just like, OK, here's what we're all going to do, and like, let's start deviating this out and kind of managing the beginning of that process. After that, for the next five or six weeks, it was all student controlled and I just came in and enjoyed the ride.
And to be honest, there was a lot of, like, missteps along the way. There were many lessons that fell flat. Some that lasted 10 minutes and it was just like, OK, let's just take over and fix that one. But it felt so much more authentic. And those kids, I remember I actually spoke to one of those kids at a coffee shop the other day who is now graduating college, which terrifies me. They still remember that and they loved it. They said it was one of the favorite things they did in school. Just from like, some decision on a whim.
Tim Fish: You know, it's so interesting too. I've learned a lot of lessons, I think, for my bumper sticker, and I've had more time to think about it. I think mine would be something to the effect of, it's not all about me. Right. You know, and I think that's the, that was one of my big lessons, right?
And so one of the ideas that I'm really curious about in this is that often when I've talked with people about what this model could look like, what engagement, heavy engagement can look like, when we can breathe more student agency, more choice, more direction, more self-efficacy into school. What does that look like? And one of the things people often fear, just like me with the salt in the little containers, was like, as soon as we let go of control, we're going to lose rigor, right? School's now just going to be this big freaking fun free for all, where kids aren't learning anything.
Right? So help me get there. Help me, if I'm a teacher or I'm a parent or I'm somebody going, come on, this sounds like the most hippy dippy sort of experience of what school is. You know, I'm pushing back a little bit. Like, come on, help me see how well designed, agency rich learning can actually increase rigor, increase complexity, and increase deep learning and engagement.
Chris McNutt: Exactly. Now that you gave a bumper sticker example, I can expand on on my own, which will help answer this question, which is an HRP tagline, which is Trust Kids.
Tim Fish: Oh, there it is.
Chris McNutt: You know, that kids can bring experience and perspective to the table and offer just as much as the teacher does, if not more.
And I, I think the way that we can explain the reason why this, this organized chaos is valuable to education is by looking to the research. We offer, I think, a one of its kind type thing on the HRP website, which is a research database that has over 550 different research articles and studies on exactly what we're talking about.
For example, if you shift toward a more hands-on style curriculum where students have more power, and you move away from traditional assessment and discipline practices, kids end up learning more. And we've known this for a very long time. There are reports on this from hundreds of years ago, of people figuring this out.
Tim Fish:1988, I was in my first education class. And I remember being introduced to the concept of constructivism.
Chris McNutt: Yeah. Classic.
Tim Fish: And constructivist learning, and it was a mindblower for me. I was like, this idea of the student constructing his or her own knowledge. I remember being inspired by it, and frankly also intimidated by it.
I was like, how do you do that? Like I, you know, we were taking these methods classes and I was learning about how to teach math and how to teach things sequentially, and there was the teacher's manual and the textbook and all that kind of stuff. So you could see what a lesson design looked like in that model, right?
Remember, the teacher's manuals had all the writing on the sides? So for like the, this is what you do as a teacher, and the middle of the page was what the kids were seeing, right? And it was like, do step one, do step two, do step three, right? And so constructivism was completely counter to that. It was like, how do you, I was like, how do I invent that?
Chris McNutt: So much of teaching the teacher has become seeing teachers as technicians, right. It's become, how can I tell teachers exactly what to do and keep firm control over the sequential pace of the curriculum? And as a result, that's how many teachers see their own classrooms.
How do I move students through step by step in order to ensure that they're “learning,” in scare quotes? Which is exactly what you and I were just talking about in terms of the beginning of this conversation. That doesn't necessarily equate to more learning. There's a debate in the research field, if you will, between child developmental psychologists, folks that study how children grow up and how they learn, versus cognitive scientists, those who kind of look at learning in a lab and look at brain science.
And many teachers and teaching curriculums look at cognitive science and they go, oh, well it says right here that if you give kids X number of questions and talk to them for X amount of time, that is like, the perfect amount of time to talk to them about this concept. Therefore, let's do that over and over again until they improve their test scores.
Meanwhile, that lacks the context of child developmental psychologists who will say, well, what about how the kid feels that day? Or what about when you place their friends in the room? Or what about social media? Or what about all of these other things that go into learning? Which at the end of the day means that learning is incredibly complex and messy. It's not something that occurs in a lab, so therefore we can't view it as such. We can't see it as something that's pre-scripted. What that means as, like, an adult who's managing, I guess, a group of students or guiding them would be a better word, is think about how kids just act in the real world outside of school.
Many parents have kids, for example, that—for example—play Minecraft, right? Which is a great learning tool. Kids learn programming and reading, and they do all this awesome stuff without any teacher guidance. And sometimes they're doing it and sometimes they're not doing it. They will play for five hours and the next day they'll play it for 30 minutes, and it's just really all over the place.
Our goal as teachers is to figure out, how can I develop frameworks that can manage that complexity and figure out ways in which we can have students that are all working together at different paces through projects in different ways and at different times. Which sounds like a lot to manage, but ultimately it comes back to that idea of trusting kids and recognizing that learning is something that we all want to do.
We just need to have help in getting there. If that makes sense.
Tim Fish: It totally makes sense. It completely makes sense. And it's this notion of also for me, what I'm so curious about, is to get to that, what the constructed environment needs to look like for students. Right? What does school need to be?
You know, last night my wife and I were downstairs and we were, she's going to be giving one of our, like this sort of like, playhouse that we had for our kids when they were really little. I have four kids, they're all grown, and we're giving it away to one of her friends at work who has some young children. And we're giving away all the furniture stuff that goes in the house and so on. And we were sitting there putting the stuff into the, into the box that we were going to give. And there was a bunch of other stuff in the boxes, right, that was unrelated to the house. And she was like, well, you don't give them that stuff, right, because that's not the furniture for a house. And I was like, well wait a minute. Like do you think they might just want to play with this? Might they invent a way that this spinny thing from another toy might fit into the house? Right.
And it was this concept for me that we got into talking about, because in her mind, when you give someone a playhouse and furniture, you give them a playhouse and furniture, you don't give them a bunch of other stuff. But what I'm curious about is in school, how we end up doing that with the way that we think about disciplinary learning, the way that we think about grade levels, the way that we think about sequential curriculum, that what we're essentially doing is only playing in a single domain. And really where learning happens is when we can do that, what Jay McTighe calls designing for transfer. That we design in the messiness, that we design in the opportunity to make new connections. Right? Because the whole thing that I understand, if I'm going to boil down brain science, if I'm going to boil down learning, it comes down to this.
That you must do it yourself, that you only can learn if you construct. This notion that constructivism is another theory and that there's this other way that you in fact can shove it into kids' heads, I'm actually like, it, that's not learning, right?
Chris McNutt: Right.
Tim Fish: That to learn something for the long term, you must construct it yourself. It's the only path, not a path. It's the only path to get there. I'd love your thoughts on that. Am I off base or does that make sense to you?
Chris McNutt:I think that makes a ton of sense. And there's two things I would say. First off, in regards to understanding that exact concept when it comes to play, there's so much fascinating research amongst play scientists, which sounds like an awesome career, where they're concerned that today's young people are being fed their imagination through play. As in, toys have become so commodified. For example, if I go to the store and buy a toy, maybe it's like SpongeBob Squarepants, that I already know how that toy is supposed to act. As in like there's a script being provided to me by watching the television show or playing the video game, whereas, in the olden days, and they still make toys like this now, but like I remember growing up and it was like a slinky, which has no, like, purpose. It's just a thing, and I invent my own stories from that.
And play scientists want to find ways at which we can design toys for young people where they manufacture their own, you know, their, their own ideas about what the world is and manipulate it and the exact kind of thing we're talking about. And that's interesting because it's the same thing that we're talking about in terms of schools, right? It's the same idea of, I don't need to provide a script or a backstory that tells people exactly what they should do with their learning. They need to discover those ideas for themselves.
So to kind of talk about how we frame this at Human Restoration Project, we see this through four different value statements. We have learning as driven by purpose finding community relevance. So it's all about getting out into the community and finding things that students have to offer, like what is the unique, awesome perspective or skillset or ideas that they have, and incorporating that into the curriculum.
The second of four is that social justice is the cornerstone to educational success. We can't build a thriving community if some people are left out, so we have to make sure the systems ensure success for all. The third is that dehumanizing practices don't belong. So speaking of research, there is plenty of research that does not support the use of grades, traditional assessment like standardized testing, authoritarianism, even the food that young people are served every day in, in many schools.
We know from the research that many of those practices harm people. We could talk about that in a second because it's usually the, the statement that gets people going. But we, we can reimagine those things. And the fourth value statement is that learners are respectful toward each other's innate human worth.
Teachers value young people. Young people value each other. So it's not all about me, it's about everyone in the room and that teachers are valued, who are often left out of those conversations about reimagining education. But there is this place for a teacher and they should be treated as professionals.
So it's really just putting into writing a lot of what constructivism already is. Those frameworks allow us to understand, really, the purpose of education and what we should be aiming toward.
Tim Fish: Yeah, I love that. You know, and it makes me also think about, even when I was grappling with the concept of constructivism, I was grappling with that concept within my own bias of what school is and my experience of school, and what I didn't understand fully, and as I do now, is that not everyone had the same opportunity, or is in the same context, to be able to construct, right? And so for me, I think you're right about creating those conditions. I love your four principles, as four principles to say, in order for us to have an environment that works, we need to honor these principles. We need to look and self-reflect and audit our own environment, our own schools to say, do we live up to these principles?
These are foundational ideas on which, it sounds to me, that you can then build the design, right? That you can then move forward. And so I'm curious, have you found schools that are living into—public schools, charter schools, independent schools—have you found places where this is being lived, or they're well on their way to living your principles?
Chris McNutt:Yes. So I mean, what's awesome about this work is that we're constantly in connection with educators who are doing this work every single day. So it's not like these aren't pragmatic ideas. There are plenty of educators who are incorporating, I guess you could call them small scale changes within our classrooms across the United States or even world.
We've seen a ton of growth within the ungrading community, for example. People are starting to lessen the impact of grades or eliminate them altogether. That includes both Nick and I, who are the co-founders of HRP. We did a lot of this work in our classrooms. We've had a lot of great guests on our podcast that talk about this work in their classrooms and also at scale.
Tim Fish: You, as a teacher in a public school in Ohio, you were able to figure out even working within the constraints that you had in terms of standardized testing that you needed to do and curriculum you needed to cover and so on. You were able to find your way toward small step strategies to continue to make your classroom more aligned with your progressive philosophy. Help me understand some small steps that you were able to take and small steps you're seeing other teachers taking.
Chris McNutt: So, there's a few different ways to look at that. I think one thing that's important to recognize, and it's something that we believe at Human Restoration Project, is: No one's coming to save us. That top down reforms from government organizations or from districts rarely lead to any type of solution. In fact, they often lead to more problems than they attempt to solve. For example, someone might come in and offer a new set of standards for us to look at and analyze and incorporate into our classrooms, which has happened, I felt like when I was teaching, every two years, there was some kind of new initiative to push for. And ultimately nothing changed, and it burnt a lot of people out.
It leads people to become very cynical about the future of education and therefore not take as many matters into their own hands. We believe that young people, families, educators, administrators, community members, et cetera, need to enact change at a grassroots level. When they start pushing toward a change in one place, the other systems change in turn, and it snowballs throughout the school, throughout the district et cetera, et cetera.
Within my own practice, I saw that in a variety of different ways. I think probably the most success I found was in Expositions of Learning, which I stole from High Tech High out in California. I remember we saw Most Likely to Succeed, which is a decent documentary. I have some criticisms, but the, it's a pretty good documentary that has an exposition of learning in it, which is at the end of the semester or at the end of the year, students share the work that they did. They talk about the projects that they worked on, community members come in, families come in. And it's just a celebration of what they did. It's not graded or anything. And I started that, I want to say my third year of teaching at the school. It was just me and a few other teachers where we were showcasing those projects that were a result of those cool things like that sci-fi government activity.
And kids loved it. Kids were initially skeptical. They're like, I don't want to do this because it's after school. They didn't have to come, but the vast majority of them did. They presented it, families loved it. It was awesome. I would say maybe 50 people showed up. I went full-time at HRP this year. In the spring of this year, which is the last expo night I attended, we had 2000 people show up. Because once the, and this is a school of 400 people, roughly 600 if you include the middle school. The practice of doing that Expo night led to other teachers and administrators seeing how cool it was, and they're like, well, why don't we do that with more people?
By far my favorite day of every single school year was either the fall or spring Expo night, where you'd have kids just like, just being so passionate about what they accomplished and then having family and community members come through and celebrate it and actually care and recognize like, oh, this is, this is really great stuff. We should be doing more of that.
Tim Fish:Yeah. Chris, you know, it reminds me of one of the things I always tell our schools when we talk about like, you know, what do you want school to be? What do you want it to look like? You know, what, what can it be? And we talk about this notion of engaged learning. We talk about students being fully involved.
And you know, it's funny, schools are often...you know, we have all these structures that get in the way. We have schedules, we have assessments, we have test days, we have all these things and people are like, what should it look like? And I just say to them, go look at your own school website.
What pictures do you put on your website? Right. Nobody ever puts a picture of a student with their head down filling in bubbles on a standardized test. No one ever puts that as the lead image on their school website saying, we do tests here. Right? Like, that's not a motto of a school, right? What we see in every school website are all the pictures we talk about, all the things we see, kids in a stream, kids building a robot, kids making food together. You know, all these images that we show, we know what we want it to be. Every time I go to schools and I say, what are you seeing? What are you enjoying? They always will, they'll take me around to show me these things. And then, but they're all sort of on the periphery, right. Even I, as a fourth grade teacher, when I was teaching, I ran an afterschool club where kids built, we built stuff in Sim City.
Chris McNutt: I love Sim City. That was like a cornerstone of my childhood.
Tim Fish: This was 1992, Mac LC classic, little software product called Sim City. But those kids, we would print out our maps on these late on ink—those, remember those old dot matrix printers? Like—[makes electronic printer noise].
Chris McNutt: Yep.
Tim Fish: We'd print out our maps and we'd tape 'em all together and we'd roll 'em out on the floor and we would talk about 'em.
I'm not kidding you, Chris, those, those fourth graders were way better than me at designing a successful city. Right. And I remember sitting around with them and talking about, well, how I, my, I keep having fires break out on this side of my city. And they're like, oh yeah, because you're not funding your fire department enough.
They would figure out how to sort of do high level urban planning and sustainability of a city in 1992 with an old computer sitting on the floor. And yet I didn't make that school. That was an afterschool club. What was school? School was me marching them through the state standards of learning for Virginia. Right? And so why can't school be more of those things? Why can't school be more of that kind of deep engaged learning? And I think you're right. I think exposition is a powerful way to unlock that potential. I'm wondering, what other things do you think could be incredibly strong levers to help schools make progress in moving toward this highly engagement based, relevant, agency rich learning?
Chris McNutt: I think that there's a variety of different tools that at the end of the day, the most important thing is that we show, rather than tell, the importance of these, these concepts. I think that educators who do a lot of this type of work, myself included, get really wrapped up in the theory. And we talk about the research, and we talk about folks like, you know, Slavoj Žižek on a podcast for a while and get, like, really into this stuff.
And the average person does not care at all, especially not parents and young people that just want to send their kids to school to do learning. So we need to enable ways to showcase progressive education and the power it has, just by looking at it. And one of those ways is through an exposition of learning. If I go to that and I see that, I'm like, oh, they did this awesome thing, if I went and saw that Sim City project, I would probably be blown away.
So the other ways that we could do that could include things like perhaps shifting to portfolio based assessment, which is something that we focus on a lot in our own professional development. How do I move away from the very real impact of anxiety and grading by focusing instead on, what did I actually do that semester? And just presenting it, and then finding ways to remediate on that if that work is not kind of up to snuff. Or perhaps we find ways to look at restorative practices. So instead of doing discipline as usual, which has a very real impact on kids, and kids will openly talk about how much they hate teachers, like, yelling at them or taking them out of class or suspending them, et cetera, especially when you're growing up and you don't necessarily even think that what you're doing is wrong, you can shift to ways in which you do like restorative circles where people are talking to each other and learning from each other. And finding ways that kids actually recognize the impact of the work that you're doing.
Part of that is not only showing that to parents, but it's also ensuring that kids know what you're doing and why you're doing it. This is a mistake I made for many years, which is, I wasn't transparent about why I was making my class so much different, and as a result, kids wouldn't buy into it. And I would get really frustrated, be like, well, why don't you like the fact we're doing a portfolio? This is awesome. You're not getting graded for it. And they'd go like, well, I just want to get a grade. I had to think to myself like, oh, well, you've been getting grades for years. Of course, this is weird. So we spent, then, weeks at the beginning of every single semester going through, ostensibly, pedagogy.
We were talking about, like, the purpose of school. Why are we doing this? Like kind of building that coalition of the willing of people in the room on fighting that battle with me kind of against the school system, which has like this almost like revolutionary feel that kids really buy into. But at the end of the day, what they created as a result and what they were able to show was better than what you would see in a traditional kind of Quiz Every Friday type class.
Tim Fish:You talked about, sort of the way we've been preparing teachers is to be technicians. Which is a term that I've been looking for and not able to find. So I thank you for that, because I think you're right. I think that that's what I was, when I was doing that first year teaching, I saw myself as a technician. Implementing a very strict and rigid approach to learning, which had baked into it—I had 32 fourth-graders in my first class, and what was baked into the theory was that they were all exactly the same person, right? Because they happened to be nine or 10 years old, they were all exactly at the same place.
And what we know today and what brain science will certainly show us is they were, could not be, at that age, more different in that, who was in that room. There was a range that was incalculable, the range that was inside of that room, that at that time. But the part for me that's interesting is, how does the teacher make progress in taking these steps, right? As you've worked with so many teachers through HRP, right? What do you find are the really helpful strategies and the dispositions that teachers need to take on as they make progress toward this engagement-based model?
Chris McNutt: The number one answer is just listening. Which is really basic, but we don't spend a lot of time actually listening to the people in the room, not just through some kind of Google form where a kid will like rate a lesson on one to five, and then we just like rarely actually use that data. At least I didn't, sadly.
But actually sitting down and having long conversations about why they're there, who they are, what their overall goals and aspirations are, and how schooling connects to that. The most successful way that HRP leads our professional development is that we do student focus groups. We go into schools. We talk to a group of five, 10 kids, maybe four or five different times, about 50 kids total. And we ask them those types of questions. Then we offer suggestions to educators using the actual audio clips from kids on how we could change up our practice and do something different together. So it's not necessarily that I'm like blaming teachers for not listening because I, I get it.
Tim Fish:Nor did I.
Chris McNutt: Yeah, you're stuck in that, that feeling of like, well, I need to get through all this stuff. I don't have time to spend three hours talking to kids about who they are. But if we can enable even more opportunities within the classroom to have those deep conversations, we're going to recognize what's working and what's not working.
And at the end of the day, the stuff that we're talking about here is, again, common sense. Kids don't want to be given individualized work and sit quietly for 60 minutes and go through a really long guided presentation, in the exact same way that if you go into any kind of teacher work room after school and you're doing professional development, the last thing you want to do after a long day is sit there for 60 minutes and listen to someone talk about some kind of educational buzzword and take notes.
No one wants to do that, young people or adults. So instead, we can talk to kids about how they feel about what they're learning and then make changes with them to ensure that that happens. Probably the, like, one of the most frustrating things about doing this type of work is that inevitably the next question is always like, well, what about this?
Like, what about when this happens? Like, that system isn't going to work because here's, here's a problem with it. And I think that that's very disabling. To go into environments in which people believe that if the solution that you're proposing does not solve every single problem—I mentioned earlier that idea of a magic potion—and what that does, is when we think about every possible solution with some kind of challenge to it as being disaffective, we never will do anything to change anything that we're doing. We'll tinker around the edges and we'll go like, well, maybe if I just do this little tiny thing, cause that's nice and safe, that that will solve the problem.
But we've been doing that for a very long time. And schools are relatively similar to where they used to be. Incrementalism is important in terms of, like, movement building and changing things, but I think that we could collectively take much riskier steps or larger steps toward re-imagining what school could be.
And what that looks like is stopping ourselves from looking at everything with a negative lens. Just starting to make those changes by listening to kids, doing it, and then just seeing what happens and then tinkering with that result, as opposed to starting off with something really small.
Tim Fish:Yeah, so your, so your notion is step one, listen to kids.
Chris McNutt: Yes.
Tim Fish: Listen to kids, and back to your bumper sticker, trust them. And use, use what they tell you as a springboard to some design, right?
I saw Dan Heath, who's, you know, the author of several books, doing a keynote, and he’s talking about his book, The Power of Moments. And these two parents were listening to the kids and they said, design for me your perfect day. So one of them was like seven and one of them was like eight or something, right? Seven, whatever. And you know, you would think if you say to your kids your perfect day, what would it be? And the parents said, we are going to try really hard to make your perfect day possible. Right.
And so the kids go off and they design their perfect—now you, most people think it would mean, all right, go to Disney World and get up and have breakfast with Mickey Mouse and blah, blah, blah. Right? Well, no. What these kids ended up writing was like, I want to start off my day with two Krispy Kreme donuts, right? And then I want to go to the park and I want to play in this stream, right? And I want to have four friends and I want to play in the stream. Then I want to, you know, not have to take a bath that night, you know, and certain things. Right. What the parents found is that when you listen, when you step back and you say to students and that in your case, what could school be, what would great school look like for you?
Right. If we just begin with some of that listening, what would the, what would a great history class look like for you? When you ask those kinds of questions, and I'm sure there are much smarter questions that someone could ask, and then use that as a teacher. Right. Moving from technician to designer. What would you add to that, Chris?
Chris McNutt:One thing I would add in addition to some other things would be recognizing that it isn't all sunshines and rainbows. Noting that when you have these conversations with kids and they're crafting their own curriculums, you are going to have many kids who are just going to say, let's go play basketball in the gym the entire time.
And sometimes you can actually get away with leaning into that because this is a, I mean, this is a classic children's story. Kids, when they're given the freedom to do something for the first time, they go wild and they want to do a lot of really fun things really quick. And over time, that gets really boring or just really over the top. And I don't want to do those things anymore. I want to get back to business. I want to do the interesting things that I'm here to do. And 99.9% of the time I found that kids, given a couple weeks to adjust into these, these new systems, will end up making much more rigorous and challenging tasks than I would've done if I were the ones designing these lessons.
I think a very common misnomer in experiential or constructivist education is that the work is somehow easier because it's more maybe, arts and craftsy, like, it's like, oh, kids are making things, it's not just drilling content. And that couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, I remember in the spring, I actually did a lesson, I think it was the spring, maybe it was the fall, surrounding utopias and dystopias and kids were doing city planning.
So we did a very similar type of lesson. We ordered a bunch of Lego. And kids were given a certain number of Lego and they could trade, and it was just a complex like economy type thing going on. They developed out their own government systems for those things, and the kids had that framework and then could do really whatever they want with it. And you had some kids that just went so over the top with their planning. There was a group that built their entire infrastructure underwater, and all it did was take one of us that were like co-leading these, this project to say, well, what about like water pressure? Like, isn't that going to impact like the people under—And all of a sudden we got a report about like, how engineers, like, I don't even know, I don't understand it, about like, how engineers build stuff underwater. It was incredibly complex. And I would've never even thought to assign something like that because I don't even know what that is. So we're learning alongside them to figure out what's going on.
So the, the first thing is recognizing that one, there's going to be some abuse of the system at first, and that's normal because that's exactly what adults do too, and we'll adjust into it over time. And what ends up as a result of that organized chaos is something that's much more rigorous and interesting.
I think the other thing that comes to mind right away of something that we could add on is the importance of it being interdisciplinary. And that the more we can invite other teachers and other classrooms into this work, not only are we spreading the pedagogy and enabling kind of a, a coalition of folks who can push back against what's already there, but we're also going to have better lessons and better projects and better units, because it's always more interesting to work with another teacher, especially if it's not a group that you're typically working with, for example, like Social Studies and Math, or Science and English, as opposed to like the humanities in STEM or the traditional groupings.
Tim Fish: I love it. You know, that also says to me, the idea that when you look at that sort of natural inclination to just want to play basketball in the gym all day, right? We can design to minimize that in some ways. We can be thoughtful about that. Not overly controlling, but we understand some of it's going to happen, but then we can sort of pull it back, right?
That, that idea of design. And I think, to your point about how we imagine what assessment looks like, right? Because I agree with you. This is not, in my mind, this is not about schools should just be fluffy and quote unquote easy and no real learning and no real accountability. And I'm like, no, in fact, what I have found, and I think you're, you're right, I, I look at the work of like Sugata Mitra, whose work around the hole in the wall experiments in India and his whole notion of just give kids access to learning, and they will create their own complex learning. And if you just give them a little bit of structure to help frame that, oh my gosh, they can learn incredibly complex information.
Chris McNutt:And we see that in, like, kindergarten classrooms, right? If you go into a kindergarten classroom and say, let's learn about space for a bit. Every single kid is going to be jumping out of their seats. They're going to be raising their hand. They're going to be so pumped to learn about something new. because it's interesting to them, and we know from survey data that by the time kids are in 12th grade, I believe engagement rates are below 40%. Versus above 80% early on in their school career. And it goes directly in line with taking away a lot of that power from what students can learn, what they want to learn about, and all those things that we've mentioned ad nauseam. And I think that something that's important in this work, in addition to talking about framing school differently, is talking about why it's problematic to not view young people in this way.
If you do not trust kids, and you think that kids are going to exploit you, that they are constantly trying to get away with things, that kids these days are different than they were in the past, which has been said every 10 years for the last, you know, thousand years. If you think about it in that way, you're going to enact a lot of policies that are anti-kid by nature.
If I walk into the room and think that kids are going to try to get away with something, I'm going to start pushing toward more carceral practices. I'm going to ban things. I'm going to tell kids what they can and can't do. And that's what leads us to schools where kids aren't allowed to talk in the hallway, or they're not allowed to have water bottles in classrooms, and these ridiculous things that I would never want to subject another person to at all.
Tim Fish: Yeah, you're right about that. It's so, it's on the other side of this, right? What does it look like when we go in the opposite direction? What does school look like? What does wellbeing look like? What does sense of belonging look like? What does curiosity, creativity, engagement, all those things go down, right?
And so if we want those things to be consequences, we need to design environments where they can happen. So as you look at your work in HRP, what your hopes for the future? What do you hope for school? What do you hope for your own organization? What's ahead?
Chris McNutt: I'll answer this in, in two ways. First, I want to get into the theoretical, because we've been talking about this a lot recently, which is a tonal shift in our own work. And recognizing that, you know, a better future. I think you actually sent me this quote. I think I would've written it. I don't remember.
Imagining a better future isn't naivety. It's essential for a thriving world. We need to think about how do we build a better world? And I think that as a culture, we've become almost obsessed with like, this nihilistic, dystopian world ahead of us. If you look at our, our, our social media use, our movies and, and books, et cetera, you see a lot of, like, Blade Runner, Robocop, Hunger Games, just dark, horrible futures.
It's really become part of our zeitgeist. So we've been very much interested in shifting that narrative and, and looking toward speculative fiction as a way to imagine a future in a better way. Things like the solar punk movement or Afrofuturism. It's where you see humans and society as being able to do better both through organizing together, demanding better, and also through technology, that technology isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I think about Octavia Butler's work. She wrote a lot about war and depression and sadness. But ultimately, the purpose of the books was to talk about optimism and creating a better future. And if we imagine a future that's better, we won't get caught in that stasis of thinking, well, you know, why would I bother attempting to do any of this stuff? I mean, look at how terrible everything is. The future is so bleak. We get caught in that stasis.
So with that said, my, my hope is that folks buy into the idea that they can push back and find ways to integrate those human-centered systemic changes. They are willing to take those bigger steps to figure out things like ungrading, restorative justice, purpose finding, experiential learning, all of these different things. And they just do it. They put it into practice. They leverage their power and privilege and recognize like, hey, I might not be able to do this this year, but if I start organizing three clubs and I've been here for a few years, I could probably get away with pushing a little bit further than I did in the past.
And taking as large a step as possible while making a difference for, for all learners.
Tim Fish:I love it, and it's this notion of take the first step, right? Learn about things. Question your own practice. Think about how you might listen a little bit more. What's one small thing you might design differently as you think about your school day or your, or your schedule or your own work? Find others who are thinking the same way. connect with them. And, and I love the idea of enjoying it, of, you know, we, we don't have to live into a dystopian future. In fact, the opportunities are great for what we can be doing with young people and what school can look like. It's not to say it's all going to be perfect and lovely. I agree with you.
Like we, there's going to be some bumps along the way for sure. But the work is worth doing. Our young people are worth the investment. And our teachers are people who can do this. I have faith in the folks who are—and such admiration for—the folks who are in our classrooms today to do this work.
Chris, this has been an incredible conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. It did. It went in all kinds of different directions, as the best conversations do. I just want to say thank you. Thank you for joining us today.
Chris McNutt: Of course, of course. Glad to be here. We're in the joyful struggle together.
Tim Fish: Yes, we are. Until the next time. Thank you, Chris.