100 Days of Conversations About School

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to episode 87 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project. My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio. Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Jennifer Mann, Abigail French, and Tegan Morton. Thank you for your ongoing support. You can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Today's conversation is all about one hundred days of conversations about school. One hundred days is a project by Human Restoration Project, ReinvisionED, Choice Filled Lives Network, and Cortico's Local Voices Network. Simply stated, one hundred days is catalyzing conversations about school and communities across the country. Featuring young people and adults, these conversations about the good life, the school experience, and equity in education are being compiled, shared, analyzed, and presented. We're taking the findings and presenting them to the new secretary of education and policymakers across the country. The process is designed to center the voices of young people and educators, both in the conversations themselves and the policy and practice recommendations that emerge from the process. We're seeking educators, young people, and education nonprofits who are interested in hosting a conversation in their community. The entire process takes about two hours, including the conversation itself. We supply all the materials, the recording space, and walk you through the conversation step by step. Simply go to 100daysofconversation.org, sign up, gather about two to eight folks, two of whom are below the age of 24, choose a time, and host the conversation. We take everything from there. Afterwards, you'll not only get to participate in an important process, but also receive a transcript and categorical analysis of what happened, which is so important figuring out how to reimagine our educational system. It's one thing for us to belabor on the importance of changing education, yet we have to include young people as the most important people in that conversation. On today's podcast, we have doctor Erin Robb, chief strategy and impact officer for Choice Filled Lives Network and cofounder of ReinvisionED, who focused her PhD on transforming school from competitions and tests to human flourishing and collective liberation. And we also have our entire social media team for one hundred days of conversations whom you'll meet shortly. Erin, we're just gonna start off with you. What is the purpose of the project? What do you hope to see? What are your aspirations? Just tell us about the project.

Speaker 2 A hundred days of conversations comes out of really this moment of multiple crises that we're facing as a society right now, not just the pandemic and our health care system, but in our democracy, in our schooling system, in our social safety net, and thinking about the fact that we are moving into a moment that brings us beyond triage. We've really been in this moment of trying to address the crises most directly and and dealing with the most urgent effects of all of these crises, but we have this moment, particularly with schooling, to think about if we are looking at heading back to, quote, unquote, normal in the next school year, what can we learn out of this moment that allows us to go back to a new kind of normal, not the old normal for schooling? And so hundred days of conversations aims to catalyze community conversations all across the country during this first hundred days of the new administration. And the idea is to have people who work together already really get to reflect deeply and listen to one another about what it is we want next, what we've learned out of this moment, and what we really want for our lives and our communities going forward. The process is designed so that the voices of young people and of educators and of families are really centered throughout that process, it's intergenerational. The idea is that I always think of this as as being that the elder generation holds a lot of wisdom from lived experience, and I kind of put myself in this generation. And and then young people bring the possibility of renewal, of new ways of thinking, and that those really need to be brought together if we're gonna be able to move forward in in new and better ways.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, how often do we actually get to hear a conversation at length from people that we don't know who are just regular people attending school, teaching in school, being a parent of kids at school, community members, etcetera? It's very rare. And by listening to these conversations, the thing that surprised me most was just I don't think I've ever heard a student talk at length about really anything outside of my own students. I don't have kids. So it's it's just fascinating to hear someone else's perspective, to either think the same things I think or offer something that I would have never thought of before. And it helps us think about, well, what will we change in the future? What can we do? What initiatives can we act on as a result of these conversations, which is where we'll take it, further? We'll get that in a second. But I do wanna introduce our social media team. So we're we're gonna go around, talk about, who you are, why you joined the conversation, and just, you know, what has your experience been like so far in this process? I know some of you have hosted conversations. You could talk about that.

Speaker 3 Just, you know, run with it. So I'm Leah. And, I actually heard about a 100 dates through my school community portal, where one of the professors at my school posted about it. And I thought it was really interesting, and I did some research. And then, I saw that it was a good opportunity for me to to learn more about education, and especially The US educational system, which I don't know much about as a European. So I thought it was a great opportunity to know about that and to hear a lot of different voices. I've always been very passionate about education. I've had the chance to have a really great education myself, and I've always helped in classrooms. And I've been surrounded by educators my whole life because of my parents. And so I thought this was a good opportunity to kind of hear everyone's voices, especially youth voices, hear the different perspectives, and to see how like, what you can make out of these new perspectives and what can come out of it. And then I actually hosted a conversation, and that was a really, really interesting and fun experience. I mean, it was with with my friends. So I think that made it even more interesting because it was we talked about stuff that we don't talk about on a daily. Or if we do, we never spend a whole hour going into detail about education, what that means to us, and what we hope to see in the future. So really having a platform and the time to do that helped us get to know each other a lot better and just opened my eyes to a lot of the opinions that my classmates have and to a lot of, like, similarities that we have, but also the differences that we had in our past educational system. And I think, all of them were doing a lot of cool work in education as well. So I learned a lot about that. I'm so curious. Like, where did the conversation take you? Where what stood out to you? So one of my friends actually is working on a project of this nonprofit organization here in San Francisco. And their goal is to help teachers is to create a platform that helps teachers teach better during these new, like, COVID times. And so they've been doing a lot of research into what it is that children need to learn online and what it's missing with online teaching and how we can help translate that to teachers. And so the conclusion that was drawn on to that is that it's the community aspect that's really missing. And the community aspect like, a classroom and being all together and just having private moments with your professors or teachers, and that's what we can't really get online. And so,

Speaker 1 it was really interesting to see the ways that they were trying to overcome that issue. Yeah. That's that's so interesting, isn't it? I I think a common theme that's emerged so far from the conversations I've listened to in these first, few has been that that concept of a a third space for students. Many adults will have, like, the coffee shop or the library or the place that they go where they can just go hang out and be with their friends or, you know, do some kind of recreational thing. School is that place for a lot of people. The question has to become, well, one, how do we figure out how to make sure that's the space for all people? Because not everyone feels that way. But then two, in the instance where we shift to online or online works better for some people, etcetera, how can we maintain a third space in electronic format? Because I I think it's possible. There were a few conversations where people shared, like, connecting with people via Zoom and watching stuff together and being with their teacher and just hanging out online. There's a lot we can take away from that. And it'll be really interesting to figure out, you know, what what's shared. Let's move over to Olivia.

Speaker 4 Hi. I'm Olivia Chang. I'm a high school student in the Bay Area. And what initially drew me to a hundred days of conversation was two things. One was the educational aspects, and one was the conversation aspect. So for the educational aspect, I was really interested in equity in education, and I really want to hear about, like, other student and teacher perspectives on the issues in education. And through listening to conversations and having conversations of my own, I've realized that, a lot of people don't have the same resources. Students really want to learn life skills in school and also that we need a lot more learning accommodations for different learning styles in students. Especially during quarantine where some people have to stay home and everything is online, it gets really difficult to have, like, a standard or a good education. And then the other thing was conversations. So something that I've been really interested in, throughout high school or the beginning of my high school experience is polarization. And one thing that I think hundred days of conversation really helps to address is that I feel that a lot of teens my age don't have the core skill to have a discussion. And a lot of the time when I talk with other, like, students and other friends of mine about, about politics, they immediately get really defensive. And sometimes I don't know when I should speak or, when something is too political, for example, that I don't feel comfortable to share my opinion. So I think, like, learning that core skill of discussion is really important. And through hosting conversations, I agree with Leah. I feel like I got so much closer with the people that I actually talked to, especially since they're already my friends, but I really never talked about political issues with them as much. And so I really got to hear their perspectives. I really got to learn from them a lot. Being able to hear others' perspectives about things in an at length conversation,

Speaker 1 I think, is needed now more than ever. It's one thing to be on social media and have your, you know, 240 character hot take. But when you dive deeper into that discussion, you actually hear what people have to say, for the most part, not always, but for the most part, people relate on a pretty deep level about most core issues. And being able to hear that, means a lot. The the process itself has a healing property to it, for us to learn from each other. Yeah. I definitely agree. I think on social media, lot of the time,

Speaker 4 we're like really pressured to have a certain political view, especially where I live right now, which is California and the school that I go to. I think many times a lot of people around me have the same political view and, like, the other political views are really, like, stifled, and it's hard to really talk about politics unless you're in a comfortable open space. For sure. For sure.

Speaker 5 Summer, let's toss it over to you. I'm Summer Fried, and I've worked in social media for about six years now in various capacities with nonprofits, student groups, and then currently in a more corporate setting. Really, the idea of using conversations in this kind of organized manner and then to synthesize that and create change going forward, that's something that was really exciting to me. When I was in college, I got a minor in leadership at the University of Minnesota, and a lot of what we kind of covered was had to do with conversations and asking questions and how that can kind of change people's opinions and how you're gonna get a different result if you have a conversation with someone rather than if you just send out a survey. Kind of that idea of getting a pulse check on where are people right now, like, what are people doing in school, what are they feeling through these conversations rather than just a survey. That was really exciting to me and made me very, yeah, interested in this project. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely come out.

Speaker 1 We'll eventually be publishing, like, excerpts of these. You can follow our social media accounts and hear what people have to say. And the the themes are definitely emerging of this, I guess, human centered, educational experience where people want to feel listened to and they wanna feel welcomed. And many of them are advocating for that and they wanna see that. Before we move on to the next part, we do have one other social media member who can't be here because it's like midnight or 1AM,

Speaker 2 in her time. Yeah. Her name is Nonto Umshalose, and Nonto and I used to work I used to live in South Africa, and she was one of my students back in the day and is now interested in education and wanted to get involved in this project to learn more about this process and about our education system.

Speaker 1 Right. I mean, there's a there's an intentional shift here as well systemically to ensure that student voice is not just a side note in the project, but literal a part of the systemic way that we operate what it is that we're doing. So being able to have you all here honestly, like, makes the entire project. It's it's how we do the things that we're doing and ensure, that we're not going in a separate direction from, this this multigenerational component. So, Aaron, let's talk about that process. Let's talk about what it means to have a conversation by, you know, learning from each other, by talking with each other. Why is it important that we have these conversations at length with both young people and elders as you referred to them.

Speaker 2 I know. Do I do I get to count as an elder? I'm not sure. All the generations. All the generations. Elder. Coming together. Yeah. There are really there are two levels to this process. Right? The the high level is this idea of the macro of getting everybody to have a conversation, being able to bring those ideas together into shared visions, common themes in this moment of intense division to Olivia's point, right, where there's a lot of partisanship. What do we have in common? What can we pull out that we actually can build on together? So there's this high level, everyone has conversations, we're gonna pull that out for policy recommendations and practice recommendations at the end. But then I think the most powerful thing about this process really is that other level is the micro level, is the fact that this is designed at the community level to get people really talking with one another, and that's off of a couple different beliefs about experience that come out of some of my work in social psychology and and their understandings of of humans and behavior change. But it's the transformative power of being able to take time and space for true deep reflection, and and that being deeply listened to is in and of itself healing and allows for new ways of seeing the world. We think that on the whole, again, to Olivia's point, that we are out of practice and that, actually, we are out of practice of having deep conversations. We're on this, you know, to to your point, the 240 character, count discussions, and issues are nuanced. Experiences are diverse, and to really be able to move us forward together, we need to have practice in democratic deliberation. So this is a way of of creating that practice across the country. And then the third part, I think, to the design of the experience itself is that the questions are designed to be what in in poetry they might call beautiful questions. They're not questions about, hey. What would you change about your lunchtime at school? Or, you know, what what's going wrong at at your school? How would you change high school? They start out with questions of what's a good life? How do we think about what makes a thriving community? What is the role of school in helping to create those good lives and those good communities? And there is a power to asking questions that, first of all, there's no right answer to. Second of all, as you've all brought up, that we just don't talk about very often, but actually are core to our human experience in in our lives, and that offer us the opportunity to think of new ways and new ways of getting there. That's not the tactic, it's it's the vision. Right? So I think those are and then I think to your point, Chris, that this whole process centers young people in the conversation, and I think we don't do that enough, particularly considering young people are the ones experiencing school. It it blows my mind to think about how little we actually hear about the experience directly from people having it in in our school redesign. Yeah. I mean, that that whole concept of feeling deeply listening to and and having conversations at school at length, I'm curious from

Speaker 1 our any of our social media folks, Have do you feel deeply listened to in school? I mean, many of you are either in school or recently out of, you know, k 12. Do you feel deeply listened to?

Speaker 4 Well, I'm in high school right now, and I'm really appreciative that my school really listens to student voice and has a lot of student led discussions about the school. And I really enjoy, especially in quarantine, the school has constantly been adjusting and changing to accommodate for teachers, students, parent opinions about how, school is going, and they have school wide surveys to ask how, like, for example, at home learning is going. And I really appreciate that, and I think that that's really important for people to have that since education can really influence your whole life and influence your job, influence your family, and everything. And that connects back to what Erin said about how, like, school can really dictate a good life and a good community. So I think that's one of the reasons that I'm really interested in education. It's the equity part and how just having a good education can really dictate where your life goes.

Speaker 3 I was thinking that in my high school, I thought we were very listened to, I thought, and they also had a lot of surveys, and it was a really a process to try and make it better. But then when I came to my university, which is just a completely different teaching style, I realized that there's a lot more that they could do to feel to make us feel listen to because here, every single activity that we have, every single professor or event that we go to, there's some kind of way for us to give our opinions about it. There's some kind of way for us to kind of shape the process for the next year. And so our school is actively seeking our opinions all the time. Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming because you don't think that you specifically have an opinion on this one particular event you went to. But they do, and they always ask us about it. And I think that the fact that they're actively asking asking us, enables us to feel a lot more safe than sharing our opinions, whether it be good or bad, and a lot more safe, to provide some, like, critical, some critical aspects and constructive criticism. Yeah. So I definitely think that it's something that all schools should try to actively seek. And you could probably start doing that, like, from, like, six or seven years old just asking kids how they feel in the classroom or what they would like to see happening differently. And it just little questions that make them feel listened to and you might not realize have a big impact later on.

Speaker 1 For sure. Yeah. That you're you're talking my language. I mean, you could walk into the classroom tomorrow with a Google Form and just have essential questions like, do you feel listened to here? Do you feel safe here? How can I help you better? These questions that both range from an academic perspective of, you am I teaching you effectively to, like, a social emotional well-being perspective, whereas do you feel like you're treated in a fair way, that kind of stuff. And when you hear that kind of feedback, that really is what guides your next steps. And when you have this power of, deep listening where you hear from a lot of students at once and kind of a critical way, but in a meaningful way, it helps guide your practice a lot better than probably most most books will or research studies. It will directly inform, what you can do next.

Speaker 5 Before I move on, Summer, did you have any thoughts? I think it's really interesting hearing from both of you that you did feel pretty, like, listened to to a degree in high school since that was not really my experience. And for context, I graduated from high school in 2013. So I don't know if stuff has changed there since then, but kind of like you were saying, Leah, at a, like, a pretty young age in elementary school, that was, like, the before college, that was kind of the last time that I remember having collaborative sort of discussions. Like, okay. What kind of environment do we want in our classroom? What topics are you interested? What do you wanna study? And then once I got to middle school and high school, it was kind of I don't remember at all ever really being asked kind of what I thought about the experience. So, yeah, very interesting to hear that that's sort of the the stuff you're having. Yeah. That was my experience,

Speaker 1 for context. I graduated not that long before. 2009, I graduated high school. So, yeah, I don't know. Maybe someone was in the water before, like, 2013. But based off of, conversations I've had with most educators, I think that's Oh my gosh. Chris, you're a baby. I am. I'm young. Yeah. You're 30 this year.

Speaker 2 I ask one follow-up question? I'm wondering, I think I think, Summer, you're still working on hosting a conversation. But for for Lea and Olivia, what was the difference for you between the conversation that you've had, with a hundred days of conversations and the experience you have right now of being regularly listening listened to through surveys, etcetera, was there any difference? Or what do you think is the there's probably values and pros and cons for both? I think that a survey doesn't get to the heart of the matter as much as a conversation might, and you don't

Speaker 3 sometimes you fill in a survey because you have to. And while this conversation is something that you everyone is really participating in because they wanna be heard. And so although a survey is a good way to get some opinions, I think it doesn't get as many deeper, and more meaningful opinions that a conversation might. And conversations also yeah. A survey is a one way streak. So a conversation, actually, you bounce off each other's ideas, and you make some, some connections, and you listen to other people. And so from that listening, there can be more, I don't know, like, active engagement and more more can come out of it, I think, than a simple survey. A survey would be good because you can get opinions from a lot of people, but I don't think that you would get as much depth. Yeah. I agree. I think that especially with having a conversation,

Speaker 4 it allows everyone to reflect on their own education, but also what they can do to improve their education and to improve education for others. So I think being able to listen to other people and really having a time to think allows you to time to just think about just education, not about school lunch or anything like that, like a focused conversation. And, also, I agree that, especially with surveys, it's centered around one specific topic. For example, what should the school lunch be, or how can, like, a certain conversation change in the classroom. But just having an open ended conversation where you can, like like Leia said, bounce off ideas and, think think critically really allows for a bunch of different solutions and a bunch of different issues to be addressed. Right. Right. There's there's nuance.

Speaker 1 It's kinda like the exact same way that if you take a multiple choice test, it's definitely a lot quicker. But if you have a conversation with someone about what is it they know, chances are they know a lot more than they're putting on the paper. So it allows us to engage in a much more complex, meaningful thing. That's not to say that surveys are bad. It's just that there's a reason for both, for for both reasons. I have one more question for you, Summer, which is thinking back or even right now, if you had a conversation with your friends from high school, how do you think the hundred days of conversations would go? Like, what do you think would be brought up? So okay. Backtracking a little bit. I I attended a public,

Speaker 5 magnet school for the last few years of elementary school, which is where I made the friends who then were my friends through the end of high school, essentially. And I think kind of seeing that difference between from these slightly more collaborative and, you know, asking students what they're interested in shift to middle school, I remember that was kind of a culture shock for some of us. I remember, like, teachers saying, it's like, those Athenian kids, they don't know how to raise their hand because we came from, like, having discussions to, you know, raise their hand to answer the question. So I'm curious to see if people wanted, like, that sort of environment to continue and kind of, like, what Olivia and Leah, you've said about not having conversations about education until you had a reason to, I don't know yeah. I don't really know what people wanted or what people would have liked to see. Yeah. So I'm I'm really not sure, and that I kind of wanna have that conversation with them now just to see how everybody else felt about our high school experience.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think there's a a meta point to be made right now, which is by not having the conversation and by having a fairly restrictive school environment that doesn't open to those conversations, you have no idea. They might have liked it. They might have not. But I would imagine that just by going through the process, you're going to at least welcome, a more positive reaction to someone's schooling experience, despite anything else that might be going on. So it's it's fascinating. Right? It's really interesting. Let's move into, Aaron, the the post conversation. So we've we've had the conversation. The process really is really cool. And afterwards, we've made a fantastic partnership with Local Voices Network, which is through Cortico, to analyze the conversations.

Speaker 2 What will educators, students, community members be able to do with those tools? What are they used for? This is such a cool partnership and really allows us to take this project to the next level. I think there are two things that come out of the Local Voices, network partnership. First of all, they have an AI transcription software. So when you sign up, you you sign up to partner, then you find a a few young people and a few adults, and you get together. You pick a time, and you sign up on our Calendly basically for a time, which will send you automatically a Zoom link that auto records the conversation. That way, you don't have to deal with downloading or uploading or kind of figuring out how to deal with the auto files. That gets uploaded to Local Voices Network, and it auto transcribes it. We are going to have a collection of hundreds of these conversations and their transcripts from all across the country, and having those transcripts means that we can analyze them. I'm a qualitative researcher by training. I have my PhD in education. Is that we can analyze them for themes. We can look at what comes out of this in terms of saying something meaningful from everybody's conversations. But even more exciting to me is that Local Voices Network allows us to democratize the meaning making process. And I know as a researcher that the power is really in whoever gets to say what was important about what came out of the conversation afterwards. Right? That's where the real power lies, is who gets to say what what was important. And what's amazing about this is every single participant gets access to those transcripts, and they can go in, make highlights. We're gonna have a couple workshops along the way for analyzing and highlighting and and making meaning out of the conversations, which means that young people, families, and educators throughout the entire process will be involved in saying what was important about what came out of their conversations, which then can inform our policy and practice recommendations.

Speaker 1 It also just looks really cool. It it has the ability, even if you're not someone that has a research background, that the AI actually figures out the core themes. Like, it will tell you, hey. This is what they were focusing on here. They were talking about, like, the environment in this section. And you can easily find that in different parts of the thing. It might not come to conclusion for you, but it will certainly give you the overall topics and make it easy to figure out what's going on. As well as those conversation highlights can be shared not only with the people in the conversation, but they work like Google Docs. So you can share them out, show them to other people. I on this podcast, I tend to be very critical of ed tech, because of, some interesting data policies and a lot of, neoliberal gains. But, I will say that based off of Cortico's data consent policy, our own data consent policy, there's nothing weird being shared. You can opt out at any time. We only collect first name, last initial. All the conversations are private on the platform until, someone shares them out, like a like a section of it, I should say. And the again, the the core component of this is giving the tools to students and educators to share their own ideas as opposed to us, like, taking this data and selling it to someone. In fact, the the data, that we're collecting is noncommercial. It can't be sold. So, by contributing to this effort, not only can you kind of participate in the larger a 100 of conversations initiative, you can also focus just on your school. You could collect, you know, 10 conversations at your school and analyze them yourselves and see what comes out of it for for free, which is pretty darn interesting.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I think that brings up a great point, Chris, because we're working with a number of communities and statewide efforts, where people really want a whole district wants to think about their family engagement and student engagement process through this process. And so they're hosting multiple conversations, then we're gonna help them with their batch of conversation at the end of that to make sense of it. I think the other thing that's important, which you touched on, is that we have a consent policy, and it's very clear and that every single participant needs to be part of it. We thought a lot about making sure, again, the power is in the hands of participants, so everybody has access to that in advance, but also signs it before starting so that they know that only their first name and last initial can be shared, that that, you know, kind of what what this can be used for, which is basically only exactly what we've told you all, which is these goals of this project. Right? Which I think that was both of us from different lenses care a lot about making sure that our consent and data policy processes are clear and

Speaker 1 well informed and protective. Right. I mean, the the future of ed tech is using technology to democratize and make a better future as opposed to making a profit. And this conversation piece is meant to do just that. We're here just to listen to people, and we're using some tech tools in order to do so. That's, like, the best of both worlds, and ensure that works. So with that being said, does anyone else have anything to add? Have we missed anything? Anything you wanna throw out there? I think just getting

Speaker 5 the, yeah, the input of people who are currently in the system, currently experiencing school, is super important because, like, even, like, in this conversation, I realized, wow. I've been out of school for a long time. I barely remember what was going on there. And especially with, like, technology and everything changing so fast, there's it's, yeah, essential to kind of have those opinions and see what it's like from the inside because I don't think it's possible to really

Speaker 4 distill what that experience is without hearing from people who are experiencing it. I think another thing about the benefit of just having a conversation is going back to the self reflecting thing, just being able to see what you'd want to change in the educational process and then giving your opinion will help other people's education become better and also your own become better. So just even thinking about education and thinking about what's good in your education, what some other people may not experience, and some things that you think would better your education. And having if you have the resources to have this conversation, you can definitely help other people in the process.

Speaker 1 Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast. I hope that this conversation leaves you inspired and right to push the progressive envelope of education. You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.