 What is most important for kids to learn in school, our commitment, it isn't about knowledge acquisition anymore and it isn't about standards or things that you need to cover to get all kids to kind of know what they're supposed to know because there's too much to be known. I mean we keep reinventing whole fields of science and so how is it that we can say what you need to know as a 10-year-old to be successful when you're 40? We have no idea. So what we need instead is to focus and be committed to these habits. So habits like systems thinking, critical thinking and problem solving, being able to know yourself and develop that emotional intelligence and self-regulation skills and then develop those collaboration skills and theory of mind to work with other people developing perspective taking and then that enables you to be an effective member of a group and work as part of a team. So you can then galvanize people and develop into leadership right develop into being able to initiate and solve problems. So there's these kind of capacities in in that regard these habits of mind that is the commitment. Boom what's up everyone welcome to Simulation I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We are in the beautiful Winchester, Massachusetts. We are at a Sarah's school and we're going to be talking about the schools and education of the future. We have Courtney Dickinson joining us on the show hello. Hi. Thanks so much for coming on the show really appreciate it. Well thank you for being here. It's such a pleasure Courtney is the founder and director of a Sarah's school which is a non-profit STEAM school serving high-ability students in grades K through 8. Their mission is to inspire children to become the problem solvers innovators creative thinkers and leaders of tomorrow catalyzing education innovation around the world. They believe that school should catalyze students passions free their potential and inspire a sense of purpose and their motto is the Massachusetts School of Science creativity and leadership and you can find a sarahschool.org and the link in the bio as well as additional links to them and Courtney. I'm so excited to cover the subject it's been super fun having a tour of the school seeing the innovation lab the tech hub the kids that are just absorbing the cutting-edge science and creativity and leadership skills of the future here. You got 130 of them running around here it's super fun seeing it. Let's start things off. We'll get to all of the great nuance of it. I love starting things off by asking the people that we feature about what their thoughts are about the direction of our world. That's a big question. Well obviously I think about everything through the lens of the next generation who will make the world hopefully better right and I think something that's so important is that our this next generation of young people really feel empowered and knowledgeable and skillful and really really brave to attack things and solve problems because you know we've we've got a lot of messes we've got a lot of messes with climate with diplomacy with there's an unending opportunity to work on health and well-being and these are the people who can help us with that and so we need to be really conscious and intentional about what experiences they're having and the habits they're patterning from throughout their childhood and in school and outside of school so they can be the people who they're going to need to be to help our world and also so that they can become the best version of themselves so we want to create habits and patterns that are then when they show up on the scene as a 35 year old and a 55 year old they're they're they're rocking and rolling so I think that we we have a world with a lot of a lot of really big challenges that don't have answers and so we need we need students who are used to asking big questions struggling with hard things having things not work coalescing all kinds of different information and figuring out what is relevant and matters and and having the courage to try something even if it's not clear what that right answer will be so that's just because the world needs needs that we need them yes I love how you talk about it from a perspective of patterns and habits how do we get the patterning and habit of wanting to explore what their intrinsic motivations are having the tool sets and the resources around them to fulfill those interests of them to tackle some of these hardest challenges that we face to figure out how to have a global cohesion around moving forward into this exponential technology age there's so many critical things that you're outlining here and a Sarah schools totally is doing exactly that and so it does it makes sense that you're also trying to scale this out to public education around the world and your journey is also very interesting because you went you went to Dartmouth and then you did culture architecture at Sapien corporation you were the founder of culture solutions a teacher corporate executive consultant but you were really inspired by finding your own children a cutting-edge curriculum in schools yeah so when I was in college I also got certified to be a teacher so I'm certified for kindergarten to grade eight I thought that's what I would do and I kind of you know had a lot of friends getting jobs in investment banking and and finance and and I kind of had this sort of seemingly humble desire to be a teacher and because I wanted to make the world better and it was tough to get jobs you know I looked for a long time I had in a position and I kind of ended up by accident at a software company but it was a company that actually imbued the things that I believed in for education in schools in a corporate setting it just had a different word so instead of calling it cooperative learning it called it team-based projects right and there was an amazing opportunity to really think about how to enable adults to take the perspective of other people as they create its software systems to not just make it cool but actually make it relevant for the client's needs and then that turned into a whole journey of five years there creating experiential learning programs that thousands of people went through and then I created my own company to do that work for 10 years and for high growth organizations and one of the patterns that I saw so often was that it is always hard for people to develop their emotional intelligence and self-regulation and self-awareness skills this is tough our whole lives yes and another huge pattern I saw was how often adults were not able to think at a systems level we see our own issue and the own problems and we think the grass is greener and so just this awareness of wow we really need to start early with developing that emotional intelligence and developing that systems thinking skill back when I'd been in college I thought oh one day maybe I'll found my own school after my kids go to college and then you know I had children and it was it was it was really going very very badly the mismatch between at that time my son was you know young in school as kindergarten first grade the mismatch between what he needed and what was happening in school was so dramatic yeah and just he had extraordinary potential but was really struggling and to realize gosh if I don't actually engage he could he could do amazing things in the world or he might end up in prison which sounds kind of like a joke but I'm completely serious and I think that really what you want school to be is a place where kids can actually know their strengths and identify for their strengths and then use that to shore up their weaknesses we all have weaknesses and have an individual approach for how that happens that fits them and you know they're all unique but we need to have schools be places where there isn't a ceiling put on them in terms of developing what they can and if a kid loves math and is wondering about negative exponents when they're seven we need to have a platform where they can actually engage on that because that kid maybe a kid who when they're 37 can really come up with something unique around climate change and everybody has their passion and everybody has strengths so let's create schools where kids can actually identify and flourish in those areas of strength and then work on whatever it is they need to work on because some kids when they don't have that chance they have this voracious desire they may be distractible or impulsive or they just need to learn hands on that what ends up happening is they actually turn in on themselves or they turn out on each other and school becomes a place where they become depressed anxious they refuse to go to school so we actually have this crisis of what's going on in education that kids all over even in incredible public school districts we have kids who are facing just tremendous issues of depression and anxiety all through school you know middle school and high school sometimes starting at 10 what and we need to really take a hard look at ourselves as adults and as educators and as a society what are we doing in school that's making this worse now of course we've got the news right we've horrendous school shootings we've got climate change we've got of course it's going to create anxiety but what are we doing in schools that we can change so that we actually get the best of kids we really create a path where they can thrive and have a sense of purpose at school so what they're learning is meaningful because right now we don't mean to but what we're doing is we're sending this message that's kind of like become this cultural norm to say oh it's so sad it's you've only got two more weeks and you have to go back to school enjoy those last days of summer you know ha ha ha and it's kind of like a shared bonding of of course school is terrible what you know and we're not we don't even it's like we don't realize we're doing it when in fact this privilege this time in our lives when our number one focus is developing ourselves and our skills and learning and figuring things out is kids are innately curious this is an amazing gift um let's let it be that in school every day for every child that's possible it is possible for kids to have a deep sense of purpose to know that what they're learning and why it matters to be able to initiate a project and you know do passion projects in school and solve problems that are relevant in their community um we so you know going to a bunch of different school districts superintendent school committees mayors trying to found a school with these ideals of hands-on projects open-ended problem solving systems thinking skill development early and deep exposure to STEM topics because that's the world we're in they need to just take on this goes kids can understand so much more than what we give them credit for yes and so if we put it in early they just they become facile they just soak it up and they get it it's amazing what they can do and figure out if we give them a chance right yes so I tried to get this going inside a different public school districts it kept not being able to happen for a variety of reasons and um and there was a sense that it wasn't a realistic goal um and then I was really sad to realize I needed I'm so committed to public education and so are all the teachers who work here and the families who come to the school are also really deeply saddened by the fact that they left public education because their kids needs weren't getting mad or they couldn't be the teacher they wanted to be so we had to do something different so what I realized was we needed to become a catalyst for change yes from outside the system yes instead of inside it um and so here we are and now we're a decade into this journey of having a school that is this vibrant organism and kids it every time new people come in and new hires come in they they're stunned you know we announce a snow day or you know we're not gonna have school because it's a report card writing and the even the middle schoolers are sad about not coming to school um you know and the kids negotiate with their parents can we please schedule this appointment so I don't miss my philosophy elective I want to be a school and this is a kid who never wanted to go to school his entire life and now for the first time you know joining our school as a sixth grader because what he's learning is really interesting and it's really relevant and he gets to do a debate and put put a revolution on trial and find out if actually it was a real revolution and learn you know so there's there's ways to bring this alive in all schools and and our commitment is to show it's possible by being here and being a microcosm of that and then figure out which approaches are portable into public education that it it isn't about money it's about approach it's about philosophy and we really started to do that work and and that's been our goal the whole time is is bring that into public schools and share with them what's what's possible you had a need to fill and it was the old code that is present in the existing educational infrastructure is archaic and it needed to be updated and sometimes you have to almost now it seems to be always you have to go outside of the system build something a new mental model new code is possible prove something different is possible and you can update the old educational code by obsolete it with this new code this new system and so I love that you had that passion to start a school yourself to prove that and then furthermore you gave us these examples of okay a kid is super passionate about a subject when they're seven years old why is there a limiting why is there a ceiling on that subject that's ridiculous this child explorative desires should be fulfilled no matter which part of the edge they want to go to and explore and keep pushing then you use two other words that I think are super important here you used two other thoughts one of them was self-awareness so to be able to foster whatever that unique DNA is of that child to have their fruits be fully come alive in the world is critical and so it requires them to be able to play and figure out who they are and have other mentors and teachers community parents helping them fully realize that and also systems thinking so actually understanding that the humans just like jammed between the crazy atoms and molecules and the solar systems and the cosmos so it's just this what are these systems and the design of civilization that we live in and how do we get that to a child's mind at a very young age and you've even you've even put together over 10 years this has developed this idea of transforming education having these intrinsic motivations be explored these real world problems be tackled steam but not only science technology engineering art and math for everyone but specifically also for young girls and and the 10 tools to transform schools so it's both behind your head as well as here and we're going to have a nice digital embed of this as well for you to check out as we continue unpacking this throughout I love this creativity and systems thinking leadership and EQ science is an innovation this is so beautiful so yes so walk us through this sort of 21st century toolkit these yeah these cores so so the backdrop behind that is that what is most important for kids to learn in school our commitment it isn't about knowledge acquisition anymore and it isn't about standards or things that you need to cover to get all kids to kind of know what they're supposed to know because there's too much to be known I mean we keep in reinventing whole fields of science and so how is it that we can say what you need to know is a 10 year old to be successful when you're 40 we have no idea so what we need instead is to focus and be committed to these habits so habits like systems thinking critical thinking and problem solving being able to know yourself and develop that emotional intelligence and self-regulation skills and then develop those collaboration skills and theory of mind to work with other people developing perspective taking and then that enables you to be an effective member of a group and work as part of a team so you can then galvanize people and develop into leadership right develop into being able to initiate and solve problems so there's these kind of capacities in in that regard these habits of mind that is the commitment when you free yourself up from thinking you're supposed to cover a certain set of content right that's been an old debate about is there a canon of knowledge it tended to be too western well there there isn't there there's we also can free ourselves up from thinking the teacher has to know all of that and teach it to kids so what we need to do instead is redefine the role of teachers to say that their job is to facilitate the students to have discovery and learning in the classroom through experiences that matter to the kids right now this is a very different job so the role of the teacher becomes much less about teaching specific things and becomes much more about asking the right questions and then coaching into where kids are and then bringing the right resources in so bring in the thought leaders beam in this scientist you can talk about why this application of CRISPR to edit gene is to edit a gene is appropriate with what's happening in the landscape of genomics and life sciences I don't have to know that as a teacher and and once you can free yourself up from an identity that is about courses and coverage suddenly you're actually focused on what's going to engage kids and that they they actually end up retaining much more of the skills and the knowledge when it's been when they've learned it in a context where they have meaningful projects they're working on so I think there are but it's it's kind of like it's just it's a reframe and in that reframe is a massive amount of freedom for teachers and students to capitalize on what's present for for each kid to engage authentically yeah and one of these keys that you said is that the teacher teachers and parents and community mentors are facilitating discovery for young people the awareness expansions these experiences for young people to be able to fully realize what they want to learn and what they want to do in our world and just these these transformative tools that you have here I think are what we need around the world to become more I know you said canon isn't necessarily the right way of perceiving it but at the same time we need to just be blunt and honest that leadership in EQ just absolutely that's what matters it it just it's the what matters and you know science and innovation how do you come up with the solutions to the problems if we're not focused on that and creativity systems thinking so yeah science in the absence of creativity isn't real science and I've learned that from some of the incredible curriculum collaborators we've worked with over the years but one of the you know so you said you asked me earlier to unpack these different yes so so one of the core ideas that I think could happen at every school is this idea of an individual learning plan for every student so it fits their interests their potential and the end there and their needs so their unique learning profile and it's a dynamic so it can adjust if their interest so at the start of the year doing assessments for kids not stressful assessments some of them are observational um they're qualitative they're not timed to find out where what is a child next ready to learn or do in writing in reading in math in emotional intelligence and perspective taking um and then that core classroom teacher can work with that student and their parents to come up with the right individual learning plan that fits appropriate learning goals for them this year the most complicated learning goals are usually around the emotional intelligence realm right um so so that's a really core concept one of the things that then links to that just as an example is having an ability-based math block so in our school we have kids take math at the same time as each other so that based upon the evaluations of where kids are what they're next ready for and their learning style they can be put into a math group they switch classes and everybody's on on deck to teach math um not everybody but um a lot of teachers are teaching math so it isn't just the math teacher teaches math and that's probably the most traditional part of our school because it's an hour-long class but that way if kids are more project-based learners and need a really deeply applied approach in this kind of third fourth grade set of of things that they should be learning then they can be in another a group of kids who learn best with that type of approach and then you also call this multi-age yes these are all so the classrooms themselves are multi-age the learning in the core classroom is um around a theme with essential questions and lots of projects woven in some of which are pre-planned that a teacher knows it are going to happen some of which are spontaneous based upon a student's idea um and uh but then in the math class they are there they can also be working potentially above grade level or even substantially above grade level whatever that means anyways um to fit what they're ready for so they're not held back when you're getting another powerful thing in the core classroom if you're doing open-ended projects um that are around themes and essential questions then let's you know gosh what's a what's a good example um in let's say the theme for the year this is an example from a third and fourth grade classroom a couple years ago the themes for the year were around climate change and the industrial revolution so kids were doing research about different aspects of climate change they ended up picking a particular topic they were passionate about it really cared about they were they got into groups they came up with answers to climate change they created you know a model they did a report they did a power point they did some persuasive writing and they kind of published newspaper articles um and then they did kind of an expo where their parents came in and got to rotate around and have each student pitch this is what's going on in climate change these are some of our answers this is some of the relevant research and current work but these are some of our creative solutions so these kids are you know eight nine and ten um and incredibly facile with all the complexities now this project happened over the course of months right and it touches every subject area science is related to writing is related to persuasive speaking is related to representing things in pictorial and movie and different formats and it's meaningful so then if I as a student struggle with organization and writing I'm really motivated to work on that because I want to make my pitch about why we've got to address this issue with co2 release from cars or too many cows and you know that we need to address the issue with with that um I'm passionate about it um and suddenly I actually start to care about applying these strategies that my teachers coaching me on for writing in a coherent way because I need to I need to convince people that this should be different um so that's a couple quick questions okay so within the classrooms within the school there is both the multi-age um as well as the uh the different learning styles so ones that want to gravitate towards a specific style of learning can engage with other students no matter which age in that specific style of learning uh and then there's also the peer-to-peer mentorship and the working together on parts that they may not understand they can get assistance with but then I also really loved the multi-month project based on a real world problem a real world problem and then being able to work on the skills of the persuasive speaking writing science all mashed together and then when it's so interesting because then when they when they're getting out actually into the world they're speaking about those things they're uh they're working on those projects so it all it seems to basically take potentially a list of the top 10 challenges that society faces and have kids do project-based work in the schools about the real challenges of our time yeah so themes that you see coming up over and over again in our school are around climate and sustainability and environment um you see it that just comes up across all the time kids bring it up um in our kind of world geography and interconnectedness elective and middle school they end up doing these pitches about about that another huge thing that comes up all the time is um inclusion social justice and voice and courage to address those needs and issues and and how we can be we can initiate change and be activists in those ways and those themes again touch all over the place so another example that's going on right now in a grade 2 3 classroom in the building they have a um this solar city box project so it's box city is kind of what it is so they're creating these cute little boxes they're little you know they're adorable children making things three-dimensional very very cute okay they're also making them solar they're planning out the whole community and then they get into campaigns so what is you know kids are making persuasive speeches about part of our climate commitment and contract in our city will be this and then they pitch to each other the ideas of what they want represented in these tenants that they then have to agree to so they're getting real world problems persuasive speaking they have to back up their ideas with evidence that and then they need to come up with an agreement together this is really hard but this is absolutely real world and then they're building these beautiful beautiful things that they love and are excited and they're measuring them and they're making them to scale and they're modeling them and um they're thinking about all the different people who would live there and so that's you know that's another example of a of a real world project and I think the power is that me as the head of the school I'm not going in and saying uh-oh you know you're supposed to be on this page or you're supposed to be covering this content that was a natural outgrowth of interest that the kids had passion that the teacher has and and then they can weave in again right the writing and the coaching and the learning that needs to happen in context in a way that really gives power and freedom and autonomy to the teacher and yes that student may write a longer sort of research persuasive piece about why this needs to be one of the tenants then that student is because they're in different places so all open-ended meaningful projects that are long term are a natural kind of format for differentiated instruction to occur in a classroom and you just create language for you know a student might say how come you're really encouraging me to write a whole page about this topic and you know you're only encouraging him to write three sentences and very quickly the teacher can just say because you can you're able to do that and the student says okay you know and so it very I think that's one of the fears we can have is that if we have different assignments or different expectations for kids that it's not fair or they'll feel bad or it's not consistent but consistency is actually the wrong goal that the real goal should be knowing yourself knowing your own limitations your own strengths and being able to ask for help where you're weak growing where you're weak um and that there's again there's freedom in that so kids by the end of being here at school you know we had a student one year at the kind of they create their graduation um she gave a speech and she said well you know I'm still not I when I came here I wasn't great with social cues and I I didn't have a lot of friends and it was really really disorganized she goes I mean my stuff is in totally organized in together now but at least it's not flying off into the sunset right it's 150 people sitting there everybody laughs she's she's good timing she's funny she's you know and you just see that kind of acceptance of self and the courage that that brings then she can advocate when she gets to high school hey these are the kind of sports I need for my profile and this is what I can offer um so that kind of constant development of emotional intelligence and self-regulation in all kinds of ways so when a teacher is doing this work let's say there's a um um um they're doing a unit around marble around magnetism and electricity and creating a game using these components I'm playing with those materials so when the teacher is working with kids the teacher is just as likely to coach into where those kids are with creating that game about taking turns with ideas and doing active listening as they are to really think about how the magnetism works and how the electricity works so that kind of constantly going back and forth between the teaching and the coaching around emotional intelligence and that medic cognition level is woven in all the time across every topic every day and that's a method of learning that's one of the tools in our toolkit about um self-regulation and emotional intelligence growth yes yes so that's I wanted to hit on that and just on the way to that there was uh there's there's this interesting balance that seems to need to be struck when talking about consistency and uh and uniqueness because we have yeah because we have this unique DNA that we want every child to express to their fullest their full creative potential their own fruits that they can bring to our world while simultaneously there's some sort of a level of basic language that needs to be learned to communicate between humans just these types of things right so so there's kind of a little balance there also uh as you were as you're speaking it it not only does it then make sense to take on something like a do you do this in your in your in in pretty much in high school when you're finishing classes in college when you're fishing classes when you're doing a thesis right you you're basically taking something on that you're fascinated with and that you're doing a presentation a summary of what so to be able to do something like your own graduation project is something that seems to be really exciting engaging you started hitting on the emotional intelligence and perspective taking how it's basically embedded in the conversations like the turn taking this type of stuff give us some more of these emotional intelligence eq examples yeah okay so another example uh where there's concurrence between the academic learning and growth with this kind of emotional intelligence growth would be you know classic examples in a math class where one of the tricky things is kids can get into habit of thinking that the purpose of school and being in classes to show what they know when in fact we want them to be in the habit of showing that they can learn which is very different um so part of what was a breakthrough it's a breakthrough for many kids is when you know they're ready maybe for some say some algebra content but their organizational skills and their writing skills aren't yet solid enough for them to be able to express um that we need to proactively teach growth mindset what that is what it looks like what it doesn't look like and give them phrases and then while they're then trying to learn how to write out things we go back and forth with as math coaches and math teachers to say okay this is how you do this now remember you need to show me that you're able to stick with it even when it's difficult that you're asking for help where you're struggling that you are um the vulnerability yeah that you're showing what you don't know because then you're coachable to learn new things and so you can that expressly was taught that was a breakthrough moment for my son in particular when he was a seventh grader when that was taught in new ways and then he said okay got it he started his his frontal lobe starts to come in he's able to have a little bit more self-regulation and so much better to do at seventh grade then as adults right but that was the breakthrough for him is really manifesting growth mindset concurrent with learning algebra that he was able to get to a whole new level as a mathematician which he was very motivated about but the the self-regulation is much harder for most people so that's that's one example another example is in a literature book club group that part of what you're doing in that conversation is not just talking about text-to-text connections and the characters and the development and the rise and fall of the storyline and storyboarding but you're also talking about the emotional life of the character and the complexities that they're getting in and then you might even use those as analogies for some conflicts kids have had on the playground at the school and then you can pop out of the conversation about the book to maybe do some conflict resolution that fits real life um you know and you then can also get on the balcony of the conversation to not just have the conversation but also talk about how you're having the conversation so kids are really developing skill in their conversation while they're in their literature book club group again so you're getting into that met a cognitive level concurrently these are things teachers know how to do can do and I think when you free them up from thinking it's about coverage or being in a certain place then they have time to do that deeper work um so that that's those are those are two examples I can go on and on with examples of emotional intelligence concurrent with academic growth yes and to be able to identify things like the importance of a growth mindset and grit and perspective taking and these emotional intelligence skills at very young ages is critical and I'm so in love with the 10 tools to transform schools I mean this is so great and I want to now I want to I want to move us into how you're also not only doing this at a Sarah for the 130 students year but you're taking this to transform public schools around the United States and hopefully around the world that's our goal yeah so yeah I know I love it yeah it's small I love it the big goals yeah yeah yeah no no small goal I love it I love it and it's definitely time for it and okay so let's talk about how um you're doing these public school teacher trainings yeah and you were blowing my mind when you were even saying oh life sciences education let's have the kids uh start doing gene editing with crisper and I was like I was like that's what's up let's get to that level yeah okay so so we're really um you know it's incredible that we're here in Boston so close to so much incredible innovation in in the science technology engineering fields and so when I founded the school a commitment from the beginning was let's leverage that let's have thought partners who are really innovating in their fields come into the school let's bring them in and figure out how to weave together learning with what is happening in the world that is relevant optics engineering for climate change you know crisper and gene editing technology for life sciences and health human health um but then the fact that we're so lucky to be able to do that let's figure out let's up the ante and also come up with an approach which could scale to other schools so over these last years in our life sciences lab that is a lab-based approach um we have been pilot testing a whole bunch of different hands-on science units that when you put them together there's now 11 units that we are ready to really translate a line to standards and bring into the public school space to really reinvent the way life sciences education is happening um now we're we're bootstrapping that again a little bit um so when I founded the school I knew how to galvanize people I didn't have any money I founded it with a powerpoint and a promise and going to public libraries and here we are you know proving that this is possible even though we didn't have any money to get going and so um but now with the education innovation work we're in a little bit of that same space again because we can't help ourselves there's such a sense of justice and fairness about every kid should be able to engage hands on in science class doing real work in this way so we went ahead um and we created a life science change agent workshop series and we had our first one in the winter um we had three days we we have you know educators from seven different school districts were part of that first-ever workshop training and now those teachers are in their high school biology classrooms um running experiments kids are having that experience of editing a jane with crisper having the conversation around what this means it is linked to next generation science standards about what they should be learning which gives teachers permission to spend time on this hands-on lab instead of worrying that they're not covering what they're kind of obligated to cover and um and then they have the conversation about ethics around it um part of what we were able to do in that day was bring the kids into a life sciences company where they actually talked to scientists who are doing this research and learning so that teachers can these science teachers are so excited to link learning to real-world innovation but they need help they want the support um so this is um we have our next cohort group starting at next month in the end of june and this is the kind of thing we look to really grow to have many cohorts um and to be able to add on all these other units the next you know we're adding is about skin microbiome sampling within the context of skin microbiome sampling over time you can actually see evolution happening within your own skin microbiome um incredibly cool and there's so many other things that can be taught about that and then the data tracking um so that's one example another example is uh the stem coordinator um stem director in the low public schools which is a um urban school district about 45 minutes north of austin um came and sought us out a couple of years ago then we were able to bring a whole group of school leaders including a bunch of their principals from that district into our building in the fall um and we were really thinking that we'd end up focusing on they kind of the initial request was hey we want to start a makerspace we hear you have a lot of makerspace stuff can we come into our school and so now what we've turned it into is that group of leaders came from that school district and they said wow we don't want to just do different makerspace things you're doing we actually do all we're doing and so what we've been able to define is a three-year whole school transformation effort where over the course we'd start with some of these units um we call them seeds science storytelling engineering where you're connecting up different electronics and design and um hacking with electricity and and and micro computers and robotics to make things so there's a right answer but there but you're tethering together imagination and story and creating something that's beautiful with design process and prototyping and making mistakes and fixing it to stem tools so this is a really powerful this particular program this seeds makerspace program can really start with kids at age five um it goes up through grade 12 and it's a really wonderful way to capture girls into these STEM topics early so our kind of our innovator who has is kind of the lead person in that area of our school is from the MIT Media Lab she used to be a fashion designer she was briefly in medical school she did all these things and she actually came from india to the MIT Media Lab with the goal of coming up with low cost ways for this to happen so it could be scalable so that's always in our minds eye of how to do things that are makerspace related that can be scaled so so that that's the start but these things can all link to standards they link to story they link to writing they link to math right um and and so that's what we're going to do we just did our first unit with that's with this k to eight school that we're going to do this three-year effort for last week and their entire staff was there for this training learning how to do toy hacking learning how to do um there were there were a few other stations we had with them one was I think about tech hub and respectful disassembly where you're getting in and understanding things and and then hacking them and creating new things out of it um and the teachers loved it so so they started off I mean you know it's it's they want to go home it's um and then they they really their faces lit up um they they love these opportunities and we made it you make it doable to bring this in you don't have to know all the answers as a teacher you but you're creating hands-on learning so that seeds is kind of one of these these 10 tools for schools that then is an entry point for a whole bunch of other things that can get you can get computer science tethered to that we have a whole computers and me curriculum for k to grade three that includes some seed stuff some physical computing and tech hub take apart but a cute idea within that is that within thinking about the different communication styles that exist uh in all people and things a computer you learn that you need to best communicate with someone else the way that we're for them and one of those things is that is a computer so then you think about logic-based communication yes and then you back into starting to you the some of these basic computer science ideas around logic loops around um you know drag and drop interfaces for young kids using scratch using other tools uh uh so that is connecting up again social-motion learning with computer science education so that's another one of our sectors is computer science and that's one example of the kinds of curriculum we've been doing here that we want to bring alive you guys are totally systems thinkers and you can tell by the way that you speak it's like you don't just know how to speak to other humans based on how well what they works for them in terms of communication style but how do you communicate with computers how do you communicate with other natural systems like animals in our world um and then further it was so cool hearing you talk about how it's taking the your 10 tools to transform schools and being able to bring that to other low income or urban schools and slowly get teachers that come to the sessions going like whoa yes these are the types of things that we need around the world across the different across these different subjects fields plus also taking that and kind of it's you're doing the slow getting to the different schools uh one at a time in person but also to do things like be able to include conversations that are currently being had at the united nations level at the corporations around the world that are some of the largest ones around things like ethics around CRISPR technologies right around genetic engineering you gotta run up a whole chain to really capture all these different kinds of learners because some if the meaning and the context that is really big is what's going to make them then focus on the details right but also you need to do that to set them up to be the citizens and innovators for the world who we need so it's you've got to run up and down the whole the whole playing field yes and to i'm really looking forward to also there's a lot of digital potential as well a lot of what we do is eye to eye face to face you know small group multi-age right in the in the communities and learning simultaneously if you if there is more and more potential for having an internet connection and a computer from around the world to be able to get other teachers from around the world how can we scale this yes it's a huge part of what we think about i think that the thing that we are doing that we're starting to pilot test and it's it's it's kind of a philosophy the thing that's the most scalable the most quickly i would say is this notion of a school success dashboard so a lot of schools are starting to think a little bit about that back in the 90s we called it a balanced scorecard approach that it's not just profitability for a company well the analogy for schools is that it isn't just standardized testing of basic literacy and basic math and then absences we need to be tracking there are other things we we kids need to be learning we need to have new ways to measure those things and we need to as these adults on point for the this next generation hold ourselves accountable for more than just these basic skills so what are the ways that we can track collaboration skill development over time so working with um peter blake who's a developmental psychologist at the b.u. social learning lab that we have the system thinking game which can also be used as a collaboration skill assessment tool so that's something that we're looking at could we translate this and grow this that's one example another example is one of our partners is the mit dolly llama center and huge focus on self-awareness and mindfulness and ethics and ethical decision-making right but they've but there's a tool that they've developed that we started to pilot test it with our kids here um which is kind of self-awareness about emotional states and it's kind of if one way to think about it if you roll that up it's a marker for happiness right so that's the kind of thing we'd love to see a happiness marker populate a school success dashboard that we're looking at across schools all over because we have kids even you know whether it's because of fear of gun violence or not having breakfast before school or they're buried under a tremendous amount of homework and pressure um you know that's the kind of the misery of school so i may be performing well by my standard as test scores but if i'm miserable i'm not that is not there isn't there isn't a tracking and an accountability for well-being so we're trying to figure out what would those measures be and how can we change the conversation everywhere about what matters in school and add new measures that we can collect data around so i think happiness is one of them and that's really real and i think i think we all kind of know that from our own experience but then once you have a child who's in school who's miserable i think your sense of urgency around this topic just escalates in such a dramatic way but if we can have you know come up with five key measures and even if we start having a groundswell of students who are saying my happiness matters this is what's going on yes i'm a straight a student at whatever great you know high school but i'm miserable and i'm upset um it's it's it's a big deal so there's some health surveys that are required by law to do there's a um a tracking around that so one of the local ones it was through the lehi health center they did some mental health tracking and they track habits risk youth behavior risk survey and one of them is around depression and um incidents of that and incidents of kids who are thinking about and have created a plan for suicide the numbers are shocking um we need to we need to look at that and we need to start measuring that in a systematic way we need to start really thinking about that um and one of the answers for that i think we put into our self kind of emotional regulation is is probably around intentionally and i think lots of people talk about this but it's about doing it right embedding mindfulness and strategy for that into school it's there's some incredible data that's come out about a difference it makes but you need to also pair that with reducing homework loads so if you look at what's indicated by there isn't a ton of research about it but what is you know what's the amount of numbers of hours of homework you should have in middle school and high school a lot of kids are having three and four hours of homework at night which is counterproductive it's actually harmful and i you know i think the american academy of pediatrics in some of their research they're really saying you reach diminishing returns anyways after two hours um yet it's almost like a badge of i'm in a good school or a badge for a teacher sometimes or the risk is that parents will say they need more homework to be ready um and it's the wrong like let's actually track those hours and let's have a goal be set that matches with the literature about what's healthy for these children so there's you know but that's another it's a massive opportunity to change what we're defining as the purpose of school if we're saying part of the purpose of school is to help kids be able to filter lots of information and know what's most important and solve and call less complicated ideas to initiate and solve problems then we need to change the way school happens because it's not about time to test it's not about showing the work the way that you were told but that could be that scalable we could start there we can have a different conversation all together yeah and to be able to have breathing space for creativity and exploration is critical and also that taking something like the 10 tools to transform schools and taking that to um in scaling it around the world to get at least the essences of the importance of emotional intelligence yes and this is so crucial because especially there's so much potential for places around the world to leapfrog in terms of the technology stacks so just as an example it's so interesting to potentially think about what it would be like for countries around the world that are still in the process of of developing themselves economically to be able to to transform up their their their their banking and payment infrastructures through decentralized infrastructures through the cryptocurrency infrastructures other things like could they potentially start genetic engineering at even before some of the advanced more developed nations do you also mentioned new measurements of well-being being something that's so critical we keep seeing this is a reoccurring theme in the political discourse around the world that we're kind of sick of just GDP and stock market of just being the the sole measures because we see that why are there what's going on with anxiety and depression and suicide why are those things so prevalent how are they related to social media use and how can we just better be able to apply mindfulness meditation these sorts of ancient practices multi-thousand-year-old practices into our lives and lives of our children to gain us a stronger global cohesion these are such pressing themes and i'm i'm looking forward to continuing to to visit what acera is doing and helping you with scaling these these these processes these tools these ways of thinking to people around the world and and i know that we'll continue having more conversations because you are just so incredible like i loved when you were talking about the story of like i was there no one i had a vision no one really you know 10 years ago it's like i have a powerpoint i have this vision and it's so hard to you know after 10 years see a school with 130 students in it that's bad ass oh well thank you are awesome oh you're really nice thank you you are so this is like this is the story this like a quintessential story of like 10 years ago there was a there was a vision there was nothing besides a vision creating something out of nothing with no money yeah yeah yeah it's such a beautiful story oh thank you it's hard work yeah it's hard work it's just you don't give up you don't give up that's right people keep saying it's not possible we also have 500 kids who come to our summer programs and we have in our after-school summer vacation camp weeks are open to the public for everybody we started to do a whole bunch of outreach work to Cambridge youth programs in you know in um in Cambridge i mean there's there's just so many things we're doing to bring this to other populations so yeah you're crushing it i love it i love it and uh it's been it's been such a cool time to be around something else that i hope people that are watching from around the world can kind of maybe feel in their essence is that for those that are maybe around the age of like 20 to 30 it's so important for us to go into settings with young kids because when because it's joyous it's joyous yeah it's so joyous it's blissful you get to be there like watching kids when kids are learning is like watching a sponge soak up the world around it and its knowledge and and performing that mind and so and being there to potentially sit down and help with oh one you know when someone's learning a reading process or an engineering process a design process whatever it may be to be there uh and it's just it's it's play at its finest and to and for us to never as adults lose yeah that playful spirit yeah is another one of the critical things one of the most fun things is when you kind of sidle up to a middle school or um they have four hours a week they work on passion projects and that's one of the things that is we really want to share and have happen everywhere um and they have a framework and they're learning on project management they're doing the research but they're also inventing something it doesn't matter what they're doing it could be bring a live a play do an art project installation do a service learning project make something but you know this girl comes to our school and she designs this dress that's supposed to be really comfortable and flow and she's had to rebuild it a couple times and then there's lace sleeves and she's come up with a way to light up the sleeves and code that with Arduino so that it it will kind of sparkle in this pattern she's tried different sensors in some of its work in some haven and she's you know she's a sixth grader and she's on fire yeah and um it's just it's it's it's it's truly awe-inspiring and then the courage and bravery of then she'll share that with when walking around you know we've got a group of people from brazil here today again another group of like 20 people visiting to see what we're doing and you you just get these kids to pause and say hey what's your project and they share it and this is a kid that you're like hmm you know that kid had before they got here they had big issues with anxiety but now they're working on something they picked they're passionate about all of that falls away and they're courageous in front of all of these adults who they don't know to share what they're doing and the struggles are having with it and what they've figured out and what they're hoping they can they can solve next time it's just it's like yeah you know that this is schooling can make you brave this is education this is the future yeah of schools in education yeah Courtney couple really quick questions on the way out that we like asking your guess um the first question is what would you say and this is this is interesting because you have so many of these skills already listed here but what would you say is one of the most critical skills for children as well as even adults to learn going into this exponential technology age they're they're totally interrelated but i'd say self-regulation and perspective taking you need to be able to manage your own responses to things you need to be and then that feeds directly then to you being able to take the perspective of somebody else because only then can you think about how the technology will get used by people who aren't you how they will affect other cultures what the impact will be on environment um the perspective taking that you know realizing we all have our own myopia and that you need to really seek to understand points of you that aren't your own um so that you can be a responsible inventor and do good because who cares if you created a bunch of cool stuff if it doesn't do something good in the world right so i'd say perspective taking and then do you think that we're in a simulation what do you mean do you think that this is a simulated reality what of our world right now that we're in a simulation well i think you can't live as if it is because then you'll you can have excuses for and be irresponsible in your behavior um no i don't think we're living in a simulation i think we're really here right now and then what we're doing actually is making an impact and i think we can you can complain and you can observe what's wrong and you can talk about what's wrong and you can do research about what's wrong or you can step up and you can live in the world with a belief of hey i'm massively imperfect and there's times i don't have or don't know but i'm gonna take a stand to change things and um you're you're not gonna do that if you think you're in a simulation um but i think i would counter and say that even if someone does uh feel like they're already in a simulated reality they can still be challenged to well i want to level up i want to keep i want to be my best i want to actualize i want to gain all the experience maybe in some ways that makes it even easier because you're not worried about the consequences in the same way if you're in a simulation then you're free because there isn't there really isn't anything at stake in the same way right um but you have to give yourself you have to give yourself that own freedom and permission to make an impact and get rid of the excuses and get rid of the fear um and fear what you uniquely have that you can offer and and go do that and the last question is what is the most beautiful thing in the world um uh i don't know a whole bunch of things come to mind but humanity when it is good is breathtaking the generosity of spirit that sometimes you can see is so magnificent um you know the acceptance the authentic acceptance of someone else's apology is so beautiful um that's one there's many nature and and the sun i love i'm also a landscape painter so i love the beauty of nature and the beauty of shapes and the analogies that creates so humanity and and nature yeah yeah that's beautiful corny this has been such an honor such a pleasure thank you thanks for coming thank you for asking it's an honor to be invited to share yes a sara school is doing incredible work thank you so much everyone for tuning in we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode also go and share more conversations about subjects like these 10 tools to transform schools about emotional intelligence about science and innovation creative creativity and systems thinking just talk to your friends your family your co-workers people on the internet just go and keep talking to people and spreading messages check out all the links below to a sarah school dot org as well as the other links below share those as well support the artists the entrepreneurs the organizations around the world that you believe in support simulation our links are below help us continue doing cool things like coming to epic places like a sarah school and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon peace that's a wrap thank you you crushed it oh you did so well i love learning about you and your story oh well thank you it's really it really is fun to have you here it's like i can go on for hours i get i sidetrack myself i'm not very good at brevity this is only the beginning and it's very important to scale this yeah and you're doing that and that's our goal and we hope to help