 We're here with Josh Rapoon. This is Think Tech. This is likeable science, actually. We're talking about science today. More specifically, we're talking about, you know, innovation, innovative science, innovative education in Hawaii. Welcome to the show, Josh. Thank you, Jay. So you have a most interesting bio, and I, you know, I actually had eye strain just trying to get through it. So can you give me like a one minute summary? Sure. Born and raised in Kahelu. My dad was a doctor in Kanoi for about 60 years. I went to Ben Parker Elementary School. Then I went to Punahou for middle school and high school. Now it gets good. Now it gets good, yeah. I briefly went to college and discovered that I wasn't very good at it. So I went to Chef School and became a certified chef, and I worked in San Francisco and San Diego. I left chefing after about eight years and went into hotel management in both California and Hawaii. Ultimately went back and got my undergrad that I had not finished at University of Iowa and came back to Hawaii and taught for about 20 years history, economics, Hawaiian studies, theory of knowledge, courses like that. Then it gets even a little bit crazier because I taught at Punahou and then Lapietra and Hawaii School for Girls and then Iolani. I did ed tech at Lapietra and Iolani. Ultimately left teaching. I now work for Apple at the Alamoana store. I'm a specialist, the salesperson there. I'm glad I know you. I will not answer your Apple ID questions on the show here. I'm off the clock. But then I got into or back into education here in Hawaii, public, private and charter. That's been my outside of Apple passion project. It's really almost like a second full time job. I'm a private citizen. I'm trying to make a difference in Hawaii and education is my passion. Okay. Innovative education. Correct. Let's talk about how you have advanced in that and it's okay to refer to your slides. Okay. The first slide references a film that I first saw in the fall of 2015. It's called Most Likely to Succeed. That's your Twitter handle too. It is, at MLTS in Hawaii. The executive producer is a guy named Ted Dintersmith. His director is Greg Whiteley, who is actually a pretty well known director. I don't know if you've seen Last Chance You on Netflix, but that's also Greg Whiteley. The film does two things. It spends the first 15 minutes talking about how the world is changing with hyperspeed. It raises the alarm that our kids are not being prepared for that 21st century, well 19 years into the 21st century scenario. And then it spends the last two thirds focusing on a school in San Diego called High Tech High. It deep dives into what High Tech High is doing. It's a public charter school. There's actually now 15 High Tech Highs in San Diego. When I saw the film, I said that's my muse. This is the piece of media that I'd been looking for for a long time that would help me to advance the education conversation in Hawaii forward. So I started screening it here in Hawaii. At the time, there were a couple of people who were screening at the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools and Education Institute of Hawaii, which is a think tank. I was the only private citizen that I knew of who was doing these screenings. Long story short, after Ted Dintersmith debuted the film at Sundance in 2015, he went on a year-long tour of all 50 states. He visited every corner of every state. His last stop, the last, the 50th stop, was here in Hawaii. His team contacted me and asked me to organize his time in the state. He thought it was going to be a one-off. What could be happening in Hawaii? Nothing. Let's do one day and go on vacation at Coale. I took him on a six-day grueling 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. learning walk. He left tweeting that Hawaii was going to be a model to the nation of education innovation. That put jet fuel in my tank. Long story short, for the last three years, Ted and I have been partnering to help develop education innovation conversations in Hawaii and to help move that forward. It's been the absolute ride of my life. It's been a joy all the way through. Why are you doing this? I'm doing this because partly the film raised my awareness of the way the world was changing. I think I was aware of it, but not quite in that condensed way. When you look at some of the statistics about job creation or the types of jobs that people are going to be holding in the future, the way technology is transforming the future, we've already moved through the information age into what Tom Friedman calls the age of acceleration. Tony Wagner wrote about the achievement gap, but now Tom Friedman's writing about the motivation gap. If you can't adapt to the speed of change, you're really in trouble. Are we in trouble here? I think not in Hawaii, no. As a nation, yes. I think that there's a significant number of Americans who are not adapting to change. I think a lot of the discord that we're experiencing in this country comes from that. I think that we can trace a lot of that back to education, which has not changed for about 130 years. That's the point of the film, is that we have to change. I'm driven by that idea. Jay, I'm actually driven by something else, which is just building a network of people as you do this work is such a joy, getting to know people, networking with people, building these relationships, these professional learning communities. I think that has overtaken the worry about the future. I just love working with public, private and charter individuals, education and education leaders, but also business leaders, because I've screened the film to a lot of business people in Hawaii. That's always a really interesting thing when you do that. Okay, so what is the secret sauce and most likely to succeed? What is it? I go into the school, I talk to somebody, what do I say to change or incentivize the way kids study technology? Innovation? Right, it's yeah, it's not so much technology as it is education. And just a quick note about technology, I think for a brief period of time, when the iPad showed up in the classroom and I'm responsible, I helped Elani go one to one with the iPad. So I played a part in this. I think we all sort of collectively lost our minds. We thought that technology was going to be the answer. I remember the Los Angeles School District went one to one with iPads, like 4000 iPads, just like that. And what happened to kids immediately figured out how to hack them and how to do all kinds of things. And the whole thing sort of went off the rails real quick. And people were thinking that technology was going to solve a lot of the problems, but they hadn't really identified what the problems were. I think since then, we have regained our senses. Technology or at least ed tech has been put back into the toolbox where it belongs. It is just a tool in furthering innovative education. And the secret sauce that you refer to is student agency. For 130 years or more, we have essentially said to kids, sit in your chair, open the top of your head, I'm going to pour a bunch of information into it. I'm going to ask you to spit it out onto a test. I'm going to rank you according to those tests. I'm going to treat you as a deficit model that needs to be fixed. And that's the way things have gone. And kids haven't really been by and large, or maybe increasingly less engaged over time as the world has changed, but education hasn't changed. So the secret sauce is student agency. We need to turn the ownership of education back over to the kids. It's actually kind of an ancient model. When you look at apprenticeships of the past going back in Europe or in Asia, students learned at the feet of the masters. If I give you a specific example, you could have one kid who's listening to somebody talk about developing an awesome tech program that streams online has a YouTube channel has a tremendous reach. You could have them listen to that person talk about it, or you could have somebody come and work directly with you. If it was your son or daughter, what would you do? I think they would want to work with you. You're the master of this domain. So increasingly, we're looking at conversations around this state where agency is being turned back over to the kids. We call it student voice or student ownership or purpose driven learning. And kids are getting a chance to act on things that they really care about that they're really interested in. And so teachers that shifts the role of the teacher to one, you know, we often talk about sage on the stage, the person who delivers the lecture. And now we're talking a lot about guide on the side, or the coach on the side or the sponsor on the side. And I as a as a teacher in the classroom, experienced that first hand, I sense that something was changing back in about 2002. And I started to change the way I was approaching my students in the classroom, I was all alone, didn't know anybody who was doing it had to do it work it out myself. But over time, I handed over a lot of the ownership of learning to my kids. And that changed my the arc of my life forever. Are you familiar with the mid pack experience? Mid pack? I think the Weinberg Foundation give every kid an iPad. Yeah. And then they they also built a science building, maybe an innovation building where the the was not classrooms, it was as modular, called the Hartley Center, the Hartley Weinberg Center was really nice. And the kids knew more about the iPad than the teachers did. Right. And the teachers were learning from the kids. And a guide on the side sounds appropriate for the way it went forward. I was very impressed. We made a movie about that. Yeah. But the question is, you know, how do you bring that, you know, to the school? How do you bring that to the public school, which is loaded with regulations and all kinds of bureaucratic, you know, limitations? How do you insinuate this new approach to a school that is going to you know, resist it? I think? Yeah. Wow. That's an incredibly complex question. Let me go back to Mid Pacific. It's funny that you bring them up because that's where I was just prior to this show today. So when Ted Dintersmith came to Hawaii in May of 2016, the 50th stop on his 50 state tour, it was a complete no brainer to me, Jay, that the first place I would take him would be Mid Pacific. Because at that point, Mid Pacific was completely on my radar screen as a school that was striving towards innovation and creativity and imagination. So we spent a whole day there. And by the way, I've made my own documentary film about Ted's six days in Hawaii. So Mid Pacific is the first of the six stories that are told there. So we screened most likely to Mid Pacific's faculty, we screened it to their parents, we screened it to students. And we started a conversation at that school that in some ways had already been underway for many years. But I think it I think most likely if I can take a little bit of credit sort of brought a number of conversations together at the same time. So one of the key parts of that is that you have to treat the whole school community as a community. You can't just say we have to change the way we teach our kids or we have to change the way our educators teach or we have to change our administration. It's a whole school, whole community approach. You can't have one constituency like parents outside of that conversation because they're key to that. And I would reject any notion that says that public schools aren't the same way. I think public school parents are just as passionate about their kids and their education as private school and charter school kids are. When I screened the public school communities, the same thing, we always tried to have as many people as possible representing all the different people of that community. So innovation happens when you get a lot of inputs from a lot of different directions, not just thou shalt change and all become project based learning. I call that macro anxiety from macro change. Let's do it from a micro change approach. So small steps lead to big change, a micro theory of change, a micro theory of innovation. And so when you get a number of people, it's like design thinking. When you get a good design thinking team, you get a bunch of different inputs and you create a prototype and then you start testing that prototype and then you move forward. So mid-Pacific has done that. They have done some very special things. They're creating a K-12 continuum so that it doesn't feel so much like an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. They actually feel like you're on one journey all the way through. And that journey is ultimately going to yield a kid who has a learner profile at the very end that doesn't just get attached to them as a diploma. It's actually a long K-12 process where we really know we, I'm saying we, I work with them a lot, where they really know who their kids are and what their kids are going to be able to do and know and feel and be as they head out into the real world, which is another idea I sort of reject, like if schools are not the real world, then we got trouble. So across the stage... They're not a good candidate. I mean when I saw them and made my movie, it was like five years ago and they were already thinking like that. So as it turns out, the meeting that I had with them today, three years later we're going to re-screen most likely to their parents and other members of the community. But unlike the first time when we did it in an auditorium, this time we're going to do it in the Hartley Center. So then you're going to have parents actually right in the thick of it. You can imagine things, you can imagine how it works, the interchange between them. Can we skip to Keala Kehe? We also made a movie at Keala Kehe. Okay. And we found that I think it was a Japanese fellow who was the principal. I think his name is Murakami. Keala Kehe Middle is actually Mark Hackelberg, so that might have been before. Yeah. Anyway, I thought him Suza was the... Art Suza. Art Suza. The great guy took us around and introduced us. It was quite something. Yeah. And what I felt was that they had achieved in the school we saw exactly what you were talking about, a community sense, that it wasn't just the kids, it wasn't just the teachers, it wasn't just the administrators, it was everybody, including the parents. And in Keala Kehe there were a lot of recent immigrants from the Samoa, Tonga, Pacific Islands who really needed to get integrated into the American style, the Hawaii style, and the Big Island style. And that was the mission. So you didn't teach just the kids, you taught the families of the kids and the whole thing was sort of an integrated community. And I was very impressed with that. Are you finding that too? Yes, I am. So if we could skip to the next slide, which is the book What School Could Be, there's a context to my answer to this question about Keala Kehe. So after Ted finished his 50 state tour, he decided to write his own book about his trip. And so in effect, What School Could Be is sort of a multi-part love letter to all of the innovators and creative and imaginative educators and education leaders that he found in every corner of every state. And the chapter on Hawaii is awesome. It references both Mid-Pacific and Waipahu High School, which has been knocking it out of the park for quite a while now. So What School Could Be is a very meaningful book to me. So about eight months ago, it sort of snapped into my brain that given the state of podcasts now and everybody seems to have a podcast, that this would be the moment for me to do the What School Could Be podcast series. So I'm working with Ted. He's backing me on this. So instead, we're going to call it the What School Could Be in Hawaii podcast series. And Ryan Rosawa involved it. Correct. Ryan and I are radio man. He's my primary partner. We met at the Apple Store one night and had this epic conversation about podcast. That's great. And he's become my partner. So I'm going to come. He's a really good guy and he's really helping me up that learning curve of the podcast. So we're going to tell public, private and charter school stories over a series of months where we release these podcasts every Monday. So here's the cool part. So I thought to myself, who's going to do my post-production? Is it going to be me sitting in front of my MacBook Pro trying to edit this thing? How would I best do that? We're a very close friend who's our state teacher of the year. His name is Matthew Williams. And he's a teacher and the media director at Kealacay Middle. So I reached out to Matthew and said, what about the idea of we turn post- production over to your students and let them do it? This is real world stuff. Treat me as the client. They have to reach broadcast quality standards like HIKI NŌ, like PBS. And the pressure is on them to produce for me because I want to get this podcast up in a, you know, various highest plane. And so as it turned out, I had just texted him about this idea. But a few nights later, Matthew was here with his team of students and they came into the Apple Store. So I pulled them off to the side. There was no way to find you. That's the way to find me. And I made a pitch to them right there in front of a Mac. I showed them this image and we walked them through and the kids were like, Oh, absolutely. Let's do it. So I think what's happening with Matthew is emblematic of Kealacay and the whole community approach. And it's not a one-off at Kealacay. This is happening across the state. Sea Rider Digital, Waianae Sea Rider Digital Productions, those guys have been doing it for 20 years. But there are other programs across the state. Many of them inspired by HIKI NŌ. Some of them in Waipahu High, as you mentioned. Right, exactly. And on Kauai and on Lonai and on Maui and Molokai. And so I'm super excited about the launch of this podcast series, the What School Could Be in Hawaii podcast. But most of all, I'm excited about the Kealacay kids getting a chance to work with me to produce something that could have national even global reach. We're going to push it out. Our goal is 10,000 podcast subscribers by the end of April. Yeah, absolutely. And you'll be able to have greater influence than you have had. And a quick word again about Kealacay. What's happening at Kealacay, there's a really important part of that equation, if you will. And it's actually marked Hackleburg, the principle there. So in order for innovation to move forward, especially when you're using a micro innovation theory of change, in order for that to happen, you got to have a principle who's going to have people's backs. That principle has to say to people, you know what, that's a really interesting idea. Roll with it. Let's see how it goes. If you fail, no worries, I got your back. We'll come back and reevaluate. But I want you to go for it. So whether it's project based learning, inquiry, challenge based, place based, culture based, technology based, whatever it is, you have to have a school leader who's willing to back the educators that are under his or her domain. And that's happening across the state. We have a superintendent whose whole theory of change is going to be empowering the different school community. Oh yeah, absolutely. I think she's a game changer for Hawaii. Well, I hope so. That says that's very encouraging to hear that because, you know, there has been a certain amount of bureaucracy in the Department of Education still is and will be there for a while. And how do you, how do you get through that? You know, you go to work, okay, for example, and in order to do what you want to do, you need somebody who'll back you the principal, what have you. And if the principal isn't on board, not going to happen. And if the principal is, you know, is going to be a bureaucrat himself or herself, not going to happen. So how do you get DOE to back you, or if it isn't backing you, how do you get the principal to take the chance, you know, be courageous, step outside the box? Great question. So a couple of things about this. This the new superintendent, she's not new anymore. She's two years into her into her job. Dr. Keshima. Yes, I know. So her her program is three parts. It's student voice. We're not just talking about a few kids in a state student council. We're talking about agency in the classroom. So student voice, teacher collaboration, meaning teachers mentoring other teachers. And in a second, I'll have I'll have the next image, which I'd like to talk for a second about that. So teacher collaboration, student voice. And then the third one is the key one. That's intentional school design. So the mandate. Now, if you if you want to call it a mandate, it's it's an interesting kind of mandate. It's simply saying the complexes are 15 complexes and to the individual schools, you need to come up with your own community plan for what your school will be, what school could be, and how you're going to implement your particular version of that. So what's happening within our Department of Education is that that kind of empowerment is moving out through the complexes into the school level. And it means that the individual principles are now in a very different place. Instead of executing a series of mandates, they're actually having to work with their communities to figure out what they want to be. So what's happening at Molokai High versus what's happening at Hohione Elementary in Hawaii Kai, or what's happening at Charter School on Maui, every single one of those stories is going to be a different story. And I just recently learned that about 40% of our schools have now completed their individual plans. And so to answer your question about the bureaucracy, what that means is you're turning your bureaucracy around into one that supports rather than one that requires certain mandates. So the whole superstructure is there to support each school community as it carries out its individual intentional design with a lot of coaching and a lot of professional development and leadership development. What's the global plan? Who is actually, you know, putting in the time? Is it you? You know, who is with most likely to succeed in the state of Hawaii that advances this program? Is it you or is it somebody else? To be clear, that's the Department of Education. And what I'm doing with most likely to succeed and with copies of the book What School Could Be is to help move those conversations, intentional school design conversations across the state. So I'll go to any island. You're the advocate. I'm the advocate, but I'm the advocate for a conversation. I'm not, I'm not agenda driven. I don't have a particular kind of teaching and learning that I'm looking for. If there's one thing I could say I'm against, it's testing. We have to move away as a state for reliance on testing, you know, my good friend Ian Kattajima at Ocean Ed often talks about design thinking. Right. If you evaluate a fish on its ability to climb a tree, then you're up a creek. And so we have to move away from evaluating kids using these standardized metrics because individual communities are going to come up with their own type of success stories. They're going to define success. Who is most likely to succeed in their own ways? And what I'm trying to do is to help move those conversations forward. Yeah, you have another slide you want to talk about. I do. I do. The next slide is actually just a quick slide about what school could be, what it does. The future of work is changing rapidly. Innovation is happening and we need empowerment, testing and accountability. And too much ed reform policy is geared towards doing obsolete things a little bit better. So the next slide, just like to explain this very briefly. So in the lower circle there, you see the 20th century. And the 20th century is spinning very slowly, clockwise, about 40 miles an hour. And it's been doing that for more than 100 years. Then if we look at the upper circle, that's the 21st century. So today, Jay, it was 40 miles an hour. Tomorrow it's going to be 140 miles an hour and on and on. So what's so interesting to me about this, you can use the two images of two canoes rushing, two va, rushing at each other from opposite directions. Think of a va. Va is a canoe. Va is a canoe. That'd be on the final, they don't do exams. We don't do exams anymore. But you should know that a va is a canoe. So anybody who's ever gone out on the ocean knows that when you jump out of one va into another, when they're going opposite directions at high speed, that's really scary and difficult to do. So I get very serious in talking with education groups about the space in between the two circles. It's sort of part trauma center, part psychiatric ward, part shark infested waters, part inspirational, bright sunshine. And what's really important to me is that there are people on the other side on that 21st century side who've been there for many years, many of them at Mid-Pacific, many at Waipahu, at Keala Kehe, they're all over the state, public, private and charter. My thought is reach out to the people who are trying to get out of the 20th century and come to the 21st century and help them come across. That's what I love about those, that particular image is that my work is partly around having conversations about what it means to cross over. I crossed over at La Pietra all by myself many, many years ago. And it was really scary and I didn't have admins, you know, support related to that. Great personal experience, I'm sure. For me, yeah, absolutely. So let me ask you a hard question here at the end of our show. You've been asking hard questions from the kicker. Oh, well, this is harder yet. OK. You know, we have a state that, you know, has not really done very much to incentivize the development of a tech industry. We have a state that, you know, dwells in the land of tourism and expensive condos that none of us can afford. We have a state that has all but abandoned agriculture. We have a state where people reject astronomy and technology and science. They do. It's a cultural point where we are. You said before that, according to Ted. Intersmith. Intersmith. This was a great candidate, the state of Hawaii. Yes. For the program. His program. Most likely to succeed and all that. And to develop, you know, a better informed, better motivated innovation culture among the students in all schools. OK. Where are they going to work? You said work is changing. You said, you know, the world is changing. We have to keep up. And the problem is up to this point, I have to say in my view. We haven't kept up. The program you're involved in sounds like a pretty good effort to keep up and to develop an innovation ethic within the schools and the student body. But there's no tech industry here. And we're moving further from that, not closer. So where are these kids going to get jobs? Where is all this innovation going to go and give them a good life? I told you it was a hard question. Yeah, it is a hard question. First of all, I'm going to reject part of what part one of your assumptions in there. I don't believe, especially that our native Hawaiian communities are rejecting science. I don't think they are. My wife is the publisher of Hawaii Business Magazine. If you go back a few issues, there was a fantastic article by a young native Hawaiian student writing about how the ancient Hawaiians were scientists. There's plenty of evidence out there that that simply isn't the case. But having said that, the question about where are the jobs going to be, I'm going to come actually back to technology. I think that it's a bit of a non-starter when we talk about the kids staying in Hawaii and what jobs are in Hawaii. I think that ship sailed a long time ago and I don't mean that they're going to leave. I mean that technology has now made it possible to pretty much work anywhere in the world on anything in the world. So the question is, can we create a community here in Hawaii that makes it possible for kids to stay in Hawaii and work on the big giant complex problems of the world either here or wherever they are? Does that make sense? It's a virtual approach. Let's use technology platforms which have been underway for 20 years to give kids an opportunity to work on problems that are not just local, they're national, and they're global. If you talk about sex trafficking, if you talk about sustainability or climate change or food sustainability, you don't have to just, it's not a binary decision that you make where I can either stay in Hawaii or I can leave and go to California or go to Washington or somewhere else. You can work on these problems wherever you are. You don't have to be fixed in one place. Good answer. I hope it can be realized. Yeah. Josh, we're out of time. It's wonderful to talk to you. That went by like a shot. You're on a lot of ground. This has really been an eye-opener for me. Thank you. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Thanks, Jake. Appreciate it. All these projects. Aloha. Thank you.