Still Curious

From guilt at leaving teaching to designing student wellbeing at scale, with Maria Fernanda Puertas | S2E12

• Danu Poyner • Season 2 • Episode 12

Share episode

A conversation all about what happens when a mingling of interests meets a sudden change in priorities. The moments where you change from being one kind of thing into another, how that happens and how you update your self-understanding along the way. Teaching moments and learning moments – the beating heart of education that enables each of us to reflect on our experiences and capitalise on those reflections in ways we can put into practice and that move us forward.

Key Topics:

  • What you lose when you stop being a teacher and reconnecting with what you love about education
  • Being in the hotseat as head teacher at the start of the pandemic and coming up with a plan to support students, teachers and parents
  • Student wellbeing and how education systems fit and discard people
  • What teachers making the transition to learning design and operations need to learn and unlearn


About the Guest:  Maria Fernanda Puertas is a Latina, tea lover and cat lady who is passionate about the science of learning and community building. After being a teacher and head teacher for over a decade, she made the decision to move into tech to pursue the mission of reaching a much wider audience with amazing learning experiences, and hopefully help people find what they are looking for. [Maria's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-fernanda-puertas/]

Recorded 21 July 2022


Links:

--
About the Host: Despite never letting school interfere with his education, Danu has nevertheless acquired two social science degrees and an executive MBA. He toils at the intersection of education, technology and society and has worked at various times in teaching, research, project management, business development and customer service. He has so many interests that he has started to outsource them, and his life plan is rapidly running out of alphabet. He is the Founder of Grokkist. [Danu's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danupoyner/]

Music: Kleptotonic Swing by Tri-Tachyon

Website: grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast | Email: podcast@grokk.ist | Socials: @grokkist
Music: Kleptotonic Swing by Tri-Tachyon

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

The hardest part about leaving teaching is that emotion backlog you have, and the feeling that you have betrayed the community, and that imprinted in your personality and who you are when you are a teacher. The guilt is terrible. When you make that decision, and this is something that after connecting with many teachers that had also transitioned into the Ed Tech industry in diverse roles, they all quote the same thing.

Danu Poyner:

You're listening to the Still Curious Podcast with me, Danu Poyner. My guest today is Maria Fernanda Puertas, who describes herself as a Latina, tea lover and cat lady who is passionate about the science of learning and community building. Today's conversation is all about what happens when a mingling of interests meets a sudden change in priorities. It's about the moments where you change from being one kind of thing into another, how that happens and how you update your self understanding along the way. It's about teaching moments and learning moments, the beating heart of education that enables each of us to reflect on our experiences and capitalize on those reflections in ways we can put into practice and that move us forward.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Basically it was retrospective saying maybe I have always been this, but I'm just realizing that this is a thing to be.

Danu Poyner:

Maria had been a teacher and a head teacher in Argentina for 10 years when she suddenly found herself in the hot seat at the start of the pandemic.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

That academic year started on March the 11th. On March 13, we stopped attending schools and we never came back. I went home and spent, seven, eight hours, just writing an email because in that email, we had to communicate clearly reassuring the entire community that we knew what we were doing when actually we had absolutely no idea

Danu Poyner:

It was a heady time and brought into focus for Maria, the importance of being part of support networks and communities of practice, what student wellbeing really means, and discovering the challenges of dealing with parents who ultimately needed something that the school was not really there to provide. The whole experience caused Maria to reflect on what was no longer working for her about the school system and how she could leverage her strengths and interests to reconnect with what you loved about education by making the transition to learning design and operations.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I just knew that I wanted to work in tech creating, supporting learning platforms or learning resources online because there was a huge lack of those. If I can support my 200 teachers with a training session and how to manage a video call, imagine what I can do by designing a resource that can support 1 million teachers.

Danu Poyner:

As usual, this is a conversation that goes on all sorts of tangents while being packed full of surprising substance throughout. We talk about why it's fun to argue with teenagers, maria's research in learning science and student wellbeing, what it's like to carry around the mission of education on your shoulders and the complexities of translating concepts from Spanish into English. Enjoy, it's Maria Fernanda Puertas coming up after the music on today's episode of the Still Curious Podcast. Hi Maria, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Hi fine. It's lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.

Danu Poyner:

Oh, you're very welcome. Lovely to have you here. You are a self described, Latina tea lover and cat lady. You are passionate about the science of learning and community building. After being a teacher and head teacher for over a decade, you made the decision to move into tech, to pursue the mission of reaching a much wider audience with amazing learning experiences and hopefully help people find what they're looking for. You're now an education lead at Atom Learning, which is an online adaptive teaching and learning platform for ages seven to 13. That's won some awards. What's the most important thing for someone to understand about what you do?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

What I would say is that we believe that there's nothing behind teaching and learning. There is just very charismatic person sharing their knowledge, but actually there's a lot that happens behind the scenes. And that's what I do to make sure that learning experiences are great and are strong and powerful independently of who is delivering it.

Danu Poyner:

Thank you. That's very clear and sets us up nicely for a conversation about why we think teaching and learning is not so complicated at its core and also what's going on behind the scenes. But I guess let's go back a bit. You started out teaching in Argentina in 2006. Was being a teacher, always plan a for you?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Absolutely. And not only being a teacher, but being a head teacher when I was four years old is I organize my Teddy bears and I'm an only child. So I have many, many teddy bears. Organize them in different classrooms. And they went classroom by classroom checking that everything was all right. Even when I was four years old, I knew I wanted to work in education and I wanted to be head teacher rather than a teacher. So I built my career and I built my personality, my definition of myself through that.

Danu Poyner:

I have a lot of, I guess, chewy questions for you about your journey through education, but before we go there, I guess I'd like to make space for a moment to talk about the magic of teaching and the power of those small human interactions, because that's what this is really all about and why we care. So would you like to share a couple of your favorite teaching moments? Ones that still stick with you?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Yeah, I have many, many of them. I struggle to finish my secondary education myself, primarily mainly with numbers subjects. I has a lovely math teacher, so I sat down with him and said, listen, I'm about to graduate. I'm going to be a teacher. I'm not going to teach maths. So please, grant me this so I can move on and this will not be an obstacle. He was amazing. So he agreed. Fast forward seven years later, I had his son in my classroom. I was teaching research methods, nothing to do with numbers, and social sciences. And I actually was the one giving him his diploma when he graduated. I had this fantastic moment when he was on the stage, the three of us. And he looked at me, my teacher and said, now I can tell you were right. That was amazing in terms of the magic of his teaching and beyond the walls of the classroom. The second one I've chosen, I used to work with senior year students. So they were about to graduate and we held a workshop on job interviewing, building resume. We rehearsed a mock job interview. They have to dress up to kill, bring the resume, prepared questions. I had one student who was, he's actually a rockstar. He is really famous. He's a musician. He couldn't care about formal job and formal education. He couldn't care less, but he dressed up amazingly. And came with a briefcase and he asked me, do you know why I have a briefcase? Because I carry a lots of money. I'm going to be a millionaire. So he didn't know how he was going to get there, but he came prepped. He really didn't care about the formal part of it, but he sees the opportunity to rehearse and to picture himself doing whatever he wanted, being a rockstar and being a millionaire. And that was his dream. So that was teaching for him. And it was for me as well. The third one was a tricky one I had as a head teacher. I always specialized in high school, in secondary school students, but for nice couple of years I was head teacher at primary school, and those kids are not my strength. One day I had one first grader, six years old, is making a mess in the playgrounds during break time. I approached him and say, okay, either you bring me your communications copy book, or you sit down for five minutes, his response was, I won't do any of those. And he continued messing around. I was defeated, beaten by a six year old. I didn't have further arguments. I knew how to argue with teenagers. The six-year-old he said No to option A, No to option B. And he got his way, I must admit, but at least it was a teaching moment for me in terms of which are my strengths as an educator as well.

Danu Poyner:

What did you take away from that about your strengths?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I'm a terrible negotiator.

Danu Poyner:

Arguing with teenagers versus negotiating with six year olds. What is the difference there?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Teenagers, they want to argue because they wanted to break the limits. They want to go even further and they understand reason. They just wants to challenge it. So it's a game of who builds the better arguments and that is super fun. And it's super enriching. And the level of the conversations get after three years of having the same group of students, is amazing debate level. With a six year old, it's not conscious, it's not challenging limits. He simply didn't want to stop running. And he simply didn't want me to tell his mom. Teenagers are very well suited to the classroom environment and the school environment and the form of institutional environment by the time they reached 16. But they love to challenge everything you say to them. And that is super fun. In the case of kids, they just want to do things differently and they don't care what you want them to do.

Danu Poyner:

Do you think with the teenagers that that challenging is always done through a mode of reason? What form does that challenging take?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Generally it's arguing and generally challenging practices, things that they're not supposed to do, and they do them anyway. And then you engage in that conversation where you learn something because they are much younger. So they have a lot to teach and they learn something on how to approach social interactions in different environments. I would be really defensive with them. Yes, it's always through reason. It's always through challenge, but if you tackle the conversation in a material way and in an empathetic way, both parties leave that conversation having learned something.

Danu Poyner:

I'm struck by the way that you are defensive of them and that you describe those arguments as being a lot of fun, but I guess that's not how most people would describe those interactions. what can you tell me about that? What makes it fun?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

It's a tricky question. I'm a communicator and I love communicating. I love the nature and the construction of language and how to use it in different contexts. I'm a researcher, so when I can get to the bottom of things, is when things become clearer and they can ask questions and that skill is useful for me to communicate with teenagers and they get something from those exchanges because they'd get questions to ask, ways to approach a problem or a conversation and ways to use analyze language. That is quite tricky with younger students, you can't do. And in my case, my strength, I have to deal with complex uses of the language and how we use that to interact with each other. I guess that both of us get something from those conversations in that aspect.

Danu Poyner:

Well, thank you for going with me on that tangent. I enjoyed that. You mentioned you always wanted to be a head teacher. What was it about being a head teacher that was particularly appealing to you from the outset?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

It was an idea of what being head teacher is, not the real thing in the end. That is why I am not in that field anymore. The learning experience of students that attend a particular school, you can make sure that the quality of their experience is amazing, not just in the amount of knowledge, but also the quality of experiences they leave, how they signify the learnings, how they experience living with each other, what they get from that experience. As a teacher, I spent my days delivering lessons and trying to make sure that that happens with my 25 students in front of me. If I could do that at a larger scale, that was going to be amazing. In the end, it's not exactly that way.

Danu Poyner:

I feel like teaching is one of those professions where it's not always easy to see what the path to growth looks like. If you're a teacher who loves the interaction with students, then a lot of what looks like career advancement actually can take you further away from that and more into the administration and the politics of administration, which seems like it might give you the opportunity to own the experience as you say. What was that experience like once you got to being a head teacher?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Exactly that way. I imagined that I was going to spend my day talking to students, visiting classrooms, talking to teachers, making sure that they had everything they needed. And they were challenging themselves and challenging students. The end you spend your day doing admin work. one hand, it makes processes more efficient but in the end, you're an agent. I now live in the UK, but in Argentina happens quite much the same way in terms of the national curriculum. We do have one curriculum, one organization of stuff, and that is the way it has to be done. The room for improvement is quite narrow. Therefore, I find myself spending my day in between meetings and working on spreadsheets. And not at all talking to students. And I found myself after a couple of years with students not really wanting to talk to me. And that was terrible.

Danu Poyner:

Was that something that crept up on you or was there a moment when you had a kind of outbreak of clarity that that had happened?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

It wasn't from one day to the other, but it was quite drastic. When the last group, I had been their teacher, graduated the rest of the school have never had the experience of sharing a classroom with me as their teacher. So they didn't really know me. There was no reason for them to trust me to come and talk to me or whatsoever. I hadn't built that bond or that connection as I had with the groups that had been my students and when it was a teacher. It was something that happened gradually. Became a lot stronger when the last group I was graduated and I remained being someone who hadn't taught anyone in this school.

Danu Poyner:

That's a nice illustration of the impact that teachers have and what the work is because it's not just what's happening in this space at this time. You really are with someone over a journey for several years of their lives and that it is not always built into the way that work is designed for teachers, I guess.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Not at all. And that's why either it's too tiring or it's proactive and not every teacher does do it, although they might wish to do it. The time they want to spend with students learning how they are feeling, what they need, what they wish. If they're finding their learning journey meaningful in any way, it's not something you get to do. On that aspect I do think that the pandemic in some cases gave students and schools in general, that opportunity because formal learning was placed in a second place, the main objective for every school, at least the vast majority, was to support those students throughout lockdown. In some cases, that was something that was addressed and hopefully it continues until now. In the situations that that didn't happen, at least is something that now we're talking about.

Danu Poyner:

Let's get into the pandemic then, because you found yourself in the hot seat when the pandemic started, suddenly responsible for standing up your institutions online homeschooling program and making it work somehow against great uncertainty. What happened? What did you do? What was it like? What can you share?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

It's incredible because it's the main reason why I'm now sitting here and doing something completely different. Terrible, but for me, it was enlightening in terms of what I want to do and what I'm great at doing. In Argentina to give some context, we had one of the longest lockdowns in the entire world, and it covered the entirety of an academic year. That academic year started on March the 11th. On March 13, we stopped attending schools and we never came back. It was an entire academic year. That day, you March the thirteenth, I had to say goodbye to my students, sat in my desk and we got a call saying that that had been the last day of regular classes. And we didn't know when those were going to be resumed. So we had to come up with something. I went home and spent, I would say seven, eight hours, just writing an email because in that email, we had to communicate clearly reassuring the entire community that we knew what we were doing when actually we had absolutely no idea and coming up with a plan. So we spent long hours writing that email for families, for teachers, for students, for the entire community. that was the Kickstarter. We send that email, we set up the virtual classrooms, we set up a schedule. We made the decision of spending 50% of the time on zoom or live lessons and 50% with async activities. We needed to support teachers on the acquisition of those resources, those tools and those structures but the most challenging part was writing that email.

Danu Poyner:

I'd love to know what was going through your head because it was so sudden, it sounds like you took on and really felt that responsibility in a farsighted way early because there was so much uncertainty.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

There were so much uncertainty that is true. At least in the Southern hemisphere, we saw how Europe was coping with this. We knew that lockdown was a possibility. At least I had some time since I've received work in February, until students came to school in March thinking of best practices in case that happens, even if it was for a week. So by the time that day came on March 13, at least it was really confident about what was great teaching and learning in on-line environments. Because I had done my research just in case.

Danu Poyner:

It sounds like you had a feeling of almost relief from the uncertainty in a way that at least now we know what we have to do. Sounds like it was quite a galvanizing moment.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

It was. It's different when I talk about it right now that everything has already finished At that moment, it was freakish. It was 2, 3, 4 weeks working 13 hours being available for teachers 24 7 because they needed support and all of us were alone at home. There were teachers that didn't own a computer, for example. They didn't even have the resource to upload a Google doc or awards document to their students. I can say that I was confident on the design of a learning experience that then the reality hits. It was a very big school, almost 1,500 students, 200 educators was a very big school. So there are plenty of realities to address and that are in a very unique moment of history. I think that that made it a bit more difficult, the human parts of all of this, rather than the design of the structure.

Danu Poyner:

That was a very confusing and difficult and overwhelming time for everyone. How did you experience that? What was that like for you and how did you get support or did you?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I was at home with my husband, he was amazing throughout the lockdown. He worked in finance. Finance was also crazy during that time. So at least we supported each other and as for my mental health, I have to think my therapist. And then it was building net. Networks with other teachers, other headteachers, parents, families of the community. Experiencing that and trying to figure out what was going on. What got me through that process was actually building networks and building really strong communities of practices in different settings. At a personal level, I was really, really supported, but I professional level. Those networks got me and a million other teachers through a lockdown.

Danu Poyner:

Can you put yourself back in that time and recall what were the main things that everyone was really talking about and puzzling out together?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I think that the main thing was what to do. At a general level, what to do to support students well, to support families, what to do to support the economic situation of those families. Many families lost their jobs, lost their income during the meltdown. So it was what do we do with teaching? What do we do with assessing? What do we do with supporting. And sharing ideas and sharing experiences and testing a lot and asking for feedback. I didn't call it feedback when I was a teacher. I called it. Please tell me how you're doing and asking for something back so we could evaluate what we were doing and steering a different direction if it was necessary. But I think that the main question was what do we do? community question among educators among schools globally, not just in Argentina, not just in south America.

Danu Poyner:

You mentioned before there was this sort of discovery that happened that supporting the students is a huge part of it and primary to the education part of it itself in many ways. And I know parents were discovering that schools are not just places of education, but they're also places of care and daycare as well. And there's a sort of redefining of what schools are actually for and about, and the relationship between teachers and students and parents. You were in the middle of all of that. What did you experience about that discovery? What did you do?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

It was really, really complex. And from the questions you raised that was one, was it more difficult students or parents. And I will always say parents, but because there is no school for parents and certainly I'm not the teacher nor the head teacher in that school for parents. So, it's difficult to find alignment with families. It's difficult to make joint decisions when in most cases, in a very conflictive scenario, they needed something that we couldn't provide. They needed a place for students to sit down so they could go to work or find a job or whatsoever. We couldn't provide that. They needed a service from the school that we were not there to do it. Those were very difficult conversations. And although we had been thinking about not being super happy about my role as a head teacher for a while, by that time, there was one day in particular that I read an email from a group of families saying they didn't think it was appropriate to pay the fee because we were not teaching during lockdown. I can completely understand now where that came from. But for me personally and professionally, it was, we are doing an amazing work, at least in the amount of work we're doing to keep this together. And if they need something different or this is not what they want. This is not the place for me.

Danu Poyner:

It's interesting when you have those kind of moments of deep clarity about what's not working and what you need to change. Did you have a clear idea of how you would make a change or what you were gonna do?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I had zero idea. I knew that I wanted to work in tech because I was tech savvy and I was clearly showing, at least myself, that I was able to do it. Didn't even know that there was a field called learning design, that people designed these learning experiences, mediated by technology. Once I digged in that field, I realized that I had been doing plenty of that when it was working in publishing, when I was working in human resources when I was a lot younger. I just knew that I wanted to work in tech and I wanted to work creating, supporting learning platforms or learning resources online because there was a huge lack of those. So I wanted to be in that hotspot saying if I can support my 200 teachers with a training session and how to manage a video call, imagine what I can do by designing a resource that can support 1 million teachers. I started Googling people who did what I did, how were they called? Where did they work? What they knew that I didn't know. And I started reading a lot. I started following certain companies, for example, Duolingo, to see if people worked in education, what did they do? And quite quickly because the offer was high, I hit my first position as a freelancer and just a couple of weeks. And then the change was tiresome because I kept two positions. I was a head teacher in my morning and it was a learning designer in my evening. And he took me a while to make those fit together. the flow was smooth let's say.

Danu Poyner:

There's a lot of intention behind the path that you take, I think, right from the Teddy bears. Was tech always on your radar then? Or was it really something that became apparent when you were thrown into this pandemic situation?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I always use tech when teaching. taught subjects that required lots of tech. I taught foreign languages. So I needed very diverse resources that were not just paper-based. I taught research methods, so we needed to collate information, to research, et cetera. And I taught subject, that was basically cultural analysis, communicative messages, it's communication theory. So I needed to bring tech into my classroom, and that was something that I started doing as a part of my teaching practice. And then it became part of a side gig. I started working in the evening in universities, supporting educators on their teaching practices through a technology. I did that for a while. And then I started working as a freelance in publishing, also designing English as a foreign language resources for the Latin American market. Also mediated by technology, but it was something that I did as part of my teaching, it became apparent that it was something to be done in itself when there was such a high need and very little available.

Danu Poyner:

So it sounds like you were drawing on a whole lot of previous experience and enthusiasm, and then there was a moment when it became clear that there was a bigger opportunity to join these Things together. Is that a fair assessment?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Yeah. I am not sure I gave it as much thought. It was quite natural. I knew that I was good at that. And I seen that in action during the pandemic. And I say, why not? If it's something that I enjoy and in this community in particular, it's not what they need, but probably in some other place, they will cherish it and I began my search.

Danu Poyner:

I'm struck by the picture of you Googling and scurrying around doing all of this online furious absorbing information from all of the places. And I'm really interested in the path that people take to trigger those moments of clarity and huge energetic activity. Because it's often the bringing together of so many different interests that have been percolating around for a long time. And then there's something that goes, oh, I can join these together. And then it's really exciting. And suddenly there's a whole lot of energy behind joining it together. Is that what that experience was like?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Yeah. And I think that in that mingling of interest and research and curiosity, there was also a changing priorities because again, my strengths in project management and organization, in people leadership, in technology, had always been subsided to my teaching practice. Up to today, I still define myself as a teacher first and foremost, and during a decade and a half, I was a teacher who also happened to be great at spreadsheets or great at project managing or great at technology. But I was a teacher. When the need changed, it clicked that I was not just a teacher was tech savvy. I was, a learning designer apparently.

Danu Poyner:

That transformation is incredible. I really like those phrases you used when a mingling of interests coincides with a change of priorities, isn't that exciting?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Is a learning moment. There is a whole backlog of theory on those specific moments, when you teach something and it becomes absolutely meaningful. They're quite a miracle when you have those teaching moments and you remember them throughout your career. But I think that there are also learning moments that can take place in an institution or learning program or whatsoever, but can also happen in very different scenarios that are beyond formal education. For me personally, that was a learning moment. Oh, no, I don't want to do this, what can I do? And seeing that set of interest so clearly defined and those priorities in a different order, compared to what they have been until that moment, that was a learning moment in itself.

Danu Poyner:

So how quickly after the learning moment did you take on the identity of learning designer and think of yourself that way?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I had the chance to have my first freelance role quite quickly, designing higher education modules for universities here in the UK. During the period of two weeks, that amazing group of professionals that were mentors to me said, okay, this is transferable. This is also transferable. This is also going to be very useful for you. And at the end of that training, I defined myself as a learning designer. Basically it was retrospective saying maybe I have always been this, but I'm just realizing that this is a thing to be. It always has to do with the people we meet and what we can learn from them and how they can help us capitalize those experiences or those main goals, interests or strategies.

Danu Poyner:

Wow. That's so incredible. So the freelance role came up quite quickly and that was great. And it sounds like you connected with some good people. How long were you in that situation of still being the head teacher moving into full time, learning designer?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

A long time, eight months. I started working as a learning designer, also in a full-time role, in may. So from may to December, I ended the academic year with my students, and then I left the school and I decided to continue working on a freelance basis. I continued working with that project until February the following here. And then I came across the company I'm currently working on. I did some smaller project, quite on demand. And quite soon I came across Atom Learning where I currently work. I started as a freelance content creator and three months later, I was offered the possibility to take a permanent position and relocated to the UK. So, it was a very long and tiring process, but actually was quite quick.

Danu Poyner:

it's funny how both of those things can be true at once. When you look at just the LinkedIn version of it, it seems very natural and inevitable really. Steady and fast, but the lived reality of it is something different and was frustrating and confusing.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Yeah, I think that this is something that happens to many, many teachers, the emotional backlog you have when you work as a teacher is really strong and it operates in your brain and in your decision-making process. Being a teacher has something of the mission. You have a mission to be there and your mission to educate and empower the younger generations. And that is embedded in your brain. You become emotionally really close to it, to your families in the community, you work, or students, and you see them grow and become adults and living that generates feelings that are sometimes very confusing, sometimes quite hard to handle. The guilt is terrible. When you make that decision, that it took you a really long time to make that you feel terribly guilty. And this is something that after connecting with many teachers that had also transitioned into the Ed Tech industry in diverse roles, they all quote the same thing. The hardest part about leaving teaching is that emotion backlog you have, and the feeling that you have betrayed the community, and that imprinted in your personality and who you are when you are a teacher.

Danu Poyner:

Yeah, really strong language there too. It resonates with me: the guilt, the betrayal, the mission. Is that something you think people bring to teaching when they arrive or is it something the Practice brings up in you as you do it, or is it a mix of both?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I would say it's a dialectic process. You bring it because when you decide to become a teacher, there's something about the mission that is there. You want to become a teacher because you want to support students. You don't want to become a teacher because of the pay. You want to become a teacher because either, you love kids and you want to see them grow and you feel the sense of responsibility and ownership on their learning, their progress and their growth that gets stronger and stronger because the environment feeds into that and it builds the teacher identity. Passion, mission, empathy are features that historically have been addressed for teachers. And they make these transitions a lot more difficult at an emotional level for teachers who decide to leave the classroom.

Danu Poyner:

How did you deal with that and recognize those feelings as part of the emotional backlog in yourself?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

For me it was simpler, because I had already moved from teacher to head teacher before, and therefore my relationship with my students was not there anymore. It was not the same as if I was their teacher and that made it simpler because I didn't like the role of a head teacher. Still was really difficult because the school I was working, I attended as a kid. I had a lot of emotional connection. It's my home, it's my community. So that made it hard. But I always think that if I had been a teacher, when the pandemic hits and not a head teacher, I wouldn't have left teaching. I wouldn't be a learning designer because I wouldn't have started to break that connection.

Danu Poyner:

It sounds like the moment of loss with the connection with the students had already happened earlier. And this recognition of that made it easier to move on, cuz you didn't want to go or you couldn't go back. Was there a grieving process for that loss once you'd recognized it?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Absolutely. I needed to leave. I moved here to the UK and traveling in a month. And one of the first things I want to do is to visit my school. And I want to see the kids and I want to see the teachers because I miss them like crazy. Every single time I see students in a playground or they are in a day out. And I see the group of students with their teachers, I feel this sense of nostalgia. but that sense of longing always focuses on the positive things and not usually on the elements that impacted the decision making process. So when you run that through reason. It quickly becomes clear that it's not the place for me, but I still grieve for my students and my years as a teacher, and I try to recover those in my daily practices, as much as I can.

Danu Poyner:

Is there anything you miss about the head teacher role itself?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Not really. We were an amazing team. The other head teacher was incredible and we had teachers in charge of the other levels within the same school were incredible. I don't miss the role, I just miss the community, the connection, the network, the working together towards the same objective, but the people it's not the duty.

Danu Poyner:

You're now based in London, where you mentioned Atom Learning, you're working in learning operations, product management, go to market strategy and growth for ed tech products. It's really interesting that kind of transition into a whole different language of terms and duties and processes. You mentioned before that you didn't know that this was a thing and that even words that are quite common, like feedback, have this corporate context that is not the lived experience of people from a teaching background necessarily. I'm really interested in this transition to this modality and this way of working and how that happened and what you learned about it.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Yeah, basically, I'm still the education experts within the team. My main focus is still making sure that the learning products we create are educationally sounds. And I trained to both my team and other teams on sounds educational practices. So in the end, I do much the same as I did as head teacher. That was training other teams and other professionals on sounds educational practices. And I make sure that processes run smoothly. That was also something I did as head teacher. So the language is different. The objective is different, and the mindsets and the strategic thinking are different. As a process as a team, as a company, or a product, the intention is quite different than if you are a teacher at your regular school, but it's a matter of learning the lingo and taking the time to find skills that are transferable. I took most of my skillsets and my background from my research and my studies into these fields and that allows me to also identify my areas of improvement. That have to do with the business mindsets. I don't have it because I didn't need it until now. This is something that teachers moving into tech struggle a bit at first on identifying what you can bring, how you have to re signify it, but also identify your areas of improvements. What do you need to master to be part of this industry?

Danu Poyner:

You said something really interesting then about how people need to re signify what they can bring and how they story themselves. You've mentioned your research interests a few times. Shall we talk about how those have helped inform what you're doing? What are your research, interests and background there?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Well, I'm a learning scientist. I am a teacher, but my background's in terms of studies and research, is learning science. Within learning science, I've been focusing in three main areas. One is language teaching and learning. Of course, that was something that I'm always keen to continue learning about us. The second one is assessment practices. How will you make sure that assessments are performed in a fair way, not in an overly pressured way and that we can gather information that is actually useful. The third area would be student wellbeing and community wellbeing within learning environments online and live. The three of them have been really useful right now, although Atom Learning does not focus on language teaching, for example, but it has enabled me to think about language units of knowledge or thinking about assessments or content that is suitable for students who do not speak English as a first language. We assume that in the UK or in the us people speak English as the first language, and there's a huge chunk of the population when that's not the case and the process should be a bit different.

Danu Poyner:

I wanna ask you about student wellbeing because that language is very apparent in the way that you've talked about all of your work so far. I have heard you say something really interesting about this, which is that the traditional system has overlooked student wellbeing for centuries. Although I agree with that intuitively, I'm struck by the time scale of centuries. Can you expand on that?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

School has always been a privilege. And until now, for example, higher education remains as a privilege, and a matter of opportunity and a matter of backgrounds. Given the nature of the objective of school, that first was a school or academia as a whole. Then it was high school. Then it was higher education, but in the end formal education was always a matter of privilege. The mechanism of the system is to throw people away. If you do not fit into the system, you don't have to be there because it's not you're right. It's a privilege. The origins of school come up to this and logics from the ancient Greece persist until now in how will we think about school. In the last couple of years, and probably the last decade or so, this concept has been challenged a lot and mass education has been talked about a lot more, even more after the pandemic and the learning loss as it is called after the pandemic. When I started teaching secondary school in Argentina was not mandatory. It was a privilege for those who wanted to attend high school. In Spain still, the last couple of years formal education are not mandatory. They are reserved for those who are going to continue with higher education. I think that it's wrong. It sounds terrible, but it has to do with logics that the system had operating since its conception.

Danu Poyner:

It seems as a fitting process that goes on in that formal education structure. The system is evaluating whether someone is gonna fit and succeed in that. And if not, as you say, they can be thrown away because there's no right. But what is that formal education structure selecting for, do you think?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Well, it originally had to deal with occupying political positions. School was forming leaders for the future. And It's something that's part of the speech until today. School educates or develops the leaders of the future. This is something we keep hearing in the school environments. That was the ancient Greece objective of the academia, not now. Developing a niche group of people to lead uneducated mass of people is not the current goal of education, but still in formal education, primary and secondary, developed students to continue their studies in the formal way to become lawyers and doctors and whatsoever without minding that they're very diverse learning journeys, and they're very diverse career prospects or life prospects that students may want to conceive. If we as educators, we only conceive as the only possible future for students to continue studying and working in an intellectual position until they retire, we're leaving many, many students out of the system that would like or would be suited or whatsoever for something completely different and they would be great. But we're not considering that. And that's why I got an interest wellbeing in particular. To make sure that the learning journey, at least the ones I'm in charge of, everyone could get something from them and something meaningful.

Danu Poyner:

Even the more recent developments in mass education, I'm thinking around when mass schooling came in around industrial revolution times, it expanded the access considerably, but was still tied to producing people who would fit the economic system. It was really about producing workers, and again that was more access, but still a fitting process and people could be easily discarded and what they were being fitted for wasn't necessarily about their wellbeing. What's your, take on that?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I think that challenge that we as educators have today is that we cannot, imagine something different, we already know that we have no idea what those students are going to be doing in 20 years, because we have no idea of what the working environment is going to look like. This is something Ken Robinson says really clearly and really powerfully. We are educating students for positions or roles that will not exist in a decade. And we have no idea how to manage things differently. So that also is why wellbeing is so important because if we don't know what we're forming students to perform, why should we do it in a certain way, rather than stimulating creativity, simulating reasoning, stimulating problem solving, or other skills. That would allow them to be happy in whatever they decide to do.

Danu Poyner:

A lot of the way that these institutions work in practice reminds me of Procrustes, the Greek mythological figure who used to kidnap travelers and lock off bits of their anatomy or stretch them in the right shape to fit his bed. We have this appalling habit of fitting people to the system instead of designing systems that can accommodate the people for who, I assume they're designed and so great violence can be done to people in the name of these systems. I spend a lot of time speaking to the people who are remaindered by the school system and have not had a good time with it. One of the things, particularly from young people that I hear a lot is that you can't reform education without overthrowing capitalism because it's so embedded in the economic system. So when we talk about how we don't know what professions and what work people will need to do in 20 years time, they're thinking much more deeply about this than just jobs. They're thinking about the whole future of the planet, and that's really weighing down on them. I don't know if it's fair to ask you for a perspective on that, but it's been on my mind a lot lately. Do you have any thoughts?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Of course I have, but it's not something I've done enough research to give a public opinion. However, the last decade, primarily the pandemic and what came after, have bring up a lot more questions and a lot more needs on thinking systems differently. And this is something that I'm really hopeful about. Because what I've seen in terms of networks in terms of questions in terms of research during the pandemic would lead to systems are less of a system and more of a variety of experiences. The risk we face right now after the pandemic, is what do we do now? As a system, as a community, do we completely forget about what progress, what questions or what experiences we had in the last couple of years. And try to go back to whatever we were doing before, or we use this to improve our students and every single person, school-aged students or grown up, learns. I think we're in a breaking point in education and I personally like to think that I'm in a great position to see how it evolves within the economic system.

Danu Poyner:

I'm struck by this concept that you use in your research, convivencia what can you tell me about that?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

The concept of convivencia in Spanish is very rich. It's not just living together and tolerating each other or respecting each other or being able to talk to each other. But there's a lot more to that. There's a process of building relationships, building communication strategies, of building values and building identities in the process. If I have to think about the concept in English, I would identify different areas, values on one hand and social interactions in the other hand. They're different things in nature, but they relate to each other really closely. A system in the human body, that functions because the outer part functions and it's holistic and it's complete.

Danu Poyner:

Even a surface exploration showed me that that term in Spanish it's much more bound up in layered meanings and historical social context of Spanish history. Using these kinds of concepts and going between languages, as someone who is interested in learning science and language teaching, and student wellbeing and accessibility, there's so much going on there,when English is the defacto global language and the language of science, do we miss out on something because we assume that it's a direct access to to how things are, but really it's just one way of seeing the world.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I think we could miss a lots of things, but if we build communities and we build research opportunities from an inclusive perspective and an empathetic perspective, there's no risk of missing anything. As a person that does not speak English their first language, there's something of the higher level thinking, putting emotions into words, for example, or reflections into words that when you translate it, you formalize it. It's not spontaneous. It's not natural. It goes through a decoding process. The thing is, I can do that and still be myself, provided the person in front of me is an active listener and is interested in what I have to say independently of the quality of my English. It's a matter of empathy. It's a matter of actively listening and asking questions and being still curious over the context from where that speech or that statement comes from. This is something we are not really good at as people. We tend to be respectful in a way that we don't ask questions to the other person just because we don't want to be irreverent. However, understanding the place where that message comes from, being a research paper, being a lesson, being an email, it's key to fill those gaps in communication that happen when you translate. They're always things that cannot be translated unless you dig a bit deeper.

Danu Poyner:

I would very happily just keep talking about highly theoretical things for hours, but I think we should probably come back to some of the practical things that you're doing in the ed tech space and learning operations seems to be a catch all term for what this is. Can you explain what learning operations means as if to a 10 year old or perhaps a teenager?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Yeah, I could do the 10 year olds because I have thought about this. When a teacher brings a board game into the classroom, she needs to cut the cardboard, draw the different parts of the board game, color them. Basically, I make sure that the teacher has the board game ready when she has to go to the classroom. That is learning operations. It's the behind the scenes of the board game the teacher brought on Friday.

Danu Poyner:

What a great way of explaining that. So the teacher can turn up and teach because the operation, everything else, is taken care of. Is that a fair assessment?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

It is a really fair assessment. Is making sure that you are enabling the teaching and learning to happen as much as you can. That is the unpopular task of learning processes and learning strategies that people in general, at least people in education don't enjoy. I love it. It's what I do.

Danu Poyner:

So what do you love about that? And what does it look like in the context that you're working in now?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I think that, from my Argentinian perspective, every single time you think about a lesson you want to deliver, or the learning program or a book you want to write, whatever learning device is the concept. And from that concept up to the final products, there's this pesky way that you never know what happens in the middle. I just love the part in between the concept and the final product. This is what I enjoy the most: taking or outlining the learning experience as a concept and turning that into a deliverable, into a product, into something that people can actually enjoy. That use idealistically. In real life, I do spreadsheets all day and I make sure that people and professionals, my colleagues, for example, that have an idea of what would they want to do, they make it happen step by step. They draw their steps, they know how they're going to do them, how to evaluate them, how to test them and then move on to the following step until the board game is finished and it can be taken to the classroom. So in reality is spreadsheets and making sure that people populate those spreadsheets or create their own.

Danu Poyner:

I can see how all the threads that we've been talking about will come to bear on that. I'm wondering if you could walk me through an example of how you have gone through that process of taking a a really cool concept and bringing it to the point where it's ready to go.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Well, when I started working at Atom Learning my job and my teams was to design an educational platform, quite similar to the one that was already existing in the UK, but for the US. We knew what we wanted to do, but it had to be done. And we did that in two very big iterations. First I was designing the content. Then I took leadership of the team and leadership of with projects. So my job was, this is what we need. We need a platform that high school students in the U S can use to prepare for entrance examinations. This is what I have to do. These number of activities, these number of educational videos, these number of other resources. This is the person I need to communicate with. I outlined everything. And with my team, we went step by step into that process and see how the platform was ready to be launched in March this year. That is actually pretty gratifying, that you can see things from start to finish.

Danu Poyner:

What's the most exciting thing that you are working on at the moment?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Well, now that I took over the management, not only of the us but also the UK learning products, as an education lead I advise in every change that needs to be done into the curriculum of our subjects or products, features of products. I advice my internal team, I advise product tech, marketing, customer success. And that is what I enjoy the most. My manager, Anna, has a phrase that we put the education in educational products. I love managing projects, but I'm an educator and what I love is advocating for great education. So that is what I enjoy the most of my work.

Danu Poyner:

It sounds Maria like the substance of what you're doing now is not so different from the head teacher work, but the context and the form is quite different. Is that a fair assessment?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Yes and no, there's some touching points in between both, that's true, but there's something that happens when you have real students, flesh and bone, in the classroom, that you're responsible for them, you're responsible for the integrity, their well-being or safety. And that shapes the role of a head teacher and the role of a teacher intrinsically. You are fully and sole responsible for each of those souls that you have sitting in front of you. That is so drastically different in both industries, in both fields that I wouldn't say they're comparable.

Danu Poyner:

Yeah, no, that's fair. So I'm curious then Coming back to how we started and the connection with students, the magic of teaching and the community of practice around that, are you getting that in the work that you're doing now? What does that look like?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Absolutely. They inherently different but what happens in Ed Tech is that you go beyond the fact that ed tech is a business field. So people want to make profits and that's fine. But when you move beyond that, you get the time and you get the mental bandwidth and you get the resources and the opportunity to think really deeply about what greats education is. When you are with a group of teachers who all have classes at the same time, you never get to that level of depth in those conversations, because the priority are those students that you're in charge of. So what I found working in Ed Tech is that I met amazing professionals with the most diverse backgrounds from all over the world, because working in a school is something quite local, but working in a huge industry such as Ed Tech is something really global and you get the opportunity to go really in-depth on what great education means on how to make that happen.

Danu Poyner:

Yeah, It sounds almost like the difference between working in something and working on something.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Yeah, absolutely. It's difficult. And It also happens when you're working in technology or in every industry, when you get so into something that you have in front of your face, your next lesson, the homework you have to grade, the project you have to complete before the deadline, you cannot see the higher level picture. You cannot ask yourself or ask your colleagues the really important, big questions about what you're doing. And coming back to that question we asked ourselves during the pandemic. What do we do? Now in this context and in this industry, not always, but sometimes you get the opportunity to ask that question and find really answers to research and to experiment with.

Danu Poyner:

With all of your experiences and perspective and intellectual depth, what have you found about what great education looks like?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

That's a big question. I would say that great education is people centred and not people as a whole, but every single person centered. If every single person can get from a learning experience of whichever kind, something meaningful, that is great to education. And not only getting something meaningful, being able to capitalize that experience and discover and put in practice what they have found. It has never been so clear that we have to be really people centered as we're trying to be right now.

Danu Poyner:

One of the things I always ask people on the podcast. What is a life changing, learning experience you would gift to someone and why?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I would say, from a very personal and current experience, I would say living abroad, I have been very privileged throughout my life in Argentina of being well-educated and having the chance to work, to meet people, to research. But what you learn when you face to a completely different culture, a completely different routine, and in group of people and ways of saying and doing things, it's a metacognitive process because you get to reflect upon your own beliefs, your own practices. I guess I've been living here for over a year and I'm still processing all of that. I'm still processing what I used to do and I used to think, I used to believe. Again, this is something that you're asking me today and today I can certainly say that: having the possibility to live in a different country.

Danu Poyner:

It's a strong answer. I Thank you for that. I wanted to ask you about the sense of mission as a teacher and what that looks like for you now, do you still have that, does it express itself in a different way? How are you feeling about that?

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I think the meaning has changed. I'm always attracted to mission driven projects. It's in my nature as a teacher, and my political being, of being drawn towards mission mission-driven projects. There is something about the mission that in teaching in formal education, that puts a lot of pressure on the teachers, on who to be, how to behave, what to think, what not to think and how to feel about what you do. That is something that I had to let go because in the end, and that happens to many, many teachers, the sacrifice is your own personal life. Your mission becomes the number one priority and whatever you do with your time with yourself or with your personal life, becomes completely secondary. And what I gained when I moved into tech was having a life that is me away from the mission. I can be myself and find interests outside of marking papers, for example. That is something that, as a teacher, you don't allow yourself to do.

Danu Poyner:

There's gonna be a lot of people listening to this who are really pricking up their ears at that. So what does your life look like? How do you fill your cup? What are some of the interests that you've pursuing now you've got a bit of space.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

I been here for a year, so I'm still settling down or living in a completely different country. I've always enjoyed traveling. Something that I can now do that I couldn't do when it was a teacher was picking my laptop and going to a cafe on a coastal town on a Tuesday and work from there because I don't have to bring 30 students with me. This is something that I try to do as much as I can, to work from different settings and try to find inspiration from visiting different places.

Danu Poyner:

Well, thank you so much for sharing that. There's so much more I could ask you about, but we've covered a lot and I'm really grateful for the way that you have shared your insights and the many different mingling of interests with such clarity.

Maria Fernanda Puertas:

Thank you for having me. And yeah, it's been a pleasure for me. Reflecting upon the journey is always an opportunity to capitalize experience and why not learn something new and I'm always up for learning something new. So yeah. Thank you for that. Bye.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Danu Poyner

Host