From Knowledge Transfer to Human Development: A New Purpose for School from Jane Shore

PODCAST Season 6 EPISODE 12

Jane R. Shore

Founder, School of Thought; Author, People-Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human

Quotes of the Podcast: 

“The stars we are given, the constellations we make.” Rebecca Solnit

 Introduction of Guest BIO – 

Jane R. Shore, EdD is the founder of School of Thought PHL, and a learning scientist and research visualizer devoted to the idea that learning is, at its core, a human act. She is especially drawn to the hard-to-measure dimensions of learning - connection, reflection and action, and to the conditions that allow them to emerge. Her work explores how People-Based Learning offers a way forward in a world overflowing with information, but starved for meaning, bridging the space between rapidly expanding knowledge, emerging technologies, and our enduring need to learn with and through one another. Through her publication School of Thought, Jane translates research into practice using visual storytelling and lived experience. She is also the co-creator of The Art of Being Human, a collective art project with Sam Chaltain that invites reflection and connection through making and shared inquiry. Her keynotes, workshops, and learning designs create spaces where ideas are not just understood, but felt. Jane’s work has been published across academic journals, book chapters, and research reports, and she also illustrated two books for children, Imagine Song and For All the Curious Girls. Her forthcoming non-fiction book, People-Based Learning: The Future of Learning Is Human, (Routledge, March 2026) brings together research, stories, and design practices to show how learning with and through others makes learning meaningful and lasting.

Interview

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators. 

• 30,000 Ft. View – Why do we, as a society invest in education?
• What drew you to education?
• School of Thought - School of Thought exists to make People-Based Learning visible, intentional, and possible everywhere we live, work, and gather. We sit at the intersection of learning science, storytelling, art, and community, translating research into forms people can feel, see, and use.
• People-Based Learning (PeBL), the essential learning we do with and through one another. PeBL is an orientation defined and described through research, stories and experiences in my book! (Routledge, 2026).
• Measuring the important intangibles
• What are the biggest challenges to you?
• What would you like decision makers to know?”

Podcast/ website/ book shoutouts

My School of Thought substack: https://schoolofthought.substack.com/

My The Art of Being Human Substack created in collaboration with Sam Chaltain: https://theartofbeinghumanproject.substack.com/; 

People-Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human: https://www.routledge.com/People-Based-Learning-The-Future-of-Learning-is-Human/Shore/p/book/9781041089858?utm_source=cjaffiliates&utm_medium=affiliates&cjevent=2dd4af965df611f181da002f0a82b836

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to Education Perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education.

Liza Holland [00:00:28]:
And welcome back to Education Perspectives. We're so excited to have Jane R. Shore joining us today. She's the founder of the School of Thought and author of People Based Learning, the Future of Learning is Human. Jane, so great to have you as a guest on Education Perspectives.

Jane R. Shore [00:00:45]:
Thank you for having me. I am really excited to be here and to get to talk to you.

Liza Holland [00:00:51]:
I need to kick you off with our 30,000 foot question. From your perspective, why do we as a society invest in education?

Jane R. Shore [00:01:00]:
I think education sits at the foundation of what we are as humans and it's not always in a formal setting. Everything we do from the time we're born is about learning. I think humans are primed to learn and our education moves to more formal places and allows us to fully develop as humans. I've been really thinking about for the question. I mean, you're asking me 30,000. You say 30,000ft. I was going to say question of 30,000ft. The zoom out.

Jane R. Shore [00:01:34]:
And I really think about also it ties to sort of like, what's the purpose of education? What's the purpose of school? And I will say that our past experience eras have brought us into places where we felt like the purpose of school was to transmit knowledge. At least when I was in school, it was like, how much can we jam into your. Into your head? And it's evolved for me in recognizing that I think education and the purpose of school is sort of more importantly or at a different layer about human development and the development of humans. And of course knowledge is important and of course all of the elements that form the foundation of what we know and what we can do and what we can be and human development at the center, at the why feels really important to recognize right now.

Liza Holland [00:02:38]:
I would agree with you wholeheartedly there. And it's no longer a situation where knowledge is a commodity that people don't have easy access to. You know, right now it's in your pocket all of a sudden. How to deal with that knowledge and the process of thinking through it is. Is the key. I love it. So what drew you to education as

Jane R. Shore [00:03:03]:
so I would, you know, I, I think about recently the home I grew up in. I always wanted to be a teacher. Honestly, I would. In the basement of my Home. We had these room dividers, and I actually, when I was very small, one of the first memories I have is setting up a game of school. My poor brother. My poor brother had to be my student, you know, my only student. But I think that, you know, I grew up.

Jane R. Shore [00:03:28]:
And I thought about this recently. I grew up in a home where our door was always open. And that meant that neighbors and family and, you know, the postman was at our Thanksgiving table one year. It was really about bringing people around the table to talk and to exchange perspectives. And at a very young age, I feel like I saw, you know, adults and children in spaces where they were engaging together, and they were. I was watching people disagree. That was just something that happened around my dinner table. But it was like it was a loving disagreement.

Jane R. Shore [00:04:07]:
So it was a. It was a way to see how. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, how we can disagree. Well, but it wasn't just disagreement. It was, you know, my dad's friend. My dad was an engineer, and his friends would come over and they were always available to help me learn math, or we had people in our neighborhood who were Spanish speaking. And it motivated me to want to learn Spanish and rooted in this idea that the door was open, that we would be inviting people in, that some of these people would be around our table. And I saw education as a way to.

Jane R. Shore [00:04:45]:
I think, as I said before, I feel like we're primed to learn. And what better place to be than a place that is devoted to that, you know, but also a place where you belong, a place where you can, you know, gather and, you know, exchange with other humans. And I think those are the things that drew me to education. They drew me to wanting to be a teacher, which I was a while, you know, and I was. I worked with immigrant and refugee groups, and that led me to all kinds of things, opening worlds that I'd never been to. And so I think. But the root of it really was this sort of open door and recognition that sitting at the table, having a meal with people, is an experience that you can maybe find in other spaces. And that sort of, I think, was my model for what I wanted school to be.

Liza Holland [00:05:41]:
Oh, I like that so much, that kind of gathering into community and how you. How you can see yourself and expand your knowledge through a variety of different contacts, all that kind of a thing. I'm working with the League of Women Voters, and we're going to be doing what we're calling democracy potlucks in the fall, where we're going to try to pull people together to research the candidates that they'll be voting for and talk about how voting works and answer any questions and all that kind of stuff and then encourage them to go together to early voting. And I'm just real excited about the topic, if for no other reason than we have gotten away from doing block parties and little potlucks and just get togethers and whatnot. And I think that that's going to be a benefit beyond the civic impact that it was rooted in.

Jane R. Shore [00:06:36]:
I love this. And I also wonder, have you heard of the author Monica Guzman? She wrote a book. She's a lovely author. She wrote a book called I Never Thought of It that Way. It's been used in a lot of freshman orientation college in the last few years. And she's somebody I've followed. And actually just in March, I got to meet her out in Los Angeles. Her book really tells her own story of growing up as someone who tends to lean more liberal with parents who are immigrants from Mexico who are very conservative.

Jane R. Shore [00:07:16]:
And she talks specifically about one story or sort of a concept that I love. And it's not called this, but I'm going to call it like the front stoop theory. And I say that because she talks about the idea that presently it feels like a lot of us are sitting on our back porch where we have people around us who agree with us and know us and they have to be invited in. But we need more of a, what she calls, I think, a front porch. I say front because I'm here in Philadelphia and there's.

Liza Holland [00:07:49]:
You only have a stoop. Yes.

Jane R. Shore [00:07:51]:
So I love it. I love it because you can sit on the stairs and people walk by and you can have conversations. And the idea being that you might not know the political orientation of the person that's walking by, asking you directions or telling you a story or. But all of a sudden you've broken a barrier to engage with people in a way that can begin to recognize that we're humans together, experiencing the world together. And I love the idea of having potlucks and having sort of. I wonder if it's like a front porch potluck idea, you know?

Liza Holland [00:08:32]:
Yeah.

Jane R. Shore [00:08:32]:
Seriously, walking by because. Because that feels like the most. It's really challenging. But one of the most important things we could be doing right now in Crossing conversation.

Liza Holland [00:08:44]:
Oh, I agree with you wholeheartedly. And I'll tell you what, a lot of your work, as I read through it, really underpins this piece of thinking and thinking differently. I love so we're gonna talk about people based learning. Tell me about how you got involved in all of that. And it's really focusing on that essential learning that we do with, with and through each other. So kind of a good, kind of good, good segue from our private prior conversation.

Jane R. Shore [00:09:09]:
Absolutely. So, and I think I want to go back to talking about having this open door feeling at my home growing up. You know, there were always people that were sorting, sitting at the foundation of curiosity or people that I was observing and, you know, at the table and learning from and learning through and where I could participate as a young person in conversations. It wasn't like we sat at a different table. We didn't have those kinds of like the little table. We were there and we could disagree and we could agree and we could add something. And so I, for many years was doing research, learning. I was a learning scientist and, and I found myself in, and this is sort of like in a little bit of a tangent, but I found myself very frequently in the role of being in between the research and the practice.

Liza Holland [00:10:11]:
Yeah.

Jane R. Shore [00:10:11]:
And it was apparent to me that the, the part of what was missing in some, some of the sort of formulaic ways we do research was this piece where we were connected. How can the researchers and the teachers be learning with and through each other instead of just one to the other? And I did that for about close to 20 years. I was doing learning science research, interdisciplinary teams. We were working with cognitive neuroscientists, understanding the brain. It was all very interesting and I learned a lot. And then in 2018, I started to feel like it was very far away from the actual human that would be affected by the research. So I had the opportunity to join a founding team of a school here in Philadelphia. And the school's called Revolution School.

Jane R. Shore [00:11:14]:
And when you start a school now, this is something, I don't know if your listeners have been our school starters. It was, it was a new experience for me. And what happens in any innovative space or a startup, you're playing all kinds of roles. Oh yeah, right. So yeah, one of the roles I got to play was really like, how are we leaning into our mission of breaking down the walls between learning and life and our mission of co creating the community? And I thought back to the way that I grew up, where my door was open and there were people coming in and I could leave and go visit somebody and I knew they would invite me in. And I thought, that's what we want to create as a school. We want that feeling that young people in the world have champions, not just guests that are coming in. They have mentors, they have partners that are in it with them.

Jane R. Shore [00:12:18]:
They have people that have experiences in which these young individuals have a part to play. And so people based learning started to emerge as a concept. And I think it was rooted back in my role in research where I thought, there's no people basis in this. You know, there's nothing there that's maintaining that connection. You can't just start with a project. You have to start with people. And then it grew when we started to create a school around the idea that we didn't want everything that was learned to have to exist only within the walls of a classroom. So people based learning started to look like, how do we go out and connect with people in city hall? The school is right close to city hall.

Jane R. Shore [00:13:15]:
Or how do we connect with the media? How do we look at all of the learning that can be done on the corner at the library with the librarians? What's available? What could we do in terms of projects for the streets? There are bike language lanes. You know, city council's trying to figure out what the bike lanes are going to be doing. You know, who was in those bike lanes? Young people. You know, who's in those council meetings? No, young people.

Liza Holland [00:13:41]:
People.

Jane R. Shore [00:13:42]:
Right. So it started to look like we really need to find ways to engage with each other, to learn with them through each other. And this idea emerged that we need to. And people based learning has three parts. They are connecting, reflect and affect. And as the years went on, started to see those patterns. We need to be able to connect and understand what the ideas are that are essential for us to know as citizens, as humans, as, you know, people know about ourselves, know about, you know, our emotion and our bodies and our spaces and our. Not all the knowledge that we need to grow and then reflect on how it fits for us or what that fits into.

Jane R. Shore [00:14:32]:
So the connect, the reflect and then the, you know, it doesn't stop there. And, and I, I think one of the things that I've seen again and again is, you know, schools set us up, especially in those knowledge era times when I was in school for spending. I mean, you maybe have connections, sometimes you add reflection, but there wasn't a lot of effect. There wasn't a lot of like, what do you do with this? And how can you engage in it? And so I think taking people based learning came from these, these series of experiences. Realizing you need to begin with people, you need to learn with and through each other. You need to co create with meaning and emotion and action. And that is what leads to sticky inclusive memories and knowledge and skills and habits that you can use. So it was a series of I was going to the events were life organic events.

Jane R. Shore [00:15:32]:
But I think that that's where people based learning emerged. And as a researcher for so many years I also had the opportunity to engage people whose research underlined a lot of this and also conduct our own research over the last couple of years that allowed us to feed into the concepts of people based learning.

Liza Holland [00:15:54]:
I love the fact that you are also applying your research hat as you are developing this thing because I see schools right now having a really difficult time knowing how to measure success in these more intangible types of arenas. You know, everybody wants to put a rubric together and everybody wants to, you know, kind of have a checklist. But this whole practical application in real world learning is so much more vibrant than, you know, most of your rubric based sorts of things have been giving kids, at least in my experience. I mean obviously there are these wonderful bright lights out there and it sounds like your school is very much one of those bright lights. But you know, how do we help the massive system that we need to turn understand this and think about how it can be measured and researched and show that it has an effect?

Jane R. Shore [00:16:59]:
Absolutely. And I want to clarify. So I still feel like it's my school. I feel very close to the school I'm no longer directly with. I talk to them on time.

Liza Holland [00:17:09]:
I.

Jane R. Shore [00:17:10]:
The teachers are just so incredible. The founder is incredible. My son graduated from the school last year.

Liza Holland [00:17:18]:
So you will always be a member.

Jane R. Shore [00:17:20]:
And I was not just, you know, part of that founding team, but I also had a child going through this experience which was really, I'm really grateful for and I think it was just a really good fit for him. But I just want to clarify that it is. I don't know if I can name my school. You know, I don't think anyone would be upset if I said it was my school because I feel very close to it. But what I wanted to respond to actually was your point about measurement. And I spent many years in an institution and a role that was largely about measurement. And I found myself in school basis where I'm very drawn to how to measure hard to measure things. I think that they are frequently the most important.

Jane R. Shore [00:18:12]:
So when we bring up engagement and belonging and connection and you know, I love the term post secondary wellness, all of these terms, they tend to be more amorphous, they tend to be less measurable and so actually, in the book that I just had the opportunity to write, Chapter 8 is devoted to measurement. And part of the reason is, and I want to just talk about one area and one way when we start to create these experiences for young people in schools that have them out doing work, you know, based on things they're interested in and following passions and curiosities and engaging in, you know, we. I'm using my fingers to say, quote, unquote, and you can't say that if we're doing a podcast. But the idea of being real world, you know, all these kids are in the real world. But I understand the idea of like, stepping out of the classroom. There is a methodology. I've been using it over the last few years with the schools that I've gotten to work with, including the school that I got to be a part of founding, but also other schools. And it is called.

Jane R. Shore [00:19:19]:
Well, the idea is ripples of impact mapping. So when we think about, you know, in business, we use the term roi mean return on investment. I hope I got that right. It is, yep. So it's a return on investment. But what about adding roi, ripples of impact to that definition? So when we think about the return on investment, certainly there are people that wonder with questions of like, how worth it is is this thing to learn. But imagine changing our lens slightly to look at the impact that learning is having. So if you're doing something related to ripples of impact mapping, what you're doing is you're mapping the connections that have been made between a curriculum and the world and looking at, with partners, the various impact points, the various way points of light that have made a difference, have made a difference to individual young people, to the community, to an organization, to a school, to the learning.

Jane R. Shore [00:20:35]:
And you begin to see almost a constellation of learning rather than a report or a test. And one of the things that this of measurement does is it brings learning and measurement from individual progress, which is how we tend to look at the way we learn in schools. What did you learn? We move it from that and we turn it into something that becomes how does learning happen between people, between organizations? What kinds of impact is being made? And when you think about it, the lasting way that we can begin to look at what measurement means. And, you know, if we really want to do report, it doesn't mean as much to say, well, we're doing this report and you got an A. That's going to be one moment in time, but we're doing this report to share with you that Your participation in the surveying on the corner of Broad street in Philadelphia, looking at how many bikes go by and how many young people are using that bike lane, how important that bike lane is. We need to make sure that there is protection for the bikers on that bike lane because there are a lot of young people going to school there. That's saving lives, that's allocating resource, that's involving young people in saying we need more bike lanes in West Philadelphia. So I'm just using our local example.

Jane R. Shore [00:22:04]:
But there are young people at that council meeting. Those impacts are, they become much more relevant to life. And when, and I think, you know, when young people express any kind of disengagement, it is not, I think teaching is the best and the hardest job ever. But disengagement piece I think we know has to do with how relevant is this for me? How important is this for me? And when you start to participate in things and measure that your voice, your presence, your whatever it is that you did, that contribution that you made ends up having some impact. It matters, right?

Liza Holland [00:22:54]:
It matters. It's got some context. It answers that age old question, when are we ever going to use this?

Jane R. Shore [00:23:00]:
Exactly, Exactly.

Liza Holland [00:23:01]:
You know, students have been asking that for ages and ages and ages, but it's even more relevant today. I love that concept of mapping the impact. And talk about how inspirational it is to go from, okay, you got an A to you are helping to save lives. I mean, wow.

Jane R. Shore [00:23:20]:
Yeah, yeah.

Liza Holland [00:23:22]:
Oh, that's so cool. So tell me more about this book because obviously that's only one wonderful, juicy piece of it, but what else do you have in this marvelous book?

Jane R. Shore [00:23:33]:
So the book, I will tell you the project that the book emerged from, although, as I was saying, I think this is. I was in research for a long time, so I've had opportunities to write in academic journals. This experience, writing a book, Liza, it was. I loved writing, I loved engaging in the ideas. It was such a learning experience. It was so fulfilling. And one of the projects that contributed to the book was a conversation campaign that we conducted over the last two years in partnership with a nonprofit called Cortico. And Cortico is.

Jane R. Shore [00:24:15]:
It's really a platform, a technology platform that allows you to upload recorded conversations and collectively make sense of them. They work. And they were started by the person who founded the MIT center for Constructive Communication. He used to be the head of the MIT Media Lab. This is a person who's been very involved over a decade in raising underheard voices. That has been part of his mission in his work in technology from really, really huge positions to things that are differently impactful like this. So Portico works with government and with schools to engage in conversation projects that raise under her voices. And so the project that I got to do, emerging from some work that was done across schools and sectors that I had initiated starting in 2024, was a youth led conversation campaign with and these were high school students leading and small groups, four to five people from across the world asking people to tell stories of a significant learning experience that happened with or through a person.

Jane R. Shore [00:25:43]:
And we collected from hundreds of of people and created a space for sense making together to identify themes and lessons and what are the skills and dispositions that are coming out again and again. So we did, you know what looks, I mean it is a qualitative study, but it also allows us to have these rich stories.

Liza Holland [00:26:07]:
Yeah.

Jane R. Shore [00:26:08]:
And themes started to emerge and this is where the model connect, reflect effect also started to emerge. And what we called skill clusters or the idea of what kinds of skills, human navigation skills and participatory agency. What are the things that are emerging that feel like they begin to define people based learning. And so the book was co authored, I will say by those young people who are now in college. And I just got, I just got to engage and facilitate a workshop at Columbia University on Wednesday in New York. One of the young people is now there. Another one of the young, young people I got to meet for the first time because she is a, she's from Hong Kong, she goes to Brown, these, these brilliant young people, she goes to Brown and she was in New York City. So I got to meet her for the first time this past week, which I feel.

Liza Holland [00:27:08]:
Oh, how fun.

Jane R. Shore [00:27:09]:
It's fun. And also I feel like I've been learning with them through her for many years. And these young people being involved in these conversations. So there are several things. They're sort of like a meta layer of learning. The book emerged and each chapter, the first three are about connect, the second three are about reflect and the third three chapters are about affect. And each chapter begins with story stories, then it moves to research and then it ends with practical applications, many of which we got to pilot with teachers across the country over the last couple of years so that they can give us feedback and we could iterate.

Liza Holland [00:27:50]:
Yeah.

Jane R. Shore [00:27:51]:
The practical applications in the, in the end of the chapters have ways to apply these people based learning findings in work, school and life. And the individuals in these conversations gave us such rich information and all of that is also available. So MIT and Cortico we were able to create a portal. So alongside the book, there is a portal that I can give you the link to if you don't have it. But there's a portal.

Liza Holland [00:28:25]:
I love it. I'll put it in our show notes so everybody else can check it out.

Jane R. Shore [00:28:29]:
There's a portal where you can. And it's not every story because that would be overwhelming and nobody needs to do the research. But there's a portal that divides all of the stories into these different categories. And the tool itself, the cortico work allowed us, as I said, to upload conversations and make sense of them. And it also is a machine. So we talk about human listening and machine learning. One of the key lessons for me again and again has been I am not anti tech, I'm just pro human. Cortico tool allowed us to code and look at themes and identify what we saw and then also work with the back end of the machine.

Jane R. Shore [00:29:13]:
And it was AI to verify, to explore if things were missed. And so that resulted in this portal that has the stories that are divided into the five key findings. And you can go on and you can tap on the story. And you can hear Richard talking about his own story of learning about moving from being head of a nonprofit to being retired and how that changed his identity. And you can hear Whitney. She is a Parisian. Well, she's living in Paris. She was from New York.

Jane R. Shore [00:29:50]:
She talked about learning from her grandfather and her conversations every week that have helped her think about her own career and guide her through life. Or Chloe, who talked about taking a gap year and how, you know, she was on this track for being very high achiever. And she said, I'm going to take a year off. And she learned how to travel. And, you know, all of these lessons that we learned through people, including lessons in school, but some of them were really life or work. And so the book has again, it starts with stories, it has research, and it ends with these practical applications. One other piece of the book that has emerged for me is I have begun creating visuals as a way for myself to dive into topics and learn them. And so all of the chapters include about 20 visuals that are meant to communicate all the key ideas in ways that allow for another form of language and communication.

Jane R. Shore [00:30:58]:
So I see visuals. I follow an artist named Mona Talibi who has done a lot of. She's a data visualization person. And I look back at my work as a researcher and think about the fact that very, very frequently research doesn't get to practice. So how can we Find ways that allow very complicated ideas to be told in other ways, like visuals. And so Mona Chalabi, as I mentioned, I love this line that she said she wanted to take the numb out of numbers, which I love.

Liza Holland [00:31:37]:
Yes, yes.

Jane R. Shore [00:31:38]:
So sometimes you can look, and it's not always the typical graph, but you can look at a visual in the newspaper, and I'm going to say New York Times, or she's done a bunch for the New York Times, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, now I get it. And so part of the goal for me has always been to both dive more deeply into my own understanding. And that allowed me to create the book itself and to write and to further evolve my ideas, but also to find ways to tap into other ways of knowing for people that might want visuals. So there are stories, research, practical applications. There are visuals, and then there's an accompanying portal so you can hear the stories. Because one of my friends said reading papal based learning is not people based learning.

Liza Holland [00:32:30]:
You know, I can totally understand that. And I love the fact that it's differentiated, too, for different people and how they learn best. You know, I tend to too be a visual person. So your. Your visual mapping of the impact that you were discussing just completely captured my imagination. I'm like, ooh, how can I do that? And, you know, I guess I'm. I love mind mapping for notes, but other people love the words, Other people love the auditory. So I just.

Liza Holland [00:32:55]:
It's. Good job.

Jane R. Shore [00:32:57]:
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, what we know about all that is that we all have all of those ways of learning. We might have preferences, and we. We learn best when we have all of them available. So if there are ways that we can tap into these differentiated, like these multimodal forms of communication, I. That sounds very formal, but, you know, just different ways of transmitting ideas. I feel like they become more durable. I feel like they are more a part of our understanding when they're.

Jane R. Shore [00:33:33]:
They're probably, you know, they're stored in different ways when you tell a story, when you read a story, when you engage in something, when you see a visual, it just is another way of reinforcing and better understanding.

Liza Holland [00:33:44]:
Let me ask you this, because I sit here and I'm like, oh, all of this makes so much wonderful sense, all these kinds of things. But I also have been in education long enough where you have your complete naysayers that are like, sel is worthless and da, da, da, da, it's fluffy and all these kinds of things. What kind of challenges have you faced in trying to spread the word and encourage adoption of people based learning.

Jane R. Shore [00:34:14]:
Yeah. So, you know, I've been lucky. You know, the book just came out and I've gotten to talk to people and I feel like a lot of us are very hungry for this idea. I think that the counter conversation, which is not one that I'm always involved in, but the counter conversation around technology right now has made this human side all the more evident to a lot of people in learning settings. At the same time I think that people will say, well first there's the measurement conversation and sort of like what we measure. And there is also a conversation around, well, you can't do that with my topic or what does it really look like? I mean, you know, so, you know, and I've been thinking about that a lot and I, I have, I'm trying to think of, I'll tell a story of what this looks like in practice because someone said this to me the other night, so I'll tell a story. So my son, as I said, he graduated from Revolution School and he was in a class the first year he. So now he is a freshman in college.

Jane R. Shore [00:35:23]:
But the year he turned 18, he was voting for the first time that November. And his teacher said, well, we're learning about the, the process of democracy in the United States and what I want you to do is go. So right outside of City hall in Philadelphia, there is a place called Love Park. There's a big statue by an artist named Robert Indiana that has the letters love and it's sort of like an iconic statue in Philadelphia. And there are people walking through all the time. And they had been studying how to do ethnographic interviews as a way to learn a way to provide sort of a human face on the topics that you're learning in the classroom. So the students task was to go to Love park and to ask people if find people who had not had the opportunity to vote in the last election and find out why. And the hypothesis of most of these teenagers was they're just apathetic, they were busy, they don't believe in democracy or they don't believe in voting.

Jane R. Shore [00:36:37]:
That's why it doesn't work. You know, 17 and 18 year olds going to talk to people. And so my son went to the park and the first person he stopped, he said, you know, did you get a chance to vote? And he said no. And my son said, would you mind telling me why? You know what, why didn't you get a chance? He said, well actually I was in line to vote. And it was a really long line and I was waiting and I got a call that my wife was in labor and I had to go, I had to get out of line. The story went on. I think I will say I'm going to finish the story, but there are more lessons learned from just that experience. My son, you know, a few weeks later, I guess it was probably more like a month later, he came.

Jane R. Shore [00:37:25]:
First of all, he came home and just was talking about this experience that this guy didn't have the opportunity to vote. And it was not for the reason that my son had assumed. So his assumptions about democracy were challenged. And I think that becomes true more when you have a person in front of you. It allows you to see how important that is. And so when he showed up to vote, his vote felt very different. And if you want to talk about how SEL doesn't matter, look at something like that. There's no greater lesson than having that experience to say, this is why it's so important.

Jane R. Shore [00:38:13]:
And the other piece of that was if I were to get my son up here right now, you know, over here right now and tell you he will say, I didn't know I could talk to a stranger like that. That felt like a really big question. I found out I was actually better at that than I thought. All of those things when you talk, when you try to program SEL into something, it's very different from when you actually are doing something and you're realizing you're growing as a person.

Liza Holland [00:38:40]:
I love that too, because I just feel that there's such a massive disconnect. You look at the top 10 workforce skills that every company from the survey, from World Economic Forum to Kentucky Employer survey or whatever, they're all coming up with these same types of skill sets that have very little to do with academic knowledge and all, you know, everything to do with this type of process that you are encouraging people to go through.

Jane R. Shore [00:39:12]:
Absolutely. And I also am not saying that academic knowledge isn't important. It absolutely is. What I am saying though, and very clearly from the work that I've been doing in the last couple of years is that connection. And these skills are not add ons. So when we try to to formulate programmatic decisions in schools around content, we're missing that connection is actually part of that. And there's lots of research that people are doing. The person that stands out for me is Mary Helen Immortino Yang.

Jane R. Shore [00:39:49]:
She's a professor at usc. She's a neuroscientist. And if you're doubting about, you know, the sel elements that people are spouting off and these idea of programs that we're introducing. Look at her work. She has been doing work for decades, and her work has really highlighted the importance of emotion as a part of learning. If we don't see that our learning is tied to a human and it's relevant, that has to come first. And so I think about, you know, recently I was thinking about this idea because someone asked me how you measure belonging or how you create belonging. And I will say you don't create belonging.

Jane R. Shore [00:40:34]:
What you need to do is give individuals in these settings something to do together. And in the process of doing the thing of creating something, of learning with and through each other, that's how they become connected and that's how. And there are all kinds of other little things. I mean, I do believe in little, you know, mini little things. I. As a part of the book writing process, I got to visit different schools across the country. And there were so many cool things that people do. Like, there was a teacher who every time this, this was a 9th grade history class, and all the students knew that.

Jane R. Shore [00:41:14]:
And there were probably about 40 students in the class. When they came into the class, they had to sit in a different seat than they sat in the day before next to new people. And it's such a little thing. But I went in there probably, I think it was the. It was close to a break, a winter break. So it was sort of late, like middle of the year, and talked to those students and they said originally they thought they wouldn't want to do that because they want to sit with their friends. But they realized there were so many things that they learned about each other, each other by sitting in these different seats. And that in itself ends up teaching you something about extending your boundaries, about how important it is.

Jane R. Shore [00:41:54]:
And they, as a class, I could tell there were things that were happening. They were so connected. They knew a lot more about one another because they were not sitting in the same seat. So there are little things, but there are also big things like creating together. So I think about those kinds of lessons that, you know, it might be a demonstration of belonging when you're asking questions about, you know, and I think that these are very important about, you know, who are your friends, who do you sit with? Do you have people you can tell things to? All of those things, those, you know, mental health questions people ask to ensure that we're looking into those connections among the students and between the students. But I feel like There are so many elements that are necessary and I think that they are design considerations. They are not add ons. They are not.

Jane R. Shore [00:42:52]:
It's not another.

Liza Holland [00:42:53]:
Yet another curriculum. It's a design. That's exactly it. Yep. How can you infuse these things into any topic that you're teaching?

Jane R. Shore [00:43:03]:
Absolutely. How can you use them and how can they be part of the design? Not the students are just going to connect when they do this. Sometimes it requires scaffolding. It requires how do we, you know, one of the things that we got to do when we are co creating the curriculum for, you know, getting out and creating partnerships and experiences and mentors and, you know, people who are advocates and champions for the young people. We had a series of actually journalists come in to say, how do you get the story? How do you. It's not, we talked about not perspective taking, perspective getting. How do you get into those conversations? How do you go? We, we use things like level one questions might be, you know, less deep. When you get to level three, you're really finding out about people.

Jane R. Shore [00:44:00]:
And we also looked into, there's this movement happening right now that I love and also, you know, mentioned in the book and got to talk to the person who founded it. It's called the Big Talk movement. It was started by a young woman named Kalina Silverman. She was a student at Northwestern and was feeling lonely and wanted to get out. And you know, this happened. It ended up coinciding with the pandemic, but even before the pandemic and she felt intimidated by small talk. So she said, what if I just immediately started asking deep questions. And so we engaged in a little bit of that experiment around how do we connect in learning with and through people.

Jane R. Shore [00:44:45]:
And that becomes a lot of the application and the memories that you have around learning that is really durable and emotion oriented and actionable. So I love it.

Liza Holland [00:44:58]:
I love it. So I think I could continue to speak to you on these topics all day, but we are running up against our time here. So my final question for you is what would you like decision makers to know? And you can define decision makers, however you would like to define them.

Jane R. Shore [00:45:16]:
You know, I love this question. I think that in our conversation right now we have and it's not distracted, but we have veered into what is technology doing to education. And I've been thinking about this historically. So I think in terms of decision makers, my mind is looking at who's out there thinking about what the purpose is of school and designing our learning spaces around those purposes. And I Also think that our learning spaces exist in our lives and our workplaces as well.

Liza Holland [00:45:57]:
We have to be lifelong learners.

Jane R. Shore [00:45:59]:
We have to be lifelong learners. And I think that in the past, schools were the recipients of say, a school in. We talk about the factory model, the old factory model where the kids were on assembly line. Everybody had. We were thinking about what can students do? And that model was really prompted by industry and what was going on in the world. And then the model that I feel like I grew up in, and it was after this, but there was the space race, there was Sputnik, there was. There were, you know, decisions made to curricula to say we need to up our game here in science and math. And we started to ask the question, what should students know? And so we had this factory model and then we, this, we had this sort of knowledge orientation, knowledge model.

Jane R. Shore [00:46:57]:
And I think for me, what I would love to be in conversation with decision makers and what I want them to know is I feel like all of those past elements were education receiving a message from industry or from, you know, economics that they needed to change. They needed to produce people that could do things, produce people that can know things. I think right now we're entering a human era and here the educators are the ones that can drive it. And what I mean by that is educators are in spaces where their job is human development. We're entering the human era and we're asking, what can humans become? And in this era, I see educators as holding a place that hasn't been held by education before. In the past they were receiving, but now I feel like they can be driving. So I see whatever role I could play in figuring out how that is manifesting. But I see people based learning not as it's capturing the story of what's happening right now.

Jane R. Shore [00:48:17]:
It's our most important and durable, emotional and actionable way to learn. Especially as we enter this human era where we're asking the question, what can humans become?

Liza Holland [00:48:31]:
That is a fabulous end to a marvelous conversation. Thank you again so much for coming on and for sharing your thoughts. And now I'm so excited to dig even further into your book. It's on my nightstand now.

Jane R. Shore [00:48:46]:
Thank you so much. Thank you for having my book on your nightstand. Thank you for this lovely conversation, for these questions. I love talking about all of it.

Liza Holland [00:48:55]:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Education Perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page. Let us know which hedge fund patient perspectives you would like to hear or share. Please subscribe and share with your friends.