Jagged Edge with Yogi Patel
Welcome to "Jagged Edge with Yogi Patel." As a certified Master Trainer and Harvard Business School alumnus with certifications in Management Essentials and Leadership, I bring over three decades of leadership experience to share practical insights on cultivating purpose, creativity, encouragement, and personal growth.
Join me in navigating the essentials of empowerment, empathy, communication, and impactful leadership. Alongside my expertise, the podcast features interviews with leaders and educators in the field, adding valuable perspectives to our skill development. Let's ignite your passion for excellence and lead with unwavering courage on this transformative journey. Each day, as leaders, we learn and grow to support our companies and communities.
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Http://yogi@yogipatel.com
Jagged Edge with Yogi Patel
Is School Still Relevant? Designing Learning for the Age of AI with Dr. Lisa Riegel & Yogi Patel
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How neuroscience, executive functions, and human-centered leadership can transform education for the future.
Are today’s schools preparing students for the future, or for a world that no longer exists?
In this episode of Jagged Edge, Yogi Patel welcomes Dr. Lisa Riegel, educator, author, speaker, and CEO of the Educational Partnerships Institute, for a thoughtful conversation about the future of education in the age of artificial intelligence.
Together, they explore how executive functions, critical thinking, creativity, psychological safety, and purpose are becoming essential skills for both students and educators. Rather than asking how schools can keep up with technology, they ask a more important question:
How do we create learning environments where every student can flourish?
This conversation offers practical insights for educators, school leaders, parents, and anyone committed to helping people grow through meaningful relationships, purposeful learning, and environments designed for human flourishing.
In This Episode
- Why student disengagement is often a purpose problem
- How AI is changing what students need to learn
- Why executive functions are essential for lifelong success
- The importance of psychological safety in learning
- Why teachers are becoming designers of learning rather than simply deliverers of content
- Practical strategies for creating schools where curiosity, creativity, and connection thrive
Key Takeaways
✔ Learning is more than acquiring information—it is developing the ability to think, adapt, and contribute.
✔ Executive functions are foundational for success in school, work, and life.
✔ Psychological safety creates the conditions where learning and innovation can flourish.
✔ Education must prepare students not only for careers but for meaningful participation in a rapidly changing world.
Resources
Transformation Through Empowerment
Helping parents, educators, leaders, and caregivers create environments where people flourish through connection, capability, contribution, and encouragement.
Learn more about Dr. Lisa Riegel
Connect with Yogi Patel
Website: https://yogipateltte.com
YouTube: @YogiPatelTTE
Podcast: Jagged Edge
Podcast: Now What?
About Jagged Edge
Jagged Edge is a podcast exploring the conversations that shape education, leadership, parenting, and organizational culture.
Each episode bridges research with practical application, helping listeners design environments where people feel connected, capable, encouraged, and empowered to contribute.
Because human flourishing doesn’t happen by chance, it happens by design.
Let me know your topics of interest and join me for training or visit the website and read the blogs. Comment with your ideas and thoughts please.
Yogi Patel - Transformation Through Empowerment
Http://yogipateltte.com
yogi@yogipateltte.com
@yogipatel_tte
Welcome to Jagged Edge with Yogi Patel. This is where we step into conversations that are often avoided, the ones that sit right at the edge of leadership systems and human behavior. Because here's the reality: education is not lacking ideas. We've got research, we have frameworks, we have passionate leaders trying to do the right thing, and yet walk into many schools and not much has fundamentally changed, not from when you were a young person or myself. So the question becomes: are we trying to fix a system that might no longer be relevant or even deeper? Is the real challenge education or how we think about education itself? I am joined by Lisa Regal. She is an author, speaker, CEO of Educational Partnerships Institute. Her work focuses on various critical areas. The real change only happens when we align brain science with human systems, not just policies, not just strategies, but how people actually think, respond, and operate inside of those systems. Lisa, I am really glad that you are here supporting parents and caregivers and leaders with these questions that are popping up for them. When you say redefining purpose, what does that actually look like in a real school today?
SPEAKER_01Purpose piece came out of the fact that we have such an attendance problem and we have a student engagement problem. A lot of people are starting to say maybe it's not an engagement problem. It really is a purpose or relevancy problem. So when you think about how schools were initially formed, initially it was so that you could read, so that you could vote. And then it became the idea that school's purpose was content transmission, that people needed a basic set of skills, and that we needed to have a liberal arts education where we would transmit a little bit of information to everybody because information wasn't accessible to everybody. So at that time, becoming what they called a renaissance man at the time was really a way to get ahead in society. Then the internet came and information access became really available to anybody. So that purpose isn't really it's not relevant anymore. However, the unfortunate thing is in education, we're still assessed on that purpose. So we have all these high-stakes tests that are assessing content transmission. Then we moved to career readiness. And so we started building pathways and credentialing pathways. And with the current state of AI, I read somewhere that 60% of the jobs in 10 years we don't have right now. And so it's not even new jobs, it's all jobs. 60% we don't have. So if anybody's trying to tell you that they understand the pathway that they need to put somebody on to be successful, they're not telling the truth because nobody knows what that pathway is. And we're starting to see a lot of questions in higher ed and in K-12 to say, what is our purpose? What's the purpose of education? Are we going to even need a college degree in the future? Are we going to need credentials? What are we going to do to equip students for their future? So that's where I've been really talking to a lot of organizations of late to say, what is the purpose of school in a post-AI world? So thinking about what do people need? And what I would argue, and I think a lot of people agree, is that we need thinking skills. We need the part of our brain up here that makes us human. Because when we start to have a relationship with the robots or a relationship with automated systems and technology, we need to equip kids to fill the gap. There are going to be gaps that human thinking and the human brain can do better than AI. But if we're just teaching kids logarithmic or algorithmic things that say, hey, here you go, you go through all these steps and you solve these math problems, or here's vocabulary, you need to know what these words mean, or here's just basic content. We're preparing them to compete with a machine that will always do it faster and better. So what we need to be doing is preparing kids for the things the machines can't do. And that and it's a massive shift. And I've even listened, and it's kind of scary, I've listened to some of the AI podcasts, and there are quite a few futurists that are saying schools won't exist in the next 10 years because if they don't become relevant, they are a huge expense. And so how do we justify that expense? And in reality, we're the time is now to really make some change.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So the change are changes are happening. And in school, we're holding on to some of the ideas because this is how we've always done it. So what are we afraid of letting go? That's one of the first questions we need to ask. And if we don't shift, what are the risks for the next generation in terms of learning?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I think the first thing that we really have to shift is get away from the structures that make school, class periods and grade levels and subject areas. We need to start to think, is there a place for that? So maybe there is. Maybe there's a place where those things are retained to a certain degree, and then we open up all kinds of other opportunities. So we need to get rid of this idea that school has to look like school from a structural standpoint. The second big shift is we need to shift the role of the teacher. Because in a content transmission purpose, the role of the teacher is to be the expert content knowledge person who can give you that knowledge, right? If we're talking about the role of the teacher now to help students start to think, then really what the teacher needs to be is the disruptor. I need to ask you really pointed questions. I need to push you to think. I need to push you to get uncomfortable with things and to resolve that discomfort. I need to teach you how to feel like you have agency and voice and that you have the capacity to create an argument and to fight for what you think is right or to be creative in different situations. And if you've been in a school recently, that is not the kind of teaching learning that's going on. So I think the second part of your question of really thinking what does this mean for kids is that they look at learning as completion and compliance. And there have been some national studies done where kids say that they learn outside of school, but they come to school to get credentialed. And we did that with the credentialing and the its grades, it's credits, it's certifications, it's all these other things. And they're not getting an opportunity to really do the experiential and authentic learning because I think the biggest mistake we ever made in education was connecting student test scores to teacher quality, because the entire system shifted from I teach kids to I teach content. And you hear teachers say things like, Well, I don't have time to remediate because I got to get through this. Well, you if the purpose is learning, you have to remediate, right? Because you haven't met your purpose yet. If the purpose is about you getting data score and you just want to get through the curriculum, then that so you can see it all the time in schools. So I think there's a lot of shifts that have to happen because at the end of the day, if they don't, kids aren't going to come to school. Public schools are going to lose more and more kids to the you know graduation mills where they can just get on and work their way through a curriculum and get bare bones of depth of knowledge around that curriculum and get a diploma and get out.
SPEAKER_00Lisa, you're speaking so much about executive functions, the importance of executive functions. And currently we are not doing as well of a job because we have systems in place, the grades that you're speaking about. Adele Diamond, she's a researcher from Canada, and she has amazing studies about executive functions, not just in early childhood, but how that plays a role as we age. And you spoke just now about having changes, especially the way the teachers show up. How are we going to prepare teachers? Currently, we have teachers going through the credentialing programs depending on the state, and there's no one set of ways that we prepare teachers. What how can we prepare the teachers now for the future?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad you asked that because I feel like that is one of our key problems. And it's part of the reason that my career path went the way it did, is because we are so focused on systems and structures in education. So when you're training teachers or even training principals and leaders, it's about org theory or classroom management or lesson plan. It's all about those structures. It's not about the human side. We don't get a good training around the human system within education, whether it's how to help teachers, how people feel about change and how to lead change, or whether it's how kids think. So teachers say executive function all the time, but they don't know what it is. They don't actually have a deep understanding. And we started with this whole science of reading initiative where we finally connected the way we teach reading to the way our brain learns reading. And it's that's not new. That's been around for decades, right? We have the same information about behavior and our brain science, how our executive functions are impacted by stress, how we develop executive functions, the impact technology is having as we continue to cognitively offload the executive function responsibilities to our devices. And teachers don't get any of it, or they just get a little snippet of it. So one of the things I think we need to do is embed the brain science into every course, not have a brain science course, but to say, this is a lesson planning course. So let's embed the brain science around learning and how relevancy and experience impacts retention and learning. And so, how are you building that into the way you're designing your instruction? And that it's not happening right now, and it's not happening at the leadership level either, which is as you opened today and you said we are never short on ideas, we're short on reform, right? And so I have so the I've got two books that kind of really get at this. One's called NeuroWell, which is really about the shapes, the changes we want to see in schools to create a culture that is aligned with the brain science in practices and routines. The other is aspirations to operations, and that's the leadership book. And it's really about exactly what you were talking about is we have all these great ideas, but we don't implement them with fidelity and we don't get sustainable change. We just chew around the edges. And I think right now we are in this super disruptive phase of the world, not just in education. And so if we don't rise to this occasion and really do, I was saying to somebody else the other day, go ahead and throw the baby out with the bathwater and then decide if the baby should come back in, as opposed to just trying to evolve around the edges but retain all these current practices that are really outdated. It's time for a very disruptive change. And it's happening all around us with different kinds of really innovative school models. It's just that our traditional public schools are struggling big time to try to keep up with that innovation.
SPEAKER_00And with the change, it's interesting when we are swimming in it and we've had historical practices, and just to break things down on the systems, what are the current systems and breaking them down, reevaluating them and putting things again in place that are useful current, and then having those practices we know about change management. However, in education, we're sticking back. We have buzzwords that we keep using. Critical thinking is everywhere right now, right? Why has it become a buzzword without clarity?
SPEAKER_01What's funny? I was working with a school and we asked that question because we were talking about what are the skills students need for a post-AI world. And a lot of schools have portraits of a learner or portraits of a graduate that kind of spell out those skills that are about communication and empathy and community. But the problem is we don't then put the same level of strategy to actually developing those K to 12. And critical thinking is one of them. Everybody complains about it. So I asked a high school staff about a month ago, I said, okay, our task today, we had a two-hour workshop. I said, we're going to define critical thinking and we're going to create a measure so we can gauge whether or not students are doing it. Because if we don't measure it, it doesn't matter, right? So it we just talk about it. And that's where we get a lot of buzzwords and lip service to things. So in two hours, they struggled to come up with a common definition. So I think part of the problem with the systems change is just this love of word salad. Educators will fight for months on one word or this or that. And it's like, can we get past the word salad and really get at the meat of things? And so we finally got to a definition that people could get around. And I said, you might not every word on it, but is this conceptually what you mean by create or critical thinking? And they said yes. And I said, okay, build a rubric. And so we started to build the rubric. And what was interesting is they had just had a session on how to use AI. But the AI, the AI training that I see in schools is how do we you how do we prevent AI from being a tool for cheating for students? Not truly how do we rethink the way that we teach and learn, knowing that AI is always here. It's like when the calculator came and people are like, they have to do it in their head because they're never going to have a calculator in their pocket 24 hours a day. Well, now we have them in our pocket, on our wrists, everywhere, right? So it's the same thing with AI. It's not going to go away. So how are we fundamentally changing what we're doing? So, anyway, some of the teachers went to AI and pulled up rubrics. So we had, I had them broken into groups, and I said, okay, make a copy of each one. And we looked at the five different rubrics that they had produced. And some of them were horrible, and some of them had elements. And so we started to talk about AI can help you like get your ideas on paper, but it's only as good as the prompts that you put in. And so we started to iterate on that and saying, how can we use AI as a tool to help us actually define the creative thinking or critical thinking? And then the next thing I had them do, which was hilarious, is I said, okay, so think of what your next assignment is or your next unit, and type into chat or Claude or whatever you use, how can I assess the following standards in this unit? Here's the book I'm using, the tool, the curriculum, whatever. How can I create an assessment that is AI proof? And what was so funny was the AI came back and said, that is a great question and one that all educators should be asking right now. And so then it gave us ideas on how to assess the students. And guess what? It was about connecting the personal side, the human side of the student to the content because AI doesn't know the student. And so I'm hopeful, as much as I'm a little scared because it's a time of real change, it's also a time of real hope where we might be able to steer the boat to turn it back toward humans, toward the people in the system versus just the test statistics that we can get out of them.
SPEAKER_00Lisa, let's stick a little bit longer with this critical thinking part of executive function. What are the biggest misconceptions?
SPEAKER_01So I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that people are capable of doing critical thinking when they're in duress. And so one of the things that I talk a lot to school leaders about and I talk to teachers about with students is that from the leader to the teacher level, think about how change in general, any kind of change you're doing, threatens the identity of a teacher. So we talked about some of the big shifts we need to make is the role of a teacher. If I've been an expert for 20 years in my department, maybe I'm a department chair, I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm considered a good teacher. Now all of a sudden, the whole purpose of what I do is shifting. You're going to be dealing with a lot of stress. And when the brain is stressed, it actually shuts down critical thinking and we can't do it. And so I talk a lot about the brain has these different departments in the brain. And so we have a data department, we have a security department, we have a systems management department. So I call the data department Harold and the security department Bob. The problem is when Harold and Bob are stressed and change like this, and this disruptive change and your whole job being out from under you and you don't know what you're doing anywhere, that's a big stressor. So Harold and Bob are very stressed. So they send a message up to you where the critical thinking is to the president of the brain, and they say, We're in danger. You go out and get a cup of coffee, and the two of us will handle this. So what I see in schools a lot when I go in to do training or work with teachers is I see a lot of stress where the Harold and Bob of one person's brain is talking to the Herald and Bob of the other person's brain. But the critical thinking part of the brain, where our smart and our personality and our humanity lives, isn't there because they are at such a level of stress. And so I think understanding that, and that's what when I talk about neuro, I talk about the importance of creating a sense of belonging and intellectual and psychological safety within organizations for students and for staff, because we're never going to get to critical thinking if we are beyond stressed and that part of our brain isn't functioning. Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to note as you're thinking about helping to prepare schools for this, when you look at how we started to teach social emotional learning, we started to teach it as a separate little subject, right? And so kids learn about certain skills and then they do a little worksheet or a little activity and then they move on, and now they know it, taught experts, right? That's not how the brain learns. So when we think about critical thinking, it we gain critical thinking skills through repetition, experience, and emotion. So if schools are truly trying to teach critical thinking, it's not a unit where they define critical thinking and they put together a workbook and you watch a YouTube video. It's truly about how they create and assess the learning environment. And so that students are having that opportunity. So one of the things that I could imagine schools doing is going, and I've even heard this. Where's the executive function curriculum? Can we just get a critical thinking curriculum? And it's like you already have a critical thinking curriculum or standards. It's like it's how you teach that is going to build this. It's not a new workbook or material. Those can be helpful. My son did an executive function curriculum when he was in middle school that really helped him learn how to prioritize and organize and things like that. It was hugely successful. But as far as critical thinking goes, that should be not a separate unit. It should be something that we're practicing. Same with creative thinking. Creative thinking is going to be incredibly important in a post-AI world. But it's not the art teacher's job to teach it. We should be teaching it all day and giving kids opportunities to think critically and creatively. Yes.
SPEAKER_00So what does weak thinking look like in students today?
SPEAKER_01Weak thinking? I think it's that they that what I see with students is they don't question anything that's told to them. And so there is no critical thinking. It's just and we built this, right? We built this because we created a content transmission purpose. And so kids are empty vessels and just filled up with the content. We've assessed them in a way that there's one right answer. So it's it's so they have come to learn that if an authority, whether it's a teacher or an AI chatbot or whatever, if somebody tells them something, then that's the content that they should be putting in their empty brain, right? And filling it up. And so we've created this monster in the way that we have educated kids. So what we want to think about is how do we start to ask the questions differently, use more Socratic method, use more inquiry-based learning, use more exploratory learning where maybe there isn't one right answer. One thing I talk about is when I was teaching, I used to, I used to do a show me how you know. And so I would tell the students, I was a ling English teacher, so I would tell the students, okay, we read this novel, whatever. Here's why we read it, here's what it had great character development, it had great imagery, whatever. I would tell them what it was. I would show them the standards of what they should be able to do in regard to character development or literary devices or whatever. And then I would say, okay, you can show me how you know any way you want. And but you, but I'm gonna grade you on this rubric that is standards based that says this is what you can do. So I had a little girl, she was freshman, she came up and she said, Can I do a dance? We had read to kill a mockingbird. And I thought, oh boy, okay. I said, I said, I said you could do it. But I said to her, You can dance the nutcracker and flunk this. I said, You have to make sure that whatever you do with this dance, I'm grading you on these standards, right? And she was like, I got it. So she came back, she had created a move for each character and a little strip of music, and she explained a little first she explained about modern dance, which was super interesting because I didn't know about it. Then she had this move and some music. She explained how it was representative of the evolution of that character throughout the book. So she had all the main character moves. Then she strung the music together and actually performed for us. And then after she was finished performing, she broke down the dance and explained how it was a modern representation of the way the theme developed. That's critical thinking. As opposed to we're gonna have some matching, we're gonna have who did what to whom, and then we're gonna do you're gonna write an essay on a question that I have beat the answer into you for the past month, right? And that's how we teach right now. It's there's one right answer. And you're going to repeat that answer. Moving into different assessment methods is the way that you move into more critical thinking. She was not an AP student. She was an average to below average student. Because I hear teachers go, oh, my kids could never do that. Yes, they can. And I think there's also a huge fallacy that teachers feel like I have to tell you everything before you have what you need to think about it. And the reality is the opposite. You can let the students discover the information with a good question that they have to go through and really look at multiple sources of information to figure it out versus telling them all the information and then making them regurgitate it or practice it or tell them, tell you they've understood it.
SPEAKER_00Is that the system itself may be working against how the brain functions? Absolutely. What is AI exposing our children to the current systems? It's a huge thing. It's information offloading that you spoke about. So what are some of the skills that are being becoming obsolete right now?
SPEAKER_01I think that skills that are algorithmic, you do step one, step two, step three, right? So skills like that are skills that are going to be automated. So even thinking about with writing, there's portions of writing that are really deep thinking. And it's funny because my when I was doing my doctoral work and writing my dissertation, my advisor said to me, There is no such thing as bad writing. It's bad thinking. And she said, So if you can write the most beautiful essay on the planet, but if you don't have good thinking, it's going to be a crummy essay, right? So it's not about, so when you think about even how AI is impacting writing, I was working with a teacher where I think we're going to see a pendulum swing away from having the kids on the computers all the time. So what she's starting to do is she's creating some paper pencil pre-thinking for the writing. So the students are going to be doing a little journaling, they're going to be doing a little bit of Venn diagrams, they're going to be doing some pre-thinking to help center what they believe. Then they can plug that pre-thinking into AI, and AI will structure out an outline for them. And then they can go through and even take it a step further, and AI could write the paper. But then the actual assessment is now you go read what AI wrote, read the primary sources, and then create a compare and contrast between what you believe and what AI produced and why. So you get around now, it's an individual thing. AI doesn't know what you think, so it can't do this for you. So I think that's the kind of stuff that we're going to have to really think about because the, and in fact, I have a friend whose son was just hired as a data analyst. And he was like, How are you? Isn't AI doing all that? Why would you want that job? Because you're going to be worked right out of a job. And his son said, No, actually, they hired me because I read the gap. I can add the human side to the data. So, you know, for example, in a company, maybe you're looking at attrition data and absentee data and things like that. A human's going to understand the people in the system and the why, but beneath the what is going on. So they're going to be able to analyze that data at the human systems level versus just what does the data tell me? And I think those are the kinds of skills that are going to be really important.
SPEAKER_00Indeed. So are the systems currently moving too slowly for the pace of change, in your opinion? 100%. And what happens when innovation exists in pockets and not in systems white?
SPEAKER_01I think from a policy perspective, this country has embraced the idea of school choice and the idea that students learn differently. And I think what we're going to start to see is more and more students are going to vote with their feet. They're not going to come to schools that are not innovating, that aren't relevant, that aren't doing the things that that need to happen. And there'll be a lag because there'll be parents that are afraid to jump into that because they want to make sure their kid has the right credential along the way. But even as that becomes murkier and murkier, I know it's stressful as a parent to try to figure out what advice to give your kid, other than just do your best in everything you're doing, because I don't know which ones are more important than others at this point. But I think that schools that schools that do very incremental iterative change and don't really start to question the larger systemic barriers that are holding us back and that are really tied to antiquated purposes for school in our history. I think they're really going to suffer. They're going to we'll we'll see some closings. We're going to see a lot of challenges for schools because declining enrollment is rough on staffing and those kinds of things as well. Yeah. It's a scary time to lead in schools, but it's also one of the most exciting times because this disruption is unlike any other disruption. And I think we had an opportunity when we were disrupted with COVID. And I'm kind of sad that we didn't really capitalize on some of the things we could have learned about the experience of hybrid education or the experience of learning online or things like that. And instead, we kind of went to work booking kids to death or work sheeting them to death. And it became more about compliance and completion than it really did about trying to figure out how to engage a whole new avenue for teaching. So I'm hopeful we don't do that again. I'm hopeful that we don't have schools adopting AI curriculum, AI literacy curriculum, and say, we'll teach them the AI literacy in a separate class. And but our teaching and learning of core will remain exactly the same because the shift in the system needs to be at the core level, not just we're missing a piece of curriculum or a program of study.
SPEAKER_00Lisa, we've done things the same way forever. There are private schools, there are charter schools, there are public schools in the United States, and this podcast is global. Do you think that the current systems can evolve or does it need to be completely reimagined?
SPEAKER_01I think that the systems that we have could reimagine themselves. I don't think they all have to close down and we have to open up new things. But one thing I've been working with a few schools that are trying to start building schools within schools, right? So trying some of these different models where you blow up the structure a little bit and see how that works, or you do more multidisciplinary work. How does that work? And starting to play in the edges. And I think that it can be done. And the thing that we have to recognize is that this is a huge threat for teachers as well. So the way we make this change needs to be very strategic and it needs to engage teachers in a way that is authentic. I see a lot of times that we ask teachers for their opinions and then we don't take them. And then we don't in you know insert things. So in the Aspirations to Operations book, where I help leaders do this strategy, the first C, there's an eight C commitment framework. The first C is culture and it's that sense of belonging and safety. I don't see that in schools right now. I see teachers burned out, overworked, stressed out, feeling like they're under a microscope, feeling like I was just talking to a principal last week who was like, I don't understand why these teachers are so afraid of feedback or even watching each other. They're they're in this gotcha mindset, right? And so when you're in that mindset, innovation is really hard to make happen because it's it because it's a fear-based culture. So that's the first thing. But then the planning sees of really thinking, so the planning C's are clarity, coherence, and cadence. And I see these messed up all the time in school reform. Clarity-wise, I worked at a school and we were doing a strategic plan. And I said, okay, so what kind of instructional expectations or what instructional model do you use? And the superintendent piped up right away, said, We use UDL, Universal Design for Learning. We've had tons of training on it. That's what we do here. And I was like, okay. So I said to the principals in the room, so if your staff is UDL in it out of the park, doing a great job, what do you see? What do you hear? What does that look like in this setting? None of them could answer me. So we went to the teachers and we said, What is UDL? And they were like, Oh, is that pillar thing we did three years ago? And the superintendent was like, that pillar thing cost us $40,000 in training, and you're telling me that the staff doesn't even know what it is. And I'm like, no, because you had a 10,000-foot view and you never got into the weeds to say, what does this look like in a fifth grade science classroom? Or what does this look like in geometry? And you never engaged the system to figure that out. And then the other thing, I was working in a school when you think about coherence. I was working in a school that was all about personalized learning. They spent three years doing personalized learning training, lots and lots of stuff. And then they bought direct instruction curriculum. And I'm like, you can't have those two things. So either thing the teacher is doing, they're gonna fail because you've got a prescriptive direct instruction and you want them to personalize it. It doesn't work. So you have coherence issues. Then you had the cadence issue of depending on how big the shift is, we have to create stepping stones to help teachers get there. Because if I'm basically teaching in an old-fashioned way, I am the sage on stage, I am whole group instruction, I am telling students their stuff. And now all of a sudden you want me to be doing all these crazy inquiry learning and different kinds of and adding this thinking and changing the whole purpose of what I'm doing in my classroom. It's a huge leap. So what's step one? How do I just dip my toe in the water and trying to define those stepping stones for teachers? If you don't have the planning sees of clarity, coherence, and cadence, you're doomed from the get-go. And then move into how do we actually engage the people through coaching, through meaningful collaboration? And then how do we sustain it through celebration and communication? So it's an this 8C framework that I use in schools, because some of my favorite work is disruptive work. I love doing total system design stuff. And using this 8C framework, you can capitalize on each of the components that you need to address the human system within the change.
SPEAKER_00So, what are some of the biggest challenges leaders have in implementing change and what should be the first step they need to take?
SPEAKER_01So I would say the first step is they need to make sure they have a safe culture. They need to make sure that they have good relationships with the teachers. We say it all the time to teachers, it's all about relationships in the classroom. So thinking how do you build a space where teachers have voice, where the collaboration is useful, where you are balancing out their autonomy with the accountability. And so that leadership piece is a critical place to get started. And then I think from there, it's really thinking about the clarity of purpose. What do you want to see happen? And not being afraid to say, we are going to not look at traditional. Remember, test scores are testing our ability to fulfill our purpose two purposes ago, right? Content transmission is basically what those tests are doing. So that's not really what we want in today's world. So leaders have to put their feet down and say, okay, we're not going to worry about that data. We're going to identify the data we want to track that tells us we're, whether it's adult implementation data or student feedback data or whatever, we're going to prioritize that data because our theory of change is that if we do these things, if you teach people to think, they'll pass the test in most cases, right? We believe that this model of teaching will get us to better outcomes.
SPEAKER_00What an amazing conversation, right? I had spoken with Andrew Falstitch. He's an elementary guide. He has worked in different countries, and he created a conversation for his students and his school where they're moving away from test scores and exactly what you're speaking about. So let's look at what does it mean to lead the human system, not just the structure? What does that mean?
SPEAKER_01So I think it means that you understand the some basic things about the brain. So when we lead, innovation requires critical thinking and creative thinking and emotional resilience because we're going to have bumps along the way that are going to be really uncomfortable. And so there's seven different things that your brain needs in order to change a habit. So the first is they have to know where to go instead. So that's where those planning sees and breaking it down and giving people a clear picture of where we want to go. It's kind of like if you've ever met somebody who wants to lose weight, but they don't really then eat the right foods or they're not following any kind of plan, they're not going to be successful, right? So we have to know where to go instead. The second is we have to have the self-awareness to drive past the comfortable behavior, the comfortable exit. So thinking of how do we create the look for's or the when you start to feel like this, then let's pivot here, or constructive conversations among staff so that they can plan together and troubleshoot some of the things that that cause them to digress back into old habits. The third is we have to try things that make us uncomfortable. Our behaviors, even when we know they're wrong or outdated, they're part of who we are. And from a brain science perspective, that means that they're less stressful. Even though we sometimes know, this is why people get into destructive relationships, right? They at least it's like the enemy they know versus the unknown. And so from a brain perspective, our brain likes certainty. And so even if we know it's not the greatest choice, we still prefer to do it. So it's breaking that habit within the mind. The next is having the energy. So if you've ever tried to eat healthy and you're like, I'm in a food prep, and then you're tired one night and you're like, eh, I don't want to do it. I'm just gonna go through the drive-thru, right? So we need positive reinforcements. We need dopamine hits, we need that little hit of energy. If you're really tired one day, but 10 people came up and said, You look great, and I'm so proud of you. You're eating so healthy, I wish I could do it, blah, blah, blah. That fuel is enough for you to say, all right, I am tired, but I'm going to continue on, right? So it's really important that the principals are giving that positive feedback constantly to teachers to give them the energy they need in order to sustain the change. And then we need persistence. It takes practice and time to train the students because the students have to unlearn what it means to be in school, and the teachers have to unlearn what good teaching looks like, right? And so we have to have persistence, and here's the big one we have to have tenacity to forgive ourselves when we screw up. We will fall off the wagon, go back to old habits. And instead of, and this is what I see happen in schools a lot, that didn't work. We knew it wasn't gonna work, so I'm just we give up, or we say, we were never meant to be like that. I'm this is what we're meant to do, versus saying that was fun, we went back to something comfortable, but I am dedicated to this and I'm gonna move it forward and looking for the positives in the change versus looking for the negatives. And then finally, we need support, peer support, structural support, leadership support. And if all seven of those things are not present, then you're not gonna change, right? And so leaders can be strategic about that. How do they support all seven of these conditions? And they're embedded within those eight C's, right? There's ways you can use collaboration or communication or celebration to bolster those seven different conditions that need to exist.
SPEAKER_00I absolutely appreciate the metaphor used here. And leaders often deal with one or two teachers who are going to resist. How do leaders deal with these types of resistance?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I talk a lot about your organization's like a crew boat. Think you have 10 people on this boat. You will have, and this is all companies, not just education industry. Yeah. You'll have two, maybe three people rowing like crazy in the right direction in sync, right? And they're your coalition of the willing, they're the risk takers, they're ready to roll. You'll have about five people that are staring at the scenery, or sometimes they'll be rowing, and sometimes it'll be in the right direction. Sometimes they'll actually be causing drag because they'll be trying stuff and it's not in the right direction, and they need coached so they can get in the right direction. You will always have two people, maybe three, depending on your culture, that are actively trying to sink your boat. We spend way too much time on those two people. What we want to do instead is build collective efficacy in the 80%, because at that point it becomes a culture. It becomes this is how we do things here. And the person who's not doing what we do here is going to have dissonance and discomfort and stress around that. And so it's going to compel them to start to do or to leave, which sometimes is not a bad idea, right? So you start with your coalition of the willing. And I actually have an exercise I do with school leaders that's an aptitude-attitude matrix. And we put people into different quadrants, and then we start to try to think why are they there? What do you think the reasons for resistance are? Because sometimes it's fear, right? It's just I don't know what to do, and I've always been good at this job, and now I feel like I don't know what I'm doing. And it's a personal problem and just a threat. So those people need different coaching than somebody who just is capable but not willing because they don't have the training or they don't have the resources. Those are so you start to go through and say, how do I fix those so that the five in the middle give the two in the front enough freedom to actually drive the boat a little bit so that they're testing the theories and they can help refine clarity on what it looks like. Get the five, the training, so that they're leaning more toward the rowing of the boat versus the sinking of the boat, and just ignore the sinkers. Ignore them for a while, use your evaluation tool to say, hey, this is what we expect, this is what we were trained on. I don't see evidence that you're doing it. Help me understand why. But you evaluate them authentically and just say, I don't, I know you're capable of doing it, and I'm helping you get there, but I can't make you want to do this. So it's up to you. And what you'll find is that when you start to approach it like that, you end up with it, your teachers are the ones that put pressure on the other person. They lose their informal leadership and respect among their peers because they're not part of the culture. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Often we fear that those two or three that are steering the boat the other way are going to steer the others around. And I appreciate the perspective of majority will shift that focus to what's going to be working. And what I'm hearing is that they will Yeah, and they only will.
SPEAKER_01There's a lot of organizations, depending on the way the leadership manages, that that those five sightseers do end up identifying with the boat sinkers, right? Because it's easier not to change. So those five in the middle are the ones that really are important for leaders to nurture and to provide support and to provide positive feedback so that you influence them to shift toward the rowers and not the sinkers.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. Why do schools struggle to move from vision to excu execution?
SPEAKER_01I think part of it is because they don't have the clarity and the coherence and the cadence. So they don't know what they want. And when they don't know what they want, then they don't know how to celebrate when they see it. And they, if and the other thing I see in schools is that they focus on outcome data. And when you're creating a change or you're implementing something, you should be focusing on output data, not outcome data. And output data is the data that we ultimately control. It's say we're gonna try inquiry learning at least once a week. Okay, now we have inquiry learning once a week. I can measure whether we did that. Did we do it? Did we not do it? So you need to have data that you're following, because remember, if you measure it, it matters. If you don't measure it, it's just word salad, right? So if we measure what we say we're gonna do, then we're actually measuring our theory of change. And so then if the outcome doesn't move, it's not your fault. It's hey, we measured this, we did what we were said we were gonna do, and it didn't work. So what we decided to try didn't work. It's not you're not a good teacher. But when we only look at outcome data, it's well, you didn't move the needle, so you're not an effective teacher. And that's not a fair statement because maybe our theory of change was wrong. So I think that's one of the things we can do to move from ideas to action is figure out what are the metrics that we're actually looking for? What does it look like? What does it sound like? How are we tracking that? How are we testing this theory of change, not testing the people who are doing it?
SPEAKER_00And what does sustainable change actually require? And you have some examples of schools that have made this shift.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I actually, one of the schools I'm so proud of, I've been working with them for 15 years, so I've seen them through multiple iterations of change. And what sustainability looks is when even the kids are like, This is how we do business. This and so this school serves at-risk kids, and at-risk kids when they come to a new school oftentimes to assert dominance and so they get in trouble, they try to be like tough. And it's this school has such a strong culture and practices around this is how we do business and this is why we're here, that the other kids will look and be like, dude, we don't do that here. Don't. And there's no and so when you get it to the level where students understand the whole theory of change of what they're doing, why they're doing it, why it's powerful, then you know you've sustained it and that you've truly built a culture where these actions and practices are embedded.
SPEAKER_00It sounds impressive because they're the ones who are going to. Be learning and growing and creating that culture. So just because we often start with the leaders and then the teachers and then the students.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I think when we think about the students, what do they they're the ones that are receiving what we give, right? So what are their priorities? What are their, what do they want? What do they find important? And a lot of times when we do strategic planning, we ask students, we do focus groups and we get information from them. And then we kind of nod and yeah, they don't know what they really need, or we can't do that, or that's crazy. But the question is, how could we do that? Because if we can align the way school operates with the needs of our kids today, and kids today are different. So, like I I've talked to schools before, they're like, kids hate these assemblies. And I'm like, then why are you doing them? Like in in Greece Lightning, when we wore poodle skirts, assemblies were a really great thing. And that was 70 years ago. So are we still doing things that used to work because life was different? What do kids want now? Like, how do we create experiences for them to engage together? Or I have one school that created like almost like a student center lounge. And so instead of having like study halls and having assemblies and having things like that, they had a lounge space where they had games, they had clubs, they had things that they could do and that the students could pick, they could come have just a little bit of downtime in the day. So they gave them some flexibility and freedom because that's what the students asked for. And the students worked harder when they were in the classes because they were given the space that they needed and they asked for. So some of it's trying to figure out how can you come together with this is the old way we used to do things. And some of it is effective, right? And then here's what students of today need, here's what they need post graduation. How do we line all the dots up so that we're delivering the structure and the programming that's actually going to make people happy, healthy, and successful. And I say happy first because we don't talk about that in schools, but at the end of the day, isn't that what we want? Happy people? We want happy people who are healthy and successful, but we only focus on one tiny little aspect of success. And the rest of it, we have a lot of kids today that are not happy and not healthy, and we're not addressing that with our systems or our programming.
SPEAKER_00And it goes back to that executive function when someone's not happy, they're also not regulated and they're not engaged, and the frontal cortex is offline, and learning is not the best option. And if a school is now looking to create their strategic plan and looking to poll their students, what are a few questions that we must ask?
SPEAKER_01So if they're asking students questions, one thing I would ask the students is why do you think you come to school? What's the purpose of school? And what would you like the purpose of school to be? And what do you, what are your fears about your ability to succeed in the future? Because if you understand what their fears are and you can assuage them through your programs, they're going to be more engaged. I think asking them what kinds of memories do you have from the years of school you've been here so far? What are the things that you really remember about your student experience? And what's a project that you love? What was something that really got you excited or that you went above and beyond? And you start to take those things and you pull the nuggets of truth out of them based on you're going to start to think about what their learning preferences are, what structures work for them, or what opportunities work for them, what are the things that they're worried about so that we can align what we're saying and doing and providing to them to help fill those gaps so that we can calm everybody, calm down their fears.
SPEAKER_00Now, looking at teachers, how can leaders support teachers without adding more?
SPEAKER_01I think the first thing is before they start trying to implement things, really truly doing a strategy so that they understand this is what we're asking for. And that coherence piece is huge for teachers. They feel like they can't take one more thing. Every time they turn around, there's another demand being placed on them. So taking some time to really say, okay, what are the different initiatives that we have? What are the values that we have here? And how is what we're doing, instead of thinking of a plate spinner where you've got 20 plates up in the sky at all times, think of it as like one Thanksgiving platter with lots of different food on it that's all serving the same meal. And I think when you do that, you start to relieve teachers because when everything is seen as a completely different new initiative, then it's overwhelming.
SPEAKER_00You spoke beautifully earlier about the culture. Every school has a culture, spoken or unspoken. How does this impact change?
SPEAKER_01That it's huge. And the culture, you can feel that when you walk into a school. And at the end of the day, teaching is stressful and it's emotional. And it's one of those things where teachers understand the gravity of what happens to kids when they don't succeed. And when that when they can't get that kid to succeed, it's a highly emotional vocation. So building that sense of belonging and safety and building that culture is absolutely critical to people being willing to change and take risks. And so that's 100% the leader. And it starts at the top and it goes down from there. And I think that's a piece of it is that culture and then that clarity. If I'm a teacher and we have a theory of change that if we do X, Y, and Z in our classroom, that it's going to be better for kids. And I do those things and I get in my car to go home at the end of the day, I feel good. I feel okay. I did what I was supposed to do. We're making progress. It's good. If I don't have clarity about what I'm supposed to be doing, or if every time I turn around, it's one more thing that I need to do and now I can't do anything well. I get in my car at the end of the day and I don't feel good. I don't feel good about my job. I don't feel good about, and you hear teachers say this all the time: I just need more support. What do you actually need? And when they say I just need more support, that doesn't mean they need more training. It means they need to know what they're supposed to do. They need to be celebrated when they're doing it. They're asking for the human side of the system when they say I need more support.
SPEAKER_00Indeed. Beliefs, they shape our behaviors. And we all have individual beliefs. And when the strategic plan is made in silos or by certain individuals, we have to take students, teachers, their belief, their understanding to view how their private logic, what's logic to logical to them, also has an important role in it. So what gives you hope right now, Lisa?
SPEAKER_01A couple things give me hope. One is that I think that people are waking up to this. I think more and more educators are starting to say, what are we really doing here? We need to really do some dramatic shifting. So I do think that I have hope in that regard that the time is now. I do think also that we're not alone. This is a so as far as the risk of being education such a mess, kind of thing, which I think has been battered into the common belief system of the country, everybody's in flux. Everybody's in kind of change. And so I think it's a time where we don't have to be quite as scared to say, hey, we're going to do some change and some leadership. And I'm also seeing some really cool school design. I'm on the board of a school that's opening in the fall that has, they have four pillars. They're called human program. They have four pillars. They have academic kind of life skills, social skills, future skills, mental health, and physical health. So the program includes an AI-driven platform that does all this personalization and academic support, but then they have squad leaders that serve as mentors. So they've shifted the role of teacher to coach, engagement coordinator, activities coordinator. They reach out and develop the relationships with the students. The students wear biometric things that keep track of their heart rate and their sleep. And so they're reflecting on their mood. And so they're moving to this whole child. And the difference that I'm seeing is that all four of the pillars have equal weight. It's not in traditional schools, I see one pillar is huge, and the other ones are like little toothpicks that aren't really necessarily supporting the building. They're just around the edges. And so I think we're seeing schools that are responding to some of these changes in our students, changes in their executive function and their needs and changes in the world. And there is there are pockets of innovation. So if people are willing to innovate, there's plenty of samples out there. They don't have to be the first one to plant their flag.
SPEAKER_00Indeed. Thank you for this hopeful conversation. We actually have Sam Shapiro, he's a school leader, and he's in Silicon Valley area, and he is doing the exact same thing that you're not exact same thing, but similar ideas on what do students need? And they're going to need to have real experiences. And how do we provide them? We already know these things. And how do we shift our behavior? So what is one belief leaders need to let go of right now?
SPEAKER_01I think they need to let go of the industrialized model of we need to so much of school is about control and compliance and rule following. And if you really think about our world in the next generation of work, we need disruptors. We need thinkers. We need people who are able to be adaptable and independent. We don't need people who do what they're told. That's what the systems will do. We will tell the systems what we want done, and they will do the systems. And I'm not schools right now are still very much preparing people for a factory. You listen to your manager, you do what you're told, you put your outputs out there and you work your way up by compliance and completion. We need to really rethink that and think about more entrepreneurial thinking, more creative thinking. And again, it's not just an art class. Like creative thinking, you can be, you've got to be a creative engineer, you've got to be a creative doctor, right? Creativity should be part of every field that we're involved in. And especially now, because that is a uniquely human thinking skill for the moment, right? We can be super, super creative in ways that a machine just can't yet that that it's doable, that this is all doable. It's not where the boat is not, the boat is not sinking, but now is not the time to reorganize the deck chairs. Now is the time to really reset a new course, redo re redecorate the whole boat, right? Rethink through all the things. And I think that it can be so exciting. Like all the things that we have learned from being in education, from our experiences as teachers or leaders, or whatever role people have played in education, now is the time when everything's up. We could do anything. And how cool is that to be on the front edge of the next generation of educational change that's truly disruptive and modernizing the system in a way that it's going to prepare kids for the future. I would say strategize, move from aspirations to operations. Because as you think about this time, there's going to be a whole lot of great ideas, but great ideas are just noise and word salad unless you get down to the operations level and you really think about how do you strategically implement that system on the human system, not just the structures and the schedules and the program of study, the curriculum, whatever, but really focused on how do we move from aspirations to engaging people to operationalizing the people in the system? Because policies shape change, but people make change. And we need to attend to the people if we want the change made and not just dreamed about.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for your work that you're doing and changes that you're making, the two books you've written, and for pushing this conversation forward, because at this moment, leaders are lost. And it looks like any idea they have towards moving, towards looking at students and their outcome and brain-based learning is going to be successful. And if this conversation challenges your thinking, good. That's where change begins. Take a moment and ask yourself where in this system are you trying to implement change without fully understanding the people inside of it? Not gonna work. And if this resonates, share it with a leader or an educator or someone that's navigating change in your school district, in your private school, wherever that might be. And you can find more tools, trainings, and conversations at yogipotel tte.com. And in the show notes, you're going to read, look at Lisa's information in case you would like to consult with her. Lisa, once again, thank you for your wisdom, knowledge, and encouragement today.
SPEAKER_01Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.