S2:E0 "Inside Out" with Phil Evans

WELCOME TO SEASON 2 OF THE EDUBYDESIGN PODCAST!

This past year, I decided to sit with an uncomfortable truth: education is full of contradictions. We say every child matters, then design systems around averages. We ask teachers to innovate, then measure them on compliance. We talk about the future constantly — and use it as a reason to wait.

For Season 2 of EduByDesign, I hope you will join me as we stop waiting. 

In this short introduction episode, "Inside Out" I share what I have been learning as I listen to educators, leaders, and innovators, each carrying a piece of what education could become. I step inside the questions myself: How do we support each other so our schools and school systems have greater vitality? How do we work with our contradictions instead of hoping they'll resolve themselves as we keep adding new initiatives and innovations? And what can we begin creating today — because if meaningful change were easy, we'd have done it by now.

At the heart of one of our shared contradictions is belief that education's purpose is not only about earning diplomas, baccalaureates, certificates, degrees, and the like. Recently on Instagram, I saw a meme that reasoned, "We don't learn to swim by reading about water." Education's purpose is about learning how to learn. So our job is to meet every learner where they are; trust and equip the people closest to the work, our teachers; and build connections across borders and across systems to co-create the kind of education a generation's future actually depends on.

In this short episode, you'll hear more about where Season 2 is headed, why the conversation should be grounded in the present with our past and our future in mind, and why I think it is time we saw less competition and isolation in the world of education, and more collaborative innovation.

If something here sparks for you, please pass it on — share it with a colleague, leave a comment or rating wherever you're listening, and tell me what it sparked by writing me a note or finding me on social media. 

That's how the show grows — but more importantly, it's how we keep moving toward the high-quality education we want for all students, while doing the things that make it possible, today!

Thank you for listening and subscribing to the podcast.

You might also like to visit the EdubyDesign blog or my new Substack.

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Follow the EduByDesign Blog to explore the podcast topics, further.

And please let Phil know what resonates with you, in the comments.

Transcript

Phil Evans 0:01

There's a lot of talk about the future of education, what we're preparing for, what's just beyond the horizon. We're waiting for technologies to improve and evolve, we're waiting for the next reform to arrive, the world to become a little bit more predictable. This is not one of those moments. The future of education is already being created. In the expectations we set for young people, in the opportunities that we extend, and the ones that we withhold, in the relationships we build, the technologies we adapt, the structures we protect, and the questions we decide are worth asking. The future is not something that happens to us, it's taking shape through what we choose to do right now. Welcome to season two of education by design. I'm Phil Evans. When I began this podcast, I wanted to explore a simple but consequential idea. Education does not become more human, more equitable, or more transformative by accident. It becomes through design. In the first season, I spoke with educators and leaders who were questioning the assumptions schools have inherited about who is capable, where expertise lives, what leadership looks like, and whether the structures surrounding young people are actually designed to help them flourish. A great deal has changed since the first season. Artificial Intelligence has moved from the margins of education conversation into classrooms, workplaces, and homes. Political and social uncertainty has deepened, and everywhere I go I hear a version of the same anxiety. That we're living through an unprecedented moment, and education must somehow predict what's coming and race to meet it. I understand the feeling though, but I don't think it's quite right. I don't think it's new. In 1957, Charles Dickens opened a novel with the sentence, we all know it was the best of times and it was the worst of times. He was writing about a revolution 70 years before his own movement and winking at his readers because they believed that they were living at the hinge in history too. So did the generations after them, and so do we. So I guess there's something I've been making peace with over the last year. It's that contradiction is a normal condition of society. It always has been. Expanding possibility and deepening inequality, extraordinary wisdom and extraordinary foolishness. These have always lived side by side. The presence of paradox is not a signal to panic, and it's not a puzzle we solve by predicting harder. But some conditions we should refuse to keep living with. And education is full of them. For example, we say we want curious learners, but then we reward compliance. We say every child learns differently, and then we batch students together by birth year and move them in lockstep. We say we're preparing young people for an unpredictable world inside structures designed for predictable ones. The one that gets me the most is that we say that we value teachers' judgments, but then we hand them scripts. None of this is a secret. The question is not why is education contradictory? Everything human is. The question is which contradictions we keep absorbing and which ones we finally decide to design our way through. And this is where I want to say something about time. We are not very good at the present. We in fact we bury the past, often out of shame or regret, rather than learning from what it has to teach us. And we chase the future, building elaborate pictures of a world we cannot fully see, and designing for that instead of for the learners right in front of us. We can set goals, we can stretch ourselves, we can grow and learn, but what we're actually becoming through all of that, we rarely know at the time. It's only later looking back that we recognized what a season in our lives was making us into. What is within our control is in the present, the choices that we make, the relationships we build, the conditions we create and the opportunities we extend. That's the honest work. Not predicting the futures, tending to the present in a way that makes better futures possible. And I see this same lesson showing up in my work. A few years ago, I began partnering with a school where most students simply didn't see themselves as capable of most of the rigorous learning the school offered. That was the message underneath everything, not for kids like me. The school made one design decision. Every student would take their part in at least one IB course. Not a program for some, an experience for all. And within the school, the stories began to shift. Because that's what the not for kids like me was. Just a story. The capability had been in the building all along. The design decision didn't create it. It let everyone, including the students themselves, finally see it, creating a proof point. But here's the part I keep returning to. Nobody told the school what to do next. They looked at their community and began to offer the same course in Spanish as well as English. Then they did the same for IB Mathematics. Students who once stood outside the program now chose between two full pathways, most taking several courses, and the school kept designing forward towards a place where the richest learning isn't a track that students have to enter. What began as one course for every student is becoming a different question entirely. What if this wasn't a program within the school? What if this just was school? I love what this particular case reveals. Coherence is appealing. When a community experiences even one fragment of genuine coherent learning, it begins reaching for the rest. And the reaching looks like design. New decisions, new work that nobody assigned, new demands that the community chooses to take on. Learners don't experience initiatives, they experience the whole school. I've spent so much of my career thinking about access. Who gets to participate in powerful learning, who remains outside it, and what schools can do to extend opportunities more intentionally. That question still matters to me deeply, but it's grown into something larger. I've become interested in the conditions that allow an entire school, and ultimately a system, to become more coherent, adaptive, and alive. Not simply whether an initiative has been implemented, but whether people understand what they're building together. Whether educators experience ownership, whether learners experience purpose and belonging. Whether leadership, culture, learning, and community reinforce one another or pull in different directions. And whether what the school learns ever travels beyond its own walls, because a vital system is one where knowledge is moving. I've come to think about this as vitality. A vital school is not one without difficulty. It's a school with collective capacity to encounter difficulty, learn from it, and move forward with purpose. I do want to be careful here because vitality is not a bar to clear. No school simply has it or lacks it. Every school is strong in some decisions and fragile in others. A struggling school is not a failing school. It's a school at a particular moment in a longer journey. This shift has sharpened something for me. The central challenge in education is no longer a shortage of ideas. There are remarkable ideas everywhere. Too often, promising ideas remain isolated from one another. Innovation sits in one department, well-being sits in another. Technology becomes a separate strategy. Equity becomes a project. Professional learning becomes an event, and student agency becomes a phrase used in presentations, but rarely experienced in the daily architecture of the school experience. But disconnected excellence does not create a coherent experience for learners. Schools don't need another collection of isolated innovations. We need schools and systems capable of connecting what they believe with what people actually experience. And coherence when it comes is certainly not a finish line. It is where most interesting questions begin. So this is the inquiry at the center of season two of Education by Design. What does it mean to design for education around human flourishing when our understanding of being human is itself being stretched? How do educators work with emerging technologies without surrendering judgment, relationships, or their own agency? And how do we move beyond asking people to be resilient inside systems that refuse to learn? These are not really technical questions. They are questions about our identity, purpose, belonging, and certainly becoming. Because education has never been about what one person knows. It's always been about our communities and whether we can each imagine ourselves to be someone with the capability to shape the world. The conversations you'll hear in this season trace an evolving inquiry, not a completed argument. This podcast is not here to manufacture certainty. It's a place to listen for patterns, to notice the conditions that let meaningful change take hold, and to explore what becomes possible when we stop treating education as a collection of separate problems and begin seeing it as a living system. Welcome to Season Two.