What will schools look like in the future? What ways can educators take today’s challenges and redesign the education system to work for everyone?
We spoke to Mike Posthumus, Education Design Specialist and President of EcoGeek Solutions, about today’s educational landscape, what schools might look like in the fall, and in future years.
Podcast Version:
Some resources mentioned in the interview:
fieldingintl.com
xqsuperschool.org
COVID Resiliency page: https://www.fieldingintl.com/covid-resiliency/
[es_transcript]
Janet Jefferson (00:03):
Welcome to Third Floor Views, where we at Chesapeake Family Life talk about health, education, and living with kids. I’m your host, Janet Jefferson. Today, we are discussing the future of schools with Michael Posthumus, an Education Design Specialist and President of EcoGeek Solutions. Mike and I are old friends, and I am so excited to dive into some big ideas about education today. So first off, Mike, a big thank you for coming on today and chatting with us about education. Let’s get started. So Mike, you have a ton of interesting unique experiences around education, both about educational philosophy, but also about physical designs of schools. Can you tell us just a little bit about your background and some of the projects that you’ve been working on in the past decade or more at this point?
Mike Posthumus (01:06):
Sure. Well, thanks for having me on, I’m super excited to have this conversation, I’ve dedicated my life to ed and so thrilled to be a part of continuing this work in all domains. So for me, it all started when I went to this one year school called Blandford Environmental Education Program, and it just completely changed the way I thought about what school could be. I was just completely immersed in this nature center, outdoor learning experience. And I had the privilege of having that experience and I recognize that, but that kind of set me on the course of thinking like school needs to be different than what is typically occurring. And so long story short, I went into education and since then have done place based education at the Teton Science Schools, really dug into the idea of using the local environment, the local community as a teaching source, I worked with the College of Education in Michigan to broaden place based and project based learning. I’ve worked with the local museum to establish what’s called the Grand Rapids Public Museum School, which was an XQ Super School awardee, won a $10 million grant to reinvent high school. And recently had started working for an architecture firm, actually designing schools around the world – in the United States, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, I’m all over the place. And so all of this is really just driven by the idea of we can do more with school and we can do better for our students. And there’s a lot of people interested in it and we want to make it happen.
Janet Jefferson (02:39):
Awesome. So I’m going to revisit a few of the things that you just threw out. So you talked a little bit about outdoor education and so being grounded in that in Blandford you talked about place based education, you talked about this idea of a museum school and XQ. Can you just tell us just a little bit more about sort of what each one of those things are and how maybe that is that has impacted some of your thinking?
Mike Posthumus (03:06):
Sure. Well, let me, let me start with the outdoor education element. I think what I learned early on through all of these, Blandford which is the outdoor program and then also the Teton Science Schools, this environmental place based education experience, the world that student lives in is a really powerful living textbook. So it’s not just outdoor education. It’s learning from the world around you, things that are meaningful and relevant that you can touch feel and see every day and too often in schools, we isolate students from their actual reality. Oftentimes when you talk about school, you’ll hear teachers say, well, when you are in the real world, you’ll do this thing. The reality is that the real world for students is school and it kind of discredits the experience if we talk that way. And so the more that you can bring the actual reality of learners to the education experience, the more powerful it becomes, the more engaged they are, the more connected and really the more long lasting it is. And so much of my education philosophy is built on this idea. If you went to my LinkedIn profile, it would say helping learners understand their environment and then equipping them to change it. And because ultimately it’s about helping all students have the toolkit to not only understand the circumstances they’re in and the world that they’re experiencing, but then also have the tools to navigate how to change that so that they can have a better life, so that the people around them can have a better life. And all of these programs, you boil them all down, are rooted in that philosophy. And we do go into the John Dewey pragmatism, and the critical pedagogy of Paulo Friere. I’ll skip that philosophical argument for now, but it’s rooted in really great cognitive science and educational philosophers from as early as the 1900’s through the 1970’s and in modern science as well.
Janet Jefferson (04:59):
I think that also highlights how you’re describing both outdoor education, environmental education, place based education. Some of those words, I think are buzzwords that we equate with more rural areas, but how it really applies to absolutely everyone because we’re all grounded in the space that we live in. We all have a front door that we walk out of and are surrounded by a community of some sort. So I think all of those ideas really apply no matter where we are and in whatever circumstance that we’re living in.
Mike Posthumus (05:34):
That’s spot on. And I think we’ll continue to see trends to understand a lot of these pedagogies, these strategies for teaching and learning pop up in places where there’s a lot of privilege and where you often can think about settings, these ideal learning classrooms, but they don’t necessarily immediately translate obviously for many people to an urban context, an impoverished community. But the reality is those are places where amazing problems and opportunities and challenges and hopeful moments exist. And these are the most powerful learning tools that a teacher has to engage students. And so it really is a universal language and has impact not just in the United States, across the world. We see this trend emerging in all schools that we work on that a meaningful place based experiences are truly becoming a catalyst for some of the best school systems we see.
Janet Jefferson (06:27):
Definitely. And utilizing the resources that we have available. So in the last few years, based on the work that you’ve been doing both internationally and nationally, what direction have you seen education head in? What sort of trends have you seen?
Mike Posthumus (06:44):
I think there are three important things that kind of pop out to me. But I think there are trends that we want to be cognizant of, first of all, is you can’t ignore how powerful technology is becoming and the way that technology is going to be used, not just to understand and process data. And I don’t mean that in the boring, did you get a 90% or an 80%, but like how learners learn and the challenges that they face when they tackle problems. We’re seeing technology emerge that helps teachers not have to understand that for all 120 students at the same time, we’re seeing neural networks and artificial intelligence equipping our teachers to make better decisions about how to give a student a different problem or offer them a different way to think about something when they’re given a challenge that they can’t solve. And so what this technology is doing, ultimately is giving us more power to individualize learning for each student and the way that works best for them. Now, we’re still kind of at the leading edge of this. There are very few schools that are rolling this out in math, but we’re going to see probably in the next decade, major transitions to artificial intelligence and neural network powered software, that’s equipping our teachers to be super human. They’re able to make decisions so much faster and in such better ways, because we have tons of data that says, Oh, a thousand other students had the same problem. And here’s a thousand ways that we were able to help them solve it so that they can learn that piece of information. I think that’s one the next, and this has been really highlighted by the COVID response right now. So we’re seeing an increase in attention to social, emotional learning. And again, this is happening all over the world, not just in the US. I’ve seen videos recently of children who, given their isolation, given the really serious, traumatic event of being ripped out of school, seeing videos of kids crying the first time they got to see their teacher again, right? It’s just so overwhelmingly powerful. It’s easy to forget how important educators are in the lives of our children, especially the lives of our children from impoverished communities who do not necessarily always have adults their lives. They’re constantly reinforcing how successful they can be, talented they are and how brilliant they are. And so the social, emotional element of school, we’re now seeing an emphasis of not only do you have this academic curriculum, but you have a social emotional curriculum. And so we’re adding another layer to what school has to do, which is almost asinine given all the things that it’s already being asked to do, but it’s so important. And what I also think, this is somewhat in response to technology, we just talked about the power of technology, but technology is also allowing learners, especially in middle school and high school to not spend as much time in community, to not have as many direct conversations with individuals that they’re around. And so we see the social, emotional learning that often happened in families and in community not being reinforced as often. And so now it’s becoming something that schools have to explicitly do. So that’s a really interesting challenge that we’re going to have to grapple with. And then the third one, and I’ll try and do this quickly, is we’re seeing the trend of learning as a skill that we have to teach, learning to learn. And one of the things that’s driving this is if you look at the largest market cap companies in the world, the three A’s Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet, which is Google. These are learning organizations. They make money by learning and creating new ideas and then applying it to business solution. That’s what they do. It’s the most valuable talent that we can have right now is the ability to learn and the ability to teach a computer to learn. So you have to be able to learn yourself, to be able to teach a computer to learn. So, as a consequence of this learning to learn is becoming this incredibly important part of the teaching and learning experience that we’re seeing way more attention being paid to. And so I think those three things, individualization in technology, the emphasis of social, emotional learning, and learning to learn, being major trends that we all want to be paying attention to.
Janet Jefferson (10:49):
Learning to learn. How would you say that’s different than critical thinking? Or would you use them almost interchangeably?
Mike Posthumus (10:58):
So sometimes the way that we talk about this, we do a lot when we’re designing schools and communities, we go in and we talk to community members and we say, look, let’s talk about the fourth industrial revolution. The fourth industrial revolution, this new world of work that students are going to be entering into that you don’t have to worry about because you maybe already retired, but your kids they’re going to need to know this stuff. The ability to critically think is the ability to take information and process through strategies. It’s very much like almost logic, you know, a lot solving logic problems to critically think about different data sets and bring in new information and often the way that it’s presented in school is to come up with a solution, right? So it’s critical thinking in that sense, when we talk about learning to learn, we think more about iterative cyclical processes. So there often aren’t solutions when you’re learning to learn, you’re just learning how take multiple nodes of specialized information, and then articulate that into new knowledge that you then might have to go learn more about. And so instead of it being oftentimes in school, there are certainly parallels between critical thinking and learning to learn. But in school, critical thinking is often presented in solving problems. Learning to learn, I think is usually presented as a growth mindset as a way of continuing to process information, fail through ideas, and then continue to build in a way that you can then apply to new situations. So it’s nuanced. Absolutely. There are parallels. You must be a critical thinker if you’re going to be a master at learning to work.
Janet Jefferson (12:37):
So learning to learn is really more about building understanding and sort of diving deeper into topics and sort of knowing what you don’t know and learning how to go after the information that you don’t know.
Mike Posthumus (12:49):
Yes. And I think that piece at the end is really important learning how and why you should investigate new information and the sources that you can go to that are better quality sources, maybe sources that aren’t quality, that’s all part of the process.
Janet Jefferson (13:03):
Absolutely. I can see how the learning to learn and the critical thinking are intertwined, complimentary, both necessary, but are two pieces to a larger puzzle.
Mike Posthumus (13:17):
The Global Economic Forum produced a piece that showed the top 10 skills that a CEO would want in their students or in a new employee. And in 2015, the CEO said critical thinking and problem solving were one and two. And in 2020, what are they? Critical thinking and problem solving are still one and two. However, what we see added to that list that were not there before. Creativity skyrocketed from number nine to number three,. This new talent called cognitive flexibility, the ability to tackle a problem from multiple perspectives and think about it in different ways. And I think the creativity and the cognitive flexibility are very much associated with this talent to be of learning.
Janet Jefferson (14:11):
Interesting. Let’s shift for a moment, but it’s totally all related. Let’s talk a little bit about COVID-19 and its impact on education. So you already talked a little bit about social, emotional issues that we are being forced to address maybe in a different way than we’ve ever done before. What are some other things? And thinking about learning to learn is what really made me think of this question as well, because here we are parents at home trying to figure out how to navigate distance learning. And they themselves are like, Oh my gosh, there’s a lot of different pieces go in here. There’s a lot of things that I don’t know, what do I need to do to figure this out? And what do my students need to do? Or one of my children need to do to figure it out. So already there’s been a profound impact on our educational system because of COVID. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges right now as we’re on the cusp of a new school year and what opportunities do you see?
Mike Posthumus (15:17):
I want to try and not be politically here, but one of the biggest challenges I see is that, and this is something that’s not new to education, but currently both federal and state administrations in some way are asking schools to do what they’ve always been asked to do, which is to continue to do more with literally less. And so we are being asked to open schools with more safety precautions with literally like physically altered interiors with different staffing structures. And we’re doing all of this in the face is one of the largest budget crisis nationwide that’s ever existed without supplemental funds to even bridge the gap to normalcy. And then beyond to what’s actually necessary to make a really robust, high quality learning experience with all of these other mandates in place. So all of that to say, it’s nothing new to the world of education. And it just speaks to the resilience and the commitment of these educators that have committed their lives to this discipline to say we’re going to figure this out. We’re going to do it. So that’s the hope, right? There’s a great education philosopher at University of Kansas Yong Zhao who just wrote a book called “An Education Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste: How Radical Changes Can Spark Student Excitement and Success.” So we’re not going to waste the crisis essentially. We’re going to take advantage of the best things that are happening and we’re going to put them into place. Distance learning is really challenging, but for some students, we actually know that distance learning is really effective. Distance learning used to be the thing for alt kids: I didn’t get school. I dropped out or I need a different system. Ok, let’s put you in an online learning platform. That’ll work for you. What we figured out is not just for all kids anymore, just like maybe you are watching at home, you were on traditional worker in the office, and now you’re working remotely and maybe it works really well for you. Maybe it doesn’t. But we now know that there’s this tool that’s really effective for a larger group of students than we maybe ever imagined. And we were able to roll out distance learning strategies at most districts within a matter of weeks. I mean, it’s really incredible. So I think distance learning is a huge challenge, but also a huge opportunity because it can be really effective. What can schools be doing now in response to COVID or what are some strategies that we’re seeing? First of all, I’m going to say, I am not an expert on this. I’m not a health specialist, so I cannot explicitly recommend what’s right for public health. What I can say is a major challenge is we have all these kids coming to classrooms, even if they may not get sick themselves, they might still be back there putting their teachers and their families at risk. So we do still need to mitigate that. So following the CDC recommendations or World Health Organization, whether it’s one meter or six feet, we do think that’s really important. So how does the school do that? When we’re designing, we’re helping schools think about how they’re transitioning to this post COVID world. We’re seeing schools take things like cafeterias and music rooms and even some cases hallways, and transitioning them into more like library and study environment, places where you can defuse students into these spaces and have them work either in small groups or independently so that they can have more distance. What does that mean for phys ed and music programming? It may mean we can still do phys ed outside and you can actually do music outside too, so that we are seeing schools kind of take on these like diffusing, density strategies. The other thing that we’re seeing a lot of schools do, if this isn’t happening in your district, that’s something that you might ask, Hey, I want my kid to be in a hybrid learning class. It doesn’t mean that I’m never going to show up to school. I might actually come to school two or three times a week, but then there’s two or three times a week when they’re not showing up to school where a different group of students can come to school. And we think that hybrid model is going to be really effective in communities where there are some opportunities for families to say, you know what? We can have our students at home for a portion of the week that might work for us. And then all of this ties back to the social equity issues surrounding school. COVID really opened up what was probably already a bleeding wound of equity and education. It just made it bigger. And so how do you do this in an equitable way? By decreasing density, by offering hybrid models or having partial openings schools have the ability to prioritize. If you are a family that needs your student in school for the traditional experience, we’ve made space for that. And so those students can still come to school on the schedule that they need to so that they can have the support. So the family can go work or so that the student can receive the food and nutrition and wellness services that schools are providing. So that’s a really long winded conversation. And I’ll say, no one has this figured out. There’s no perfect solution. All of the schools that are grappling with this are truly struggling with this. It’s such a complex problem.
Janet Jefferson (20:02):
Yeah, definitely. If you had a magic ball and could have a crystal ball and could look into five, ten years down the line, how do you think COVID will have impacted our education? What do you think is going to stick from this experience? Do you think it’s going to promote more distance or remote learning, or do you think it’s really going to have a pushback and people realize the importance of being in person? Do you think there’s going to be more opportunities for kids to go outside because it does promote social distancing and that’s something that might continue on. What do you think is going to stick in the future?
Mike Posthumus (20:39):
Well, so I started writing an essay. I haven’t finished it yet, but the idea of the essay is: School is dead, Long Live School. COVID is this turning point, even the community I live in, Grand Rapids, Michigan, people really figured out that school is not just academics. And a lot of people know that, but just the public opinion of school, you get on the bus, you go to school, you learn some stuff. You come home. School is a market for food, it’s a restaurant, it’s a mental health service provider, it’s a physical fitness, physical therapy experience. School is a social service. It is not an organization. It is not a building. And I think COVID has really opened the wound, like look school, we are asking these organizations, this service, this system to do so much, we need to respond to it. So just in the same ways that you’re seeing as a consequence of the BLM movement and defund the police and all of those really scary, unending, challenging, not scary, but challenging ideas, challenging the norms. I think we’re going to see similar norms, getting challenged in education. For schools to operate the way that they need to operate, to really support communities, the way they need to be supported, we’re funding them for academics and they’re doing much more than that. There’s going to be some change, I think in the way that people think about school, right? So some other really practical things that I think will happen. Distance learning, it’s not going away. It’s going to be a part of every student’s learning experience at this point, K through 12, you’re going to have distance learning now, because even if it’s not the ideal form of teaching and learning, they have to be prepared for it for when they leave onto whatever next level they’re going on to, whether it’s working remotely or learning remotely at university, or getting connected to the global centers of knowledge that we have access to. So this connected model of learning, we can learn from anyone anywhere, we need to equip students to be able to do that. And so I think this hybrid, and this was something you might see a new normal in school, it’s where you might even do online learning, but you might be in an online learning space where it’s comfy. We’re kind of like a coworking space, or we might see school is starting to develop these types of environments where your juniors and seniors, or even sophomores and freshmen have a class where they’re in that space, doing some type of instruction or learning experience, hopefully where they’re learning to learn. So I think that that’s a permanent thing. And then I hope, my dream, what I think is going to happen is we’re going to start seeing a response to culturally responsive community responsive learning. And that plays into the social, emotional elements too. We have to teach things that are relevant. How do you gain the attention of a seven year old online if you’re teaching something that they don’t care about? You’re online, they can go to anything in the world that they might be more interested in. And so it’s going to force curriculum to become more responsive to the audience. And I think we’re going to start seeing curriculum become more specialized to localities and not so generalized to broad audiences. And hopefully that happens because that’s necessary for us to actually have a more equitable learning experience for people of color, for marginalized communities. We have to see curriculum change in order for those communities to really feel engaged in a part of the learning experience.
Janet Jefferson (23:58):
Let’s talk about that for a second. So we’ve got 2020, interesting year. We have COVID-19 and then we have defund the police, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, as a tipping point, as a potential moment of change. What does that mean for education? So you’ve talked a little bit about all sorts of things, whether it be the importance of school as a social service provider, or thinking about equity in terms of more individualized education, how does this play out in terms of diversity? How, especially right now, our school system is more segregated than it’s been basically since we’ve desegregated schools, thinking about educational design, both the philosophy and the physical design of the space, how does that play out? How do we make school a more equitable place?
Mike Posthumus (24:50):
Great. Let me first and foremost say, I am not a person of color. I’m not black, I’m not Hispanic, Latino. I’m a white privileged, raised Anglo Saxon, Protestant male. So I am not authority and I cannot pretend to have the answers to this. But what I will say is we work very hard to work with and work alongside and to elevate the voices of these community members when we’re designing schools and when we’re designing experiences for schools. There’s this great resource on the internet. If you want to Google it, it’s called the BlackSpace Manifesto (https://www.blackspace.org/manifesto). It’s a group of black architects and city planners that came together and said, what does it mean to build a building or to build a community alongside the black community. And so there’s going to be more and more things like this emerging to position people of color in the leadership positions, to help be the authority on what needs to change, what needs to happen, so that learning can be more equitable. What’s going to happen? I can’t pretend to know. What I can tell you is some things that I see happening. We’re designing a school in Wenatchee, Washington. It’s a small rural community and there’s a strong Hispanic, Latino community designing their first community school. It would be the first charter school in their community. And so we’re designing the physical building for it. And so what is it, what does that school look like? Well, it looks very different than a traditional school. There are, for a population for their high school, as an example, they’re a population of about 360 students. There are only four things that you would look at that look like traditional classrooms. Everything else are open spaces. We have a Plaza which pulls on the Hispanic home experiences with beautiful rich fabrics and dance and music and mariachi. So the school has a Plaza and we have a market instead of a cafe. And so kids can come and get food trucks, the taco truck and the local community vendor. And so we are truly taking the community that the school is serving and building what a learning a learning space should be for that community based on their voice. We’re building it around their vision, not what we call cells and belts, where you have a corridor and a line of boxes that could go into it, mimics prison. We even know that the school to prison pipeline is a real thing. We are trying to decolonize the nature of school by literally designing them differently. So more open spaces, more labs, more round, literal round spaces for discourse and conversation and dialogue. Then also one really important thing is places to bring in other community members, so literal places for community organizations to have offices in the school, spaces for community members to come and have conversation. And then of course, places for dance and music and gathering and celebration. And guess what? All of those things are really closely connected to social, emotional learning too. So that I think we need to see more of that in education, not just around the physical design of buildings, but also around the curriculum that students are experiencing as well.
Janet Jefferson (28:10):
Yeah. I mean, it makes sense, right. You’re designing a space or you’re designing an idea. You better ask the people that you’re designing it for, involve the community members specifically. If it’s a community of color, talk to the people that are there and make sure that you’re incorporating what’s important to them. It makes a lot of sense.
Mike Posthumus (28:34):
And I would say, if you are a person of color watching this, we need more person of color architects. We need more person of color designers. We need your voice. I can only work my best to work alongside people that are experts and we need the voices represented. Which also means if you’re one of those people and you are a part of a school system, elevate your voice, get on a board or get elected to the school board, be a leader because we need your voice more than ever to make sure that our schools are actually responding appropriately to the issues that we see in other parts of our world that are being challenged in really significant and important ways.
Janet Jefferson (29:16):
And community leaders that are in those spaces right now, who are on the boards already need to make sure that they are reaching out to communities of color too.
Mike Posthumus (29:25):
Absolutely. Yes. If you are a community leader, intentionally go out and find and make sure that you’re not asking for free and that’s because that’s part of the problem. We need to compensate people. It is a talent and an expertise to be an expert in a culture. We cannot forget that it needs to be compensated or at least recognized appropriately.
Janet Jefferson (29:47):
That’s a really good point. Last question, really quick. I just want to hear a little bit about your personal hopes and dreams for education. So you have this varied background, you’ve done a lot of things. What’s one thing that you would really like to see change in our education system, whether it be a physical design aspect or something more about the philosophy and how we actually do school.
Mike Posthumus (30:15):
Sure. I’ll give you both. In terms of the physical design, I would encourage everyone to think about as an adult: What are the spaces where you feel most excited, empowered, recharged, and ready, right? What are the qualities of those spaces? Is it natural lighting? Is it under a tree like I am? Is it in front of a water feature? Is it on a comfy couch? Well, guess what? From kindergarten to 12th grade, your students have those same feelings and it’s not steel desks and it’s not plastic hardscapes. Right? So my dream is that we figure that out and we start designing and funding schools so that kids can have great spaces because they deserve them because this is their real world. Like I said earlier, it’s not real world in school. This is their real world. Their job is to learn, their job is to be prepared, to be leaders and active members of the societies that we’re forcing them into, or that they’re going to be moving into. So let’s treat them like the assets they are, like the humans they are and give them great spaces. So that’s one. And then from an education philosophy, I will leave with a story. There’s a student at the museum school that I had an opportunity to talk with. We were talking about what can high schools do differently to respond to them? We were having them brainstorm things that they were interested in learning. And this student, literally said, I am not interested in learning anything. And we ended up having a conversation for 15 minutes. You don’t want to learn anything. He’s like, no, there’s nothing that I care about. There’s nothing that I’m passionate about. No one’s ever showed me why I should learn something, right. This student has been so disenfranchised from his place in his community, not his place, but the place that he lives in. In the community, he never had mentors. He was never shown something that he could be passionate about. And it is my dream that that is never a conversation I ever have to happen again. We need to find ways to include students voice in education earlier and in more authentic ways. It’s not just one high school student serving on a government, it’s not one high school student serving on the school board. It’s actually constantly engaging with kids and asking about, does this lesson work? Are you excited about this? What can we do differently? How can we improve it? We’re not asking those questions. We’re not actually working for our kids. And even as an educator myself, I always had a hard time doing it too. We need to do better. We need to, that’s part of our job. And so I hope that in the future, I’ll never have to have that conversation with a kid ever again. And by the way, by the end of the year, we got him really interested in basketball and we got him to design a basketball court for his local park that didn’t exist. So we got him going and I trust that it will keep going.
Janet Jefferson (32:55):
That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Mike, for being here with us today, to talk about big ideas and education. We love to hear your thoughts, comments, and questions. If you enjoyed what you heard today, check out more at thirdfloorviews.com. I’m Janet Jefferson. This is Third Floor Views. Thank you for listening.
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