Shannon Schmidt is the Director of the The Amabel Boyce ’70 Center for Learning and Thriving at Garrison Forest School (MD) and a Faculty Advisory Board member at R.E.A.L.® Discussion. We interviewed Shannon about her approach to leadership and how building discussion skills align with the goals of the Boyce Center. What follows is a conversation between Shannon and R.E.A.L.® Partnerships and Program Manager Catherine Dragone. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Catherine: Shannon, could you tell me your name, position, and your hometown? 

Shannon:  I’m Shannon Schmidt, the Director of the Boyce Center for Learning and Thriving at Garrison Forest School in Maryland, and I am from Queens, New York.

Catherine: Thinking back, what three words would you use to describe yourself as a student?

Shannon: Enthusiastic, curious, diligent.

Catherine: All words that I would still use to describe you! Did you have a favorite teacher? 

Shannon: Yes, my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Renner-Smith. She really saw the strengths in all of her students. She had been a writer before she was a teacher, and I loved writing as a kid, so she was fabulous at giving me a lot of opportunities to write and grow. Her ability to really connect with my personal strengths and interests is something that I try to do as a teacher, and is my goal at the Boyce Center – to see each girl as an individual and have the Center be a place where students can foster their strengths. 

Catherine: How would you describe your academic leadership style?

Shannon: Collaborative first and foremost. I’ve always felt that you can have an impact on the students in front of you, but if you can really be collaborative and get a whole team on board, you can have such a greater impact on the whole school. If I had to summarize my approach as a leader it would be: find the strengths in both students and teachers, and get everyone on board rowing in the same direction so that we can make progress and keep students at the center. 

Catherine: Tell us about the Boyce Center, and how R.E.A.L. relates to the Boyce Center mission and vision. 

Shannon: At the Boyce Center we have three main areas we focus on: academic support, growth and enrichment, and wellness and well being. What is special about R.E.A.L. is that it really does support all three of these, with data that demonstrates how R.E.A.L. is impacting each of these “buckets.”

Catherine: Wow R.E.A.L. really centers a lot of those goals!  What do you see as the power of discussion in today’s world for the girls at Garrison Forest?

Shannon: I think discussion, and particularly R.E.A.L., gives the girls the language to voice  and own their opinion, and respectfully disagree with people. I think sometimes our girls are afraid to wade into difficult conversations because they don’t want to say the wrong thing, or they don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. Most students don’t yet have the language, or sometimes the confidence, to have these conversations. One of the powers of R.E.A.L. is that practice that I was talking about, instead of just talking about what discussion should look like, or telling them it’s okay to disagree – but really having them practice those skills. I really connect with Liza’s metaphor that students don’t need computer labs anymore, they need discussion labs! It’s so powerful to have students reflect on their own growth on these skills too. 

Catherine: When it comes to discussion, what are your hopes for students? 

Shannon: My hope for the students is that they feel like their voice matters in their classrooms.  I want every student to feel like their voice, and all their classmates,’ are a valuable part of the community they are in.  With that, I want them to listen to others, not just to respond, but also to understand other perspectives. 

Catherine: What about your hopes for the Garrison Forest teachers using R.E.A.L. in their classrooms? 

Shannon: I hope that R.E.A.L. helps teachers feel empowered and brave enough to have difficult conversations in their classrooms. Our teachers care so much about their students and their students’ learning, and I hope that R.E.A.L. gives them the tools to approach those conversations and feel confident navigating them. I’ve also heard from teachers in the past that they would like tools for how to support quieter or introverted students in discussions, and so my hope for teachers is to really lean on the structures of R.E.A.L. to meet the needs of all our learners. 

Catherine: For someone who knows absolutely nothing about R.E.A.L. yet, what would you tell them? 

Shannon: R.E.A.L. is a framework for discussion in classrooms, not a curriculum. It can be used in any humanities class to help guide conversation and structure it in a way that is more productive and meaningful for students. I think it’s unique to have a framework that works with lower schoolers all the way up through upper school. So I would also tell people that R.E.A.L. can be a unifying thread throughout campus – and it has been very exciting to have that here at Garrison Forest. 

Catherine: We are pedagogy nerds here at R.E.A.L.; even beyond discussion…so we have to ask: which education trends or teaching pedagogies do you feel are at the center of your work right now?

Shannon: One thing that I’m doing a lot with right now is looking at how students learn and how to make learning stick for students.  We’re really centering that at the Boyce Center.  We’ve done a lot of work with retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving, which leads into my focus of “ how do we get students learning by doing?” 

 I’m also working with teachers on how to give students feedback in a way that supports their learning and encourages their growth. We’re talking a lot about helping kids develop self-awareness and reflection skills around what it is that they’re learning and what their goals are. 

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Catherine: Thank you so much, Shannon. What a compelling vision for discussion skills leading to learning and thriving at Garrison Forest! 

Name: Eamon Thornton 

Hometown: Atlanta, Georgia, but I was actually a boarding student here at McCallie. 

Current school: I teach ninth grade honors English here at McCallie in Chattanooga, TN. 

Eamon, thanks for being here today – we are thrilled to have a conversation with someone who has so clearly already established himself as a stellar R.E.A.L. practitioner even in year one of the program! To start us off, could you describe yourself as a student in three words?

As a student, I would say I was gifted, lazy and that autonomy was the main thing that I wanted. I wanted to be able to do what I wanted to do, so I could be really passionate about certain things if I was the one driving the car, but I would also just be really reluctant if I didn’t think there was value in what we were doing in class. 

How about a favorite teacher?

My senior year English teacher was the one who kind of hooked me on the subject. You know, so much of high school, at least in my mind, was about getting into college. But my AP English was the one guy that really didn’t teach to the test and was really student driven. I think we even got to choose one of the books that we read in the second semester. 

Turning to you as a teacher: when it comes to discussion, what’s your “why”? In other words, why do you think discussion is important in your class?

What ultimately drove me to English is that it is one of the primary subjects where people really get to voice their own opinions, and you don’t have an authoritative text. I’ve always tried to teach from a place that really tries to grow that in students, and to free them up to have their own interpretation. With all the websites like Spark Notes and Gradesaver and ChatGPT, I love the ability to challenge students to think for themselves, and say to them, “okay, well, sure. I mean, that’s what everybody says about that thing but what do you think?” And in discussion, that’s a place where they can really do that, and where they can ask that of their peers, and ask follow up questions, “well, why do you think that? Where do you see that?” I’ve struggled for  probably 10 to 12 years now on how to have those discussions in a way that allows for that thinking, and that I am able to evaluate and have clear guidelines for students so that they know what I’m looking for. 

You’re definitely not alone in those pedagogical challenges – that’s why we built R.E.A.L.! So, when you’re having a class discussion, what are the learning goals that you focus on for your students?

For me, I care less about whether the students remember who the characters are in a specific novel in the long term. I want students to develop the communication they need for life beyond my classroom – and to practice doing so with the text at hand. 

In the last few years, given all that’s happening in the world, students are really struggling to do this. I generally have some kind of content assessment first – like a book test that ensures students are engaged with the content – so that they are structured for success in discussion. It’s hard to have a discussion if the kids don’t know the text! 

But, more than anything, the skills that I try to focus on are related to Excerpting: how do you support your claims with the text? If you say that this character is this way, show me in the text where there’s something that he says, or some narration about him, or some particular word that demonstrates your point. I tell students, “I’m more interested in how you back up your opinions than whether you’re right or wrong.”

Before your first R.E.A.L. discussion, what were you worried about going in? 

I don’t know if I was really worried about anything in particular – maybe because I’m a lacrosse coach as well as a teacher, and I constantly preach to my players “don’t be afraid to make mistakes.” I tell them a lot “let’s just give it our best shot and see where our mistakes are, and learn from there.” So, I kind of went into the first R.E.A.L. Discussion with that mindset, and tried to emphasize that to students as well. We did a practice R.E.A.L. and we stopped at various points and talked about things – so I’d given them a lot of training before we got into it.

What challenges have you faced in your first year using R.E.A.L.?

What I have seen is that in the beginning, it turns into popcorn reading where students just want to read their excerpt, or their prep, and the next guy will be like, well, here’s another quotation, and here’s what I got out of it. There’s no connectivity or building and synthesizing. That’s the biggest thing that I’ve tried to lead them into more of over the first semester. We’ve talked about this a lot as a class, and now I see it on their own after discussion reflections. 

I’ve thought about how to address this, and I think what I’m going to try to do is actually have them observe each other. Because boys, especially ninth grade boys, are really good at pointing out what other people do poorly! And during the discussion they can have blinders on about themselves. So, I’m going to have one group go and the other group observe, and then halfway through, flip it. I’m hoping that that’s going to help them see the moves their classmates make and then in the debrief talk about what we all saw. 

I think it’s also so interesting when students see discussion in action because I think sometimes students are eager to get their voice in, or they’re anxious about speaking in class and the anxiety or the instinct to talk can get in the way of what they’re saying and how they participate in the discussion. 

I honestly think one of the things I emphasize in my class is that English is so different from the other subjects because I’m not just checking for retention. The goal of the discussion is not for me to see that you did the reading and that you did your discussion prep. But that’s still where students’ brains are, because it’s kind of been indoctrinated into them that the class discussion is to show that they did their homework. So in using R.E.A.L., the goal of discussion is not to show me that you read the chapter and completed your discussion prep; it is about expressing and backing up your opinions.  

Can you think of a moment in using R.E.A.L. this year where it clicked for students? 

I remember there was one student who made a claim, and another student in the group disagreed with him, and as that student was disagreeing, the original student used an NVC, like “hmm I agree with your disagreement with my point.” And I just remember thinking, oh wow! That’s a very visual moment that encapsulates that goal, that the discussion is a kind of a threshing floor where you’re supposed to just put it out there, and in that process, really figure out what you’re trying to say and what you think, and it’s okay to change your mind during the discussion.

The last question I have is kind of a fun one. Do you have any new year’s resolutions?

We stopped doing resolutions, my wife and I probably eight years ago, but we picked up on having a one word focus for the year. My word this year is “devote”. So I’m trying to be more intentional about how I devote my time, more to family, more to rest, and just try to slow down this crazy world a little bit. 

Thanks so much, Eamon. What tremendous insights and thoughts. I’m excited to see what the second semester holds! 

First, we’d love a chance to know about your background and how you came to your current work (speaking and writing about Education). When did your interest in Education emerge, and what have been some core experiences in the development of your current practice?

I got into this field totally by accident. I had a Public Policy and writing background, and I went to business school to get away from both. Either I failed to escape or what I was really meant to do was ignited in me while I was at business school. What really helped me to see this purpose was a class I took with Clay Christensen, who is considered the “father of disruptive innovation theory.” He was writing a book about applying his ideas to public education, and he gave me the opportunity to coauthor it with him. His class totally transformed how I saw the world, and so I leapt at the opportunity to do the book. Two years later, the book came out and we founded the Christenson Institute, a nonprofit. Over 15 years later, I’m still doing this work in education, specifically thinking about how we can help every person to build their passions and fulfill their potential. The work fuels me.

I’m a podcast lover, and I recently took the chance to listen to some episodes of one of your podcasts, Class Disrupted (with Dianne Tavener). I know you’ve been thinking about meritocracy and education. When you think on a teacher level (most of our readers are teachers), what can or should teachers do to rethink the way that we talk about and assess merit in our classrooms?

The first thing to do is step back and recognize that the way schools function isn’t preordained. It doesn’t have to be this way. The way school is structured now forces teachers to make distinctions between students and sort them into pathways and tracks. That conflicts with what we know about human development, that people have jagged profiles, different strengths and weaknesses. To judge them with some finality is the opposite of the growth mindset that most teachers want to build. So, what can teachers do with that tension?

One move to make is to step away from the model of the whole class of students always operating in lock-step. Instead, maybe you could flip the classroom to use class time for discussion and homework time for individual work where you need it. Or you could do something more complex, moving to a mastery based learning model where students move on as they master and the role of the teacher is to coach and motivate and guide. We need to think about our time in the classroom: how do we really use the time that we’re given to best meet each student with what’s really going to engage them? 

When teaching online during the pandemic, I and other teachers really started to zero in on the value of class time. You really have to do in class what you can only do when gathered together.

It all connects back to this question: “what’s the purpose of what we’re doing and the modalities we’re using?” Really starting each class intentionally, planning lessons, beginning with the end in mind can help to build that intention. But then it’s also important to ask: how would I know if students had really realized the outcome that I intended? That’s where assessments fit in, to help inform the teacher of the success of their work. 

At REAL, we focus on discussion, which isn’t necessarily an innovative technology or tool. We do, however, believe that thoughtfully teaching discussion skills in the classroom is an innovative approach to a familiar tool . How can teachers innovate using what’s already familiar to them? Does it count as innovation to rework what we already know?

To me, innovation in education is anything that helps learners make progress that wasn’t being done before. It doesn’t have to involve technology, and it doesn’t have to involve a newfangled design. In many cases innovation can mean executing something more purposefully and deliberately to produce enormous gains. I buy into this idea that if you’re purposeful in structuring a conversation and a discussion, you can see real learning gains from it. It’s not about creating something new, but something better.

It’s useful for teachers to reflect on their own times as students. How many times were you in a discussion in English class where the discussion was interesting but you had no idea what you got from the discussion and what you’re supposed to take out of it? That happened to me all the time in business school. The environment was not structured and scaffolded in a way that would help me to know what we were trying to achieve and this is how we have the conversation. What I take from REAL is that we can make these discussions the valuable asset that we know they can be by layering in intention and purpose.

Even if a teacher intends for students to have open-ended exploration, that teacher also needs to have directions for both themselves and their students.

Let’s think about this through another example: teamwork and team activities are very fashionable. If a teacher hasn’t structured that environment so that students know how to assign roles, or manage a meeting, or productively collaborate, then they’re often setting students up for the freerider problem. Frustration can be productive, but there has to be some reflective practice on the other side built in to start learning more about how to work effectively as a team. And the same thing applies to individual work: busy work for its own sake isn’t useful unless it takes us in the right direction. Being deliberate and setting students up to succeed and find the takeaway, even if that takeaway is not proscriptive, is important. Every student wants to feel successful, and in order for that feeling to take root, they need to know what success would be.

Sometimes, kids even lean on extracurricular activities – sports, chess, robotics – to get that feeling of success because they don’t find it in the classroom.

The fact that we call extracurriculars “extra” is wild. We could take the values from those extracurriculars and bring them into the core curriculum to build and enhance motivation there. Traditional school experience is structured in a way that doesn’t always help kids to find genuine feelings of progress and success. I’ve never thought of this before, but while external approval is important, if you don’t feel it and understand why, that feeling isn’t going to be helpful. In your future life, you can only determine the quality of your own work, you can’t always determine how other people are going to respond. That’s a life skill that we need students to learn in school. I can’t control how people will react when they read my book. What I can control is what I’m writing and how and under what time. I need to know how to say that I’ve done a good job without that approval.

You specialize in innovation in education, and lately, it seems like all kinds of groups and schools are working to innovate. At the same time, some of those innovations or new programs seem to serve factionalization (or separation between groups, especially in a political sense). What’s the difference, in schools, between innovation and factionalization? How can we distinguish between the two and move toward innovation?

This is the topic of the conclusion of my book, where I wrestle with it deeply. One of the things I’ve concluded is that we might have to separate some in order to make progress for all. I reach that conclusion grudgingly. Just look at the fights in districts over anything and everything. The ability to make progress toward mastery based learning or student success or the chance to collaborate can’t happen right now because the oxygen is getting sucked up by battling factions. A core lesson from innovation is that when no one agrees on the outcomes or how you get there, the only tools available for a leader are power tools (hiring and firing, fiat, other brutal tools). You don’t want to use these in public school settings, even if they’re available. The only tool you have to make progress is the tool of separation. I don’t think that’s an end state. I think that if you can separate and prove success, families and students want to join. To me, it’s a short-term move to build a base. Starting small with a group of people and building success can be incredibly healthy, actually. 

Sadly, we’re an incredibly factionalized, segregating population as it is. In some ways, I think that it might overstate how well we’re doing to think about less separation. A more deliberate crafting of innovation may require separation initially.

I don’t think anything is innovative unless it’s actually benefiting and helping students make progress. If it’s not helping, it’s not innovation. The Prius was an innovation because it helped a lot of people make progress toward electric cars; the Segway was an invention, but it didn’t really help people. 

Sometimes, new tools or practices that aren’t innovative appeal to schools because they can represent innovation, but it sounds like something truly innovative would require a school to transform.

Private schools suffer with the innovator’s dilemma, which is that if you do anything radically different, it’s hard to build momentum and approval. Innovation upsets the grain and disturbs what’s made a private school successful up to this point. Many independent schools have incredible resources and histories, and they really struggle to do radical things.

You speak all the time about the future of education, and so we’ll narrow down our final question. What is a prediction that you have for the practice of teaching in the future?

I think that because of all the pressures in the workforce and in schools, we’re going to have to find ways to make teaching more motivating and more sustainable. That will mean that more schools will figure out ways for teachers to genuinely work with other teachers in co-teaching, team environments. I don’t think that, without that, this will be a sustainable profession. More and more people want and need that flexibility. If someone needs to care for their kids one day and be absent, all these kids fall through the cracks and parents are angry and it’s not sustainable. 

You’ve built a book about leadership which promotes sharing leadership and empowering everyone in a group to bring something to the table. What’s the origin story of that idea?

When I was writing this book, I always knew the antagonists I had in mind. Villain is too strong a word for what I’m thinking. But I knew that the “pyramid” mindset, meaning hierarchical and representing the world of top-down processes was the antagonist. I knew that because I’d seen, both as I was growing up and in my professional lives in the dot-com world and later in presidential politics and diplomacy, that despite what we learned in science class, which told us energy is always conserved and never destroyed, in human affairs, the same principles don’t apply. Every time I was gathered around a table with people, I was sensitive, perhaps more than the average person, to how people’s energy could either be created and kindled or smothered. It’s not just jerky people who do that smothering, disempowering or cutting off, but it’s also good, decent people who think that that’s what leadership looks like and that that’s how meetings work. I saw the ways that those approaches would kill initiative in groups. 

For a long time, my working framework was the pyramid vision vs. the “blank” – I didn’t know how to describe what I intuitively understood as the rival. I also, eventually, didn’t want the “versus,” because I simply wanted to develop an alternative. I thought about using “snowflake,” but that became a political word. Then, in Chicago, I was looking at the back of a dollar bill, and I saw above the eagle, this thing that looked like a fuzzball. On Wikipedia, I researched the Great Seal of the United States and discovered the radiant constellation: the symbol for how you pursue diversity without division, unity with individuality. It was the perfect symbol.

At REAL, we’re so excited about this vision of gathering people together. It really is, in some ways, a civic mission to think about how we can use classrooms to move toward that democracy-driven ideal of unity with individuality that you just named. What does it look like to raise kids to operate in a constellation model like the one you describe in your book?

The honest answer is that I don’t know. I have ideas for adults but would presume to try to educate educators of kids. I do know that there’s a lot that we shouldn’t do. I often draw a picture on a whiteboard that sets off space at each corner, each space representing a “rocky shore,” or a thing to be mindful of and avoid. The happy space is in the middle. what I picture when I imagine answering this question. 

One of the rocky shores is centering one specific kind of temperament in workplaces or, by extension, education spaces. The instinct in those spaces is to get the hand-raisers, the people who are disproportionately interested. The types of kids who raise their hands for Model UN, Mock Trial, and other similar activities in high school often become the same ones who stay at the center of power as we grow into adults. We tend to try to mold all of us into this type. However, to the extent that you believe in Myers-Briggs or other temperament typing mechanisms, the world tends to organize into 4s: four houses in Harry Potter, four gospels, etc. So you’re leaving out three of four other types. That’s most of us.

The interested ones, the handraisers, often cluster under a particular temperament. They like rules and gatekeeping. We wouldn’t survive without them. But it’s not the only temperament that should be represented, and it crowds out other thinkers from access to the conversation. 

The other rocky shore is the “middle school science project” idea. By this I mean a gathering or initiative that lacks rigor, in which one person does all the work and everyone else tags along. It usually feels fake. It’s the reason that labs in school science classes can be terrible even when taught by good teachers. They say “take this, mix in this compound, and you’ll get nylon.” It takes away the surprise and the discovery because it’s too easy. I could just read a sentence explaining this would happen. Where’s the drama? Where’s the learning? Some types of learners might be amazed, but what’s missing there is uncertainty. Kids are good at knowing if something is BS or not. 

Another rocky shore would be the idea of a “group hug,” the “hey, what unites us is greater than what divides us” model. I’m not so sure about that. That idea makes people afraid of difference. What Mary Follett, the matron saint of the Constellation mindset, says is that difference is where a group’s energy lies. Branching, breaking, and differing is how we grow. We shouldn’t be scared of it. If you can constructively engage difference, you can create an exciting, well-functioning space. 

I don’t know what the other rocky shores are yet around education. I would say that most of the instincts that we, adults, have about sharing the power of work, discovery, and vision aren’t very good. 

Oftentimes, these days, companies and schools and groups talk about “making space” for new voices, but it also sounds like fashioning a space in which all people can exist as themselves might be more productive than just inviting new people in.

We often hear the cliche that “we need bridges, not walls.” I don’t find that a useful framework, because  you could build a useless bridge to nowhere, and there are lots of walls that are incredibly helpful. I want to look at the cliché through the Pragmatic framework, the philosophy co-developed by William James and other. It would ask, “Does the wall or bridge make the world more or less like what we want it to become?” The idea of the bridge comes from a good place, but we have to remember that nobody lives on a bridge. A bridge is a means of travel. Also, you don’t build a bridge from the middle. If you watch a bridge built, for the whole first year it looks like they’re building two walls on either side of the river. With individuals, if you want bridging to happen, the first step is to foster a space of self-definition: who you are, where you stand, what you stand for. Then, from there, people can start to see the other, acknowledge the other, listen to the other, and then finally have that “bridge” moment of seeing yourself in them. 

That practice of self-definition and “bridging” certainly connects to and roots a lot of teaching practice, and this vision of what a shared space looks like transfers meaningfully to education. What, in your mind, are differences between the workplace and educational spaces when we think about sharing power?

I did spent a lot of time with eighteen-year-olds at one point, when I interviewed twenty thousand kids in the United Kingdom. I led workshops because I wanted to learn about them and how they perceived the United States. What I learned was that young people are capable of thinking like adults. C.S. Lewis offered the advice that the best way to write great books for children was to not treat them as children. His point, in my mind, was that there’s so much condescension toward children, but they can handle most material. In his “children’s” books, children encounter murder and all kinds of “difficult” subjects. When I led those workshops with British kids, I asked what frustrates them about America. They were focused on real issues: they said that they thought about drones, guns, racism, and the Israel/Palestine conflict. 

I’d also ask those kids: “who likes to lose an argument?” And, of course, generally speaking, nobody likes to lose an argument. We spend a lot of time convincing people to be in the argument winning business, but that probably isn’t productive for creating a space in which people can share power. 

I do imagine a lot more similarities between the spaces than differences. I don’t know classrooms that well, and so I know I’m not an expert, but I’d treat the eighteen-year-olds like full grown-ups. But I also treat everyone as a learner. When I was in that role, I would ask my senior team – full of people who were in their 50s – to do things like draw me a picture of a good or bad day at work. These people are extraordinary. They have graduate degrees and endless qualifications, but I wanted them to do something they’re not as good at as they are with words. It’s amazing what you learn when you ask people to try something in a new way. It gets them to open up. 

I’ve found that nonsense questions, or questions that pull everyone in the room out of their own areas of mastery and expertise, can be a powerful way to bring my students into a conversation as equals.

With my team, I’d write “ALSO” in all caps on a whiteboard. Then, I’d write “also” underneath it in lowercase letters. Every person in the room would be good at Arguing, Lecturing, Securing (this is a big skill in the State Department, but in a corporate world I’d say “strategizing”) and then Organizing. That is the definition of leadership for most of their people. But what else is there?  You could make the L lead, of course. All of these skills are all sort of hard and sharp – they’re the all-caps ALSO. Then, I’d say okay, cool, good for us. I want to explore what else spells “also”: asking others about hopes and fears, linking them to your own, serving the overlap between the two of you, and in the process, opening up. That’s not a linear process; rather, all of that can happen at once. These skills, and the process of implementing them, is not intuitive for many people. Giving them the permission to try these other, less familiar skills can be empowering. It really works. What the lowercase “also” skills have in common is that they help teams to embrace uncertainty and turn it into a positive experience. Those capital letters are trying to factor out uncertainty.

Fear of uncertainty is huge when we talk to students about entering into discussions during a class. Kids also have reservations about entering into uncertain territory or making claims that might not be “right,” but teachers struggle with that hesitance, because teachers generally really hope that their students will take risks in the classroom. Fostering a space where students face uncertainty is one of teaching’s biggest challenges.

I has a colleague who was thinking about this with me one day. He said, in our world (the State Department), doing something good is +10, but a bad thing is -10000, and it follows you forever. This guy made this great point that yes, you can’t calculate the exact impact of your move, but you can quantify that there’s a lot less love or trust after a moment of miscalculation in response to uncertainty. To my mind, we shouldn’t run away from quantifying these more abstract, hard-to-pin-down thoughts or moments because they can force us to see the culture we’ve actually created, not the one we think we have.

The idea of quantifying impact translates directly into teaching. One challenge that teachers face is quantifying or naming progress and growth in relation to these more uncertain or amorphous skills and challenges, like the ability to link others’ hopes and fears to your own or open up. As we implement these processes to try and foster environments in which people share power, how can we build those skills and also measure their success, particularly for kids?

In my next book, I’m hoping to get more practical and tactical about how this process can work in schools, in philanthropy, and in other such organizations. My answer, for now, is imperfect. We can start by noticing that teachers and students by and large have been living in hierarchical pyramids, because most of our institutions are pyramids. We’ve gotten good at the habits of the pyramid. When you sit down at your first faculty meeting or kindergarten: you pay attention to and internalize that hierarchy, asking and answering, “Who’s in charge? What’s the point? Where do I fit in?” We stop noticing it, but that’s what we ask ourselves all the time. In a new job, you’re super aware of it. We establish what I think of as the habits of a pyramid: we get good at knowing who’s up and who’s down, we develop focus, and we excel at chopping things into their component parts. That’s what we’re good at.

As and when we try to also build habits of democracy and interdependence, we begin to see the impact of the habits of a pyramid. We begin to see that we’ve lost our awareness of other kinds of order. The order of the night sky, for example, or a tidal pool, your favorite song, or a soccer field, still exist, they’re just not hierarchical in the same familiar way. Then, as we’ve become good at focus, we’ve also gained a kind of tunnel vision, and we don’t notice things on the side or behind us. Then, as we’ve gotten good at chopping things up, we’ve lost the feel for things that cannot be understood in that reductive way. 

In a corporate setting, you can’t just understand the customer experience or a competitive landscape through these habits of a pyramid – those essential elements that we’re trying to deal with aren’t isolated in one level of a pyramid structure. Similarly, with kids, something like team spirit or the energy of a classroom doesn’t lie in the hands of one level of the pyramid. Students know such feelings and forces are real, but they can’t be reduced to a simplistic structure. That can be an entry point into thinking about the less tangible skills, because they’re often related to those kinds of concepts.

The endemic anxiety among teenagers makes that kind of work really challenging for students, so it’s certainly at the top of many of our (teachers’) minds. Another thought in my mind is the fact that the most privileged students are often the ones who exist in school spaces that challenge or disrupt hierarchical systems, and the least privileged students are often in the most hierarchical spaces. 

Music is important to me. I’m not a musician. The music that kids listen to is important and can be an access point into power sharing for anyone. Music is not linear; it’s not hierarchical. It’s turf that feels like any listener’s own. 

Thank you so much for joining us, Matthew!

Thanks so much for joining me today. To start off, I’d love to hear about your life and experiences leading up to Mastery Portfolio. What got you interested in this work?

I was a full-time classroom teacher for about eleven years and instructional coach for a few different schools. Through those experiences, I spent time in classes from K-12, working in private schools, charter schools, and district public schools, and the common denominator of all those experiences was that traditional grading really didn’t motivate my students. Standards-based grading provided them with much more motivation. What made a difference in motivation and engagement was tracking student skill mastery over time and giving students credit as soon as they learned something. Showing students their mastery level and tying that back to goals for the year was empowering, especially as students watched their knowledge grow and their mastery levels change. As mastery increased, they could see the direct result of their effort and celebrate that result. I built a classroom culture around learning and skills development. I saw, through these experiences, that skill-based curriculum eliminates the distraction of the points-grubbing game. If I myself hadn’t always been just trying to do the minimum amount of work to get As when I was in school, I sometimes wonder how authentically and deeply I might have learned!

At the school in which I worked most recently, I was looking for a software tool to help track skill mastery and couldn’t find one that was truly aligned to a standards-based grading philosophy. My partners and I decided to build that tool. That was the birth of Mastery Portfolio. Across the company’s journey, I’ve realized that schools benefit from the workshops, consulting, and leadership coaching that we do. We aim to support best practices in grading and assessment to bring equity, clarity, and motivation to all students at all kinds of schools.

It’s usually a four- to six-year plan to fully and successfully shift a school to a mastery-based system, and the amount of time depends on the existing philosophical alignment that the school has, or whether that alignment needs to be developed. The first move we make is consulting with the school on what the plan might look like based on what they’re already doing well and where they need to grow – their assets, gaps, inconsistencies, and so on. The first year is the building capacity year, a time during which teachers do structured learning about what best practices are, have conversations, norm as a community, and build a grading philosophy statement. From there, we work to track out what the second through fifth years will look like. Usually, there’s a big goal. Maybe all students will have portfolios by the end of the year reflecting their own self-assessment. Or maybe a school aims for full implementation of a competency-based transcript model, which can be a 3D document showing what makes a kid tick, what twenty-first century skills they’ve mastered, that they can send to admissions officers at colleges to really illustrate who a student is. I usually describe a mastery portfolio as shifting the transcript. Especially at top schools, every kid sends a transcript with all As and AP courses to the admissions office. To differentiate and visualize what a student brings to the table, we need to be able to show a broader and more productive picture of the skills they’ll bring with them to campus.

One of our real values at Mastery Portfolio is that every school community is very different. You can’t push one model and expect it to work in every school. That’s really why the goals and processes we propose to schools look different and take different amounts of time. The way that we help schools gain clarity on their vision is by asking questions, listening deeply, and teasing out the best direction for that community. If a school leader can articulate what a school is doing to develop equitable learning, that’s huge, and our team can use that action and build off of it. We can bring our experience from a variety of schools to the table, so that a given school can benefit from all those other schools or districts we’ve worked with before. A lot of schools redesigning assessment may never have done so before, and so that breadth of that experience adds value to our work.

Mastery Portfolio works to bring school districts, schools, and teachers more tangible and actionable representations of students’ skill development and needs. Much of your material focuses on shifting assessment away from comparison and ranking and toward a more holistic measurement of student progress. What, in your eyes, are the biggest areas that schools and teachers should center as they consider and reconsider assessment?

There’s often a misalignment between a school leader’s impressions of the teaching and learning and assessments in a classroom and the actual, on-the-ground work that teachers do. That means that you might have a quiet teacher who does her own thing and is not on the principal’s radar as a stand-out, but is really a model for assessment. In another school, the principal might trust teachers to the extent that they believe that certain practices are in place that aren’t actually uniformly practiced. One element of our work is to teach school leaders to ask the right questions and really see what’s happening; we have to center what’s really happening in a school in order to identify goals and needs for that school.

Sometimes, we go into a conversation with a school leader and they have a very ambitious goal, but as we uncover what’s happening, sometimes we have to scaffold more than expected to get to that ambitious outcome. Taking stock of where you are now is a really important piece that school leaders sometimes identify but not always. If we don’t take stock of the starting point, that blind spot can stop schools from making appropriate changes.

We also often see teachers who like the vision and see the value in where the district wants to move, but they have a hard time seeing the steps. If you have three professional development days, how can you use that limited time to really move the needle of school practice? When my team and I work with schools, we’re really trying to build that roadmap. Organizational change is exciting and important, but with one misstep you can lose buy-in from stakeholders. 

Mastery Portfolio seems to focus a lot on data as an avenue for teacher and school learning. What kinds of surprises tend to emerge from that data? What are some of the blind spots that you often see, and what are some areas of growth that you think teachers should focus on?

A lot of teachers and leaders come to us because they have limited data showing student progress, and that’s because they measure progress only once or a few times in the year (state test data, or map testing, or the iReady program, which allows a pre- and post-assessment). All the growth tools available are largely based on summative assessments. Our tool allows teachers to keep track of formative assessment data without “hurting” a student’s grade as they continue learning. Teachers can enter as many observational or mastery skills into the system as they want to. That way, they can really start to see a long and short term vision of progress. Having specific, real-time data doesn’t seem possible in the status quo, but it is possible, and that data is transformative. When the students do a summative assessment at the end of a unit, that data will stand as their mastery level and the formative data will just be there to show the progress they made along the journey. At the first parent-teacher conferences in a school year, a lot of parents don’t expect teachers to have growth data yet, but teachers who use our tool really can. It’s really helpful to communicate with parents and students. Students have access to it at all times.

We have a chart that’s a bar graph mirrored above and below the x axis. Above the axis, anyone can see the skills mastered, and below the axis one can see the skills the student hasn’t mastered. One of the most common patterns comes when a teacher can see how a student has grown, but the number of standards that student has been taught but has not yet mastered has also grown. The teacher won’t have thought that the student was struggling, but the bars show what’s not there and allow for us to see what we don’t otherwise see. The quiet, well-behaved student doesn’t seem like they need your help, but a comprehensive check with our data displays can reveal otherwise and address the blind spots and biases that we can easily have unknowingly with our students. 

How does Mastery Portfolio engage with social-emotional or interpersonal skills? How can we measure and provide meaningful feedback on those skills?

Part of the impetus for this work is that schools identify higher anxiety and mental illness related to pressure to have perfect grades. As college admissions become more competitive, that trickles down, and kids show up to college in the middle of a breakdown. Dr. Lisa Damour has done great research on the relationship between that grade pressure and student wellbeing. One of our philosophies is to strip away the distractions in school. Points and averages are really ranking and sorting systems. If a school’s goal is to develop the potential of every student, the way that they measure student potential, progress, and achievement needs to change. We (at Mastery Portfolio) specialize in helping schools identify: what do you want students to leave your school with? If it’s not a label or a rank, let’s redesign your grading and assessment system and design it to celebrate the word that does represent achievement. Credentialing, semester long internships: whatever that portrait of a graduate is that you have in mind, let’s make sure your grading and assessment rewards match that. We’ve done a standards-design workshop with schools with graduation competencies around discussion, argumentation, and other interpersonal skills. We identify those skills that are the aim and then we can help schools backmap what that looks like at each grade level. 

One way that I’ve found success in more traditional schools is to tackle this work in bite-sized chunks. If you’re not ready to, don’t even touch the transcript. Do work with formative assessment. Just because you’re talking about iambic pentameter doesn’t mean students learned it – how have you checked that skill? What’s the authentic assessment that could assess the skill? You could have students submit their work to a Shakespearean director and get their feedback. Send it to Kenneth Branagh! That opens up a student’s world. Some kids have extraordinary connections, and some kids have none; you’re helping kids and giving them confidence by having them think about authentic audiences and how they might engage with them. Doing the work of the field, not just learning about it, is empowering and gives students more clear feedback on how much, and what, they understand. I get really excited about this stuff. Kids will blow you away with what they can produce once they have the freedom given by the structure of rigorous standards and authentic assessments.

When you don’t have standards defined as a department, and expectations for both students and teachers aren’t clear, there’s too much latitude. Students need clear expectations to feel successful. My partner, Starr Sackstein, has published many books on grading and assessment. She’s a great resource, and her writing is great to look into. There are lots of low-hanging fruit opportunities within just a department to shift practices toward mastery and motivation to build skills that can otherwise seem intangible. 

Reflection seems to be a big part of Mastery Portfolio’s work. What does reflective practice look like for students, and in your mind, what is its relationship to student learning?

One of the first steps we recommend is for each teacher who’s using our app, the Mastery Book, to take one day or class period per semester with each group of students you teach and call it a remastery day. Print out the mastery reports from the masterybook.com so kids can see what they’ve mastered and what they don’t have credit for yet. Then, give students time to read through and highlight key words they don’t recognize. For example, if there is a standard on fraction multiplication that you didn’t learn in that unit, and you learned it in a later unit, you should reassess on it, as you may have mastered it by now. Giving students a chance to reassess on missed material from before, and providing a quick check for understanding right there on that day, gives the student a chance to hand that assessment to you, and then you enter that mastery rating. They immediately see the impact, whether upon their grade (if you’re still tied to that) or maybe it’s a red/orange/green scale and the green goes up. This shows kids that when they take the time to relearn and reassess, they see improvement – they’re not dinged for not having understood sooner. That more appropriately mirrors how the world works. If you’re not good at something, and then you get it, people notice the fruit of your labor. We want to build the practice in students to take feedback, reflect on it, act on it, improve, and then demonstrate mastery so that they can move on without lingering on the fact that they didn’t “get” it the very first time. Really, this isn’t just about redesigning assessment; rather, it’s about redesigning the feedback loop and making sure that we build student reflection so that teachers aren’t the purveyors of learning. These are the dispositions that we all want in our colleagues, employees, and supervisors, so let’s build them in our children.

What is a prediction that you have for the future of education?

I have a lot of hopes and dreams. I think the pandemic made parents realize how valuable good teachers are, and also the discrepancy between effective and ineffective teachers. I hope for a change in compensation structures for teachers so that we compensate teachers well for the good work that they do. Secondly, the push to go virtual during the pandemic has expanded people’s ideas of what’s possible in a pandemic and beyond. For example, if I have students do research on ancient civilizations in History class and building of real numbers in Math class, that could be an opportunity for cross-curricular projects. Online sources are great, and experts in the field could join from anywhere virtually. The world has become a smaller place. I’m hopeful that with those opportunities, students will be the ones leading. They’ll start to use technology to make learning more authentic for themselves. Whenever learning is more authentic, the other pieces – assessment and outcomes – fall into place. 

Hometown Manchester, NH. My dad grew up there, too – it’s very much home.

Favorite teacher growing up: who and why? Ms. Sears was my sophomore English teacher. She brought English to life for me. She had us acting and had us doing research, really extending and building a full experience. I stuck around for an independent study in English with her over the summer, which involved me traveling to a nearby university to read critical sources. I loved it! It was in her class one day that I had this thought, more like a voice, that I want to be an English teacher one day. And then I thought, “no I don’t!” But I did. She was so instrumental for me. I was a pretty shy and nervous kid in high school. I remember reading The Scarlet Letter in this class, though, and reading this scene where Hester Prynne lets down her hair in the middle of the forest, bathed in sunshine. I had the same kind of experience in that class: I kind of let down my hair and stepped into who I was. The catalyst was literature, but Ms. Sears cultivated relationships and community in our class. Hers was the first class where it really felt like we were a team; I loved the people in my class, and she made that happen, and I didn’t think that was possible before.

Describe yourself as a student in three words Anxious, competitive, intense. 

Current City, School, Teaching Assignments (?) I teach sophomore and senior English at Westminster School in Simsbury, CT. My sophomore class is general English, and with my seniors, in the winter and spring, we do electives. This winter, I’m doing an interdisciplinary Science Fiction course on Artificial Intelligence and Literature, which I call “Man and Machine.”

Favorite historical figure? My grandmother – my dad’s mom. She’s passed away, but she’s one of my heroes. She was in Greece during a civil war, and she escaped in the night because she was engaged to an American. She told the Greek army where the Communists were and was a celebrated hero. Something that I most admire about her is her selflessness. Even when she immigrated to America, she still sent clothes – from what little she had – back to children in Greece.  

Favorite literary character? I read a lot of Sci-Fi. So many heroes are men or small boys in these stories, and I don’t identify with them much. Katniss Everdeen is probably my favorite choice. I’m also really into Wonderwoman – I’m thinking about film as literature here. Wonder Woman is so badass! For me, I had this experience going to see the film. The fact that it’s directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins, and then the fact that it’s a woman from an island of Greek female warriors, is awesome for me. As an athlete, and as a Greek woman, to see this woman who’s really cool and respected by the men was really inspiring for me. It was the first time I’d ever had that experience watching a film – I really wanted to be this female character. I’d neer seen a woman represented like this on screen. 

Favorite school supply? I am a lefty. I love gel pens, and there’s a specific Inkjoy (Papermate) pen that doesn’t really smudge. I can correct essays in turquoise or hot pink, and that’s exciting. Also, my mother is a retired health teacher, and I start my classes by having my students throw around a large stuffed version of the cold virus that she gave me when she retired. It’s not intimidating to catch, and it gets everyone connected to start off. It’s random that it’s the cold virus, by the way – but that becomes a fun topic of conversation. A month in, students ask “what IS this?” and I say, “figure it out!” 

Pet peeve about class (student-led?) discussion? I would say my pet peeve is probably when the conversation goes into a direction that is neither productive nor kind, which can sometimes happen when there are a lot of ideas being shared. This is something I’m constantly working on with my sophomores, in terms of steering the conversation in a productive and thoughtful direction. And, certainly, when they are more eager to share their ideas than to listen to what their classmates have to say (I am quick to forget that self-control is a pretty challenging skill, and one that comes with maturity and age!).

Favorite moment of class discussion? I think one of my favorite things is when students get really excited about something that another student has said, and they all  begin to feverishly agree. There’s a hand signal that students use here; sometimes, if they hear a really powerful statement, several students will do that signal really energetically, and you can feel how engaged they are with one another. Also, I love when there’s silence and then someone speaks up and the others really encourage them. I love when I feel totally obsolete in the conversation, when there’s such a surge of momentum when you can feel that they’ve taken ownership of the subject matter. There’s a flow. 

Text you count on to inspire conversation? I love several texts for this. I really love to show my students an excerpt of David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water.” I watch the video with them, and then we unpack it. Even just listening to the speech fosters interesting discussion and makes students think about their own experiences and the way they interact with the others around them. I love hearing what they think about it.

What do you nerd out about? Robots, probably. My “Man and Machine” class is so fun. I was a Biology and English double major in college, and I taught science for four years before I taught English. I nerd out about Biology, and any time I can bring it into the classroom is exciting. We were reading “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” and talking about whether or not androids were alive, and eventually we were thinking about zombie fungus. They’re learning about the natural world, but they can use it to think about whether or not ants have minds, whether or not those minds can be controlled, and eventually it takes us to these big questions about what it even means to have a mind. 

What is a wish for this world? The word that comes to mind is perspective. Perspective, kindness, humility. That’s a way I’m growing in right now – learning to grow in humility and learning to see things from others’ perspectives. Another text I was going to mention that I love is Chimamanda Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story.” The importance of extending compassion to those around you and finding your mind inside of theirs. I think about what it would look like if we, in humility, considered others more important than ourselves? How different would our interactions be? What if people assumed the best in other people? What this is coming back to is treating people with kindness regardless of who that person is or what you think about that person. I wish more of us did that. 

When historians recount the past two years, what will they be especially fascinated by? First, Black Lives Matter and the relearning and rediscovering along with it will be a narrative that (I hope) historians will attend to. Second, the word “isolation” rises to the surface for me. The way that people have responded to isolation is interesting. It’s caused a paradigm shift and asked people on a corporate, social, andi individual level to reorganize their priorities and their lives. It’s related to conversations about equity and injustice, and it’s also related to questions of mental health, empathy, spiritual practice, and self-compassion. 

One prediction for the future of schools? This is a hope as much as it is a prediction. Everything I’m fascinated by is how we think about learning in terms of who the students are and what they need to know for the twenty-first century. In some ways, I feel a little bit stuck in what a classroom has looked like historically, and I envision that schools will adjust to either more project-based learning or more movement in the class. There are so many students who don’t learn best when they’re stuck in a seat the whole time. We’re more conscious of mental health and the grace that we give our students. I think schools will be a place where we’re really thinking about what students need for the world we’re in. I hope that we’re giving them skills and, I pray, creativity and curiosity and courage to have hard conversations. I hope that we’ll be creating students who are problem solvers – who are excited by problems, not made anxious by them.

I also hope that schools will become more equitable and inclusive. I don’t know that this is necessarily the case with where things seem to be headed economically, but I certainly hope that schools of the future (I am thinking about the private school world, here, the one I currently belong to) will become more inclusive institutions… ones who open the door to people who have historically been excluded.

Best advice given to you by a department chair or supervisor? My department chair shared a story about his father, and the message really is just this: “love your students.” 

Educator-Influencer you count on? First place you turn for classroom advice? I look all over. I’ll look it up on Google. I’m thankful for some meaningful conferences I’ve attended at Exeter and Taft. The learning and the brain conferences have been incredibly helpful to learn about how students learn. I also really love connecting with colleagues. I love to walk down the halls and see what teachers have written on their boards – see what exercises they’ve left up, what activities they’re doing. Also, connecting with colleagues at other schools who teach similar books and can share lesson plans. 

Better class discussions will _______________. Lead to more empathy in my students. Lead to stronger communities, generally.

Hometown My hometown is Weston, MA, which is about fifteen minutes outside Boston. 

Favorite teacher growing up: who and why? I think my most favorite teacher was my theatre teacher in college (I minored in Theatre in college). She taught me Theatre of the Avant-Garde, and the energy that she had and the trust that she had for her students was amazing. I was nervous in this class — it was an elective for majors, and they all seemed much more talented than me — and for our first big assignment, she paired me with the best actress in the grade. It intimidated me and also forced me to question what makes a good student or a good actress. The experience inspired me to be more confident. I’ve kept that with me as a teacher: I want my students to feel like I believe in them and trust them, that every challenge I give them is designed to lead them to success. 

Describe yourself as a student in three words I would say driven, creative, and grade-focused. I really argued with every teacher I had over why I earned the grades I did (now, as a teacher, I laugh, because it’s so frustrating when students do this!)

Current City, School, Teaching Assignments (?) I teach at Blair Academy, a boarding school in New Jersey. I teach English II and Narrative Writing, which is an upper class elective focusing on narrative writing (it’s a creative writing course). 

Favorite historical figure (or best line from history?) I feel like it’s changed. For a very long time growing up, it was the girl from Iron Jawed Angels. I liked the story of how she fought for women’s rights in England and then came back to the United States and talked back against Woodrow Wilson. Now that I’m older, I think that she was really problematic towards Black women who were looking for voting rights, and I don’t feel the same way about her. Jane Austen is a favorite for me — she took something in her life which she couldn’t have, true love, and gave it to her characters. 

Favorite literary character (or best line from a novel?) Anne of Green Gables! There’s no other correct answer! She reminded me a lot of myself. She’s loquacious, tends to get over-excited, and tends to ramble. I saw myself in her and in the joy she has in everything about life. I also saw in her the parts of yourself that are hard to improve in terms of not liking criticism. The way L.M. Montgomery wrote her maturation was really inspiring. I love that she’s so realistic, so inspiring, and also has a lot of growth. 

Favorite school supply? I think my favorite items, which I don’t have but that bring my students a lot of joy, are iPads. Several of my students take notes on them with a stylus, and every time a kid gets an iPad for the first time, all they want to do is show me their notes for thirty minutes. That’s incredible – for something academic to bring them joy!

Pet peeve about class (student-led?) discussion? When the kids get really excited about a tangent that takes away from the depth I’d like them to get to in discussion. Someone will raise an interesting point that isn’t focused on analysis of the material, and that’s when I feel like we’re so close to the point, but we lost that. Text-to-world points (an element of the R.E.A.L. Discussion system) can get too exciting for students, and they can lose track of the whole picture that they need to see. 

Favorite moment of class discussion? When, halfway through the discussion, something is said by someone who it clicked for and then another kid replies: “I NEVER thought about that!” Suddenly everyone’s getting something really significant out of the discussion. When students can feel they’ve done the heavy lifting, it makes them feel smarter, and it makes me feel proud of their own work. 

Text you count on to inspire conversation? Fairy tales! We do this very cool thing in the English II curriculum where we read through classic fairy tales — most are Eurocentric, but we also draw in tales from other parts of the world. This year, we started off with “The Little Match-Girl” in class. The way that the kids suddenly realized that 18th and 19th century fairy tales function as religious propaganda is really fun. It upsets kids’ expectations. The students expect that the unit is going to be so boring, but they connect it to sexism or the Protestant Reformation from History class, and it’s cool and unique. 

What do you nerd out about? This is very specific, but I really love service dogs. A friend of mine has a service dog, and that familiarized me with laws behind service dogs and ways that you can teach the dogs to learn. It’s interesting, because I have my own (pet) dog, but I use a lot of the skills taught to service trainers in working with my own dog. It’s something that I find interesting, and rarely do people know the laws with it. It also draws people back to invisible disabilities. 

What is your wish for this world? It’s hard because right now, life is so affected by Covid. My wish would be that we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic and could take learning about health and apply it to a post-pandemic world. If we weren’t here, I’d say I wish we could give younger generations more opportunities to increase their attention span. Covid has exacerbated this. People’s attention spans are shrinking: if you compare the attention span of an early 00s kid with a child now, there’s a significant difference, and I wish we could give that back. 

When historians recount 2020-1, what will they be especially fascinated by? I think they’ll be fascinated by how health policies change during and after covid protocols. We often say that it takes tragedy and massive struggle for real change to occur, and I think that we are seeing real change, but I do think that people in the United States are very unaccustomed to wearing masks, whereas in other nations it’s very customary to wear a mask, especially if you’re ill. People are considering that relationship to others differently now. How the public and the world responds to people during Covid are drastically different. 

One prediction for the future of schools? I have a positive and a negative. The negative prediction is that eventually there will be no in-person school. I think that so much socialization happens in school that it’s really important for emotional growth to be in school with people your own age, people around your age, and physical teachers. I took this Sociology class in college in which we learned about the difference between a school’s reputation versus its place – the reputation can be moved online. My positive prediction is that as long as we are in person, there will be a bigger focus on the emotional value of in-person learning. At Blair, there’s a huge focus on the lack of socializing over the last year and a half: how do we encourage emotional and social growth? That’s on the minds of anyone involved in education. We all know that education is not just about learning, but it’s also about growing as a person, and there’s going to be a big focus on that in the future.

Best advice given to you by a department chair or supervisor? My department chair here at Blair has been fantastic. He has a lot of helpful suggestions. The one I remember the most is just to be confident in yourself and be confident in your skills. I graduated from college in 2020. It’s hard to feel qualified to teach awesome kids. During Covid, he told me that I wouldn’t have been hired if I weren’t qualified; I should teach with confidence if I’m going to do a good job. If you’re not confident in your abilities, how can they learn?

Educator-Influencer you count on? First place you turn for classroom advice? My amazing mentor here, Kaye Evans, has been teaching for a very long time. Second, one of my closest friends in my teaching year, Pam Schulman, who also uses REAL in her History classroom. The skill she has is incredible. And then the third is the Dean of Teaching and Learning at Blair, Amanda Lucas, who has been teaching English for many years. She’s a fountain of wisdom and is always looking for ways to improve and do new things.

Better class discussions will _______________. Lead to better analysis, lead to more intrapersonal relationships, and lead to better-prepared citizens of the world in the future.

Let’s talk, first, a little bit about your background and who you are. How did your story lead or contribute to your decision to found Premise?

I was a teacher and school administrator for about twenty years. I stopped two years ago, when I transitioned to work for an equity-centered tech company that partnered with school districts. I am and always have been very interested in discussion-based learning environments and circles, and those interests grew stronger through curriculum and teacher training programs like the Touchstones program. I was partnered on an NEH grant with Touchstones when I taught in Washington, D.C. Public Schools, and they introduced me to seminar styles teaching and learning strategies. 

Another influence that led to my interest in discussion-based learning was my experience in the graduate program at St. John’s College, which uses an all-seminar program in both undergraduate and graduate programs. St. John’s lets teachers complete degrees across summer semesters, and the degree took about eight years to finish. Through my student experience at St. John’s and trial and error in the classroom as a teacher, I learned how to plan and run discussions in classrooms. I came to understand that seminar-based learning is most powerful when it is properly structured and scaffolded. That approach was true to my origins as a teacher: my teacher training was through Brown University in the late 1990s, and in my program there was a strong emphasis placed on constructivist education and the use of driving essential questions in the classroom. 

As a teacher, then, I’m rooted in the practice of student discussions. Premise was born of that training and my strong desire to help people, especially adults who are out of college and feel their lives are too busy for connection and learning, to find time to make meaning together. 

In 2013, when I left my last school job at Lick-Wilmerding School in San Francisco, I had taught public, charter, and private schools. I had an itch I wanted to scratch to continue to have meaningful, purposeful, joyful conversations with adults. I tried to join book groups and take long form courses, but neither worked well for me. I found that the book club scenario was less facilitated than I was hoping for; I didn’t know what to expect when I got there, because sometimes the group involved more wine drinking than book talking. The long form classes were arduous as a full time worker, both in the tuition and the length of time they required. 

I started a program similar to Premise, called Polis, in San Francisco in 2013. The idea was born out of an NEH fellowship on Hannah Arendt, which took place at Bard. Polis was my culminating project, an attempt to take Arendt’s ideas of making a common world by grappling together and make an accessible and joyful space for adults to do that grappling together. I rented space at the Women’s Building in San Francisco and held classes a couple of times a month with fifteen to twenty people. That experience lasted about three years, and I learned a ton from it. I was a facilitator, and I also had a group of people who ran classes. In all of this work, I want to make sure that the learning is joyful. The most popular series was called “Drinkers and Great Thinkers,” and each class paired a beer with a thinker.

I have a lot of ambition around this kind of work, and I’m mainly learning about starting a business by doing. I’m learning from building Premise. I moved up to Portland, and Polis ended. Then, the pandemic hit. I had been teaching classes through Portland Literary Arts Foundation, and they moved online during the pandemic. I’d designed courses at Portland Literary Arts including a five-week session on Arendt. I realized through that discussion that my mental barriers about doing it online weren’t necessary, that there were some real opportunities that come with teaching online. I taught three classes with that organization during the pandemic. The itch (to educate adults) was still there, and something wasn’t quite right in the model we were using. What I want to be part of and am creating with Premise is a program that has a really strong pedagogical thread that runs through all of the classes, so it doesn’t feel like the success of the experience depends on the teacher. I want to have a range in texts and instructors, but I also want commonality through a strongly defined pedagogical approach. Students should be able to anticipate no structure no matter what course they’re coming into. 

I started to build Premise in February last year. The work involved finding instructors aligned with the pedagogical model who could apply it to content. Diversity in all kinds of ways was important to me. A lot of adult learning programs out there lean older and mostly draw in retirement age audiences. Or, they lean toward a canonical, “great books” style of learning. At St. John’s, I appreciated that “great books” style, but it’s not for everybody. I wanted a less canonical, more age-diverse community, and I also wanted more diversity in instructor age and background.

I also want Premise to be inquiry-driven, rather than leading with author or text. Each class is designed around an enduring or “beautiful question.” Instructors propose an enduring question and the text that they want to use with the class to probe that question. Then they design the class. I have a pretty open idea about what kinds of texts get at these enduring questions, but it’s a wide range. I want classes to have modern applicability, which looks like pairing Lysistrata with Spike Lee’s Chi-raq. I think that can lead to more intergenerational participation. 

Ultimately, that’s where Premise came from: I’ve been looking for something like this and haven’t been able to find it. I have a feeling that people are going to increasingly need an explicit way to connect around the mind. The president of Barnard said, a while back, that “you want your mind to be an interesting place to live for the rest of your life.” That happens by trying on ideas with other people. I also have a loftier goal, which is that when people practice this interaction with a range of people they might not normally meet, the world becomes a better place. 

Premise focuses on the idea of a “beautiful question.” To me, the idea of a “beautiful question” reads as almost spiritual, or driven toward the pursuit of beauty, intangibles. Why do beautiful questions matter to you, and how do they drive instruction?

I think that one way to think about beautiful questions is that they offer a philosophical way to think about how we’re living, the choices that we’re making, how we’re interacting with other people. Most of the way that I got to understand my own thinking was in formal institutions, mostly schools, as a student or teacher. I explored my own thinking as a teacher through questions like these, through what teachers call essential questions. I’ve found that in a more nonacademic setting — with friends, on Facebook, in day to day life — I don’t have an opportunity to be external with a philosophical way of living without a very formal environment. This is a selfish reason to start Premise, but I have a strong desire to talk about and grapple with these big life questions in the company of others. I’m not in a PhD program or part of a religious community, so I don’t have another natural way to talk with others about how we’re living.

The most recent class “How does illness and pain define the human experience?” brought together a group made up of fourteen people from across the country. We read Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and Zadie Smith Intimations. The conversation, it’s odd to say, was joyful; people who’d never met were sharing their own experiences with illness and death, especially in Covid, and connecting it through text. The text provides a thing in common, which helps to make the conversation much more egalitarian. I want the discussion to give space to connect life to text. That said, being a good facilitator often means managing that connection, so it doesn’t veer so far to the personal that we lose sight of the common, central text. My goal isn’t to have most participants in one time classes, but to provide multi-week classes through which people get to know each other over time. So far, one-time classes are what have filled, but I want them to feed into the multi-meeting classes. When it comes to me, I have this strong desire to talk to people in a safe and comfortable way to have uncomfortable experiences together.

What problems does Premise address?

I’m really interested in the “epidemic of loneliness.” I’m interested in the shame that people feel when they don’t have connection to others and what they do to cope, even to name. Premise isn’t the solution to loneliness, but I do think that when we all experience disconnection in many ways and for many reasons, and there’s not a great accessible place for explicit connection. There’s a lot in the news lately about male friendships in the US, about how challenging it is for men to make new friends. I think that it’s unlikely that someone’s going to join the community if it’s explicitly named to make friends. But if that’s a side effect, that’s going to be an enormous benefit for many.

Another challenge, or problem, in the world now is a lack of quality thinking — not just critical, thinking, but also nuanced thinking. Many of us lean into black and white decision making and thinking and are unwilling or unable to live in the gray. Some of these classes are designed to have participants occupy the gray space, at least for an hour and a half. I’m in a social media world, and I find myself feeling really polarized, but unintentionally. This class experience can be an antidote to that feeling.

It seems like Premise deemphasizes the idea of an end product or a “finish.” This idea is more accessible to adults, it seems to me (as a high school teacher), than it is to kids. How can schools center the process of discovery over the product? How can we enlist more people, of all ages, in building that mindset? 

One of the hard things is that I feel some pressure to have Premise become something I don’t want. I want Premise classes to be for the sake of themselves, not ending in badges or certificates. I want it to be an ongoing experience from which people derive meaning for meaning’s sake. It’s difficult to have education for its own sake, especially because there is facilitation and structure. Maybe at the high school level it’s more micro-experiences where we can make that happen. It’s unrealistic to think that kids won’t jump through hoops set before them or fixate on those hoops. Within a class, when teachers can try to name the moments that are for the sake of themselves as they’re happening — try to be a bit meta, talking about how it feels — that can help students to become more aware of that work. Name the learning. Name what can happen when kids construct meaning together, not in an individualized or competitive construction. It’s not easy, especially in a college prep context, but I do think it’s possible. I want Premise to bring the feeling you get when you walk into a dorm room at a liberal arts college at midnight and come upon roommates in a spontaneous deep, philosophical conversation. That feeling of witnessing a conversation that you really want to hear and really want to join — that’s what I want to recreate.

Education can be really performative, even when it’s called “Authentic.” Upper middle-class college bound kids, especially, tend to know how to perform authenticity. One thing I like about Premise is that there’s no need to perform. 

I often think about Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, where she talks about the imperative to perform dialogues of experience based on the situation. When we talk about authenticity, it can translate into expectation, pressure, and even danger.

Priya Parker’s Art of Gathering has been very important as I’ve started Premise. The art of gathering with purpose has a lot of applicability to a high school classroom but also in adult learning contexts. Parker writes that we have to be explicit about why we’re together and not assume that there’s a common understanding of purpose. Then, you set guidelines and boundaries. With a book club, there are no limitations. I once watched a ceramics class with limited resources, and that course produced more creativity than a class with unlimited resources did, because with unlimited resources, it was too easy to just scrap an idea. Limitations produce better thinking. 

How do leaders at Premise teach? What does Premise take from education, and how could teaching from Premise carry over into formal classrooms?

I’ve done a lot of planning professional development for adults in my professional life. In doing that, I had to think about what kind of pedagogy translates to an adult world but doesn’t infantilize adults. There are strong pillars from high school teaching that live in Premise. Making guidelines that are known and recognized is huge. I send all students the guidelines for convo in advance of class and ask to read, then review and give examples when they’re in the room, and I do that for every class. Maybe that won’t be as necessary over time, but it starts us from a common place of what we’re here to learn and how we’re here to learn. I think that not doing as much hand holding and assuming an adult perspective is also part of how we teach in the class. Something I’ve seen in other programs is the opposite: they assume that because we’re all adults, we’ll be offended by structure, feel constrained by it. I think that structure is freeing; structure allows for voices that may not normally feel they have a place. St John’s overdoes it with structure, but it’s helpful in the end.

What’s a goal or a prediction that you have about or for the future of education? 

I kind of think about it like Whole Foods. When Whole Foods started in the 70s, most people thought that it was niche, artistinal, boutique. Then the pendulum of understanding processed food started to swing, and now that way of thinking about food is more integrated into mainstream life. I’m not, we’re not, creating from scratch a new way of learning; rather, we’re borrowing from a long history. The pendulum has been so far to the “drill and kill”and knowledge acquisition side, and I still feel like this kind of discussion-based learning, in most education settings, is seen as a “nice to have but not essential” feature. My prediction is that kids and adults will want more and more of this over time, either because they’ve had a sample and realize it’s different, or because they understand the damage that’s done by the more individualized, knowledge-acquisition driven learning. So my prediction is that people are going to start to push back on how we’re doing school. 

Thank you for your time, Mary!

Premise was featured in this EdSurge article last Friday. Click through to read more about Mary’s work and the ways in which it fits into Humanities education beyond the classroom! 

Callie Hammond, teacher at Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart in Houston, Texas

Hometown Technically, Charlotte, North Carolina, but I also claim Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as the city where I truly grew up. I’m in Houston, Texas right now.

Favorite teacher growing up: who and why? It’s hard to pick one. I think that overall my favorite teacher was Mr. Cokerdem, who actually was my high school Social Studies teacher. At the time, I loved English and reading, but I always struggled in English class because I didn’t like teachers telling me what to read and write. History, as a result, was my favorite subject. Mr. Cokerdem was a young teacher who came into the school at the same time I came into ninth grade. He was very energetic, and different from other teachers because he had us move around the room and do activities that I’d never done before in a classroom. We also had a good relationship where I felt like I could talk to him and ask him questions. His dedication to teaching and to building relationships with his students meant a lot to me. 

Describe yourself as a student in three words I would say analytical, perfectionistic, rule-follower. 

Current City, School, Teaching Assignments (?) I’m in Houston, Texas, where I teach at Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart, which is an all-girls school. I teach seventh and eighth grade English, and I’m also the eighth grade Dean of Students. Previously, I’ve also taught sixth grade English. 

Favorite historical figure (or best line from history?) It’s a toss-up between Ruth Bader Ginsburg (I guess she’s historical, now) and Malala Yousafzai, who isn’t historical (yet). I find a lot of inspiration from Malala’s story because she’s passionate about girls’ education. I also love using her story at an all girls’ school with pre-teens and teenagers. She was their age when she was shot, and discovering that part of her story really inspires my students. I’m also personally inspired by her and her work because of the girls’ education aspect. RBG I didn’t know much about until recently, but when I found out she’d passed away I started to read more about her and better understand the things she’d done. I’m in the process of still learning about her. 

Favorite literary character (or best line from a novel?) My seventh graders just completed the book Chains, by Laurie Halse Anderson, and the main character is Isabel who is a young Black girl living as a slave during the Revolutionary War. Some horrible things happen to her, and she plans her own escape and runs away. I think she’s one of the best examples of a very strong female protagonist in YA literature, and I love that she’s a person of color, because students don’t always have the double whammy of a strong female character and a Black girl with great power in the books that they read. Another favorite from my own girlhood is Francie Nolan from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I connected a lot with her when I was reading that book as a ten year old, so she’s always the one I first think of when I’m asked about a literary character who I’d love to go to dinner with!

Favorite school supply? Paper Mate “Flare” felt tip pens. Also, post-it notes. 

Pet peeve about class (student-led?) discussion? I recently discovered that I really hate when students all turn and look at me and say “We’re done.” 

Favorite moment of class discussion? I love that moment when a group thinks they can move on from a topic and suddenly, one of my girls will disagree. All the others are like “oh, someone disagrees with us?!” Then, when that brave girl explains what she’s thinking, why she disagrees, and can back it up? Amazing. Stand up, stand out!

Text you count on to inspire conversation? This is my first year in a long time not with sixth grade, but at that grade level, I absolutely love teaching The Giver. In almost every chapter, there’s something that happens that the students are so excited to talk about: they love discussing Jonas, or what they would do in a situation, or applying it to themselves. I always know that kids will eat it up. There’ll be discussion both in the class room and in the hallways, too. Also, I love teaching 12 Angry Men, which I teach in seventh grade. I love teaching that book because again, they get so excited that there’s no definitive answer of whether or not the boy is the murderer. My girls will be (goodnaturedly!) screaming at each other in the hall about his guilt or innocence, and they just can’t stop talking about it! That’s a really great thing to see. 

What do you nerd out about? Teaching, mostly. But, also I really love staying on top of what’s recently come out in adult fiction, and I try my very best to know if my favorite authors are coming out with new books. I just started reading Apples Never Fall, the new Liane Moriarty book. It’s not quite a beach read, but I always know when I pick up a book by her that it’s going to be a compelling read.

What is your wish for this world? My wish, and it kind of goes along with REAL, is that people would be open-minded about talking with one another and open-minded with hearing differing opinions about anything and everything. 

When historians recount 2020-21, what will they be especially fascinated by? Two things: the state of United States politics and tracking environmental change and how rapidly that’s happening. 

One prediction for the future of schools? I would love for the future of schools to be one in which students are truly engaged – not just in their seats – and where they really feel like they are preparing for their future. I want our students to learn academic skills and life skills. I spend a lot of time thinking about middle school, especially, and my wish for the future of middle school would be that kids feel like middle school has a point. The girls at my school will even say “oh, no one cares about us, they only care about the lower schoolers or the high schoolers.” My middle schoolers are ready for more – more leadership, more say, more experiences – but we often don’t let them do more. There’s so much that educators can do to enhance education in middle school.

Best advice given to you by a department chair or supervisor? One piece of advice that’s stuck with me came from a curriculum developer at the public school where I previously worked. She taught me a lot about how to teach English well, and her advice was to always practice lessons – not necessarily standing up and practicing for an hour, but running through sections in a lesson to make sure that there was flow to a lesson within the larger unit. That’s something that I do to this day: I want activities and classwork and homework to seamlessly piece together so that students can see how one thing connects to the next and they say “ohhh, so that’s why we did that!”. 

Educator-Influencer you count on? First place you turn for classroom advice? I am a huge Teachers-Pay-Teachers person. I was literally just on there! I like Martina Cahill, the Hungry Teacher, and PrestoPlans. I also read the Cult of Pedagogy’s blog and regularly go to her site for advice and insights. 

Better class discussions will _______________. Lead to students being open-minded. 

Amethyst King, teacher at THINK Global School

Hometown I grew up in Topeka, Kansas. Even though it’s the capital of the state, it still feels like the middle of nowhere. Now I call Denver home, but I went to high school in Georgia and college in New York so I’d say I’m from all over the US.

Favorite teacher growing up: who and why? I had a really great high school English teacher; we’re still in contact. She really saw me as a full person, and that’s why we connected. I opened up to her a lot, and that was especially important because there was a lot of turbulence in my life in high school. It was nice to have an adult there who I could really trust and who supported me. I loved the content of her class, but she really met me on a personal level.

Describe yourself as a student in three words I was very intense about grades and college. I see that in my students and even though I tell them grades aren’t all that matters, it’s like looking at my younger self. I also knew how to check all the boxes of school without putting in too much effort, especially with subjects I wasn’t very interested in. 

Current City, School, Teaching Assignments I teach at THINK Global School, where I began working recently after two years at the Lawrenceville School. TGS is hard to describe, as it’s very different from traditional school. Everything is student-led and project-based, so there’s a great intermingling between academic rigor and student interest. All students work on personally-designed projects while also completing teacher-led modules. There are eight educators on staff, but we don’t have specific content in mind; our modules are focused on developing skills using the content and context of the place where we’re teaching. In Maun, Botswana, the most recent base, the module was based on storytelling. Then, in a few days, we’ll go to Oaxaca Mexico, where I’ll lead a module on Architecture, Anthropology, and Sustainability. There are a series of learning targets the students have to attain before graduation and they choose modules based on that requirement and their own interests. In addition to modules, I also lead the 10th and 12th grade academic writing classes.

Favorite historical figure (or best line from history?) I can’t really think of a figure that stuck with me from history classes and I think part of the reason is the lack of figures I could relate to. The few Black women whose stories I saw were always connected to a specific history of trauma and oppression that was fairly dehumanizing. I’d have loved to see stories of people who looked like me that were as agentic, global, and even joyful that I heard about other historical figures. 

Favorite literary character (or best line from a novel?) Books that you read when you are young really stick with you and that’s what I’ll say The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen. She went through so many challenges in the series and I liked how it all was present in the story of who she was without the common narrative of suffering that “everything happens for a reason” or “bad things are necessary to appreciate good things.” Instead, her character really believed that those things should never have happened, they didn’t happen for any reason, and they shouldn’t happen to anyone ever again. 

Favorite school supply? Teaching in Botswana was so interesting because we didn’t have much in the way of school supplies. In most of our global locations we’re in or close to a city, but it was the first time back to traveling after Covid and the school wanted to be near wildlife, so we were 30 minutes away from the nearest village, staying in a lodge. It was intense to live and work all together for the whole trip. Although we did a lot with laptops, the wifi was spotty and so we really just used paper and pencil. It showed how much we could do with so little. We went on safaris and spent so much time out in the field, and students really learned without all of the supplies I used to think was necessary.

Pet peeve about class (student-led?) discussion? You’ll always have external processors and students who are more internal and of course, one of those internal processors is going to have really amazing ideas that they might not feel comfortable sharing. I’ve learned a lot about respecting those boundaries and finding ways for students to contribute that aren’t verbal, but I do still believe that being able to articulate your thinking is an important life skill. Another pet peeve comes from the way that a lot of students, because they’re so much more exposed to ideas on social media, have all these concepts and buzzwords in their back pockets, but they don’t know what those words mean when they use them. In Botswana, students would just spew words like “colonialism!” without any background knowledge about what colonialism actually looked like there. I always think it’s important to have a grounding of facts before you can have a meaningful “big picture” discussion.

Favorite moment of class discussion? I love when kids just forget about the “school of it all” and that I’m a teacher. At TGS, we’re all called by our first names, and while that was an adjustment for me coming in, there are so many moments when it helps them to forget that this experience is school. They just ask genuine questions and then, together, we pursue what they’re interested in. Those moments at the dinner table or in a car going somewhere have been my favorite. 

Text you count on to inspire conversation? I really like using visual primary sources, and generally primary sources that represent different perspectives. I like them to ask the “whys” and have them explain the differences between the sources. And visual sources are always great because they push students to observe before inferring. “That’s a car” “well how do you know?” It annoys them sometimes, but it requires them to think deeply and challenge their assumptions.

What do you nerd out about? I’m a big rewatcher and rereader, so I love nerding out on things I enjoyed from my childhood. I love revisiting Harry Potter across all these ages in my life and taking a new message or perspective every time. I do the same with music (Manchester Orchestra) and poetry (Anis Mojgani).Returning to media is something I get excited about. 

What is your wish for this world? More empathy! I think a lot of situations are actually quite simple when you look at it through the lens of “we should care about other people.” It’s strange to me that believing in that statement has been so politicized and polarizing. 

When historians recount 2020-21, what will they be especially fascinated by? What’s culturally relevant. I really got into a TikTok spiral during the pandemic. It’s so fascinating what we gravitate towards in hard times and isolation. I think historians will also be compelled by how fleeting a lot of things have been. Everything from Black Lives Matter to a TikTok dance can be a social trend that comes and goes out of public attention. What makes something culturally relevant and what does its relevance say about our social, cultural, and economic reality? What makes it stick and not stick? 

One prediction for the future of schools? I think that my prediction is a little cynical. As much as I hope for the opposite, I think schools are going to get more unequal. I come from a low income community, and my first teaching jobs have been at some of the most resourced schools in the country. At TGS, students get $2000 per year  for their personal project budgets. I love teaching in these places because I get to use these resources too and do so much with kids, but I would hope that all kids would have that. Our society isn’t headed that way, so it’s hard to see schools doing that. Compared with my own experience, what I see around me seems unreal. Students getting iPads and film-quality cameras? Daily safari drives? Living in a lodge with housekeeping and a pool? Like, what is this? I wish that all kids could have opportunities even close to this. 

Best advice given to you by a department chair or supervisor? At my last job, I was given an offer to stick around after my teaching fellowship and being young, being a woman, and being a teacher, I’ve been socialized to be selfless. When people wanted me to stay and it would be a burden to have to hire someone, I felt like I should do that. But my department chair said to me to “put yourself first.” and affirmed that travel was what I wanted, so that’s what I should do. That was really good advice. 

Educator-Influencer you count on? First place you turn for classroom advice? In terms of people I reach out to, I don’t have one specific person. I’ve been blessed to have really supportive colleagues in my very short teaching career. I feel like I can reach out to whoever’s closest to me. There are so many things that you just need another ear for and I’ve been surrounded by people who are willing to provide that. 

Better class discussions will __________ Lead to better adult conversations, more open-mindedness, and hopefully a less polarized world.