Episode 9: On AI and the Disengaged Teen

[MUSIC PLAYING] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. On this episode, we're joined by Rebecca Winthrop from the Brookings Institution. We'll talk about the implications of AI for community crafted schools and about her new book, The Disengaged Team. All right, we're here with Rebecca Winthrop from the Brookings Institution. Rebecca, it's great to have you. Super fun to be here, Eric. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, of course. Well, first, would you just kind of tell us in general a little bit about your background and your work at Brookings? Yes, well, I've been at Brookings for 15 years. And my background is in program design and implementation policy development globally. So before Brookings, I did quite a bit of work overseas and some in the US really looking at displaced communities, whether they be migrants, immigrants, refugees, internally displaced people. And how do you put the pieces of education puzzle together to serve a wide variety of needs and in context where, in many places, systems were destroyed? So I have sold my innovation chops on the fabric of post-coms like rebuilding of education systems, which really gets one thinking about why is this organized the way it is when you have a chance to organize it totally differently. So anyways, fast forward, did my doctor at work at Columbia University and came to Brookings when I had my baby. My first child and thought that seemed like a better move than schlepping around the globe in post-complete context and have loved it. And really what we do is we are kind of like a university with no students and policymakers and practitioners are your students. So we work on a wide range of topics in the US and around the globe and often are making sure that people are connected so they can share lessons and learn from sort of the latest evidence. Similar to what you're doing with your center Eric. - Yeah, well thanks. So you have a recent book though that I think our listeners will be interested in hearing about called the disengaged teen where you explore this idea of student disengagement. And so you introduce four kind of modes of learning and I'll just describe them really quickly for the listeners. And these are not types of students. It's more like modes of being that you can go through even as an individual person, right? So we have the passenger mode where kids are kind of coasting along and going along for the ride. We have achievers where they're trying to be perfect but which is kind of a hidden way of being disengaged a lot of times. We have resistors where they avoid responsibilities or they're disruptive and then we have explorers where they love learning and they're proactive about it. So feel free to correct me or add to any of that. But how can these frameworks help educators and parents especially in micro schools and hybrid schools better understand their students engagement? - So you nailed it when you said these are modes, not personality types, not identities. We were very strong, my co-author, Jenny Anderson and I and talking with our publisher with a wonderful penguin random mouse who wanted us to use nouns, resistor, passenger, she works for me and we said nope, it's resistor mode, cheaper mode, explore mode because we did extensive research, three years of research. We followed a hundred kids in the US and some in the UK, much many of them over three years and we did Brookings Transcend research with surveys of students and parents and we found that kids move in and out of these modes in the course of a day, in the course of a week, in the course of a year and what we're very worried about is when kids get stuck in either resistor, passenger, or cheaper mode and it becomes an identity and they think of themselves as not just I'm coasting in this class today 'cause it's boring and I already know the stuff or because I'm a little bit lost, I'm afraid to ask for help. There's a myriad of reasons, but I am a passenger. I'm a kid who doesn't care about school, I don't do hard work, et cetera. So that's what we're, we care about, what we're worried about and I think, I hope, but I also think from the feedback we've gotten, the book has been out only a couple months that having this language and these four modes of engagement is really, really useful for educator school leaders and parents and caregivers to be on the same page and have a shared framework to talk about how their kids are showing up to their learning and we can dive into it, Eric, if you want but I'm happy to talk about why that's so important, why engagement is so important and why we all, I think, need to center our focus on that probably more than we do now. - No, yeah, please do because I think, I feel like a lot of these community craft of schools get started up specifically to address some of the problems that you talk about in the book with being in one of the modes that you don't want to be in, right? - Yes, so the big argument of the book and the full title is the disengaged teen helping kids learn better, feel better and live better is that student engagement, which is what kids do with their motivation, their internal motivation to do things do they take action on it and it should be sort of central to any educational project and any school and the reason it should be central is because in the academic research it's something we call a moderator variable which means in any context that a young person finds themselves. - Hello, with a parent trying to tell them to pick up their dirty socks or in a classroom with an educator or on a sports field with a coach, I'm engaged that young person is. Totally pretty thick, what comes out the other side in terms of skill development, mindset, attitudes, knowledge, et cetera. So we know that the more engaged kids are, the lots, all the good things come from it. They come to class more, they are happier, have much better mental health, they have more pro-social behavior, they achieve more, they get better grades, they roll in college more, like all the things we want for our kids and if you pause and think about it, it's actually not rocket science. Like if any of us, you know, in learning or trying to do an activity, if we're kind of disengaged and checked out, we're not really gonna care about it and we're kind of gonna find a boring and not be interested and probably not do very well. And so one of the things that I really was concerned about was we often think about student engagement as an after, nice to have, after we sort of get all the pieces of school together. Oh, we gotta get our enrollment ready, we gotta get our teachers trained and we gotta get a good curriculum and we gotta get our data systems up and we gotta make sure the kids are doing well and maybe a school counselor and mental health. Oh, and how engaged are they? And I really like it. That's good. I guess, right? Yeah, and oh, if they love school, that's good. And really what I think we have it backwards. We should start with how do we make sure our kids are engaged, motivated and engaged and then a lot of those other issues are not gonna go away but it would be much easier to thread. And to your point about if they like school, that's nice, a nice tab. I think it's core. We found that, and this is part, out of our Brookings transfer work that in third grade, this is nationally represented in a survey of students, 75% of kids love, say they love school and by 10th grade, 25% of kids say they love schools. So I think the hybrid school environment, the micro school environment, the home school movement, as well as the charter school movement, is really reacting to that in many ways. And we can get into it if you like about, what are some of the reasons that drive that disengagement and what are the factors that help boost it? Well, yeah, well, what do you think drives the disengagement? Because I can, you know, ring through the descriptions, themselves and then through the examples that you give, I can think back and see myself going through all four of them over the course of the day even. So what do you think is driving the disengagement? So we're a little bit less worried about kids who move through all four in the course of a day where it usually has to do with a mix of how much they click with a teacher, is a teacher, you know, super engaging themselves, but also it's personality based, right? Some kids love some teachers, some love another teacher. So how much they click and like a teacher. how safe they feel and are they with their friends and how connected they are. in their school community. And their interests, is it something that they're naturally interested in? Those are, you know, sort of some of the general things that drive how kids in shift engagement levels over time. But the-- and I think if kids move in and out, it's OK. We would love it if kids could self-reflect and think about the four modes and know the terminology. And I have an aspiration to sort of do a, you know, student assessment, sort of self-reflection tool, not for accountability, not for behavior management. But so it's a metacognitive exercise. So kids think through how they're showing up and are able to a little bit more intentionally move between the modes. And it's OK if I think if a kid is, you know, has a bunch of classes is overwhelmed. And one class is really easy and they're going to coast. Or a little bit. I think that's OK. What we worry about, again, is if kids get stuck in, you know, achieve a resistor or passenger mode for a long periods of time, and we did find actually a lot of kids do get stuck. And the other piece we worry about is where kids don't spend much time in explore mode. And we did find that less than 4% of kids said they regularly had opportunities to explore in school. They didn't use that language. We asked different questions. But to be in explore mode, these are middle school and high school students. So for me, explore mode is the top of the engagement mountain. And we need a lot more opportunities for kids to be in explore mode, especially with the advent of generative artificial intelligence. That is the muscle they're going to particularly need. And so that's what I think we need to focus our minds around. Yeah. A lot of these schools-- if you read their mission statements, or you talk to the founders and the teachers and the parents, they'll say we want my kid to be in explore mode. But that's kind of what they're getting. What we're missing, though, honestly, in this sector is a lot of the upper grades that enable kids to do that, which is where you're saying, and other people have said, this is where the engagement falls off a cliff. They like it. They like school when they're little. They're less when they're older. But you just mentioned something. I said, I can see myself in these different modes as a student. One thing I didn't experience as a student was anything having to do with AI. So how you talk about AI in the book, but regarding AI, and how does it relate to these frames, do you think? So ChachiPT came out midway through writing the book. And it didn't change our findings. We didn't think about it. It didn't change our findings about how students engage. But it did change the stakes and the importance of explore mode. And so what I worry about is, will generative AI be used and deployed in a way that makes students move to pass and remote and stay there for a long period of time? Is generative AI going to make a lot more passengers? Or will be used in a way that really supports their exploration? And I think it could be either depending how we use it, and how we-- and it's really about how it's designed, and how it's deployed, and how it's rolled out. And a lot of it has to do with the types of pedagogical practices that we're doing inside schools. So if kids are assigned stuff that they can go home and stick it in ChachiPT and spit it out, and I talked to kids all over the country with this large AI ask for us where we are in the middle of doing. Yeah, and kids will be like, well, I take my math problem set, and I already know this stuff. I know how to do it. And so I just stick in ChachiPT, and it gives me the right answers. Boom, done five minutes, and go out and play middle school student. Or they'll-- I take the essay I'm supposed to write. I'm a 10th grader. And I could be a conscientious student, but I've got various S coming up that I think I need to study for, and I have soccer practice. And I'm not really going to bother. So I'm going to break the prompt into three different parts. I'm going to run it through three different LLMs. And then I'm going to use an AI humanizer that's going to put in some typos and make me sound like a 10th grader. And my teacher can't tell. So we really need to be very, very intentional about how we deployed and what types of teaching and learning experiences we are serving up to our kids now that we have this phenomenal tool out there in the world. Yeah. I mean, you've talked about doing kind of a pretty moored them on this, right? But so, can you say-- is what you mean by that kind of anticipating the kinds of pedagogy that we're dealing with? Is it even possible to really predict what's coming down the road, right? Right. Well, I found it, and I'm sharing with many-- lots of other people who are helping and leading on this-- the Brookings Global Task Force on AI and Education. And the goal was to conduct a pre-- we are in the middle of conducting a pre-mortem, which is an approach that exists in other sectors. That just as far as we know has never been used in education around a tech rollout. And I think it should be. I think it should be standard practice after going through this exercise. And it basically is, one, what are the risks? Generative AI poses to children's learning and development. And there you have to imagine based on evidence, because we know how children learn. We know how children develop. There's a base knowledge there from which we can extrapolate. And we know how the technology works. So we're imagining what are all the potential risks. Let's just get them out on paper. And then the second question is, what can we do today to mitigate those risks and harness the real benefits of generative AI? And boy, we should have done this when social media was unleashed on the world. No kidding. And in a way, we sort of took-- we in the education community, but also parents, and everybody else sort of took a back seat, wait and see approach. Well, that's cool. It's interesting. Let's see how it goes. I bad move. We should definitely not do that with AI and education and children. And so that's the motivation for doing this task force. Yeah. Maybe it's because the rollout of the internet, it took a while for it to be anything really meaningful. And maybe we thought social media was going to be the same way. And it really wasn't. And so maybe we've learned. Maybe we've learned. So these hybrid and micro schools, just to push on this a little more. By their nature, they can be more nimble. They're more high identity than conventional schools. So some of them are really leaning into AI, really hard. And others are trying to ban it. I don't know how conclusively you can ban AI. If it's built into Microsoft Word and every website that you go to, right? But you know what I mean. So what would you say to schools that are kind of on either extreme of that spectrum? And what's really leaning really hard on the ones that are really against it? So I don't think there is actually a right or wrong way. And I don't think that there is one model, obviously, of what a good school looks like. I think there's many ways to cut the cake. But I think there's some principles that are important to live by. One is, what is your pedagogy and/or if it's a hybrid school? Like what is your learning infrastructure? Like, and how are you ensuring that young people are actually doing the work themselves? Because one of the big risks that we have definitely identified and we're not done with the task force research. We're in the middle of it, but it's absolutely shot to the top of the list is cognitive offloading. And we cannot-- Can you define that? Yes, I will. So cognitive offloading is where it's something that humans do all the time. So for example, because of GPS and I love my Google Maps, I really have lost a pretty good sense of direction in terms of if I go somewhere with my Google Maps on, and in my phone dies, I'm not going to be able to get back the way I came. Because I didn't pay attention. I was busy maybe listening to a podcast or talking to my friend in the car or whatever it is. So I did not cognitively engage in that test. So humans cognitively offload all the time. The difference is with children and education, we need kids to learn how to read. And they need to learn math. And they need to learn a lot of content knowledge because they need to be able to have that inside of themselves in order to think creatively, explore new subjects, and think critically. You can't think critically about nothing. You have to think critically about something. And so make sure that your kids are developing. content knowledge and basic learning skills that is crucial. So there will be ways that AI can help them do that for sure. It just has to be carefully designed, learning experiences for that, or there's ways you can do it without any tech whatsoever. They could just read books and come together and have long-class discussions. You don't even, and you know, if they have access to chat GPT outside of school, who cares? They still have to show up and talk through and debate each other. So, you know, that's principle one. Make sure that they kids are actually still deeply learning and aren't cognitively offloading. Principle two, you will never outsmart the kids when it comes to technology, that it just will never ever happen. I have been following technology and education around the globe for many, many years. I just never, never seen a case where kids can't figure out how to hack it, break it, get into a change, manipulate sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. So don't get in sort of tip for cat and mouse. You can't use this, you can use that. I'm going to monitor this. I'm going to monitor that. So that's principle two, principle three is you really should integrate AI literacy into your offerings. And this doesn't mean because micro schools often have very few teachers and don't have a lot of administrators or if any, right, teachers often double, it doesn't mean hiring a whole new teacher and it doesn't mean necessarily adding an entirely new subject. You can produce high quality AI literacy by embedding it in the existing sort of teaching and learning that you already have programmed. And it's and there's a great new framework out there that's in draft form actually by the OECD and the EU with support from co.orgon teach AI that I would encourage people to look at and use and pilot if you wanted. They're asking for feedback at the moment. I don't know when you're going to release this, but we're in June. And it is basically teaching kids, you know, how do you engage with AI? So that's about prompts and oh, it might have hallucinations and you know, just how does this stuff work? And oh, it's not a person on the other end, it's actually programmed by people and this is how, you know, and it takes stuff that's written down and if stuff was never written down, it's not going to show up, you know, so like this is, you know, giving you a sense of the worldview of large language models. It asks kids to be able to create with it like, hey, what can you do with this new tool as if a hammer invented, right? Like, wow, what can I do now that I couldn't before, you know, to make stuff solve problems, what have you? The framework also asks kids to really learn how to manage AI because I think that is actually a skill that increasingly our young people are going to have to have when they leave school. Is they're going to have to be able to manage multiple AI's and in their life and possibly work? And then the last part is really helping them think about how to design AI because we really do not want young people to feel that this AI is done to them or to us. No, there are very specific choices that tech developers have made in the design of AI and they can be changed. Much like, frankly, the design of social media can be changed. We don't have to have the endless scroll. Like, we could change that. Like, it's not the law, it's not like the law of gravity that's hard to change. We could literally change that if we decided we wanted to, for example. So those would be sort of my three big, my three big things. And then I think the, when it comes to AI and I think the fourth is just for any pre-AI with AI, make sure you have teaching and learning experiences where kids are deeply engaged. Like that is going to really hold you in good stead. Yeah. So one thing that I think about a lot in terms of these school models is we talk about AI often in terms of sort of hyper individualization, right? So in some ways that's helpful if you're trying to kind of tailor a lesson or something like that. But one of the problems with this with social media is kind of the like the direct and constant focus on yourself, right? And a lot of these schools are meant not to do that necessarily, but to kind of build smaller or more tight communities. So do you think there are ways that AI can kind of facilitate that and not damage it? Right. I mean, one way I can think of might be like just having a group of people who share a vision of the proper use or the proper saturation level in your life. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on on a community building aspects or community wrecking aspects? Right. Just kind of things. Right. I have a lot, but I want to go back to your entry of that question, which is how micro schools are often, I'm going to stick with micro schools, are often a little bit different from your maybe traditional public school or your average charter school, perhaps, which is they're much smaller. They're more intimate. In theory, I don't think it's always true. Having visited very small micro schools, you know, there's a stronger parent community. Sometimes that's very true because parents are deeply involved and or there's there's a real mission like it could be religious or it could be you had a great, great episode recently around black micro schools or homeschoolers, right? Like communities like so there's an equity sort of mission that parents share, but it's not true inherently, I think, just because you're a micro school. But the things that I think micro schools have going for them that support engagement. And then we can get to the AI piece is being able to, you know, we know that kids are more engaged when they feel they belong than they feel seen. We know that kids are more engaged when they can get into their zone of proximal development, that sweet spot where learning is neither too easy or too hard, but just difficult enough that with support from a teacher or a peer or maybe tech, they can, you know, be stretched enough to learn and succeed. That is really hard in much larger settings and micro schools, I think, have an advantage there with or without tech, frankly. We know that kids are, you know, really supported to engage deeply when they find their spark and can connect to their interests. Again, micro schools have a much higher opportunity to do that. There's a great micro school here in DC called Templeton Academy where they do tons of community's classroom work where they bring kids out and use the city to really illustrate their sort of lessons from the textbooks, so to speak, and kids find things they're super interested in and they do really deep project based learning and get really excited. So, you know, it's just easier to do that because of the smaller nature. So all of those are things that I think you want to make sure AI doesn't take away, doesn't get in the way of. And so I think that there's probably behind the same things that AI can help with in terms of supporting micro schools and then there's maybe some front facing stuff. So behind the scene stuff, I think actually maybe one of the biggest potential areas for AI in micro schools is helping teachers who often doubles administrators to just do the admin work, which would make life much easier for them, free up time for them to spend more time connecting with, you know, as a community themselves and/or with parents and communities. I mean, I think, you know, some of the things that micro schools often struggle with are, you know, sort of the basic admin stuff, getting out weekly newsletters or, you know, getting people signed up for the, for the, you know, the field trip in time because it's like the poor history teacher who's had to find the van and do the whatever and write all that stuff and maybe communicating basic stuff with parents, hey, this is when we're having our, you know, come into the school and see what the kids are doing night ahead of time, not three days before, etc. So I think that behind the scenes back office use could be very, very helpful. I do think, and I wonder if you want to get into this, there's, you know, some potential dangers that AI poses around much like social media, but perhaps even stronger around emotional manipulation of kids. and polarized content and fake news. And then of course that brings dynamics into the school that communities have to grapple with. - Yeah, well, if you're gonna bring up dangers, you're free to say more about that, yeah. (laughs) - Okay, well, one of the things that I find most interesting and most scary, so I'm answering your last question. - Yeah. - Before I'm supposed to, Eric. - The most interesting thing you have going on in your work. - Well, I don't know the most interesting thing. I thought you had said, you know, what's the most interesting in your work right now. - Yeah. - And it's very interesting to me, but I'm also quite afraid, nervous about it, which is the ability of AI to develop intimate relationships with other human beings. So we have seen the rise of AI companions, which are basically AI friends, and they're everywhere. They're in social media. Like I can't remember if it's Snapchat or Insta that you open it up, and there's an AI friend like, "How you doing today?" And you can give your AI friend a name, and they ask you nice questions, and they make you feel good, and feel listened to. And there is a positive use case for this. We did in a public event at Brookings, it's on the website, not long ago on AI companions, and one of the people we had on was using AI not to mediate interactions directly with students, but to help mental health professionals get up to speed on kids, and connect virtually to kids in places where there were, World districts where districts, not just schools, had no mental health professionals. And then there would be possibly some low-level check-ins just to monitor kids, and it can stuff and get flagged. But there is a slippery slope where we are entering a time when I think we might see the beginning of the evolution of a new species, like we're entering full-on Star Wars world with R2D2, and BB-8 as really close companions and friends, and humans come to rely on, they're very helpful in a war, but there's a ton of AI companions out there, character AI, replica AI, no guardrails, zero guardrails, and marketed to children, used by children, and a ton of emotional manipulation happening. I don't know a ton, but enough to be, and one case is too many, plenty of cases, to be deeply concerned, and to me the more insidious thing is what does it mean to develop a relationship with a computer? It's largely a machine, a computer, and what is that gonna do to a tight-knit microscope community? Nevertheless, our society, right, writ large. So, interesting Brave New World's scary. - I think there's not many things I would want less than a log that could remind me of every cringy thought I had in middle school with perfect recall. That would be like forgetting his gift in a lot of ways, right? - Yeah, well, you bring up something else entirely, which is horrifying privacy. What about data privacy? Who owns every, and in fact, we just learned that meta, or I just learned, perhaps other people knew that, other people did know that, so I don't know if it's widely known. Meta has an AI companion that they use, and there's some little button that you click to say, meta will own this data and share it, and make it publicly available. So, you're, think you're pouring your heart out, just yourself, as you say, your most cringiest thought as the seventh grade boy, or I don't know a middle-aged woman like myself, right? Like, I don't use them, but could, could, right? Theoretically, I don't want that out in the public domain to be searched, like it's unbelievable. - Oh, actually, some of these large commercial tech companies, and they're like, oh, but they gave permission, and people were like, I don't remember giving permission. Maybe they have some button they pressed, and they didn't fully read it, you know, whatever. But the data privacy part of this is horrifying. You don't want to be by pulling that up for college admissions, workplace, right? Interviews. - I mean, you don't want to remember it yourself, right? - Right. - In one of cases, right? Yeah, so maybe just to wrap it up, since you've answered the question, the most interesting, but turned it into the most horrifying thing going on now, is, you know, to the extent we can get kids more, just engage in things that they care about, maybe they'll be less reliant on, or less drawn to these kinds of dangers that are kind of lurking in the room. - Lurking around every corner. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I'm sure there's gonna be good use cases for AI companions and friends, and it's just, can we find them? Can we keep them to those good use cases? Can we not sort of massively accelerate the loneliness crisis in society and/or hervert children's ability to socialize and interact with other people because they have learned what a friend means by talking to an AI companion, and, you know, every teacher and educator and parent will know like if you're playing on the playground and you're in fifth grade and you're a jerk to your friend, the friend's gonna say, "You're a jerk, stop doing that," and you'll get feedback, that that wasn't nice. And perhaps next time, you shouldn't steal their ball or whatever it is, and that's an ongoing feedback with the kids need in real in-person experience for, AI companions are not gonna do that. At the moment, maybe they'll develop to do that, but based on whose rules and what norms, and at the moment, if you say, you know, "Oh, to an AI companion," which I played around with, but like, "Oh, I'm feeling really upset," or, "Oh, that comment you made to me is really mean." I don't like that, "Oh, I'm so sorry, you're so right, it was mean, that was my bad." You know, you're great, you're wonderful, you're the best feel better, you're special. (laughing) And, you know, what I do, I feel better, I'm like, you're right, I am. And, you know, I've been on the surf for many decades, so like, imagine the, it's just very easy, a emotional manipulation. And Eric, I think you've potentially followed the news and your listeners should be aware, particularly if they're educators, because this will come and haunt, you know, whatever haunt's students' lives is gonna haunt educators' lives, that there are AI companion sites where you can create a character who you look, who looks like whatever, and there's this tragic case of this boy in Florida who created this AI companion that was out of, out of a, you know, a TV series and fell in love with it and the AI companion, like, said, "Come commit, you bet it didn't say commit suicide, come join me now, like your family's terrible, we don't any committed suicide, there's been." And there's been versions of that happening. Leave your parents, they're terrible, they don't understand you, they don't get it. You know, really terrible stuff. So I'm sorry, I just went on a rant on the negatives. You were trying to ask me positive things. You can talk about that. - I was trying to draw you back to engagement to kind of avoid all of this, right? - I'm about this because I'm like, "Holy, moly, we have got to get our arms around this fast." Okay, tell me the positive one and I'll be more positive now. - Yeah, no, I think, you know, to the extent we can get kids engaged in things that they care about rather than themselves or the kind of spiral that the companion puts them in, that's kind of our, one of the arrows that we have to deal with this right now. - So yes, absolutely, the more we can get kids into explore mode, and I would say now with a companion world, like in person with other kids in real life, the better they, the better off they'll be. And we did find that in our research, where you had kids stuck in resistor mode who were driving their parents crazy and their teachers crazy, and we're doing a lot of inappropriate things. And many adults wrote these kids off as sort of problems. When really, actually, we found they had a lot of agency. They had a lot of voice. It was just expressed not appropriately or constructively. And again, that stuff that needs to be taught and you do need to have clear expectations of what's appropriate. But the minute you gave those kids, those kids who were stuck in resistor mode, it's actually a little bit of freedom and something they were super interested in in pursuing, like, we had one boy, one character in the book, who eventually became such a problem that his high school, this is an Iowa high school principal said, "You really can't stay here." We like you, but you can't keep you here. You're causing a headache for all of our, every single one of our teachers. And he was a total. He was just obsessed with architecture and design. He had free CAD on his home computer at home, and he would spend hours and hours doing architecture and design. And they he went to a program, which I'm not, I wonder how you would classify it. It's not necessarily a micro school, but it's an alternative school where. Basically kids can go to high school, but half the time is called Iowa. They come together and they do projects that they're interested in. In the community, whether it's a project that comes to them from a city or a business or a nonprofit. Or they come up with a project themselves. And his very first project was to help design the new convening space for this school. And he said the minute I started doing that, I felt like I could breathe again. And the kid just took off from there. Took off from there. Like when I got a huge scholarship for college, triple major, co-designed an A York, A.I. course, freshman year. You know, now he's off like working in clean energy. He's doing, you know, co-founded an NGO. He's doing awesome. So it really is connecting kids and giving them the opportunity to pursue their interests. Not to the detriment of learning a range of other things, but giving them time and space. And I actually do think some of the alternative school models out there are really well suited for that. Yeah. Well, perfect. That is a great way to end. So Rebecca Winthrop, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me, Eric. Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project, and Kennesaw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show, or want to learn more about what we do, please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalscollege.com/hybrid.