1. Why do we need paradigm change in education?

(upbeat music) - We decided that there's a lot of strength in students and if you give them the ability to design things and design things, they will take it and run. - This is the Education Crisis, what it is and how to fix it. I'm your host, Temby Duncan. This series features renowned education expert, Dr. Charles Reigluth, author of the book, Vision and Action, reinventing schools through personalized competency-based education. Together, we examine the crisis in American education, what has caused the crisis, what our schools need to be like to fix the crisis, how to successfully transform to that very different kind of school and what you can do to help your schools to transform. This series has 10 chapters and each one is split into two parts, discussion with Dr. Reigluth and conversations with educators from around the country who are successfully operating in a transformed school, as well as organizations that help schools transform. Each chapter of this series builds on the previous chapter. So for the full picture of school transformation, we suggest you listen to the chapters in order first, then revisit those chapters that most interest you. If you're listening to this series, it means that you know that our education system is broken and you wanna do something about it. The good news is that transformation is possible. Thousands of schools have already done it. Stay tuned to learn how to change our schools for the better. (upbeat music) Chapter one, why do we need paradigm change to address the crisis in education? Here to answer this question is Dr. Charles Reigluth, a prominent and celebrated voice in the field of education. Dr. Reigluth, why is this podcast important? - K to 12 education is in crisis in the United States and this is true for private schools and our best suburban schools as well as less affluent public schools. Why is this so? One big problem is insufficient learning. While our schools don't do well in international comparisons, according to the program for international student assessment, 15-year-old students in the US ranked 18th in science and 37th in math among OECD countries in 2018, yet we spent an average of $3,100 more per student that year than the average of the other OECD countries. Oh, the OECD is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but our schools are not just bad in international comparisons. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAPE for short, reported that in 2022, reading scores for fourth graders dropped by the largest margin in two decades. What's worse is that only 33% of fourth grade students were proficient in reading in 2022 and 31% of eighth graders, that's less than one third of students becoming proficient in reading. For math, it's 36% of fourth graders and 26% of eighth graders. A report from the NEKC Foundation indicated that nearly 70% of eighth graders from low income backgrounds were not proficient in math, 70%. This is really abysmal, and I'll talk about how to solve this problem. Also, data from the ACT and SAT assessments revealed that a significant percentage of high school graduates are not meeting college readiness benchmarks. For instance, ACT data indicate that only about 40% of students met all four college readiness benchmarks in recent years. English, math, reading, and science. This is really a big problem, but academic achievement isn't the only problem. The National Center for Educational Statistics reported that in the 2021 to '22 school year, about 19% of students, ages 12 to 18, reported being bullied during school. That's about one in five being bullied, and that can negatively affect those students for their entire lives. Another big problem is that students are not learning the things that are most important for them to become successful, happy adults in the digital age of artificial intelligence. This is partly due to what's taught in schools, but it's also due to the high dropout rate. In 2022, there were 2.1 million dropouts between the ages of 16 and 24, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. 2.1 million dropouts ill-prepared to succeed in an increasingly technological and complex world, and their people who are becoming angry about being left behind. Other problems with our schools include lack of motivation to learn, more disciplinary incidents, expulsions, truancy, student anxiety and depression, suicides, teacher burnout, teacher shortages, and much more. I'll talk about how to address all these problems. And I'd like to point out that China's focus on education is what has greatly increased its economic prosperity and standards of living over the past few decades. For example, China has been reported to graduate over 1 million engineering students annually, while the United States graduates around 100,000 to 150,000 engineers each year. America can't be great without a strong educational system. - Wow, clearly America's schools are indeed in crisis. - Yes, perhaps most importantly, our schools are not meeting most of our students' individual needs. Here's an analogy. Imagine if our education system was like a transportation system. Let's say the one-room schoolhouse was like a horse, flexible to meet individual needs. Then came the industrial age, where our schools became like a railroad, with everybody traveling toward the same destination at the same speed, or they got dropped off along the way. Now that we're in the digital age, we need our educational system to be like a car so every learner can go where they need to go on their own schedule and at their own pace. So the current school structure itself makes it hard to address widely differing individual needs in a classroom. It also makes it hard to give students a love of learning, to truly motivate them, and motivation is key to accelerating learning and promoting lifelong learning. It's the structure of our school systems that makes it impossible for either our slower learners or our faster learners to reach their potential. This podcast will explain why our school structure, which was designed for the industrial age, is failing our students in the digital age. Then it will describe the digital age paradigm of education that helps every child reach their potential, and it will offer suggestions about what our listeners can do to help their schools to transform, to better meet the needs of students, their parents, their communities, and even their teachers. Also, we'll talk with educators from some of the more than a thousand schools nationwide that have transformed to this learner-centered paradigm of education with great success. - I'm excited to learn about workable solutions to the current challenges in our schools, but before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit about your background and why people should listen to what you have to say? - I remember the exact day when I was 16 years old that I walked out of the school building, very frustrated with my learning experience, and decided to dedicate my life to making education more enjoyable. - What was the cause of your frustration? Was there one incident that happened, or were you just generally disheartened with your high school learning journey? - Well, that day, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The frustration had been building because I really wanted to learn, but my classes and homework were so tedious and boring that it made me hate learning, which was a very conflicted situation that I felt I should try to do something about. - So you decided to become an educator so others wouldn't experience your same frustrations. What steps did you take to get there? - When I went to Harvard, I understood that since it's a liberal arts college, I couldn't major in education, but I was able to take some graduate-level courses in education. Then, when I graduated, I understood that I needed to have some experience as a teacher in order to have credibility to change the system. So I taught high school science for three years, and I found how difficult it was to create an exciting learning experience in schools that are organized the way they were designed during the industrial age. - So what did you do next? - Well, I also realized that an advanced degree would give me even more credibility, and I sensed that computers were going to be important for making education more enjoyable. So I left the high school and went to the graduate program that was researching what I felt was the most promising use of computers at the time, Brigham Young University. - What drew you to computers as a tool for improving the educational experience? - I sensed that computers would be able to help customize learning to each student's individual needs and interests. I didn't, at that time, in the mid-1970s, realize how powerful and immersive a learning environment they would eventually be able to make. But while I was learning about computer uses in education, I realized that the field of education needed to develop more knowledge about how to make learning more effective, efficient, and enjoyable, with or without computers. So I took a position at Syracuse University. 10 years later, when I was offered a position at Indiana University, I accepted the offer because it provided more opportunity for me to work on paradigm change in education, which I had come to realize was essential to making education more enjoyable and effective. But paradigm change was relatively unknown in 1988. - Did you get a chance to conduct any field research on this new educational paradigm? - Yes, I did. As a part of my research, I served as the facilitator for a paradigm change project in the Decatur Township School District in Indianapolis. That resulted in the development of much useful knowledge about both what the new paradigm should be like and the process for transforming from the current teacher-centered industrial age paradigm to the learner-centered digital age paradigm. - But why do we have to change the whole paradigm? Is it possible to just change certain parts of the educational system? - Well, let's begin with the understanding that people learn at different rates. I think we can all agree on that. Yet in our current system, we teach a fixed amount of content in a fixed amount of time. So slower learners are forced to move on before they've learned the material and they get gaps in their knowledge that make it more difficult for them to learn related material in the future. That really condemns them to flunking out. And that was actually a good thing in the industrial age when manual labor was the predominant form of work. So we didn't need to educate many people to high levels. We needed a system that would sort out the manual laborers from our schools. - Why is that no longer appropriate? - Well, the industrial age has given way to the digital age in which knowledge work is replacing manual labor as the predominant form of work. So far more people need to be educated to higher levels. Currently, we have to rely on immigration to get enough educated workers. For example, many of our doctors and many in our tech industry are foreign born. But the digital age has also brought much more complexity into our lives. Computers and mobile phones with all their growing numbers of apps, navigating our healthcare system, navigating retirement, buying and selling a home, and the list goes on. Just look at how much more complex it is to use a TV compared to in the 1960s. Now we have cable, satellite, and internet-based reception, many apps for streaming shows like Netflix, DVRs and cloud for recording shows, and much more. In addition to knowledge work and complexity, a third issue is humanity. Our system, which was designed to sort out the slower learners, did so by creating a stressful, competitive learning environment where the major incentive to learn was grades. It was this unpleasant learning environment that spurred me at the age of 16 to dedicate my life to changing the system. And now the digital age has made such paradigm change essential to the success of our society and our children's futures. The bottom line is that we need an educational system that is focused more on learning than on sorting. And this requires that student progress be based on learning rather than on time. But how can a teacher manage a classroom where the students are learning different things at different times and rates? In our current paradigm, that's impossible, which is why the paradigm has to change. We have to change all parts of the system, the way instruction is done, the way student assessment is done, the way report cards are done, the roles of teachers and students, the ways students are motivated to learn, and the organizational structures to support all these changes. Changing all these parts of the system is what makes it paradigm change rather than piecemeal reforms within the current paradigm. Incidentally, the need for paradigm change is supported by UNESCO's Call to Rethink and Reshape Education. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Unfortunately, it's hard to think outside the box, as they say. So attempts to improve education have focused on piecemeal reforms within the industrial age paradigm. But piecemeal changes cannot meet the needs of our communities, families, and students in the digital age. It's comforting to know that there are over a thousand schools nationwide that have already transformed to the digital age paradigm with great success. But this is a drop in the bucket. Every year that a school district goes without transforming, the schools get more out of sync with the needs of their community, families, and students. And the more damage is done to their community, families, and students. This is a truly urgent national crisis. - We spoke with Dee Thomas, Jim Wortman, and Nick Ryan in the Minnesota New Country School, founded in 1994 in Henderson, Minnesota by a number of concerned individuals and educators. Dee, why did you create a school in the Learner Center paradigm? - I think when we started talking about this, we knew that there were different needs for different students. Having taught for 27 years, it was pretty apparent that not all students work in the industrial age model. We decided that there's a lot of strength in students, and if you give them the ability to design things and design things, they will take it and run. - Jim, how do you find families willing to explore such a different approach to their children's education? - So we keep finding students who are disenfranchised with that model. They find us, I shouldn't say, but we have to individualize our program for kids. - Nick, how do the students respond to a new way of learning? - Way back in the day, I went to a very traditional high school, and I think students really pick up on right away that this isn't what real life looks like. We don't have that real world versus your school world mentality here. Like, this is the real world. What you're doing here is what the rest of your life is gonna look like. You're doing projects, you're organizing yourself, you're advocating for yourself. - I think our education system should transform to meet the needs of the diversity of learners. As an education system, we should be making a series of smaller schools. We shouldn't be building schools that go beyond 200 students. We should be building personalized schools that personalize to students' needs. - Overall, how's the learner-centered paradigm working out for you? - It's worked out wonderfully. 30 years later, it replicated hundreds of times over through other organizations that have looked at our models and say, "This is a model for education." - We interviewed Nikita Katan and Kristen Godell in the Redbridge School, which was founded in San Francisco, California, in 2020 by Orly Friedman. Nikita, how did you create a school in the learner-centered paradigm? - We knew that a new model of education was necessary, and this began with our founder, Orly Friedman, who's our founder and head of school. She was exploring the question of, what is the role of education when you have tech tools, like Khan Academy, where you can really further your own learning at the snap of your fingers? And so she decided to launch a school-centered around student agency, and around the idea that really what students need is to have both the motivation as well as the foundational skills to be able to set meaningful goals for themselves and work toward those goals. Regardless of your background, the school system was not serving students. We see that there is a necessity to have schools teach students how to be self-directed learners and continue their education no matter what the world around them looks like. - That sounds so much better for students. Kristen, how is the new paradigm for teachers? - I definitely think it's better for teachers as well, not only do we and our school have more autonomy over how we teach. We are guides for them on their journey, supporting them in their passions, helping them, motivating them. - That sounds very rewarding. How is the new paradigm for parents? - I absolutely believe that this learner-centered paradigm is better for parents and for communities as well. For a few reasons, in terms of parents, I think that the biggest thing that we see a difference with in our school is that students really love coming to school. Our parents really trust us and that's based off of this warm and caring environment that we've created for our students where they feel a sense of ownership in this space. So I absolutely think it's better for parents and for the community as well. - How has the transformation process been for you? - It's definitely a difficult endeavor. It's not easy. We're solving complex problems. We're growing this model from the ground up. So especially in these early years, there's just a lot of work to be done, a lot of details and nuances to be figured out. But I can't imagine going back to a fully traditional model and a fully traditional system where one person is in charge of all the aspects of development of 30 kids or more and was often in an enclosed room with a very little space for collaboration with others to be able to talk to other like-minded educators and get to know their students as individuals and really meet their needs as individuals. - For me, I wouldn't say that my day-to-day is more difficult. I have a cohort right now of 20 kids in my autonomy level and these students might have a different reading, math, writing teacher and they're seen outside by the whole team of teachers that we have. And so it has this sense of collective support that I never had when I was teaching in a more self-contained classroom. We're all educators that really get excited about how we can do this. And so even though it's been a lot of hours of work, it's been exciting and that part hasn't felt difficult for me as an educator here. - Dr. Riegluth, you've published 13 books and seven of them have won awards for Best Book of the Year by Professional Associations. You and Dr. Jennifer Carnop wrote Vision and Action, which provides the foundation for this series and offers proven guidance to anyone interested in paradigm change. Can you say a few words about that? - Sure, there are two kinds of knowledge that school systems need to transform themselves. A vision of what the new paradigm should be like and actions to transform a school system to the vision. To use an analogy, it's like deciding on the destination for a trip and deciding on the route to get there. Both are important. So our book offers proven guidance for both the vision and the action based on practical experience and research. But it's essential to understand that communities differ greatly from one to another. Communities have different needs and different conditions. So paradigm change is not a cookie cutter process. Our book provides guidance for users to adapt both the vision and the action to their local context and needs. Our book also identifies resources that users can access to facilitate their process, including exemplary schools that have transformed that educators and parents can visit to get ideas and nonprofit organizations that can help them with both the vision and the transformation process. - This book is an essential resource for anyone who wants to change our schools for the better. Dr. Riegluth, thank you for joining us for this important conversation. - Thank you for having me. I look forward to more conversation about this important issue. - Before we end this chapter, listen closely for a special offer. Listeners of this podcast receive 20% off Dr. Riegluth's book, Vision and Action with the exclusive code VA20 when you order directly from solutiontree.com. This offer is only available for a limited time. Visit solutiontree.com to order your copy today. We're deeply grateful to everyone who supported our GoFundMe campaign, including Roberto Joseph, Fred O'Neill, Unakbeck, and Olga Moral. The campaign is called Help and America's Education Crisis Now, and the link is in the show notes. Donate today to help us keep this podcast available to all. Thanks so much to Dr. Riegluth, as well as our guests from the Minnesota New Country School, Dee Thomas, Jim Wortman, and Nick Ryan, and from the Redbridge School, Nikita Katan, and Kristin Gadel. That's it for chapter one of the Education Crisis, What It Is and How to Fix It. I'm Tembi Duncan, and remember, the future of education is in our hands. (upbeat music)