In episode 9 of Social Learning Amplified, Eric Mazur chats with Julie Jungalwala. Jungalwala is the founder and executive director of the Institute for the Future of Learning, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping transform the ‘one size does not fit all’ model of education. They discuss what needs to change in K-12 education and what works when leading that change.

Eric Mazur:

Welcome to the Social Learning Amplified podcast, the podcast that brings us candid conversations with educators who are finding new ways to engage and motivate their students inside and outside the classroom. Each episode of Social Learning Amplified will give you real life examples and practical strategies you can put into practice in your own courses. Let's meet today's guest!

Welcome to Social Learning Amplified. I'm your host, Eric Mazur, and our guest on the episode today is Julie Jungalwala, founder and executive director of the Institute for the Future of Learning, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping transform the 'one size does not fit all' model of education. Thank you for joining us, Julie.

Julie Jungalwala:

Thank you for having me, Eric.

Eric Mazur:

Julie is coach and advisor to school leaders, educational institutions and foundations whose mission is to shape the future of K through 12 education. Since graduating from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she's focused on building effective learning environments that unlock the human potential and enable organizational culture to adapt and grow during times of change, particularly relevant for what we're going through right now. Julie teaches authentic leadership and strengths-based development at the Harvard Extension School and her widely acclaimed book, The Human Side of Changing Education, was published by Corwin Press in 2018. Julie, why did you start the Institute for the Future of Learning?

Julie Jungalwala:

Why did I start it? well, I tried to get a job in an organization that didn't exist, <laugh>, so I thought, I thought I better.

Eric Mazur:

You created your own.

Julie Jungalwala:

I created my own, yes. I I don't have a traditional K through 12 background, Eric. I've been working for 20 four-ish years at this point in the fields of adult development and large scale organizational change. And after about 10 years of doing that work, this theme started to come up for me, which was that so much of what we were helping adults do in those workshops and the one-on-one coaching and the consulting, was essentially to unlearn what they learned through a standardized system of education. So that brought me back to K through 12. And my initial research showed that not a great deal had changed since I had left high school many, many, many years prior. So I decided I want to shift gears a little bit and take what I know with regards to how human beings learn and grow and change, and bring that to K through 12. But I found that an organization didn't exist where I could bring those skills and I decided to start a nonprofit that would enable me to do that. So that was back in 2011, I think.

Eric Mazur:

And much has happened since 2011. So, mm-hmm. <affirmative>, what about the current activities of the institute?

Julie Jungalwala:

So you mentioned a book. I published a book called The Human Side of Changing Education in 2018, and it's been interesting to reflect just as you said that I thought, oh, yes, that was pre Covid <laugh>, and here we are at the start of the 2020s, and much has changed in the two short years so far. And I've been working on a new project called Three Truths for the Future of Education, and it basically came out of just thinking through the pandemic. Everything was on pause for some time, and then we shifted online. And I felt when I wrote the human side of changing education, it was very invitational. So for those leaders who have that vision here are some tools and resources and frameworks that might help you. And through Covid, I just became less invitational and maybe more cranky thinking, okay, this has to fundamentally change. School has been brought inside people's houses, their kitchen tables, their living rooms, bedrooms, and we've got a firsthand look at what's working and what's not, and how one site does not fit all. So the Three Truths framework is one that I'm getting out there to the masses and will share it to anybody who will listen.

Eric Mazur:

Very interesting. Now, going back to your currently the book that is currently out the Human Side of Changing Education. When you wrote it, you could, of course, not have predicted what happened in 2020. So from the perspective of then 2018, what needed to change in K through 12 education?

Julie Jungalwala:

The biggest change that I thought back then needed to change, and it still is as true as ever, and I know you're a card carrying member of this crew, is assessment. As long as we have a standardized system of education that we have passing these tests to get to quotes the next level, like SAT and so forth, we're not going to see the kind of change that we want to see. I remember working with the school one time, they had a really ambitious change project. They were completely overhauling their curriculum pedagogy. They were working on interdisciplinary deep inquiry-based, project-based learning approach to their learning. And they were about a year and a half into it. And we were having these focus groups, and they had students as part of the focus groups, and the whole question of assessment came up, and they really wanted to prioritize assessing such things as critical thinking and creativity, problem solving and so forth. And, and I'll never forget one of the students said, yeah, but those don't matter as much. And thankfully, the lead at the table said stop, please say more <laugh>. And the student said, well, the grades are on the first page, and the commentary and those skills on the second, what matters are the grades. That's just, you know, supplemental information. And I'll never forget, the school leadership just set back and went, wow, this is the whole point of it. And you're absolutely right. You know, small major things like real estate matter, and it's it still is the case that it's the grades. Did you get the A? Or did you not?

Eric Mazur:

Somewhere I have this quote written down. I will probably mangle the quote is something like, you know, "some people rather die than think, in fact they do" <laugh>. I forgot to who it was attributed, but it seems to be very true. Now assessment is a talk that's come up through in just about every podcast, and I think that the pandemic and the teaching at home sort of put assessment a little bit more front on the radar of many educators because the old approach to assessment was suddenly broken. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Do you find that there's any progress in actually thinking about more authentic approaches to assessing students?

Julie Jungalwala:

Yes. There is promising work not only in this country, but across the world. So there's an organization, for example called Rethinking Assessment. They're based out of the UK and the backdrop here, I mean, this organization existed pre-Covid but given all of the conversation around learning loss, I think we need to start that conversation with, okay, well, what, what do we mean by learning loss? Is it defined by a test? I think back to whenever I was in high school, we would all cram for the test. So I would cram for my physics exam and maybe get to a B. And if I were to take that same exam three months, I would've later, I would've probably gotten an E or an F. You know, it, it's all about, you know, very short term non-durable learning.

But the folks from Rethinking Assessment, there's this line on their website that I read just a few weeks ago actually, that really made me sit back where they said the whole concept of raising standards is obsolete. When in this country, the UK, the GCSE system is designed so that one third of students will fail. And that was wow, blinding flatly obvious that I hadn't put together in my own head before. And they're working on action learning projects related to assessment and drafting different models for digital learning portfolios. There's also the Mastery Transcript Consortium here in the us started out of the Independent School Network. But they're explicit that they want to completely overhaul the high school experience in public schools as well. And they've got a number of public schools signed up for their work. And when you see them, when you see a copy of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, again, it's a digital portfolio, and you compare that to a very standard high school transcript. You know, it, it's night and day as a parent, just what you have insight into as a student, as a teacher, and so forth. It's just so much. You see the child - you just don't see grade. You see the child in all of their brilliance and uniqueness.

Eric Mazur:

I visited one of the founding members of the Mastery Transfer Consortium, the Nueva School in Hillsboro, California. And I was so incredibly impressed with the transformation that the Mastery Transcript brought onto the students and how they were focused on learning and reflecting on their learning and enriching themselves rather than jumping through hoops to please the teachers. It's absolutely amazing. Now, your work focuses on change and the central premise of your book, the Human Side of Changing Education, is that asking schools to change really requires human beings to change, and we know how hard it is to change human beings. Is that the reason that change is so incredibly difficult in education and that many change initiatives fail?

Julie Jungalwala:

It's certainly part of it. I would say there are a lot of external scaffold, if you will, that that keeps a centuries plus old system upright. I was trying to think when I was writing the book of any other institution that the vast majority of the world's population has gone through for a decade plus <laugh>, and I couldn't think of one, but the majority of us have gone through a standardized system of education. Therefore, our mental models are pretty strong on what school is and what isn't. That's a significant factor. The assessment structure keeps a lot in place. So if, again, if you're trying to implement something like high quality project-based learning, the assessment structure too often is the tail, the wags, the dog, as it were. And then the funding structure of how schools are funded. That's another unique aspect, and that keeps a lot of disparity pretty solid in the system. There are a lot of factors, but the one that gets ignored most often and that I think has the biggest potential to not be the case, is if we were to focus on the adults that and their opportunity to change behavior, their opportunity to grow, learn, and thrive as they lead and implement this change. I think a lot of change initiatives don't go as deep there as they could.

"So never underestimate the power of doing the work that's in your heart to do, because that's your work to do, and also how inspirational that is for other people."

Eric Mazur:

Right. And then an additional problem, I guess, in case of K - 12 education is that there is a lot of external accountability that prevents change.

Julie Jungalwala:

Yes. Yes.

Eric Mazur:

How do you, how do you propose tackling that issue?

Julie Jungalwala:

So the external accountability there is no silver bullet. If there was one, somebody smarter than me, <laugh>, and that's not hard, would've found that and come up with that by now. And I remember when I started to write the book, my vision for the book was that I would, I would share how we changed the system, and I realized after a dark night at the Eagle that nobody's come up with that yet, <laugh>, if we had it, it would've changed by now. So why I kept coming back to, Eric, was the individual's capacity to act. So there will be people out there, again, smarter than me, who can see within this, within their own purview, okay, if this changes, this could have a significant impact, and it will be their role, and it will be their their mission to do that.

So as I got deeper and deeper into the book, there's this sort of lynch point, if you will, lynchpin in the middle of the book where I said, there's no single person, policy, procedure, app, or entity that's going to precipitate the kind of change that we want. However, if every single person who has a vision for what they want to see, if they were to start taking a single baby step towards that, we would unleash a massive force for change. And I've seen the power of that. So whenever I share with a group, for example, how you teach physics and the, the AB-comparisons that you do in your class, people all of a sudden just see, just a little tweak that might be possible in their own classroom. I don't need a policy change here. I don't need leadership to tell me what to do or not what not to do. That is a shift that I can make in my own classroom. So never underestimate the power of doing the work that's in your heart to do, because that's your work to do, and also how inspirational that is for other people.

Eric Mazur:

I see. You mentioned leadership and you coach many, many leaders. What do you tell leaders about change? What is it that works when leading change?

Julie Jungalwala:

So what, particularly within schools, again, there's no silver bullet but there are a number of factors that if they're in place, your change stands a greater chance of success. So write down to brass tags. Do you have a shared vision of what the change is? And by shared vision, I mean the board, the community, parents, students, teachers, and administrators, is that shared? Is that understood? Is that in plain English? Are we agreed that this is important and this is what matters? Secondly are you bringing teams of people together to implement this change? Or are you depending on other people from outside community? This, it's really about unleashing the talent within and outside of school buildings to help, to help make it be so, and the extent to which you can really start to address assessment will make a significant difference.

There was a school superintendent, I believe he was in Virginia, and he gathered his school community and they identified the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind that would, that they really wanted their kids to graduate with. And he had a conversation with his school board to say, the standardized test scores will likely take a hit as we implement this. Are you okay with that? And they said, yes. So it's having those real conversations honest conversations and committing to the work and understanding that for the most part, this kind of change takes anywhere between three to five years in order for it to really stick and to go beyond the life or the tenure as it were of the leader. I do think as a result of Covid, that there is an accelerant that we, it's extraordinary the amount of change that schools have gone through in the past two years. If you'd said, for example, that Harvard would shift to going virtual within a matter of weeks, you know, many folks sort of said, oh, you know, that's not possible. But it happened and it happened in many universities and many schools. So there's a lot more that's possible. And we've got proof of that over the past couple of years.

Eric Mazur:

So as we're wrapping up here, I I have two more short questions. What are some of the most promising educational ideas you are seeing and that you wish every listener, every reader of your book knew? What are these?

Julie Jungalwala:

I am harping on this, but assessment. So check out the Rethinking Assessment folks. Check out Knowledge Works. They are bringing together a repository of great work that's happening across many states across the country. Just reading about what other people are doing, check out the Mastery Transcript Consortium. So that's one. And secondly Kelly Young and her work through Education Reimagined where they're building learning ecosystems where we need to start thinking about just the world of possibility including schools. So there will be a point in time when education is not the purview, the sole purview of schools. So the work that Kelly's leading with designing learning ecosystems locally, I think has tremendous promise, and it's a lot of agency in that work. So I encourage folks to check out educationreimagined.org.

Eric Mazur:

That's wonderful. Final question. We've talked a lot about how education requires in the sense a chain of events from assessment to, you know, curriculum, learning spaces, you name it. Among our listeners, we have people who are in front of schools in K through 12, in higher education. We have educational leadership you know, deans of higher education, superintendents of school district. To each of those, the teachers and the leaders, what would be one thing they should be doing and they should be doing now to move the needle in the right direction that they, they don't have to wait for others to implement a change. What, what would your recommendation be?

Julie Jungalwala:

That's a great question. <laugh> <affirmative>, so I recognize that I'm really biased here, but I'm gonna say it anyway, to show up as themselves, as a human being. There is a lot of, you know, and I, and I understand it and I can be dangerous work being a leader and, and being vulnerable. But the more you can show up and say, this is the work that's in my heart to do, this is why it matters, and this is why I care. And connect that with the hopes and the vision of the people who work with you and for you, then you start to unleash human capacity at scale. The good news and the bad news is that it starts with you as a leader and bringing more of your humanity and your, and and yourself to the work.

Eric Mazur:

And, and what do you just tell the teacher who doesn't wanna wait for the leader to step up to the plate and, and change that way?

Julie Jungalwala:

The same thing.

Eric Mazur:

The same thing?

Julie Jungalwala:

Yeah. There's a saying that we teach who we are, and every, I would say, every teacher without exception that I've met, they're mission-driven people. and the reality of this creaking bureaucracy that we're in can strip that away. This big, open, hope-filled heart can sometimes become clo closed over. So as a teacher, I would say your job is to keep following that vision and to not your, not let your heart close over in the work.

Eric Mazur:

I think that's wonderful. You, you actually gave me a lot to think about for my own teaching and in my own role as as academic dean. Thank you all for listening and thank you to our guest, Julie Jungalwala.

Julie Jungalwala:

Thank you so much for having me, Eric. Thank you.

Eric Mazur:

If you're interested in Julie's book, just Google the Human Side of Changing Education. It will set you on a path to lead educational change with clarity and and determination. You can find our podcast and more on perusall.com/SocialLearningAmplified, all in one word. Subscribe to join us, and I hope to have you in the audience again on our next episode. Thank you very much.

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