Host Justin Reich and Jal Mehta from the Harvard Graduate School of Education continue our Subtraction in Action series with Leidy Klotz, Professor of Engineering at the University of Virginia, and the author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Together they discuss Leidy’s book, his research and inspirations, as well as how these ideas can better serve education.
Host Justin Reich and Jal Mehta from the Harvard Graduate School of Education continue our Subtraction in Action series with Leidy Klotz, Professor of Engineering at the University of Virginia, and the author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Together they discuss Leidy’s book, his research and inspirations, as well as how these ideas can better serve education.
Resources and Links
Learn more about the untapped potential of subtraction in Leidy Klotz’s book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less
Check out Jal Mehta’s Book In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School
Subscribe to Jal’s podcast Free Range Humans
Watch our film We Have to Do Something Different
Check out Justin Reich’s book Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education
Transcript
https://teachlabpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/leidy-klotz/transcript
Produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley
Recorded and mixed by Garrett Beazley
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Justin Reich: From the MIT Studios of the Teaching Systems Lab, this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching. I'm Justin Reich. I'm here with my good colleague, Jal Mehta, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education for the second episode in our series on Subtraction in Action.
Jal is the author of the terrific Harvard University Press book In Search of Deeper Learning. And he and I together have been trying to help schools think about moving forward in a climate where people keep asking them to add and add and add.
How could they do everything they've been doing before plus add more tutoring and have after school and have new programs and address conflict and violence in schools and all these other things we want them to do.
They're not going to be able to solve the most important challenges they have if we can't figure out things that we can take away from schools, that we can pull off of the plates of teachers and students and families and school communities so they can focus on the most important things.
If you haven't listened to our first episode on Subtraction in Action, be sure to check it out and we're super excited because our guest today is, Leidy Klotz, who's a Professor at the University of Virginia, my alma mater in the School of Engineering and he's the author of a fabulous book called Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.
And we were so excited to have Leidy here because he's done some really incredible psychological research, some experimentation on why it is that when human beings encounter design problems, they are more likely to lean into solutions that involve adding or changing rather than taking things away. And that's what we want to try to dig into today. So Jal and Leidy, thanks so much for joining us.
Leidy Klotz: Thanks Justin. It's great to be here.
Jal Mehta: Yeah. Justin, great to see you again. And Leidy, great to be with you.
Justin Reich: Leidy, you start your book with what was, to me, a really surprising story about the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Can you tell us a little bit about what the Embarcadero looked like in the 1980s and why it's so much better now?
Leidy Klotz: Yeah. It was surprising to me too, so I'm glad it was surprising to you. It makes me feel less bad as a civil engineer by training.
So the Embarcadero in San Francisco, Embarcadero I believe means something akin to waterfront and it's this beautiful waterfront walkway that is in San Francisco now. And it's one of the most visited places in the world.
Justin Reich: It's a big tourist area. The trams go there. There's all kinds of stores. You can see the sea lions jump up on the wall there. It's just a beautiful urban coastal environment.
Leidy Klotz: Exactly. Way to paint the picture. My son, he got to a, I'll never forget, he had a balloon monkey made for him on the waterfront there. And I mean, it's a big carnival and it takes advantage of this natural beauty that's there. And I remember visiting and then thinking, oh, this can't be the same place. Can it?
So the Embarcadero used to be covered by a double-decker freeway basically since the 1950s. And planners had long recognized that, "Hey, maybe the city would be better if we got rid of this highway," but the people just weren't into it until an earthquake happened.
And this was one of the most expensive earthquakes in history when it happened in 1989. And the earthquake kind of changed the calculus for how people thought about this double-decker highway. Billions of dollars worth of damage, 63 people died. A lot of the people who died died in the collapse of a double-decker highway that looked a lot like the Embarcadero.
So this earthquake kind of changed the calculus for subtracting in this case it was number one, it showed people the risk of having a double-decker concrete highway in a earthquake zone. Number two, it damaged the Embarcadero enough that people had to live without it for a little while.
And they saw that, "Look, life goes on in the city, we find ways to get around and it turns out there's some good things. It doesn't necessarily totally ruin traffic everywhere in the city." And so with the help of the earthquake, the planners were able to kind of ram through this change which was we're going to subtract this double-decker freeway from the waterfront.
And now that that's been done, there's absolutely no argument that it was the right thing to do for San Francisco. So it's a cool example I think because it shows the power of subtraction and these on a really large scale, but also illustrates some of the challenges of following through with subtraction even after we think about it.
Justin Reich: When I read that story in the days after COVID-19, it was pretty easy for me to make an allegory to schools. Our schools are covered in double-decker freeways, things that just seem totally impossible to move, that are vital to the system, that have been there for decades.
And COVID-19 was like an earthquake that shook a whole bunch of these things and we said, "Oh, maybe we don't need that." And really trying to think about what are the double-decker freeways in our schools that if we could just pull them out and get rid of them, there'd be some new possibility there, there would be some new waterfront that we could build. So that story was really helpful for me.
Leidy Klotz: Yeah. I love that you're kind of using the concrete literally example and then extending it to schools, because I think that's a really powerful way of thinking about it.
Jal Mehta: Leidy, just tell us a little bit about what sparked your interest in subtraction? As a kid, were you a very sort of neat spare Barry condo kind of kid? Did you have a room with not much stuff in it? How did you get excited about this idea?
Leidy Klotz: I haven't gone all the way back. That's interesting question. I am thinking, I never liked to have a lot of stuff. I was a dude did kind of enjoy a spartan existence. So I guess there's a little bit of a personal bit to it there. But I mean, my professional background, I think of myself as studying how people design.
And I've always been interested in engineering and architecture and big structures that we design, but then realizing through professional experience, through education, through seeing what my students do when they go out into the world, that so much of what gets created depends on the thought processes that are going on in people's heads.
So this thing that we think of is inherently physical, actually is totally influenced by the thinking that happens. And so that's where I kind of started to merge behavioral science and design as behavioral science being another lens through which we could look at design.
And I define design very broadly. It's changing something from how it is to how we want it to be. And so of course bridges and highways and things like that fall into the category, but also schools or even your workday, you're designing all the time and all of us are designing.
And then I guess the other big piece here was a big social issue that I was always keyed into was climate change and environmental issues. My dad's a retired biology professor and my mom went to college in Vermont in the '70s.
So we grew up with a strong environmental ethic in our family. And I think we knew as kids that humans were totally dependent on a thriving environment, for example. And so that's something that I've always been trying to have a positive impact on through my work.
And realizing that a lot of these, so subtracting that freeway, for example, that's a civil engineering design that is also in addition to creating this beautiful space, is also better for society because it makes driving less convenient.
And so I saw these examples where, okay, here are the designs that are good for sustainability and there's this kind of common thread in them and then started to think about, okay, what is it that gets us to that thread?
Jal Mehta: And then you got interested in subtraction across a whole wide range of different domains. And one of the examples in your book that really struck me and that I've shared with students and has resonated with them is this experiment that you did with LEGOs. So could you tell us a little bit about that?
Leidy Klotz: Yeah, that's great. Well, I mean, I'd always been interested in less in the spartan existence, but I never honed in on subtraction, which is a really key distinction here because less is an end state, less is a noun and subtract is a verb. This is how you get there in a lot of cases.
Certainly there's a form of less that you can get to just by not doing anything, but most of the less that you're talking about is like, okay, we've got something and now we want to get to the less beyond that.
And so what helped me really think about subtracting as the thing that I wanted to study and was worth writing a book about, first, just a really simple thing. I was playing with LEGOs with my son and he was three at the time and we were building a bridge and the bridge wasn't level and I reached around behind me to add and to grab a block and I was going to add it to the shorter column of the bridge.
And by the time I had turned back around, he had removed it from the longer column of the bridge. And we'd since done a lot more serious studies and that was not one of the studies that went into the paper, that was in nature.
So it was a good paper that the cognitive process that we all have is very similar to what my cognitive process was in that moment which is like, okay, we're trying to make something better. We're designing. We're trying to change something from how it is we want it to be in this case make a level bridge.
And why is it that my first thought was, hey, what can I add to this thing? And if my son hadn't been there and reminded me of the subtractive option, I would've added and then just moved on without even considering whether subtraction might also be an option.
And so it led us down this path through 18 different studies that were in the paper showing that people follow this thinking process and that they systematically overlook subtraction even when it's a better option.
Jal Mehta: And why do you think that is? You know might imagine that if you were a hunter-gatherer and there were two huts and you wanted to make them symmetrical, it would be easier to take something off of one hut than put something on the other hut. But it seems like your research is suggesting that your son is the outlier and that you are the norm in that LEGO story. So why do you think that is?
Leidy Klotz: Definitely. And my son is a horrible adder before he gets... He'll be so impressed that he's talking to a Harvard and MIT students, but he's repetitive. He plays a lot of LEGOs and this was the case where he thought about subtraction. So yes, he was the outlier there.
And I mean, to the question about reasons, let me describe just one of the experiments and then I'll go into some of the reasons, because I think the experiment kind of illustrates how hardwired this is and that's the first reason. And so we tried this with other in controlled experiments with LEGOs, with itineraries, with writing and people always added.
And the criticism with any single experiment like that could be, well, that's just what people do when they're playing with LEGOs, right? This doesn't necessarily extend to how they solve problems in general, but we came up with this really cool grid task and we display grids on a computer screen and basically the pattern was symmetrical from left to and from top to bottom.
So you have four quadrants except for the only thing that wasn't symmetric was there be extraneous marks in one of the quarters corners. And we had a whole bunch of patterns that kind of followed that same basic principle and we'd say, "Okay, make this symmetrical from left to and top to bottom and as fewer clicks as possible."
And when people looked at that, they would add to all three corners more often than they would subtract. And so it showed that number one, this isn't something that's dependent on the context, it's not something that we only do with LEGOs. It also showed that we do it to our detriment.
So the task was to do this in as fewer clicks as possible. And we even offered incentives on some of our tasks where they would get money if they did it right. And then we would ask people what the right way to do it was after they figured out the right answer.
And so this was showing that people were overlooking subtraction to their detriment. So again, the first reason is just we think about things in sequence. We can't consider all the possible options simultaneously. And in this case, it seems like we tend to think about what we can add first and that's not necessarily a problem.
But the problem is that we think about what we can add, problems solved in a good enough way and we don't consider the other options. So the first reason here is that we don't even think about subtraction and it's kind of hardwired in.
Justin Reich: Why are human beings like this?
Leidy Klotz: Well, and I mean, the short answer is we don't know. I mean, I devote three chapters of the book to exploring there are, as you know, lots of reasons why we do have any of these kind of decision-making shortcuts and-
Justin Reich: The behavior is observable and the underlying rationale is mysterious.
Leidy Klotz: Is mysterious. But I mean, observing the behavior does allow you to tie into what we know from other sciences and kind of analyze this new finding through those lenses. And so I think it is useful also because it, not just from a scientific standpoint, but it also suggests ways that we can overcome this.
Because that's the other hopeful thing. This is just the default thinking process. It's not like we can't override it. So if you think about reasons for behavior, there's kind of biological or evolutionary reasons. So behaviors that we've evolved to prefer or thinking processes that we've evolved to use because they've helped us pass down our genes.
And so adding is good when it comes to storing food, for example. If you store food, you and your family or the people you're with are more likely to survive through scarce times. So stockpiling exquisiteness, this is something that kind of explains some of the hoarding disorders even that you see today.
So there's that part that's very biological. A more surprising one that's biological, for me at least, is this desire to display competence. And I think this very much applies in education as I've observed in many way. It's like there's a biological desire to show that we can effectively interact with the world.
And the story I use in the book is bowerbirds, the male bowerbirds build these ceremonial nests and then the female bowerbirds go look at the nest to decide which male they want meet with. And then the female bowerbird goes and builds a nest to shelter the young. So the whole point of the male built nest is just to show that the male has competence, they can effectively interact with the world.
And if we're honest with ourselves, we all share that. And there's since been even Albert Bandura, famous psychologist, extended this notion of competence to task completion too. So you show competence when you attend a meeting or when you think about another topic that you add to a course that you're now going to teach to your students.
And sure it's competence to also remove things from your course, but there's no evidence of it. So this critical thing of showing other people that you're competent and displaying this ability to effectively interact with the world isn't there when you subtract and it is when you add.
So there's some biological forces and I think that the cultural forces, I think for a long time it's just adding has spent better. If you think about, from tribes of hunter-gatherers to where we are today and the way to make progress is when there's no books, is to add books. When there's no cities, it's to add buildings.
And when there's no roads, it's to add roads. And so a lot of these kind of opportunities to subtract that we have today weren't really there throughout history. And so that could be part of the explanation too. And I mean, that extends to organizations and bureaucracies and education as well.
When there's no schools, it's pretty much all of anything you can do to add education is good. And it's only when the system's been going for a while that the pruning starts to be a significant way to make improvements. And then I guess I'll just finish with the last kind of broad category of reasons is these economic and social forces.
And I think what's important with our research and with understanding the biological and cultural forces is that people will often jump right to the like, "Oh, this is capitalism's fault."
And it's like, yeah, I mean, some elements of capitalism like the accumulation of capital piece is pretty additive, but capitalism also has subtractive parts. I mean, the whole creative, is it creative destruction? So basically if a business isn't thriving, that's capitalism's way of pruning out things just the same way that nature evolves.
So I think it's an oversimplified view to just say, okay, this is capitalism's fault that we're just adding things and can't subtract them, or this is just big government's fault that we're adding things and can't subtract them because the roots of it are much deeper than that.
It's almost more symptom than cause these kind of modern economic and social forces pulling us in the direction of adding.
Justin Reich: So we have deep inside us this urge to add, but as you say, we can override that urge, but it requires some more kind of deliberate thinking to be subtractive. So you've got these four principles of subtraction. Help us think about what these four principles are.
Leidy Klotz: All right. So the first step is to subtract before we improve. And so this refers to basically our mental models of the system that we're trying to improve.
And I think it's really easy to get caught up in all of the complexity and I think it's important to understand the complexity, but before we start to improve, we need to strip away some of that complexity so that we are actually focused on the most critical points.
I'm actually going to be teaching this in my class this evening. I mean, I think it's not as if there are an infinite number of change makers who want to improve education. So the ones who do it behooves us to try to figure out where our efforts can have the greatest impact.
And that requires subtracting, it requires subtracting some of this accurate detail about the situation to focus on the most important elements of the situation. Then the second one is to make subtracting first. And that seems really obvious and blunt, but it's a surefire way to make sure you don't overlook subtraction.
So we've seen that part of the problem is that we don't think of it if you're putting in place rules. And rules could be broadly defined. So a rule could be A, every time I'm doing my to-do list or my lesson planning, I'm going to force myself to think about subtraction possibilities.
And could also be even more blunt where it's like if I'm doing a lesson plan and I put two things in, I have to take two things out. And you could imagine that all the way up to scale from your individual teaching to the overall curricular planning to programmatic things. And so you make subtraction first, you avoid this tendency to overlook it.
You also with these rules help people see that you avoid that competence issue, right? Because now you've shifted competence from, okay, adding is the only way to display competence to now subtracting is required and so people are expecting it and it's easier to see it and subtracting can be a way to display competence.
And then the other benefit of subtracting first is you don't end up trying to spin your wheels improving something that isn't optimized in the first place.
So if your goal is to invest money in infrastructure to improve San Francisco, it makes sense to get rid of the useless infrastructure before you start investing that new money because the system with the redundant things subtracted is going to be a different system than if you leave everything in place.
So if you try to improve something before you've subtracted from it, you could just be putting bandaids on things instead of addressing the fundamental issues. And then the next step, which is really important is to persist to noticeable less. So we've talked about some of the basic disadvantages that subtraction faces.
One being this, it doesn't show competence as obviously. If I clean one thing up from my living room, nobody's even going to notice that that happened. But if you persist to noticeable less, this is continuing to clean and prune and subtract things so that it's undeniable that you've stripped away on and that you've been creative in your subtracting efforts.
So if I totally cleaned up my living room, then my wife would notice when she came home and the kids might even notice and not mess it up some more. And it's the same principle when you think about some of the creative things that you've seen. I mean, nobody really notices if somebody's doing a good job of grading less and giving more student feedback.
But this move towards ungrading, for example, and I'm not saying that works in every situation, but that's a really noticeable subtraction. And the principle there is like, "Hey, I'm not going to grade anything because that's sending the wrong signals to you all and I'm still going to give you all this feedback." And nobody can mistake that noticeable less for a lack of competence.
The other way that it really helps is the systematic disadvantage that subtraction has of not being visible. So we think of things and one of the reasons we think of things is because we're surrounded by them in the world and subtraction by definition have been removed from the world.
But if you have noticeable less, then people will notice the subtraction when they're walking around. And it's a reminder that subtracting is an option for future improvements. And the last one is to remember that you can reuse your subtraction. So we were both in Boston, I'll go to a donut example.
And so donut holes, right? The history of donut holes, it's fun. Takes a really long time for people to realize that the fried dough will taste better if you remove the middle because it cooks more evenly and then you can spread more stuff on it like cinnamon, sugar or whatever.
And okay, after you've subtracted, what do you have? You have a donut plus you have this hole. So we've talked about some of these systematic disadvantages, but a systematic advantage of subtraction is that it leaves you with the new improved situation plus something left over.
I mean, in the case of me playing with LEGOs with my son, it was an extra LEGO block. In the case of the donut, it's a donut hole that then can be another stream of income. And so I think don't forget to enjoy that last part of the process here and look for ways that you can reuse your subtraction.
Jal Mehta: So it occurs to me that a big part of professional work is subtraction and that there are whole roles like gardeners, I mean, gardeners plant, but a lot of what they do is prune. House stagers mostly take things out of your house. Movie editors mostly cut and cut and cut and cut.
Strunk and White, Kill Your Darlings. Editors of any sort are always just cutting and cutting and cutting. When I started to going to conferences, I would notice that graduate students, they'd have 15 minutes to present and they'd hit minute 14 and they'd still be in their literature review.
Leidy Klotz: Some professors too.
Jal Mehta: Yeah, some professors too. And eventually you kind of learned that a part of being a professional is that you've got a cut, that is part of your responsibility. So I guess I wondered if you'd ever sort of noticed the range of subtraction professionals that exist or the role of subtraction and professional work and what that makes you think.
Leidy Klotz: I think it's great because there's two different things going on there. One is that in some cases the whole profession is devoted to subtraction because the other people can't do it. And so the editors help Kill Your Darlings and obviously editors do more than just that, but it is hard to get rid of your own work.
It's hard to look at your own work with a fresh set of eyes. And so one of the essential roles that editors play is to say, "Yeah. That's good, buddy, but let's save it for the next book." And of course never sees the light of day anywhere.
So I think there are these professions that entirely focus on subtraction and then, yeah, that's interesting about it being... I certainly see, yeah, design being this kind of unifying thing that the professions do and people who get good at any profession have figured out how to subtract in it.
Jal Mehta: The point about editors is really interesting. There is this sort of interesting, like when you've created something, it's hard to take it away even if you know that overall the better product would be created if some were taken away, it's still very difficult to do yourself. That is an interesting dynamic.
Leidy Klotz: And I will say that, I mean, we had after the book, so many people have kind of reached out on behalf of their profession saying, "Oh no, we're good at this. We're coders," for example.
They're like, "We do this all day, try to simplify code." And I have no doubt that they're good at it in their profession. I'm curious whether it kind of seeps over into other elements of their lives, but to be tested.
Justin Reich: So Leidy, one feature of schools is that everything feels essential. If you go to a math teacher and say like, "Well, what are the parts of the geometry curriculum that we just stop teaching?"
That's a really hard question for people. And I brought up math, but I think you could say the same thing if you go to English teachers and say, "Which of these books do you not need to read this year?"
You get a history teachers and say, "Which of the ancient empires can we just kind of skip?" And that's a hard question for people. And then you ask about all the other components of school, which rules can we get rid of? Well, these are really important for this reason. Or which routines or which things.
They're sort of a stakeholder for everything in schools. That's why it's there. I wonder if you have thoughts or suggestions when people are facing kind of complex and trenched systems, what are some ways of thinking about subtraction in those complex entrenched systems?
Leidy Klotz: Well, first I just acknowledge I think you're exactly right. It becomes harder the more you care about the thing. So one of the last places that I've been able to apply this mindset is in my parenting because I care so much about it. And when it's important, in say, removing Moby Dick from the curriculum.
That's important and that's an important decision, it becomes even harder to subtract. And one reason for that is because this is not my research, but it's some of the most robust science research that shows that we're basically twice as disappointed to lose something as we are to gain something of the same value.
And so those losses loom large. And if we're focused on the loss of geometry or the loss of whatever empire you decided to delete, that's going to carry additional weight. So for this, I think there's an analogy to be made actually to Marie Kondo.
And what she does is she encourages people, she doesn't have people focus on the specific items that they're getting rid of. She's talking about the joy that will be sparked in the end state. And she really helps people visualize the end destination. That's one of the first steps in her process.
So it's like, okay, visualize this space that's been decluttered and then that's the thing that you're focused on and that's the gain that you're focused on. And then these kind of subtraction are a path to getting there.
And so going back to the school example, and we need to do this in our curriculum, so I'll use our department as an example. It's like, okay, yeah, it's going to be hard to remove some of these traditional civil engineering courses to talk more about sustainability engineering, but what's the future vision?
And so staying focused on, okay, this is what it's going to look like when it's all done. And look, this is definitely going to be a preferred state and it is true that we're going to have to subtract some things to get there. Does that make sense?
Justin Reich: Yeah. I mean, and it sounds like actually that doing subtraction in schools and complex systems is going to be kind of a two part process. So you're going to say, "Well, what are some things that we think we can get rid of?" And actually, I think in education we're in a unique moment to identify some things that we can get rid of.
I was talking with some assistant principals who said, "Yeah, we had all these rules about hats and sweatshirts and hoods and we don't have those rules anymore."
Leidy Klotz: That's great. Yeah.
Justin Reich: And it's sort of a small thing to get rid of them, but there are a few minutes in class every day that teachers and students were needlessly battling over hats. And there were a few trips to the assistant principal every week or two that we were needlessly spending people's time about hats.
And all those people now can spend that time on other things. And so maybe there's some low hanging fruit, but what you're saying is pass the low hanging fruit. You may have to stop subtracting for a moment and think about what you want at the end.
You may have to an imagination of what better could look like to inspire you to then go back to some things that you have some attachment to and say, "Okay, yes, it's going to hurt to take the Roman Empire out of this history class, but we can actually have a better history class where we're digging deeper."
If we just say, "For a couple years we're going to try not having the students learn about the Romans and they'll get it somewhere else and they'll be okay." And it's worth it because what they're going to get in the rest of the class is better.
That maybe doing this subtraction work in schools requires looking specifically at some things that you can cut and then looking forward into imagination of a better future and using that to inspire you to come back and cut some things that hurt a little more in the short term to bring out.
Leidy Klotz: Definitely. And I know it's hard. I mean, having those visions is hard and that's like when people talk about the silver linings of a pandemic, that what it's done is given us a vision of this different way that things could be.
And most of that we don't like, but some elements of it, you're like, "Oh jeez, look, that turned out to be good." And it becomes really powerful kind of motivation to make changes towards that.
Jal Mehta: I might add to that that just to remember the Embarcadero story and that when you're developing your vision, you need to start from an almost zero-based budgeting perspective. Let's not assume that there was this huge concrete structure here and then develop a vision.
Let's develop a vision as if there was nothing here. And then think about do we want to have the structure here or not? Yeah, because I think it's easy to get trapped. I think that's part of how you end up in a sort of addition mindset.
Leidy Klotz: Yeah. We set the baseline, instead of setting the baseline at zero, we set it at the current state and then we assume that we can't go below the current state.
And it's a fundamental barrier to subtraction even just in the cognition, but also in all of these real world examples where it's like, okay, yeah, you're making subtraction not even possible when you're thinking about it that way. And it's really easy to fall into that way of thinking.
Justin Reich: Leidy, when you look at schools today, are there particular dimensions where you think to yourself, wow, we could really make some cuts here. Are there areas in schools that you see that are ripe for subtraction?
Leidy Klotz: Well, I'm just so humbled when I see what K-12 educators are doing that I hesitate to prescribe anything to them. I have some examples that I've seen of subtraction. Like Ezra has an amazing teacher right now, Meg Greenwood, and she's seven time all-American swimmer at University of Virginia and then decides to devote her life to teaching first graders.
And one of the things that they do in their class is this thing called Walk and Talk, and I'm pretty sure that came about from the pandemic. So they have recess still, but they also have this additional session that's called Walk and Talk. And it's, there's a track and the kids can walk around it, they talk to each other, the rambunctious ones get to run and get their energy out.
But it's this thing and I think it came from the pandemic because when people were doing virtual, I was like, "Well, we need to move them away from the screen for a little while." But they decided, okay, let's keep that, but nobody is getting taught any content during that time.
But it's some of the most valuable time during the day because if you think about how YouTube probably organize your lives, you don't sit there and stare at the computer for eight straight hours. You do work and then maybe you go for walks and that's where some of the epiphanies happen.
We're processing information during that time. So what that Walk and Talk is like total empty space in terms of how we're thinking about content, but it's essential space in terms of kids processing information. So I think that's an example of a really good subtraction.
I think another, I've had some really good discussions with people who are working on issues like systemic racism and they use very similar to what Jal just said, which is like, look, reason systemic racism means it's baked into the system and you need to go all the way back and think about, okay, who were the people making these rules?
Who was in the room when these rules were made and now we're following these rules and who do these rules disadvantage? And so even something like systemic racism and how that kind of perpetuates in our schools, that's something where we can kind of strip down, strip away and figure out what the root cause is and maybe have some help there.
I think one of the things Ezra's teacher did to help address that, they did this amazing project where there's the Vinegar Hill neighborhood in Charlottesville, which is historically black neighborhood was a thriving community and then is essentially taken over developers and white people.
So it was just the classic thing that happened all around the country. And Ms. Greenwood, I mean, she didn't preach about systemic racism or talk about what her views were of what we should do in response to it. She's just like, "Here's the history of Vinegar Hill." And Ezra built the model of the daycare center.
So he is doing all this cool stuff that he likes to do, but when I talk to him about it, he totally gets it. He totally gets systemic racism. And that's a really high level concept that Ms. Greenwood was able to get across through a very simple, and I think authentic to the history project.
I mean, one thing that we struggle with and I struggle with in my classes is all the new science that is created and we want to add that, but then we don't think about, okay, what are we taking away to make room for this?
And there are a lot of things that are just kind of left over artifacts that, again, it's like, this is important, but it's not as important as the things that you could be doing.
And we've got things that we make our students do more just because it's like mental weightlifting rather than actually being something that helps them advance their knowledge. So I do think that that's one that education at all levels, whether it's full courses or whether it's pruning your own courses, has a lot of potential.
Jal Mehta: That also makes me think about design and kind of user-centered design. Curriculums often come together because lots of committees of people at different periods of time each advocated for something they thought was important. And the way they resolved that was by going with both then.
But no one was of imagining it from the perspective of the student or the teacher who has to go through the course and what was in the beating. They were arguing over, what Justin was saying, is it more important to talk about the Romans or the Greeks?
But the lived experience of the student is like these empires blurring by worrying by at a rate of one every two weeks and no one's sort of thinking about the experience of the learner. So I see a lot of connections to the way that designers think in the way that you're talking.
Leidy Klotz: I love that. One of my favorite examples in the book is the Schrader bike, and these are the little bikes for two year olds that they pedal like Flintstone vehicles and they can balance and the bike works by subtracting the pedals.
And so it's a great example of it took a long time for people to think of subtraction, but the breakthrough came by understanding the human. Because the designer Ryan McFarland also was a father of a young kid at the time, and when he subtracted the pedals, he realized that the kid could provide the propulsion.
That's a little bit unsurprising. We know that kids have a lot of energy, but also that the kids could balance. It's like the kid can balance, they don't need training wheels. And that required thinking about the human. And it's the same with education. We often think, oh, here we've got to totally control this situation.
And when we do that, we're not paying attention to the tremendous potential of the humans in this situation. I was also talking about this to Kelly Leonard who directs Second City. He works at Second City, it was a improv comedy in Chicago. All of the famous comedians have come through it.
And he's like, one of the subtractive realizations that he had was that the role that the audience plays in a show. And if they try to over script everything, then they don't get to take advantage of the genius of the audience. So again, it's very similar to this, look, we've got this tremendous human potential in the students.
And so not only do we need to consider them because they're the ones who are living this experience, but when we don't consider them, we're missing out on things that they can bring to the table, things that they can provide to kind of meet their needs of what we're trying to accomplish.
Jal Mehta: So we got interested in subtraction in part because of the pandemic, because there were a lot of opportunities. People did remove a lot of things. And we thought just very practically, if you're trying to help someone change rather than say, "Hey, you're in state A and there's state Z, which might be beautiful if you could get there."
Just to say like, "Hey, you already let go of a few things during the pandemic and now that you're coming back from the pandemic, which of those things do you want to let go permanently? And which other things would that give you room to amplify? What kind of space would that create?"
So we created a little protocol called Hospice, Amplify Create, just like, what do you want to let go of? What do you want to grow? What sort of new things might you put in its place? And so that's sort one motivation of what got us into it.
And then I think another one is this sense that as folks who have worked with a lot of schools over a long period of time, that schools are sort the accretion of a lot of well-intentioned ideas from different points in time.
And that essentially new ideas come, but then the old ideas are never removed in part for a sort of political reason that it's always easier to add because somebody's excited about something so it gets added. Whereas to subtract, somebody is losing something. It's kind of like the political scientists talk about concentrated costs and diffuse benefits.
If you remove something, one person might be really unhappy, but the benefit to the whole of creating the space would be great, but it's really hard to do that. And then I guess on my own end, on the sort of deeper powerful learning front, I spent a lot of time in schools.
I saw a lot of those classrooms where kids were studying an empire a week and it all kind of flew by. And if you ask them at the end of the year, the Greeks and the Romans and the Mayans would all sort run into each other in their minds because there wasn't really enough time for each of them.
And then conversely, the sort of best or most powerful learning experiences were almost always where there was enough time to explore something in depth and see where it led and so forth.
And so began to wonder what it would look like if more of the curriculum were organized that way. So those are some of the reasons that I'm interested in this subtraction idea and why I was really taken with Leidy's book. Justin, how about you?
Justin Reich: Well, all of that, Jal. And then I think schools are completely overwhelmed. As I talk to teachers, as I talk to school leaders, you just get the sense that they just can't take one more thing. But in a lot of places, schools still aren't working right now.
They haven't gotten back to the rhythm that they were in. They haven't gotten back to doing all the magic that our schools can do. The joy I hear in a lot of places sort of hasn't returned. So we have this case where people are both completely maxed out and it's not working.
And when people are completely maxed out, you can't fix the problem by saying, well, let's try this new thing. Let's do this thing. Let's add this piece to it. Let's all dig deep and make this other thing happen happened.
Seems like the only way to create some space for innovation is to look at everything we're doing right now and with a real hard look say, what can we stop doing?
It's only when we can get rid of things that we're going to be able to figure out what it is we need to do to make our return to a better kind of schooling feel better. But I don't know, Leidy, how do those challenges sound to you? How do they align with the things that you've been thinking about now for a long time?
Leidy Klotz: I mean, they match my experiences. I'd want to take the opportunity to say we should pay teachers way more. We should put more funding into schools. So this isn't just on the schools, but imagine the combination of those two things.
So the combination of stripping away all this essential stuff plus having enough funding to keep teachers like Ms. Greenwood wanting to be teachers. So yeah, I think there's also, Jal, I like the idea about, okay, there are reasons why it's hard to get rid of what's already there and sometimes it's entrenched interest.
Sometimes it's just a good decision-making shortcut to not question what's already there. Because you have to be pretty audacious to come into a situation and be like, "Oh, I've been here for two minutes, I see this thing and it should go." Because to think about something that needs to be subtracted, you need to understand the system.
You need to understand, okay, look, this freeway looks like it's blocking the water, but is it also contributing something that I'm not seeing? And so it does take time to understand and to evaluate what can be taken away.
Whereas if you just add something it's like, okay, well, we don't really have to even understand how the system works. So I think both of those things kind of contribute. And I love the Amplify, Hospice, Create. Particularly, I like that it makes subtraction one of the things, but also you subtract first.
And there's this, yeah, so by doing the hospice first, you're clearing space for what you might want to amplify and what you might want to create. So it's following some of the best practices, I guess, for taking away.
Justin Reich: Well, Leidy, this has been great. You've been enormously generous with your time. I think this is really going to resonate with a lot of people in education right now because for so many teachers...
I mean, I think a lot of affluent schools across the United States are feeling like they're kind of getting back to normal and things are working. But in places that serve poverty impacted communities, I think the school year just really feels like there is something which is not working despite extraordinary efforts over multiple years for teachers and educators to make it work.
And so we've got to find a way to help people shake into some different thinking. And then I think this could be really helpful and really powerful and obviously helped inspire the whole title and structure of what we're doing right now.
I'm Justin Reich, and this is TeachLab. Thanks for listening to the second episode of our new series on Subtraction in Action. If you miss the first, be sure to go back and check it out. And don't miss our new film We Have to Do Something Different at somethingdifferentfilm.com.
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