Our host Justin Reich is joined by Jal Mehta from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to kick off our series on Our host Justin Reich is joined by Jal Mehta from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to kick off Subtraction in Action, our new series about the positive impact that subtraction can have on school communities. Justin and Jal have been talking to teachers, school leaders, and design experts from around the country about what we can take away from schools to free people up to focus on the essential. Justin and Jal share their ideas about subtraction, along with highlights from some conversations they’ve had throughout the series.
Our host Justin Reich is joined by Jal Mehta from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to kick off Subtraction in Action, our new series about the positive impact that subtraction can have on school communities. Justin and Jal have been talking to teachers, school leaders, and design experts from around the country about what we can take away from schools to free people up to focus on the essential. Justin and Jal share their ideas about subtraction, along with highlights from some conversations they’ve had throughout the series.
In this episode, Justin is joined by Jal Mehta, Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, co-author of In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School, and co-host of the Free Range Humans podcast.
We also hear highlights from conversations with:
Resources and Links
Subscribe to Jal’s podcast Free Range Humans
Learn more about the untapped potential of subtraction in Leidy Klotz’s book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less
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/subtraction-in-action/transcript
Produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley
Recorded and mixed by Garrett Beazley
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Follow our host Justin Reich on Twitter
Justin Reich: From the MIT studios of the Teaching Systems Lab, I'm Justin Reich and this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching. Today, we're kicking off a brand new series of episodes called Subtraction in Action. For two years, I've listened to pundits tell schools over and over again that they need to be doing more, and when I look at schools and talk to educators I see folks who, even coming back this year, are still feeling pretty tired, pretty worn down, pretty stretched thin from the last few years, and it strikes me that if we wanted to have anything different happen in schools, if we want to make room to build, then we need to start by figuring out what it is that we can take away.
So to kick off our series, I sat down with my good friend and colleague Jal Mehta, from the Harvard graduate school of education. Jal is the author, with Sarah Fine, of In Search of Deeper Learning. A terrific book about some of the best high schools in the United States. Loyal TeachLab listeners will know that, along with Neema Avashia in the Boston public schools, Jal Mehta has been one of my most steadfast colleagues in thinking about, and thinking through the pandemic how we learn, how we grow, how we do better moving forward. He's been an invaluable thought partner in thinking through the Subtraction in Action series and I was really grateful for his help in this conversation in getting us started. Jal, I had a funny story from my childhood that I wanted to tell you.
Jal Mehta: Great.
Justin Reich: Did you go through a rebellious phase ever in your teens or anything like that?
Jal Mehta: No.
Justin Reich: I had a very specific rebellious phase. It's what the D&D players would call a lawful evil phase. I didn't do a lot of rule breaking but I really tried to find ways to make people miserable while following all the rules and doing the things that I was supposed to. That, to me, was the best way of rebelling.
Jal Mehta: I'm very excited to hear this story.
Justin Reich: So some winters, my mother would assign me to decorate the Christmas tree and a thing that I, as a teenager thought was hilarious was we'd get a Christmas tree and then I'd go up into the attic and I would get every box of ornaments that my family had accumulated over my mother's four decades, over my 10 or 15 years of life, I would get all of the strips of lights that we had acquired and I would put everything on the tree. I would take rows of lights and just wrap and wrap them around the tree. I would take every ornament that we would have and cram it in every corner of the tree, and then I would bring my mother in and I would go, "Look, mom, I decorated the tree." And she would laugh in mock horror because if you take every single ornament that you have in the house and you shove it on the tree, it looks terrible.
Jal Mehta: You couldn't just do drugs or stay out after curfew or things that other kids did?
Justin Reich: No, no, no. That would be breaking the rules but this was doing exactly what I was told, the generating misery while doing exactly what I was told was my specialization
Jal Mehta: I'm keeping you away from my kids.
Justin Reich: That's good.
Jal Mehta: Yeah.
Justin Reich: But of course Jal the Christmas tree is a metaphor for our schools.
Jal Mehta: Yeah. And in fact, I think not just our metaphor, I think that people talk about Christmas tree schools.
Justin Reich: Who says Christmas tree schools?
Jal Mehta: I think it's from the '90s. I want to say that Tony Bryk said it at one point.
Justin Reich: And what do they mean by Christmas tree schools?
Jal Mehta: So it's very similar to what you just described. So basically that each of those ornaments has a story and a history. I don't know, maybe your family was the kind of people that just went to Christmas tree shops and bought ornaments, but a lot of people, when they collect ornaments, each ornament is itself a special thing, you go to a city and you get an ornament or a family member gives you an ornament, or my kid plays the violin so we have a violin ornament and so forth. So individually each of those things was a good idea at the time. But in concert it makes for a miserable Christmas tree. And similarly in schools like a geological sediment, there were lots of things that were good ideas at the time, but they never go away. And then when new things get introduced, the result is the cacophony that I suspect your mother was faced with. Is that what you were thinking of when you introduced the story?
Justin Reich: That's what I was thinking of and I didn't know, but now do that in the 1990s, Tony Bryk colleagues wrote a book called charting Chicago School Reform: Democratic Localism as a Lever for Change, which is one of the places where the Christmas tree schools term appears. So yeah, that's what we've done to our schools. And I think under normal times, people walk by Christmas tree schools and go, oh man, that's a little busy. There's a little bit too much going on here, a little bit stressful. And when you add a pandemic into the mix and you just reduce the capacity of staff because they are as overwhelmed as all of us are, when you add all of the additional issues related to digital learning, attendance, accelerated learning, tutoring, catch up, it's really just asking Christmas tree schools to put more and more ornaments on the trees to add new layers on top of the existing sentiment layers and it's too much. It's like trying to make Christmas trees more beautiful by keep putting more and more ornaments on the ones that are already stuffed.
Jal Mehta: Yeah. And the only difference between a tree and a school is that actual human beings have to deal and manage all the ornaments.
Justin Reich: The thing about schools right now is they are completely overwhelmed and the staff are exhausted. That is the defining feature of many, maybe not sort affluent well supported schools, but for the majority of urban districts, district serving, diverse poverty, impacted kids, things are tough in schools right now.
Jal Mehta: They really are. And that raises the question of how are we going to respond and how can we respond when not just the students, but the adults are in that state that you just outlined.
Justin Reich: And it strikes me that if people are exhausted, it's hard to make them feel better by saying, here's a new thing that you have to do. Here's a new program or here's a new exercise that we think will fix your exhaustion. It seems like if you're dealing with folks who are totally maxed out in an environment where schools aren't working then the place you have to start is what is it that we can stop doing?
Jal Mehta: And that's what led us to the idea for this podcast series Subtraction in Action. So Justin, why don't you tell us a little bit about what got you excited or what might be important about Subtraction in Action?
Justin Reich: Well, I just kept hearing policy folks saying that schools needed to do more and I wasn't necessarily opposed to any of the new things that, maybe I was opposed to some of the new things they were providing, but in the right place, summer school is a good idea, lengthening learning is a good idea, tutoring is a good idea. All these things are done well done in the right context with community support can be good ideas but they are just not human beings with the energy to put these new ideas into practice. If the staff of schools are 110% maxed out and the things they're doing are not working then the only place to start is by asking the question, what are we doing right now that we can stop doing that we can take off the plate of educators so they can have some more space to think and so we can make some more room for new ideas. To me, that's the most urgent work to be doing in schools that are having a tough time over the next three, six, 12 months.
Jal Mehta: And not just new ideas, but new energy that if we were to clear out some space we could help people rejuvenate and regenerate and be in a space where they would be excited about doing new things. So we clearly need some new energy to respond to the things that kids experienced during COVID. And to get that new energy, we need some space, a little bit of relief from the things that people are dealing with day to day.
Justin Reich: I think what I'm most excited about with that new energy too is that there were many terrible things that happened to schools in schools during the pandemic. But one amazing thing that happened is that teachers made extraordinary changes to schools. There were all kinds of things in schools that seemed fixed, that seemed permanent, that seemed received, that seemed unchangeable, that all of a sudden we looked around and were like, oh no, wait, we could do that thing differently. We don't even need to have the kids in the building anymore. If they are, we can organize them in new ways or we can structure our class differently. Not everything that we tried worked but, you and I were talking to a group of high school teachers, principals in Madison, Wisconsin, and one of them said, "We know how to change. We've been changing every three weeks for the last year and a half.
We know how to change." So I feel like one of the things that developed during the pandemic was this sense of possibility. And I feel like part of what has locked up that new sense of possibility is this counterbalancing sense of exhaustion. I feel like if we could address that sense of exhaustion, we might be able to go back to educators and say, "Remember that sense that we had, that we really could try anything. We still can." Now that it doesn't feel as disastrous, it doesn't feel as urgent as emergency like, what would it be like to apply that same spirit of possibility to the day to day operation of schools that are not facing the challenges of COVID as strongly as they were every single day?
Jal Mehta: Yeah. I think that would be great.
Justin Reich: So in our study of subtraction and action, we got to sit down with some great school leaders and teachers from around the country. One of our favorite examples of subtraction came from our good friend, Nat Vaughn, the principal of a Blake middle school in Medfield, Massachusetts.
Nat Vaughn: Fall 2020 when we were coming back to the hybrid model, we had to look at how we just did things. And one thing that really came to light, and it was because we had to have windows open, doors open at different times. So prior to that middle school, we had this rule, no hats, hoodies was a big conversation, but our buildings were freezing and so everyone's wearing winter hat.
Justin Reich: This is in Massachusetts in November and December and January, that kind of thing?
Nat Vaughn: Yeah. Totally. Winter air starts coming in. We're going outside a lot as best we can, get kids outdoor classrooms. And it was like, all those rules, well, of course we're going to let kids wear their winter hats and it did not change learning. These ideas we had in the head-
Justin Reich: You're telling me that students came to school with a sweatshirt, with a hood on top of it and pulled that hood up and they were still capable of learning.
Nat Vaughn: Yeah, it's blasphemy. I know that. And it was just this piece of thinking about, wait a minute, what are we doing? And we've had different times cultures of the school, some teachers more lax than others and things like that. And I would say it was a thing that when we came back, it just wasn't a conversation. We got started to the warmer weather and we had a little bit, all right, we're going to bring that back and it was just, why does it matter? So what that actually, I have found it frees up time because we spent time, I would say battling with sixth, seventh, and eighth graders over honestly, a hat. And let's not take that time. And the habitual things might go down the guidance counselor, assistant principal. It actually freed up time for us to look at things and to look at kids differently. And what I found too is it does give some kids some agency. That small piece was a huge win for kids.
Justin Reich: That was the agency that they had inadvertently discovered during the pandemic. They were learning at home from their computers and they could sit whenever they want, nap whenever they want, snack whatever they want, go to the bathroom whenever they want and wear hoodies and hats if they wanted to.
Nat Vaughn: Totally.
Justin Reich: And so this was one little piece of that autonomy that you can keep while subtracting some bureaucracy, some rule enforcement. And it sounds like you're just subtracting some spaces for confrontation with kids.
Nat Vaughn: And I would say too, it gives a leverage point to talking to kids about culture, about saying, we're not going to try to have these rules just for the sake of rules, because it was one of those times that when a kid would get sit down, I often would say, I don't have a great argument why you couldn't wear your hat in class. I really didn't. It was just like, well, I don't know, because the rule says and it's tradition and respect, but really is it. So I think it's a leverage point to also get kids more invested in their own learning and feeling this is their space because it really is their school and trying to get into that culture.
Justin Reich: So we had a great conversation with Leidy Klotz, professor of engineering at the university of Virginia, who I would say gave us some really good psychological reasons why subtractive changes are hard and designed that for whatever reason, our brains are more wired to see opportunities for addition in problem solving than opportunities for subtraction in problem solving. Why don't we share a clip of that now?
Leidy Klotz: 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 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. The cognitive process that we all have is very similar to what my cognitive process was in that moment, which is okay, we're trying to make something better.
We're designing, we're trying to change something from how it is to how 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 have 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 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. 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 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 option. So the first reason here is that we don't even think about subtraction and it's hardwired in.
Justin Reich: The behavior is observable and the underlying rationale is mysterious.
Leidy Klotz: Is mysterious, but observing the behavior does allow you to tie into what we know from other sciences and analyze this new finding through those lenses. And if you think about reasons for behavior, there's biological or evolutionary reasons. So things that 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, your family or the people you're with are more likely to survive through scarce times. So stockpiling, acquisitiveness, this is something that 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 it anyway. There's a biological desire to show that we can effectively interact with the world. And the story I use in the book is Bower birds, the male Bower birds build these ceremonial nests and then the female Bower birds go look at the nest to decide which male they want to mate with. And then the female Bower bird 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 than it is when you add. So there's some biological forces. And I think that the cultural forces, I think for a long time addings been 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 opportunities to subtract that we have today weren't really there throughout history. And that extends to organizations and bureaucracies and education as well. When there's no schools, it's pretty much anything you can do to add education is good and it's only when you've got, the system's been going for a while that the pruning starts to be a significant way to make improvements.
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 deliberate thinking to be subtractive, but it's not just psychology that predicts this intuition towards additive change. What do we know from political science? What do we know from sociology about why all kinds of institutions, not just schools, but firms, political organizations, municipalities, states, things like that. Why is addition such a compelling way to solve problems and why is subtraction often harder?
Jal Mehta: Yeah. So the political scientists have a lot to say about this that basically their story is that, okay, so you're an institution and somebody proposes that they want to add something because they're excited about it. And so what are the benefits and costs to you as the leaders of the organization of making a decision about that? Almost everything goes with the benefits. The people are excited about it. It's supposed to solve some problem which people have identified. And so there are benefits, but the costs which will accumulate when it becomes a Christmas tree are largely invisible and they're diffuse, they land on everybody, but the benefits are really apparent and the people who want to do it really want to do it. And if you turn down a lot of ideas that people are excited about then eventually people will get frustrated with you.
Now turn it around and let's say that you let's say that somebody proposes or let's say that you think that you should cut something. Well now, okay, well from the point of view of the whole, it makes a lot of sense to do the cuts just like it makes a lot of sense for the Christmas tree to not have too many ornaments on it. But specifically somebody is running the thing that is going to get cut or somebody's excited about it, or someone is invested in it. And so those people will be really unhappy with you if you cut. So those are really heavy, concentrated costs. Whereas the benefits that will accumulate diffuse long term hard to see, eventually it's better for the institution for there to be cuts. But at the moment, the people who are getting cut or the program or the thing that's getting cut will be really unhappy with you. So it's just a lot easier to add than it is to subtract. So that's one story that I know from the political science literature.
Justin Reich: We heard an inspiring story from Beth Rabbit who's the CEO of the Learning Accelerator, a consultancy that supports schools with learning innovation and with technology integration.
Beth Rabbitt: Where we really saw it happening was at the level of the district because districts were trying to suddenly stand up to support a bunch of teachers, curriculum and tools that they could bring into their classrooms. And so a lot of districts we spoke with, Cedar Rapids in Iowa, Austin, Texas brought together teams of teachers from across campuses to say, what do we believe is most important and how will we organize our time against that? The places that seem to do it most effectively were those that actually had engaged their teaching staff in those questions because that allowed teachers to not only work together to spend time really looking at their curricular practices and the things that they were prioritizing, but it also supported some teachers in letting go of some lesson plans and projects that candidly weren't as essential, and that ranged from lessons that teachers might have been teaching for 20 years to maybe some fun things.
One of our leaders in Iowa had noted when we were in class together for eight hours a day, maybe it was okay we were spending an hour watching Shrek for example, but we don't need that right now. And that process though of having professionals come together and really inquire with each other out and what was most important and scrutinize how we were spending time seemed to be in a really important thing. Now, obviously during the pandemic a lot of teachers did that intuitively on their own, but we did see a lot of district movement, which frankly freed up others who perhaps didn't have as much power in the district to feel comfortable spending time going deeper rather than broader.
Justin Reich: And I think a lot of teachers had a lot of experiences around school change during the pandemic that they were very unhappy with. I think teachers had a lot of experiences that were like, the district is sending us new mandates every three weeks. We don't know what's going on. But the kinds of conversations that you're talking about are amongst those that we heard most consistently positive feedback around, particularly when sixth grade math teachers got to talk with fifth grade math teachers and seventh grade math teachers, and seventh grade math teachers get to talk with sixth grade teachers and eighth grade teachers and do some of that vertical alignment because ideally you don't want these conversations just to be happening within a grade level vacuum.
If you're deciding that these things are the most important things to focus on this year and you're going to let this other stuff go, you want to let the people know in the next couple of grades ahead of you, hey, here's what we did less of, here's what we're doing more of, here's how we're focusing. And I think it was conversations that teachers said, man, it took a pandemic to have us engaging like this but we should keep doing this. I like talking to my colleagues about this kind of stuff. It's fundamentally, how are we going to help our kids be successful year after year throughout our curriculum?
Jal Mehta: I remember once Larry Rosenstock, the founder of high tech high asked me, why do we have the subjects that we study? How come physics but no astronomy, how come history but no sociology or economics or political science. It's not that the things that we're doing are bad, but there are a lot of other things you could study like why these things. And I started looking into that, and particularly with respect to the social sciences, the answer is they developed the curriculum before they developed the social sciences. So the social sciences came into being in their modern form in the first third of the 20th century and the curriculum stems to the 1890s.
And so once they'd made the decision that these were going to be the subjects, then whole other arenas of understanding in the world developed. But those things couldn't be added without subtracting, whereas in universities because they have a more modular structure, they did just sort add and add and add without subtracting. And so all the original subjects are still there, but now there are a whole bunch of new subjects, but in schools we have the original subjects, but maybe you could take an elective in African American history, or you could take a senior year economics class or whatever. There's a little bit of space in the elective curriculum, but because people won't subtract that they don't become part of the core.
Justin Reich: My earliest effort at making a school better was in the first school that I worked in and I taught this ninth grade world history class that all of us who were teaching it hated, well maybe we didn't hate it, but none of us really liked it that much. And our students, even the ones who really liked history, didn't like it that much. And one day we were looking around being like, why are we teaching this class if it's not a big hit? And the actual we're teaching this class because some guy who worked here 20 years ago designed the class and we're just still doing it. So we said, great, well, let's take this history class and let's boil it down. A huge problem with it is it was just let's do the pre-history of hominids for three days and then let's do the Sumerians for two days and let's do the Egyptians for four and see if we can race our way to the Renaissance by May.
And the only way to make the course better is to do much, much less. And my good colleague, Tom Decor was just a huge fan of some teach. He was completely on board with this idea of narrowing down but a thing that we realized is we just couldn't spend weeks on the Greeks and Romans anymore. If we could take them out, there were other more interesting things that we could do that could address all the different populations we were serving in schools. And it was just so painful for him to lose all of the work that had put into this great teaching he had done around the Greeks and Romans. And so he was feeling that pain really acutely, the benefits of doing it were hypothetical and in the distance. And it was the same thing with, I use that example of the Greeks and Romans because it was one of the things we ended up cutting, but any of the units we had had someone who was attached to it.
I think we see this a lot when people talk about trying to add new things into the curriculum. I've spent a lot of time with computer science educators and I think a whole crew of computer science educators have realized that if you want to add computer science to the curriculum, something must be taken out. There's not 100% of people who believe that there's some cool folks who've been like, "Look so let's just make computer science a part of math. Let's do math with computers and then we'll teach this stuff and we don't have to take anything away." And there's very few people who are opposed to adding computer science to the curriculum. It's when you get to the specific of, are you going to take away an art class because then the art people are going to be pretty upset about that.
Are you going to take away a world language class? Then the world language class people are going to be pretty upset about that. And so it's the same idea that there may be a bunch of diffuse benefits of changing something, making more space, but the stakeholders who own the particular pieces, they're there in the schools because people are passionate about them and because they were a good idea. I think there's some stuff in schools that maybe we could all look around and go, "Man, this is pretty silly. Let's get rid of that." But there's actually quite a bit of schools that on its own makes good sense. It only stops making sense because there's too much of it. So Jal, it was your good colleague, Tyler Thigpen, the co-founder of the four school in Atlanta, Georgia who had some firsthand experience with this.
Tyler Thigpen: One is AP classes, advanced placement. So we've actually capped those for our learners, for our high schoolers in particular. They can choose really any that they want to do but we've said the max you can take at our school is four unless you get permission from our school leadership and-
Justin Reich: Four per year or four throughout high school?
Tyler Thigpen: Four throughout high school.
Justin Reich: One a year in high school or four at the end?
Tyler Thigpen: Yeah. And it could be four throughout any year of your high school career. But by the time you graduate, you can max have taken four. And we got a lot of feedback before we made this decision from college admissions officers around the United States from for example, Georgia tech, Yale, Elon, California Lutheran, a diverse set of colleges and universities who really advised us that they've seen that before in the field and it did not concern them. And in fact when they look at high school students graduating, they asked the question, well, what's offered at the school? What are the limitations? And then what are students choosing to do within that? But the reason we chose to subtract APS and really limit them is recognizing that a lot of the AP classes, and this is somewhat controversial and debatable, I know, but are still very content heavy and not as more skills based.
For me, the most skills based one is probably AP literature, excuse me, AP language, which really you can study almost any content through that, which is amazing, but a lot of them are still content heavy. And so this is a way for, by us limiting them, it's a way for students to create little bandwidth in their minds and hearts for other things.
Justin Reich: What were the administrative consequences of that decision? What about the forest school? We could talk in a minute about how student experiences got simpler, but tell me from the point of view of administrators, schedulers, teachers, how did that simplify your school?
Tyler Thigpen: Well, from a registrar standpoint, it simplifies things because there's less math and calculations that need to be done on GPAs because often in high schools, APS will garner a higher GPA than a 4.0. I think from a parent's standpoint, we needed to start messaging to our parents the rationale and the why for that and we needed to showcase the feedback we were getting from college admissions officers especially to give them confidence. So it added a little extra work on the front end to bring parents and students along. But once there was community buy in then it really did save us time because our educators just aren't having to spend as much time on content, heavy content, heavy subjects.
Justin Reich: After you made that decision, were there fewer AP classes that you taught across the school or did you just have fewer students in each section?
Tyler Thigpen: Yeah, we designed the high school so that learners could experience improve rigor in multiple different ways. Historically, in schools by taking as many APS as you possibly could, that was the primary way of demonstrating rigor. And we just complexified that and created really five or six different ways where learners could prove rigor. And so this decreased enrollment in AP courses for sure and increased interest in the other ways that learners could prove rigor, whether that was through dual enrollment or designing their own independent studies, which we called learner design courses or taking more apprenticeships, which count for school credit or some other ways.
Justin Reich: Great. So you didn't subtract young people's ambitions, which is definitely not something that we want to do and in a lot of cases we can't because kids are always going to be ambitious about something, whether it's an opportunity we offer or not, but you really helped them diversify how they decided to apply those interests.
Tyler Thigpen: That's right. And I guess what I would finally add with Justin is what we saw is the learners who were college bound, especially striving for elite colleges, they're the ones who really maxed that out. And then learners who are not college bound and are really leaning into the diverse, arguably faster and cheaper alternatives in college that exists these days, they really opted completely out of APS and said, no, no, we want to deepen our learning and understanding through other means.
Justin Reich: Here's a question that we went back and forth on recently, which is, how much do you think of subtraction as an urgent thing to work on in this moment, as in our schools are overloaded, there's a lot of things that we need to help them do better. People are tired and so it really has to focus on subtraction. If we do a good job focusing on subtraction, if we pick some things to pull out, then we're making room for other things and in that sense subtraction is not a forever activity. We don't have to spend the next decade continuing to pull things away from schools versus the idea of, actually subtraction is something that sort always needs to be on the mind of educators and school leaders. How much should subtraction be thought of in this subtraction and action project as an urgent thing to do in this moment versus a forever skill forever practice that school leaders should be working on all the time?
Jal Mehta: I'd be interested to hear your view on that question Justin. My thought is it's both. That in this moment, it's particularly urgent because everyone is exhausted and overwhelmed and we need space to do things like kids spent a year and a half basically in a lot of places very disconnected from other human beings and that has created a huge toll on young people. The academy of pediatrics has declared a national emergency with respect to mental health of adolescence. And so you have to respond to certain pretty urgent needs yet you have a workforce that is exhausted and overwhelmed and in some places leaving you. And so if you don't subtract, you can't address the most urgent current priorities, and so it's a current thing. I think it's sort of like your house. Ideally for everything that comes into your house, something would go out of your house.
And if you don't do that over time, your house will accumulate and I'm pretty confident that some of our listers that this resonates with them. And I also think that mission aligned institutions of all sorts are really good at thinking about what is it we're really trying to do. And then when something new is offered thinking about, does this thing add to what we're really trying to do or not? So I feel like mission aligned institutions are much better than non-mission aligned institutions that's saying no to things.
Justin Reich: So when we spoke with Nicole Allard, executive director of educational excellence and innovation at the Vista schools in California, she had a great example of this.
Nicole Allard: So it goes back for me to knowing your why. So we were really crystal clear on why we were here. We were really crystal clear on what our work was. And when you do that then it's easy to know what's important and what can be left off. So it's almost like being in an emergency room and being able to triage really quickly. They have their simple rules. And so for us, we had our simple rules. We know who we were, we know why we were there and we knew what we were doing. And so we just tried to focus on the essential so teachers didn't get really overwhelmed by the non-essential parts of the work that can wear people down and get in the way of what's really important. And so I think for us, some of the things that we subtracted, we gave permission to teachers.
So I think the very first thing is teachers have a lot of fear. Teachers are all type A personalities, are all perfectionists. They all want to do their job really well. They all want to do the best thing and they can for kids. And so part of it was we gave permission to teachers to let go of certain things so they could prioritize the work they really wanted to do and the work that they had passion on. And so some of those was about, we don't want to cover material. It's not about breath, it's about depth. If you get students interested, if you get students excited, if you get students passionate, that's the knowledge that we want. It doesn't matter if you cover every single chapter in your book or go through everything. And so we removed a lot of that mentality from teachers and we modeled that in the way that we held meetings or wrote e-mails or did priorities so that they could step away from that.
And by doing that, it really freed up their time to have relationships with students and for students to engage with them and with the material in more authentic and meaningful ways than they had ever done before. And it made the students voices rise up, which is what was really important and it made them take ownership in their learning. And so I think I would be remiss if I just talked about physical things we subtracted without really leaning into some of the mindset shifts that we had to subtract with the fear and the permission in order for them to even be in that space to do that work.
Jal Mehta: Justin, what do you think about this? Is this a crisis for the moment or is this a long-term thing?
Justin Reich: Yeah, I guess I've been thinking of gardens as metaphors for this. Sometimes your garden has just completely overgrown things. Again, they're all flowers or plants or food. They're all good things but they're just too close to each other and things can't get as big as you want and they're not meshing with each other and there's a moment where you have to be I'm really just going to have to pull out that whole row, that whole section and rework this. And it certainly feels like a overgrown moment. I think what's so distinctive about this moment is that there are lots of calls for schools to do more stuff and each of the individual do more stuff, things may be reasonable. But what I feel is lacking in the calls for more stuff is the recognition that there is simply no bandwidth to do extra things.
Jal Mehta: I think what you're saying is more like economists say sometimes it's okay to spend and then there will be other periods where you need to save. And I really like the idea that, if you take your garden metaphor, I'm looking back out at my back garden which is not something that we've done anything with and thus many things need to be pulled out. And I'm just visualizing it. Imagine if we pulled out all of the things that are there and then put some mulch down and it was just an open space and then what you could do with it and the amount of energy that that would unleash being in that place. So I agree with your point about rhythms. And if you could create a lot of space then that would unleash energy and ideas to do some new things, which would be good.
Justin Reich: That rhythm thing, the other thing that resonates with that is I feel like in most schools, in basically every school system that I've ever visited, there are people who are energized by new stuff under normal operating conditions being like, hey, let's try this new thing. That's something that a lot of teachers, a lot of school leaders are into. Not all of them. There are a lot of folks who have innovation fatigue. There are a lot of folks who approach new ideas with a lot of skepticism, but there are a lot of people in schools who are like, oh yeah, if we did that a different way, that might work better. That would be cool to try. And even those people I think are pretty exhausted right now. I just think in September of 2022, October of 2022, the number of people in any given school district who are going to get really fired up by trying to pull in a big program that is just much, much smaller than it would have been in September, October, November of 2019.
And so, yeah, it's a moment for really thinking about subtraction. Jal, it's been super fun developing this series with you and it feels like something that's really important right now. All the feedback that we've gotten from people that we've talked to, that we've leaked early drafts of this material to is that these ideas of Subtraction in Action are stories that people really need to hear right now as an alternative to what they're getting from other places and it's going to be really exciting in the next few episodes as we roll them out to not just talk about this in the big picture, but to really talk with some teachers, some school leaders, some district folks who are trying to make this work in their schools and to hear their stories. And then in this next episode, we're going to sit down with Leidy and he's going to talk us through the research behind his book.
Some of the key findings from his experiments. We talked a little bit about the sociology, the political science, the politics of why subtraction is hard. And I think Leidy adds some great new evidence, some great new insight on why the psychology, why our brains are not that well wired thinking about engineering with subtraction first. I'm Justin Reich. This is TeachLab. Thanks for listening to our first episode of our new series on Subtraction in Action. You can check out our new film, we have to do something different at somethingdifferentfilm.com. You can attend a local screening or sign up to host your own. Learn more about screening opportunities and check out the screening guide at somethingdifferentfilm.com. Be sure to subscribe to TeachLab wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, leave us a rating or review. This episode was produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley, sound mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe until next time.