This transcript was automatically generated

0:01
You know, it turns out that when you look at a hive of bees, it looks chaotic and it sounds chaotic and it looks really busy. It might even look agitated or disorganized to someone outside, but there is, you know, in hives themselves, a lot of democratic activity. Every bee has a substantive role. They’re all working as a collective to adapt in this, you know, ever changing environment, in order to survive and thrive ultimately. So there are a lot of ways in which the metaphor felt sufficiently, sufficiently similar that we could, we could stick with calling our our graphic, the hive, and use it as a sort of a metaphor throughout the book, you know, whether it was about sort of swarming, which is, I think, an idea, you think a lot would be swarming problems, innovating and pollinating, learning, which is another thing that hives do is really spread what they’ve learned from one context to another. We, you know, harvesting data and thinking about how you can take all of the information that you’re gathering to improve and then, of course, leadership.

1:11
This is high tech, high unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and now is the voice of Liz Chu, Executive Director of the Center for Public research and leadership, or sea Pearl at Columbia University. Sea pearls focuses specifically on education, leadership and governance. It’s been around nearly 15 years, and Liz was there right at the beginning because she happened to be getting her doctorate from Columbia at the time. Liz is on the show today because she, along with her co authors, just published a book that captures sea pearls big insights about education, leadership and governance. It’s called the learning hive, leading collective innovation to transform education systems. The book has lots of examples of organizations with characteristics of learning hives, including partners in school innovation, the Mississippi Literacy Initiative, and I’m pleased to say, the High Tech High Graduate School of Education’s very own car pay college access network. Okay, if you want to hang out with us and connect with people from across the country, across the country who are doing cool stuff like this, there is only one place you want to be from March 30 to April 1, 2026 and that is San Diego, California, for the National Summit on improvement in education. Book your spot today while you still can. We’ve got a link in the show notes. Before we go any further, I want to introduce some other key terms we’ll be talking about in this episode. First, evolutionary learning, a phrase originated by the political scientist Christopher K Ansell. It describes organizations which are able to respond to problems through experimentation and feedback in real time, rather than by committing to inflexible top down reform programs. Next, the book discusses three governance models that one often finds in education organizations, bureaucracy, managerialism and what they refer to as professionalism and craft. Liz will explain all these concepts better than I could, but I wanted to make sure you heard them right at the start, so you know to look out for them. Now, a little bit about Liz. She grew up in Minnesota, then went to Yale as an undergraduate, and when she graduated, went to teach in a middle school in the Bronx. Here’s what stands out to her about her first teaching job.

3:07
Like a lot of folks at the time, I started my teaching career as part of Teach for America, so I had pretty little formal training before going into the classroom. And what I’m sure won’t surprise you is that I found the job to be extremely challenging. And it turns out that the way that I learned the most about how to teach was from the Spanish teacher in the school at the time who was the only veteran teacher in the school. And my school that I was teaching in had already been slated to be closed and was in the process of being phased out when I started teaching there. And so during my prep periods. Miss Gomez, if she’s out there listening, give her a huge shout out. She’s changed my life. She would come in and teach the kids Spanish, and I, instead of prepping for my next lessons, I found myself just totally wrapped up in watching how she taught the kids, because they learned so much. They were so engaged. They were so excited to be there. They were answering and asking challenging questions. They were sad when the period was over. I mean, it was all the signs of sort of real, authentic engagement and learning. And I wanted to soak up every single thing that she was doing to make the learning environment as vibrant as that for the kids, and she was a true master of her craft. And I say the word craft because at the time, the impression I had, you know, was that not everyone had access, even in that school, to miss Gomez, she was the only real veteran teacher, strong veteran teacher there. You know, by happenstance, she taught in my classroom during my prep periods, and I, at the time, was thinking, you know, how are all of the folks like me going to learn to teach if what needs to happen is that you have this sort of exposure to someone who is so good at what they’re doing, and I didn’t meet or know or experience any. Sort of people or centers or thinkers who were talking about solutions to how you would solve that problem, how would you make sure that there’s excellent teaching across every single classroom, given the scale of public education, until I came to seperate and that’s where I learned about governance and democracy. Getting back to your question, and really, you know, to use some of the concepts of the book, what I was experiencing in that class with Miss Gomez was the craft model, which we argue is not well matched at scale to an organizing approach for activity in public education. And well, I felt that in my very first days, I didn’t really have a way of explaining why that seemed like it wouldn’t be a real option or solution to the scale of the crisis.

5:50
That’s interesting, because on the one hand, I take your point that, like, not everybody got to sit and watch this Gomez teach, but on the other hand, like, could you have learned to teach without that experience of seeing it in action? Do you think?

6:05
I think I would like to say yes, but I do think it would have probably taken structured learning that would have had sort of the sufficient flexibility for you to learn how to do something well in a particular context, while exposing you to cross cutting principles and frameworks and evidence about what should guide that very context specific practice. And what was not happening for me is that in the other places where I was getting trained, or my peers were getting trained, we weren’t having that type of real training, the training I was experiencing outside of that very context specific apprenticeship or observation, was much more, you know, designing for the modal student, and more of the one size fits all approach.

6:50
So we’ve talked a little bit about the term that you use in the book, is professional and craft. And do you want to say a little bit about that distinction? What they what each one is?

6:59
What I would say is, you know, what we look at is to your point, putting first the system design before real questions of what the right policy is. Under the hypothesis that if you have a system design that allows you to choose, well, implement, well, improve, well policies for specific contexts, those policies will work for the kids, families, communities that you’re serving. So it’s governance and democracy before policy. And of course, the prevailing governance model in a lot of public institutions and in public education is bureaucracy, which is a very top down way of organizing activity, and it works best in places where you have very stable and homogeneous conditions, strategy and goals, so that you could have someone at the top of this chain who knows a ton about how work should be organized. You can then have well defined divisions of labor with lots of well specified rules that help people put in place that action or that that knowledge about what works best. That’s that’s the sort of the design for the modal student, imagining that you could have people at the top who sort of figure out how education should work for all kids, and sort of can design rules that would make sure that people are implementing according to that particular view.

8:25
Is there anything in particular, looking back on your time as a teacher, when you go like, Oh, yeah, that was bureaucracy. I think

8:34
I definitely experienced the bureaucracy, including in things like the curriculum implementation. But when I was a teacher, and I was one of those teachers who was handed a particular curriculum and a bunch of rules about how to implement it, and felt very much like the curriculum was mismatched to my student, including in such an egregious way that in one particular case, it was actually for lower grades than the students that I was Teaching. And so I did the thing where I accepted the curriculum and I shut my door and taught something different. So, yes, I think we, you know, I both experienced sort of the attempt at the one size fits all, and then, you know, the reaction of a lot of folks over the history of public education to figure out, even in that context, you know, how can you make sure that your kids are learning and exercise the discretion that we see so often exercised, even in bureaucracies at the front lines, with folks saying, You know what, I really need to do

9:33
something different. And then next up, managerialism.

9:37
So this is what we saw a lot in the early 2000s Yeah, I

9:41
was gonna say you really experienced like peak managerialism. I know,

9:44
through school closures and other things, I was a teacher in peak managerialism. But yes, this is, this is where, instead of trying to organize activity through that top down management of activity through rules. Is the management lever comes from target setting and thinking about what these performance targets should be, and incentivizing performance against those targets, both through rewards and through consequences. And so yes, you can think a lot about a lot of the big cities in that time period that were very focused on performance targets, and there was a lot of latitude and very little explicit guidance or direction around the processes that it would take and that schools or classrooms or even districts themselves were taking to reach those particular targets. But the idea was, you know, you can hire, you can fire, you can you can pay more, you can pay less, and so through those rewards and consequences, you can ultimately, basically incentivize or hire your way toward toward excellent service provision across the board.

10:57
And the way I understand it is in in the most simplified terms, bureaucracy is kind of, here’s a set of processes. As long as you’re carrying out these processes with fidelity, don’t worry too much about your results. And managerialism is, here’s the results you need to get. As long as you’re getting these results, I’m not too worried about how you’re getting

11:21
them. Yeah, I think that’s great shorthand. Excellent.

11:25
What comes to mind as experiencing managerialism when you’re a teacher.

11:30
I think the broader framework that I was working in was largely managerialist in terms of at the school level, the closures and openings of schools.

11:39
Yeah, what was, what was it like going from a school that was marked for closure before you arrived to a brand new school?

11:47
In both cases, I would say things sort of fell apart in the way activity was organized. Again, you know, it’s why the framework we describe in the book and the work of seabroll around how you do your work in addition to what you’re doing, resonates so much because in both cases, the way the activity was organized ended up being sort of a really big flaw in the way the school operated. And therefore both the school that was closing, and it turns out, with the school that I had joined, really struggled to me that students needs

12:21
tell me more about that with the with the second school,

12:25
the second school was really aiming to develop a very dynamic model of teaching and learning that I think aimed to provide a very, very rich education for the kids in for the kids in Its community, in ways that I think are really impressive. It didn’t want to fit into either the bureaucratic or the managerialist model of working. I do think, interestingly enough, because this is what I found very appealing in my first school was, as I was describing with Miss Gomez, I think it fit more into this professionalism and craft model. And perhaps, you know, in hindsight that should have been obvious, because it was an arts school. And as we talk about in the book, a lot of the arts are governed through the craft model. And a lot of what I described in terms of my experience with Miss Gomez and sort of the inability to scale, even within one school, really effective teaching through that type of model I experienced at my second school in terms of making sure across all classrooms, there was high quality teaching, well tuned to students particular needs. So again, not that I had this language in at the time I was teaching, but there was a lot of sense making afterwards, once I really learned about this framework of governance, democracy, you know, then policy and how all of those things combined really have an effect on the extent to which you’re able to advance educational equity. The other interesting thing about teaching at that second school, I was part of some of the first inquiry teams in New York City. And inquiry teams were an early version of an attempt to have teachers really engaging in a form of improvement science. And as a first inquiry team, the first year that I engaged in that process, we took the team of teachers and school leaders that were part of the inquiry team really tackled a challenge related to how we were helping kids increase their literacy levels, and discovered really, really interesting insights about how to better teach kids across content areas and bringing them knowledge rich curriculum that would build their vocabulary across content areas in ways that would also help them with their literacy region scores and things like that. And what was interesting is that we did that still, though that was sort of like a one off improvement project within this broader governance model that was not an evolution. Learning or an improvement oriented governance model, and where that project really fell down was in the second year where we tried to scale that practice, and trying to scale these project based improvement cycles in this broader governance context was extremely, extremely challenging. So there’s, there are lots of things like with with the with the work that I do now, that looking back years ago to my teaching experience helped me understand some of what, what occurred or did during that time of my professional career.

15:34
That’s interesting. It seems like there’s a very thorny chicken and egg problem there where, like when people are engaging in continuous improvement, it should soften hierarchy a little bit and give the people closest to the problem sort of more more power and more authority. And so the improvement is kind of a mechanism for changing the governance. But on the other hand, as you’re describing, the improvement can also get stopped dead in its track by the governance.

16:10
Yes, this is where we ended the book was sort of how you might realistically think about your governance change and ambitions given the broader context that you work in. And so a number of folks who are really interested in changing system design find themselves with a level of positional authority where they probably couldn’t change the whole system design of the system that they’re working in, whether you’re a teacher, and so you have a lot of control maybe over your class, you have maybe a lot of authority within your department or your grade, but it’d be much more difficult to change the governance of the school system that you work with or the school that you work in, perhaps, and there are other folks who they are, the principal, and so changing how your school runs is much More within your authority than changing how your district runs. And so one of the things that we try and do when engaging with folks at SQL is to be really realistic about what the actual governance ambition might be, and then helping figure out a path to getting there. And so sometimes we work with folks in systems, and the ambition is not to change the way the entire system is governed. It’s to work within a particular initiative or a particular subset of a broader system to figure out how to update their governance approach and their approach to democracy. And sometimes it’s actually to change the system as a whole.

17:43
So was that literacy inquiry team that you were a part of as a teacher? Would you say that was your first taste of evolutionary learning as a possibility? Not that you would have called it that.

17:56
Then I think you could definitely call it my first taste of improvement or improvement science. It whetted my appetite, I will say, for organizing the activity of an entire system in a different way. But we sort of didn’t, I didn’t get there, as I said, in a perhaps too honest way. We didn’t get there. We really sort of hit a wall when we tried to think about how to go bigger with that is the organizing frame.

18:22
And looking back on that, what was that wall? What? Why was scale? The problem,

18:28
you know, again, this is sort of what we talk about a little bit in the book, in terms of transition, is that sometimes when you come to improvement in terms of method to solve just a particular, isolated problem of practice. And when you don’t see governance and democracy as the issue, once you see it, it’s very hard to unsee it. It’s very hard to unsee the way, the way the system itself, is operating. And so I think a lot of folks like me, when you start off with using improvement as a way to solve a particular problem of practice, where the charge is to identify a problem of practice to solve using this method, it becomes just a method of problem solving, and it is hard to scale that method of problem solving in ways that are authentic to problem solving as a practice in some of these other governance models. And so you know, when you don’t have systematic ways, as is often the case in craft models, when you don’t have systematic ways to ensure everyone in a system is engaged in explicit learning, it is very hard to spread problem solving practices that change everyone’s behavior. So you just there can be a real there, you can hit a wall in terms of trying to figure out how to move from using improvement as a problem solving mechanism to using improvement as a method of operating all activity, which is really what evolutionary learning is. It’s. Using improvement or experimentalism or evolutionary learning as your way of organizing all activity within the system.

20:07
What led you to leave K 12 teaching

20:10
this issue of scale? Honestly, you know, I really was interested in trying to figure out how you could make sure across every single learning experience with a student, interaction between teacher and student, whole groups of students and a teacher, whole schools, whole communities. How you could make sure you could have high quality service at scale, you know, and that, and that is the pursuit that Cipro is about. And you know, right when I left, I started to try and do that more by getting first more engaged in teacher training, and I loved that work. But it was again, when I found zero, when I really got into the system design question, that I felt like I had encountered a solution to match the scale of the problem. And that was what really compelled me to devote my career to this.

21:04
When did sea pro in its development? When did hit on evolutionary learning as a concept

21:11
from the get go? And that, that’s, that’s what was really exciting. And in fact, you know, the inquiry teams that you were, that we were discussing, that was one of, one of the things that our founder, Jim was was most proud of. There’s a long history of scholarship around evolutionary learning. You know, again, it’s sort of different words for this, but experimentalist governance models in law, and he’s been a part of that body of scholarship for well beyond the time that Cipro has existed. So when I came to see for all, and I understood some of what was happening in New York City through the evolutionary learn, learning lens, and through an attempt at changing the DNA of the way the system worked as

21:55
an editor, something that I that happens to me a lot is like sort of negotiating between and figuring out different people’s language that describes similar or somewhat connected things. And so why do you say evolutionary learning and don’t just say, for example, continuous improvement.

22:17
The term evolutionary learning is not one that we invented out of thin air. Sometimes I wish it works. I would love to take credit for something clever. But like I said, it’s part of this broader body of scholarship that really looks at the way activity is organized within one system and across ecosystems, particularly with respect to taking on really, really thorny public problems in complex environments. And so when we started out, see for all actually we we typically used as a full range of of names, sometimes democratic experimentalism, sometimes just experimentalist governance, sometimes some form of continuous improvement as the governance approach, and sometimes evolutionary learning. And it was actually through testing, a very improvement oriented way that we landed on using evolutionary learning as the dominant term because of how it was received and understood by the folks that we were working with. So our own testing cycles about what term to use most frequently. And I my, my recollection from that, from from what we were learning during that time, is that a lot of folks did associate continuous improvement with just sort of the problem of practice testing cycles that I was describing, as opposed to a framework for managing or organizing all activity, from the leadership all the way to the frontline workers, and really holding the entire organization accountable to both doing and learning at every single moment, and not just as a mechanism of like I said, solving a one off problem, or in sort of helping people who they might deem as less capable, is helping them solve their problems. And so we, you know, we could call it, you know, governance through continuous improvement. It was clear that it was helpful to have sort of a different term in use.

24:19
What’s your relationship like with expeditionary learning. Do you guys like fight over el

24:24
Well, happily enough, we have a very close relationship with El education,

24:30
and a number of their schools, like wheels, expeditionary learning schools wheels in New York City, but yes, the Yale education, actually one of the one of the fun things is that with El education, we’ve been putting evolutionary learning in practice in a number of places, as is referenced in the book, a lot of what we’ve been doing is using evolutionary learning, in this case, to help schools figure out how to in an improvement oriented way. In. Lament curriculum, including el education, so that that curriculum can be used with a high degree of integrity, but in ways that are customized to meet their students needs at high quality levels of class across classrooms. So it turns out, in this case, strong relationship with El education definitely have to be cognizant of how many ELS we’re using, though, in any of those partnerships.

25:25
And this brings to the next phrase, learning hive. So what is a learning hive?

25:34
Learning hives are the dynamic, coordinated communities of people and activity that we’ve been describing, and we landed on that name because of one of the diagrams that we had in the book and that we’ve been using for a number of years now, which moved from sort of the traditional top down triangle that I think probably a lot of folks can imagine, that they’ve seen with bureaucracies where you have a Few people at the top of the triangle pushing down directives. And so there are a lot of one way arrows going from the top down in terms of how people should be going about their day to day work, and moving toward much more sort of circular sets of overlapping circles, of folks working together in with permeable boundaries, with a lot of creative exchange learning and innovation, but it’s all driving toward these shared goals. And you know, it turns out that with bees, there’s a lot of ways that when you look at a hive of bees, it looks chaotic and it sounds chaotic and it looks really busy. It might even look agitated or disorganized to someone outside. But there is, you know, in hives themselves, a lot of democratic activity there. Every bee has a substantive role. They’re all working as a collective to adapt in this, you know, ever changing environment, in order to survive and thrive, ultimately. So there are a lot of ways in which the metaphor felt sufficiently, sufficiently similar that we could, we could stick with calling our our graphic, the hive, and use it as a sort of a metaphor throughout the book.

27:17
Now, do you remember like the first organization that you encountered that was like, like that you would now describe as learning hive, that you were like, Oh, this place, there’s something going on here.

27:27
Here’s something that really excites me is that we see learning hives all over the place. What I love is that, like in our work that we do with organizations, we’re seeing lots of whole hives as as we coin them in the book, where every every activity is sort of Hive like and we see a lot of places where, you know, for a number of reasons, that would be feasible. But there are, you know, subsets of the organization or initiatives that are really governed in this way, and in terms of some of the hives that have had the most impact on us. You know, one is high tech, high partners in school innovation Alan Chang’s district in New York City. Although all the all the hives that we wrote about in the book are those that have really made a strong impact on us at sea Pro as an organization, in terms of imagining what’s possible. And then there are so many, there are so many more that we work with now. One of the things that’s really exciting with sort of hot off the presses is that we do a bunch of work with New York City public schools around their literacy initiative, and have been engaging with them and a number of other actors across the city to turn the city both the city the public’s the public schools approach, but the broader cities approach into a hive that’s very, very focused on a shared goal of students drastically improving their literacy rates. And this means that we’ve done a bunch of things like participatory strategy work with actors in and outside of the system. There’s been a lot of constant measurement and use of information, a lot of ongoing multi level problem solving, all the way from central office to folks who are working most directly with kids. A lot of work trying to get families very engaged in the project. And we’re also really excited about, when we talk about the sort of the city as a hive is their number of efforts to get organizations to collaborate across agency boundaries or institution boundaries, you know, so that the libraries and the after school programs and the school system itself and they can all be working together toward toward these shared goals and in ways that are really Exciting. There were huge, meaningful improvements over the past year in students, literacy rates and so everything from, you know, various subgroups having amazing improvements to a real decrease in the in the percentage of students who are fitting in the below proficiency level. To overall increases in students proficiency rate. So it’s really, really, really exciting. So we have current hives that we’re really excited about being a part of, and there are a number of hives that we’ve gotten to see and observe that have really inspired us and taught us a lot in terms of our own research about how to do this work?

30:20
Well, is there something we haven’t talked about yet that you were hoping to talk about?

30:25
A lot of what we’ve been discussing has been what you might consider internal organization, but a lot of the work of hives, of course, is also on the democracy front and sort of the method of politics. And one of the reasons why I find the current work in New York City really exciting is because a lot of it exemplifies this public problem solving, or participatory problem solving, model that engages folks within and outside the formal boundaries of the organization. And I think I’d be remiss not to say that I think true hives. Really, it’s not just about what happens within the formal bounds of an organization, but it’s also what happens with all of the relevant actors and individuals that are part of driving towards and achieving the goals that that really matter.

31:15
I really liked in the book your definition of democracy as well. I’ll just read how and to what extent public systems enable their client populations, ground level, staff and other stakeholders to participate meaningfully in making, carrying out, evaluating and improving substantive decisions. I thought that was, I thought that was really like, you covered the basis really well there. Thank you. If somebody’s listening to this, and they’re like, look, I feel like I kind of get this, but I don’t know if I’m seeing the water I’m swimming in. If you’re working in education right now, what are the things that you see now that you didn’t see then that people would be helpful for people, people to notice and take a look at?

31:58
Yeah, yeah. I think if you were trying to actually say, like, how can I see this, I would ask myself the questions about, how are decisions made and the system that I’m working in, who decides what is knowledge, or what is information, and how is it spread? Who decides what success is, and how is success measured and rewarded? Who gets respected? What are the sources of respect, and how can you attain a high level of respect? How do we improve? And to your last point of democracy, who gets to be involved in not just doing, but deciding and at what points and with what level of consequence, you know, what you see is that, if you’re in a system where, particularly on the democracy piece, the folks that are at the table and are engaged are are only those that are furthest away from the real point of service or point of impact, then you are missing such important expertise that is required if you are going to have high quality service provision at scale. So a lot of this work is really about creating structures for organizing, problem solving and organizing activity that sort of engages people all along the vertical spine of, in our case, public education, but really it could be applied to any public institution.

33:27
So I imagine that a lot of people who do that perceptual and intellectual exercise you just described will just come out of it very depressed, like, what do they do then?

33:40
Hopefully they’ve read the book, and there’s a way to get started, but basically, really taking hope from the fact that that in almost every case, you can change the way your part of the world operates, even if you’re working within a system that doesn’t operate that way. And that’s the sort of that’s the direction we wanted to provide. And you know, we have the different typologies of what the change process looks like. And in writing the book, one of them is solo, which is sort of, you’re really only trying to engage in system design for your corner of the world right now. And I would add the right now, because, of course, things can change over time, but that’s still a big change for kids, even if it’s in your piece. And so we’re that’s what we urge, is for folks to think about how they can change the slice of a system that they have real authority over, or that they have the real possibility of changing and then, you know, go from there.

34:42
Liz Chu, thank you so much.

34:46
Thank you so much, Alec. It was really wonderful talking to you.

34:52
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted by me Alec Patton, with editing by Yesenia Moreno, huge thanks to Liz chew for this conversation. Her book is the learning hive, leading collective innovation to transform systems. Check out our show notes to find links to that book, to an article about learning hives, to the National Summit on improvement in education and more. Thanks for listening. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai