Laura McBain:
Really, when we’re coming together as adults, our aim is to learn and connect. Actually, learning is such a joyful experience. I think one of the tenets that we tried to do is it’s okay to have joy, it’s okay to bring joy, it’s okay to have serendipity. It’s okay to let people run stuff, it’s okay to prototype, because we were trying a lot of things, and I will tell you, we were nervous about it.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Laura McBain. In this episode, Laura’s interviewed by Michelle Pledger, Director of Liberation at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. I don’t want to say anything more, ’cause this interview’s just awesome and I want to get right into it. Here’s Michelle.

Michelle Pledger:
Well, I am thrilled and excited to be here with none other than Laura McBain, Co-Managing Director of Stanford d.school and K12 Lab Co-Director. I just want to know, Laura, just for people who haven’t met you yet and can’t see you right now, can you just go ahead and share some aspects of your identity so listeners can get a sense of how you move through the world?

Laura McBain:
Sure. One, this is such a blast to reconnect with the amazing Dr. Pledger. We’ve had a long history of shaking things up in education, so it’s fun to have a reflection conversation about where deeper learning has been and where it’s going.

Yeah, my name is Laura McBain. I am the co-managing director of the d.school and also co-lead the K12 Lab. I have been a lifelong educator, I think, for 20 years now. I am a white cisgender designer. My job or my role and my values is really around how I help people see the world through a more ethical and equitable lens, and give people their capacities to create radical things in the world to make the lives of young people better and more just.

Michelle Pledger:
Whew. Okay, that’s a lot, especially this creation of radical things to make the world a more just place. I imagine your days are different and filled with all kinds of incredible opportunities, but what exactly do you get to do in the world in these roles that you described?

Laura McBain:
Yeah, so I was part of High Tech High. I was a founding teacher of High Tech High, I was a principal. I helped found our Graduate School of Education, I was the original architect of the Deeper Learning Conference, and so I consider myself, I would say, a learning experience designer and just designer outright.

So, what I do now currently is I lead some design strategy work at the d.school, which is organizational design, helping us think about who we want to become in the next 15 years and what is the role that design can play in really creating and shaping the future.

So what that looks like in reality is my team and our crew, we take on what we call a lot of experiments or explorations. We look at, I would say, pockets or areas or things that are rather invisible within education, really find new ways to think about issues in education differently, or reframe problems in education quite differently.

A couple examples of that. A couple years ago, as Michelle knows, we took on a project that was focused on deeper learning, but really focus on how we assess deeper learning, particularly looking at collaboration, critical thinking and problem-solving. Many people think about that and they’re like, “Oh, I got another rubric. I got to assess the students with a test, maybe we’ll do a presentation of learning.” But what we did is we realized, through our own explorations, that escape rooms are a really amazing performance assessment of how you can actually see collaboration and communication in action.

So, that project in particular was a way for us to help educators not just see, yes, I should really assess collaboration and communication, but actually know what it looks like when you see it. So, that project was aimed at helping educators really reimagine not just how they understand those key deeper learning competencies, but actually how they can help young people see it for themselves and reflect on when they’re doing it really well.
So that’s just one of the many projects that we do, but it’s really around finding pockets or unsolved intractable problems in education, and finding, I would say, novel ways to approach them and providing really creative solutions that everyone can kind of take up and use.

Michelle Pledger:
Yeah, and I love how escape rooms really get at almost all of the six deeper learning competencies. For our listeners, just in case you’re unaware of the competencies, I’ll just share them with you briefly. The six DL competencies are content expertise, critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration, effective communication, self-directed learning, and academic mindsets. So, you can definitely get more information about those in the show notes.

These deeper learning competencies, people use them, mix them, mash them up in all these different ways, but there was something that happened about a decade ago where y’all said, “Okay, we need to have a deeper learning conference.” So, please tell me the story of how the Deeper Learning Conference came to be. Just take us back to a decade ago and how all this started.

Laura McBain:
I mean, I think it would be ridiculous for us not to mention the acknowledgement or acknowledge the work that Barbara Chow, who was the head of the Hewlett Foundation for seven years, who really, really developed a deeper learning competencies in connection to researchers. Of course, the amazing support and leadership that Marc Chun, who was of the Hewlett Foundation for seven years did.
Early days when the Hewlett Foundation got together, they put together what we called these 10 communities of practice, 10 COPs. We called it the COP. It was 10 schools around the country that we ourselves weren’t calling ourselves deeper learning schools, we were just doing work that we think is interesting in schools. That network included High Tech High, Big Picture Learning, PBLWorks, New Tech Network, Envisions. A whole swath of schools and organizations that were aspiring to bring what I would consider just basic good progressive pedagogy to schools.

We were all doing it slightly in different ways. Some ran networks where they provided tools and resources to districts. High Tech High, we ran schools, Big Picture Learning equipped schools around the world to think about how they can blend academic internships in schools to real world learning. So, we were all approaching, I would say, this progressive area of education slightly different.
What the deeper learning of the Hewlett Group did is they brought us together, and they said, “Y’all are doing great work together. How do we actually help more people understand and see how to do this within their own region and within their own context?” One of the levers that I think the Hewlett Foundation did in particular that was quite smart, is that they developed research and practice groups. So, they were investing in research. I was like, “How do we know this stuff is working?”
They invested in policy, which is how do we ensure that the government adoption is looking at this? Then of course, they really looked at evaluation. They studied these schools for over 10 years looking at longitudinal studies about does a young person who goes to a deeper learning school, will they graduate at higher rates? And they do. That’s actually the result of the study that came out.

But the hunch about bringing these folks together is that all these folks in this group, we all trained educators and we knew that one of the levers to bring people together was yes, a conference, but really the aim was to help other people understand what deeper learning is and how you can do it within your context.

So, I think we were up at a grant meeting and we were having conversation about how to scale this work, and there was lots of different things happening. The Deeper Learning Conference was not the only thing, there was a series of Edutopia videos that got launched that are still available, there’s a whole series of blogs on deeper learning that was sponsored by EdWeek. There was a lot of research initiatives that were happening around the country, there was a deeper learning leadership forum that focused on leaders doing this in their own context.

So, when the call came to be is like who wants to host a conference? Your colleague and my former colleague, Ben Daley, said, “We’ll host it. We’ll do it, sure.” We do conferences all the time. High Tech High did those kind of gatherings for years, even since the early days, and so we were most equipped to host a space. We were never intended to hold the conference forever. We actually were the ones to say, “We’ll do it the first year, anyone else is welcome to take over.”

From there, I think we were really intentional in the first couple years of making it an experience where it wasn’t an event for High Tech High, it was an event for the deeper learning community. That meant that we called it the Deeper Learning Conference that happened to be held in San Diego at a High Tech High school, but the event itself was never really about High Tech High, it was about profiling and featuring the great work of the community, this deeper learning COP that was doing to advance deeper learning. Our job was really just to amplify and elevate the great work of all the schools that were in this community of practice.

Michelle Pledger:
Wow. I just learned something, because I had no idea that we had only committed to just posting that first year and that it was going to hopefully rotate around. But anyway, here we are, it’s still being hosted-

Laura McBain:
We hope that was the case. We were hoping people would jump in. We’re like, “Ah, should we do it?” We were hesitant, I will say, because that puts a lot of weight on High Tech High at the day. We were hoping potentially, but again, the grant, we agreed to host it. I’m sure within the grant there was probably like we’ll host it for three years, but something like that, I’m sure there was some language. But as the organizer, we were like, “Yeah, we don’t have to hold it, we just happen to be holding the space this year.”

Michelle Pledger:
Oh, okay. Well, I know you did an excellent job in those origins, and even when it became a conference at High Tech High, it was continuing to hold to find so many ways for all of the community of practice deeper learning orgs to participate and be involved in lead elements of it, whether that was through dens or deep dives or social gatherings and things like that. So we’re hoping a decade later, even though you have moved on, that we’re hopefully still carrying that legacy and that hope that you had at the beginning in terms of keeping it as integrated and as inclusive as possible.
So now that we’re about 10 years into this, if you could go back in time knowing all of the brilliant things that Laura McBain knows now about the world of education, about deeper learning, about policy, about all of this, if you could go back in time at the start of this, what would you have told yourself back then?

Laura McBain:
That’s a really great question. I mean, I think one of the things that we were starting to figure out back then, and it was really early, but it was some inklings, it’s continuing to be bold. I think that one of the things that I think is a signature of some of the experiences of deeper learning is that you get out of the building, you do things that educators and young people do, so we actually put educators in the role of being a student. Exhibitions of learning, they’re actually experiencing learning for themselves and really diving in.

I think as someone who’s leading conferences and things like that, we tend to let’s make sure that it’s really high fidelity, and make sure the conference is adult conference. But here’s the thing, is really when we’re coming together as adults, our aim is to learn and connect.
Actually learning is such a joyful experience, and I think one of the tenants that we tried to do is it’s okay to have joy, it’s okay to bring joy. It’s okay to have serendipity, it’s okay to let people run stuff, it’s okay to prototype, because we were trying a lot of things, and I will tell you, we were nervous about it.

I remember the very first year of the den, I had gone to a bunch of conferences to kind of experience what’s out there in the world. I went to South by Southwest early, and I came back and I told Ben, I said, “We got to create these lounges, because I found that the best conversations I had at this conference was in the lounge.” Then Ben and I were like, “Well, yeah, the best conversations I have at a conference is in the hallway.” So, we’re like, “Well, what is that?” That’s an unmet need, that’s an area that’s the interstitial space at conferences.
So from there, we designed this lounge space where we literally took over one of our old hallway buildings. I just remember stapling things to a wall, finding furniture, there were bathrooms. It was a hot mess for sure I remember, and I didn’t know it would be a thing. I was like, “Let’s just try this. Let’s try little den, let’s take over this small area, and Michelle knows the space of this school.”

I remember that first year, and it was packed in that space. It was standing room only and it was hot, because there was so many people in this space. It was one of those things, as an organization, we have to follow our instinct and we have to look for, I would’ve continued, what is the unmet need in this group right now? What’s the thing that’s not being met in this community?
So looking back, I think would’ve been really interesting to continue to ask people, not did they have a great time at the conference, they did, but what need has not been met yet for them to activate and accelerate deeper learning in their conference? What’s the need they don’t have yet and what’s not being seen? I think we could have done a better job really understanding the users in the early stages, so that they could really take this work back and really activate it and implement it in their region.

Michelle Pledger:
All right, so deeper learning is still happening, thankfully, in the world. In the work you do now, because you’re out, you’re in so many different spaces, what are some of the most powerful examples of deeper learning that you’ve observed or you’ve experienced?

Laura McBain:
I mean, I think one thing about deeper learning, this is always the challenge, is that it’s tough to see it sometimes. People I think get confused by, there’s these six competencies, Michelle, that you named of just who are the six. They all are kind of fluid. They happen, they’re ubiquitous, and I think for me, some of the best examples, of course, of deeper learning is in with schools, helping schools take on some projects.

I’ve seen great examples of projects in Australia, Virginia, Chicago, where you and I had personal experience. I will say, I think one of the most rewarding projects that I think you and I probably got to work on was working in a school in Pilsen, in Illinois in the south side of Chicago, where I think you and I were a little hesitant about how is this even going to translate to the young people there? I think one of the things that you and I could probably agree upon is the idea that the young people in this school are going to get excited about their learning and they’re going to show up is pretty powerful.

I remember, Michelle, you and I went to their very first exhibition. It was winter and it was cold and you and I [inaudible 00:16:10] time in the cold, it was freezing. We went to the exhibition, and I remember you and I were talking with a couple of the teachers, and one of the teachers that I think you and I talked with said, “I don’t think my kids are going to show up.” He’s like, “They haven’t done the work, they’re not going to show up to this. None of the kids are going to show up.” We’re like, “Well, let’s just see what happens.”

Michelle Pledger:
Yep.

Laura McBain:
That’s great. We had faith in this process, in this system, that if you do really cool projects that embed deeper learning, kids will show up, and I think almost every kid showed up. I mean, this is a very small moment, but I remember there were two kids in particular who showed up to the exhibition, and I remember talking to the teacher and he’s like, “And they started hanging up stuff, they started helping, they were on the ladders trying to get the space ready.” Then the project was like, they didn’t even do the project [inaudible 00:17:02] to make the work sing.

I think that’s just a very small example. I remember that of those early days, and it just had a renewed faith of when you give young people the capacity to show their brilliance, they will show up.

Michelle Pledger:
Yep.

Laura McBain:
Even now, you and I probably follow their Instagram, they’re still doing great work. They continue to do amazing work with young people. I just saw something today from pottery, they’re doing showcases. So that was one example that you and I sparked, and now is taking on his life of his own. I feel like I’m proud of that work, and I think you are too, is here’s a school that took this and did it in a way that made sense to them.

It wasn’t something we said, “This is the prescription, you got to follow it.” It was about how this work shows up in their context. For me, I think looking back over time, it was a blast of a project and we got to do great work, but seeing the young people continue to do really powerful deeper learning projects even now is really inspiring.

Michelle Pledger:
Yeah, and I totally agree. I remember working on that incredible three-year project with you at that school, and just that’s what’s so powerful, I think, about the deeper learning conference experience is that folks get to actually experience what it feels like. The hope is not so that they then go and replicate exactly what happened, because their context is different, their young people are different, but it’s that inspiration, that belief in what is possible, right?

Just like you said, we create that space for kids to show up and be brilliant, they already are brilliant, it’s just all about us shaping that path, supporting them in the ways they need to be supported. But it can happen everywhere, ’cause I’m sure you’ve heard the critique of like, “Oh, that’s High Tech High, they can do that there, or that’s this region.” We know that we see deeper learning happening in rural spaces, in urban spaces, in spaces with less resources, so it’s possible.
Even at the recent Deeper Learning Boston conference, for our deep dives, we were literally in the woods, no technology, so that wasn’t an excuse. We were experiencing deeper learning with no tech, no computers, just the outdoors and human beings. That’s really all we needed in that moment, right?
So really this whole idea, this movement of moving from just the San Diego conference, and now we’re moving into having more regional conferences through Deeper Learning Global, just to demonstrate that this is possible, there is brilliance and expertise in every single region. It’s about how are we leveraging that brilliance, connecting those humans to each other to just continue to serve young people.

So my final question for you is around, because you do a lot of futurism work as well is my understanding, so you’re thinking a lot about the future. So, what are your hopes for the future of deeper learning?

Laura McBain:
Yeah, so one of the projects right now that I’m working on is really at the intersection of futurist thinking, design inequity and really how educators can see and use the practices and approaches of futurist thinking in education, because educators are futurist, we are shaping the future every day. One of the areas that we kind of tagline within our work is most educators right now, we have this … you and I have been at conferences many times, we’re like, “Educators must prepare young people for the future that does not exist.”

Now as an educator, I was like, “That’s insane. How am I supposed to do that? The world doesn’t even exist yet, and I’m supposed to do this too? It’s a little bit of a high bar to me.” We realized really ultimately, and I think deeper learning has a role to play here, is that we need to move beyond preparing young people for a future that may or may not exist, but really giving them the skills and capacity to shape the future in the way that they see fit. So, it’s moving from preparing to shaping.

I think one of the deep things that I think come of the deeper learning work, especially in this moment that I think is probably extremely important. There’s an article that came out this morning in The Atlantic about the end of English. You and I were humanities English teachers, and we’re seeing the evolution of AI, like OpenAI that’s coming up, that’s writing pros. Some of it’s good, some of it probably has ethical and bias that’s embedded in it, a lot of that. But I do think it really challenges us to think about agency in a new way of how we equip young people with a sense of self-determination and capacity to really shape the world that they need to see happen in the future.
So I think when I think about the deeper learning, I think there needs to be a rework of mastering content. In the 10 years that deeper learning’s been going on, we have seen a massive uptick in AI, right? Concept consumption. We had Khan Academy probably 10 years ago, now we have computers that are writing essays for us, that’s happening.

So we really have to think about what does it mean to master content consumption that we’re talking about, but create with new content, I think, is a really area of investigation, that I think the deeper learning movement really need to think about is what does it mean when we think about the content area that first competency has, is what does it mean around content, which I think is an area to really play into.

Then I do think this sense of agency is probably really, really important. One of the things that we think about within the future is that while we may not predict it, we can get better and anticipating and seeing the signals and seeing how the world can unfold.

One of the things that I think is really interesting about futurist work is what we call trend casting, which is looking backwards and forwards and seeing how trends unfold. One of them being emerging technology is a trend, right? I would say economic injustice is a trend, all these things that are happening in the world.

I think one of the areas that we get excited by, which is really a high-level of agency, is equipping educators and young people with the capacity to start seeing signals, to start seeing how the world is changing so that the future doesn’t happen to them. That is the type of thing that I think deeper learning can help us do.

When we’re talking about learning to learn, we’re talking about agency, but I think futurist thinking and this connection to agency is really important, is allowing people to have the skillsets and the capacity to see the future, so that they’re developing the careers of the future, not just getting ready for the job that’s going to come at them.

10 years ago, we were telling educators that everyone needs to be a coder. I am sitting here in Silicon Valley, that may or may not be the case anymore given the way that technology is moving. So, I think deeper learning has this capacity to really help young people think about how they really play with content and interrogate content actually, because if computers are creating the content, what is our role? I think our role was around interrogating the content that gets created through these massive technologies, that has a role that critical thinking and deeper learning has to play.
Then of course, really helping people, young people in particular create. The power of creation and the power of creating something that did not exist before gives people, I think everyone, whether a young person or educator, the feeling that you have some power. In a world that’s radically changing in this vocal world that we call, I think tapping into your own capacity and belief system, that you actually have a voice and how this future will unfold and you actually have the capacity to shape it is not just a deeper learning question, it’s an education question. I think the deeper learning community in particular is actually quite poised to play a role in that.

Michelle Pledger:
Whew. Oh my goodness. There’s so much there that we’re going to probably have a part two that’s focused just on the futurism and the intersection of design and equity in the future. Wow, you have my mind racing right now of thinking about what does that look like? What could that mean? And what types of workshop, deep dives experiences would you want to make sure are happening at a Deeper Learning Conference?

But I just want to thank you so much for all of your time, Laura. Side note to everyone here. Laura has just been an integral part of where I am today, because she was believing in me way back when, when I wasn’t even believing in myself, and I was just really trusting in her belief of me to get some things going. You opened so many doors for me, Laura, and I’m so grateful. I really appreciate you taking the time to just chat a little bit about this past decade of deeper learning, and I hope we get to hear more from you soon.

Laura McBain:
Awesome. I love you, Michelle, and I’m so proud of the work y’all are doing. It’s really cool to see this work, and you living in the world in such brave and bold ways. So it’s such an honor, and I’m excited for what y’all cook up.

Michelle Pledger:
Thank you, friend. Until next time. Bye-bye.

Laura McBain:
Bye.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Michelle Pledger and Laura McBain for this interview. There are links to lots of great resources in the show notes. Thanks for listening.