The origin story

A few years ago, when we were building Revolution School, ’s book Who You Know and her own research at the Christensen Institute aided design and thinking. The concepts, tools, and stories contributed to the structure of our school’s learning, how we intentionally around durable relationships, and how we sought to expose the hidden architecture of opportunity. Her work lit a path for mine long before my own book existed.

So when Julia became an early reader and reviewer of People-Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human, and then immediately connected me with , it was like a thread pulling taut.

Stephanie’s newest book How We Thrive was born from a feeling most of us recognize: the overwhelm and disengagement that has quietly swallowed learning whole. Her answer isn’t a new framework, it’s a return. Learners are full human bodies, not minds to be managed. Schools and systems should be designed around what we actually know about humans not around what’s convenient to measure.

Julia saw the alignment before the books were even out. She saw our resonant messages threaded with the concepts of embodied learning and human connection.

Stephanie’s work is around this concept of what she calls re-humaning, a term I adore and one that resonates deeply. People-Based Learning is ancient, it’s how we started, it’s learning in intergenerational spaces, learning with and through others. It is learning not in our individual siloes, the way schools and work set us up to do, but by engaging with and through each other.

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People-Based Learning is ancient. It’s how we (humanity!) started - intergenerational, contextual. It’s thinking alongside others, exploring where ideas catch or are suspended, it’s an orientation to the collective wisdom and connection that happens when we learn together. It is NOT in the individual silos that school and work have spent decades perfecting.

Check out the video and let me know how it landed.

I might want to do more of these Substack Lives. Would you show up?

Leave a comment

Speaking of LIVES, I hope you can join for the next live event next Tuesday. ⬇️

A Community Experience with Ness Labs

The Future of Learning is Human

When: May 26 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET.

Where: FREE. Click here to register. This will also be recorded.

I’ve spent the past several many1 years studying a simple question: why does some learning stick, and some just… doesn’t?

What I’ve found is that the difference often isn’t the content, but the context. Learning that is personal, social, and slightly unpredictable tends to be more meaningful and more durable.

In this session, I’ll introduce a simple model: Connect, Reflect, Affect, and invite you into a few lightweight experiments to explore what changes when learning moves through people instead of staying in your head.

This session is designed to be interactive, reflective, and practical. You’ll leave not with more information, but with a small shift you can try right away.

Based on: People-Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human

As far back as I can remember, as soon as they could hold scissors, fold paper, press clay, every holiday brought something handmade. Maybe it arose because of all of the art supplies in our house, or their interest in making things with paper - both are true. But no one taught them to do this, it just arose, the way the best rituals do. And now, that is what happens.

Now those gifts are scattered around our house like little time capsules. Clay flowers. Origami animals and their babies.

A drawing of our family, all with very distinct belly buttons - a phase my oldest went through. That one is in a frame on the wall.

One of my favorites was a note of my husband’s favorite things at the time, which included broccoli, or the one where they apologized for the expression on the portrait they drew of him.

Some of these objects are more than a decade old, all of them are still here.

Mother’s Day is one of those holidays that can feel manufactured, Hallmark-shaped, a little obligatory and not always happy for everyone. But every year, these gifts remind me why we pause…to mark something.

I love the idea that a gift can disclose itself over time. That a gesture, a small object, a phrase can accrue meaning until one day you find yourself holding it differently.

The clay flowers my kids made are less delicate now than they once seemed. The origami has started to soften at the folds. But the young men who made them, now both taller than me, still make things every holiday.

Maybe that’s what these small objects carry: not just the moment they were made, but all the moments since. The hands that made them, growing.

Rebecca Solnit has written that mothering might be better understood as a verb, something done again and again, often without knowing how or whether it will be received. These handmade gifts feel like that to me. Not proof of anything, just evidence of the ongoing practice.

Before we start, a quick check. Answer honestly (just to yourself, no grades!):

• Do you tend to speak for yourself, not for others?

• Do you think analytically, breaking things into parts?

• Do you believe in free will?

• Do you take personal responsibility for your actions?

If you answered yes to most of those, you likely fit the WEIRD profile. And so, probably, does your picture of what good teaching and learning looks like.

The Big Idea

In 2010, researchers Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan reviewed global databases of behavioral science studies and found something that should have stopped us cold. People from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies (aka WEIRD) represent roughly 80 percent of study participants in behavioral research, but only about 12 percent of the world’s population.

And if you are doing good research, that alone would be a problem.

But here’s the deeper issue: on many psychological measures, WEIRD people are actually the outliers.

That means we built the science of human behavior on the outliers.

Put clearly: The science of learning, how memory works, what motivation looks like, how people respond to feedback, rests substantially on WEIRD samples: mostly American college students, often psychology majors earning course credit.

So when we say “students learn better when they have autonomy” or “feedback should be specific and timely,” we might be right. Or we might be right for a particular kind of learner, shaped by a particular culture, operating under particular assumptions about what a self even is.

The non-WEIRD majority identifies more strongly with family, tribe, and community. They think more holistically. They take responsibility for what their group does, not just what they do individually. The individual as the unit of learning is not a universal assumption. For most of human history, it wasn’t even a common one.

And yet we keep building systems as though it is.

Consider self-directed learning, arguably the most celebrated idea in progressive education. Give learners agency and let them drive, trusting in their intrinsic motivation. Questioning it can feel almost heretical in certain circles. But self-directed learning is a deeply WEIRD idea. It assumes the individual as the engine of their own development, that autonomy is universally motivating, that charting your own course is how growth works.

I’ve spent years arguing that the most transformative learning happens through people, through relationships, proximity, and community rather than content alone. That’s the core argument of People-Based Learning.

But here’s what I’ve had to sit with: the science I’ve drawn on to make that argument was largely built on WEIRD samples.

So the question I can’t entirely answer is this: does People-Based Learning work because of something universal about human sociality? Or does it work because it resonates with Western learners who’ve been trained to think of growth as an individual project?

I hold that question genuinely, not rhetorically.

I’ve been digging into a reframe lately that relates to this. The field’s response to WEIRD-skewed research has mostly been to call for more inclusion, to welcome a wider range of learners into existing frameworks.

But welcoming still assumes a center. It keeps the original model and adds a door, “Come on in!”

That’s not the same thing as designing differently.

Designing for range starts from a different premise entirely: that variation isn’t a problem to accommodate. It’s the actual condition you’re designing for. The range of how people learn, collectively or individually, through doing or through reflection, with a co-pilot or alone, isn’t deviation from the norm. It’s the norm. We just built our defaults around one end of it and called everything else a learning challenge.

That realization should feel obvious in retrospect. It usually does, once you see it. The question is why it took this long, and what we’ve been designing in the meantime.

Making Big Ideas Usable

This isn’t a call to distrust research. It’s a call to stop treating WEIRD findings as neutral defaults and start treating range as the design brief.

In practice, that means something different from being more inclusive. It means we shouldn’t build a default and add options. How can we infuse the variation in from the start? If your workshop assumes individual reflection, you haven’t designed for range. You’ve designed for one kind of thinker and left room for others to adapt.

We also have to ask, inquire, dig in to knowing and seeing and hearing peop[pe. How do people in this room right now prefer to receive recognition, publicly or privately, individually or as a group? What does accountability feel like to them? You’ll get answers that don’t fit your model, and that is the whole point.

A way to examine if this is you: Find one assumption you hold about motivation or feedback or learning that you’ve never questioned. Go looking for the study behind it. Then go looking for who was in the study.

The deeper shift is this: designing for range doesn’t mean every learning experience becomes infinitely customized. It means you stop treating one profile of learner as the water everyone else is swimming in.

Most of humanity never assumed the individual was the unit of learning. We did. And we built an entire science, and then an entire field, on that assumption without quite noticing it was one.

“Two things stand out to me from these sessions. The first is that they don’t just talk about connection—they actually create it. There’s something about being in a space where you’re expected to think with other people, not just listen, that shifts how you show up. I find myself taking more risks, sharing ideas earlier, and actually learning in the moment. The second is that everything is small enough to try right away. I don’t leave with a list of things I should do someday—I leave with one thing I can try tomorrow. And that has made all the difference.”

— Sara, a School of Thought participant

“I work in a setting where we’re constantly being given new strategies, new frameworks, new initiatives. What’s different here is that this doesn’t feel like another layer to add. It feels like a return to something more human, more intuitive, but also more intentional. I’ve started to notice how much of learning actually happens in the in-between moments, and now I’m designing for those. It’s changed how I run meetings, how I start classes, even how I listen.”

— Frances, an Educator

This month, we’re choosing to keep learning with and through people.

I am hearing versions of the same comments:

“I have ideas, but I’m not sure where to try them.”
“I leave inspired, but then…nothing changes.”
“I want to feel connected to my work again.”

So this month, I’m opening a few spaces to practice People-Based Learning together where we will connect, reflect, and try things in the company of others.

For learning to stick, it can’t just be a solo experience, it has to move between us.

Without further ado, here are a few ways to join us this May:

🎥 A Live Conversation

Returning to the Art & Science of Being Human
with and

When: Wednesday, May 20th | 1:00–1:30 PM ET
Where: LinkedIn Live and recording

We spend so much time optimizing for efficiency, outcomes, and scale.

But what does it look like to return to something more fundamental ~ to relationships, to meaning, to the ways we actually learn and grow as humans?

This will be a short, live conversation about what it means to design for that in schools, in work, and in life.

Come listen, or come pop into the comments and think with us.

🌱 A Community Experience with Ness Labs

The Future of Learning is Human

When: May 26 | 12:00–1:00 PM ET.
Where: FREE. Click here to register. This will be recorded.

Dr. Anne Laure LeCunff is a neuroscientist who has built a community around mindful productivity, how to make growth and goals more human. This webinar is offered with Ness Labs, the online gathering space she has co-created with people around the world.

This experience will focus on the fact that I’ve spent the past few years studying a simple question: why does some learning stick, and some just… doesn’t?

What I’ve found is that the difference often isn’t the content, but the context. Learning that is personal, social, and slightly unpredictable tends to be more meaningful and more durable.

In this session, I’ll introduce a simple model: Connect, Reflect, Affect, and invite you into a few lightweight experiments to explore what changes when learning moves through people instead of staying in your head.

This session is designed to be interactive, reflective, and practical. You’ll leave not with more information, but with a small shift you can try right away.

📘 Based on my recently published book: People-Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human

However, wherever and whenever you can just show up, please do!

Come learn with and through other people, and see what happens. Because the future of learning isn’t just human, it’s shared, responsive, and alive between us.

Subscribe now

Ernest Shackleton showed up in story as an illustration of what People-Based Learning can look like when you design a team around it. His is a dramatic story of survival in the coldest place on earth, Antarctica. But the reason it had such a pull was because it’s clear that Shackleton understood something about the deep value of human differences that we’re still struggling to fully act on today.

I’d explain it this way: Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctica expedition is famous for the wrong reason. People remember that everyone survived, and they don’t ask why.

He didn’t hire the best crew for Antarctica. He didn’t optimize for the obvious traits, like physical fitness, navigational skill, cold tolerance. He built something so much weirder and more deliberate: a team with range. A team that could benefit and learn from one another. The qualities were things like those who could tolerate boredom, noticed subtle shifts in ice and weather, who could keep others steady when everything felt like it was collapsing.

In Antarctica, survival wasn’t about having the right kind of person. It was about having the right mix of ways of being, at the right moment.

Same humans. Different environment. Different value.

We don’t do this in schools. We build for one mode, and then call the rest a problem or a disorder or a delay…

I think about this when I recall stories about my younger son.

When he was little, he experienced the world intensely. Everything was noticed ~ smells, sounds, textures, sunlight. Everything came in HOT.

He once summarized his situation with devastating economy: “I hate mustard more than baths and the sun.”

It would have been easy to tell a story about sensitivity as a problem.

Here’s a different way to tell the same story.

When Beckett was three, my dad fell out of his wheelchair. Sudden, awkward, disorienting. Adults got panicky, rushing around, trying to take control.

But B just scanned the room and calmly declared, “Popi,” in a steady voice, not loudly, and then noticed what none of us did: every chair in the room had wheels. Except one.

He moved the chair next to my dad,“Take this.”

This was the same little guy whose nervous system got overwhelmed by smells and sounds. Two completely different stories depending on the environment.

The Big Idea

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with lately.

asks a thoughtful question in a recent post most people are not asking out loud: What if neurodivergence isn’t a deviation from the human baseline, but closer to the baseline itself?

Calculated Flawnesses of Neural Jazz - Neurodivergent Gantry

What If Neurodivergence Isn't The Deviation

What If The Science Has Been Backwards…

Read more

a month ago · 1184 likes · 239 comments · A.E.Larsson

The traits we label as ADHD, autism, dyslexia, which may include, but are not limited to constant environmental scanning, heightened sensory awareness, rapid pattern recognition, might not be malfunctions. They might be mismatches.1 Mismatched to environments designed for sitting still, focusing on one thing for long periods, ignoring most stimuli, tolerating low novelty.

That reframe is notable right now because it shifts the question from what’s wrong with this person to what kind of environment makes this way of being difficult?

I want to push further because flipping the baseline doesn’t solve the problem.

While essential to shift the conversation, it still seems like saying, “neurodivergent is the real baseline,” keeps us in a binary. And binaries are how we got here in the first place.

The version I am here for: there is no single baseline, there is only fit.

Different ways of thinking don’t exist in isolation. They exist in relationship to environments, tasks, and other people. Which means the same trait can be a liability in one context and a strength in another. Same kid, different room.

Ecosystems (environmentally speaking) don’t ask which organism is correct, they ask how different organisms function together under different conditions.

Most schools aren’t built like ecosystems, they’re built like filters. Can you sit still? Can you focus the right way? Can you demonstrate understanding in this format? If the answer is no, the problem appears to be you.

So we design narrow environments, and then we spend enormous energy “supporting” the people who don’t fit them. We treat the symptom while protecting the cause.

Here’s the part that needs pause —> We are rapidly building machines that are very good at repetition, linear processing, sustained attention, and predictable output. In other words: the exact traits we’ve been optimizing humans for.

Which means what actually becomes valuable is noticing what others miss, reading environments in real time, connecting across disparate inputs, responding under uncertainty.

«<pause, right???»>

These are the kinds of abilities that showed up when my son was three. And I am not intended to humble brag, truly. But I have been living in a story of education, long before kids, that questioned the way we set up environments for only certain ways of being.

The kinds of skills that don’t always appear on a worksheet, or, increasingly, in a job description, are the very ones it seems like we need right now.

Making Big Ideas Usable

If you want to do something with this, you might start here: Stop asking who is struggling and start asking who is this environment built for.

Look for who notices subtle shifts, reads people or spaces quickly, sees patterns others miss. Then make that visible instead of treating it as beside the point.

And if you have any say over the design of a room, a curriculum, a meeting, a team, build for range. Multiple ways to engage, to show understanding, to participate. Not as an accommodation. As the default.

We’ve spent a long time asking: What’s wrong with the learner?

Then we upgraded to: How do we support the learner?

Maybe the more useful question is: What are the conditions under which more kinds of minds can matter?

Because these qualities aren’t bad versions of good traits. They’re the right traits in the wrong room. The same rapid environmental scanning that gets a kid sent to the hallway in first grade, is what helps a surgeon read a floor that’s about to go sideways. The same pattern recognition that looks like distraction is what debugs the program no one else can crack, or finds the structural flaw in the building before it becomes a catastrophe.

We didn’t have a deficit problem, we had a setting problem. Because sometimes the difference between a deficit and a strength isn’t the person, it’s the room.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Virginia Apgar was an anesthesiologist who got tired of watching newborns die because no one could agree on whether they were in trouble. So in 1952, she invented a number.

Ten points, five indicators: heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, reflexes, color. Assessed at one minute after birth, then five. A score of seven or above meant the baby was likely fine; below four meant act now. It was elegant, it was fast, and it worked, in that infant mortality dropped. The Apgar score is still used in every delivery room in the world today.

I don’t remember the Apgar scores of my babies. They are taller than I am now, and it has never once come up. Those numbers mattered enormously for about five minutes, and then they didn’t, because they weren’t designed to. Apgar wasn’t trying to predict a life, she was trying to save one.

The problem isn’t the score. The problem is what happens when we take a measurement built for one purpose and let it quietly stand in for something much larger.

When a number designed to answer is this baby in danger? gets treated as though it might also answer will this child flourish?, that’s an issue. It can’t, and was never meant to. But we keep asking our measurements to do more than they were built for, and then designing entire systems around whatever they happen to be able to say.

The Big Idea

Satisfaction scores after a class or workshop are the Apgar of professional or academic learning. They are useful for about five minutes, designed for a specific and limited purpose, and almost entirely beside the point of what we actually want to know for the future.1

A mean score of 4.6 out of 5 may signal that people left happy. It tells you almost nothing about whether anything shifted, opened, or influenced.

Like this typical survey I found online, which sought to measure “effectiveness.” What would it mean to be effective in a learning setting? Growth? Change? Connection? Now look at each of the questions and think about how it fits your definition.

Do any of those questions fit your definition of effectiveness?

What we actually want to know lives beneath that surface:

• Did you continue the work beyond the session?

• Did you feel seen or connected in a way that supported your own learning?

• Is there evidence of change in how you think or what you do?

Without attending to those questions, high ratings get misread as impact. They aren’t. They’re a snapshot of short-term sentiment, which means they are useful for a few minutes, but limited, and not to be confused with transformation.

Here is what I’ve come to believe, after years of working in learning: Measurement doesn’t just fail to capture transformation, it can suppress it. When the only thing a system can see is satisfaction, that’s what people learn to produce. Facilitators smooth the rough edges. Designers remove the discomfort. Participants perform “engagement” rather than risk honesty. The institution gets its 4.6, and nobody asks whether anything real happened because the system wasn’t built to ask.

When we design evaluation systems that can only see satisfaction, we get very good at producing satisfaction and we stop asking whether anything real happened.

We were in the early days of building Revolution School, gathering people around the possibility of something different. We had the support of author and edupreneur Ted Dintersmith, and we brought him to Philadelphia for a full day: school visits, conversations, a live event at a local theater where my friend and ABC news anchor Nydia Han facilitated a conversation with him in a room full of people we hoped wouldn’t stay strangers.

The goal wasn’t to launch anything. It was to open a door and to notice and name what school could be, to shift minds about the future of learning, to begin in and for a potential community.

A standard eval form would have “worked,” in the way most tests do. We probably would have gotten a solid 4.6, with comments like “inspiring” and “wish we had more time.” Fine. Good for marketing. Not for mattering.

What I witnessed that night couldn’t fit in a box: a teacher who said, as an aside, I didn’t have a name for this before. The people who stayed after, talking to colleagues they had just met. The shift in posture, in tone, in energy by the end of a twelve-hour day.

We didn’t want a form that captured the event. We wanted to capture the shifts that might have been happening outside our circles.

So we built questions that could reach. The framework we designed to guide our questions mapped stages of where learning actually lives. It’s not a checklist about the a/v equipment, but a theory of what a room full of people and new ideas can actually do.

School of Thought Lab #2: Designing People-Based Learning Experiences

Friday, May 1st, 12:30-1:15pm This gathering is for paid subscribers of School of Thought. If you’re interested in designing spaces for People-Based Learning, join a 45-minute School of Thought Lab where we’ll experience a few ideas together.

Get it on your calendar by registering here.

Attendees will receive a list of resources for People-Based Learning shaped gatherings.

Read more

She said two words. “I’m okay.”

And I felt tears coming on. That was the moment I knew something unusual was happening.

The evening had started simply enough: a cozy online fireside chat hosted by Angela Stockman, who introduced us to her friend Firoozeh Dumas, author of Funny in Farsi, a first-person account of growing up Iranian-American that puts a human face on a culture many of us only know through headlines. Dumas had been telling stories from the book, and the digital room felt genuinely shared. And then, in the middle of it, she said those two words.

I’m okay.

A few people teared up, including me.

For many of us who grew up in the United States, Iran was introduced to us not as a place of people, but as a place of fear. I remember the stories coming from our tiny color TV in the corner of the kitchen in the morning, the one we only watched the news on. Day 421 of the Iran Hostage Crisis. Day 422. Day 423.

The numbers accumulated like something being counted down rather than up.

And now it’s in the news again. And here she is — not arguing against the narrative, but gracefully, persistently replacing it with stories and laughter and joy.

At one point she said:

“Joy is not shallow. To find joy during one of the darkest periods in global history? It’s profound.”

That stopped me. Because we tend to treat joy in learning — or in any serious conversation — the way we treat dessert: optional, indulgent, slightly suspicious. Something you earn after the real work.

What if that’s completely backwards?

Read more

A few evenings ago, I found myself tuning in to a Substack Live conversation that featured Priya Parker, Anand Giridharadas, and Jodi Kantor talking about Jodi’s new book, How to Start. (There is a link below to the recording. It was fabulous.)

The Live had the feeling of being inside a living room, not a virtual stage. Priya and Anand were in the familiar backdrop of their home offices. Jodi was at the New York Times, she even gave a little tour at the end. You could hear the long friendship between them, the ease, the questions coming from a place of genuine connection.

The.Ink

How to find your life’s work in the age of A.I.

When so many things feel like they’re ending, how do you make a start? That is the question at the heart of Jodi Kantor’s moving and eminently useful new book, “How to Start.” Kantor, an investigative reporter for The New York Times who has probed workplace abuses and helped ignite the #MeToo movement with her reporting on Harvey Weinstein and now cover…

Listen now

a month ago · 92 likes · 7 comments · Priya Parker and Jodi

At one point, Priya dropped a fabulous single prompt into the chat, as she does:

Where did you start?

(How would you respond???)

My response felt like it arrived almost too quickly:

I lost my job and found myself.1 (it’s true.)

I’m still unpacking that one. There’s a whole essay inside that sentence about what it means to have your identity so tied to a role that losing the role renders everything else out of whack. About how the ground moving, though terrifying, sometimes reveals what was always underneath.

There are so many restarts in our lives. How to start feels universally relevant.

What I know is this: the question, “What should I do next?” felt full of anxiety then. Too big, and too shapeless; entirely overwhelming. I couldn’t find my balance.

But somewhere in that conversation, Jodi named a different question and it gave me exactly that ~ just a little bit of “aha” balance.

The Big Idea

If you’re trying to figure out your future, Jodi suggests, don’t start with passion, or purpose, or titles, or even a plan, start with two things:

craft and need.2

She got specific, and here are my notes:

Craft isn’t “having a career in journalism.” It’s something more precise:

• Writing a sentence that makes someone read the next one

• Holding the attention of a room

• Listening closely enough to ask the question that actually matters

Need isn’t a mission statement, it’s something closer to friction:

• A conversation that isn’t happening, but should be

• A system that isn’t working for the people inside it

• A tension you can feel, but haven’t yet resolved

Yessssss. love this specificity. Vague frameworks produce vague lives.

Craft: The Thing You Can Do That Others Can’t (Yet)- the How

Craft is not your job title or your field, it’s the underlying capability.

It’s not “working in education,” but facilitating conversations that shift how people see one another. It’s not “being a writer,” but making complexity feel like something a reader can hold. *(I want to run with this one a second…)

It’s not..

• “being a salesperson,” but finding the story and communicating it in a way that moves someone to act.

• “being an author,” but making meaning where others see information.

• “being an artist,” but seeing and rendering what others can’t yet perceive.

It’s not being a ____________, but __________________________.

Craft is a constellation of skills built slowly on windy paths with turns and stops. And something Jodi said: Craft is usually unsexy for a long time.

But this whole framework relies on the knowledge that the reps matter less than what you do with the reps. And with all of this activity around AI and automation, this is essential. We are all talking about how jobs disappear and industries shift and entire categories get reorganized overnight. But no one can take your craft from you. The form changes; but the underlying capacity travels.

Need: The Problem That Pulls You Forward- the What

If craft is your language, need is the conversation.

Priya Parker shared her own personal story, which makes this concrete.

Growing up biracial, moving between cultures, she was often asked a question that never quite fit: What are you? Later, at UVA, she encountered a campus deeply divided along racial lines, students physically and socially separated, conversations stalled at the surface.

She didn’t start with a job title. She started with a recognition: There is a need here. And then a second question: What skill is required to meet it? She found sustained dialogue, practiced facilitation. She built something, with others.

And then September 11th happened and suddenly her craft had somewhere urgent to go.

Need isn’t something you manufacture, it’s something you notice. The frustrations that keep surfacing, conversations that aren’t happening.

Craft without need becomes isolated, even indulgent.

Need without craft becomes overwhelming, even paralyzing.

But together, they create momentum.

And this is where unpredictability lives … because no one planned the emergence of app economies, or Substack as a livelihood, or the particular role you might play in a world that didn’t exist five years ago.

You can’t plan your way into the future, but you can prepare your way into it by building craft, staying attuned to need, asking not what job do I want, but what am I willing to practice?

But there is a third element they did not name.

Here’s what I keep coming back to, though, the thing that Jodi’s framework points toward without quite saying: Craft is almost never built alone.

People are essential.

Take Priya Parker and Hal Saunders, the mentor she frequently mentions. It’s easy to treat that as a footnote, she learned sustained dialogue from him, but that framing misses what actually happened. She didn’t just learn a technique. She was in proximity to someone who had already built the thing she was reaching toward. She watched it happen in real time, felt the standard, and absorbed the judgment calls, the pacing. She experienced the way difficulty gets held instead of avoided.

That’s not mentorship as transaction, from master to learner. That is mentorship as environment. And here’s what proximity to the right person actually does, and why it can’t be replicated by a book or a course:

Someone models how to hold tension without collapsing it. Someone asks a question that reorganized how you think. Someone’s standard resets your own. Someone believes in your work just long enough for you to keep going.

People: The Connection(s) that Make Craft Possible-the Who

The word “network” has been so flattened by LinkedIn culture that it’s unusable. It suggests transactions and future utility. That’s not what this is. People include:

• Those who see your capacity before you do and cheer you on

• The room where you witness the thing you now care about

• The colleague who names your craft when you can’t articulate it

• The mentor who embodies the work

The “Who” piece is easy to overlook because it doesn’t feel like work. It’s got no transactional quality if it’s done authentically. There’s no checklist, deliverable or obvious output. But my advice is to slow down and look again.

People, your people, are the real, essential, and necessary part of how (and through/with) to start. The people around you don’t just support your development, they shape what your craft becomes or illuminate the need.

Which leads to a more useful set of questions:

• Who has already built what you’re trying to build?

• Who sees your craft more clearly than you do right now?

• Whose room do you need to be in, even at the edges?

• Who makes you more than you’d be alone?

We spend a lot of time asking:

• What am I good at?

• What does the world need?

Both matter, but they’re incomplete. We need a third question:

• Who are you with when your craft is growing fastest?

Because that answer tells you something more precise than passion or skill ever could: It tells you the conditions under which you actually develop.

Making Big Ideas Usable

Instead of trying to “figure out my future,” at this time in my own life, I am trying something smaller. I’ve articulated what worked for me would love to know if it sits with you. Here are some questions I’ve been thinking about:

What can you do now that you couldn’t do two years ago? What do people come to you for, even informally?

Where are people stuck? Where does something feel off, unresolved, misaligned?

Where might your craft meet a real need at human scale? This does not need to be mapped as a career move, it’s just a next move.

And a question I’ve been thinking about a lot: Who truly sees you? Expands your ideas?

I’ve been sitting with this people-based question. And the answer that keeps surfacing is simple, almost annoyingly so: I lost my job and found myself.

But that’s not quite right, what I found wasn’t just me in the last several years.

It was:

• A clearer sense of what I can actually do

• A sharper view of what the world actually needs

• And a growing awareness of whose company makes that work better

That feels less like an identity and more like a direction. And for now, that’s enough to start.

School of Thought Lab #2: Designing for People-Based Learning

Friday, May 1st, 12:30-1:15pm

If you’re interested in exploring this in practice, I’ll be hosting a 45-minute School of Thought Lab where we’ll experience a few of these ideas together.

It won’t be a presentation. We’ll move through a simple Connect → Reflect → Affect rhythm, try out a few short activities, and you’ll leave with one small shift you can bring into your own workshops or learning spaces.

Come ready to participate. Leave with something you can try.

Get it on your calendar by registering here.

Attendees who are able to join will receive a list of sources of inspiration and guidance for People-Based Learning shaped gatherings.

My own responses to the above. Feel free to share yours.

1. What I can do now that I couldn’t do two years ago:

• Turn lived conversations into research-backed insight without flattening the humanity inside them

• Design and facilitate spaces where people feel seen quickly—and then think differently because of it

• Translate complex ideas (from neuroscience, sociology, education) into visuals and language people can actually use

• Listen for patterns across stories, not just content inside them

• Create connective experiences (workshops, writing, visuals) that move from Connect → Reflect → Affect in real time

What people come to me for, even informally:

• Making sense of something they’re in the middle of

• Designing a gathering or experience that actually works

• Seeing what’s there that they can’t yet articulate

• Naming the deeper pattern beneath what feels messy or fragmented

2. Where people are stuck:

• Learning is still designed as an individual activity in a world that requires collective sensemaking

• Schools and organizations say they value connection, but don’t know how to design for it

• Assessment captures what’s easy to measure, not what actually matters

• People feel isolated in their thinking, even when surrounded by others

Where something feels off:

• We are over-indexing on information and under-investing in relationships

• We confuse exposure to ideas with transformation

• We treat connection as a byproduct instead of something that can be intentionally designed

3. Where might craft meet a real need at human scale?

• Designing small, human-scale learning spaces (4–7 people) where people grown minds in relational ways

• Creating visual and narrative tools that help schools and organizations see what People-Based Learning looks like in practice

• Facilitating talks, workshops and labs where people don’t just hear about connection, they deeply experience it, reflect on it, and act on it

• Building the PeBL Portal as a living example of research that includes actual human voices, not just summaries of them

4. Who was you with when you grew fastest?

• Lena Adams Kim who pushes ideas into personal and shared space

• Anne-Laure Le Cunff who reframed experimentation as a way of living

• Mary Helen Immordino-Yang who gave language to what I had been sensing about emotion and learning

• Those who showed up for PeBL conversations and made the work real

• The Cortico team who added structure to the combo of humans and machines

We don’t have a shortage of opportunities for learning, we have a shortage of learning that changes anything.

Most workshops are lectures in disguise. You walk in to chairs in rows, one person in the front, slides doing most of the talking. Twenty people trying to look engaged while quietly wondering how much longer this will last.

And then we go back to our lives largely the same.

This is strange, if you think about it. Because most of us, especially if you are reading this, care deeply about learning. We invest time, energy, entire days into it. We gather people together with the hope that something meaningful will shift.

And sometimes it does, but not always in the ways we expect.

The learning experiences that stay with us are rarely the ones with the most content, they’re the ones where something happened between people.

Some gatherings are designed to share ideas. Others to change what people do next.

And that second kind, that lingers, reshapes practice, moves with people, it doesn’t live inside a single session. It unfolds across moments.

Which has led me to a different question. It’s not: How do we run better workshops?

But: How do we design learning experiences that people can’t just attend, but actually enter, shape, and carry with them?

Because if the goal is learning that is sustainable, relational, and alive, then what we’re designing is something much bigger. Wearing the lens of People-Based Learning, I keep coming back to one simple, slightly uncomfortable premise.

If you are interested in going deeper, paid subscribers are invited to a gathering on May 1st, 12:30pm. Details and link beyond the paywall. ♥️

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On Saturday night, I wore wobbly shoes to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). I found a painter who matched my mood.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) are sharing a collection, A Nation of Artists, drawn from their own private collections, and from the coll…

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Sometimes our strengths have a dark side, and our weaknesses a bright one.

My older son had rarely seemed stressed as a child. He would say he didn’t feel stressed. He moved through life with a kind of cool, calm nonchalance that I couldn’t help but admire. He still does.

As a child, he would shrug when I asked. “I’m fine.”
Big project due? Fine.
Speech for 200 people written the night before? Fine.
Admissions interview? Fine.

Meanwhile, I am… I am pro-chalance. My son is anti-drama

It’s enviable in so many ways.

From the outside, it looks like a superpower we’d all love to have.

And yet, as a mom, I’ve always found it just a little unsettling. Not because I want him to feel stressed, but because stress serves a purpose. It’s a signal that tells us to pay attention, to act, to protect ourselves. Stress is like a nudge, or maybe even better, a flare that says: Pay attention.

What looks like competence might actually be undetected overload.

So the question is: what happens when that signal… doesn’t show up?

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All of our feelings have an evolutionary history, a reason for sticking around.

For my son, the signs never seemed to show up, or so I thought.

I had questions: What if calm isn’t calm? What if some people aren’t “unbothered”… they’re just missing the early signals?

Or put a different way: What if your body is talking and you’re just not fluent in the language?

It turns out, stress doesn’t always arrive as panic. Sometimes it arrives as… nothing. Until it doesn’t.

Join at 12:30 today for the School of Thought Learning Lab: Stop Learning Alone. This is a live introduction to People-Based Learning. We’ll activate ideas, create space to connect, and commit to an action. Register to receive the link.

The Big Idea

The difference between resilience and burnout is often just timing.

We spend a lot of time worrying about people who feel too much stress—the anxious, the overwhelmed, the visibly struggling. But what if the bigger risk is people who don’t feel it soon enough?

What I used to read as calm, I now read differently.

Maybe it’s not really the absence of stress, but the absence of early signals.

There’s a term for this: interoception—our ability to sense what’s happening inside our bodies. For some people, those signals are loud and immediate. For others, they’re delayed, muted, or easy to miss.

Their stamina bar looks full, until it’s suddenly flashing red.

Which means stress isn’t missing, it’s just late. And when stress is late, it doesn’t warn, it descends.

We tell people to listen to their bodies, but what if they can’t hear them clearly?

This creates a strange problem. Because we live in systems like schools, workplaces, even families, that are built to respond to visible stress, the loud version of it.

If you look overwhelmed, people help. But if you look calm, people assume you’re fine.

So when someone crashes out of nowhere, we don’t think:

“Maybe the signals were quiet.”

We think:

“What went wrong?”

We misread timing as character.

Making Big Ideas Usable

So what do you do when the warning system isn’t reliable?

You don’t wait to feel it, maybe you design around it. Here’s what we do.

1. Schedule recovery before you “earn” it

If your body doesn’t send early warnings, you can’t rely on feeling tired to rest. You have to rest before it makes sense, before you feel burnt out or detach.

2. Track trends, not moods

Instead of asking, “Am I stressed right now?” notice patterns over days. Your mood is a terrible data source, patterns are much better. When do the crashes happen? After social events, intense focus, travel? Stress often shows up on a delay, but it’s stored in our bodies.

3. Externalize the load

Put the tasks somewhere visible. Break them down and assign them time. Research on executive functioning shows that when the plan lives outside your head, overwhelm shrinks. Invisible stress loves invisible to-do lists.

4. Keep a standing conversation

Sometimes stress only becomes visible in dialogue. You don’t need to feel overwhelmed to benefit from saying things out loud to someone.

5. Build body awareness gently

If the signals are quiet, you don’t force them louder.
You just check in more often. Calm can coexist with accumulated strain. That’s the whole point.

The more I sit with this, the more I realize: This isn’t just a story about stress, it’s a story about signals.

Some of us live with alarms that go off too early and some of us live with alarms that go off too late. Neither is a flaw, but they require different designs.

Because what looks like calm isn’t always calm, sometimes it’s someone flying without instruments. And if we don’t understand that, we won’t help them until they’ve already crashed.

Further resources and tools beyond the paywall, below.

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“After reading for a while, I realized I didn’t want to just dip in occasionally—I wanted to stay in it. Each post gives me something I can actually use, and it’s changed how I think about the spaces I design, both personally and professionally.” — Rhiannon

“It’s rare to find something that feels both thoughtful and usable. School of Thought does both.” — Tracy

“I spend a lot of my time facilitating professional development and bringing people together to learn, and your work meets me there. It doesn’t just resonate, it gives me language and ideas I can carry into my own work right away.” — Luis

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Dear Friends,

I’ve been moving around a lot this month, into different cities, different rooms, different kinds of learning spaces. And I’m started noticing something small that keeps revealing something big.

In Los Angeles, I checked into a hotel and was handed a warm cookie. It was still soft and the chocolate was all melty. It’s was the kind you instinctively take with you, back to your room, your bag, your own little orbit.

The next week in Philadelphia, I arrived at a meeting. This time, the welcome wasn’t something to take away, but something to walk toward: an open bar just off the lobby, already full of people leaning in, chatter everywhere.

When you think about it, these were similar takes, but very different invitations. One says: take this and settle in. The other says: come be part of something with others.

One wasn’t inherently better than the other, but they were two different assumptions about what the experience is for. Which experiences offer conditions that invite learning to move through people, and which stay within individuals?

At School of Thought, I want to stay with that question to ask:

Are we designing experiences people consume…or ones they enter?

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This week, I hope you’re able to join something simple: spaces to learn with others, each one exploring a slightly different angle of the same question.

Wednesday, April 8th, 12-1pm

The Human Advantage: Why Human Connection is Still the #1 Skill for Success

In an era where artificial intelligence can process information, generate content, and complete tasks at unprecedented speed, the question facing educators and parents has become more urgent than ever before: What learning matters most in school?

The Village School’s Humentic Learning Series names three things that won’t be automated anytime soon: humanity, humility, and hustle.

I’ll be in conversation with The Village School’s Head of Learning Design, Dr. Elizabeth C. Dean, to explore why connection isn’t a “soft skill” sitting on the margins, but the infrastructure that makes everything else work.

If you’ve been thinking about what learning should look like now—at school, at work, at home—this is a good place to start the conversation.

Click here to register for April 8th, 12-1.

School of Thought Lab: Friday, April 10th, 12:30-1:15pm

Stop Learning Alone: It’s Less Effective Than You Think

Most of us were taught to learn like this: read it, watch it, figure it out.

But the learning that actually changes us tends to move differently. It moves through other people.

This 45-minute session is a chance to feel that, not just hear about it. We’ll gather, think together, and leave with something small but real:
an idea you’ve shaped with others, and a next step you can actually take.

This is the first in a short series designed around three moves:
Connect. Reflect. Affect.

This first session is open to everyone. Future sessions will go deeper for those who want to continue the work.

If you’re curious what it looks like to stop learning alone, come try it.

Click here to register for April 10th, 12:30-1:15

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If any of this resonates, I hope you’ll join us.

They’re both designed around a central premise: Learning becomes more meaningful when it moves through people.

And that even a short, shared experience can shift what happens next.

If you’ve been thinking about these questions, about what learning looks like now, about what still belongs to us, come be part of the experiment.

Hope to see you soon!

The session would end, her agenda complete, and she would just stay. There she was, answering, listening, workshopping, doing a quick demo, drifting in and out of conversation with whomever remained.

And we ALL remained, too, hanging out there in our little zoom boxes, revealing our art studios in California, attics in New Hampshire, bedrooms in Philadelphia.

What was scheduled as two hours regularly stretched into three, sometimes more. And everyone stayed. Was it the content? The people? The culture of art and sharing? The conversation definitely loosened and got messier, maybe it could be described as more honest. People asked questions they hadn’t planned to ask, or at least I did. Stories surfaced that didn’t quite belong to the assignment, but I’d say clearly belonged in the room.

By the end of the course, it would have been easy for it to dissolve. A final session, a few kind words, a sharing of our projects and everyone returning to their lives…but it didn’t.

Many of us are still meeting once a month (online learning never failed). We bring drafts and fragments and ideas we’re not sure about yet. We encourage each other in ways that only make sense if you’ve watched someone build something from the beginning.

This month, I was in Los Angeles and even met one of my online friends in real life, . Here is a gorgeous story she created last summer:

Take Wing

Birds of Los Angeles

I’m thrilled to share that my comic, “Birds of Los Angeles,” has been published by Crucial Comix. It’s about birds, but it’s also about human migration, and what has been happening in Los Angeles (and elsewhere) with ICE raids. I hope you will read it…

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8 months ago · 9 likes · 4 comments · Melissa Fitzpatrick

I’ve been trying to understand why that class became that kind of community, why it stuck. And the answer isn’t just that we’re human. We did something a bot or self-paced independent work can’t do. We showed up, stayed, and chose to be messy, not polished with each other every time.

I’ve been thinking about that class in the context of a much bigger question people keep asking right now, too: What happens as AI gets better at everything we used to think made us human?

We tend to answer that question with biology, or intelligence, or creativity, but I think the real answer is simpler, and harder:

Humans will win because of what we’re willing to do with and for each other.

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The Big Idea

shared a post recently where she reflects on a study I haven’t been able to shake. College students did one of three things for two weeks: 1. texted daily with a chatbot, 2. texted daily with another student, or journaled alone and their feelings of connection were tracked.

Connection Error

The human advantage we’re not leveraging

Humans make better companions than bots…but only if we ask people to show up…

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2 months ago · 18 likes · 3 comments · Julia Freeland Fisher

The full study is linked here if you want to see the source.

In the moment, everyone felt a little better - the bot group, the human to human group and the journalers. But over time, only one thing made a lasting difference: another person.

Which is reassuring, in a broad, human way, sure. But it’s also incomplete if we stop there, because it suggests that humans win simply by being human. That’s not quite what’s happening. The students paired with other people didn’t just have access to humans, they had a reason to show up every day for two weeks.

They were placed inside a structure where interaction wasn’t optional. And inside that structure, something accumulated - and it may be described as recognition or familiarity. The subtle shift from someone to someone I know.

The question in the study was not whether something felt good right then, it was whether it changed how people feel over time, and whether it kept going after the study (or the class) ended.

Only in the human to human condition it did.

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So why do humans win when it comes to real connection?

The easy answer is because we’re human, which is true and spectacularly unhelpful. Because if biology were sufficient, if being wired for connection automatically produced connection, we wouldn’t be lonely at scale.

Humans don’t win because of what we are, we win because of what we’re willing to do with and for each other. Humans win not because we’re better machines,
but because we’re not machines at all.

Yes, our brains synchronize. Yes, we are wired for connection. But wiring isn’t the same as building. Biology gives us an innate capacity, but it doesn’t create the conditions we need. Those, we have to make ourselves, through choices, policies, systems, and convictions.

And when we do, they look a lot like that class last summer ~ returning to the same place, with the same people, long enough for something to take shape. They look like messy conversations, pauses, moments where someone says something slightly off-script or gets emotional or shares something “else” and everything shifts.

A chatbot will follow you anywhere, true, but a human will surprise you, interrupt you, misunderstand you, say the thing you didn’t know you needed to hear. That unpredictability, the part that resists “optimization,” and it is where the learning breathes.

But there’s something else that is purely human: the cost of showing up.

A message from a human arrives from inside a life already full of other demands, deadlines, obligations. Getting a thoughtful note from someone during a hard week matters partly because it signals you were worth their time.

There’s a cost, in someone’s attention, their limited hours, and that cost is part of what makes it mean something. There was a cost for each person showing up in that graphic storytelling class, something that brought us together.

A chatbot has infinite time for you, which sounds generous until you realize that infinite availability might also mean infinite disposability.

Bots are infinitely available. A human chooses to be.

And finally, this: humans don’t just connect with you. They connect you. One conversation leads to other people, other contexts, other possibilities you couldn’t have mapped in advance.

A chatbot is a conversation. A human is a doorway.

Research shows that even people we barely know, weak ties, are often the ones who open new doors. A chatbot can respond, but a human can reroute your life.

Human connection won in that study not because humans are magical or messy. It won because the researchers made it happen. They paired people up, set expectations, created a structure where showing up wasn’t optional. They did something our actual institutions almost never do: they designed for connection.

Outside the study, no one assigns you a human. No one says: talk to this person every day for two weeks and see what happens. But what if we tried something like that?

We tell people connection matters and then leave them to figure it out alone, to “just show up.” But showing up does not work if you don’t have the skills and conditions.1

The problem isn’t that we don’t want connection, or we don’t show up, it’s that we haven’t built for it.

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Making Big Ideas Usable

Which is where I want to land, and stay: The lingering looks like magic, the connections serendipitous, but the conditions were a choice.

The moments that feel accidental, the conversations that run long, the people who don’t leave, the groups that keep meeting months after they were supposed to dissolve, almost always exist because someone, somewhere, built the conditions that made them possible.2

The researchers in the human/AI/journaling study didn’t hope connection would emerge, they engineered its preconditions. Kelcey didn’t stumble into being a connector; she built a room where connection was possible and then refused to be the first one to leave.

We don’t linger everywhere, we linger where something feels possible, where there’s enough trust, enough curiosity, enough productive friction to make staying worthwhile.

The goal, then, isn’t to “show up more.”

It’s to place ourselves in spaces where showing up might actually lead to something. To engage in really knowing a person, and ourselves. It’s to build lives, classrooms, and communities that aren’t optimized for exit or efficiency, but for depth and humanity.

The future of connection won’t be decided by better technology, and deep down we all truly know that. But what we need to say aloud is that it will be decided by whether we choose to build lives where actual people can still find each other.

Not accidentally, but on purpose.

And THIS is how humans win.

Not by outperforming machines at efficiency or scale, but by continuing to choose each other, again and again, in ways that require something of us.

School of Thought Live

Friday, April 11th from 12:30-1:15pm

Stop Learning Alone: It’s Less Effective Than You Think. Most of us have been taught to treat learning as a solo activity: read it, watch it, figure it out. But the learning that sticks tends to move through other people. The first in a series of 45 minute interactive sessions. Experience People-Based Learning in real time. We’ll activate ideas, create connection, and identify a small action you can take right away.

This session is free and open to all. If you find yourself wanting to go further, we’ll be offering two longer sessions that build on this experience, open to everyone, with a discounted rate for paid subscribers.

Register here to receive the link.

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A brain sits in a room. Information enters the brain. The brain processes, stores, retrieves. Repeat until graduation.

And this, my friends, is the story we tell about learning in schools.

And it’s almost completely backwards.

Let’s start with the period of time before you could talk.

Within hours of being born, not days, HOURS, newborn infants do something that should make every instructional designer question their assumptions. They look for faces. And it’s not movement in general they watch, it’s YOU.

When babies are born they can barely see, but they look for faces specifically.

And then, before anyone has taught them anything about social norms or emotional intelligence or how to make a good first impression, they begin responding to facial expressions.

Some of the first communication we might see from infants, a soft smile, raised eyebrow, a widened gaze…it’s all about faces. These are not neutral signals, they are information.

Researchers like Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington have found that infants aren’t just seeing faces, they’re already interpreting them. Babies, newly born, are already participating in something that looks a lot like a conversation. I might even suggest they are already learning. (People-Based Learning)

To be sure it’s clear, this is before spoken language and even before memory as we typically define it. It is definitely before anything we’d recognize as instruction. There is connection with other humans, on a level of connected communication.

Now here’s where it gets fascinating to me, and a little bit unexpected if you consider the way most have designed education. If a human being, fresh out of the womb, with no prior experience whatsoever, whose visual system is barely functional, whose brain is still largely unfinished, if that little person’s first instinct is to find another face and try to read it…

What does that tell us about learning?

We know we didn’t arrive as blank slates waiting to be filled. We’ve read all the quotes and stories and know those cliched sayings about vessels and flames.1 We arrive oriented toward other people, expression, meaning, and human connection. Which raises a question that might not even need to be asked (but I will ask it):

What if the brain’s social machinery is the whole thing?

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My next door neighbor Nancy just leaned out her door and waved. A guy I’ve never seen before slowed down on his bike a little earlier to ask about the plant in our window - it is beautiful and floor to ceiling HUGE. An older man I vaguely recognize who might be my neighbor’s father, stopped to tell me, unprompted, that he just walked down to the Schuykyll River and back. I don’t know him, or know his name at least. I also don’t know anything about his politics, his religion, or whether he thinks pineapple belongs on pizza. I congratulate him anyway.

I wasn’t trying to expand my worldview just sitting on my stoop. But…

And this all settles into me in a new way today.

Two weeks ago, I heard Monica Guzman give a keynote in Los Angeles. Guzman, author of I Never Thought of It That Way and a tireless practitioner of bridging disagreement, offered a metaphor that cracked something open for me.

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She called it the front porch versus the back porch.

The back porch, she explained, is where you go with the people you already know. Those people are your “peeps” as the older people say, your tribe. Those are the ones who nod when you talk, laugh at your jokes, and share your basic assumptions about how the world works. It’s comfortable and warm. I had a porch like that when I lived in the Georgetown neighborhood of DC many years ago. We sat out there with friends frequently.

But in Philly, and now, it’s different in a deliberate way.

The front porch, or in Philadelphia, the stoop, has its own culture. It faces the street, strangers pass, and unexpected conversations happen all the time. Someone might sit down who doesn’t already agree with you, and something shifts, even slightly, in how you see things.

Monica Guzman says:

“The front porch faces the street. The back porch faces the people who already think like you. We’ve all been sneaking out the back.”

Sitting here on my stoop in the spring sun, I realize: most of my life, my feeds, my podcasts, my dinner tables, happen on the back porch. And I bet yours do, too. So I started thinking…

If we’ve engineered almost every social environment to keep us among people who already agree with us, what is that actually doing to our ability to think?

The Big Idea

Here’s what the research says, and it’s both obvious and deeply underappreciated: cognitive diversity: exposure to people who think differently than you makes your thinking sharper. Not just more empathetic, actually smarter.

Researchers at Columbia and Northwestern studied groups solving complex problems. Homogeneous groups, those with similar backgrounds and perspectives, were initially more efficient and more confident.1

➡️But they were also consistently more wrong.

Diverse groups felt more uncomfortable and took longer, but they also outperformed. But the friction wasn’t the cost of diversity, it was the benefit.2

This is counterintuitive because friction feels bad. When someone pushes back on your ideas, your body reads it as threat, not gift. Cortisol rises and you get a little defensive. You reach for your back porch, the people who will validate you.

But here’s what Guzman understood that most conflict-avoidance culture misses: disagreement without disengagement is a skill, not a personality trait. And like any skill, it atrophies when you don’t use it.

Psychologist Peter Coleman, who studies “impossible conversations,” has documented what he calls the complexity effect. 3

The complexity effect: When we frame disagreements in complex, multi-layered ways, rather than simple us-versus-them binaries, our brains literally process them differently. Our amygdala, that flight/fight/freeze/fawn part of our brains, calms down.

The front porch is something you can learn to build inside yourself.

What’s striking about Guzman’s front porch metaphor is that it’s not really about grand political reconciliation. It’s about the low-stakes, accidental collisions that happen when you simply position yourself toward the street. It’s like doing reps.

The stoop conversation I had with my neighbor’s father I might never think about again. And yet, for thirty seconds, I held a tiny fragment of his joy. That exchange cost me nothing. And it is the kind of encounter my algorithm will never surface.

We talk a lot about “echo chambers” as if they’re a technology problem, but the echo chamber was here long before social media.

The back porch is ancient. What social media did was make the back porch so comfortable and safe, that almost nobody bothers to walk around front anymore.

The question isn’t whether your back porch is cozy because, well, of course it is. The question is what you’re losing by not leaving it. It might be your capacity for surprise, your tolerance for complexity. And slowly, the quality of your own ideas.

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Making Big Ideas Usable

The point is not to torture yourself with bad-faith arguments, sitting in places where people are arguing politics today. I definitely do not want to seek out conflict for sport. It is everywhere lately and so exhausting.

The point is to create conditions where unexpected thinking can reach you.

So my invitation to you today is to sit on the front stoop. Literally, if you can.

Find a public bench, a coffee shop counter seat, a stoop, a park. Go without a podcast or a phone for twenty minutes. Let your surroundings talk at you. Notice what unexpected conversations you’re invited into. And tell me about it if you do!

The back porch isn’t going anywhere, and it shouldn’t. We all need places where we feel understood and at home. But if that’s the only porch you have, something important is dying ~ our capacity to see others as multi-layered humans, to be genuinely surprised, genuinely changed, genuinely alive to the full range of how humans make sense of the world.

Philadelphia knows something about this. The stoop isn’t just architecture, it’s a commitment: I will sit where the street can reach me.

Which porch are you on right now?

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Opportunities

The Art of Being Human

If you are intrigued by this theme of friction, and might like to be part of an upcoming gathering on the topic, join and me this Friday, 3/27, at 1pm. Register here to receive the details and the link. And subscribe below.

The Art of Being Human

The Art of Being Human is a collaborative yearlong exploration of one of the oldest and most urgent questions: What makes us human?

By Jane R. Shore

People-Based Learning Online

Would you like to join for online People-Based Learning workshops this summer? The goal is to bring PeBL to life. They will follow the PeBL model of starting with Connection for all, and then the Reflect and Affect sessions will go deeper. They will be accessible, with reduced rates for paid subscribers and a few flexible spots.

If you’re interested, please click here to let me know your thoughts so I can bring this in a direction that resonates.

Learning is not the outcome of school. Learning is the means.

This comment itself raises the possibility that we may have spent decades carefully measuring the wrong thing. The outcome of school, she explains, is human development.

Isn’t that a bit of a mindshift?

Because if that is the real outcome, it changes how we do everything. Human development is what actually predicts whether a young person will like who they become, whether they’ll feel their relationships are worth having, whether they’ll wake up in their twenties feeling like their life is theirs.

And if that’s the goal, it rearranges everything: what we design for, what we prioritize, and what we measure.

It also raises a more fundamental question: What is school for, if not this?

And at present, from a People-Based Learning perspective, we have not been intentional about planning for human development, designing for it, or capturing it in our learning settings.

The neuroscientist who said this is Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. And she would know, her USC lab has the brain scans to prove it.

I had the surreal experience, just last week, of holding her words in my hands in a different form, as a blurb for my newly published book, People-Based Learning. She wrote:

“People-Based Learning reflects what developmental neuroscience tells us about how humans learn best: we learn most deeply when learning is socially meaningful, emotionally engaging, and connected to purpose. Jane R. Shore offers a practical, human framework for designing learning environments, in schools, workplaces, and communities, that support people’s growth into engaged, connected adults.” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Immordino-Yang had read my book and her words indicate that the neuroscience and the practice pointing in the same direction, a direction she knows well. It was confirmation, an invitation to keep going, an exhale.

Then, last week, I heard her speak in person at Learning InspirED’s Student Power Summit in LA, sharing her most current research, unfolding in real time. And meeting her afterward, it felt like the conversation had only just begun.

She drew a distinction between two kinds of relevance in learning.

First, there is the small-r relevance, which is when we tell students: you can use this in daily life. It’s fine, not nothing.

But Big R Relevance, the kind that actually rewires the brain and predicts whether a young person will like who they become as an adult, is something else entirely.

Big R is the felt experience of being yourself, thinking.

And it made me wonder: we’ve spent over a century building education around three Rs. What if the most important one was hiding in plain sight all along?

What if the 4th R is the one that makes the other three matter?

Immordino-Yang’s research, longitudinal, neurobiological, rigorous, offers a remarkable answer to that question.

Her team at USC studied teenagers from low-income, high-immigrant neighborhoods across LA. They interviewed them, scanned their brains, followed them for years, and then found them again in young adulthood and asked:

How much do you like who you’ve become? How satisfied are you with your relationships? Do you feel like you’re living a life that’s actually yours?

What predicted the answers?

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For a long time, this book, the one that may arrive to a few of you today, lived mostly inside conversations.

It was in classrooms where teachers tried something new and told me how it went. It was during interviews where someone paused halfway through a sentence and said, “I’ve never quite said it this way before.” I found myself in coffee shops, workshops, email threads, zoom calls and the kind of long walks where ideas get just enough oxygen to change shape.

Eventually those conversations turned into notes and posts and visuals and pages, they were adorned in bows of research and science and practice, they became suggestions for schools and workplaces and our lives in the form of tiny experiments and invitations. They were piloted and iterated upon.

And now…something slightly strange is happening.

Copies of People-Based Learning are beginning to arrive in the world, maybe to some of your hands and eyes and minds, which creates a mildly paradoxical moment for a book that argues something simple:

Learning doesn’t really move through books.

I mean, of course it is in books, it is inspired by books, and it is with books. But as my friend and colleague put it,

“Reading People-Based Learning is not People-Based Learning.”

For ideas to root and grow and build, they move through people. Books are just one of the vehicles.

The Big Idea

If you zoom out far enough, this has always been how learning works. Ideas don’t spread because they’re written down, they spread because someone says,

“You have to hear this.”

It might be a colleague, a student, a friend, a neighbor, someone simply walking down the street with you. A story moves from one mind into another, picks up a little momentum along the way, and eventually it looks like an idea traveling.

But what’s actually happening is PEOPLE are carrying it. That’s the real infrastructure of learning, which means something important about this book. It carries the fingerprints of hundreds (& hundreds) of people.

Teachers who opened their classrooms, young people who told the truth about how learning feels from the inside, about those who engaged in lessons in the world with them that could not have happened without another human. Researchers who gave language to things many of us sensed, but didn’t yet have words for. People in workspaces, schools, health organizations contributed their stories. There were artists and farmers and people building technology. People zoomed in from Kenya and France, from Hong Kong and London, Long Beach Island and Detroit. Friends and collaborators shared their own learning stories and kept asking better and better questions about the work we were doing.

And now…for readers of School of Thought, you can also HEAR the voices - quotes and stories and insights that contributed, fed the ideas and made the concept come alive.

Click here to explore the School of Thought Live website page that includes the People-Based Learning Portal.

Many of you reading this were part of those conversations, which makes this moment feel less like publishing a book and more like watching a conversation take a new form.

There’s a passage in the book that tries to capture this idea:

People-Based Learning is not a curriculum or a strategy, it is the human infrastructure that allows learning to happen at all. When people feel seen, invited, and connected, something shifts inside the mind. Curiosity expands, risk becomes possible and ideas begin to move.

Here we go.

Making Big Ideas Usable

And now the book itself is starting to move. Some copies are landing on desks or on kitchen tables. Maybe some will be in backpacks soon, waiting for a train ride or a quiet hour somewhere.

If your copy arrives, I’d LOVE to see where it lands…not just the book, but the moment around it. Where you’re reading? Who you’re talking with? How is it hitting you?

I would love any sharing of photos of the places where the ideas meet real life.

Because if this book is right about anything, it’s this: The most important part of a book begins the moment someone else enters the conversation.

Books carry ideas.

People carry them the rest of the way.

Dr. Elizabeth Dean reading at the Village School in Arlington, Virginia.

And here is another because she is just so great.

Share yours on social media because that helps us come together, or even just here, in notes, in the chat, dm me… or wherever you feel called to do.

Please feel free to tag me, whatever you do, so I can see where you all are.

#peoplebasedlearning #schoolofthought #connectreflectaffect

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The same book, lesson, information is getting passed along, but when a certain person is there, something shifts. Maybe you pay closer attention or take a risk you might not have taken otherwise. You might ask a question instead of wordlessly pretending you understand.

Sometimes it’s even subtler than that ~ someone remembers your name, notices when you’re quiet, asks what you think before offering their own answer. Nothing in the curriculum has changed, but the conditions for learning have.

I was reminded of this at the Student Power Summit in Los Angeles this week.

The gathering had been filled with good ideas, shifting bodies, the hum of people trying to take everything in for two full days. Then came the final keynote, the end of a schedule of back-to-back wisdom, youth voice, and energy.

Father Greg Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries, humbly took the stage. Something in the atmosphere shifted. Attention felt shared, not scattered.

The mood shifted from we are in a conference to something is happening here.

Nothing visible had been added to the space: no slides, no visuals, no dramatic storytelling setup. In fact, it almost seemed like he didn’t have a plan. Just a human being standing in front of other human beings, speaking from a place of depth, trust, and lived experience.

No new information had entered the room, yet the room had become charged.

Neuroscientists sometimes describe moments like this as shared attention fields: when a group begins focusing on the same thing together, their attention and emotional engagement start to synchronize.

That may explain what happened in that room. It might be one of the strangest things about being human: another person can walk into a room and change what becomes possible inside your mind.

Watching that moment unfold, I returned to a question that follows me lately:

How do people change learning in ways information alone cannot?

The more I think about it, the more it feels like one of the central questions of this moment. It sits underneath my framework of People-Based Learning.
It shows up in conversations about what matters most in schools and organizations. And it becomes even more urgent in a world increasingly organized around artificial intelligence.

Because if machines can deliver information faster, summarize ideas more efficiently, and personalize content at scale, then the problem of learning starts to look different. For a long time, the challenge has been framed as:

How do we get knowledge to people?

But if information can increasingly travel on its own, a different question begins to surface.

What do people themselves add to learning?

Watching Father Greg Boyle step onto that stage helped sharpen the question for me. No new information was presented, yet the learning environment changed.

Which made me wonder:

What is it about the presence of people that changes how learning happens?

The Big Idea

This was the very question at the center of a recent conversation I had with Isabelle Hau, executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and one of the leading voices developing the idea of relational intelligence.

You can hear the our full conversation here:

Hau’s work is both straight forward and profound: we have no shortage of evidence that human connection matters for learning and wellbeing. In fact, across psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, learning science, and human development, the message is remarkably consistent.

Human beings learn through human connection. We thrive through trust, reciprocity, presence, and belonging. Hau shares,

“We have known for a very long time—from many corners of science—that the thing that matters most for learning and wellbeing is human relationships.”

The problem is not that we do not know this, it is that we keep building systems as if it doesn’t matter. I would further argue that conventional schools get the order entirely backward.

Relationships are not what you add to learning once the important part is over. Relationships are often the reason the important part happens at all.

That is part of what makes Isabelle’s work land so sharply right now.

Hau reminds us, “Our brains are molded by human relationships.”

At the very moment that AI is accelerating into every domain of life, it is also revealing something.

“Artificial intelligence is helping people see more clearly what is uniquely human.”

If machines can increasingly deliver information, summarize readings, simulate dialogue, personalize feedback, and even convincingly present to care,

then the question is no longer just: What can technology do?

It becomes: What, exactly, is the human advantage here?

Hau’s answer is relational intelligence.1 And not social polish, extroversion, networking or even charisma.

Relational intelligence is the human capacity to form and sustain meaningful connections with others, to read context, build trust, recognize interdependence, and make learning possible through relationship. An essential part of making learning stick involves learning with and through other people.

As Isabelle Hau and I talked, five ideas kept lighting up for me, places where her work and People-Based Learning strongly overlap.

1. Relationships are not a support for learning. They are part of the mechanism.

Our brains are shaped by relationships. Attention, motivation, and memory all change depending on whether we feel safe, seen, and connected.

Learning is not just cognitive, it happens when humans connect with humans.

2. Presence matters, but trust matters more.

Being around people changes learning, but being known by people changes it even more.

“When we learn from trusted people, we perform at our best.”

A shared laugh in a museum, a conversation in a classroom, or the awareness that others are learning alongside you all shape the experience. But trust deepens that effect.

When we feel trusted and supported, we take intellectual risks.

3. Learning deepens over time through relationships.

Hau shared research connected to programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters showing that learning benefits increase as relationships deepen. (more here)

Not instantly nor entirely efficiently, but through time and trust.

Learning grows through the slow work of being there for one another.

4. Systems often want the outcomes of human connection without building the conditions.

We want:

Engagement… without belonging.
Collaboration… without trust.
Agency… without relationship.
Learning… without the human infrastructure that makes it durable.

But relationships cannot be optimized like a workflow, they must be cultivated.

5. Relationships are infrastructure.

Hau uses a phrase that has stayed with me: relational infrastructure.

If we took relational intelligence seriously, we would stop treating relationships as soft extras and start seeing them as core architecture.

Schools would ask not only what students should learn, but:

• Who knows them? Who greets them? Who notices when they’re absent?

• Who makes the classroom learning come alive and real?

• Who helps them make meaning of what they are learning?

This is where Isabelle Hau’s work and People-Based Learning feel deeply braided to me. People-Based Learning begins with a simple premise: learning becomes more inclusive, durable, emotional, and action-oriented when it is rooted in human connection.

Hau’s research helps explain why.

Relationships shape attention, safety, memory and motivation. They shape whether knowledge becomes action.

In other words, relational intelligence is a central condition for People-Based Learning.

And in a moment when so many conversations about the future focus on what artificial intelligence might replace, Hau offers a different lens. Perhaps the rise of AI is not only asking what humans can still do.

Perhaps it is helping us see more clearly what humans should finally center.

Because connection with others changes what and how we learn. In the presence of trusted people, we do not just receive information differently. We become different learners.

Making Big Ideas Usable

If relationships are central to learning, then the question shifts.

It’s no longer only: How do we deliver information more effectively?

Instead, it becomes something more fundamental: What kinds of human environments allow learning to happen?

The research Isabelle Hau points to suggests that learning thrives in environments where people feel safe enough to be wrong, known enough to take risks, and connected enough to think together.

Spaces where attention is shared, curiosity is welcomed and disagreement sharpens ideas rather than ending conversations. In other words, learning becomes more powerful in environments that feel unmistakably human.

Which raises a challenge for anyone designing schools, organizations, or communities:

How might we create spaces where people feel safe to think, visible to others, and invited into shared meaning-making?

Because information can travel almost anywhere now. But the environments where people grow, question, and change together still have to be built.

People-Based Learning (the book!)

It’s almost here! People-Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human will become available on March 18th. If you are so inclined, pre-ordering is still a possibility!

Pre-ordering helps because it lets publishers know there is interest in the subject, helps spread the word about the book early and supports my ability to share my work with you. Click here to pre-order.

A few days ago, my husband and I were in the car driving back from a visit with my mom, when an NPR segment hosted by Manoush Zomorodi about teens, anxiety, and smartphones came on.

Walker reached for the dial. “Maybe we shouldn’t,” he said gently. “This Jonathan Haidt conversation has riled you up enough.”

He wasn’t wrong. It’s not because I think smartphones are harmless. They aren’t. I don’t oppose phone-free schools. They work for some. I understand the appeal of the argument. I have two teens, I work with schools, all sources of information.

But my issue is that the conversation keeps collapsing into a single question:

Are phones causing the crisis?

And I keep wondering if that’s the wrong question.1

Adolescent anxiety does appear to be rising. That part is real. But the leap from smartphones arrived to smartphones caused this is far less settled than the cultural narrative suggests.

When you return to the primary studies cited, the story is much more modest. In one widely cited 2019 study, digital technology use explained less than 1% of the variance in adolescent well-being.

Less than 1%. And think about how much we’re talking about it.

And another high quality NIH study found that the direction of causality remains contested. Meaning that adolescents who are already distressed may increase their social media use. That is, the arrow may point both ways. ↔️

And the most recent information we have from a 2025 scoping review on social media and youth mental health concludes there is mixed evidence of causality in either direction, citing the methods are pretty weak (like self‑report) constraining strong conclusions.

That doesn’t mean phones don’t matter. It means they are one piece of a much larger puzzle.

And yet the simplicity of the story is seductive:

A technological shift → rise in anxiety → clear villain.

It feels tidy, scientific, actionable. But social science research is rarely tidy. I used to get so frustrated when I would lead studies and we had to include some form of “and there is not enough research yet to conclude x,y, z.”

But there is honestly no research here that has me agreeing with Haidt.

What struck me most in the NPR segment wasn’t even the debate about devices. It was a Gen Z voice pushing back. I thought…finally.

Maximilian Milovidov2 , a Columbia University student and online safety advocate described growing up with phone bans in and bypassing parental controls at home. Rules were set. Workarounds were found.

And then he said something that lingered:

“Fear-mongering won’t change anything. And nostalgic fantasies about childhoods “before the smartphone” won’t solve the crisis of meaning that many young people feel now. Currently, Jonathan Haidt’s theory remains just that. A theory. We need more longitudinal studies that will allow for definitive conclusions about the long-term effects of these platforms.

Above all, the real issue isn’t that we’re anxious. It’s that we’re unheard.”

When was the last time you heard a compelling counter argument from someone who is in the targeted population for the cell phone bans? And why haven’t we?

Because if adolescents are unheard, then the issue isn’t simply technological exposure, it’s relational exclusion. And that reframes this whole conversation.3

Developmental science tells us something remarkably consistent: learning and development are biologically social. When humans feel safe, seen, and connected, neural systems organize in ways that make integration and growth possible. Attuned relationships regulate stress. Belonging buffers adversity. Connection isn’t sentimental. It’s neurological.

So even if phones are not the primary driver of rising anxiety, they may still be displacing something biologically essential. And maybe the more generative question isn’t: Are phones harming teens? Maybe it’s:

What experiences are we under-investing in? And what would it look like to invest there instead?

The Big Idea

Here are some ideas that we might be under-investing in:

-Sleep
-Unstructured play
-Intergenerational trust
-Meaningful participation
-Shared problem-solving

But instead of focusing on these, the debate often narrows. We move from: “There is a small, context-dependent association…” to “Therefore, these are the norms we must adopt.”

And Haidt’s book comes along with neat little boxes that appear to be a fix.

✔️ Delay smartphones.

✔️ Ban social media before 16.

✔️ Phone-free schools.

Those might be wise choices for certain contexts. A school might decide phone-free spaces support its culture. That’s a values decision: This works for us.

But that’s different from saying: The science requires this.

When the research is complicated and the story is clean, the clean story wins. Especially when it flatters our fear. And fear always prefers a rule to a relationship.

Here’s the part I keep circling: Restriction without relationship doesn’t teach discernment, it teaches compliance.

It doesn’t build judgment, it builds obedience.

And when obedience is the lesson, secrecy is the homework.

Making Big Ideas Usable

Adolescents are wired for autonomy. If adults respond only with prohibition, teens will respond with ingenuity.

You cannot firewall adolescence into well-being.

So yes, ask hard questions about phones, but also ask:

• What kinds of digital engagement are harmful and which are protective?

• Under what conditions do phones amplify loneliness and under what conditions do they facilitate connection?

• How are we equipping young people with judgment, not just boundaries?

• Where are they participating in shaping the environments that shape them?

If the crisis is relational as much as technological, then the solution cannot be purely technical. Removing devices does not automatically build belonging. Delaying access does not automatically build regulation.

Policies can shape behavior, but cultures shape development.

And culture is built in the daily architecture of relationships.

And one last thing, the loudest voices in this debate are adults with platforms, bestselling authors, professors, keynote speakers. Their credentials matter. Their arguments are articulate. Their narratives are clean.

But adolescents are living inside the systems we are theorizing about. Inviting a few articulate students onto a panel is not the same as sharing authority. Listening here is data. My friend is doing incredible work in Maine around this issue.

The Source School • Jennifer Chace, PhD

The Story Behind Listening Schools.

I’m so glad you want to know more! School can be a place where we learn to flourish, together. It can be a place where students and adults alike feel hope and know they matter. We have some work to do to get there, but today it’s story time. (At the end of the post, I’ll give a preview of the overview of the phases of becoming a Listening School…

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6 months ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · Jennifer Chace, PhD

If we care about adolescent mental health, we owe ourselves more than a tidy villain and a satisfying fix. We owe ourselves a harder design question:

Are we building environments that align with how humans actually develop?

The danger isn’t asking hard questions about phones, it’s stopping there. Because if connection is the mechanism, then relationships aren’t enrichment, they’re the foundation.

And if we underinvest there, no ban will compensate.

After the paywall, subscribers will find a preview of a People-Based Learning Culture Audit: a practical tool for examining whether your school or organization is investing in connection as infrastructure or treating it as enrichment. It’s designed for leadership teams, faculty groups, or community conversations ready to move from reacting to redesigning.

If your school, district, or organization is wrestling with these questions, not just about devices, but about culture, I facilitate People-Based design conversations that help teams examine where connection is being built into the structure of their work, and where it’s being left to chance. These sessions are less about adding initiatives and more about clarifying architecture. More here: https://www.schoolofthoughtphl.comMore here: https://www.schoolofthoughtphl.com

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If you generously pre-ordered People-Based Learning, thank you! You are a FOUNDING READER, and I have a little giveaway and something for you. Just kindly fill out this form.

Before the world slowed down, before the pandemic paused so many experiments in learning, we were buzzing with big visions of what school could be.

We imagined learning spaces alive with curiosity and agency. Schools that felt human. Places with the hum of collaboration instead of the silence of compliance.

In 2018, I was part of a group that co-founded what we called the Innovative Schools Cooperative. Led by a school leader in Brooklyn, Andrew Ravin, and others across schools. we represented about ten newly launched, or just-about-to-launch, schools. We gathered for the first time at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where made a two-minute video, full of optimism and belief.

This was pre-Zoom. Pre-“learning loss.” Pre-AI explosion. What we did have was a near-relentless conviction that we were standing at the beginning of a new era in education.

Revolution School, Hudson Lab School, Workshop Middle School, Portfolio School, Brightworks, Millennium School. There were many different versions.

Our collective question:

What happens when bold educational experiments don’t “scale,” but still change everyone who touched them?

We came from far corners of the country, but we were united by a shared refusal to accept schooling as fixed or inevitable.

As I sit here in 2026, it’s clear that not all of those early school-starting experiments turned out as expected. Some fizzled. Some stumbled under financial pressure, leadership transitions, or the sheer gravity of legacy systems.

And yet, some persisted. All illuminating paths that still matter. The ones that did survive did not do so because they were perfect, but because they were some combination of resilient, adaptable, and brave. 1Each represented a refusal to accept schooling as inevitable, fixed, or neutral and an attempt to answer some fundamental challenges:

• A system optimized for compliance over curiosity

• Learning environments that confuse measurement with meaning

• Schools designed for efficiency, not human development

• Adults positioned as deliverers of content rather than stewards of conditions

• Young people deprived of participation in shaping their own learning lives

These schools, and the broader People-Based Learning movement, didn’t emerge from ideology. They emerged from friction - educators noticing that what we were doing wasn’t matching what we said we valued.

Which raises the question that still follows me:

Did these schools fail?
Or did we simply ask the wrong question of them?

We talk about “school failure” as if schools are startups pitching investors.
What if the metric is wrong?

That question resurfaced when I recently reconnected with Chris Balme — because his career is a study in this tension.

Chris was the founding Head of School at Millennium School in San Francisco. He later served as founding principal of Hakuba International School in Japan. He is now exploring child-directed learning through homeschooling his daughter, Wren. He’s also presently writing what I know will be a profoundly useful guide to creating thoughtful advisory programs.

His experiences sit in radically different contexts ~ urban U.S., rural international, intimate family learning. And yet there is a throughline.

The same questions keep coming up across spaces:

• What is developmentally appropriate here, not just academically impressive?

• What conditions help young people trust themselves as learners?

• How do we design environments where relationship, agency, and reflection aren’t add-ons—but the medium of learning itself?

That kind of continuity matters. It suggests this isn’t a model, it’s a way of seeing. Putting people at the center of learning is a design constraint. It forces trade-offs.

It’s People-Based Learning.

From my conversation with Chris, three key tensions emerged that align directly with the concept I’ve been co-authoring, People-Based Learning.

1. We need to move from human capital to human experience

Schools are remarkably good at sorting, labeling, and compressing people into data. Chris pushes against that instinct practically by insisting that curiosity, wandering, and reflection are not inefficiencies. They are how humans actually learn.

“I just love being an explorer… trying to get out of whatever boxes we’re lucky to notice that we’re in.”

This challenges systems that reward speed, certainty, and polish over sense-making and growth.

The bottom line: Schools are optimized for human capital.
The PeBL thread: Chris is designing for human experience.

If you want to see how exploration becomes institutional practice (not just a personality trait), Chris’s writing on school redesign is a good place to start.

Growing Wiser

A Better Story of Middle School

As many of you know, my second book (Challenge Accepted) is almost ready to launch, and we could use your help getting the Kickstarter over the top. We're 84% funded as I write this! If you'd like to help get this book-baby out into the world, check out the campaign…

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a year ago · 3 likes · Chris Balme

People-Based Learning identifies the same process: the moments that look inefficient on paper are often the ones that change a life. The challenge isn’t convincing ourselves that curiosity matters, it’s building schools and cultures that refuse to compress it.

2. From Instruction to Participation

Chris names something many educators feel but rarely articulate clearly: we’ve built enormous capacity around teaching content, and very little around designing conditions.

“We’ve overdeveloped one muscle of being instructors… and underdeveloped the muscle of being facilitators who are concerned about conditions more than content.”

This isn’t about adults stepping back entirely, or teachers disappearing. It’s about repositioning authority so learners can practice agency, contribution, and authorship while learning is happening. It’s about what happens when responsibility is shared and co-ownership deepens.

Chris writes about this in more detail here:

Growing Wiser

The Facilitator's Way

In 1991, a teacher named John Taylor Gatto gave a speech as he accepted his award as New York State Teacher of the Year. He began as one might expect, thanking others, acknowledging the many other teachers who also deserved to be recognized. But then he did something quite unexpected: he quit. On the spot…

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3 years ago · 12 likes · 7 comments · Chris Balme

3. From Culture as Add-On to Culture as Infrastructure

Perhaps most powerfully, Chris emphasizes that schools don’t become relational by adding SEL programs. They become relational when adults practice presence, listening, and shared meaning-making with one another first.

“If we start off with presence for each other… then we will build that for the students.”

Learning travels through social fields, not lesson plans.

Put another way, you can mandate curriculum, but you cannot mandate belonging.

Schools that treat culture as infrastructure tend to embed advisory, restorative practices, and adult collaboration into the daily rhythm. Check out the following:

• The Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility for restorative practices that are embedded schoolwide.

• EL Education for advisory as a cultural backbone.

• The National School Reform Faculty for protocols to structure adult listening.

What connects Millennium, Hakuba, Revolution, and People-Based Learning isn’t a shared structure. It’s a shared rejection of false binaries:

• content or connection

• rigor or relationship

• expertise or participation

• standards or humanity

Instead, these efforts insist that learning is relational, developmental, and participatory, whether it happens in a school, a family, a workplace, or a community.

We say we want innovation in education, but rarely tolerate the instability innovation requires. So perhaps the better questions are not:

Did these schools succeed? But:

• What did they make visible that had been hidden?

• What capacities did they cultivate that traditional systems neglect?

• What risks were they willing to take publicly that others only discuss privately?

None were truly “failed” schools. Students were deeply connected, seen, elevated to co-authorship in programming. What happened was really diagnostic. The experiences showed us where the system needed attention.

Seen this way, these weren’t isolated experiments. They were early heat maps.

And we are still using them.

These schools weren’t supposed to be permanent monuments, they were probes.
They tested what happens when you treat young people as participants instead of products.

Some didn’t last, but the questions did. And if the questions are still alive, the experiment isn’t over.

This post names the questions.⬆️
The Kindred Work section that follows is where you get to walk with them.⬇️

Paid subscribers have access to this carefully selected set of podcasts, conversations, and resources that extend these ideas into lived practice, voices wrestling honestly with participation, agency, facilitation, and human development.

If you’re looking for places to think alongside rather than answers to copy, it’s there.

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