The Company We Keep
Why the who of learning matters just as much as the what.
Click the ♥️ if this resonates.
In preparing for the launch of People-Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human, I’ve had the rare gift of sitting down with thought leaders whose work has shaped my own. These conversations will soon become part of a listening series, that I’ll begin to share as we move closer to the publication date.
But waiting has never been my strength. So, I’m sharing initial sparks now with this community.
If you’re not yet a subscriber, I’d love for you to join us. This is where the work first breathes into the world.
One of those sparks comes from Dr. Sarah Fine.
To say I admire her work feels too small. Sarah is not only a co-author (with Jal Mehta) of In Search of Deeper Learning1, a book that has become a touchstone for educators across the country, but she’s also one of the clearest minds I know in education. She has the rare ability to move seamlessly between research and practice, between the classroom and the big-picture systems, without losing sight of the human beings at the center.
When I first read In Search of Deeper Learning, it felt like someone had finally named what so many of us sensed but hadn’t been able to articulate. The book came out just we were launching Revolution School in 2019, and its research and stories mirrored the very questions we were living as we co-created a new high school, most importantly this one:
How do we move beyond surface-level achievement to learning that sticks, that ignites, that endures?
Talking with Dr. Fine (she asked me to call her Sarah) now, years later, felt like circling back to a companion who had been walking alongside me all along. As she spoke, five images surfaced, five illuminations where her work on Deeper Learning and my framing of People-Based Learning meet.
They are less steps than sparks, less arguments than reminders of what we already know in our bones: that learning is at its deepest when it is human.
1. Purposeful Work is Relational Work
Sarah spoke of students who knew exactly what they were doing, why it mattered, and for whom. A group building a tiny home for an unhoused family. Another designing a museum exhibit for children.
It’s not the hammer or the PowerPoint that transforms them, it’s the for whom. The work is braided to real people.
I was reminded of an old story from the jazz world: when saxophonist Sonny Rollins was asked why he practiced alone on a bridge for years, he said, “I was preparing for people. You can’t play jazz without them.”
Purpose is relational. Whether in carpentry or music, the meaning lives in connection.
Related Recommendation: From the Next Big Idea Club, 8 Strategies for Meaningful Work, from Jennifer Moss’s Book, Why Are We Here?
All so easily translated to schools and life…
2. Connection Unlocks Capacity
Sarah described a boy who floundered in math class but thrived in carpentry, measuring with precision, cutting angles to perfection. His ability wasn’t missing, it was waiting for the right conditions.
Connection, to peers, mentors, an audience, unlocks what tests often bury.
It’s the same in activism.
When Dolores Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers, she wasn’t teaching workers how to organize from scratch. The capacity was already there, decades of field knowledge, shared survival, quiet leadership. What unlocked it was connection: people realizing they had each other.
PeBL names this rhythm:
Connect → Reflect → Affect.
Capacity blooms when it is tethered to others.
Related Recommendation: Adam Grant on our capacity for learning. ❤️
3. Learning as Relational Spirals
Sarah often returns to the “instructional core” teacher, student, content.
But in deeper learning, that triangle isn’t fixed. It breathes.
A student wrestles with a poem because it echoes her life.
A teacher listens as much as they direct.
Classmates lean on each other, sparked into new understandings.
The image I get isn’t a triangle at all.
It’s a string quartet: violin, violin, viola, cello. No instrument alone makes the music. The beauty lives in relationship, listening, adjusting, responding.
Or maybe it’s more of a spiral, it curls around roles and content and anchors in people.
People-Based Learning maps this same terrain. Knowledge doesn’t travel in straight lines; it moves through the human web. We are all teachers and students, all the time. And when we center people, not just content, we invite inclusivity, durability, emotion, and action into the learning.
Related Recommendation: There is a great course on Coursera called Learning How to Learn, taught by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski.
4. Two Logics, One Building
Every school houses two worlds:
One, the test-driven classroom with its rows and rubrics.
The other, the humming spaces of orchestra, debate, theater, carpentry, where learning feels urgent and alive.
Sarah’s question was sharp: how do we bring that vitality into the academic core?
PeBL poses the same challenge.
Connection cannot be an elective. It must thread the whole fabric of learning.
This is no different from a city. The main roads are efficient, utilitarian. But the side streets, the markets, murals, conversations spilling out of cafés, are where culture lives.
What would it mean if our “main roads” of schooling carried that same human pulse?
Related Recommendation: Professor Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell shares how leveraging social networks can spark meaningful change, and why schools must embrace the power of human connection to achieve lasting success. Check it out here on Harvard EdCast.
5. Intrapersonal is People-Based
Sarah told me of an English class where the teacher asked students to reflect quietly on love, friendship, and loss, and then to share. It was not an elaborate project, but more a dialogue.
Sometimes, the “people” in People-Based Learning are all the parts of ourselves, in honest conversation with each other.
PeBL names this, too: reflection is not a pause from learning; it is learning. Affect, turning inward, then outward, matters as much as building a house or staging a protest.
It reminded me of Maya Angelou’s line:
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
To tell your stories, even in a circle of peers, is to become more human together.
Related Recommendation: Listen to this chapter about storytelling from one of the greatest storytellers of modern times, Will Storr. Chapter 2 of his book How I Write talks about how to tell a story. Fabulous. Check it out.
These five threads highlight a natural bridge.
Deeper Learning locates where authentic, purpose-filled, human-centered learning already thrives, while People-Based Learning makes the human thread explicit and essential across all contexts.