August 25, 2025 • 37 mins
In Indiana, a bold experiment is reshaping how students learn. Through the i-Lab, more than 150 leaders have joined forces to design a statewide apprenticeship model — one that connects high schools, employers, and higher education in new ways. At the center of this work is a breakthrough partnership with IU Health, which not only trains students but guarantees them employment upon graduation.
But the real story goes beyond jobs. As Mel Coryell explains, applied learning experiences become identity work. When students step into real workplaces, they don’t just practice skills — they discover who they are, what they care about, and what they are capable of. They learn to see themselves in new futures.
At the core are the ABCs of learning: Agency, Belonging, and Connectedness. Apprenticeships give students the chance to feel seen, to belong in professional spaces, and to build agency over their own paths.
This episode invites educators, leaders, and parents to see apprenticeships not as an alternative to school, but as a powerful extension of it — a design for opportunity, growth, and human flourishing.
Discover more about i-Lab Indiana
Listen to a recording of Mel and other key players speak on a panel at SxSW Edu earlier this year: Scaling Apprenticeship Statewide: Lessons from Indiana
Follow the EduByDesign Blog to explore the podcast topics, further.
And please let Phil know what resonates with you, in the comments.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Welcome to Education by Design, the podcast that
explores how schools are shapingthe future of education by
centering on values, embracingcommunity voices, and building
systems that work for everystudent.
(00:23):
I'm your host, Phil Evans.
Education in Indiana isundergoing a quiet redesign.
(00:47):
Instead of treating college andcareers as a separate track,
leaders are building systemsthat braid them together,
opening access points and exitpoints that allow students to
move seamlessly between school,work, and higher education.
At the center of this effort isa statewide apprenticeship
initiative inspired by the Swissmodel, but adapted for Indiana's
(01:10):
context.
It's not about replacing school.
It's about extending it.
It's about a new layer ofauthentic learning where
students gain skills, test theirinterests, and discover who
they're becoming.
In this episode, I welcome MelCorreal, who spends her entire
career advancing opportunity inpublic education.
(01:33):
In this conversation, sheexplains how apprenticeships
expand opportunity, not bynarrowing pathways, but by
multiplying them.
Students earn credentials,explore professions, and most
importantly, begin to seethemselves differently.
They develop agency, belonging,and connectedness, the
(01:53):
conditions that sustain bothlearning and work.
This approach challenges theindustrial logic of education.
And in an AI age, it insists inhuman-centered systems where
every outcome is tied to aperson, not just a data point.
And it offers a vision forschool that is less about
compliance and more aboutcultivating possibility.
(02:16):
Mal invites us to think aboutthe intersection between
personal, professional, andacademic skill development.
For Indiana, a new model foryouth apprenticeships is taking
shape through what is called theImplementation Lab, or iLab.
Since early 2024, more than 150leaders spanning K-12 schools,
higher education, businesses,philanthropy, and government
(02:40):
have been working together inthis intensive 10-month design
lab.
Their task has been to adapt theelements of the Swiss
apprenticeship model forIndiana.
I
SPEAKER_01 (02:49):
think the iLab approach is unique to the
country from what I understand.
And part of what makes it uniqueis how many different partners
are on board with it and howmuch they are trying to engage
the workforce side of thepartnership.
And so they have the ear of, youknow, Thank you.
(03:23):
take on students in largenumbers, because a lot of times
people think that the barrierwould be on the high school
side.
And there are some barriersthere, right?
Like the high school scheduleand meeting graduation
requirements and studentinterests and all of these
pieces are barriers for us.
But we find that the largerbarrier is just the different
(03:45):
industries' capacities to employmany students and to know how to
meet students where they are intheir developmental Yeah,
absolutely.
If you're an employer, you know,how do you manage that?
(04:07):
How do we acknowledge that astudent is on a journey and
they're young and they're goingto make mistakes,
SPEAKER_00 (04:30):
but also...
We'll dig into them a little bitmore in a moment.
You've really thought about theway in which you can create
greater opportunity for morestudents.
SPEAKER_01 (04:43):
Yes.
So we're in a place where everyschool now has a CTE pathway or
more and an advanced academicprogram.
But that was kind of, to me,step one.
Step two is we have toacknowledge that College and
career are not mutuallyexclusive.
(05:04):
We know that in Indiana, acrossthe nation, around the world,
when a student has a credentialor further education beyond
their high school diploma,they're going to be better set
up for their future.
And we like to pretend, I think,just the world, well, I'll say
in the US, we like to pretendthat either you take a college
(05:26):
track or you take a careertrack.
And so, you know, choose theone.
And if we tell you more about itearlier, we pretend that you
will choose it and you'll stayin it all the way, right?
And neither of these things areactually true about young
people, about our own journeys.
And so...
About a year ago, I reallystarted leaning into this
(05:46):
language and this frame of, weneed to show students how to
braid college and careertogether.
And we need to reallyacknowledge that each student is
a human being who has their ownjourney, who has their own
goals.
And the more they know abouttheir options and the more they
(06:08):
can see themselves in a future,the better they will be able to
make decisions for themselvesand navigate.
And that's really different fromwhat a lot of folks are talking
about in this space, right?
Outcomes are so important.
We're measuring outcomes.
We're moving the needle.
But each one of those outcomesis a person who has a unique
(06:30):
journey and who needs guidanceand examples in order to fulfill
their goal.
And so that makes scalinganything up difficult, but, you
know, we've had some initialsuccess with the IB program,
then with the early collegeprogram.
Now we're moving towards, um,we've, we've had this IU health
(06:53):
fellowship that's beensuccessful, um, which I'll talk
a little bit about here.
It's And we are working onreplication guide for that
health fellowship to use for aSTEM fellowship.
And for the STEM fellowship, ourgoal is really going to be not
to create a standalone cohort ofstudents in one specific STEM
(07:15):
pathway who take CTE courses andgo on to a STEM job.
But instead, taking our existingSTEM pathways and our existing
early college program and reallyfocusing on how do we get the
students who want to do both ofthose things to have work-based
(07:36):
learning experience that's highquality, earn dual credits both
in their core classes and intheir CTE pathway, and then
their next step would be afour-year degree in a STEM-based
field, and they would have thiswork-based learning experience
that could carry them throughthrough that process and into a
(07:59):
long-term career or the firststep career in a long journey of
discovering who they are andwhat they wanna do.
So our Indiana University HealthFellowship at Crispus Attucks
High School has just had itssecond cohort of graduates.
And with those students, beforeI was in my seat, the ambitious
(08:23):
goal at that time for thosestudents was, What if we could
get a bunch of IPS, IndianapolisPublic Schools students, to be
able to get a CNA, a clinicalnursing license, while they're
still in high school?
And what if we really ensuredthat they had strong work-based
learning experiences?
(08:44):
And what if we could get IndianaUniversity Health to guarantee
them a job upon graduation?
So you can imagine, this isambitious, right?
This is six years ago thisprogram began.
This program has been highlysuccessful.
It has not achieved the goalthat it set out to achieve.
And we're really glad becauseyes, these students by and large
(09:06):
get their CNA license.
But what we learned is theydon't want to work as a CNA for
the rest of their lives.
That's what they learn.
And so 100% of our students inour first cohort pursued
something related to medicine.
Some of them want to be nurseanesthetists.
(09:27):
Some of them want to be, there'sone young woman who wants to
work in the records office.
There's one young woman who'salready working in a pathology
lab.
Many of them are using theirCNAs to pay their way through
high school.
They've claimed that guaranteedjob at IU, but it's a part-time
(09:47):
position so that they can paytheir way through.
And so what this program thataimed for this very specific
outcome for students did was itopened up possibilities for
these students throughnetworking opportunities.
They could see themselvesthrough summer internships where
they rotated through differentpositions in the health system.
(10:08):
They could begin to seethemselves and what they liked
and they didn't like.
And so Now, when you ask me,what does the IU Health
Fellowship do for students?
My answer is not they get a CNAlicense and a job, right?
My answer is they get a CNAlicense.
They have a guarantee for a job.
But by and large, most of themcontinue on in a
(10:28):
medicine-related pathway towardsbigger and better and more
wonderful lives for themselvesthan we ever could have imagined
for them.
SPEAKER_00 (10:37):
Mel, this is absolutely what lifelong
learning looks like in action.
And it's just so refreshingThank you so much.
(11:12):
even in a comprehensive highschool, could be experiencing
their learning and development?
SPEAKER_01 (11:16):
This is an interesting question for this
day because I've been in areflective space.
I've had some conversations withjust some people around me and
people in meetings.
I'm going to come to yourquestion in sort of a roundabout
way.
So what I see when I look at theeducational landscape right now
(11:37):
is that The pendulum has swungvery far towards outcomes driven
education.
And I believe in outcomes driveneducation.
I believe in data informedeverything.
We have to know what's happeningin order to move forward.
But I believe that.
the solutions that we seek haveto be human-centered.
(12:00):
And I think about, someone saidyesterday, it's the little ABCs,
the agency, belonging, andconnectedness.
And I think about that forstudents, but I also think about
that for adults.
I have done some research duringCOVID.
(12:21):
I worked with an organization toconduct some research of
educators and their mentalhealth.
And I did some work withco-regulation, with fuel ed, and
did some training around socialand emotional learning with
CASEL.
And it was so clear to me thatwe have in so many ways tried to
(12:43):
systematize human relationshipsAnd I do think there are things
that we can learn and thingsthat hold true when it comes to
human relationships.
But I think that sometimes inthe systematizing, we lose the
humanity, if that makes anysense.
And so yesterday I was thinkingabout the next step for my team.
We have created structures andsystems.
(13:07):
They are solid.
We are seeing outcomes, positiveoutcomes in some spaces.
We've seen our graduation rateincrease significantly.
We met our ambitious graduationgoal, we met it a year early.
SPEAKER_00 (13:19):
Incredible.
SPEAKER_01 (13:20):
We have these outcomes, but there are other
sort of blind spots, otherspaces within our work where
we're not seeing these outcomes.
And so my reflection this weekwas, what is the lever that from
a systems level I can flip thatwill empower, enable, my team
members in those spaces to seethe same kinds of outcomes that
(13:44):
we've seen in the spaces thathave been more successful.
And what I landed on, I justkept coming back to, it's the
humanity, right?
It's the humans.
And I landed on you know, thatwe all really need to be
coaches.
Like we all, like when I thinkabout my most successful team
members, they're able tocollaborate with teams and
(14:04):
schools by listening, beingempathetic, asking questions.
You know, I look back, agency,belonging, and connectedness,
like that's what works foradults as well.
And so I think, I don't know ifit feels like I'm answering your
question to you or not, but forme, it just all comes back to
(14:25):
agency, belonging,connectedness.
And even work-based learningcomes down to that, right?
When a student feels seen andthey're in a work-based learning
opportunity, That feelsdifferent when it's the person
who's actually doing the jobwho's seeing you, right?
When I show up to anelectrician's job and I put on
(14:45):
the outfit of an electrician andthe person I'm working with is
an electrician and they'rehelping me be an electrician,
that is just an inherentlydifferent experience, not just
in terms of skills, but also interms of my own identity, you
know, going into that space.
I think differently about myselfand I feel differently about my
(15:07):
agency, my belonging, and myconnectedness when I have an
experience outside of school.
But we need that in-schoolexperience too, right?
We can't, these things are notmutually exclusive.
I don't imagine a world in whichwe just start abbreviating
students requirements for coreclasses and pushing them into
(15:30):
the work world earlier.
I don't think that that is theanswer.
I think flexibility is importantand relevance is important for
students.
SPEAKER_00 (15:44):
I couldn't agree more.
And it's our agency and ourbelonging and connectedness that
makes us want to keep comingback, like whether it's to work,
whether it's to school, whetherit's to a friendship group, to
the dinner table, like thesethings are just so
characteristically human and sodeeply entwined in our learning
experiences.
And helping young people to finda connection to their learning
(16:08):
is possible and is And themeaningful way in which you're
talking about doing this, justshifting from a traditional
notion of what school is to anexperience where I can see
opportunities to leverage thislearning that I just didn't see
before.
I mean, the possibilities thatyoung people who may not have
(16:30):
necessarily had a nurturing homeor may not have had all the
advantages that other studentshave have.
you know, these young people areable to see themselves in their
learning and come to life in away that, you know, is
transformative.
SPEAKER_01 (16:46):
Yeah, I think that's true.
I think, you know, I thinkabout, I got quiet there for a
minute because there are just somany things I think about.
I think about that, right?
Like I think about the studentsI work with, you know, are
disproportionately, they live inpoverty when compared to their
peers.
the demographics do not reflectthe larger demographics of our
(17:09):
city on really any level in myschool district.
And, you know, so often I hear,you know, students need to learn
to be resilient.
And I look at my students and Ithink many of these are students
who've had to be resilient inways that many of us could never
imagine, right?
And I think about how, yousomething I learned from my own
(17:29):
experience as, you know, thechild of blue collar parents,
you know, I am a firstgeneration college student
myself, um, my brother and Iare, and, um, you know, my mom
did get, she got an associate'sdegree when I was in high
school, but in terms of a fouryear degree, my brother and I
were the first.
And so I think about, you know,my brother getting his degree in
(17:51):
aeronautical engineering and,um, When my grandparents said to
him, there's a job on theassembly line at Delco
Electronics in our hometown.
That's a great job.
You're paying to go to college.
You're not going to get a highpaying job when you get out of
college immediately.
We think that you shouldconsider just taking this job on
(18:13):
the assembly line, right?
And I remember that that was ahard conversation with my very
caring grandparents, right?
And I think about how In my ownfamily, by going to college and
going to grad school and being aperson who loves language, there
were times when my family beganto feel like I was judging them
(18:35):
because I was using differentlanguage or because my
experiences had been different,right?
And so I think about mystudents, and this is
potentially true of manystudents beyond my students, but
I think about just what a liftthat is to have to choose
something that no one in yourfamily has done before, that
(18:56):
there's just no collectiveknowledge in your family around
that experience.
I think about return oninvestment, right?
And I think about how we framecollege, and college is
expensive.
And for a family that doesn'thave a lot of money, it's maybe
not a great...
investment in terms of return oninvestment actual money coming
(19:20):
back to that family right and wehave families who you know
they've they've experiencedalmost it will become
generational poverty becausethey took out student loans in
the early 2000s and then did itweren't able to get you know a
job that paid the wage that theywanted to get um and so All of
that is very real.
(19:41):
And the need to end generationalpoverty is very real.
And people who live in povertyare having...
just as much of a right to havea job that they love, that
they're passionate about, andwhere they make a difference as
people who don't live inpoverty.
And so I think about just theways we potentially could limit
(20:03):
students' possibilities when wemake assumptions about what they
want for themselves or what'sbest for them based on limited
information.
Instead, I think you know,agency.
Let's get them the informationthat they need.
Let's engage with them.
Let's let them begin to be incharge of their own lives as
they grow up and as they'reable.
(20:24):
And, you know, let's see wherethat takes them.
I know maybe 15 years ago, oneof the things that, you know,
was what I was thinking about ineducation that I was sort of
obsessed with for, I don't know,a couple months was I was trying
to map out, like, what I...
know i can do or what i believei can do what i believe a
(20:47):
student is capable of what thestudent believes they're capable
of and then what each of usactually could do right and
that's i know that's sort oflike a deep and esoteric thing
but it's like and i do not knowwhat the possibilities are for
any student i can't know it idon't even know them for myself
(21:08):
the student doesn't know theirown possibilities either.
So how would we act in aclassroom or when we build a
program, if we were to justground ourselves in the
assumption that that's true, wewould build things very
differently than the way we tendto build things these days in
(21:28):
education.
And also, and this is mydissertation work, but we have
research that shows us without adoubt, that tracking is not the
best way to do business.
That telling students you are anIB student or you're not an IB
student, you know, you're anhonors student or you're not an
(21:48):
honors student.
We know that when we track, wehurt kids.
We hurt the students who arearguably most vulnerable.
And when we detrack students, Weget the same outcomes for the
highest achieving kids, butthose students who are most
vulnerable, they have muchbetter outcomes.
(22:10):
That rising tide lifts all theboats.
We know it.
We see it over and over again.
And a parent who has to make achoice about where to place
their high-achieving student,and sometimes not even their
high-achieving student, right?
Over and over again, they willnot believe that research, and
they will think that what beinga good parent means is getting
(22:31):
their student to be in a trackedclass environment.
To me, that's just anotherstructure we've put into place,
because if we really believedthat all students could learn,
And that being in a healthyecosystem of learning is good
for all students.
We would never divide them up inthis way.
But that's what we do.
SPEAKER_00 (22:51):
That's what we do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just want to point out theincredible empathy that you have
and others like you that areworking in this space.
Let's talk a little bit moreabout the infrastructure behind
all this work.
It's called iLab, right?
SPEAKER_01 (23:09):
Summit's iLab is the name of the entity that's really
leading this work.
The Richard M.
Fairbanks Foundation has fundedit and is one of the conveners
of the work.
And they work closely withAscend Indiana, which is a
workforce development arm of theIndiana government.
And so...
What they're doing isre-envisioning what
(23:31):
apprenticeship could look likein the United States and in
Indiana specifically, andthey're really looking at the
Swiss model.
So they've taken many, manyconstituents from education,
from the workforce, fromgovernment, over to witness the
Swiss model in action, and thenworked with all of these
(23:52):
different entities, IndianapolisPublic Schools included, to
pilot a program, Modern YouthApprenticeship, and to look at
the barriers to implementingthis, to scaling this, so that
it could really support studentsto meet the workforce needs in
Indiana over the next decade andbeyond.
(24:13):
And so for our students who arein those apprenticeships, a
student who works on a financeteam.
We have a student who works onan IT team.
We have students in differentplacements.
And there is this attempt tobridge from high school to
college.
(24:33):
And so a lot of times whenpeople hear apprenticeship, they
think this is a track, right?
This is a track straight tocareer.
But that's not really what theSwiss model is.
Students engage withapprenticeships early on and
then they decide do they want topursue a four-year degree that's
(24:54):
in like a traditional academicexperience or do they want to
pursue a professional degreethat is a split between that
work-based experience andcareer-based experience and so
um What iLab is doing is, again,looking at those barriers and
trying to figure out how toscale up this apprenticeship
pilot that Indianapolis PublicSchools has been involved in.
(25:17):
And they're finding that workingwith CEOs and workforce
partners, as I mentioned at thebeginning of our conversation,
is really an area of needbecause the workforce is not
ready for, you know, 10,000 highschool students to descend upon
it.
Upon it, there's capacitybuilding that has to happen in
(25:37):
that space.
And, you know, we know certainsectors are better equipped for
this and have been doing thiswork already.
And so it's no coincidence thatthe IU Health Fellowship is our
first big fellowship, whichthose are not apprentices per
se, they are interns.
And also they do clinicals.
But the health sector, has beenmore invested in a pipeline that
(26:01):
starts with high school andcollege than some other sectors
have.
But we know that cybersecurity,for example, is a sector where
there are thousands of jobsevery year that a high school
student who has experience inhigh school with that work could
potentially move into if theyhad the experience.
(26:23):
But Employers are notnecessarily equipped yet in that
field to take on a large numberof them.
And so for the iLab and CEMETSpeople, they're really looking
at that scalability and thatcapacity building.
For us on the high school side,we have to be involved in that
conversation, right?
Because we have to buildsomething that meets the needs
(26:45):
of our students.
How we have engaged has reallybeen piloting, trying to figure
out like what the needs are,what we need workforce to do.
Because obviously, there aregraduation requirements and a
student has to be at school acertain number of hours a day in
order to meet thoserequirements.
And so an employer who says, theonly way we will do an
(27:06):
apprenticeship is if a studentis there every day of the week
from 7 a.m.
to 10 a.m., that high schoolschedule may not allow for that.
And so that flexibility is key.
There's curriculum that theemployers are going to need.
So we have these careerdiscovery meetings that are now
(27:29):
required in Indiana.
So every student has to engagewith these in their junior and
senior year.
And It can be collegerepresentatives or workforce
representatives, but they haveto engage with community folks
who help them with their pathand their planning, which is
amazing, I think, and a hugelift for us, right?
(27:49):
We reached out to a partner,Junior Achievement of Indiana,
to help us envision what thiscould look like.
Thousands of students havingindividual meetings, which can't
be large meetings.
So there's a limit on, it couldbe a small group or an
individual meeting.
One of my first concerns was,all right, we're going to have
dozens of career folks coming inand meeting with our students,
(28:13):
career folks who may notunderstand young people and
their needs.
Career folks whose return oninvestment might be convincing a
highly qualified high schoolerto want to be in their career.
Career folks who may notunderstand the cultures that our
students come from, as ifanybody can understand anybody's
(28:35):
culture, but who may not besensitive to whatever experience
our students have had.
We have this at times with evensubstitute teachers who come in
and really don't understand howto work with an urban
population.
So we needed to createcurriculum for those folks who
(28:56):
were coming in.
We worked with our partner,Junior Achievement, to create
training materials for theemployers who were coming in to
meet with our students so thatthey would know what to expect
and how to engage.
And so just imagine that.
again, for thousands ofapprenticeships.
Imagine the interpersonal liftof all of this.
(29:18):
And the question of who'sresponsible, you know, I think
Summit's iLab, and I think youheard them say this as well, you
know, they are really leaning onthe employer carrying the
picking up their share of thelift here, which I'm really
excited about the employersthey've engaged because this can
(29:39):
be a really hard thing foremployers.
We were talking about this todayin a collaboration meeting that
I was in.
Sometimes I hear from employersthat their return on investment
is, again, a student who's inhigh school, meets with them,
gets excited about theirpathway, takes pathway courses
in that pathway, does work-basedlearning in that pathway, gets a
(30:00):
job in that pathway and stays inthat pathway until they're 90
years old, right?
Like this is perfect return oninvestment, like check mark,
like that kid, we really nailedit with that kid.
That is not what I believe is areturn on investment as we
discussed earlier.
When you engage with students inthis way, your pipeline will
(30:24):
grow.
It may not grow by theindividual students that you are
engaging with.
We hear stories of someone whosebrother or cousin became really
excited about what that personwas doing, and then they ended
up coming over to get a job inthat space.
I think there are some employerswho really understand the
(30:45):
landscape, and those are myfavorite people to work with.
So I think about IU Health andtheir COO, when he speaks at our
white coat ceremony every year,when we're giving students their
white coats as they start thefellowship, he says, every one
of you has an offer ofemployment at IU Health upon
graduation.
And my greatest hope is thatnone of you will take me up on
(31:07):
it and that you will all go tocollege and that you'll be at
four-year university and maybego to med school and you'll come
back to IU Health or you'llcontribute to some other
healthcare organization.
And he says that would be a winfor me.
I was a classroom teacher and anIB coordinator for 20 years.
And I know what kind ofenvironment influenced the best
(31:33):
outcomes for my students.
It was an approach thatencompassed the fact that young
people are learning theiridentities and that they need to
be seen and that there's roomfor inspiration and passion and
creativity.
And that when a teacher canmodel that they're happy doing
(31:55):
the job that they're doing andthey're engaged with their
content area or with teachingas, you know, just as an
avocation, I would always getbetter outcomes for students
when I created an environmentthat was like that.
When we reduce what it means tobe a teacher down to a set of
(32:16):
steps or outcomes, and wedeprofessionalize teaching, we
get a reduced outcome forstudents.
So how do we give teachersagency?
How do we, you know, how do weuse those ABCs for teachers?
Because again, we've worked sohard on systems and if you are a
(32:44):
teacher right now in a publicschool in the United States,
this is not my district.
This is, again, I've done, I'vedone this research of holding
focus groups and bringinginformation together from other
people who held focus groups,you are being asked, you're
being told to do many, manythings that seem irrelevant to
(33:06):
the learning that studentsshould accomplish in your
classroom.
And you're being asked to do animpossible job.
And sometimes you're faced witha choice between doing what you
know as a professional is bestfor students, what you've been
trained to do, and trying tomeet the mark with all of these
(33:28):
impossible asks that come frommultiple directions.
And what I learned as a teacherwas, and I don't know if I could
do this now because the worldhas changed a little bit, was
that if I could...
if I could diminish the noiseand really focus on what I knew
to be true about relationshipsand then show my outcomes,
(33:50):
people would sort of leave mealone to do the work that they
knew I could do because I wouldoutperform other classrooms.
which is not outperforming otherteachers really, right?
But I hope, again, that thependulum is swinging away from
this like machine business modelof education.
SPEAKER_00 (34:08):
Industrial.
SPEAKER_01 (34:09):
Industrial, military industrial complex education.
And like, I think there's also,you know, I work with a lot of
educational partners and I readsomething recently in one of my
grad classes about educationalpartners as technocracy, like
educational intermediaries astechnocracy.
you know, when your bread andbutter is to teach schools how
(34:30):
to crunch data and respond toit, then, and you're creating,
you know, evaluation tools forteachers and they're based on,
you know, your bread and butter,then we sort of have the tail
wagging the dog in terms of whatwe do in education, right?
And I had never thought of itthat way before.
And, yeah, And I love myeducation partners and many of
(34:55):
them are shifting away from thatmodel, right?
Like they're shifting more to awhole child model.
But, you know, sometimes I meetpeople who they've just, they've
swallowed the pill, you know,the miracle pill of this way of
thinking about education.
And I just see that as onereally important part of what we
(35:17):
need to do.
And so, yeah.
To me, the systems, that's a funstrategy game, right?
To create systems that allowstudents to have access to
things.
But what's so much moredifficult and more important is
empowering educators asprofessionals who can do their
(35:38):
jobs.
And when we do that, we willreally see those outcomes shift.
And I think about my work as anIB workshop leader for language
and literature.
And how many times, you know, Iknow that a teacher's wanting to
do the work that is, you know,that the research tells us is
the important work and thesystems that they're in do not
(36:02):
allow for them to do that work.
And so as a systems level leadernow, sometimes what I do is
block and tackle.
I don't really tackle people,but block, right?
Or buffer, I guess is thegentler way to say this or
translate, right?
And say, you know, This seemslike a good idea to you, central
office person, but here's whatthis looks like in
(36:23):
implementation.
SPEAKER_00 (36:24):
In the classroom.
SPEAKER_01 (36:25):
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so do you want to contributeto that dissonance for something
that's unachievable?
Or do you want to engage withthe people in schools and to
partner to figure out how tocreate a climate and culture
that works for students andteachers and school leaders and
(36:48):
central office employees.
SPEAKER_00 (36:51):
You've been listening to the Education by
Design podcast.
I've been your host, Phil Evans.
If you like this episode, pleasehit subscribe or follow and join
me for my next episode.
Until next time, keep onlearning.
Welcome to Education by Design, the podcast that
explores how schools are shapingthe future of education by
centering on values, embracingcommunity voices, and building
systems that work for everystudent.
(00:23):
I'm your host, Phil Evans.
Education in Indiana isundergoing a quiet redesign.
(00:47):
Instead of treating college andcareers as a separate track,
leaders are building systemsthat braid them together,
opening access points and exitpoints that allow students to
move seamlessly between school,work, and higher education.
At the center of this effort isa statewide apprenticeship
initiative inspired by the Swissmodel, but adapted for Indiana's
(01:10):
context.
It's not about replacing school.
It's about extending it.
It's about a new layer ofauthentic learning where
students gain skills, test theirinterests, and discover who
they're becoming.
In this episode, I welcome MelCorreal, who spends her entire
career advancing opportunity inpublic education.
(01:33):
In this conversation, sheexplains how apprenticeships
expand opportunity, not bynarrowing pathways, but by
multiplying them.
Students earn credentials,explore professions, and most
importantly, begin to seethemselves differently.
They develop agency, belonging,and connectedness, the
(01:53):
conditions that sustain bothlearning and work.
This approach challenges theindustrial logic of education.
And in an AI age, it insists inhuman-centered systems where
every outcome is tied to aperson, not just a data point.
And it offers a vision forschool that is less about
compliance and more aboutcultivating possibility.
(02:16):
Mal invites us to think aboutthe intersection between
personal, professional, andacademic skill development.
For Indiana, a new model foryouth apprenticeships is taking
shape through what is called theImplementation Lab, or iLab.
Since early 2024, more than 150leaders spanning K-12 schools,
higher education, businesses,philanthropy, and government
(02:40):
have been working together inthis intensive 10-month design
lab.
Their task has been to adapt theelements of the Swiss
apprenticeship model forIndiana.
I
SPEAKER_01 (02:49):
think the iLab approach is unique to the
country from what I understand.
And part of what makes it uniqueis how many different partners
are on board with it and howmuch they are trying to engage
the workforce side of thepartnership.
And so they have the ear of, youknow, Thank you.
(03:23):
take on students in largenumbers, because a lot of times
people think that the barrierwould be on the high school
side.
And there are some barriersthere, right?
Like the high school scheduleand meeting graduation
requirements and studentinterests and all of these
pieces are barriers for us.
But we find that the largerbarrier is just the different
(03:45):
industries' capacities to employmany students and to know how to
meet students where they are intheir developmental Yeah,
absolutely.
If you're an employer, you know,how do you manage that?
(04:07):
How do we acknowledge that astudent is on a journey and
they're young and they're goingto make mistakes,
SPEAKER_00 (04:30):
but also...
We'll dig into them a little bitmore in a moment.
You've really thought about theway in which you can create
greater opportunity for morestudents.
SPEAKER_01 (04:43):
Yes.
So we're in a place where everyschool now has a CTE pathway or
more and an advanced academicprogram.
But that was kind of, to me,step one.
Step two is we have toacknowledge that College and
career are not mutuallyexclusive.
(05:04):
We know that in Indiana, acrossthe nation, around the world,
when a student has a credentialor further education beyond
their high school diploma,they're going to be better set
up for their future.
And we like to pretend, I think,just the world, well, I'll say
in the US, we like to pretendthat either you take a college
(05:26):
track or you take a careertrack.
And so, you know, choose theone.
And if we tell you more about itearlier, we pretend that you
will choose it and you'll stayin it all the way, right?
And neither of these things areactually true about young
people, about our own journeys.
And so...
About a year ago, I reallystarted leaning into this
(05:46):
language and this frame of, weneed to show students how to
braid college and careertogether.
And we need to reallyacknowledge that each student is
a human being who has their ownjourney, who has their own
goals.
And the more they know abouttheir options and the more they
(06:08):
can see themselves in a future,the better they will be able to
make decisions for themselvesand navigate.
And that's really different fromwhat a lot of folks are talking
about in this space, right?
Outcomes are so important.
We're measuring outcomes.
We're moving the needle.
But each one of those outcomesis a person who has a unique
(06:30):
journey and who needs guidanceand examples in order to fulfill
their goal.
And so that makes scalinganything up difficult, but, you
know, we've had some initialsuccess with the IB program,
then with the early collegeprogram.
Now we're moving towards, um,we've, we've had this IU health
(06:53):
fellowship that's beensuccessful, um, which I'll talk
a little bit about here.
It's And we are working onreplication guide for that
health fellowship to use for aSTEM fellowship.
And for the STEM fellowship, ourgoal is really going to be not
to create a standalone cohort ofstudents in one specific STEM
(07:15):
pathway who take CTE courses andgo on to a STEM job.
But instead, taking our existingSTEM pathways and our existing
early college program and reallyfocusing on how do we get the
students who want to do both ofthose things to have work-based
(07:36):
learning experience that's highquality, earn dual credits both
in their core classes and intheir CTE pathway, and then
their next step would be afour-year degree in a STEM-based
field, and they would have thiswork-based learning experience
that could carry them throughthrough that process and into a
(07:59):
long-term career or the firststep career in a long journey of
discovering who they are andwhat they wanna do.
So our Indiana University HealthFellowship at Crispus Attucks
High School has just had itssecond cohort of graduates.
And with those students, beforeI was in my seat, the ambitious
(08:23):
goal at that time for thosestudents was, What if we could
get a bunch of IPS, IndianapolisPublic Schools students, to be
able to get a CNA, a clinicalnursing license, while they're
still in high school?
And what if we really ensuredthat they had strong work-based
learning experiences?
(08:44):
And what if we could get IndianaUniversity Health to guarantee
them a job upon graduation?
So you can imagine, this isambitious, right?
This is six years ago thisprogram began.
This program has been highlysuccessful.
It has not achieved the goalthat it set out to achieve.
And we're really glad becauseyes, these students by and large
(09:06):
get their CNA license.
But what we learned is theydon't want to work as a CNA for
the rest of their lives.
That's what they learn.
And so 100% of our students inour first cohort pursued
something related to medicine.
Some of them want to be nurseanesthetists.
(09:27):
Some of them want to be, there'sone young woman who wants to
work in the records office.
There's one young woman who'salready working in a pathology
lab.
Many of them are using theirCNAs to pay their way through
high school.
They've claimed that guaranteedjob at IU, but it's a part-time
(09:47):
position so that they can paytheir way through.
And so what this program thataimed for this very specific
outcome for students did was itopened up possibilities for
these students throughnetworking opportunities.
They could see themselvesthrough summer internships where
they rotated through differentpositions in the health system.
(10:08):
They could begin to seethemselves and what they liked
and they didn't like.
And so Now, when you ask me,what does the IU Health
Fellowship do for students?
My answer is not they get a CNAlicense and a job, right?
My answer is they get a CNAlicense.
They have a guarantee for a job.
But by and large, most of themcontinue on in a
(10:28):
medicine-related pathway towardsbigger and better and more
wonderful lives for themselvesthan we ever could have imagined
for them.
SPEAKER_00 (10:37):
Mel, this is absolutely what lifelong
learning looks like in action.
And it's just so refreshingThank you so much.
(11:12):
even in a comprehensive highschool, could be experiencing
their learning and development?
SPEAKER_01 (11:16):
This is an interesting question for this
day because I've been in areflective space.
I've had some conversations withjust some people around me and
people in meetings.
I'm going to come to yourquestion in sort of a roundabout
way.
So what I see when I look at theeducational landscape right now
(11:37):
is that The pendulum has swungvery far towards outcomes driven
education.
And I believe in outcomes driveneducation.
I believe in data informedeverything.
We have to know what's happeningin order to move forward.
But I believe that.
the solutions that we seek haveto be human-centered.
(12:00):
And I think about, someone saidyesterday, it's the little ABCs,
the agency, belonging, andconnectedness.
And I think about that forstudents, but I also think about
that for adults.
I have done some research duringCOVID.
(12:21):
I worked with an organization toconduct some research of
educators and their mentalhealth.
And I did some work withco-regulation, with fuel ed, and
did some training around socialand emotional learning with
CASEL.
And it was so clear to me thatwe have in so many ways tried to
(12:43):
systematize human relationshipsAnd I do think there are things
that we can learn and thingsthat hold true when it comes to
human relationships.
But I think that sometimes inthe systematizing, we lose the
humanity, if that makes anysense.
And so yesterday I was thinkingabout the next step for my team.
We have created structures andsystems.
(13:07):
They are solid.
We are seeing outcomes, positiveoutcomes in some spaces.
We've seen our graduation rateincrease significantly.
We met our ambitious graduationgoal, we met it a year early.
SPEAKER_00 (13:19):
Incredible.
SPEAKER_01 (13:20):
We have these outcomes, but there are other
sort of blind spots, otherspaces within our work where
we're not seeing these outcomes.
And so my reflection this weekwas, what is the lever that from
a systems level I can flip thatwill empower, enable, my team
members in those spaces to seethe same kinds of outcomes that
(13:44):
we've seen in the spaces thathave been more successful.
And what I landed on, I justkept coming back to, it's the
humanity, right?
It's the humans.
And I landed on you know, thatwe all really need to be
coaches.
Like we all, like when I thinkabout my most successful team
members, they're able tocollaborate with teams and
(14:04):
schools by listening, beingempathetic, asking questions.
You know, I look back, agency,belonging, and connectedness,
like that's what works foradults as well.
And so I think, I don't know ifit feels like I'm answering your
question to you or not, but forme, it just all comes back to
(14:25):
agency, belonging,connectedness.
And even work-based learningcomes down to that, right?
When a student feels seen andthey're in a work-based learning
opportunity, That feelsdifferent when it's the person
who's actually doing the jobwho's seeing you, right?
When I show up to anelectrician's job and I put on
(14:45):
the outfit of an electrician andthe person I'm working with is
an electrician and they'rehelping me be an electrician,
that is just an inherentlydifferent experience, not just
in terms of skills, but also interms of my own identity, you
know, going into that space.
I think differently about myselfand I feel differently about my
(15:07):
agency, my belonging, and myconnectedness when I have an
experience outside of school.
But we need that in-schoolexperience too, right?
We can't, these things are notmutually exclusive.
I don't imagine a world in whichwe just start abbreviating
students requirements for coreclasses and pushing them into
(15:30):
the work world earlier.
I don't think that that is theanswer.
I think flexibility is importantand relevance is important for
students.
SPEAKER_00 (15:44):
I couldn't agree more.
And it's our agency and ourbelonging and connectedness that
makes us want to keep comingback, like whether it's to work,
whether it's to school, whetherit's to a friendship group, to
the dinner table, like thesethings are just so
characteristically human and sodeeply entwined in our learning
experiences.
And helping young people to finda connection to their learning
(16:08):
is possible and is And themeaningful way in which you're
talking about doing this, justshifting from a traditional
notion of what school is to anexperience where I can see
opportunities to leverage thislearning that I just didn't see
before.
I mean, the possibilities thatyoung people who may not have
(16:30):
necessarily had a nurturing homeor may not have had all the
advantages that other studentshave have.
you know, these young people areable to see themselves in their
learning and come to life in away that, you know, is
transformative.
SPEAKER_01 (16:46):
Yeah, I think that's true.
I think, you know, I thinkabout, I got quiet there for a
minute because there are just somany things I think about.
I think about that, right?
Like I think about the studentsI work with, you know, are
disproportionately, they live inpoverty when compared to their
peers.
the demographics do not reflectthe larger demographics of our
(17:09):
city on really any level in myschool district.
And, you know, so often I hear,you know, students need to learn
to be resilient.
And I look at my students and Ithink many of these are students
who've had to be resilient inways that many of us could never
imagine, right?
And I think about how, yousomething I learned from my own
(17:29):
experience as, you know, thechild of blue collar parents,
you know, I am a firstgeneration college student
myself, um, my brother and Iare, and, um, you know, my mom
did get, she got an associate'sdegree when I was in high
school, but in terms of a fouryear degree, my brother and I
were the first.
And so I think about, you know,my brother getting his degree in
(17:51):
aeronautical engineering and,um, When my grandparents said to
him, there's a job on theassembly line at Delco
Electronics in our hometown.
That's a great job.
You're paying to go to college.
You're not going to get a highpaying job when you get out of
college immediately.
We think that you shouldconsider just taking this job on
(18:13):
the assembly line, right?
And I remember that that was ahard conversation with my very
caring grandparents, right?
And I think about how In my ownfamily, by going to college and
going to grad school and being aperson who loves language, there
were times when my family beganto feel like I was judging them
(18:35):
because I was using differentlanguage or because my
experiences had been different,right?
And so I think about mystudents, and this is
potentially true of manystudents beyond my students, but
I think about just what a liftthat is to have to choose
something that no one in yourfamily has done before, that
(18:56):
there's just no collectiveknowledge in your family around
that experience.
I think about return oninvestment, right?
And I think about how we framecollege, and college is
expensive.
And for a family that doesn'thave a lot of money, it's maybe
not a great...
investment in terms of return oninvestment actual money coming
(19:20):
back to that family right and wehave families who you know
they've they've experiencedalmost it will become
generational poverty becausethey took out student loans in
the early 2000s and then did itweren't able to get you know a
job that paid the wage that theywanted to get um and so All of
that is very real.
(19:41):
And the need to end generationalpoverty is very real.
And people who live in povertyare having...
just as much of a right to havea job that they love, that
they're passionate about, andwhere they make a difference as
people who don't live inpoverty.
And so I think about just theways we potentially could limit
(20:03):
students' possibilities when wemake assumptions about what they
want for themselves or what'sbest for them based on limited
information.
Instead, I think you know,agency.
Let's get them the informationthat they need.
Let's engage with them.
Let's let them begin to be incharge of their own lives as
they grow up and as they'reable.
(20:24):
And, you know, let's see wherethat takes them.
I know maybe 15 years ago, oneof the things that, you know,
was what I was thinking about ineducation that I was sort of
obsessed with for, I don't know,a couple months was I was trying
to map out, like, what I...
know i can do or what i believei can do what i believe a
(20:47):
student is capable of what thestudent believes they're capable
of and then what each of usactually could do right and
that's i know that's sort oflike a deep and esoteric thing
but it's like and i do not knowwhat the possibilities are for
any student i can't know it idon't even know them for myself
(21:08):
the student doesn't know theirown possibilities either.
So how would we act in aclassroom or when we build a
program, if we were to justground ourselves in the
assumption that that's true, wewould build things very
differently than the way we tendto build things these days in
(21:28):
education.
And also, and this is mydissertation work, but we have
research that shows us without adoubt, that tracking is not the
best way to do business.
That telling students you are anIB student or you're not an IB
student, you know, you're anhonors student or you're not an
(21:48):
honors student.
We know that when we track, wehurt kids.
We hurt the students who arearguably most vulnerable.
And when we detrack students, Weget the same outcomes for the
highest achieving kids, butthose students who are most
vulnerable, they have muchbetter outcomes.
(22:10):
That rising tide lifts all theboats.
We know it.
We see it over and over again.
And a parent who has to make achoice about where to place
their high-achieving student,and sometimes not even their
high-achieving student, right?
Over and over again, they willnot believe that research, and
they will think that what beinga good parent means is getting
(22:31):
their student to be in a trackedclass environment.
To me, that's just anotherstructure we've put into place,
because if we really believedthat all students could learn,
And that being in a healthyecosystem of learning is good
for all students.
We would never divide them up inthis way.
But that's what we do.
SPEAKER_00 (22:51):
That's what we do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just want to point out theincredible empathy that you have
and others like you that areworking in this space.
Let's talk a little bit moreabout the infrastructure behind
all this work.
It's called iLab, right?
SPEAKER_01 (23:09):
Summit's iLab is the name of the entity that's really
leading this work.
The Richard M.
Fairbanks Foundation has fundedit and is one of the conveners
of the work.
And they work closely withAscend Indiana, which is a
workforce development arm of theIndiana government.
And so...
What they're doing isre-envisioning what
(23:31):
apprenticeship could look likein the United States and in
Indiana specifically, andthey're really looking at the
Swiss model.
So they've taken many, manyconstituents from education,
from the workforce, fromgovernment, over to witness the
Swiss model in action, and thenworked with all of these
(23:52):
different entities, IndianapolisPublic Schools included, to
pilot a program, Modern YouthApprenticeship, and to look at
the barriers to implementingthis, to scaling this, so that
it could really support studentsto meet the workforce needs in
Indiana over the next decade andbeyond.
(24:13):
And so for our students who arein those apprenticeships, a
student who works on a financeteam.
We have a student who works onan IT team.
We have students in differentplacements.
And there is this attempt tobridge from high school to
college.
(24:33):
And so a lot of times whenpeople hear apprenticeship, they
think this is a track, right?
This is a track straight tocareer.
But that's not really what theSwiss model is.
Students engage withapprenticeships early on and
then they decide do they want topursue a four-year degree that's
(24:54):
in like a traditional academicexperience or do they want to
pursue a professional degreethat is a split between that
work-based experience andcareer-based experience and so
um What iLab is doing is, again,looking at those barriers and
trying to figure out how toscale up this apprenticeship
pilot that Indianapolis PublicSchools has been involved in.
(25:17):
And they're finding that workingwith CEOs and workforce
partners, as I mentioned at thebeginning of our conversation,
is really an area of needbecause the workforce is not
ready for, you know, 10,000 highschool students to descend upon
it.
Upon it, there's capacitybuilding that has to happen in
(25:37):
that space.
And, you know, we know certainsectors are better equipped for
this and have been doing thiswork already.
And so it's no coincidence thatthe IU Health Fellowship is our
first big fellowship, whichthose are not apprentices per
se, they are interns.
And also they do clinicals.
But the health sector, has beenmore invested in a pipeline that
(26:01):
starts with high school andcollege than some other sectors
have.
But we know that cybersecurity,for example, is a sector where
there are thousands of jobsevery year that a high school
student who has experience inhigh school with that work could
potentially move into if theyhad the experience.
(26:23):
But Employers are notnecessarily equipped yet in that
field to take on a large numberof them.
And so for the iLab and CEMETSpeople, they're really looking
at that scalability and thatcapacity building.
For us on the high school side,we have to be involved in that
conversation, right?
Because we have to buildsomething that meets the needs
(26:45):
of our students.
How we have engaged has reallybeen piloting, trying to figure
out like what the needs are,what we need workforce to do.
Because obviously, there aregraduation requirements and a
student has to be at school acertain number of hours a day in
order to meet thoserequirements.
And so an employer who says, theonly way we will do an
(27:06):
apprenticeship is if a studentis there every day of the week
from 7 a.m.
to 10 a.m., that high schoolschedule may not allow for that.
And so that flexibility is key.
There's curriculum that theemployers are going to need.
So we have these careerdiscovery meetings that are now
(27:29):
required in Indiana.
So every student has to engagewith these in their junior and
senior year.
And It can be collegerepresentatives or workforce
representatives, but they haveto engage with community folks
who help them with their pathand their planning, which is
amazing, I think, and a hugelift for us, right?
(27:49):
We reached out to a partner,Junior Achievement of Indiana,
to help us envision what thiscould look like.
Thousands of students havingindividual meetings, which can't
be large meetings.
So there's a limit on, it couldbe a small group or an
individual meeting.
One of my first concerns was,all right, we're going to have
dozens of career folks coming inand meeting with our students,
(28:13):
career folks who may notunderstand young people and
their needs.
Career folks whose return oninvestment might be convincing a
highly qualified high schoolerto want to be in their career.
Career folks who may notunderstand the cultures that our
students come from, as ifanybody can understand anybody's
(28:35):
culture, but who may not besensitive to whatever experience
our students have had.
We have this at times with evensubstitute teachers who come in
and really don't understand howto work with an urban
population.
So we needed to createcurriculum for those folks who
(28:56):
were coming in.
We worked with our partner,Junior Achievement, to create
training materials for theemployers who were coming in to
meet with our students so thatthey would know what to expect
and how to engage.
And so just imagine that.
again, for thousands ofapprenticeships.
Imagine the interpersonal liftof all of this.
(29:18):
And the question of who'sresponsible, you know, I think
Summit's iLab, and I think youheard them say this as well, you
know, they are really leaning onthe employer carrying the
picking up their share of thelift here, which I'm really
excited about the employersthey've engaged because this can
(29:39):
be a really hard thing foremployers.
We were talking about this todayin a collaboration meeting that
I was in.
Sometimes I hear from employersthat their return on investment
is, again, a student who's inhigh school, meets with them,
gets excited about theirpathway, takes pathway courses
in that pathway, does work-basedlearning in that pathway, gets a
(30:00):
job in that pathway and stays inthat pathway until they're 90
years old, right?
Like this is perfect return oninvestment, like check mark,
like that kid, we really nailedit with that kid.
That is not what I believe is areturn on investment as we
discussed earlier.
When you engage with students inthis way, your pipeline will
(30:24):
grow.
It may not grow by theindividual students that you are
engaging with.
We hear stories of someone whosebrother or cousin became really
excited about what that personwas doing, and then they ended
up coming over to get a job inthat space.
I think there are some employerswho really understand the
(30:45):
landscape, and those are myfavorite people to work with.
So I think about IU Health andtheir COO, when he speaks at our
white coat ceremony every year,when we're giving students their
white coats as they start thefellowship, he says, every one
of you has an offer ofemployment at IU Health upon
graduation.
And my greatest hope is thatnone of you will take me up on
(31:07):
it and that you will all go tocollege and that you'll be at
four-year university and maybego to med school and you'll come
back to IU Health or you'llcontribute to some other
healthcare organization.
And he says that would be a winfor me.
I was a classroom teacher and anIB coordinator for 20 years.
And I know what kind ofenvironment influenced the best
(31:33):
outcomes for my students.
It was an approach thatencompassed the fact that young
people are learning theiridentities and that they need to
be seen and that there's roomfor inspiration and passion and
creativity.
And that when a teacher canmodel that they're happy doing
(31:55):
the job that they're doing andthey're engaged with their
content area or with teachingas, you know, just as an
avocation, I would always getbetter outcomes for students
when I created an environmentthat was like that.
When we reduce what it means tobe a teacher down to a set of
(32:16):
steps or outcomes, and wedeprofessionalize teaching, we
get a reduced outcome forstudents.
So how do we give teachersagency?
How do we, you know, how do weuse those ABCs for teachers?
Because again, we've worked sohard on systems and if you are a
(32:44):
teacher right now in a publicschool in the United States,
this is not my district.
This is, again, I've done, I'vedone this research of holding
focus groups and bringinginformation together from other
people who held focus groups,you are being asked, you're
being told to do many, manythings that seem irrelevant to
(33:06):
the learning that studentsshould accomplish in your
classroom.
And you're being asked to do animpossible job.
And sometimes you're faced witha choice between doing what you
know as a professional is bestfor students, what you've been
trained to do, and trying tomeet the mark with all of these
(33:28):
impossible asks that come frommultiple directions.
And what I learned as a teacherwas, and I don't know if I could
do this now because the worldhas changed a little bit, was
that if I could...
if I could diminish the noiseand really focus on what I knew
to be true about relationshipsand then show my outcomes,
(33:50):
people would sort of leave mealone to do the work that they
knew I could do because I wouldoutperform other classrooms.
which is not outperforming otherteachers really, right?
But I hope, again, that thependulum is swinging away from
this like machine business modelof education.
SPEAKER_00 (34:08):
Industrial.
SPEAKER_01 (34:09):
Industrial, military industrial complex education.
And like, I think there's also,you know, I work with a lot of
educational partners and I readsomething recently in one of my
grad classes about educationalpartners as technocracy, like
educational intermediaries astechnocracy.
you know, when your bread andbutter is to teach schools how
(34:30):
to crunch data and respond toit, then, and you're creating,
you know, evaluation tools forteachers and they're based on,
you know, your bread and butter,then we sort of have the tail
wagging the dog in terms of whatwe do in education, right?
And I had never thought of itthat way before.
And, yeah, And I love myeducation partners and many of
(34:55):
them are shifting away from thatmodel, right?
Like they're shifting more to awhole child model.
But, you know, sometimes I meetpeople who they've just, they've
swallowed the pill, you know,the miracle pill of this way of
thinking about education.
And I just see that as onereally important part of what we
(35:17):
need to do.
And so, yeah.
To me, the systems, that's a funstrategy game, right?
To create systems that allowstudents to have access to
things.
But what's so much moredifficult and more important is
empowering educators asprofessionals who can do their
(35:38):
jobs.
And when we do that, we willreally see those outcomes shift.
And I think about my work as anIB workshop leader for language
and literature.
And how many times, you know, Iknow that a teacher's wanting to
do the work that is, you know,that the research tells us is
the important work and thesystems that they're in do not
(36:02):
allow for them to do that work.
And so as a systems level leadernow, sometimes what I do is
block and tackle.
I don't really tackle people,but block, right?
Or buffer, I guess is thegentler way to say this or
translate, right?
And say, you know, This seemslike a good idea to you, central
office person, but here's whatthis looks like in
(36:23):
implementation.
SPEAKER_00 (36:24):
In the classroom.
SPEAKER_01 (36:25):
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so do you want to contributeto that dissonance for something
that's unachievable?
Or do you want to engage withthe people in schools and to
partner to figure out how tocreate a climate and culture
that works for students andteachers and school leaders and
(36:48):
central office employees.
SPEAKER_00 (36:51):
You've been listening to the Education by
Design podcast.
I've been your host, Phil Evans.
If you like this episode, pleasehit subscribe or follow and join
me for my next episode.
Until next time, keep onlearning.
Host
Phil Evans
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