Welcome to another thought-provoking episode of the Redefining Society Podcast, where Marco Ciappelli explores the intersection of technology, society, and education with Jenee Henry Wood, Chief Learning Officer at Transcend and co-author of Extraordinary Learning for All.
Guest: Jenee Henry Wood, Chief Learning Officer, Transcend [@TranscendBuilds]
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenee-henry-wood-12ba9871/
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Host: Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society Podcast & Audio Signals Podcast
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli
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Episode Introduction
In the latest episode of the Redefining Society Podcast, host Marco Ciappelli welcomes Jenee Henry Wood to explore the transformative ideas in her new book, Extraordinary Learning for All. As the Chief Learning Officer at Transcend, Jenee leads a forward-thinking organization dedicated to reimagining the educational system. Together, they discuss the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for the future of education.
A Brief Note on the Episode
The episode opens with a friendly exchange, setting the stage for an in-depth discussion on educational reform. Marco and Jenee share a passion for breaking away from outdated educational models and exploring more community-driven, adaptive approaches.
Breaking Down the Industrial Era Model
Jenee introduces the concept of “industrial era learning,” the traditional model that groups students by age and follows a standardized curriculum. This approach, which has dominated education for over a century, no longer meets the diverse needs of today’s society. At Transcend, Jenee and her team are working to dismantle this one-size-fits-all system, emphasizing the need for more personalized, inclusive learning models.
Challenges and the Need for Change
Marco and Jenee discuss how the current system often stifles creativity and critical thinking. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed these limitations, highlighting the urgency for reform. Jenee explains how Transcend is leading efforts to address these shortcomings, helping schools and communities develop education systems that are more flexible and responsive to individual student needs.
Envisioning a New Model
In Extraordinary Learning for All, Jenee offers a blueprint for reshaping education, with a focus on holistic development rather than standardized testing. She introduces the concept of “community-based design journeys,” which empowers local communities to collaborate with Transcend in redesigning their educational frameworks. This model prioritizes creativity, purpose, and adaptability, preparing students for the uncertainties of the modern world.
The Importance of Self-Directed Learning
Marco reflects on his own experiences with education, emphasizing how self-directed learning fosters independence and lifelong curiosity. Jenee agrees, pointing out that Transcend’s mission is to cultivate environments where students are encouraged to pursue their passions and take ownership of their learning journeys.
The Role of Technology
While technology is a key tool in educational transformation, both Marco and Jenee emphasize that it’s not a silver bullet. Digital platforms and tools can enhance learning, but as Transcend advocates, they must be integrated thoughtfully into a broader strategy of reform. The real power of technology lies in its ability to support more personalized and adaptive learning experiences.
Looking Ahead
As they conclude their conversation, Marco and Jenee agree that the journey toward educational reform is just beginning. Extraordinary Learning for All is not only a book, but also a call to action for educators, policymakers, and communities to rethink how we approach education. Through the work of Transcend, the future of learning looks promising—one that is inclusive, adaptive, and student-centered.
Get Involved
For those eager to learn more, Extraordinary Learning for All is available for pre-order on Amazon. The book serves as a guide to the innovative strategies that can reshape education. Stay tuned for part two of this enlightening conversation, where Marco and Jenee will dive deeper into the transformative work that Transcend is doing to redefine education.
A Call to Action
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Redefining Society Podcast for more thought-provoking discussions on how technology and societal changes are shaping the world. Be sure to pre-order Extraordinary Learning for All and join Transcend in the movement to create a brighter future for education.
About the Book
Are you ready to break free from the constraints of an education system that isn’t working for all of our children and embrace a future where every student thrives? You’re not alone. Innovation and change has never been more possible in schools than now, today.
Discover the secrets to creating extraordinary learning environments in our new book:
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Resources
Extraordinary Learning for All: How Communities Design Schools Where Everyone Thrives (Book): https://transcendeducation.org/resources/extraordinary-learning-for-all/
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Book | Reimagining Education with Transcend: Insights from Extraordinary Learning for All | A Conversation with Author Jenee Henry Wood | Redefining Society Podcast With Marco Ciappelli
Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
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[00:00:00] Marco Ciappelli: All right, let's do it. Now. Here we go. Welcome again to another episode of Redefining Society Podcast. We were talking about air before starting. I don't know if it was my good hair day or not, but
[00:00:13] Jenee Henry Wood: Oh, your hair is so good.
Look at that little lean.
Look at that crispy.
[00:00:17] Marco Ciappelli: It's like I worked on it. Yeah, you did. Again, welcome everybody. This is going to be a quick episode because we have a little bit of a crunch in time. But we felt like me and Jenee, my guest here today, we just want to be spontaneous. And even if we're going to talk about something very important, it's something that we can talk about again if we want to and go a little bit deeper.
But I kind of want to get this done because I want to get to know what Jenne does. She's been introduced to me by Jeff Wetzler, which has been my guest presenting this book, Ask, a few months ago. And he mentioned about the organization that he co founded and Jenne is part of it. And also, there is a book coming up.
So, A lot to talk about in a little bit of time. Let's start with you. What do you do? What is your role in the organization?
[00:01:15] Jenee Henry Wood: Well, thank you so much, Marco, for having me. And thank you to the listeners, um, for just entertaining and hearing about our little corner of the world. And I know Jeff well, your former guest and his book is really on my list as best of the year, as I'm hoping Extraordinary Learning for All will be on your guest list this So I'm Janae Henry Wood and I'm the Chief Learning Officer at Transcend.
I get to do the awesome work of thinking about how in the world do we train people, do we train many more people, to get on what we call community based design journeys. Community based design journeys is our belief, our theory, for how we are going to reimagine school for the very new century that we find ourselves in.
Uh, we came to this work about 10 years ago. Uh, Jeff and Alon both worked at Teach for America. I also worked at Teach for America. And there we were really obsessed with how do you take young people, orient them, get them to understand one of the biggest problems in society, our educational system, and train them up to go in some of the highest needs communities for a minimum of two years, um, but for a lifetime of leadership.
And what we all three of us were really obsessed with. How do you make teachers great? And we know that this question of how do you make teachers great? What makes a great teacher absolutely matters. That's a deeply important conversation, but over and over we saw some real patterns in the classrooms and in the communities that we went that we went to.
We noticed in all of those spaces that by and large, whether you were in a charter school, a traditional public school, that school looked the same no matter where you went. There were some incredibly innovative teachers who were doing a lot, putting on a show, the hardest working person in the building, There were some schools where that was not happening, but for the most part, we noticed that whether you were in the suburbs, whether you were in rural parts of the country, in the densest urban city, the box and the experience of school and the experience of learning was the same.
And not only was the experience the same, but the outcomes were failing to meet what we as a society, what we as a society have sort of collectively said matters to us, roughly. So we said to ourselves, there has to be something different than this box. And we came to the realization that school has a design.
Whoa! That there is an actual design to this thing. It's not like this structure fell from the divine heavens. And now we're execute. It's like we've made deliberate societal choices and we've made it function this way. So if we've made it function this way, where young people are getting a kind of experience, a certain kind of outcomes, we can design it another way.
And so we came to the belief that the work we really wanted to push forward is to think about that box, to think about that structure of school and to really put communities specifically on a path to redesigning it.
[00:04:23] Marco Ciappelli: I'm so gonna have you back because I cannot, we can't have this in 20 minutes or less, but okay, let's let's tackle the main things right now, which is the box.
I think the box is the main issue. And I know from other conversation I had and from my, my past study as political scientist, I have looked at, you know, back in the days of education. And as you say, there is a blueprint of it. And that blueprint hasn't changed. Honestly, in, uh, I don't know, centuries, so we're, we're in a modern society where technology is coming, where we could have adaptive learning, we can, we know we need to treat people with certain needs in a certain way.
And yet. There is this big pressure of, hey, you're coming out of the box. I'm going to hammer you back in there because that's how it works. Yes. That's a big challenge. So what is the, again, it's a big conversation, but what are the key elements that you guys are looking? into the book to, to make things change.
[00:05:30] Jenee Henry Wood: Yes. Let's do a couple of things. I think I'm inviting myself back, Marco, because I'm having such a fun time. So I'm going to open up a whole bunch of threads of discussion so that you can invite me back. Let's just start with defining the box for a minute, because I actually think one of the things I've learned is like, if you want to change anything, you've got to have some respect for the thing that you're actually looking at, you know, and the system you're looking at.
So let's like have respect for what we call the traditional model or what we call also industrial era design. And let's just talk about what industrial era school design actually looks like. So the characteristics of this model are you are going to be in a group of young people around the same age as you.
And this has changed. This is different. So we started about a century plus more with more village schools. So imagine a one room classroom and you've got kids of a bunch of different ages, one teacher at the front. And then a group of folks came into society and said, we need to bring some order and discipline to this because we are an industrial society.
We need industrial workers. This village school thing is a mess. That is not the best description. There are whole books that will tell you about that, but just trust that that is like the main thrust. And so we then get a school, we then get a model that we're looking at now, which has a couple of these core characteristics.
The first is you are going to be batched with the same, with like people who roughly are born in a certain time period. So same age batching. The next thing is you are going to be in, uh, progressive grade levels, where you are going to move with those same group of people through a standardized curriculum assessed on a standardized timeline.
And the real goal of that is to see What do you retain? What do you learn? Who is at the top? Who is at the bottom? And that is then going to determine so many things about your future life and prospects. But in general, we have a system that was really designed to do something very particular in the century in which it was produced.
It was designed to figure out Who are going to be the managers? Who are going to be the workers? How are we going to structure? Who's going to do more manual labor? Who's going to do? And that really did in its time serve some purposes and have some wins. We would not have the high literacy rates that we have now without it.
You know, there's a whole bunch of things that we can think about that that model gave us, but those are the core characteristics. Basically, What we have is a one size fits all. No matter where you go, you are going to walk into a school, and don't get me wrong, you can have outstanding teachers, outstanding principals, outstanding system leaders who are, by and large, all there because they love young people, they believe in their potential, but all of those people are operating in a system where their job is to keep the system going.
School systems are all about how do I keep operate this system. And that's not necessarily nefarious. They're not waking up and saying, like, how do I ruin society today? No, they're waking up and saying, you know, a system is waking up and saying, how do I take in thousands of young people, feed them, put them in classrooms where hopefully, God willing, they're safe.
Feed them lunch, get them basic skills, and get them home at the end of the day. So let's be clear that, like, this system really does serve a function and a purpose. Where we come in is we think that so much that we have basically, like, squeezed this system for all the juice that we're going to get out of it.
We've got a decent literacy rate, graduation rates have gone up a bit, um, but we're not getting a ton of other things from this. We're not getting young people who are coming out with a real understanding of their purpose. We're not getting young people who are on fire, who have an inventive spirit, who are as creative as they were when they were five years old and came to school as they are when they're 18 and leave the system.
We find that the system bashes the creativity out of them, and we just think that we are, by and large, reaching our returns on this system.
And so, we need to make real leaps away from that old way of being. So we basically say, you know, we have like squeezed all the juice out of this system. We call that, that system, where you are moving with a group of people your same age through a standardized curriculum, through grade progression, graduating at the end, unit tests, all of that, that standardization, we call that industrial era learning.
We are trying to create a world where we think about the purpose of education, the purpose of schooling, the experiences of learning, and the outcomes very differently. We think that there are real big leaps that we need to make away from industrial era experiences. So one is Instead of focusing purely on the cognitive dimensions of learning, we really need to be focusing on what researchers, what lots of people call whole child.
That's one example. Instead of focusing on a narrow set of skills, we believe that we really need to broaden the set of skills that young people have. So we have developed a way of thinking about a way of talking about this called 10 Leaps for Extraordinary Equitable Learning. And those leaps lay out the experiences of school, what we believe school should feel like, what the learning experience should feel like.
And that's one contribution that we want to make is to talk about schooling, not just Just or solely as the outcomes, meaning what's the graduation rate? What's the test rate? But we also want to be thinking about how are young people engaging with the design of school? That matters just as much as the outcomes matter.
The outcomes, and we've gotten really good at talking about outcomes, I would say, in the last 20 years. We talk about those outcomes, though, quite narrowly. So what's the test that young people are taking? What's our ranking? You know, in, in, in the PISA, where do we fall relative to other countries? That is certainly one way of thinking about outcomes.
There are other outcomes that are much harder to measure that we really know matter. We know when we talk to parents that what they want for their young people is sense of purpose. They want character. They want young people who are, uh, Um, actually happy who are developing like skills that are making them happy and bringing them joy.
And they want young people who are creative, who are going to be able to have jobs of the future that we don't even know yet. We're in a world and I know that your, your audience knows this. Where the technology, the jobs, they are changing at such rate that in schools, we cannot sit here and predict, we're going to prepare your kid for this job and that job and that job, because the jobs we might be thinking about might be obsolete.
So that means that schools really have to think about not just what the job is, but who the young person is, who the skills are, or what the skills are, and how we're developing them to be as adaptable as possible. So we need both a real a real paradigm shift in how we think about the experience of school, the outcomes that matter most, and then most importantly, how we go about making that change, which is what our book is talking about.
[00:12:57] Marco Ciappelli: Wow. I couldn't agree more. And I'm talking about everything pretty much you said, because, you know, even when I look back and leaving and looking back again, and my experience, other people I know experience in school, I feel like you, you break free when you, and if you're lucky enough to get there, when you go into the academic world and the college, like the university, and where all Everything becomes so less structure.
It's on you to make decisions. It's on you to talk to the professor and decide what is your direction, what motivates you, what's your passion. And then you look back and you're like, yeah, I wasn't that good doing that kind of study because I wasn't myself.
[00:13:49] Jenee Henry Wood: Great point. And you know what else you're making me think of?
So, um, basically you're saying like, We educate children, you know, in our public system. And it's not just public, it's also private. Let's be clear. Private school is solving for a different set of problems, but it's not always solving for the experiential problem. Um, when they, when young people find themselves in college or other settings, where they all of a sudden need to actively self direct their learning, Many, many young people are paralyzed.
And you know, when we saw this most, we saw it during COVID lockdowns. I did a whole thing where I interviewed hundreds of parents about what they saw and what they experienced during COVID. And I'm telling you, parents were stunned to see. the experience that young people were having because they don't see it.
They go to work, kids come home, they say, what'd you learn? So they're not seeing everything. They were seeing that without a, the lightly coercive element of the teacher at the front of the room, kids were sleeping. They were not, now that's not all their fault, right? Like the content, the pedagogy, We were trying to, in that moment, I think, take what we have done for a hundred years in person and switch that overnight to being on Zoom.
And it, in many ways, it was not wonderful. I mean, that's the, that's a kind way of what some of these classrooms were during COVID. But we saw that, and what we learned from that, is that, uh, Schooling as we know it has not produced young folks who are actively self directed, who can say, here are the skills I'm working on.
I'm going to do it in this way today. Who can say, uh, I don't need a teacher to be on Zoom. I mean, I'm going to read this chapter and I'm going to do this project that's going to illustrate whether I don't, whether I'm going We just don't have those skills built in young people. We have a very factory based, you know, move through next step, move through next step.
Um, but it's based on some rewards systems that really broke during COVID. And if you think about what you're most hearing from school districts now, lower enrollment, chronic absenteeism, A real moment where we saw that rupture happen was during COVID, because once you get out of the rhythm and you look at the box, you're like, Oh my gosh, I've been doing that for 11 years.
I've been wasting my time. So I really think that another thing that we should be thinking about, or at least inserting in the conversation is how did the, this is a bit of a stretch, but how did the virus, how did the technology of the virus How we are thinking about what is actually happening in schooling, in teaching, and where did we see things really break down, um, as a result?
We don't need to include that, Marco, in the podcast, but when you said that, it really made me think about how we're not even preparing young people for the kinds of experiences they're going to have in the workplace, in college, because so much of pre K through 12 is so scripted.
[00:16:48] Marco Ciappelli: Now, you know what this and I know your heart, you have a hard stop and this is a teaser for our next podcast, right?
That's what we're gonna, we're gonna call it, right? I like your idea of the virus, how it break the status quo and make us see what was wrong. But I agree with you. I mean, it did work to a certain level. It was very automated. Very on rail. But the other thing that was a big breakthrough is the technology, the social media, the remote learning, the technology that we didn't have 20, 30 years ago and even less before.
So even that is part of this big breakthrough. change in the way that we can approach things because and I'm going to finish with this and in a comment from you on that and then we said the goodbye and of course point to the book is for me learning is about learning how to learn. Teaching should give the tools to the kids to then Keep learning the rest of their life, because in this society, we're constantly learning.
If we want to stay in our job with all the changes that are coming from a generative AI to again, social media, to the way we read, the way we interact. I thought about, about that. And then, And then the problem is that we're going to come back.
[00:18:11] Jenee Henry Wood: Great. We're going to come back, Marco. So, that's a great point.
We, as individuals, need to be constant learners. But another message of this book, Extraordinary Learning for All, How Communities Design Schools Where Everyone Thrives, an important message in our book is that communities need to be learning engines too, and that schools need to be learning engines too.
And one of our biggest ahas over the past decade, what we've learned is that schools themselves, systems themselves are not learning engines, but they are executors of the model of industrial era learning. And our approach, community based design, really needs to be at the heart of how schools view their work and how they continually learn and really evolve themselves to be the kinds of schools that we want for young people.
So it's not just us as individuals that need to be learners, but our institutions and schools need to be learners too.
[00:19:10] Marco Ciappelli: Love it. I love it. So I know you have to go. So we're going to stop here and part two will come as soon as we get to it. back together again. And a quick reminder that the book is actually already available for pre order on Amazon.
So I will be sure to put the link to the organization, Transcend. Did I pronounce it right? I think so. Perfect, Marco. And, uh, how to connect with you, with Jeff, and all the amazing people that are working on this. And of course, to pre order the book. And, uh, I'm going to say goodbye to everybody. Goodbye to you.
Subscribe. I'll see you again. And, uh, stay tuned. More about this topic soon. Take care.