The idea that schools simply deliver objective and neutral knowledge and skills to our young humans is a complete myth. In fact, with the amount of time that we spend in them over the course of our early lives, schools are incredibly good at conditioning us into particular sets of assumptions about the way the world works. My guest this week, Dr Ida Rose Florez is calling this out in amazing and very grounded ways and we discuss the impacts of what this does to our ability to be comfortable and competent in working with and in complexity (which is pretty much the place we all find ourselves in pretty consistently these days!). Ida Rose tells the full story brilliantly in her new book, The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times, as well as describing the examples of learning communities that are successfully doing education in whole new ways!

Ida Rose Florez, PhD, is a transformative leader in education, dedicated to reshaping learning for a more sustainable future. As the author of The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times, she challenges traditional education models and advocates for schools that nurture individual growth and ecological responsibility.

Ida Rose has spoken at a White House panel on Hispanic education, keynoted the Asian Preschool Education Annual Conference, and presented to leaders such as the governor of Shanghai and the California State Legislature.

Over the last decades, Ida Rose has led statewide education initiatives in Arizona and California, was a National Science Foundation Advancing Informal Science Learning Principal Investigator and governing board vice president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. She served as assessment subject-matter expert with the National Governor’s Association and is a frequent grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation. She has also served on the board of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute.

Ida Rose holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Arizona. She has held faculty positions at Penn State University College of Medicine, University of Arizona College of Education, Northern Arizona University College of Education, and Arizona State University Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. She is a certified Human Systems Dynamics Professional and certified Warm Data Host with the International Bateson Institute. In 2017 she founded a consulting practice serving U.S. and international clients that focuses on regenerative education.

If people are interested, here is a blog post from Dave Snowden that touches on his view that we are unable to understand systems as wholes: https://thecynefin.co/regularities-reduction-2-2/

And here is a video where Jiddu Krishnamurti talks about thinking itself being the cause of the fragmentation and separation: https://youtu.be/CvL4uNA4U-k?si=bLbWpiSaPHJ4K5-Z&t=1073

Ida Rose's website: https://idaroseflorez.com/

The book: https://theendofeducationasweknowit.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/idaroseflorez/

After learning about the amazing work of my guest this week, I had an idea that I wanted to test out. Perhaps our current obsession with Large Language Models is revealing of our historic obsession with a narrow cognitivist view of how human learning happens (and, therefore, how schooling is structured)?!

Memorise the largest possible bank of static data and then output plausible propositions, in response to prompts from a teacher or a standardised exam! Obviously that's a bit of an unfair caricature of the industrial schooling system, but also not a million miles from the truth! As you will have seen from my explorations over the last few years in episodes on ecological psychology, play, movement, active inference and 4E cognitive science, I believe that there is an emerging understanding of how radically embodied and embedded in place and in relationships human learning is actually is. So that's why I was so excited to learn about a vastly different approach to artificial intelligence that is based on a sensorimotor learning framework and Jeff Hawkin's Thousand Brains theory of the neocortex.

Dr Viviane Clay is Executive Director of the Thousand Brains Project and a scientist with years of experience in neuroscience, AI and machine learning. She has a PhD in Cognitive Computing. The Thousand Brains Project grew out of decades of research at Numenta, a leading company in neuroscience-based AI technology, and is developing Monty, a new type of artificial intelligence based on the sensorimotor principles observed in the brain. Numenta's co-founder Jeff Hawkins is Research Advisor and Board Member of the Thousand Brains Project.

You can find links to additional information about Monty and the Thousand Brains Project below:

https://thousandbrains.org/

https://linktr.ee/1000brainsproj

2 page overview: https://thousandbrains.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/TBP_Overview.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/@thousandbrainsproject

This week, we're thinking about how change happens, or more often doesn't happen in formal education! What are the practical approaches that education leaders and policy-makers sometimes miss when they are initiating change management and innovation processes. This week we welcome back Dr James Mannion to the podcast, in light of the recent publication of his book 'Making Change Stick'. He's done a fabulous job of synthesising the change management literature, including techniques and strategies from many disciplines so that you don't have to.

Dr James Mannion is the Director of Rethinking Education, a teacher training organisation dedicated to improving outcomes for children and young people through implementation science, self-regulated learning and practitioner inquiry. He has a Masters in person-centred education from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in self-regulated learning from the University of Cambridge. James is an Associate of Oracy Cambridge: The Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication, through which he provides training and consultancy for schools and other organisations, such as the National Gallery. He is a renowned expert in metacognition, self-regulation and self-regulated learning, and regularly presents on these topics at national and international conferences. James is also the host of the popular Rethinking Education podcast, now in the top 3% globally, which features long-form conversations about how we might reform education to bring about a more harmonious, less hair-raising state of world affairs. With Kate McAllister, James is the co-author of Fear is the Mind Killer: Why Learning to Learn deserves lesson time – and how to make it work for your pupils. He has also more recently published Making Change Stick: A Practical Guide to Implementing School Improvement.

James' website: https://www.drjamesmannion.com/

Book: www.makingchangestick.co

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-mannion/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjamesmannion/

A huge part of the shifts we want to see in schools and in education more broadly is more agency, choice-making and self direction for young people. There is an increasingly compelling story about why this is important for them, as well as for the kinds of challenges we're facing in local communities and national and global society. But sometimes what isn't highlighted is the impact of not having those things. What toll does it take on youth well-being and mental health? So this week I'm joined by renowned clinical psychologist and educator Dr Naomi Fisher to help me find out.

Naomi is a clinical psychologist, author and EMDR-Europe Accredited trainer. She specialises in trauma, autism and alternative ways to learn. She has a doctorate in clinical psychology from Kings College London (Maudsley), a PhD in developmental cognitive psychology also from Kings College (IoPPN), and a degree in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge. Naomi is also an alumni of UWC Atlantic College, Wales.

Whilst in the NHS, Naomi worked in primary care and specialist trauma services in London, as well as neurodevelopmental services. She has worked for the Metropolitan Police and third sector organisations. She now works in private practice with adults, adolescents and children. She runs self-help webinars for parents on how to help their children with common mental health difficulties.

Naomi is the author of several books on psychology, mental health and alternative education. She is the author of Changing our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning, A Different Way to Learn: Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education, When The Naughty Step Makes Things Worse, The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout and What Can We Do When School’s Not Working?: An Illustrated Handbook for Professionals (with Abigail Fisher). Most of Naomi's books are beautifully illustrated by Eliza Fricker.

Social Links

Naomi's substack, Think Again: https://naomicfisher.substack.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/naomicfisher/?hl=en

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomi-fisher-psychologist/

Naomi's website: https://naomifisher.co.uk/

This week, we are celebrating 5 years and 193 episodes since going live with Episode 1 in April 2020!

You can hear Tim's reflections, as well as clips from previous episodes with Marie Battiste (Ep154), Nora Bateson (Ep116), Roland Kupers (Ep 185), Wakanyi Hoffman (Ep 157), Carl Mika (Ep179), Nolita Mvunelo & Matias Lara (Ep190), Zineb Mouhyi (Ep184) and Zoe Weil (Ep171).

Please share your own thoughts and reflections on the podcast guests, topics and future possibilities here: https://forms.gle/4nNEcw3QEopjf1W98

Thanks so much for being a great supporter of the podcast... and here's to the next 5 years!

Are we educating young people as consumers? Have educational institutions become service providers in the consumer economy of educational products?  Or are we educating young people as citizens - of their local communities, nations and the planet? If so what does that mean for how we engage them in the  processes of living and working together, making meaningful contributions and learning important things as they go.  I'm not sure that that looks much like what we're currently doing in most schools around the world.

Jon Alexander is on a mission to help a new story to emerge about how people all over the world are getting involved in 'citizening' - that is, thinking of citizen as a verb and a local participatory responsibility, rather than citizen as a noun that you claim rights to.

Jon began his career with success in advertising, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring consumerism and its alternatives from every angle. In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project, a strategy and innovation consultancy that aims to shift the dominant story of the individual in society from Consumer to Citizen. NCP’s client list includes The Guardian, the European Central Bank, and the European Journalism Centre. They have partnered with the BBC, Amnesty International, National Trust, the British Film Institute, Tate galleries, the National Union of Students, YouGov, the Centre for Public Impact, the Food Standards Agency and the Food Ethics Council.

Jon is author of Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us - a book that seeks to reframe the moment in time we're living in as one of huge civic opportunity, not just crisis and collapse, and in doing so opens up a world of possibility for organisations and leaders across sectors and across the world.

Links to Jon's work:

• Citizens (Book): https://www.jonalexander.net/
• How to Citizen, with Baratunde Thurston: https://stories.howtocitizen.com/form
• New Citizenship Project: https://www.newcitizenproject.com/
• Jon's Four Thought lecture, BBC Radio 4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04md5b0
• Jon's NCP article on Three Post Covid Futures: https://medium.com/new-citizenship-project/subject-consumer-or-citizen-three-post-covid-futures-8c3cc469a984
• Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-alexander-11b66345/
• Baratunde on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/baratunde/

Is it possible to unlearn the conditioning of our minds, that many of us who have had traditional educations have experienced, such that we can think differently about what an education could be? This week's guest has seen both sides of this experience, and is weaving incredible communities and new institutions all over India and the world!

Manish Jain is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse local knowledge systems and cultural imaginations and is one of the strong planetary voices for de-schooling our lives. He has served for the past 20 years as coordinator and co-founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development based in Udaipur, India, and is co-founder of the Swaraj University, Creativity Adda, Learning Societies Unconference, Walkouts-Walkon network, Udaipur as a Learning City, and Families Learning Together network in India. He recently helped launch the global Ecoversities Network and the global Giftival Network. He is a featured speaker / advisory member of the Economics of Happiness network for localization. He has edited several books on vimukt shiksha (liberating learning) on themes such as learning societies, unlearning, gift culture, community media, and tools for deep dialogue. Prior to this, Manish worked as one of the principal team members of the UNESCO Learning Without Frontiers global initiative. He has also been a consultant to UNICEF, World Bank, and USAID in Africa, South Asia, and the former Soviet Union. Manish also worked as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley. He has been trying to unlearn his master’s degree in education from Harvard University and his BA in economics, international development, and political philosophy from Brown University. He and his wife Vidhi have been unschooling themselves with their 15-year-old daughter, Kanku, in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Manish is passionate about urban organic farming, filmmaking, simulation gaming, bicycling, group facilitation, clowning, intercultural dialogue, and slow food cooking.

Links to Manish's communities of practice:

www.shikshantar.org
www.ecoversities.org
www.swarajuniversity.org
www.udaipurlearningcity.org
https://complexity.university/
www.jailuniversity.org
www.farmversities.org
www.creativityadda.org
www.creativityconsortium.org

As I often say we radically underestimate young people and what they are capable of. They are asking to be involved in the critical conversations about systems change. And not only that they are also building their own capabilities for and with each other about how to engage with it's systemic issues. So it's a huge pleasure this week to be speaking with Nolita Mvunelo, Matías Lara and Vanessa Terschluse who have taken it upon themselves, as The 50 Percent, to gather a collection of insights to enhance young people's understanding of systems and how they move and change. They have published the amazing 'Young Person's Guide to Systems Change'.

Nolita Mvunelo is Co-Director of The 50 Percent and Club of Rome Youth Program Manager: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nolita-thina-mvunelo/

Matías Lara is Director of The 50 Percent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milara14/

Vanessa Terschluse is Chief Editor of The 50 Percent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessa-terschluse-915a5b171/

Other links:

https://the50percent.org/

The Young Person's Guide to Systems Change: https://the50percent.org/young-persons-guide/

https://youth-talks.org/

https://www.clubofrome.org/

There are very different ways of 'doing' education all around the world and my guest this week has spent many years exploring and deeply understanding many of them. As Alex Beard highlights in this conversation really powerfully, "does the purpose match the how or the process?" And how does this align with the values of the communities involved? When there is so much ideological warfare and polarisation around, we need more wise voices like Alex who are deeply expert and evidence-based but also oriented strongly around values and purpose.

After starting out as a teacher in a London comprehensive, Alex did his MA at the IOE before joining Teach For All, a growing network of independent organizations working in sixty countries to ensure that every child has access to an excellent education. while building collective leadership and driving systemic changes from within and outside of the education sector. He is the Senior Director at Teach for All (https://teachforall.org/) and leads the Global Learning Lab supporting a global network of leaders working to drive systemic change in the fields of social innovation, school leadership, teacher training and policy-making. He has written extensively about his experiences in search of the practices that will shape the future of learning in publications such as the Guardian, Financial Times and Wired. He is the author of Natural Born Learners: Our incredible capacity to learn and how we can harness it, published in 2018 and he wrote and presented The Learning Revolution, a three part series on the future of education for BBC Radio 4 (2020). I've also had the privilege of chatting to Wendy Kopp, Alex's colleague and founderand CEO of Teach for All in episode 79 so do also check that one out!

Alex's website: https://www.alexbeard.org/

The Learning Revolution documentary: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000h93c/episodes/player

The Missing Piece report: https://teachforall.org/MissingPieceBrief

Social Links

LinkedIn: @alex-beard - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-beard-08901915/

As you will know if you've listened to previous episodes, this podcast is really about the central question of the kind of education (formal and informal) that we need to support and enable us all, but most importantly our young people, to transition effectively through this historical period of massive flux and change. There are many people around the world putting language to these shifts and offering guidance to leaders, and organisations for how to navigate them. But few are doing this as prominently and at such a scale as my guest this week. Otto Scharmer's substantial work with MIT, Theory U and the Presencing Institute for the last few decades has been helping leaders embrace cross-sector systems transformation. To quote his 2007 book on Theory U, his work opens up pathways for "dealing with the resistance of thought, emotion, and will; and intentionally reintegrating the intelligence of the head, the heart, and the hand" in the context of leadership, decision-making, and almost any kind of collaborative work.

Otto Scharmer, a Senior Lecturer at MIT and Founding Chair of the Presencing Institute, has dedicated the past 20 years to helping leaders embrace cross-sector systems transformation.

Through his bestselling books Theory U and Presence (the latter co-authored with Peter Senge and others), Otto introduced the groundbreaking concept of "presencing" — learning from the emerging future. He also co-authored Leading from the Emerging Future, which outlines eight acupuncture points for transforming our economy from egocentric to ecocentric. His most recent book The Essentials of Theory U (2018) summarizes the core principles and applications of awareness-based systems change.

He co-founded the MITx u-lab, which has activated a vibrant worldwide ecosystem of transformational change involving more than 250,000 users from 186 countries. In collaboration with colleagues, he co-created global Action Learning Labs for UN agencies and SDG Leadership Labs for UN Country Teams in 26 countries, which support cross-sector initiatives for addressing urgent humanitarian crises.

Born and raised near Hamburg, Germany, Otto’s early experiences on his family farm profoundly shaped his vision. From his father, a pioneer of regenerative farming, Otto learned the significance of the living quality of the soil in organic agriculture, which inspired his thinking about social fields as the grounding condition from which visible transformations emerge. Like a good farmer who cares for the soil, Otto believes responsible leaders must nurture the social field in which they operate. He emphasizes that shifting our economic operating systems from extractive to regenerative requires innovations in leadership support structures for shifting mindsets from ego to eco. Building that infrastructure is the purpose of the u-school for Transformation.

Otto earned his diploma and his PhD in economics from Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. He is a member of the UN Learning Advisory Council for the 2030 Agenda, the Club of Rome and the World Future Council. He has won the Jamieson Prize for Teaching Excellence at MIT and the European Leonardo Corporate Learning Award. In 2021, he received the Elevating Humanity Award from the Organizational Development Network.

Useful Links:

https://ottoscharmer.com/

https://youtu.be/6nAagnY_Hq0?si=5CnM5fT0dp4lKQ50

https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/a-farmer-who-puts-his-hand-to-the-plow-must-look-forward-402e6960a7d9?source=friends_link&sk=b78b2cd3b346324ba70f217b2175b060

https://youtu.be/YB25Bqc0yGU?si=UZ1sPNKLo0ynG9eZ