127 – Scalable Solutions vs Individual Impact in Education

[00:00:00] David: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m David Stern and I’m here today with Santiago Borio, who’s currently back in school and this is really what I’m keen to talk about. Hi Santiago.

[00:00:20] Santiago: Hi David, sorry to hear you’re struggling a bit with your voice.

[00:00:24] David: Absolutely, I feel much better but my voice has not come back yet.

So anyway, it’s nice to have this opportunity to actually chat with you while you’re on your long vacation from school and an even longer vacation from your time with IDEMS of course.

[00:00:42] Santiago: Yes summer holidays, two months off, brilliant. Not so brilliant to be off from IDEMS, I’m missing it, but, good experience at the school.

[00:00:53] David: But this is what it’s always so interesting for me, and where I have to admit I’m a little bit jealous for you jumping backwards and forwards into actually working with kids, helping individuals, seeing the impact of your work, thinking about it at that very personal level. And the contrast in some sense between that and a lot of the work we do, which is trying to have impact at scale and the importance of both.

So I’m really keen to just sort of dig into your experience, you enjoy that getting back to actually working with people.

[00:01:33] Santiago: Working with people, you say, as if we didn’t work with people in IDEMS.

[00:01:39] David: I know, I know.

[00:01:41] Santiago: We tend to think a bit more abstractly and generate solutions that then others will apply more directly, but, we do work with people as well. And it’s amazing people that we work with, but let’s go back to my experience.

One thing that you said was very interesting about working with people, and working with individuals. One of the things about the school that I work at is that it’s a very inclusive school and about a third of the student population has some sort of neurodiversity diagnosis of some kind, from mild attention deficit disorder to almost being in the autistic spectrum. And that leads to individualised education plans.

So even when working with a group of 25 kids, we might have to plan and deliver two, three different lessons with individuals in mind.

[00:02:46] David: Yeah.

[00:02:47] Santiago: Which is a challenge, but an exciting one.

[00:02:50] David: Absolutely. You know, this is what I always loved about teaching in any form, is the fact that even if you are teaching a group, it always comes back down to the individuals and those interactions with individuals. That’s what makes it rewarding, actually, that’s when learning really happens.

[00:03:07] Santiago: Yes, that’s when perhaps you can have the most direct impact on people, or the most visible impact on people. Because that visibility of impact sometimes is unclear when you’re teaching large groups.

Of course, the contrast is, also within teaching, we’ve talked about STACK at universities in Kenya, where one of the motivations was there’s a thousand kids, and you can’t pay attention to a thousand individuals in a single lesson, in a single lecture, or even within a semester, you cannot talk to each individual. It’s physically impossible with multiple of those classes. So we thought of STACK as a solution for that. And, in particular, the ability for STACK to give personalised feedback.

[00:04:02] David: Well, this is a whole different story because what’s happening now as well is there’s all this work about AI tutors and how you get personalised feedback in different ways generated on the fly. But that’s a whole different episode and I look forward to such an episode in the future.

But coming back to the desire, and I feel it, and I know you have it, if you’re working at scale, in the abstract too long, you get a hunger to teach. Now, you mentioned the fact you’re looking forward to coming back to IDEMS, and we’re looking forward to welcoming you back. But, you know, when you’re working with the individuals, you also get a hunger to have a wider impact.

And that desire, or that tension between these two, is a really interesting…

[00:04:52] Santiago: Dichotomy.

[00:04:53] David: Yes. And it’s central to a lot of what we do. We believe very strongly in the power of human interactions, personal interactions lead to learning and lead to other things, which is exactly what you’re having within your teaching. But we also believe that certain things, you know, are needed to support that, which require these sorts of scalable solutions, you mentioned STACK.

[00:05:22] Santiago: But, an interesting point about that is that as part of this scalable solution that we found, STACK, a lot of my work was training small teams. Again, working with small groups and getting individuals to learn and be able to apply this technology to facilitate that scaling. And I’m glad that within IDEMS, I was also able to teach in some sense.

[00:05:58] David: Well, that I would call mentoring more than teaching and I’d be interested to see, do you feel there’s a fundamental difference? You missed the classroom. What is it about teaching which is different?

[00:06:12] Santiago: Well, one key aspect is that the people I was mentoring or teaching in INNODEMS in Kenya were in Kenya while I was either in the UK or in Argentina. And that lack of face to face personal contact, I think, is a key difference. If I was working with small groups like that, maybe I wouldn’t feel so much the need to go back to the classroom. It’s something that I’m hoping to try to implement as I bring these ideas to Argentina when I come back to IDEMS full time. But it’s going to be a challenge.

[00:06:56] David: And I think one of the things that I think you’re not mentioning, which I know you valued in the teaching, is the structure that a school brings. There is structure to a day. There’s a structure to interactions, which is positive and negative. But this is something where that level of structure, in terms of the interactions you then have with people, is something which is rewarding in its own right.

[00:07:29] Santiago: Of course, of course. And very important for my mental health as well. IDEMS is a very interesting place to work at, but there is a lot of independence within IDEMS, and we tend to have a lot of things going on at the same time. And I have to come up with my own way of prioritising, allocating time to different things, and that I have found extremely challenging.

There’s another aspect as well…

[00:08:10] David: Well, before you move on, I want to just draw a link between that and a recent episode where people tend to think of independence as being good, whereas I love the way you’re bringing this up, that actually, you know, independence has positive elements, but so does dependence. So actually being dependent on the sort of structure, you know, the constraints of a school, has its own positive. That’s something which I find really interesting and sometimes undervalued.

[00:08:42] Santiago: Of course, you know, the teaching profession is almost unique in that amount of structure and there’s not many jobs that have such a fixed schedule or timetable. I have to be there at 8 o’clock in the morning and I know every Monday who I’m going to see, when I’m going to see them. I pretty much know on my free period what I’m going to be doing, it’s always either marking or planning, or departmental meetings, which is part of planning I suppose, at a different level.

It’s both wonderful and extremely exhausting, having that level of structure can be tedious.

[00:09:37] David: Absolutely. Many people leave the teaching profession because of this. But many people actually who are in the teaching profession find themselves very much within that community of people who have and appreciate that similar experience. So you often get really strong communities within schools or across schools with different teachers and so on, that real sense of community, because of that shared structure. I really find this very valuable. You know, I miss that community that comes with some of those constraints.

[00:10:15] Santiago: And it’s funny enough that you mentioned community, it’s almost impossible to have a social event with teachers in which the school and teaching is not central in the conversation. It’s funny, I haven’t seen any other profession where, when they get together, the conversation is dominated by the experiences that they have at work as much.

Don’t take me wrong, I like it, it leads to very interesting conversations and sharing of experiences, which are learning opportunities as well. But again, it can be quite tiring.

[00:10:57] David: Well, this is the thing, and it’s the thing about communities, you know, you make compromises, when you’re immersed, you’re part of the community and you’re part of that life, and it’s sometimes difficult to see or imagine what it would be like outside it. And this is where you’re in a rather strange position as actually having gone in and out multiple times.

And I think that’s a, it’s rare for teachers to do that, to either break free, but certainly once they’ve broken free to say no, to go back and to enjoy both sides of that. There’s not many people who I think, like you, have enjoyed both sides and do enjoy both sides.

[00:11:37] Santiago: And maybe part of the reasons why I keep going back is because I miss that sense of community as well. I have teacher friends and when I’m not teaching and I meet up with friends, again the conversation tends to be dominated by schools. And I find myself not knowing the kids, and I say, oh, maybe I want to know those kids. Maybe I want to teach those kids. Maybe I want the challenge of dealing with that challenging pupil who doesn’t necessarily enjoy the schooling experience. And maybe that is another motivation that I hadn’t thought of.

[00:12:16] David: And what I love about that recognition in some sense, the value of being part of such a community, even though I know there are elements of, you know, frustration, which is so strong, and every teacher has frustrations. It’s recognising that those frustrations aren’t necessarily negative, but they’re part of the experience, and they’re part of what being in a community, a strong community is.

And I feel there’s so much for us to, as society, to learn from valuing and recognising some of these subtleties.

[00:12:57] Santiago: Yes, and the chatter at the staff room, it tends to focus about those challenging pupils and the different things that we do in order to get them engaged, which is related as well to the other path I wanted to take this conversation on.

Another difference between the mentoring and the actual teaching is that with the mentoring, the team was extremely motivated and wanted to learn and was very keen to progress. And they saw the value of what they were doing and wanted to grow and contribute to that community where they were at. While often, in schools, you get pupils who are disengaged and they don’t see the value. And we could perhaps do an episode on the value of schooling as opposed to other types of education. But that’s a completely different story.

[00:14:03] David: It is, and it’s a really interesting one, because are we talking about the value of schooling to an individual, to a society, to a community? And there’s so many different levels and layers.

[00:14:17] Santiago: Well, there are communities that got very hard done by enforced schooling, but we could delve into that in a separate episode, I think, because I believe you were keen to focus a bit more on individuals.

[00:14:33] David: Well, it’s not just about focusing on individuals, but understanding the value of interacting with individuals, with community. You know, this is what I feel is coming out so strongly that your desire to go back, and it’s almost a need to go back into those individual interactions and the community interactions. I feel is something where this is so positive, and when you come back and when you step back and you look at the sort of bigger picture ideas, the scaling ideas, if you don’t have that desire to be actually, you know, able to influence or impact an individual, you can go so wrong trying to do things at scale.

[00:15:23] Santiago: Yes, and it can go wrong as well with individuals in school. If you get it wrong with a particularly challenging kid, you can negatively influence as well. So you have to be extremely careful. But, I’d like to talk about an anecdote that I had recently in school where we had an informal end of year barbecue with our house, the school has four houses, four groups of students, and there was one kid who pretty much all the teachers find, let’s put it bluntly, annoying and rude.

I got talking to that kid and I talked about rugby and I talked about objectives and the future and what he sees himself doing in 5, 10 years time. And, that conversation led me to interact in a very different way with that kid, in a way that is more like mentoring, as you were saying. We call it tutoring in the school environment, it’s more the personal side of things.

And he was wonderful, and he was polite, and he was grateful to be able to have a conversation with a teacher at that level, and that might not have a long term impact, but for a short time, he saw me, a teacher, as a human being, which is not something that students normally see teachers as.

[00:17:15] David: Teachers as human beings? No, no, no, they’re aliens from another planet, surely!

[00:17:22] Santiago: Yeah, they don’t have a life, they only exist in school.

[00:17:27] David: Yes.

[00:17:29] Santiago: But that visible impact on individuals at that level is something that really attracts me, which happened to some extent with my mentoring of the Kenyan team, but really not in the same way. Even some of them asked me to mentor them beyond STACK, which was the area that we were focusing on, and I did my best, but I struggled to find the time because of the constraints of other pieces of work or projects. There’s a limit to how much time one can spend on those things.

I mean, you yourself, you are a natural mentor. You have discussions with former students and stuff like that on a semi regular basis.

[00:18:21] David: But I miss exactly what you’re describing as those opportunities when you’re an educator to have that moment. And it often is special moments that can be enabled by creating the right situation, like your end of year barbecue, but they can happen at any time, they can happen in a class, they can happen, you know, coming in, going out, you know, a random encounter in the hallway, or at a sort of scheduled event. There’s so many ways, so, when you’re an educator, those moments which is so rewarding, where something is transmitted, even if it’s just a personal feeling, it has value.

[00:19:15] Santiago: Let me give you a very concrete example of something that is, in my opinion, quite unimportant, which is, for boys, boys uniform is trousers and a shirt, and they have to have the shirt tucked in at all times. There’s one kid who, every time I saw him in the corridor, had his shirt untucked. And every time I mentioned it, and he would tuck his shirt in. And after a few weeks, every time he saw me in the corridor, naturally, he would start taking his shirt in without me having to say anything.

That is some sort of learning that’s happening outside the classroom. That individual was impacted in some way. Well, tucking the shirt in, yes, there are important points related to that, you know, how you present yourself and so on, or preparing kids for the future and all of that, and they need to be able to understand that they have to present themselves well in a work environment and so on and so forth. But, that is some sort of personal growth or personal learning.

[00:20:36] David: Whether it’s growth or it is a connection that you form, it has meaning.

[00:20:42] Santiago: Yes. And the contrast, of course, is with all of these, when I was working with the team in Kenya, they were the ones going to the universities to help the lecturers, and they were the ones who were interacting with the students, and they were the ones helping the project scale. And I didn’t see any of that.

I heard stories, like, some of those interns, or now part of the team, who were being addressed in the same way as lecturers were, and they were presenting themselves and teaching softer skills, perhaps, to the university students. They were taken at the same level as a lecturer was, and they were transmitting these attitudes and these ways of thinking.

And that’s part of the scaling that I particularly find challenging, because in some ways it’s out of your hands. You know, you develop the ideas, you train the team, and then they go off and apply it, and they get to interact, and they get to have those wonderful experiences that may be silly, like tucking your shirt in, but build that connection.

[00:22:10] David: Absolutely. Or you get an extra layer removed and you interact with the person who interacts with the team. And so that layers of abstraction which needed to scale and to be able to work on these things to scale, being able to accompany those with these real interactions, the human interactions, actually, seeing that impact. That combination is so important.

And so, my challenge to you, because I know you’re enjoying your holiday at the school for another few months and then you’re coming back to IDEMS, we need to be thinking about more ways as an organisation of having these outlets for our team to get those personal experiences.

I’m conscious we’ve now got quite a team of people who some of them don’t really have teaching experience in the same way, but they would love it. And they’re working too far removed without those components. And so an interesting challenge that I’m going to set to you as you come back is to think, how should we as an organisation be making sure that those moments, those interactions, to be able to give people those experiences, don’t get lost.

Because to value the community that you’ve had within teaching, we really need to find ways to bring elements of that community into our team alongside the work we’re doing, which is often a few steps removed. And I think we’re doing some things right. But my feeling is, if we were doing more things right, your hunger would be less. And other people would be gaining some of the hunger you have to have those personal interactions.

[00:24:04] Santiago: Yes, some people would absolutely hate them though. But one thing I was going to say is the structure of the Postdoctoral Impact Activation Fellowship, that allows for opportunities, and there are examples where Lily, for example, went and taught a course in West Africa, if I’m not mistaken.

[00:24:29] David: Well, in Ghana and in Cameroon and in Rwanda, I believe.

[00:24:35] Santiago: Okay. So she did go and teach, but that was, if I’m not mistaken, very much down to her initiative. She said, I would like to do this.

[00:24:46] David: Yeah, exactly. And she saw and seized the opportunities.

[00:24:51] Santiago: Yes. And that is part of the fellowship. The fellowship encourages to take those initiatives. But finding the right opportunities can be quite challenging, and I think that’s where I perhaps could bring a bit more of my experience coming in and out of schools a bit more.

[00:25:11] David: I think this is right, and I think as we look more and more to be able to sort of create these opportunities for more fellowships, and actually getting structure into them, thinking how to bring in this sort of wider skills and some of these experiences more coherently is something where I think this could be valuable for the team more widely, particularly really important as people start out and who don’t have this experience.

[00:25:49] Santiago: Yes, but let me counter argue for a second. I know we’re getting towards the end of the episode, and maybe we can delve into this in another episode in more detail as well. That is partly, as well, the structure of medium or large sized organisations, where, you know, naturally, at a starting position, you have a lot more sense of community, and as you grow and climb the ladder, uh, so to speak, you have less and less of those direct interactions and you take more levers of responsibility that create a bit of distance between you and the actual output directly.

[00:26:44] David: So, yes, there is truth to that. But, you’ve got to remember, from a teaching perspective, that makes perfect sense. The more responsibility you have the further removed you are from the classroom. But you’ve got to remember that not all of our work has that end interaction with, let’s say, education, with teaching.

[00:27:09] Santiago: I’m thinking more of an internal community and how in organisations there tends to be an output and those who are working more directly with the output itself tend to be more entry level.

[00:27:29] David: This is a really, really interesting discussion, totally a different topic, one I’d love to have and let’s do another episode about this before you go back, before the end of your holiday. So discussing this idea that actually this is maybe nothing to do with the sort of individual engagements you get for education, school. This is something where elements of that abstraction which exist within any organisational structure, which relate to responsibility versus actual action, if you want. And that’s an interesting discussion for another day.

[00:28:07] Santiago: Which is very much related as well to your episode with Lucie about community.

[00:28:13] David: Absolutely.

[00:28:14] Santiago: Those who take the leadership positions and so on. But let’s discuss it further another day.

[00:28:21] David: Sounds great. I look forward to it.

[00:28:24] Santiago: Right. Thank you very much, David.

[00:28:26] David: Well, thank you.