Welcome to Season 8: Louka Parry
Hello team and welcome back to the Learning Future Podcast! It's been quite a while since our last release, but we're excited to bring you a special episode today. We’re taking a moment to reflect on the incredible journey of Season 7, aptly titled "Education Transformed," and offering a glimpse into the exciting content we have lined up for Season 8.
Season 7 Retrospective:
Season 7 was an extraordinary collaboration with the international think tank, Salzburg Global Seminar. As a multiple-time fellow, I’ve witnessed firsthand their efforts to bridge divides and foster leadership globally. We kicked off the season with Dominic Regester, Director of the Center for Education Transformation at Salzburg Global Seminar. Dominic set the stage for our discussions on transforming education, moving beyond merely improving the old model to creating something fundamentally new and impactful.
Throughout the season, we engaged with 20 remarkable educators, designers, innovators, and thought leaders. Highlights include:
Dr. Anantha Duraiappah from the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, who discussed the power of cognition and social-emotional learning.
John Goodwin and Chris Purifoy from the Learning Economy Foundation, who explored the concept of a learning economy and transferable credentials.
Gavin Dykes from the Education World Forum, who emphasized the importance of global collaboration in education.
Professor Frank Oberklaid, a pediatrician and public health expert, who spoke on centering child well-being in education systems.
Tom Vander Ark from Getting Smart, who shared insights on AI in education and the role of passion and purpose in learning.
We also had enlightening conversations with educators like Franco Mosso from Enseña Perú, who dreams of a nation of young changemakers, and Romana Shaikh, who underscored the need for self-transformation for systemic change.
Our discussions touched on various themes, from humanizing technology in education to fostering curiosity and resilience. The season concluded with profound reflections from Professor Stephanie Jones from Harvard's EASEL Lab and Olli-Pekka Heinonen, Director General of the International Baccalaureate.
Season 8 Preview:
As we look forward to Season 8, I'm thrilled to share that we have already recorded eight episodes featuring some of the world’s most insightful educators and thinkers.
Rebecca Winthrop from the Brookings Institution will discuss agency and relationships in student engagement.
Charles Fadel, author of "Education for the Age of AI," will delve into the implications of AI on learning.
Mette Miriam Boell from MIT will share insights on building compassionate, living system-based educational models.
We also have an exciting series featuring colleagues from the Stanford D School, who will present innovative approaches to creative education.
Closing:
Thank you so much for joining us on this journey. Your support and engagement are what make this podcast possible. If you have any suggestions or want to share your thoughts, reach out to us at hello@thelearningfuture.com or connect with us on LinkedIn at Louka Parry or The Learning Future. We’d love to hear from you and learn about your work as an educator, innovator, or leader.
Until next time, thanks for listening and stay tuned for an incredible Season 8!
Call to Action:
Stay connected with us for updates and new episodes. Subscribe to the Learning Future Podcast on your favorite platform, and don’t forget to leave a review. Your feedback helps us grow and bring you the best content in education transformation.
[TRANSCRIPT AUTO GENERATED]
Louka Parry (00:00.75)
Hello team and welcome back to the learning future podcast. It's been quite a while since actually we released one of our conversations with these amazing educators from around the world. And so what I wanted to do in this episode is I guess just a bit of a retrospective, a bit of a reflection on season seven, which we entitled education transformed and a bit of a look forward into what we're going to release for season eight. And we have again, some absolutely phenomenal.
educators, designers, innovators, thinkers, leaders that will contribute their perspective on what might be needed for us to truly enable a human centered, thriving environment for our learners all over the world. And so just to go back a bit into season seven, and this was a fantastic collaboration, actually, with the international think tank Salzburg Global Seminar.
of which I am a fellow multiple times, and it is an incredible organization set up in 1947 to try to bridge divides, to enable leadership, and in some ways reconstruct the intellectual architecture of Europe post -World War II. And it's work they continue to do in connecting people all over the world. And it was for that reason that we actually began season seven with Dominic Regester, who is the director of the Center for Education Transformation at Salzburg Global Seminar.
And Dominic is one of those wonderful, wonderful human beings who is in some way so astute and so considered and he has just the most beautiful British accent as well. And he's also a dear friend of mine. And so Dominic kind of set the scene for where we are in terms of the transformation of education, not the improvement of an old model, not trying to fix what's broken, but actually how do we consider all the aspects of what education is, take them apart and then...
put them back together to actually end up with something that is different, not just at a surface level, but different at a level of depth. And so Dominic really surveyed the scene and he has a wonderful vantage point there. The United Nations actually ran a transforming education summit in 2022. And that was a fantastic moment because it really put education onto the agenda post COVID. And again, Dominic.
Louka Parry (02:26.734)
was involved in a number of events that I saw there as well. So that was kind of where we started. And then, you know, there are 20 episodes in this season and they're all pretty remarkable and different. In me just going back and looking at them all. You know, be it speaking to the director of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute for Education, Peace and Sustainable Development, wonderful man called Dr. Ananth Duryapa. And he spoke about the power of cognition.
as an economist, he also talked about the kind of Kahneman work of system one and system two, thinking fast, thinking slow, especially because their work really is centralized on social and emotional learning and how that becomes imbued into education systems. A fantastic episode. After that, we spoke with two fantastic leaders, I think, at the forefront of kind of the role that technologies can play in humanizing education. And that's our friends.
John Goodwin, who's the chair of the Learning Economy Foundation and Chris Purifoy, who's their CEO. And again, they spoke a lot about this idea of what a learning economy is and how we are moving into this space where it's no longer about a single institution. It's really about these transferable credentials. And how do you have effectively a passport that you can take with you and that you can enhance across a life of learning? I mean, really profound conversation with those two.
After that, we spoke with Gavin Dykes, who's a wonderful educator and now contributes to the Education World Forum, which is the event that gets the most education ministers to attend in the world. And again, he spoke a lot about how we work together, funny enough, how we collaborate. And again, that's the core of some of these global packs, be it on climate and net zero, either Paris Accord or be it on biodiversity, you know, the Vancouver Accord, you know, how do we actually look at the future we want?
and then try to work together to bring about really some fantastic high level global work from Gavin. And then we spoke to one of my favorite Australians, Professor Frank Oberklaid. He's a pediatrician and a public health expert. And he's just, again, if you've listened to this episode and what we've titled it centering child wellbeing, because he's been involved for a long period of time, of course, at a clinical level, but now much more about how do we as a system, as an education system,
Louka Parry (04:52.654)
collection of schools, a single school, how do we center well -being? What does it actually look like? And he spoke really clearly about some of the fantastic work happening in the state of Victoria here in Australia, where they have put in place these mental health and well -being liaison roles in schools across Victoria. It's a $200 million project now to scale this up across the state. And they're seeing some wonderful impact of that project. After that, we went back to the US.
and spoke to Tom Vander Ark. And Tom is one of those wonderful educationalists that I'm sure some of you have, hopefully many of you have heard about. He runs an organization called Getting Smart with a great team there. And he's just really been involved at this kind of education innovation level for many, many years actually, studying Gates Foundation and moving across a whole suite of different organizations. We had a really good chat about artificial intelligence in education, like again, ikigai the role of passion and purpose in learning.
what's interesting about that is that that's probably 12 months old. And so now it's ancient history when it comes to AI, maybe nine months old in any case, it's just this, we've really seen such transformation, the pace of changes to so, so immense. And so that's yeah, some interesting, reflections from Tom and my conversation there, which was co -hosted as well on the getting smart podcast. We then spoke to Dr. Ann Nock, a wonderful colleague.
of mine and our director of leadership and culture and strategy and culture here at the learning future. He spoke a lot about her PhD and her deep dive into complexity theory. And now when we think about learning, it should be considered an emergent phenomenon. And that ultimately schools of the future, just like the great schools and environments of today, people are deeply collaborative. They do things in teams. There is no such thing as
one teacher, one classroom. There's ultimately teaching teams, there's different groups that emerge and then kind of devolve as they need to. Yeah, really interesting when you think about creating innovative learning environments, which again has been part of her core work and things I'm very lucky to learn from her and with her as we travel about the world. After that, some really actually three people in a row all that had very clear themes. Franco Mosso, who's a
Louka Parry (07:16.366)
from Enseña Peru, which is Teach for Peru, is a co -founder there. He's doing this wonderful work with young people across the country of Peru. And the way that he frames it in this podcast episode that we did together is that what would it look like if we had a whole country of young Malalas, you know, if we had change makers at every single level, the young people that were effectively looking at what was possible and acting. And I'm going to goosebumps talking about this friends because
You know, Franco is one of these people that is just so inspired and it actually, in my view, changing the trajectory of his country of Peru, which is a beautiful part of the world and also has many challenges like many other places. So really beautiful, this piece around agency in particular. And after Franco, we talked to Romana Shaikh. He's doing some incredible work across the subcontinent in southern Asia.
Again, we always talk about change is needed and we have to change, but Romana, again, deeply spiritual, I think insightful human being and a wonderful leader, young leader, talked about how self -transformation is required for systemic change. And so the inner world, meaning the outer world, you know, the self -leadership, meaning the leadership of others and of organizations, that inside out model of leadership, really wonderful. Thinking about that.
And then we also spoke with Eloise Heiler and Aliyah Irabayor for a joint podcast, which was wonderful because Aliyah is one of these people, as a young person, who's really just kind of, I remember being in a session she ran at the UNGA last year. It was just fantastic to see young people taking kind of these leadership roles and saying, actually, we want education to be different and we're not.
going to wait for, in some cases, people like me and like teachers and principals and school boards and departments to act, we are going to be very vocal about the world that we want. It's a wonderful conversation about co -generational design and intergenerational design. After that, some really good friends, Lassele O 'Ponemi from Finland, from 100, of which he's the co -founder, talking about innovations for flexible learning.
Louka Parry (09:44.014)
You know, 100 is a great org, if you haven't seen it before, that maps the education innovation landscape. And it looks at every year they have a global collection of 100 different ideas from around the world that are making change. And so often it's not just improvements, although that's critical, we definitely want improvement. It's actually innovation, which means not just trying something that doesn't work, it means scaling out an idea that has been tested at a small scale.
And so then how do we kind of in an innovation is something that works. It's not innovative if it doesn't. It was a really great point that we talked about. Gosh, this was such a massive, this is such a massive season. I have to say these 20 conversations really did change me. Episode 12 was with Alex Batterson and he's a deputy leader at a school in the UK. But we spoke a lot about approaches for flourishing.
Because he also chairs the human flourishing one of the one of the groups for the human flourishing project out of Harvard's Graduate School for Education. And you know, this idea that schooling isn't about achieving solely, it's about flourishing and fulfillment. How do we have a more broad way of understanding that? How do we measure that as systems? How do we care about not just what our young people know, and not just what about that they can do the applied knowledge, but actually about how they are and then who they are, the identity piece, the social and the emotional.
aspects of being and of learning and doing. Really great conversation, which can float into episode 13 with Dido Bala. Dido and I met actually in Israel, where we were looking at some of the social and emotional work taking place there. We spoke at a couple of events and it was really interesting. Dido and I really dropped into flow during this conversation. We spoke about cultivating fitness, flow and learning.
and how the more flow young people experience, the more meaningful their life feels. And again, if we think about this moment in time, colleagues, where we have a lot of things emerging from the negative impact of the social media platforms, and at the same time we have this incredible transformational technology and artificial intelligence and machine learning that is impacting every aspect of our lives in some negative ways, but also in some really positive ways.
Louka Parry (12:11.31)
around the future of work and learning. It was really great chat and DDoS again, just a wonderful presence, a wonderful educator. Lots more good things to come from him. When we discussed that, he was at the Goldie Horne Foundation and ran like a really perfect, a really powerful program called Mind Up as the driver of education there, which is how do you explicitly teach young people how the brain works, mindfulness techniques as well that help us all regulate.
brilliant work. I then spoke with one of my colleagues from Karanga and from South Spok Global Seminar, Jigyasa Labrou. And we spoke a lot about curiosity and also bittersweetness, which I hadn't really thought about, to cultivate the feeling of bittersweet. A lot of conversation here about, again, the human side of change and the human side of education, which is, and when I say the human side, all I mean is the convergence of the
cognitive, the social and the emotional. And you can add to that the spiritual and the physical as well in one of the models that we really like through our work. After that, we had the Director General of the International Baccalaureate of the IB, Oli Pekka, Henanen. And, you know, he used to lead the Finnish education system and now he's leading, you know, the IB, which is seen as one of the premier innovative models for schooling internationally. We spoke a lot about what it means
to do meaningful and memorable public work. And Olipek has been a public servant really for most of his career as a politician and in the Finnish system. And so, yeah, I was really just trying to poke a little to see what the thinking is for the IB. Because like any educational model, it's holding true to the value set, but also enabling radical innovation to come in in our view as well.
After that was a conversation with, I mean, I have to say all these people are just so fabulous. And if anyone's still listening to this, I mean, I really hope that you go back and, and actually listen to some of these podcasts. Cause I have to say I'm different after I have a conversation with, with these people, with some of these people in particular. And one of them is professor Stephanie Jones. She's at Harvard at, and she runs the easel lab, the ecological approaches for social emotional learning.
Louka Parry (14:38.446)
my goodness. Stephanie to me kind of epitomizes like who an academic can be and what they can be for the world. She's so deeply humble, so deeply astute and so on mission, you know, and yet the way she, you know, there's no, this is what we have to do. It's just, there's so much deep inquiry and curiosity in a Stephanie, in the way that Stephanie speaks and considers her work.
And a lot of that work really is again about how do you position social and emotional learning so that it supports cognitive learning and ultimately well -being and ultimately academic achievement. And there's 30 years of research now that shows the clear link between social emotional learning and academic outcomes, as well as social emotional learning and life outcomes. And so I often wonder, you know, why we haven't yet fully worked this out.
why we still are stuck in the kind of what we sometimes my friend Gene clinicals the myth or the tyranny of cognitive obsession. You are what you think only instead of you are what you think and how you feel and the effect of neuroscience is opening up into that space. We talked a lot about redefining good behavior and engagement. And you know, we talked interestingly as well about the Brougham Brenner like having
the child in the center versus what if we had relationships in the center? And we thought about, and this again is moving us from the idea of like child centered into what's interesting like ecosystem language or living system language, very like really, really interesting. One of my favorites, I have to say that I've ever recorded. After that, we talked with Catherine Floyd and this was a wonderful conversation about the early years in particular and nature, you know.
How do we make sure that we, in some ways, protect childhood itself from, I don't know, corporate interests or from too much expectation or from, you know, in some ways, like, more horrific things like, you know, pornography or unfiltered access to violence and other aspects. A lot of the conversation was, you know, in the natural world, the impact that we can have on our young people by giving them access.
Louka Parry (17:03.246)
to higher quality early years education.
Louka Parry (17:09.229)
After that, we had three final, we finished with three wonderful thinkers. One a school principal, one an education thought leader and one an academic. We had Sal Gordon, who's the school principal at Green School, Bali. And I was lucky last year to go and visit the Green School. And it's a very, it's a famous school because it's a school without walls. It's built purely of bamboo. And it's pretty remarkable learning environment, I have to say, in walking through there and Sal.
took me and the Learning Future team on a great tour. It was interesting. He talked a lot. The metaphor we used a lot was the idea of sailing. Like, you know, you go from a nomadic learning to nautical. How do you kind of, how do you way find, especially as a leader of a very innovative school like that? I was also very lucky to be there when students were doing what's called the Greenstone, which is a Ted Talk kind of capstone project. And goodness me, you know, sometimes
It's easy to feel a bit despondent when you look at the world around us, but young people, if you really speak to them about what they want, as I saw there from some of these leaders of this school, just deeply inspiring, deeply inspiring when given agency, which is a big theme at that school. Then we spoke with Dylan William, a Welshman and a very famous educationalist. He's really the world expert on formative assessment. But again, our conversation was absolutely about AI in this instance.
because both he and I are paying a lot of attention to how it's going to impact learning, schooling and the workforce, let alone any every other part of society, because it really is a general purpose technology in my view, which means it will impact everything about our world already is. And yeah, we spoke a lot about fulfillment and AI and how it can, how it might be deployed actually. So gosh, wouldn't it be nice to be a teacher and not have to go through and do marking, you know, most nights a week.
I remember my time in a classroom and as a principal of a school, I remember my mum always marking as a teacher herself. I went for a coffee on the weekend and there was a teacher sitting next to me with her science marking, you know, on a Saturday. And so there's just something about like how these tools might be able to do kind of more lower order pieces of work for teachers, how the tutoring, the intelligent tutoring systems actually also come online and what they're all might be there too. Yeah, Dylan, he doesn't pull any punches. He's really to the point.
Louka Parry (19:34.094)
Yeah, I like I like his energy a lot. And finally, we finished education trans transformed, season seven of the learning future broadcasts. Amazingly, episode 20 with writer Della Loia. And he talked a lot about compassion in learning. He also he leads what's called the C learning, which is the social, emotional and ethical learning, which is interestingly like the model that's been endorsed by the Dalai Lama. And it's interesting because it brings in the ethics.
It's not just social and emotional for the individual, it's really about the collective. Again, a beautiful conversation, just a really human conversation about the difference between maybe schooling and learning. And what we are trying to enable is really powerful, multi -dimensional learning that both celebrates and prepares young people for tomorrow's world. But at the same time, you know...
How do we come together and make sure that these are environments that are really deeply founded in compassion? Yeah, it's a beautiful, beautiful close to our series of Education Transformed here at the Learning Future podcast. So that's my retrospective of season seven. Thanks so much for listening to this, you know, 21 minute kind of episode that we've put out just as a bit of a retrospective on season seven.
Season eight is going to be an absolute, it's going to be really, really great. I've recorded about eight of the podcasts so far. And again, we've got some wonderful global thinkers, which is really kind of the place that I find I learn the most in my unique vantage point. And so we speak with Rebecca Winthrop, who is one of, I think, the best education thinkers and policymakers in the world. She runs the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution out of Washington, D .C.
We have a wonderful, wonderful conversation about agency and relationships and the role that it has. Yeah, in our student engagement in particular, you know, this idea of engagement and are we in an engagement, disengagement epidemic right now, you know, with kind of social media platforms, technology, mobile phone bands in schools, you know, a lot of things that we unpack there. We speak to the man who wrote the book on 21st century learning next.
Louka Parry (22:03.438)
Charles Fadel, who's at the Center for Curriculum Redesign, has been attached to Harvard for a long time. And again, great conversation, straight to on AI. And he's got a great book called Education for the Age of AI, which he and the team wrote, which is something that I often reference in our work as well. We've got some great other colleagues like Mette Miriam Boell who's at MIT. And so she is a biologist and talks a lot about living systems and is working with Peter Senghi.
He's a very famous systems thinker and effectively, you know, how do you build a compassionate system that is based on a living system model rather than a mechanistic system? So again, a really beautiful conversation with her. And then, then we have some wonderful colleagues, former colleagues of mine from the Stanford D school. Many of whom have kind of put out these beautiful things called the D school guides. And it's like a really beautiful contribution and they look gorgeous.
And so they all talk on slightly different things. And so I'm really excited for that. We've got five of them. And that completes our whole series on the Stanford D School team and some of the more recent thinking that's been coming out of what is, I think, the most innovative creative environment that I've been lucky to be a part of. So that is what season eight has in store for all of you and for me. Thank you so much, team, for listening, for what you do.
Please get in touch with us at The Learning Future. If you have any ideas of who you might want us to speak with, send us an email at hello at thelearningfuture .com. Also talk to us on LinkedIn at Louka Parry or The Learning Future. We'd love to know what you're working on as an educator, as an innovator, as a leader yourself. Until next time, thanks for listening.