Leticia Britos Cavagnaro: Power of Reflection
How can we, as educators, better harness the power of reflection to shape the future of our students and our world? In a system that often prioritizes the "right answer," how can we cultivate a culture of divergent thinking and curiosity in our classrooms?
Leticia Britos Cavagnaro is an innovative educator, designer, and scientist, currently co-directing the University Innovation Fellows program at Stanford's D School. With a PhD in developmental biology from Stanford University, Leticia has dedicated her career to creating and facilitating transformative learning experiences that emphasize creativity, design, and the use of emerging technologies. Her latest book, Experiments in Reflection: How to See the Present, Reconsider the Past, and Shape the Future, explores the importance of reflective practices in both education and personal development.
In this episode, Louka Parry sits down with Leticia Britos Cavagnaro to dive deep into the art of reflection and its pivotal role in education. Leticia shares insights from her extensive experience at Stanford's D School, where she has been at the forefront of developing innovative educational methodologies. Listeners will explore how reflective practices can help students and educators alike engage more deeply with their learning experiences, fostering a culture of curiosity, empathy, and lifelong learning.
The conversation touches on the importance of divergent thinking and how educators can move beyond traditional, convergent models of teaching to encourage a more holistic approach to learning. Leticia also discusses the idea of using reflection not just to understand the past but to actively shape the future, offering practical experiments and strategies for educators to implement in their classrooms. Whether you're a teacher, principal, or educational innovator, this episode provides valuable insights into how to create a more dynamic, reflective, and future-focused educational environment.
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Louka Parry (00:02.35)
Hello friends and welcome back to the learning future podcast. I'm your host, Louka Parry today. I'm really excited to be hosting a wonderful designer, scientist, innovator, educator. Her name is Leticia Britos Cavagnaro and she is working at the Stanford D school. She's actually created and facilitated a wide range of learning experiences in design, creativity and innovation. at that wonderful place, which is a, such a creative hotspot.
at the Stanford D school. Her creative methods include the use of emerging technologies to help people grow as self -directed, action oriented, reflective and responsible shapers of the future. She co -directs the university innovation fellows program and is an adjunct professor at the D school. And she has a PhD in developmental biology from Stanford university and is a former member of the research in education and design lab. Fantastically. I also have in my hand her new book.
which is called Experiments in Reflection, How to See the Present, Reconsider the Past and Shape the Future. And it's part of the Stanford D .School Guide series that we've been profiling over the last 12 months or so now. It's newly released and it is absolutely beautiful. Leticia, wonderful to have you with us to have a conversation. Thank you, Louka I'm so excited to be here. So many wonderful things to dive into, including about reflection.
So first question, of course, is a reflective one. What is something that you've been learning recently as someone that's really at the forefront of experimentation? Yeah, yeah. So right now I'm spending some weeks in Uruguay, in my home country. And one thing that I had been, it's in my mind, in my mind,
right now is how much we can learn through conversations. And as it happens here, our customs here and the pace of living really is much more conducive to just sitting down and chatting with people, right? Informally, at the beach, while you're having, after having lunch. So you might have like a two hour lunch and like really spend some time chatting.
Louka Parry (02:25.518)
So in the past few weeks, I've had many, many conversations with family, with friends, and across all ages, from like my 12 year old niece to my father just earlier today. And it really strikes me how important it is to that we learn a lot, right? Like if we really lean into listening, right? And being present, in asking good questions, right?
And those are all like skills that I think that the education system should do a better job of, you know, helping us develop. Right. But yeah, that's, that's something that I've been reading. I wouldn't say like, this is something I learned, but it's something that I continue to gather evidence for, right. That, that this is an important way of learning through conversation. Yeah. It feels like, and there's something I'd love you to reflect more on the
The kind of first step of any futures work that we're really interested in, of course, is how do you notice? It's the first part of your book as well. And even the idea of like slow looking or like presencing, right? Or even having like a, I don't know, a bit technical, like a psychophysiological coherent state. So rather than being kind of disembodied, there's this real interesting piece I'd love you to kind of keep going on around embodiment, the idea of presence.
in a world that is constantly distracting and notifications digging everywhere and all of us setting far too many goals to try to achieve. And especially when we think about, you know, our education systems and the amount, I would say of like the breadth of things that educators are trying to support young people to understand across their cognitive, social, emotional health. What's your kind of your piece on this, on noticing and feel free to take us into some of the practices as well that you suggest.
Yeah, and as you mentioned, so the book Experiments in Reflection, at the beginning, when I was starting to write the book, I was thinking, well, if the book is about reflection, I need to define it or use a definition. And I soon realized it was not going to work to really just take one of the popular definitions. Let's take Dewey's definition of reflection or Schöns definition of reflection.
Louka Parry (04:52.302)
Because not only they're overly academic, but I decided to pivot from that and really draft or craft a definition of my own that really allowed people to grasp reflection and apply it and build it into their practice. So the definition of reflection that I use in the book starts with saying it's a whole body process.
of transforming experience into meaning to shape futures in order to shape futures. And I think like that first part, whole body process is really about understanding that we need to learn and to live with our whole body. And oftentimes like in the education system, we're thinking about like, you know, as if the students were like their brains only or like these, you know, disembodied.
you know, intelligences, but really what we need to lean in into kind of like, how do we kind of like sense with our whole body? How do we take in information and practice that, right? Like the same way that we practice other skills, how do we practice noticing? How do we practice paying attention? And it's not just about, you know, fixing our attention in one spot, but as...
has been shown by amazing researchers like Ellen Langer, it's about shifting your perspective, focusing and refocusing. So one of the experiments in the book, it's about taking how photographers work, for instance, in thinking about different, how you change your focus, how you look at things from different angles, how you add some filters, and using that same
strategy to focus our attention and thinking about like, how can I look at the situation from a different point of view, right? From a different vantage point, from the perspective of someone else that it's across the table or from thinking about the organization and the system and kind of like, and thinking about, well, how can we think about it through the lens of our, you know,
Louka Parry (07:11.662)
learners, but also from the lens of like the teachers and from like all of the different perspectives. So I think it's really important, to think of ourselves as like, you know, take advantage of our whole body. Absolutely. It's actually reminds me of something I heard Sir Ken Robinson say once, which was, sometimes we just think that our bodies are just to move our brain around. And like, that's the only reason they exist is just to kind of move, you know,
And the whole field of embodied cognition in particular. and I'm very interested, be it, you know, and situated cognition, distributed cognition, decide thinking together, thinking with your body, thinking in spaces. I really reflect, I reflected on that as I read through the first part of the book, the other piece that I'm so interested in. and I think it's something that we can talk more about is this. Whenever we think of change, right. And clearly in our world right now, we're all called to.
do things differently, perhaps even be different. the role of the teacher, the way we focus on curriculum and school systems, even the way we interact with technology across the board. it's this, like this thing that you were just speaking to, which is the distinction between perception and perspective. And I think sometimes we all get stuck in perception, which is no, I I'm seeing the truth. Whereas what I'm saying is my perception of said truth.
And someone else has a completely different view. And I think to come back to your first piece, the power of conversations is that we engage in dialogue. And what we do is we share two perceptions and we start to take perspective. And that seems to be like a, like a meta level of understanding and certainly something that we can cultivate more, be it meta cognition in our young, them thinking about their thinking, meta learning, them learning about their learning. But this idea is how do you kind of, I don't know, hold onto
your perspective, like your perception lightly and realize that well, you're only ever seeing part of the picture. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that that has to do what you're mentioning has to do also with that, that second dimension of reflection that, that I explore in the book of, of making sense, right. And going from what you notice to how do you make sense of it? And it's, it's about really finding.
Louka Parry (09:32.974)
very different meanings, not just one interpretation, but really a diversity of possibilities. And this divergent thinking, I think, is what really we need to use more and invite our students to use more so that they can hold onto even things that might be
feel incompatible or perspectives that can feel incompatible and not implode on that perspective of like, I have these two interpretations and they might contradict one another, but I can still hold them and stay there in the discomfort of like, I wonder what this means and which one helps me.
see it's more helpful instead of like thinking just on right and wrong, right? Like, but like looking at, I'd like different, degrees of, of, of possibility. I love a few, I don't know who the quote is from, but it's this idea of a first rate intelligence is to hold two ideas in mind without accepting either one. And there is something about, I guess, the modern world and even kind of the skill of discernment is to be able to sit with cognitive dissonance.
Well, I'm going to consider these two views and continue to consider them and not necessarily wed myself to one immediately. And then be triggered if you challenge my viewpoint, you know, and I think this is like, how do we disagree better? Leticia And I is one question that I always sit with. And I think slowing ourselves down to be able to reflect deeply seems to be one of the ways to do that, especially when it comes to sense making.
Take us into that sense making space a little bit more. So if it's first about noticing, right. And like, I don't know, interoception in terms of the body, but even introspection. If we're talking about, okay, well, why would I believe, you know, that noticing your own biases even, how then do you, how do you take them into kind of the physical world as you've suggested through a few experiments, you know, take them from the mind into a space where you can look at them and go,
Louka Parry (11:54.03)
Yeah, I think it's going from, you know, seeing what is to what could be right and going into that, you know, conditional space. And there's, of course, many, many ways of doing that. I think that one one very powerful way is the part of asking questions and reframing things as questions and asking a diversity of questions and right, like and and different questions. And then there's actually, you know,
research on how questions, for instance, helped designers understand and make more useful products, for instance, but more generally, like how different questions like asking ourselves, you know, what if, right? Like triggers, you know, thought experiments, right? Like that allows us to kind of like consider different, you know, possibilities, different possible scenarios, right? Or asking,
One question that we love in design, as you probably know, is how might we? Every single word of that question unlocks something. It has a very intentional role. How invites actually finding solutions? Might is like, well, this might work or might not work. It's not like how will be. It's not something that is certain.
we're trying something innovative and we is about, you know, working with others, right? Like in innovating with others. So, but when we think about like, for instance, recognizing we might be at a, you know, at a meeting and we might say like, you know, our meetings are really unproductive, right? And if, or we can say, how might we make our meetings more productive, right? And we're sort of like, you know, acknowledging
the same kind of reality, if you will. But if we phrase it as questions, then it invites us to go into a different mode, like for others and for ourselves, and really this inviting possibility. So asking questions, asking questions to ourselves and asking questions to others, I think it's a powerful way of this process of making sense of what we notice.
Louka Parry (14:22.126)
Also the power of language, right? Like so metaphors, for instance, there's one of the experiments in the book. It's about creating, you know, creating sort of connections or unexpected connections using metaphors and using images that are drawn by words to make connections that you would not normally make. So like in the experiment, I invite you to make a metaphor maker.
that combining verbs in nouns or different words and kind of like using those to kind of like, and thinking about a situation that you have and say like, how is this like a beautiful mirror? Let's say whatever like metaphor you get randomly. And then like allowing to form that connection, you know, even if you're forcing it because that's how
you know, we learn new things, right, like creating new connections. But for instance, I think the power of language is very important when we teach as teachers to recognize that when we use absolute language versus conditional language in our teaching, we're really changing or sending a message to the students that is very important. And this is
Ellen Langer from Harvard has done a lot of work in this sense. But if we say these are the three ways of looking at this, it's very different than saying like this can be seen in these three ways, which implies like there's opportunity to see it in like the fourth and the fifth and the sixth way. So it's inviting the student or the learner to really think about like there's space for more, there's space for other perspectives. And it's not like
This is the interpretation of something. So really thinking about like how, how we use language, and inviting others and inviting in this case learners into this sense making process that is so important to go beneath the surface, right? Like, and not looking at things, you know, taking things literally, too much. It's, I'm so curious as I really want you to speak a bit more on.
Louka Parry (16:46.99)
You know, we talked about imagination and divergent. Well, you, you write about this, you know, imagination, divergent thinking. And I think what I'd love for you, for those of those listening educators and innovators that kind of don't understand the difference between convergent and divergent thinking. I'd love your reflection on that because I feel as in it, as a teacher, as teachers, you know, I feel that a lot of the system has been based on convergent thinking and we end up in this space where what
young people end up trying to do is find the right answer instead of explore the problem space and look at a whole range of possible questions. You know, is that, A, would you agree with that statement and B, like, how would you discern between kind of convergence and divergence? Yeah, yeah. And well, very simply, right, like you converse towards one thing, right, and you diverse towards multiple things, right, like you kind of like starting.
one place and it's like, well, and go in different directions. It could be interpretations of something you notice, or it could be ideas for new things or solutions, right? And it's understandable that convergence often feels more comfortable, right, from the...
emotional point of view or the effective point of view, right? That is like, okay, I'm going towards knowing. It's like, okay, this is the answer. But I think that most of the learning should be about being in these uncomfortable places that are places of possibility, right? Like, so inviting our students to kind of like say, well, you know,
you're going to, we're going to give you, let's say a challenge or exploration space, but you have to define even what question you're interested in, right? That might be very, very uncomfortable, right? And it's, I think it's our job to kind of like create the conditions and create the support structures to actually help students.
Louka Parry (18:57.102)
stay, remain in that discomfort and find their way through that productive struggle. And there's research on that, right? Like there's research on that productive struggle that, for instance, in math education, right? Like that when students walk through and lecture through a way of solving a problem, they might understand what the teacher did.
But then if you compare with a group that was given a problem and given the opportunity to struggle with solving it, they might struggle with that particular problem. But then when presented with a new type of problem, they're more successful than those who were lectured, right? Because they have actually, the learning might not feel like, it might not feel that you learned how to solve the problem, but actually,
In the struggle, you develop strategies that are transferable. The same way that there's studies that show that there's a difference between learning and the perception of learning, which is really interesting. For instance, this is a study from Harvard in a physics class, comparing, again, a lecture -based class and an active learning class on the same topic.
And then the two groups of students receiving both different types of teaching were asked, like, how much did you learn? And how much did you, how good do you think the teacher is? How much did you like the experience? And those who got the lecture, they thought they learned more and they liked the lecture more and they liked the experience more. But then when they were tested, actually those who did the active learning were the ones that
you know, objectively learn more in the same test, right? So it's kind of like when we think we learn and when and what we actually learn are different. And I think we need to recognize that and build that into our teaching. I mean, I love the, we spoke with Professor Stephanie Jones from the EASEL Lab at Harvard recently. We talked a lot about grappling.
Louka Parry (21:19.15)
as one of the key acts of learning. And I was thinking of Professor Manu Kapur's work on productive struggle as well. I was going to ask the question, you brought it up, which is brilliant. Cause I figure, let's just say someone that supported many different professors and lecturers from universities around the world as the university innovation fellows program to try to kind of change the way of teaching from this kind of lecture -based model to a fully more, like a more experiential model.
What, what do you see as the key factors to help people in that journey? Cause it's the same question in K to 12, you know, it feels safer potentially is a hypothesis. It feels safer. And, even like.
more effective to teach in a kind of clearly instructed way. But of course, what we're discovering from the learning sciences is that might be true in the short term, but it doesn't actually build the capability and certainly the meta capabilities that we want. So what do you, what do you, how do we support teachers or if as teachers ourselves, what's the journey to that space? Yeah. And I think there's this disconnect on one hand, between research and researchers, right? In education.
and teachers and practitioners in the sense that, you know, there's a lot of, when I read papers, right, like it's like, my God, this is so interesting. And it took me, and at the same time, it was so difficult to find this paper, right? Probably this paper is going to be read by very few people, by very few teachers, right? Like, so that they need, so there's that disconnect. And so I think that the,
key, the missing ingredient is that teachers need to be experimenters in their practice, right? Like that needs something that all teachers need to be required to do, like be experimenters trying different things. And because that is going to also inform researchers like, well, there's something here. We probably should do a controlled
Louka Parry (23:21.838)
you know, well, you know, design control study about this, but it's kind of like coming from the practice and at the same time, kind of like also kind of like using that the actual, you know, systemic control science to inform teachers. But the teachers need to be experimenters. And I'm not sure that that's part of like how we prepare teachers. Right. So we have like some that are
experimenters, but like for the most part it seems like, you know, okay, we need to kind of like be, yeah, it's kind of like be following a program or yeah, for delivering something that is, you know, that is stable and everyone is getting the same. And I don't, I think that that actually does a disservice to learners. And the other disconnect for me,
for teachers at all levels is that oftentimes like we as teachers do not experience experiential learning. So for instance, I might go to a conference and you hear a lecture on experiential learning and say, wait, what? It's like, no, that means that probably that teacher does not do experiential learning if they're doing a lecture on it, right? Like you have to,
And so I think that teachers are often not exposed as learners to the kind of learning that would be most beneficial to their students. Right. So we need to think about teacher education and training in kind of like mirroring the learning that we want them to create for their students. Right. It cannot be kind of like
theoretical thing that then they need to figure out how to translate. And I think it would be important to think about how do we get better at supporting learning and not really think about the teaching as the delivery or the facilitation of an activity, but about like the designing of the space and the finding the resources and all of that.
Louka Parry (25:45.454)
all of those other things that are not just like delivering or talking to the students or even giving instructions or right, like, but all of those other elements of creating the space where the learning happens, right? And that often, I mean, we have at the D school, all of the classes are taught in teams, right? Like it might be two teachers, three, even more. And oftentimes like the,
Who is at a given time in front of the, at least this is the case in my teams, who is delivering a particular set of instructions or an activity? We might decide that at the last minute, right? But we're co -designing the experience. We're thinking about different levers of like, how are you using the space? What artifacts are we using? How are the students moving? How do we want them to feel through an experience?
And actually when we hear someone commenting, like oftentimes they think of like, that was the part that you taught Leticia or that you taught another colleague. And it's like, no, that was just kind of like the delivery, but it was just a little piece of a holistic way of thinking about creating that space.
I love that as a generative space and you made so many great points there. I often feel, as educators, we often teach how we learned, you know, and so we end up in the same mental model. And I, I'd often wonder about the kind of mindset or the mental model for, for learning and what we're operating on. Is it kind of a, I teach, they learn instructor type understanding, or is it a
I create an experience in which people learn maybe that they choose to learn. We start to bring learner agency and then social connectedness and belonging into this whole piece. So yeah, really that generative space of even something at the core of our work, the TCO as well. How do you build this process? sorry, sorry about that. No, and they might, you were saying like, you know, I teach you learn and you might learn something that, you know, is beyond or different than what I.
Louka Parry (28:08.782)
wanted you to learn and that's fantastic, right? So being kind of like open and attuned to that is like, what are students really learning? And sometimes like, if it's in a lecture that is very sort of like one way, they might learn how excited you are about the topic and like nothing more, right?
Yeah. Which can be inspiring, I guess in part. Yeah, no, absolutely. Right. Like they could say like, wow. Well, they love that topic. Exactly. Maybe I should look into it. Yeah, that's pretty true. I want us to get to this because I feel like this is the piece around like us moving from, you know, teachers as the best knowers to educators as the best learners. And even the whole notion that I'm teaching, like
we are always part of the same learning experience, even if we are co -designing it. And so we're always in a, like a evolutionary state, you know, a state of ongoing learning. And so I just, I often think about that in the way that we think about the work that we do is, are we considering ourselves as part of this learning process? Or do we see ourselves as separate from it? Because I think the moment we see ourselves as separate, we start.
to change the way that we interact. We're doing to instead of being with and you have to your earlier point on language, which I'm obsessed by, as you know, you know, it's like those prepositions, they matter because it's the relationship between concepts and constructs then. and I guess on, on that final point is this collection number three of like envisage. so the envision, like how do we collectively envisage the future?
especially when we think about reflection, it's often thought of as the past, but you know, it's also as you, you know, as we both think about, and, both big fans of Lisa K Solomon, of course, he's also been on the podcast and kind of the futures literacy space. So tell us, take us a little bit into the power of reflection to actually build a different kind of future for ourselves, our learners, our schools, our universities, our world.
Louka Parry (30:23.662)
Right. And you mentioned Lisa. Yeah, Lisa is a very dear colleague at the D-school and we were fortunate that she brought to us the wealth of the methods in futures thinking and really a way of thinking about the future that really, for me, it was like game changing. Right. And it really impacted my work. And it's reflected in the book as well.
And really, like, if you think about it, I'm hoping that, you know, 100 years from now, someone will look back at, you know, education system today and it's like, and will say like, can you believe that they only used to teach about the past? You know, it's like, wow, right? That's crazy, right? Like, and can we teach about the future, right? Like, that hasn't happened? Absolutely, right? Like we...
we not only can, but we must, right? Because we really need all of our young people to feel the agency that the future is not happening to them, that they are happening to the future, right? And it's going to be, of course, like the result of individual drive and ingenuity and many systemic forces, but ultimately,
All of those systems are made of people who made decisions and we really need to kind of like give students that agency of kind of like, yes, you can shape the future. You can make decisions today and choices today. And also because we need to, we cannot build something that we haven't imagined, right? Like, so we have to activate our imagination to
think of many possible futures, many fantastic and desirable futures and also scary futures that we need to work to prevent, right? And so I think that's such a kind of like shift for me. And I'm like the whole, I really love the last part of the book, the four experiments on envisioning.
Louka Parry (32:47.95)
because it really, I'm hoping that is something that will be more and more part of like a normal part of our education system. And yes, and kind of like thinking about how we even think about the concept for instance of intergenerational collaboration and intergenerational empathy, right? Like how can we really
keep in mind the generations, many generations to come and how are, what we do today will affect them. And that this comes from indigenous thinking. It's not something new, it's something that has been around for many, many years in traditional cultures, but that we need to bring back and honor fully. I remember the seventh generation thinking.
which is something I've heard from our first nations here in Australia. and, I think Roman Krznaric as well, you know, the be a good ancestor is part of that idea. one of the experiments that I really loved was even just the hypothesis of, prospective psychology. you know, think about the next, what's something you're working on that's due within five days. Why are you doing it? If it's successful, who's going to think about something you want to achieve the next five years.
why are you doing that? And if you're successful, benefit. And then finally think of a project you could start, but that would take 100 years to complete. You know, it's so powerful. Like that, it's just, just that extension. And I, I've heard this described sometimes as cosmic time perspective, you know, it's like the idea and almost cosmic time therapy, which when you realize actually maybe, you know, as egoic as we sometimes get this, I need to finish this piece. Do we, is it actually in service of the future that we want?
kind of just, I think, lightening our grasp on that. Such a wonderful one. Yeah. And the question there on the kind of like, what's a project that would take a hundred years? The key question there is like, who could take, you know, which person in the, you know, a young person could you collaborate with so that they take on, right? Like what is something that, you know, would take
Louka Parry (35:07.47)
another generation taking, taking over and finishing. Right. And I think like we need to think with those, you know, with that kind of ambition, right. Like if we're going to solve the complex problems that face us. That's beautiful. Brings us to kind of my final question, Leticia, which is as you think about the past, consider the present and look to the future. What is the takeaway message that you'd like to leave our listeners with wherever they happen to be in this world?
Yeah, so I'd say work on your learner's resume. In other words, work on understanding yourself as a learner, right? And develop your identity as a learner, what learning strategies work for you and really work on flexing those learning muscles because that's what's going to help you figure out what to do when you don't know what to do, right? And yeah, so that would be my...
my suggestion, my humble idea. I love it because it so taps into this idea from moving from knowing to learning. And you know, I so often think it's so many of us choose education because we love the process of learning. And then the challenge is somehow retaining that deep curiosity and inquiry as sometimes the system conditions just are not conducive yet.
To enable us to kind of continually do that best work. But it's a beautiful journey today in reflection and much more. Leticia, thank you so much for your time and for joining us for the Learning Future Podcast. Thank you, Louka. Que disfrutes Uruguay. Gracias.