The Role of Student Voice in K-12 Educational Reform: A Conversation with Milton Chen

Elana Leoni:

Welcome everyone to our podcast, All Things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately, grow their lead. Every week, my guests, who range from educators, to EdTech entrepreneurs, to experts in the field, will all share tips, strategies and insight in either social media, content marketing, and community building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy.

So no matter who you are in the education industry, I know you'll find this talk incredibly inspiring, as I did. It's refreshing and it's also very candid about the ups and downs and nuances of K-12 education. And we also talk about what we're excited about and specifically the innovations and the future of K-12 education. So please enjoy this episode.

Milton, welcome to All Things Marketing and Education. I am beyond excited that you're here. It is a very beautiful role reversal from where I started my career. And maybe I'll share this little bit is my first role at Edutopia, part of my duties were to produce webinars. And back in the day, webinars were that big thing. We didn't have a lot of social media, and it was our way to get out and connect to our memberships, connect to our community. And I remember being the producer in the background and I don't want to embarrass you, but I was in awe of how smooth you were and how, under pressure, you were able to just make everyone feel calm and say insightful things. And everyone in the background is freaking it, right? Welcome.

Milton Chen:

I think that experience must come from working in public television at KQED. And at a certain point, if you work in public television long enough, you'll be asked to go on the air live and do pledge breaks, be part of a pledge drive. So there's nothing as terrifying as trying to improvise a 10 or 15 minute pledge break. Back in the day, we did not have teleprompter, so when that little red light goes on, it's quite a terrifying thing to be live and being watched by 6 million households across Northern California. Well, I guess not all of them watch.

Elana Leoni:

And then, ask them for money too, right?

Milton Chen:

-: 9999

Elana Leoni:

Amazing. Well, bonus points if anyone wants to donate to KQED, please, do so. So Milton, you've had such a... Gosh, if I look back at your career, and you're still doing a lot of things in education, we talked a little bit about your bio in the beginning, but I'd love to hear just from you around your journey to date and what led you through this path. Because a lot of our audience is meandering through education. They might be just jumping into education for the first time. They might be in decades into it. They might be an educator that's jumped into the world of EdTech. But I always find, especially someone like you with you with such a deep and comprehensive look at working with different organizations in education, why and what drove you along this beautiful path?

Milton Chen:

Well, I sometimes say that I got lucky very early on when I was in college. I went to Harvard with not much of a thought, as many students do going to college, not much of a thought about a career path, only that I was interested in social science. It was coming out of the early '70s, and I think about trying to do something related to civil rights and social justice, but not quite clear what that was.

I did an internship at the Center for Law and Education, for instance, at Harvard, as an undergraduate, doing some beginnings of legal research on educational law cases. Our director was a woman named Marian Wright Edelman, and one day she said, "I'm going to leave Harvard and go and start this new organization called the Children's Defense Fund in Washington DC." And we said, "Wow, okay, that sounds like a good idea."

But at one point, I was introduced to a professor of education named Gerald Lesser, and Jerry was the chair of the board of advisors for Sesame Workshop, back then, it was called Children's Television Workshop. So as an undergraduate in my late teens, early 20s, I began doing what we called formative research, formative evaluation, watching kids watch programs like the Electric Company or Sesame Street from the Children's Television Workshop. It was very exciting and a chance to then report our findings to the producers and writers and to see the impact of some of the findings we were getting beyond the air that fall.

So I got bitten by this bug very early on around educational innovation that kids could learn in a different way, that preschool kids could learn. First of all, that was not an accepted thing, now, of course, we say, "Oh, early childhood is so important," but back then, it was not clear that early childhood education was as important as we know it to be today.

So Sesame Street was founded on the idea of trying to use television to educate preschoolers before they got to school. And back then, a lot of educational experts said, "Well, that'll never work. We have kids in kindergarten who don't know the alphabet, they don't know how to count. You're going to try to teach that to them when they're three? Using television? That'll never... Have you seen television? It's horrible. How are you going to do that?" So early on, I learned the value of trying to do education in a new and different way, and that kids can learn more than we think they can at an earlier age if they're given the right kinds of opportunities.

So very quickly after college graduation, I went to work at Sesame Workshop in New York for about five years. I got interested in education, education research, and came out to Stanford to study that. And then, worked in public television for about 10 years.

And then, had an opportunity to join the George Lucas Educational Foundation, which was making, as you know, Elana, short documentaries about educational innovation, things like project-based learning and the importance of social-emotional learning. These were still very new ideas back in the late '90s. It's interesting to think about the path of project-based learning, the path of social-emotional learning, whether they are more accepted now and known now, but still, we are having difficulty getting these concepts and these curricula into the classrooms and finding teachers who know how to teach these topics.

So it was very interesting to have worked at the beginning of my career at Sesame Workshop in New York for Joan Cooney, the founder, and then, towards the end of my career, at Edutopia, at the George Lucas Educational Foundation for George Lucas. So educational entrepreneurs, I'll call them, on both coasts who didn't know each other really, but had very similar ideas about how education needed to change. So that, in a nutshell, was my career, and it's been wonderful.

And I've had a chance to work, for instance, in national parks and apply some of these ideas to getting kids outdoors and into nature, breaking down the four walls of the classroom, that's what project-based learning does. So we can do project-based learning in national parks, we can learn about our nation's history, we can learn about STEM and climate change. So trying to find new environments for learning and more natural environments for learning, I'll put it that way, that's been kind of a through line in my career.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. And not until you told me, but having the ability to really collaborate with the entrepreneurs, but I almost call them mavericks because I know that that's the word that is associated with George a little bit of like, "So what if someone's not doing it? That just means they haven't seen the opportunity." And they're so bullish about it. I've learned that, and I was inspired by George, even just the story within Star Wars, how many people turned him down and thought he was crazy? And I still saw that when he had those ideas about project-based learning and social-emotional learning, we need to teach kids critical thinking beyond Google. Because Google, at the time, was the AI, right?

Milton Chen:

Yes. Both Joan Cooney and Sesame Workshop and Edutopia, they really were champions, are champions of new ideas in learning, the ideas that kids can learn earlier, more quickly, more naturally, and engagement with the real world, I'll put it that way, that kids don't learn by just sitting and looking at a computer or sitting in a classroom and listening to a teacher. They learn through experience, they learn through whether it's an experience, a visual experience through television or it's getting out in the community and doing project-based learning.

Elana Leoni:

It's really fascinating to see that through line again of your career. And then, you've moved into the Kellogg Foundation, the national parks. Do you want to talk a little bit about your work there and how that kind of relates to, I mean, all of this experiential making learning feel immersive, engaging students, meeting them where they're at socially and emotionally, all of these things I still see in your career?

Milton Chen:

Yes, and we sometimes call the national parks our best outdoor classrooms. These are the most important sites in our country, and they have a very active educational presence. Again, many educators are not aware of it, so I'm glad to give some visibility to it. But if you go to nps.org/education or /teacher, you'll see all sorts of lesson plans for doing whatever topics related to, as I mentioned, climate change, learning about our nation's history, learning about African American history, Asian American history. The most important sites in our country related to our nation's history are national park sites or national historic sites.

So through the National Park System Advisory Board, we try to promote this more. There is, again, perhaps like project-based learning or social-emotional learning, there's a core group of teachers who know about the value of national parks and state parks and getting into nature and learning through field experience. We're trying to expand the numbers of folks and the opportunities and the funding and support for doing these kinds of experiences.

We published a book, I'm glad to send you the link to it. We were hearing these amazing stories of kids just coming alive in the outdoors, that they were different people when they were outdoors in nature than they were sitting in the classroom.

So a number of these projects got kids involved with, for instance, doing conservation work in national parks, building trails, doing bioblitzes, which are quite sophisticated citizen science where you're actually documenting the species in particular location, whether it's a national park, could be a college campus, could be a school campus as well. This is a project sponsored by the National Geographic. So now, we have digital tools to do that, photographing the species that you see, identifying them, you've got some citizen scientists who are helping you identify them. You can collect and curate your collection of species. So that's the kind of work the national parks make possible.

And through my work at the Kellogg Foundation, this is one of the major American foundations supporting vulnerable children, vulnerable families, and again, emphasizing the importance of zero to five, of getting kids off on the right footing even before they come to school. And even supporting mothers during the prenatal period, prenatal health, maternal health, infant health. So it's been very inspired to work at the Kellogg Foundation, which funds, in certain places, more vulnerable communities like New Orleans and Mississippi, and then also, in Haiti and in Mexico and the Yucatan.

Elana Leoni:

So I selfishly wanted you to go for your timeline, one because it's impressive, but it has this beautiful thesis around what probably holds at your heartstrings and where you want to go deeper and where you want to help more, and all within education. And I'm kind of wondering within, let's just say, ballpark, 30 years, within 30 years, what things stood out to you?

Because you talked a little bit about that within Sesame Street and things that you learned and what assumptions around, all right, kids can't learn that young, but what were some of the light bulb moments that you kind of were a part of within that? But I feel like sometimes so much of our arguments around what works and what doesn't work in education, we kind of need to take a step back and look at our breadth of what's been done. And I've read Diane Ravitch books around how we just keep circling back in education, but what stayed the same throughout it too?

Milton Chen:

Yeah.

Elana Leoni:

And I know that's a big question, but maybe let's just start about some things that you learned along the way and maybe with that caveat of what even is still true today.

Milton Chen:

Well, I'd say one theme throughout my work has been this idea of making learning more individualistic, and giving students more choice, and more voice in what they learn and how they learn, and even in when they learn.

But instead of that, you have an educational system that's set up for mass production. And by that, I mean that you have so many students and a limited number of teachers, and therefore, it's hard to give students more choice in what is learned. I mean, if you're sitting in a classroom with 25 students, how are going to let every individual student have choice in what they're going to learn and how they're going to learn it? So you end up with, as it's been called, kind of a factory model where every student has to be doing something at the same time in the same way in the classroom.

Even the idea of being in a classroom, you come to school and you go to your desk. And there will be group activities, some of which you feel connected to, some of which you don't. And for many students, most of what happens in schools, you don't feel much connection to. Rarely does a school ask a student, "What is it you'd like to learn? How can we support you your learning? What are your interests?" And if your interests are limited, "Here's some things we think might be interesting to you."

I feel so many students are not interested in the traditional academic subjects, but they're interested in other things like music, the arts, sports, physical activity. They're not interested in the academic topic of reading and writing and math, but instead, the school system in this kind of hegemonic way says, "You'll all do this and we're going to focus on reading and math." And that's what we test, of course, and what we test is what gets taught.

When The Common Core was being debated... And again, Common Core was built around language arts and math. What about other subjects like the arts, like history? What about studying your own local history? What about studying your own family's history? Can we start with that? And through that, then connect to other themes in American history. And then, there'd be a lot of reading and writing advanced with that.

As The Common Core was being debated, I said, "Well, why don't we flip it on its head? And what if we made The Common Core, the arts and sports? And you'd have to figure out how to make language arts and math and science connect to the arts or connect to sports." There's a lot of science, very exciting science and technology and math in sports. If you look at professional sports these days, it's all about use of technology for training. And the same thing with the arts, you could connect to a lot of the language arts, you could connect to a lot of mathematics through the arts.

But I think by starting with things that kids are interested in and then trying to figure out how other subject can relate to that. As you know, from our work at Edutopia, we're all big fans of multidisciplinary curricula. So that's one thing that I've learned along the way is that we need to find ways to make learning much more engaging and really starting with students' interests.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. And I love how you said, specifically, you're talking about The Common Core, let's flip it on its head, but I've known you to flip other things on its head. And really, a transition into your book, Education Nation. Gosh, I don't know where time has gone, but it's almost 10 years old, right?

Milton Chen:

Tell me.

Elana Leoni:

But you flipped-

Milton Chen:

13, but who's counting?

Elana Leoni:

... society's values. Okay, 13. You flipped society's values on that. And you asked those core questions on, what if we were truly an education nation? What would that mean? How would we invest our fund? How would we treat educators versus we treated celebrities or sports stars? And I just think we need more people like you asking those questions and really prompting, if we truly want to compete educationally, we need to invest, we need to purely put our actions where we want to go. And it just reminded me of your book and all of the things that we did together at Edutopia of we elevated so many amazing teachers doing things, but I think the crux of it was, it was still the exception and not the rule. And the goal was to tell that story so they could adapt it to their own environments. But it was never that simple, right?

Milton Chen:

Yeah. I think what I did not fully appreciate earlier in my career was that we have an educational system, that it's actually a political system. Of course, there are many folks who are trying to change the nature of the system, do the kinds of more creative teaching and learning that we're talking about, but fundamentally, the education system, like the healthcare system is a political system with very strongly entrenched interests that are very hard to change.

I sometimes said if you wanted to create a system that was incapable, impervious to change, you would create the American public school system. First of all, there's no system, there's 14,000 different systems that you have to change. You might be able to change one smaller district with three elementary schools and a middle school and a high school, but there's 14,000 school districts varying size, and most of them have elected school board members, so that immediately puts into play the political nature of the school system and school boards.

Whereas other nations have much more centralized ministries of education, for better or for worse. But if you get the right leaders in your ministry of education, and here, we look at places like all the Scandinavian countries, Finland, of course, comes to mind, if you get the right leadership that understands some of what we're talking about, you can make these changes much more quickly.

So I think that political nature and decentralized nature of the American school systems is a big barrier to change. So yeah, I think that that's partly why we've seen relatively little change over the past three or four decades that I've been involved with this.

I was hopeful, for instance, that with the pandemic and schools closing and then gradually opening up, getting kids outdoors more because of the virus, that teachers and leaders would say, "Oh my gosh, they're learning a lot of interesting things when they get outdoors about nature, about climate, about biodiversity," but that didn't really happen. The system is set up to have teachers in classrooms. We'd look at the role of schools of education, educating teachers in a certain way. I hope that issues of climate change are part of how teachers are being educated in schools of education these days and how we look at all of the STEM curricula being brought to bear to teach about climate change. But again, connecting the classroom to what's happening in the real world, that's always been somewhat of a challenge.

Elana Leoni:

I think that we've always operated, and I learned it so much from Edutopia, is don't try to change the system, try to create these pockets and show how easy it is, these pockets of innovation, show how easy it is, and then these small fires can start burning brighter and brighter and brighter and create more of a groundswell movement. And I know that that sounds a little naive because we're still within a broken system, but yes, I can, it's doing something. And there's so many amazing teachers doing innovative things in the classroom, despite a lot.

Milton Chen:

Yeah. So I do think it's fair to say that that bottom-up approach, that Edutopia kind of espoused, that is one effective way of doing. It's much slower. And there are many more innovators out there that you're reaching, that Edutopia is reaching, that's a good thing. But it's still at the very top of the system, whether it's governors, mayors can play an important role in this as well, often they are not quite recognized, but yes, from the top-down, we have very few risk-takers, I'll put it that way, who are able to say, "Let's have a different conversation about what schools can be."

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. And I know we can get in, we talk for hours about the role of education and what it should be and how it's evolved. And you started a little bit about how it's been kind of you can't scale it and at the same time, do personalized learning at times. So they're kind of a little bit at odds at times.

There's a lot to be talked about, the role of education, but at the end of it is how do we currently measure success of education? And if it is not in alignment with the other things, the beautiful things that you're talking about of students becoming alive for the first time, and seeing a national park, and then, getting excited about the curricula... And maybe the curricula is more in the art and that's actually not measured. And then, we start talking about learning loss as it relates to the three things that we measure. So it's a system that I think that I have learned to love because I've been able to see progress in it, but I've never failed to recognize the shortcomings of it.

Milton Chen:

Yes. And I do point to the current state of our nation in terms of the divisiveness and the democracy that we have had being at risk. We've seen things in the past five years that we never imagined, and that continues today. But I do point to the failures in education and that if you had a better educational system, we'd be at a better place as a democracy. When you look at totalitarian regimes and how they want to foist a certain mindset and mentality on their people, they start with the education system. And that's essentially what's going on now, there's this battle, struggle going on within schools about what should be taught, how it should be taught, and that's where our nation is currently.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. Well, let's move forward into a couple of other... You were at Edutopia for quite a while. You've got some really great experiences, and throughout, in different educational organizations. Is there anything you'd like to point out of, "Here is my light bulb moments in these areas"? And then, potentially, like I said, there's so many innovations coming every day, and the speed of technology is mind-blowing right now, and the speed of adoption within K-12 is the fastest I've ever seen. But at the same time, there are some things that are still remaining the same too, in a good way. So you want to talk a little bit about some lessons learned along the way and some things that still apply today?

Milton Chen:

Well, I continue to be impressed by, for instance, giving kids experiences, experiential learning in the real world. I mean, that's at the heart of project-based learning, that's at the heart of so many things. But the kids can do more when they're given the opportunity. And I point to, one of the things I learned at the Kellogg Foundation was one of our former CEOs, Russ Mawby from Michigan, where the foundation is located, he grew up on a farm and he said, "When you're on the farm, as soon as you can, as a boy or girl, you're given work to do on the farm." He said that he earns a driver's license when he was like 14 or something. He is driving vehicles and tractors and cars around the farm.

And when he looked at the state of American youth, he said, "We have, in this country, a prolonged adolescence for American youth. We don't give them much to do. They can't actually work. So we have teenagers who are sitting bored and without a real job, without being productive in their families, in their communities." And I've come to understand that, I think George Lucas once said this that what kids want more is to have a job, whether it's paid or unpaid, but to give them some responsibility in their families and their communities to do something of value that's recognized and to do it with others.

So I've had experiences with groups such as the Linked Learning, the Linked Learning pathways, career pathways high schools. I think that's one of the best models for high school is to connect up the academic subjects with workplace experience. So in the freshman year, you might do some typical field trips to visit healthcare center or to visit an architectural firm or visit a media company. And then, in your sophomore year, you might be given an assignment. And in the junior year, you might be given a chance to shadow a professional and work alongside them. And so, that ability to be exposed to the world of work, I think is very important, and it should happen during the high school years.

I said I was just at KQED and they've really transformed the public broadcaster from a one-to-many, we're broadcasting these programs on television and you watch them at a certain time or listen to them at a certain time, to understanding that their future role is around community engagement and bringing the community into partnership with the station.

And one of the emphasis for what they're doing is really around young people. So they have a youth media literacy curriculum. They educate teachers on how to work with kids around, not only interpreting the media that they use, but also making their own media. I think one of the most exciting things they do is called a Youth Takeover. They actually have young people come in, I think it was about 50 teenagers come in, and actually take over the station.

They get to have roles, for instance, I was listening to the Forum talk show, which is now, I learned, carried around California, not just on KQED in Northern California, but picked up statewide, listening to Forum, and it's a great interview program with some of the leading authors, scientists, politicians of the day. And it was co-hosted with a high school student. So you heard the voice of a high school student as the co-host asking questions and making comments, and so they're given a real role at the station. I think that's one of the most exciting things that workplaces can do is to have young people come in, and of course, there's some training that goes on before they actually go live and get to do the work, but to actually educate kids about the importance of how they do their work and exposing kids to careers.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. As you were talking, it really reminded me around student voice, student choice, student co-creation, having student ownership into what they're learning. And we don't, frankly, see enough of that because I think the idea of that can be intimidating and it can be hard, and I don't know where to start.

I do believe technology is making it easier to do so and to scaffold it into appropriate ways, but I am still a little disappointed that we don't see it as much. When I go to education conferences, even if it's catered toward teachers, there should be more students there, there should be more students talking about what works, where there should be more student voice in education journalism. And I love the Takeover because we've seen that in social media sometimes, and seeing the students take over an entire station, that's awesome.

Milton Chen:

Yeah. I learned a word last year, Elana, a new world called adultism. We're trying to combat sexism and racism, there is something called adultism where adults feel, "We own this as adults, and we're not going to let young people... We will always do the work. And we might ask them for opinions once in a while, but we don't actually let them in and actually be contributing parts of the community." There's actually some research about it, I read some papers about it, but it's a real thing, and it's a real thing in education.

I think it's one of the things that holds back education. What if you could co-create a school, a learning environment with the students? And there are places where they begin to do that. At Edutopia, we covered some, for instance, school architecture and building of new schools in the school building boom, that probably continues because school buildings are aging, but they would ask students to be partners in coming up with...

"I mean, you've been living in this place since you've been in a school, since you were in kindergarten. Now you're not five anymore, you're 15. You must have some ideas about what works or what you'd like to have that could improve your school experience."

So yeah, I think adultism is one of those things. It's funny, it's not talked about, I never learned that word before, but it is a thing, it's a real thing where adults do not allow young people to actually have a contributing role.

Elana Leoni:

And I first learned... I mean, I've never learned that term before, so thank you, but I dove deep a little bit more at Edutopia around why do we value the sage on the stage? And why is it so hard to get teachers to relinquish control and be in those vulnerable moments of just testing out things that might fail, or getting students to come in and lead that might be better at a certain technology. And they might just be like, "Hey, I'm an adult, I'm supposed to know, I'm supposed to know. And what if they think I don't know and I lose their trust or things?" So there is all this emotion built into some of that that I wasn't aware of.

Milton Chen:

And that has a lot to do with how we think about the role of teachers and how we prepare teachers in the schools of education.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine a better time for being okay with the unknown.

Milton Chen:

Yeah. Yeah.

Elana Leoni:

I learned from our mission statement at Edutopia is really we're preparing students for a world that we have no idea what it'll be, what we'll leave them. And they need to be critical thinkers. They need to be people that are innovative and take initiative and not just taking instruction. And I don't know. I know I'm going on a soapbox to someone who has written a book on it.

Milton Chen:

Well, what better time, as we've seen during the past five years, to really understand how the world is changing and how climate is changing? And the world that this new generation of students are coming into is going to be so impacted, it already is by things that we did not do as the adult generation. So yeah, it's important that...

And there is some movement there, but again, it's not as quick as you'd like. All of these crises are moving much more quickly than the institutions can handle. I was just reading an article today and some of Eric Schmidt's comments about AI that this is moving so much more quickly than the governments can handle, it's running circles around regulation. So yeah, hold onto your hats.

Elana Leoni:

So for our audience listening, specifically those in the EdTech sector, whether they be EdTech entrepreneurs, they might be leading sales teams, they might be heading marketing initiatives, content marketing, I would be curious to have you... Maybe some of them may or may not be new to education too, but if you had any advice for them as they navigate this tumultuous pass. I know you don't specifically spend a lot of time in EdTech proper, but you know the industry, you know the sound things that truly work in learning. And these people are on the front lines of trying to really help with products and services.

Milton Chen:

Yeah. I think one thing that concerns me, has concerned me all throughout my career, is equity. And technology is one of those things that tends to divide. The digital divide sometimes gets deeper. I think one of the good, silver linings coming out of the pandemic is that schools recognize, "Oh my gosh, if we're going to online, we've got to make sure that every student has the equipment to get online." So there was now some movement to make sure that every student, no matter what their school and their family background is has access to technology. We're still not quite there yet in terms of broadband access and all of that.

But I think that's one thing that I would encourage educators to continue and EdTech leaders and all roles involved with education, both within the system or in companies, is to really focus on equity that we cannot continue to have the wealthier districts get more technology. We need to find ways to provide the funding for school districts with less affluent students to have access to the technology.

There has been, for instance, in California, this CETF, the California Emerging Technology Fund, which has been around for probably 20 years, which was an effort to make sure that, for instance, cable companies and telecom companies, as they were merging and as they were creating even more profits, had to put some of that money into a fund to make sure that school districts could provide the technology to the poorer students.

So there are some examples, and again, not enough of them, but perhaps, there should be more attention to making sure that there are funds available within districts and states to make sure that it's a level playing field.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. And I too have seen that increased focus, but I want to make sure that it's appropriately executed and that we consistently ask ourselves whether we are educators or EdTech entrepreneurs or anyone in the education spaces, who's not here? Who's not showing at the table? Who's not using the product? Who is using it? And how can I really co-create potentially with the users and make sure that we're satisfying the buyer's needs at the same time? Something that brings everyone to the table, brings all of their voice.

Milton Chen:

Yeah. And I think if more companies saw that as an opportunity, they would learn a lot from the families and students who didn't have as much access, the way in which they use the technology, what they do with it. I think there's a lot of interesting innovation that happens. We certainly saw that, going all the way back to Sesame Street, we saw this idea that preschool kids could learn the kindergarten curriculum.

But it was even more powerful. And this was something that a number of Hispanic families did, if the mothers watched the program with their kids, what we now call co-viewing, that Sesame Street was not just for the three or four-year-old that parents could learn a lot by watching Sesame Street about how to talk to kids, what the curriculum could be, and that these mothers then reinforce what happened in the program after the program is over, they would read books together, they would have conversations about the people in your neighborhood, the theme song, colors, classification of objects, all the things that they saw happening on the screen. It was a program both for the children and to the parents. It was kind of realtime parent education.

In fact, Joan Cooney, when she wrote the proposal for Sesame Street, and you can find that original proposal online, she said, "There needs to be two programs," in doing the research, she said, "There needs to be a program for the children and a separate program for the parents. If the parents really understood the importance of early childhood and what your kids can learn and getting them ready for school, then you'd really have some."

The parents' show never got done. I continue to think there's a real role of a parent education. At one point, at Sesame Workshop, we talked about shouldn't we launch something called Parent University online and have these short clips from Sesame Street and others and people talking about here's... And it would be free and open. Again, that's something that could really help with those first five years.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. And the thing that resonated, there's so much that you were talking about, but to start with, how do we make sure that we kind of make it as applicable and broad as possible? And when you say like... It reminds of when we were at Edutopia, we made that switch to what works in public education. And people said, "Why public education?" Because you can reach the masses that way, but if you can do it in public, you can certainly do it in any other area.

So it was more about how do we make it as easy as possible to then adapt it to your own niche, your own specific requirement? And that was something that when I translated to product development in EdTech is that sometimes we come in with a very super niche need and we're serving this target audience and we're really eloquent about it, but we don't realize that we're kind of segmenting the market too soon. And what you need to do is really have the market play with it and make sure you're not uninviting anyone to the table in the beginning. So start small, potentially, go a little broad.

But then, your story about the Sesame Street workshop is like the unanticipated usage or benefit of you saw parents there and, "Okay, hold that. Let's note it and let's see how we can maybe lean into it and create some support around it to keep that trend going."

Milton Chen:

Yes, there are lots of interesting examples of products that are well-designed for a particular group, and when they are well-designed and successful with that particular group, a lot of other groups find them to be useful too. And just from Sesame Street, even though it was designed for American preschoolers, once the program was licensed abroad in English, we learned that it could be very useful in teaching teenagers to learn English abroad, and one of the most successful countries where that happened was Japan.

Japan is a country very intent on learning English, still is, but back then, there wasn't an easy way to access that, you had to go to an English school or something. But by watching Sesame Street for preschoolers, a lot of Japanese teenagers learned English. I think George Lucas is famous for saying, "I started off making Star Wars for a 10-year-old boy, it was a science fiction fantasy film for a 10-year-old boy, and if I made it well enough, it turns out a lot of other people would be interested in seeing it."

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. I mean, that gives me a little goosebumps because it's just like you got to go down and discover, but then pause and say, "Gosh, who else is taking note? Who else is using it?" But then, on the equity piece, "Who is not using it as well?" And I love that.

I know we could talk all day about education reform and education innovation, but I think I'd love to just close out with one question and then we'll get to a fun question afterwards. And this is really the holy grail and it's probably what you continue to devote your career to. So there's probably wrong, I don't know. But when we think about your career, you've worked with some of the most biggest and brightest minds in education and in innovation and technology and in storytelling, and you've been at the forefront of what's truly working in education and a lot of your career, you've written books about it. What do you feel like... I don't know. I almost want to ask you what's absolutely critical to have a good education? That's a big workshop in itself, but what do you want to talk about, what you've noticed of what truly works in education and where you hope that we put emphasis in the future?

Milton Chen:

Well, I think it does go back to student choice and student voice. George Lucas was, now it's not, well, not a very good student, was kind of a disengaged student. Imagine you're a teacher of a young 18-year-old whose name is George Lucas, and he's sitting in the back of your class and he doesn't seem very engaged, and he's not getting a very good grade in your class, maybe barely passing. If you had this idea, "Well, maybe I should ask him about how I might engage him." If you ask George, "George, you're not doing well in this class, what is it that you are interested in?" He would've said, "I'm interested in photography. I have a darkroom at home. I like the camera. I like taking images and developing them."

Of course, back then, it was never anything, not like today, where you could ask a student, "Okay, that's great. Let's have you tell the story, through photographs, of your neighborhood, of your community, of your family. But it was never anything that that teacher could incorporate into the curriculum, or at least back then, I guess.

So I do think it does start with the student. It's so easy to say students at the center of their learning, but do we really do it? Do we really allow them to express their interests and find ways to connect their interests with their learning?

I'll just give you one example of one of my favorite projects, and I mentioned it in the Education Nation book. It was the independent project. This was a high school seniors project where he was, after the tests are done and you're heading towards graduating high school, there's a period of a couple of months there where you finish your college applications or what have you, and there is this disease that overtakes many seniors called senioritis, which means that they, basically, don't come to class much, they're not very engaged, they're getting ready to graduate.

And so, this student's parents noticed he wasn't very engaged, he was just complaining about school, and his mother said, "Why don't you go and talk with the principal and say, "Look, I'm kind of bored. There's nothing much to do"?" And he developed a project where the seniors, it all happened over the course of maybe a few weeks and months, were able to do their own independent projects.

Of course, doing an independent project is something that happens a lot in middle school and high school, but they said to the seniors, "Okay, you can take the rest of your time, pick up a topic, a project, come back and present it to us in a matter of weeks, something that you're really passionate about and always wanted to study. You don't have to come to a classroom anymore. And every teacher in this school can be a resource for your project. If you want to do photography, talk to the art teacher. If you want to do something in science, and the science teachers can be a resource. And you can get out in the community and find other resource and experts to help you."

It was amazing what students did. And I can follow up and send you the link to the book that this student wrote. But it was amazing what students can do, again, when they're given the opportunity and able to pursue projects of their own passion. Students are writing. "I've always wanted to write short stories. I'm going to write a bunch of short stories and put it together in a collection. I've always wanted to get out and do some learning about the environment, I'm going to do that." So it was amazing what students were able to do. Again, when they're given the flexibility, they can power their own learning.

Elana Leoni:

And I feel that now we have so much technology to make it quicker and do it all. When you have the example of George Lucas, at the time, there weren't digital cameras, so it wasn't like, "Oh, you can put that in a PowerPoint. And you can do this and create this interactive this and create this video." None of that existed at that time.

Now we have all this technology at our fingertips, and although I do see student voice and choice increasing, but not to the level... If you could tell someone way back in the day when George was at school and say, "You can have all this at your fingertips," what would school be like? I think they would imagine something a bit more owned by the student if we could.

All right. Well, Milton, I know that I feel very grateful you were able to spend your time with us. Any of the resources that you mentioned, we will put in the show notes of this episode. So if you want to send along anything from the national parks as well as some guides, anything, you mentioned some things from your book that we'll put in the show notes as well, and Edutopia, anything from the Sesame Street, I think also KQED they have some great resources you were talking about, we'll put them all in the show notes so people can peruse.

But our last question we love to close out with is around just being a curious, intellectual human and being in this challenging world sometime of EdTech, but also rewarding of how do you, in those days where you were just feeling, maybe, "Gosh, I've had a long day and I don't feel like I've made the momentum I want to in education. I feel a little drained." What are the ways that you particularly nourish yourself and get back that energy to tackle another day of what you're doing? What truly fills your cup? And if you want to mention a couple of books or videos that you've been watching that have inspired you lately, feel free.

Milton Chen:

Well, I'm very fortunate to be at a point in my life where I'm a grandfather. So my three-year-old granddaughter is constantly... I call her a Joy Bomb when she comes through the door. We care for her two days a week. She's very present and you have to be present with that young child. So it's just a lot of movement and singing and joking and learning of language. I think that's also something, as someone who studied child development and interested in how kids acquire language, to just see that on a weekly basis. The preparation before when you're talking with the infant and the toddler, they're not able to talk back, but they're clearly absorbing and understanding that certain sounds go with certain objects and things like that. Also, the capacity, as I mentioned, to learn more than one language, I think that's also something and a challenge I'll put to the American school system is in this day and age where we live in a global economy, so important that American students learn about other cultures and other languages.

How do you fit that into a curriculum? But it can be done. We have all sorts of digital tools, as you mentioned, to learn other languages, but I will reference a TED Talk from a University of Washington professor called the Bilingual Brain, where she studied infants and toddlers, brought them into her lab, put little electrodes on them and studied whether they could understand two different languages, and she saw that even before they could speak, their brains were organizing certain sounds with one language, and when they heard a different language, those sounds went with a different language.

It's actually a TED Talk that Mellody Hobson saw and came back and said to George Lucas, "Our little daughter can be learning a second language. We need to find out a language and get her started because her brain is capable of this." So their daughter, they chose Chinese, enrolled their daughter in a Mandarin immersion program, and I'm sure their daughter is pretty fluent in Chinese. This must have been six or seven years ago. But yes, watching a young child develop-

Elana Leoni:

I would agree. That's truly amazing.

Milton Chen:

Yeah, I'll just reference something I saw the other day about our National Poet Laureate, Youth Poet Laureate, a young woman who's from Sacramento, she's now a college student, but the age of 18. Her name is Alexandra Huynh from Sacramento. A great story of a young woman, and a fairly shy student when she was growing up, finding her voice, literally her voice as poet and becoming our National Youth Poet Laureate. And I'll send you the link about that. It's very inspiring to see a young woman of Vietnamese family become our Youth Poet Laureate nationally.

Elana Leoni:

Those are great. And I love how you talk about your granddaughter being a joy bomb. I love that phrase, I absolutely love it.

Milton Chen:

It's very true.

Elana Leoni:

I want to thank you for being our joy bomb for today. It's put so much smile and laughter on my face. Even though we're talking about really complex issues, it gives me hope that there are people like you still working within it, and we're having these challenging and critical conversations of what we need to do to go forward in education.

Milton Chen:

It's been a pleasure. Elana, thank you.

Elana Leoni:

Well, thank you so much, Milton. Take care.

Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter at Leoni Group, or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoyed today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.