Aylon Samouha on How Communities Can Design Extraordinary Learning for All

Shownotes

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, host Rebecca Midles sits down with Aylon Samouha, the CEO of Transcend and a visionary in education reform. They delve into the concept of The Third Way, an approach that blends community insights with proven educational practices to create lasting change in schools. Aylon shares his insights from years of experience in the field, discussing the limitations of traditional top-down reforms and the challenges faced by grassroots efforts. Together, they explore the importance of truly listening to students and communities to design learning environments that meet today’s needs. The conversation is a thoughtful journey through the complexities and possibilities of transforming education, emphasizing the power of student-centered learning and community-based design.

Outline

(00:00) Introduction to the Podcast
(02:19) The Need for a New Educational Design
(06:04) Historical Resistance to Change in Education
(10:01) Impact of the Pandemic on Education
(11:41) The Importance of Student Experience
(14:31) Listening to Students: Challenges and Benefits
(18:16) Surprises in Community-Based Design
(21:47) Hopes for the Future of Education
(24:20) Parallels Between Jazz and Education Design

Introduction to the Podcast

Rebecca Midles: You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Rebecca Midles. Today, we’re joined by Aylon Samouha, CEO of Transcend and co-founder of an approach to education reform called The Third Way. Aylon has worked with schools across the country to redesign learning environments through community-based design. In this podcast, we’ll explore the challenges schools are facing, from chronic absenteeism to the lingering effects of the pandemic, and why neither top-down mandates nor grassroots reforms have fully delivered the transformation our learning systems need. Instead, Aylon makes a case for a new model that truly listens to students and communities. Aylon, welcome.

Aylon Samouha: Thanks for having me.

Rebecca Midles: Thank you for joining us.

Rebecca Midles: Can you give us some background on what The Third Way is and how you developed it as a viable model for change?

Aylon Samouha: After being in education for a couple of decades and being a part of many reform efforts, one of the insights my co-founder and I, Jeff Wetzler, circled around was the idea that the core design of school needed to change. Many of the reform efforts that we were a part of amounted to tinkering within a model of school that was designed a very long time ago.

Aylon Samouha: I think it’s important to note that what many now call the industrial model or the factory model of school was at the time very much an innovation. It’s worth remembering that in 1900, 6% of high school-age kids actually attended high school. The idea that we had an efficient way to get lots of kids into school buildings, into formal learning, was in and of itself an innovation. It was designed to prepare students for farm and factory work, so it should be no surprise that there’s a fundamental mismatch between what schools were designed for and what we need from them today. When we ask ourselves, what do we need from graduates today?

The Need for a New Educational Design

Aylon Samouha: We thought to ourselves things that I think parents, employers, and students themselves say, which is, I want to be intellectually engaged, I want to be personally connected, I want to be in charge, I want to be empowered. So that I can be successful in life, make an impact in my community, and live out my life’s purpose. Since school wasn’t designed that way, we were asking ourselves, what kind of design might prepare students in this new way? As we started answering that question, working with schools to answer it, we realized there’s a question even before that, which is, how do we even come up with that answer? Because if we just come up with an answer and then say, “Okay, we have the answer, everybody. This is what school should be.”

Aylon Samouha: We’re going to do this top-down thing that even in your intro you named. Through my time at Teach for America and other reform efforts, the top-down thing does not work. By the way, it doesn’t only not work in education, although we’re talking about education here, it just doesn’t work. In no world can you tell a community or a practitioner of anything, “We have the answer, please just do it with fidelity. If you don’t, you’re not being smart.” That has been so much of the approach of many reform efforts over the past couple of decades. Now, we’ve gotten some measure of change as a result of that because yes, certainly, taking a best practice, trying to bottle it up and help people use it is better than not doing that. I mean, let’s be clear. But what we noticed is that in response to this top-down thing, we were hearing a lot of bottom-up stuff, which was also very well-intentioned. It’s like, “Well, no, the answers can’t come from up on high. The answers live with the community. Students and families know the answer. The classroom teacher knows the answer. They should be empowered to make this change.” We thought to ourselves, that also feels incomplete because there’s a burden that you then place on teachers and families and students that we would never do in another sector. We’d never go to a doctor who’s serving patients and say, “Hey, while you’re serving patients, can you also come up with a vaccine? Can you also invent the X-ray machine? Can you also invent new surgical techniques?” No. We don’t do that.

Aylon Samouha: What we came to realize is, and it’s partly why we named the organization Transcend, that we actually need the best of both of those approaches. We need the bottoms-up, “What are our values? What’s the purpose of education as we define it? What are the insights that only we have about ourselves and our own community?” And the investment and conviction that comes with that. But we also need, “What are the best practices? What are evidence-based models that I can use? How can we make it so that a community doesn’t have to start from scratch?” That kind of expertise matters. We ended up with this third way, where we’re combining the best of these two approaches into what we call community-based design.

Rebecca Midles: I’m still processing some of those nice connections.

Historical Resistance to Change in Education

Rebecca Midles: Historically, why do you think the educational systems in the United States have been so slow to embrace this kind of change at one form or another that you’ve expressed?

Aylon Samouha: A lot of the change has been hard to come by because an incumbent system, as we well know, is not necessarily designed to pursue change in this way. Right? We know that from every sector. Right? Because we’re in education, we like to bemoan how slow education change happens because it’s the thing we know most. In the places where there have been faster changes, there have been some very intentional choices that have been made to undo the gravitational pull of incumbency. That’s why we have all of this change management literature. That’s why we have entire organizations devoted to adaptive leadership, etc. That’s why we have lots of R&D practices within organizations and ecosystems. For example, healthcare thankfully looks a lot different today than it did 100 years ago. That’s because there’s a lot of intentional choices that have been made to make that true. It’s still not perfect, but certainly, it’s made more progress relatively from an innovation standpoint than education has. There’s a $40 billion National Institutes of Health that doesn’t serve a patient, that does R&D. How much does Johnson & Johnson spend on this? How does medical school look different? How does ongoing training for doctors and nurses, etc., look different over time? These things happen with intentional choices. I think that school in and of itself is a thing. Not only is there the power of incumbency, but it is an incumbency that every single individual has experienced. If I had a kidney issue and I went to the nephrologist, I don’t have an archetype in my head of what a nephrology appointment should look like. But the second I walk into a third-grade classroom as a parent, let’s say, I’m thinking about the third-grade classroom that I was in. The third grader is thinking about the second-grade classroom that she was in. We all have an archetype. The power of incumbency is multiplied by the shared deep immersive archetype we have in school. It’s worth remembering that, on average, you spend 15,000 hours between K and 12 in school, and so that’s 15,000 hours of incumbency that each individual is carrying with them, which means it’s even a deeper learning process than it would be. The level of complexity and nuance that comes with that has made it very, very hard to make this change, especially when the go-to thing was like, “We have the answer. Just use it.”

Rebecca Midles: I’m thinking about that piece and how the parental experience is also a part of that personal experience that we have, like how our parents. I think about the urgency platform that has driven a lot of change that has taken root in some of those systems you’ve worked with, and then how you try to manufacture that level of urgency, if that’s the driver that has helped with acceleration, or does that need to be the case? Thinking about those pieces with what you’ve just shared, we’re four years out from the pandemic.

Impact of the Pandemic on Education

Rebecca Midles: How are the impacts of that time that we all experienced collectively still shaping schools today?

Aylon Samouha: Many parents got a look-see into what the experience of school can be, should be, where it’s successful, where it’s falling short. I have an optimistic side on this question and I have a less optimistic side. The optimistic side of me says more than ever before, at least in my experience, it’s more common for a parent to really, really center. How does this just feel right? What is the experience of school? It’s been my observation as a parent—I have a 13-year-old and an 8-year-old—and obviously, I’ve talked to many, many, many kids, that the high watermark of the answer to the question, “How was school today?” is “fine.” Fine is decidedly mediocre. At best, it means like, well, and in worse circumstances, it actually is masking something even more deeply painful or whatever. I know, I’m sure there are cases where you can’t even muster the word “fine.” That has always been true. I don’t think that when I came home from school, I magically was on fire in terms of my motivation when my mom asked me how was school today. But I actually think people care about it more now. I think that’s a good thing.

The Importance of Student Experience

Aylon Samouha: Part of the reason why change has been so hard to come by is there’s no way to get outcomes without thinking about the experience that the individual is having. I think that’s a truism across anything, but it certainly is true in school. In fact, John Dewey would take it a step further and say, not only is the experience an enabler of outcomes, he would say experiences are the journey itself. He said so many versions of “education is not preparation for life, education is life.” I take from that a centering of student experience, not in a hokey sort of “how did you feel” sort of way, but actually something much, much deeper than that. Where we are strategically understanding there is a sense of motivation and cognition that I need to have to be ready to learn to be able to reach the outcomes we care about. The process by which I am deeply engaged in learning is a habit that we want to have that can only be created through experience. For both short-term and long-term outcomes, we have to care about experiences. The optimistic side of me believes that parents, educators, superintendents, funders are more awake to that concept than they’ve ever been as a result of the pandemic.

Rebecca Midles: I think about that a lot, and I think about the feelings piece in that that’s the residual for many parents is what they felt in school, less and more about what they learned. I often think that’s a big driver in that conversation, as well as our general awareness about emotional intelligence and how important that is. Deep learning, I think what you hit on for me, like I’m a big fan of the flow of learning. Deep learning does have an emotional connection, whether we intrinsically know that when we’re asking or whether we were slowly getting there for kind of a common collective understanding. We know that that matters for retention and we know that that matters for passion, right? And showing up intrinsically. So your

Aylon Samouha: The thing you just brought up is the learning science. Says the same thing, right? And how wonderful that is, as opposed to like, well, students want one thing, but the science says something else. Actually, they’re saying the same thing, and I think there’s something really, really powerful in that. I might even add that not only are they saying the same thing, but also employers. We want to hire people who are collaborative and emotionally healthy and, you know, competent and X, Y, Z, and have empathy and, you know, with the customer, etc. It’s like literally everyone’s saying the same thing, scientists, employers, and students and families.

Listening to Students: Challenges and Benefits

Rebecca Midles: I know enough about you and Transcend to know, of course, listening to students is an obvious strategy. We know that’s an important piece. Other than efficiency, like an adult-centric system with efficiency, other than that driver, why do you think historically students haven’t consistently been given a voice, at least traditionally, in their education? I know they’re seeing it more now, but

Aylon Samouha: Yeah, no. I mean, I think in general, ideas of centeredness, right? And listening to your customer or right. These are all concepts. I don’t, I can’t really tell you why in 1740 people weren’t asking people, right, whatever. But that would actually be a very interesting dissertation. I’m sure it has to do with lots of cultural things and what leadership and expertise and all that kind of stuff. I think that’s just true for any sector. If students are the user here, it’s going to be true for them too. I think there’s an additional thing, which is that at least in the Western society that I’m used to, the overwhelming orientation that we have about young people is that they are vessels to be filled with information. I was just reading David Yeager’s 10 to 25 book where I’m not getting the exact words right, but where they’re like, it’s more like they’re monsters to be controlled or whatever. They literally will make the wrong choice unless you tell them the right choice. So it’s even worse than vessels to be filled. I think that has been just the predominant way that we view children at school and at home. I like to play the back-to-the-future game with myself sometimes. I’m like, what would be the equivalent 50 years from now of today when people say, “Yeah, we used to smoke in the car with the baby in the back with the windows rolled up,” right? And they’re like, “Were you crazy?” In 50 years, I’d like to think that my grandchildren would say, “Why didn’t you think that a 16-year-old could do anything?” We know how to do stuff, right? It’s just insane that you thought of us as these empty vessels or worse, right? I think there’s a bit of that. Then the final thing is that even someone who’s just run a team of six people or runs a small shop knows that when you start asking people their opinion, you get more work. It’s a little easier to put the blinders on and you multiply that by a system of how many students and families, etc. We’ve never gotten good at having the methods for being able to deeply listen and be able to make choices in an efficient way. I do think that people may have some lived experience, but also probably more of a fear that by asking people, you’re literally just creating more work and more of a headache because they’re going to ask for things that you can’t even do. So now you’re just telling people no all the time, as opposed to having a process that feels protected from that binary choice of either you do something with your blinders on or you listen and never get anything done.

Rebecca Midles: Which would also necessitate the revisit of roles. I think sometimes it’s so often because educators feel like they have to have the answer still, and so often asking that question feels uncomfortable because they feel like the more work is going out and having the answer or having it already prepared.

Surprises in Community-Based Design

Rebecca Midles: What has been the biggest surprise from your experience working with communities to redesign schools? What has surprised you in this work?

Aylon Samouha: I think I was expecting mindsets and these deep archetypes to be a lot harder. That the learning journey itself would be very, very difficult. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the notion that it actually doesn’t take much. I’ve seen a skeptical veteran educator completely flip her view with like two 45-minute conversations with students where she spent 42 minutes of that 45 minutes listening and three minutes talking. Not just in words, because she’s supposed to say, like, literally like, “Now I remember why I got in education,” and “the fog is lifting” kind of thing. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by, and it charges me up that if someone has even a little bit of willingness to go on a design journey or just a learning journey, you’ve got the design to ask these questions. It’s all there. The wisdom is just under the surface and the desire is right under the surface too. The thing is, when you do innovative work, you actually do have to work harder because you don’t get to ditch the thing that you were already doing because kids are still in third grade. You actually have more work, so you have every incentive. Like, yeah, I didn’t really hear that. Let’s just move on. But instead, people are not just saying, but acting with a renewed sense of energy and purpose. It’s shocking how little it takes for that to happen at the individual level. On the other hand, I’ve been surprised by how hard it is to get an entire system to do that. If it’s so easy with each individual, it’s all the individuals you do, and then it should happen. No, actually, what the archetype is of leadership really matters. Back to that, the student question of why didn’t we listen to students? Well, I didn’t listen to them because I, as the leader, as the soup or as the principal, am supposed to have the answers. When I don’t have the answers, that means I’m not good enough. How do we help everyone become learner-centered and even change their conception of what leadership and expertise is to begin with? That stuff is hard. So maybe I’m cheating a little bit. It’s like, did I really think that was going to be easy? Probably not. But I guess I would say I’m struck by that juxtaposition of how simple it is on the one hand and how hard it is on the other.

Rebecca Midles: So true. And it’s the magic. I mean, you’re often put in this position as I have been in the past, as well as others that are listening, where, you know, we’re kind of expected to be able to speak to how to scale. I think that’s the driver to, you think that there’s going to be some kind of recipe, even if it’s just a framework, not a really high micromanaged recipe, but there’s supposed to be some sort of response to that. That’s why I love the work that you’re surfacing. So let’s think about that. Now, we were in January.

Hopes for the Future of Education

Rebecca Midles: 2025. We’re starting a new chapter as a nation in our leadership. What is your hope around this work in the four years ahead? With a predicted shift from national initiatives around education to a more state and perhaps regional local approach, how do you see this work showing up?

Aylon Samouha: What’s been hard over the last few years is that since we started Transcend in 2015, there’s been quite an ecosystem shift. I would say from there being a bipartisan effort to bolster the work of schools to improve outcomes for kids. While the two sides disagreed on a lot of stuff, there was a remarkable number of shared collaborations in the couple of decades before. Our political climate has changed, and now it feels as though, with our worst impulses as a society, schools have become the place to sow division. Not find the places for collaboration and shared effort and discourse to begin with, from the classroom to the school board meeting. My hope is that we can figure out how to recapture some of that working together. I’m not Pollyannaish, there’s no way we’re going to just agree on all the things. But can we agree on any of the things, and can we use that, whether it be locally or nationally, to work together on behalf of kids? And with young people. For example, I see a lot of similar rhetoric across the spectrum around preparing students for work, work-based learning, certifications, competency-based, etc. These are themes that seem to be speaking to many demographics, urban, rural, etc. Is there a way to build on that? Because the adults fighting is not going to lead to young people thriving in and ultimately transforming the world we live in.

Parallels Between Jazz and Education Design

Rebecca Midles: I went deep there for a minute; I have to ask you, how does being a jazz guitarist influence your approach to education design? Are there parallels between improvising in music, particularly jazz, and innovating in schools that you could share some insights? I’m revealing to our listeners that you are.

Aylon Samouha: I am a jazz guitarist. Thank you. It’s one of my favorite topics. I really appreciate it. I’ll say two things about this. One is I referenced earlier what kind of learning environments do we need? I said intellectually engaged, emotionally connected, and personally empowered. A lot of times when I ask people, when were you the most wildly motivated to learn? The example they will give me is, a lot of times, not in formal schooling. Unfortunately. When I give my answer, it is always the guitar. Because those things are true. I am so intellectually engaged when I’m trying to figure out the theory and what scales and why did they make that choice? Why does that chord work there, not there? I am emotionally connected. The music makes me feel good, even if I’m playing by myself, let alone when I’m playing with other people, where we’re in community, let alone I’m playing with other people for an audience where now we’re connected. That brings me so much joy, and I’m personally empowered. I get to make choices about when? How long? Do I do that scale 14 more times? Or do I put that aside and work on this other thing? And I live with the consequences of those choices, like where I needed a little bit of that on the next gig and it wasn’t there, or whatever it is. To me, it serves as a way of thinking about how could learning be like that? In school, right? So that’s one. From a process standpoint, which you brought up, and improvisation, etc. In music in general, and certainly in jazz, there’s not just a right answer. Trying to be overly precise and overly prescriptive will lead to music that usually the person doesn’t enjoy playing and no one enjoys listening to. There’s a give and take. There is learning from listening to the last thing that someone played and playing off of that and making them better by what you do. I think is part of what a successful learning environment is but also what a successful process of design needs to feel like.

Rebecca Midles: I think it’s also why you so often say the experience versus maybe the traditional view of a teacher delivering that what we’re talking about is more interactive, which I have a partiality towards jazz as well, because I think it’s less about listening to the music played, but more about the experience of being in that moment while you’re listening. Love that you shared that. I think music and sports for some folks. I mean, I think that’s where people often get in their individual flow and have the magic of a communal flow in that learning too. Wonderful to hear. Thank you so much for taking time to join us today and to share about the work that you’re doing with Transcend. I hope our listeners will look to our links that we will share and find out more. Thank you.

Aylon Samouha: Thanks for having me. It’s been wonderful.

Aylon Samouha

Aylon Samouha serves as the CEO of Transcend. With a commitment to ensuring all students receive the education they deserve, Aylon has dedicated his career to driving transformative change in American schooling. In 2015, he and Jeff Wetzler co-founded Transcend, an organization established on the belief that realizing the infinite potential of all students requires us to reimagine “schooling” as we know it. Before co-founding Transcend, Aylon served as the Chief Schools Officer at Rocketship Education, where he led the highest performing network of low-income schools in California. Additionally, Aylon spent several years as a Senior Vice President at Teach For America, directing pre-service institutes and service development for teachers. Aylon’s expertise and insights have been widely recognized, and he has been invited to speak at various convenings, including the ASU+GSV conference, The New Schools Venture Fund Summit, Digital Promise’s Annual Convening, and numerous others dedicated to advancing education innovation globally. Aylon also serves on the board of Leading Educators.

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