In this, the second of two episodes with this guest, Ivana Isailovic, Ph.D., flips the conversation and temporarily fills the role of host, pushing David’s thinking deeper into the principles that undergird teaching and learning exchanges. Ivana also highlights differences she has observed during her educational experiences in Europe and the United States. Read the Show Notes for more details!
Ivana seeks another perspective on addressing biases (2:45)
Engagement cuts across all groups (3:45)
Dr. Phil Schlechty influenced David’s views on learning (4:15)
Your mom’s opinion matters (4:45)
Affiliation requires collaboration (5:30)
All learners “bring motives to the table” (6:25)
It’s the work that engages the learner (7:00)
A, B, or Not Yet (7:00)
Diversity of interest (8:05)
Engagement and learning, cradle to grave (9:15)
Ivana shares some thoughts on balancing universality and individual contexts (9:45)
Engage all or engage most? (10:30)
Attention as the currency of a student’s time (12:40)
Ivana digs into the “student as customer” concept(14:40)
School as a place for the creation of a civic project (15:10)
Students have choices, even in a compulsory attendance context (16:30)
The student-customer metaphor (17:30)
School’s connection to community – the metaphor expanded (18:25)
Different types of teaching and the effect on learner engagement (20:10)
Ivana describes some university experiences in Europe (21:00)
Clarifying the meaning of student choice (22:00)
The most important customers (24:45)
David and Ivana agree (25:20)
Ivana asks about the Professional Association of Georgia Educators (25:25)
Safe schools, wraparound services, funding formula, and the teacher pipeline (26:25)
PAGE benefits – individual, school, profession (28:30)
True accountability (29:15)
Generosity, patience, and community matter (30:25)
Ivana highlights important concepts in the customer metaphor (31:20)
David and Ivana agree, again (32:10)
Ivana points out the great contributions of teachers (32:30)
Ivana’s grandmother is still serving in a teaching role (33:50)
David Reynolds: What matters most in learning? The challenge? The thrill? The benefits? Interacting with other people? Or something else entirely? What is the connection between leading and learning? Does change drive learning, or does learning drive change? What's more important teaching or learning? Is everyone a leader? A learner? A teacher? Want answers? Listen in, as we address these intriguing issues to commentary and with guests who share their thinking and tell us their stories. Lead. Learn. Change.
Ivana Isailovic: What is ultimately the goal? Our goal as educators?
David Reynolds: Everything that happens in school ought to be for the benefit of the learner.
Ivana Isailovic: Our classrooms are embedded in a context that keeps generating huge inequalities. So we really need to be aware of that. And I think it's so difficult, but it's a work that has to be done.
David Reynolds: I mean, it takes personal interaction with people to know what's going to work best in a particular setting.
Ivana Isailovic: Some of us think a lot about their teaching. Others do that less.
David Reynolds: It comes back to the individual.
Ivana Isailovic: She's of course retired, but she still animates a theater workshop in Belgrade with disabled adults.
David Reynolds: That school has built a school in another country.
Ivana Isailovic: You can do everything with love and generosity, really.
David Reynolds: During a previous episode, guest Ivana Isailovic told us about how her experiences in Yugoslavia, France, and the United States coalesced to form her current views on teaching and learning. Our conversation continued beyond the end of that episode and today we share some of our extended discussion with you. Ivana and I engage in a friendly debate about the student as customer concept, land on some points of agreement, and learn a bit more about Ivana's thinking and why she teaches the way she does. Guest turns host, and vice-versa as Ivana asks the questions and I respond. Note, you may hear a few instances of some background city traffic due to the recording location today. Now let's pick up where we left off.
Do you have questions that you want to ask or anything else you want to add that I should have asked?
Ivana Isailovic: Yeah. I mean, I was really interested in this idea of how do you think about the question that you asked me earlier about biases? Right? So for me, we really need to understand how our classroom is embedded in a political context and be aware of our biases and try the best we can to address those. But what are the kinds of conversations that you have when it comes to that topic?
David Reynolds: That topic specifically, probably doesn't surface with that terminology very often. However, I would have to respond to that by saying that it comes back to the individual and then your reference to we all operate in different contexts. So our approach is, when we focus on the qualities of work that actually lead to engagement, and you've touched on a number of those today, they cut across all groups, whether it's race or gender or socioeconomic status, ethnicity, nationality, how old you are, previous experience, there are still going to be characteristics of work that appeal to each learner. And you've identified those that matter to you most. So each person is motivated. Every learner is motivated for something. And the teacher's role is to design work that aligns with what those motives are. I need to make sure I mention that most of my response will be really grounded in the work of Dr. Phil Schlechty, the late Dr. Phil Schlechty, because that's who really sort of made me thinking about this work.
And those motives or those qualities of work that people care about the most are different for everybody. And they do ebb and flow a little bit. But you mentioned, for example, choice. You mentioned that a lot, you provide that with your students now, it was important for you to have some choice in how you do some things. Some people are really motivated by just having the choice to demonstrate what they learn, the way they want to do it, as opposed to everybody having to do exactly the same thing. Others are really affirmed by having their work or their knowledge shared with people that matter to them. So when you call your mom after you sell your first dress by yourself, that is all the affirmation you really need about that learning experience to see how far you've come.
And because your mom's opinion matters, you can't distort this notion of affirmation by saying, well, if we just put the students work on the wall and people walk by and see it, it's being affirmed. It has to be affirmed by people that matter to them. So when you design the work you build in a component that allows students an opportunity to share work with people that matter to them. Same thing with affiliation. That is far more than just counting off by fours and all the ones working together and all the twos and saying, well, now we're doing cooperative work. Affiliation really means that you designed work in such a way that it cannot be done well without working with other people. And then students are led to seek out who those others are, find those others, and then work that collaboration piece to get that done.
And then there's people who really thrive on novelty and variety. They don't want the same thing every day. Some people really want the exact same thing every day. Some people need a lot of clarity about what the product is supposed to look like when they get done, the product, the performance, the exhibition. Some people don't want that. They want to be able to kind of do their own thing.
So for teachers, what we try to impart is all of your learners bring these motives to the table and you design work in a way that appeals to those motives. And what we do as an organization in our professional learning sessions has to demonstrate and model and emphasize those same things. So that it's obvious to the participants that this does work because it's resonating with me. And they're engaged in the whole thing. We are not saying that what teachers do now is wrong at all. We're not trying to work on teachers we are working on the work, because it's the work, the experience that you designed for the learner that engages them. So we're talking about working on the work and building relationships, but that's another huge topic.
You almost skirted over towards the issue of social, emotional learning. And we know that one of the main things you have to do at a school is create conditions for engagement. And part of that is social emotional focus to make sure that it's a safe learning environment. And that doesn't mean just physically safe, but academically. So the students are protected from initial quote unquote failure. They get multiple chances to demonstrate that they know something. I have a friend who, when he taught, he greeted all of his students, A, B, and not yet. He would not accept anything other than the student's best effort. And he pushed that until some sort of guideline said, no, you've got to give that student an incomplete or a failing grade or whatever, but he dragged that out as long as he could to make sure that the student had a chance to do that.
So when we address biases or diversity, it's really talking about the diversity of interest and the people that we serve. They know, as you've mentioned earlier, their operating context. They know their students and their families and their community. And if they need a very specific focus on something like that, which is going to be different for every educator in the room or every team of educators in the room, that's when we would help them think about the right questions to ask, to help them get started on addressing that particular need at their school. And then the Ivanas and other experts who can actually help somebody with a particular need, whether it's about gender issues or whether it's about a racial issues, or whether it's just about the extreme needs that are generated by generational poverty or whatever it is, it's going to be different for every single school.
And so our sessions don't focus on those specifics as much as the things that are truly universal and that we help them think about how they can address the specifics by looking through this lens of, I guess you could call it differentiation, but it's really more customizing the work, but there are universal concepts that apply to everybody. It's not a K-12 thing. It's not even a P 16 or P 20 thing. It's really a birth until thing because we're learning. I mean, you're learning right now. You just picked up this new skill of sewing. So that's a long response to how we address that. But we address it by default, by addressing what matters to every single student, every single teacher, regardless of what group somebody might place them in.
Ivana Isailovic: That's super interesting. There's always this tension. I'm happy how you talked about the tension between the universal aspect and the fact that we are not in a universal body. We are people with our experiences. We belong to certain groups or people think that we belong to some groups. So there's always this tension between the idea of universality and the idea that it's all taking place in a specific context, place, and time. And that some of these issues matter a lot because our classrooms are embedded in a context that keeps generating huge inequalities. So we really need to be aware of that. And I think it's so difficult, but it's a work that has to be done.
David Reynolds: We're also saying that a goal is for all learners to be engaged as much as possible, but there's not an unrealistic aim that teachers are supposed to be superhuman and create learning experiences that engage every single student every single day, all day long, that's just simply not possible. So you're trying to engage as many students as possible, as often as possible over time with another goal being that there should not be a student who has never engaged. And there's a difference between engagement and compliance. Engagement is when when you're voluntarily committing your attention and your focus to a task or a project or an undertaking, and again, voluntarily because you find inherent value in it. And the reason you do is because of the design qualities of those characteristics I just mentioned earlier. If the work has embedded in it those qualities that appeal to you, then sometimes it's even the content, it may just be that I want to learn how to do this particular thing, that's content and substance type of quality.
So you can be engaged or you can have some other level of response to the work. It comes and goes. It ebbs and flows, but you are constantly engaged a hundred percent of the time, either as an adult. And you should not label a student as, oh that that child is disengaged, or that child is rebellious, or that student is always retreating from the work, or they're just passively compliant. They're just doing enough to stay out of trouble. Because if the work appeals to the motives that they have and the interests that they have, then they'll be engaged. And if the student is never engaged, you really do need to take a step back and look at the work.
That's the whole notion of students as customers. You think about the phrase paying attention. That is the currency of a student's time in the classroom. It's their attention and their commitment. And that's what they pay with. If what you're quote unquote selling appeals to them, then they're going to quote unquote, buy it. And if, because it's a value to them, they're going to make that trade. Attendance is not the same as attention. So that's where that phrase really comes from about students as customers. And if you go back to the diversity and differences conversation, everybody has their own reason for paying attention, because they're all different. And it happens in adult life too. I mean, if you're looking for some wood, you can go to big box home improvement store A or you can go to big box home improvement store B, its competitor. They're usually one of each in the same town or nearby.
Or you can go to a mom and pop kind of shop that just specializes in exotic woods or something like that. But you can even buy something really similar that you need online. There's all kinds of ways to go at it, but you can go straight to the saw mill, if you want to and chop up your own tree. I mean, you can get anything that you want. So each person has a different reason for picking big box store A as their favorite. There's something about it that they like more, but that doesn't mean they will never go in the other store. So at times you'll choose a different retailer depending on what you need and what your interest is and what they have available. And you're sort of shopping, but you're the customer and you're driving your attention and your commitment and your resources to that location.
And the student is there. And so they don't really have that shopping sort of opportunity, but they do internally with their commitment and their attention. So when they pay attention they're demonstrating very clearly how they are a customer. And that's the reason that a school or a learning organization exists anyway, it's for the student or for the learner. So they are the most important customer.
Ivana Isailovic: So the reason why I really dislike this idea of students as customers has more to do with, I suppose, first I come from Europe and we are very kind of when you hear things like that, because it seems as if a school was a corporation. Which it's not, we don't have the same interest we're not preparing individuals for the same thing. So we always think about school as a place where we built a civic project. So in France, for instance, where you like this idea of universalism and fraternity, and that's what we do there, right? We are kind of producing citizens that are going to be able to perpetuate these values. And so these are not customers. It's bigger than that.
Now I know also that in United States, the idea of customer is more complex than that, that there are a lot of people who thought about it really hard. So it might not be the simplistic kind of idea that we have in Europe. But there is something about this idea that really bothers me. And I think that that has to do with that. It has to do with what is ultimately the goal, our goal as educators.
David Reynolds: The goal is that we are doing everything possible to ensure that every student is prepared for whatever's next. That might be the next project or the next grade level, or the next school that he or she attends or university or something that's post-school, whether that's career or service. The student as a customer, the reason that that's used is to highlight the fact that students do have choices. Even if their attendance is compulsory, their attention and their commitment is not. And that they are the reason for you being there. And if all the customer's quote unquote customers went away, then the organization would cease to exist. And lots of times you're striving to create a true learning community or learning environment everywhere and flip the bureaucracy on its head and spend more time on systems that support learning as opposed to systems that create rules and guidelines and decisions for the convenience of adults versus the benefit of students.
Everything that happens in school ought to be for the benefit of the learner period. So in that instance, if you think about a business, and we're not saying a school's analogous to a business at all, it's just a metaphor for lack of a better descriptor. Everything that happens in the company is to support the customer, if you think about that. Profit is a by-product of doing your business right and serving your customers. There's not going to be any profit as a lagging indicator for example, if the business doesn't meet it's customer's needs, it will cease to exist unless it's a monopoly or some of the other types of things we could talk about. In a school, learning is not going to happen either if students aren't engaged in the work. You don't learn from work that you don't do.
You just don't. And you forget things that you just study for for the test. That's minimalism. That's not full engagement or being invested. We're really talking about appealing to what they need and what they want, to help them be as successful as possible. So your phrase, I think he said civic project, that's really quite synonymous with what we're talking about. Is the point is for it to be a community that generates community in the larger sense, so that people serve their communities in whatever way that they do after, during and or after school. So I don't really think we're far off. I think there are some semantics issues there, but I do think it goes back to our opening conversation as well, about a different perspective or different sort of experiences or different background, and even a different definition for a particular word can really spin how you view something. So talking about it makes that much more clear I hope.
Ivana Isailovic: It's very interesting. I guess that my, as an academic, I have two basic jobs. One is to write my papers and the other one is to teach. So I'm not somebody who strains to teach. I wouldn't say it's a secondary thing, but it is really... So I teach topics that I'm an expert in. And in that sense, we don't really... We don't... Some of us think a lot about their teaching, others do that less. And so by talking with you and others in the fellowship, I really get a new perspective on some of these notions.
David Reynolds: Your students would still be there in your classes. I'm assuming in some instances, because it might be part of a degree program or something where they need to take particular courses in order to earn a degree, or it could be that everything that you're doing is truly voluntary and an elective.
Ivana Isailovic: A lot of the things that I do is elective.
David Reynolds: If you change the way that you interacted with your students, and you stopped doing the things that you described at the very beginning of this conversation, where you provide choice, and you let quite a range of opportunities for people to select their own tools and their own processes, if you stopped doing that completely, and you became a stand and deliver teacher, your students would not be engaged. They would not learn, they would not sign up. And so your customers for our metaphor term is really what that is, would not be coming to your place of information offering, because it wouldn't be teaching and learning exchanges. It would simply be a stand up version of what they might be able to find online if you're just talking at them or to them. So I think we're actually pretty close and your practices support that.
Ivana Isailovic: Yeah, no, of course. And I think that another thing changing moment for me, like why I decided to teach the way I do is when I realized how different the teaching methods are here in the United States. So basically in France at university we have this huge lectures. We have a person who's basically talking at students for three hours nonstop, and you're supposed to take notes and you're supposed to then basically write long papers about this topic. But there's no interaction, right? We can't really raise our hand and say, Oh, I didn't understand X, or I didn't understand this concept. That doesn't really exist. So of course that also my teaching is colored by that experience. I don't think that this is a right way to teach. But at the same time, I, as I said, I do have issues with this idea that students can tailor completely their experience and they can evaluate you. And if you're not good well they are going to bear the consequences.
David Reynolds: We would not be leaning toward the direction of, you're now going to be evaluated on how joyfully happy and what a free for all environment this is and so that's what you need to make you happy. They're still the students and you're in front of the room or in charge of the classes you teach for a reason, because you do know what you're talking about. And they're there to learn from you and for you to use a pull platform, to pull them along, towards more learning. It's a choice not so much sometimes as what you learn, because there are standards of content, but how you demonstrate it should have more options available more often, not necessarily all the time. None of these things are all or nothing. I mean, it takes personal interaction with people to know what's going to work best in a particular setting. So we create the conditions for engagement and you facilitate learning and you try to do it in a way that appeals to students.
Every decision should be made for the benefit of learning, and students really. I mean, if it's just a convenience of adults thing, then you're really missing the boat. If a store, going back to that very basic, simplistic parallel of a customer, if they didn't offer anything that appealed to the customers, no one would ever show up and they would never come there. Taking that to a classroom, if you don't offer something that appeals to and is beneficial for the learners, they may be physically present, but they're not showing up. They're not engaged.
Ivana Isailovic: I agree. I... No. I really, really agree. It's just that I was, as I said, bothered by the metaphor because of the kind of older repercussions. If we understand it out of the context or if you use it...
David Reynolds: I think the point is students are the most important customers that you serve because you do serve the community. You do serve parents. Schools certainly serve educators as colleagues in the profession. And you're serving the community at large as a school or a school district. You have businesses. If you are graduating students, whether that's at the high school level or the college level who are ready for the workplace, then you are supporting your community and your business people. So if you weren't doing those things, you wouldn't be fulfilling your job as, as a group of educators or as a school district.
So I think saying students are the most important customers means that the emphasis on the most important. That the school exists for them and the other people are, they're also served. They're also stakeholders. They're also invested, but that's not who shows up in your school house doors every day. And you also serve your colleagues at the university, but the most important people that you design work for and that you invest your time and your talents in? The students that you work with every single day.
Ivana Isailovic: I agree on this last part, it's really interesting. So your organization is only active in Georgia?
David Reynolds: Yeah. We're an independent educator organization. We're not affiliated with any national group. We exist to support educators and the professional learning component of it is to help them think about their work more intentionally, more deliberately. I mean, you've put thought into how you teach. You're thinking about that now during this conversation quite a bit, and we want people to get clearer about their who. If you don't want to use the word customer, then just talk about the who, their who, and how do you support those learners so that they're really prepared for the next challenge, as we talked about earlier? So we advocate on behalf of Georgia public schools and we have over 90,000 members and it's not just professional learning, although that's a big part of it, but we have priorities on an annual basis. We have a legislative group that advocates on behalf of Georgia 's schools and Georgia's educators, and we have legislative priorities, just two or three or four of those a year.
For example, this past year, there was a school safety type of priority, which is not just about buildings and personnel, but it is also about the social emotional environment and wraparound services for example, especially in areas of high poverty. And funding continues to be a legislative priority that is not synonymous with more money, please. It's synonymous with let's have a funding formula that actually tries to calculate what it costs to educate a student. And the funding formula in place in Georgia has been around for quite a long time. It's not been modernized. It's not been adjusted to have a different funding weight for poverty or increasing transportation costs. And then we have a teacher pipeline legislative priority, which is recruiting quality teachers, retaining them and supporting them through retirement after their service. And right now the professional learning department is facilitating some sessions called page engage academies.
And for the first time ever, we have university students and staff members sitting alongside our public school practitioners in the sessions for a two-year commitment. Four sessions a year for two years. So eight sessions over two years, full days, each session around the work that I've been describing to you. So we're very excited about that because that feeds into the teacher pipeline and keeping that vibrant and helping other people at the university level understand why engagement is central to learning and why you need to create the conditions for engagement and what it is and what it isn't and why students are so important. And we also have a future Georgia educators group that hosts on college campuses one day events for high school students who are interested in becoming an educator as a career. And that has taken off. Some of our colleges of education have dropped in numbers in recent years or participants who are going to graduate with a teaching degree, and this is really going to support that going forward.
The benefits of being in an organization that focuses on supporting education. There's a benefit to you as an individual. Like how does this help me today? But then there's also, how does this help my colleague and our school in general? And then there's the larger, how do we collectively contribute to the whole profession? And how can we shift the narrative to one that focuses on what really matters, what should really be taking place, what the metrics should really be and what we should assess and how we should talk about our work and keeping it really professional.
We also have one other legislative priority about assessment, and that's another entire conversation. What assessment mechanisms that should be in place to determine the quality of a school or a learning experience and grading schools on a A to F scale and making 75% of the metrics associated with a single day standardized tests for example. We're working on a true accountability process that individual districts and communities can embrace and run with on their own to say, this is what matters. The question I asked you earlier, what matters most in learning or in teaching? Well, what really does matter? And when you start talking with parents and community members about what they want to see in a school and what matters to them, very different things surface in those conversations every single time, other than the metrics that are currently used to say, Oh, this is a good school, or this is a bad school.
It's very skewed and very off, very inaccurate. And I think about all the things you've talked about, not once did you talk about anything, even remotely connected to that type of metrics. You talked about generosity, patience, and building community, and those sorts of things. That's what really matters. That's what makes you successful at your job or your next level of schooling. So we ought to be focusing on those things and we need to be willing to say, we're going to design ways to actually determine how well students are doing in those areas and how well schools do in those areas. There's nothing wrong with the standardized test. It has its purpose. Its intended purpose is not what they're being used for today.
Ivana Isailovic: No, that's super interesting. And I just wanted to say something about our conversation. I don't want to come off as somebody who doesn't think that students should be at the center of the experience without conversation about customers. But I thought I'll just push back a little bit. Fine if it's a metaphor, but it also commodifies our relationship. It's more than that, right? So the teacher and the student is not just the customer provider. It's more than that. It's you are setting an example. You're showing them some values, you're trying to change their world view. You're trying to make... You're trying to foster the critical thinking. And that's not for me compatible with the idea of customer.
David Reynolds: There are parallels. Trying to not convince but convey, to educators more than anybody else who work with students in that kind of context every single day, that those are the most important people you serve every single day. I think that's it.
Ivana Isailovic: No. Yeah. I completely, as I said, I completely agree with that idea. I think it's kind of a universal thing that teachers are criticized a lot, especially public teachers are criticized a lot, and that all the stories of generosity and support and sacrifice sometimes and emotional work are beneath the surface.
David Reynolds: And just success of actually moving students to a place where they're ready for what's next. I mean, there aren't any 11th graders who knew how to do calculus when they were seven. That probably wasn't taught at home. I mean, it did happen at school or work with a student every day who's severely challenged and takes a step by herself. I mean that happens at school. It happens all the time. Tie your shoes, ask for something because you're aphasic and you can't really communicate well, that kind of stuff. It happens so much. Or the high school that pulls together and nominates the young couple, both who have Downs Syndrome for Prom Queen and King. That gets on the news, but that kind of stuff happens all the time. There's a school right here in North Georgia, Heritage High School, where I conducted a focus group and we met with a group of kids in the leadership class and their teacher. That school has built a school in another country.
Ivana Isailovic: No, that's impressive. That's really impressive. I mean, again, I think that for me, these stories are so again, natural because I come from a family of teachers and actually my grandmother was for 40 years, she was a teacher for kids with special needs. So people who have Downs Syndrome or are disabled... Differently disabled and yeah, that was an amazing experience. And I spent a lot of time in her classroom and actually, that was the first classroom that I attended when I was four or five. And it was amazing to see. Now she's of course retired, but she still animates a theater workshop in Belgrade with disabled adults. And they've been performing all around Serbia all around former Yugoslavia.
They won these amazing prizes for like best performances. And everybody asks her, how do you do that? How do you make them perform like that? And she just like works a lot with them. And there's a lot of love involved and again, generosity and support, and you can do everything with love and generosity, really. So all of these stories, I'm familiar with all of these stories and I know that they're under the radar. We take them for granted. We take them for granted, or we don't want to talk about that. We prefer criticizing public school teachers rather than emphasizing all of these beautiful stories that happen everywhere.
David Reynolds: Where can people find out more about you and your work?
Ivana Isailovic: Well, I am an academic, so I basically write for specialized journals. Some of my work is posted on academia. I try also to be present on Twitter and I hope that my podcast will be live in a couple months. So that's where people could find more about me and my work.
David Reynolds: Well, thank you very much, Ivana. And you have a great day. Talk to you later.
Ivana Isailovic: You too. Have a great day. Say hi to Debbie.
David Reynolds: I will. Bye.
Ivana Isailovic: Bye.
David Reynolds: Thanks for listening today. Find the Lead Learn Change podcast on your search engine, iTunes, or other listening app. Leave a rating, write a review, subscribe, and share with others. In the meantime, go lead, go learn, go make a change. Go.