Written in Spring 2024

Last week, I skipped class.

This may come as a surprise, as I am someone who is very invested in my own learning and find great joy in attending my Montessori adolescent diploma course, which is the class that I skipped.

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Yet that’s not always an easy task.

This is why I am so excited to have Dr. Paige Krabill facilitate our upcoming Montessori Adolescent Collaborative (MAC) Forum on “From Inclusion to Belonging: What's the Difference, and Why Does It Matter for Adolescents?” taking place tomorrow (Tuesday) 6/9 at 7:00pm EDT!

Join the MAC Forum

Whether you’ve been a long-time attendee of our MAC Forums, or this is your first one, you are welcome! These are not lectures, but rather conversations among practitioners who are committed to continuous improvement in our work.

You can also check out the podcast episode I did with Paige here!

We cannot wait to see you there!

About the MAC Forum:

Our Purpose:

Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.

Why join the MAC Forum?

• Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.

• Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.

• Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.

Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm EST

Join Today and Find Your Community!

Join the MAC Forum

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

My guest, Suzanne Yatim, is a Palestinian-American actress, writer, filmmaker, and co-owner of Montessori Thrive. Her directorial debut, Breathe, filmed in Palestine, is currently in post-production. She’s also the bestselling author of Post Pardon Me, a dark comedy exploring motherhood and mental health. And when the genocide in Gaza began, she stopped everything she was doing and turned her full attention to getting people to understand what Palestinians have known their entire lives.

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Suzanne and I discussed the discomfort that solidarity requires and asks a question that we each must ask ourselves: how much are we really willing to change our daily life for collective liberation?

We also dig into why neutrality is a myth and why Montessori herself would never have stayed silent in this moment.

This episode is a continuation of our work with the third edition of Provocations Magazine, which centered Palestine and Montessori’s call for the liberation of all children. If that issue moved you, this conversation will too. Become a paid subscriber for full access to all issues of our paradigm breaking magazine!

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You can find Suzanne on Instagram (@TheActorvist) and learn more about Montessori Thrive at montessorithrive.com.

Thanks, Suzanne, for a great conversation!

Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!

Our Purpose:

Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.

Why join the MAC Forum?

• Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.

• Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.

• Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.

Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm EST

Join Today and Find Your Community!

Join the MAC Forum

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

In an era when teaching about global struggle, identity, and resistance demands more than textbook coverage, educators are challenged to move beyond surface narratives and toward layered, critical, intersectional inquiry. The familiar paradigms—presenting facts, dates, and maps—no longer suffice. We must cultivate classrooms where meaning is actively built, perspectives questioned, images interrogated, and students empowered to peel back the layers of complex realities.

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It’s the question that almost every educator I know is asking.

There’s a massive apparatus of intervention and support built around labels, diagnoses, and deficit-based thinking that was designed for conventional classrooms where compliance and uniformity are the goals. It’s referred to as the medical deficit model.

When that apparatus gets imported into Montessori environments, it doesn’t just fail to help our young people, it actively undermines the very things we know children need: autonomy, competence, and meaningful relationships.

In this conversation, Dr. Paige Krabill and I explore what it looks like to reject that apparatus and to build something in its place that’s rooted in the Montessori philosophy, building on the strengths and gifts inherent in every young person while providing them the support they need to cultivate independence and autonomy.

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Dr. Krabill is a clinical and school psychologist, an AMI-trained Montessori educator, and founder of PDK Educational Consulting. She spent the first chapter of her career working within the traditional intervention and support system, and kept hitting a wall.

It wasn’t until she walked into a Montessori classroom with her own child that she found the language she’d been searching for. That discovery eventually led her to develop the Power of Possibility framework and to begin building something new: the Montessori Institute of Northeast Ohio, a training center dedicated to reimagining what inclusion can look like when it’s rooted in Montessori philosophy rather than layered on top of it.

In this conversation, we dig into the cycle that so many schools get stuck in: how a behavioral manifestation leads to a label, which leads to separation, which leads to disconnection, which leads us to say Montessori “isn’t for this child.”

Paige names the myths that keep that cycle spinning and calls us back to something deceptively simple: presume competence, start with yourself, prepare the environment, and observe.

Montessori can (and should) be for every child, if we are willing to prepare environments to meet their needs.

What would it mean to stop educating diagnoses and start being in communication with the child in front of us? What becomes possible when we trade the language of deficits for the language of aid to life, and when we trust that the prepared environment can do what no checklist of strategies ever could?

This is a conversation about our spiritual preparation as adults; the kind that has to be practiced daily, that works against the grain of enormous systems, and that changes everything when we commit to it.

Thanks, Paige for a great conversation!

Subscribe now

Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!

Our Purpose:

Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.

Why join the MAC Forum?

• Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.

• Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.

• Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.

Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm EST

Join Today and Find Your Community!

Join the MAC Forum

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

On a morning that seemed no different from any other, the sound of an explosion rose above every familiar noise of life in Gaza. Children were running, women were screaming, and men were trying to hold on to whatever remained of their ordinary day. Here, in the heart of a city that refuses to surrender, the stories of the Palestinian people begin, stories rarely told, stories that almost fade before reaching the light, yet still refuse to die. There were children who had never slept without fear, and mothers who dared to feel at ease only for a brief moment when the door closed behind them, offering a few seconds of quiet. Among the rubble, a woman emerged who realised that her role was no longer simply to teach. Her mission had become to rebuild hope.

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That question led me back through my own journey: into my own childhood and adolescent experiences, some shocking revelations I had while working with 12-15 year olds, and into a hard look at what we might be unconsciously reproducing even in our most beautifully prepared environments.

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I wanted the room to wrestle with the reality that the dominant culture of modernity doesn’t just surround our schools, it lives inside each of us. And that meeting developmental needs, as essential as it is, may only be the starting point of our truly revolutionary work.

Ultimately, this talk is about what’s becomes possible when we recognize the path we’re actually on: when we understand that Montessori didn’t leave us a recipe to follow, but a method to experimenting with. It’s about the new human that each of us is capable of becoming, and the courage it takes to walk that path alongside our students rather than sending them ahead alone.

I’m grateful to the Alabama Montessori community for creating such a warm and generative space. After the talk, multiple participants wanted to share their Montessori origin stories with me. One school leader, who was a Montessori student at her mother’s school, said to me “I realize I am not just carrying on my mother’s legacy, but Maria’s too.”

This is at the core of what I think needs to shift in our Montessori collective conscious: that we are carrying on Maria’s legacy and must act as she did- not as replicators of her end result, but of scientists of human development and radical social change.

I hope you’ll give the talk a listen and share your thoughts. It was a labor of love to create, and so much was left on the cutting room floor. I hope it invites you to revisit your own origin story and consider how YOU are a part of this legacy too!

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Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!

Our Purpose:

Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.

Why join the MAC Forum?

• Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.

• Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.

• Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.

Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm EST

Join Today and Find Your Community!

Join the MAC Forum

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

Yes, dignity is important, yet it seems difficult to talk about dignity when children are being mass slaughtered with our USA tax dollars?

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Probably AI itself.

That was one of the most clarifying moments from our recent webinar with Dana Anderson, Building a Positive Tech Culture at Your School (and Why It’s Not About AI Bans and Phone Policing). Dana, who comes to this work as a Montessorian with experience across all three levels and who is one of the most thoughtful voices on digital citizenship I know, didn’t come to give us another policy template or a tighter phone ban. She came to ask a harder question:

Who actually gets a voice in how your school handles technology?

Because right now, in most schools, the answer is “adults.” And that’s exactly the problem.

The reactive playbook isn’t working

Schools keep reaching for the same tools: ban the phones, block the AI. Write a stricter policy. Print it out. Post it on the website.

But as Dana pointed out, a recent Gallup poll shows that 60 to 87 percent of teachers are already using AI for school-based work. Meanwhile, students in many of those same schools are told they can’t use AI at all, under any circumstances.

This isn’t a policy problem. It’s a trust problem. And the fallout is predictable: young people circumvent the rules, hide their use, and stop bringing their real questions to the adults in their lives.

Dana named it plainly: when students feel a tech policy has been imposed on them rather than built with them, the response is rebellion, not reflection.

In a time when young people need to build discernment and critical thinking, not talking about technology is a disservice.

What happens when we co-create rather than dictate?

One powerful moment in the webinar came from Mara Weitzman, a Montessori educator who ran a service-learning program where her students used 3D printing and CAD design to create real replacement pieces, and entirely new materials, for other classrooms across her school.

The students managed the projects, emailed the teachers, set up the meetings, and iterated until the material was right.

The teachers ended up needing the students’ expertise. The students experienced themselves as contributors, not consumers. And the whole culture of the school shifted, not because someone wrote a better tech policy, but because young people were trusted with real responsibility.

At Bridgemont International School, where Dana teaches, her AI literacy students are currently designing a professional development day on AI for the faculty. The students are teaching the teachers.

That is what a positive tech culture actually looks like. Not surveillance. Not bans. Partnership.

The paradigm we’re inviting you into

As Dana reminded us, Maria Montessori wrote that education depends on a belief that the child has within themselves the capacity to develop into a being far superior to us, and that they will be the only ones who can show us a better way of living.

Comfortable conversations don’t dismantle oppressive systems. Adult-only tech policies don’t prepare young people for a world saturated in technology they’ll inherit from us.

The students are ready. The question is whether we are.

What’s next!

Dana and Developing Education are building something bigger around this work: a full course for educators and school leaders who are ready to stop reacting and start partnering with young people to build genuinely positive tech cultures in their schools.

We want it to actually meet you where you are. If you’re even a little curious, we’d love your voice in shaping it.

Share what YOU want to see in a course here!

The revolution our students need starts with us having the courage to let them in.

What would YOU like in a course?

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

In my early years of this work, before starting Breaking the Paradigm, I felt like the only one in my school who wanted to think deeply about education and question the status quo. So where did I turn?

The Human Restoration Project- an organization committed to spreading progressive education and leading systems level change in education around the world!

I used to commute over an hour to school every day, and would listen to their podcasts religiously for years on that long commute. Seeing the work that was being done by Nick Covington and Chris McNutt (Creative Director and CEO) was incredibly inspiring to me, and HRP was one of my inspirations when starting my own podcast.

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Though we had been in many similar online circles over the last few years, I had the opportunity to meet Nick and Chris in LA this year at the Student Power Summit, and the idea came up that we needed to do a “Montessori Myth Busting” podcast, since so many folks in the progressive education space see Montessori as a black box (and vice versa).

The result of that idea is the following podcast episode featuring Ayize Sabater, Kelly Jonelis, and myself talking about the promise and persistent myths of Montessori education. If you like this episode, definitely become an HRP subscriber and check out their other episodes- Montessorians can learn so much from the guests they have on.

Thanks to Nick for being an incredible host and for Ayize and Kelly for a great conversation!

Watch on YouTube:

Listen on HRP’s Website:

Listen Now!

Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!

Our Purpose:

Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.

Why join the MAC Forum?

• Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.

• Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.

• Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.

Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm EST

Join Today and Find Your Community!

Join the MAC Forum

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

Tonight, we’re doing something about it.

Dana Anderson is facilitating a free webinar with Developing Education: Building a Positive Tech Culture at Your School... And Why It’s Not About Phone Bans and AI Policing. If you caught our podcast conversation, you already know that Dana brings something rare to this space; she’s deeply rooted in Montessori philosophy, she’s a digital citizenship expert who has worked with Common Sense Media, and she refuses to separate technology from the bigger questions of human development and peace education. And she has real, practical tools to help you use technology as a tool for human development.

Register Now

Two sessions are still available: tonight, Thursday April 16 at 7:00 PM EDT and Sunday, April 19 at 12:00 PM EDT.

This is free! Register for the session that works for you here.

And if there’s someone on your team, in your school, or in your network who is stuck in the cycle of banning, policing, and reacting, send this to them. They should to be in this conversation too!

Register Now

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The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

Our students are already living in a digital world. The question isn’t whether technology belongs in our environments. It’s whether we’re preparing young people for that reality or pretending it doesn’t exist. And right now, too many schools are choosing fear over preparation. They’re writing rules instead of building culture. They’re policing devices instead of developing humans.

Dana Anderson is one of the people changing that conversation. Dana is a Montessori guide who has taught from early childhood through adolescence, a digital citizenship expert, and someone whose work I deeply respect. We had a fantastic conversation on Breaking the Paradigm about why digital citizenship matters in Montessori environments and why it has to come before any policy gets written. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I’d encourage you to check it out:

And now, Dana is facilitating a free webinar with Developing Education: Building a Positive Tech Culture at Your School... And Why It’s Not About Phone Bans and AI Policing. Two sessions are available: Wednesday, April 16 at 7:00 PM EDT and Saturday, April 19 at 12:00 PM EDT.

This isn’t another conversation about what to ban. It’s about what to build. Register for the session that works for you here, and if you know someone at a school that’s struggling with this right now, forward this email to them. They need to be in the room.

Register Here!

And before the webinar, don't miss this Tuesday's MAC Forum session! Kelly Jonelis is facilitating Making Math Accessible for All Learners (Students and Guides): a conversation about what it actually looks like to meet every student where they are in math, and what it means for us as guides to rethink our own relationship with math instruction.

This isn't a lecture. It's a collaborative dialogue with practitioners who are in the work every day. Tuesday, April 14 at 7:00 PM EST.

If you've been looking for a space where adolescent educators think together instead of just being talked at, this is it. Register here!

Join the MAC Forum

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

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Kathy Leitch, executive director of the International Montessori Council, joins Breaking the Paradigm to explore what it really means to carry Montessori forward as a living, experimental method rather than a fixed recipe. With decades of experience in Montessori schools around the world, Kathy makes a case that’s both provocative and deeply generous: Montessori is for every child, even if every school, every classroom, and every guide isn’t yet ready for every child.

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What would change if we stopped treating the album as the method?

What happens when we let fear: of parents, of imperfection, of breaking with tradition, drive decisions that should be rooted in love?

And what does it actually look like to transform our own spirit before we try to transform education?

Kathy names the energy of love as the most powerful and least explored dimension of Montessori's legacy: an organizing force that shows up in highly functioning classrooms and lingers in the adults those classrooms produce. She challenges the protective instincts that keep our movement small: the hierarchy, the gatekeeping, the insistence on perfection. And she calls us back to the inner work that makes everything else possible: the kind of spiritual preparation that doesn't just happen once in training but every time a child triggers something we didn't know we were carrying.

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This is a conversation about courage, energy, and the unfinished work Montessori left us, not as a limitation, but as an invitation. Thanks Kathy for a great conversation!

Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!

Our Purpose:

Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.

Why join the MAC Forum?

• Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.

• Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.

• Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.

Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm EST

Join Today and Find Your Community!

Join the MAC Forum

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

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It’s perhaps my favorite trait about myself: that there’s always something new to discover that could reshape my ideas, practice, and view of the world.

With that in mind, I wanted to share these upcoming opportunities for life long learning!

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Upcoming DevEd Webinar: Building a Positive Tech Culture at Your School ... And why it's not about phone bans and AI policing.

Longtime listeners to the podcast will know that I have a particular disdain for phone and technology bans for a few reasons, but in particular because a ban fails to equip students with the dispositions that will allow them to thrive in a world increasingly filled with technology.

In this Developing Education webinar, Dana Anderson, an expert in Digital Citizenship, will be discussing what it takes to build a positive tech culture: moving away from the fear, compliance, and control approach that is our cultural reflex and considering what it means to see technology as a tool to support development.

We will hold the webinar twice: April 16th at 7:00pm EST and April 19th at 12:00pm.

You can register for this free webinar here!

Register Here!

If you want to learn more about Dana and her work, check out her Breaking the Paradigm podcast episode:

The 2026 Montessori Experience: More to Explore! (Virtual)

For those who did not attend AMI/USA’s Montessori Experience: Refresher Courses and More in San Diego, there is still a chance to be a part of the event virtually! AMI/USA is hosting a virtual event on April 11, 2026. The adolescent session in San Diego was incredibly impactful so if you work with adolescents and were not in person, I highly recommend attending.

You can find more information below!

Check Out the Montessori Experience

Upcoming Course: Living in the Metacrisis: A Depth Inquiry for Parents, Educators, and Administrators

This six-week virtual inquiry invites parents, educators, and administrators - particularly within Montessori learning communities - to pause inside a world in transition and examine how modern habits of care and control shape our relationships with the young, with one another, and with the more-than-human world.

Living in the Metacrisis emphasizes reflection, relational maturity, and the capacity to stay present in the midst of uncertainty. Rather than teaching strategies for resilience or reform, this inquiry explores how the story of progress, mastery, and separability - that we have all internalized as “the human condition” - lives through us.

The metacrisis is approached not as an external catastrophe to solve but as a mirror of our collective inner world. Through that mirror, participants explore questions such as:

• How do inherited ideas of goodness, protection, and achievement shape the ways we guide or limit young people?

• What becomes possible when we release the need to appear certain or right?

• How might care become companionship, and teaching become co-learning, in a time when the old maps no longer seem to hold?

This course was created by Raj Chawla and Andrew Kutt who appeared on a recent episode to discuss this important work. If you want to learn more about some of the ideas in the course, check out my podcast episode with Raj and Andrew here:

Register for the course here:

Living in the Metacrisis Registration

Ongoing with Developing Education: The Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum

We have had some incredible conversations with adolescent guides and practitioners from across the country over the last few weeks and want YOU to join us!

Our Purpose:

Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.

Why join the MAC Forum?

• Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.

• Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.

• Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.

Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm EST

Join Today and Find Your Community!

Join the MAC Forum

Do you have ideas about what kinds of learning opportunities you’d like to see from Developing Education? Reply to this email to let us know!

Subscribe now

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

Here’s the provocation from Tammy Oesting in her third Breaking the Paradigm apprearance: Peace education isn’t about mindfulness exercises or conflict resolution scripts.

It’s not the “kumbaya approach” where we shield children from the world’s hard truths.

Real peace education creates conditions that produce a new human who has embodied interdependence: who knows in their bones that they are part of a web, not standing above it. That’s systems-level work. That requires us to look at what we’re afraid to see.

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And then there’s the question we need to ask about Montessori teacher preparation: Is all our scaffolding: the affiliations, the compliance measures, the rigid fidelity requirements, supporting the rise of human potential, or is it a cage? Why are we so committed to structures that don’t reflect how adults actually learn? And why do we trust children to organize their own time and follow their developmental path, but then demand adults comply with preparation programs that look nothing like the way Dr. Montessori herself taught?

At the heart of everything Tammy is asking us to sit with is this: What happens when we let go of control? What emerges in the chaos? Because from chaos comes emergence.

This conversation won’t give you easy answers. It will give you better questions.

Thanks, Tammy, for bringing the courage we all need right now!

Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!

Our Purpose:

Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.

Why join the MAC Forum?

• Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.

• Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.

• Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.

Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm EST

Join Today and Find Your Community!

Join the MAC Forum

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

Mixed-age groupings. The three-hour work cycle. Observation-based curriculum. Teacher preparation rooted in human development. Everything that makes Montessori transformative deserves to be reflected in the laws, funding streams, and regulations that shape what’s possible for schools and families. But when we’re not at the table, the language gets written without us; and that’s exactly what MPPI is working to change.

In this special live episode, Kelly and I sit down with Denise Monnier and Vyju Kadambi of the Montessori Public Policy Initiative: a two-person organization with advocates in 45 states doing the essential work of making sure Montessori has a voice where it matters most. They’re not waiting for a crisis. They’re building relationships with legislators so public policy includes and uplifts our work in Montessori.

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This Thursday, as part of the AMS conference in Washington, D.C., MPPI is leading Montessori on the Move, a day of preparation, storytelling, and over 30 meetings on Capitol Hill. It’s the first time our community has organized something like this at the federal level, and Denise and Vyju want you there! It’s not too late to register. It’s not too late to show up for the afternoon. It’s not too late to be in that group photo on the Capitol steps (and get a cool Montessori hat while you’re at it!).

And if you can’t make it to D.C., this conversation will convince you that advocacy is already something you do, and that the leap from advocating for a child in your classroom to advocating for Montessori in your statehouse is shorter than you think.

You can find MPPI and get connected at MontessoriAdvocacy.org.

See you in DC!

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Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!

Our Purpose:

Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.

Why join the MAC Forum?

• Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.

• Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.

• Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.

Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm EST

Join Today and Find Your Community!

Join the MAC Forum

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

Join us to learn more about Montessori advocacy, the current public policy landscape, and how YOU can get involved! You can join here on Substack, on Youtube, LinkedIn, or Riverside!

Join us on your platform of choice!

Riverside: https://riverside.com/studio/andrews-studio-WStAI

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andrew-faulstich

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Breaking-the-Paradigm

Subscribe now

Are you a Montessori Adolescent educator or leader? Join our Montessori Adolescent Collaborative Forum!

Our Purpose:

Realizing Montessori’s vision of a new world starting with how we, as practitioners, transform through dialogue and community.

Why join the MAC Forum?

• Build community: Connect with fellow adolescent guides from around the world.

• Co-create the forum: Your questions, observations, and experiments shape the discussion.

• Access the archive: Can’t make it live? All sessions recorded and available.

Forums are held virtually every second Tuesday at 7:00pm EST

Join Today and Find Your Community!

Join the MAC Forum

The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.

This is a special three-part episode recorded before, during, and after the Student Power Summit in Los Angeles: a conference that truly and authentically centered student voice. Students from across the country weren’t just in attendance, they were active participants in sessions, pushing back on what adults were saying, and ultimately presenting their own vision for what education should look like. You’ll hear that in the final segment, and it’s worth the wait.

Part one begins with my reflections on Johann Hari’s Lost Connections and the research showing that depression is not a chemical imbalance to be medicated away, but rather a response to environments that disconnect us from meaningful work, from each other, from our values, from the natural world, and from a hopeful future.

Sound like any institution you know?

Part two is a conversation with Jason Blair, an elementary art teacher from Columbus, Ohio, and Jennifer Goen, teacher and instructional leader at HB Woodlawn, a democratic school in Arlington, Virginia. Fresh off the first day of the summit and inspired by the partnership with Homeboy Industries, Jason and Jennifer dig into what happens when we start from strengths instead of deficits, why the arts hold a key that most schools throw away, and why efficiency may be the single greatest enemy of real learning.

Part three is the students themselves, and I’ll leave that for you to experience firsthand. They share clearly what they need in order to thrive.

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I also want to share some key takeaways I had from the breakout sessions. Dr. Stuart Slavin, while leading a medical school, found that his students had skyrocketing anxiety and depression that only worsened each year. His response wasn’t to offer more counseling. He cut class time by 10%, made all courses pass/fail, freed up every other Wednesday for student-chosen pursuits, and reduced daily homework by one to two hours. Board scores rose. The failure rate was cut in half. Students left their first year of medical school less anxious than when they entered. His metaphor says it all: when the canaries started dying in the coal mines, miners didn’t give the canaries antidepressants. They got out of the mine. Our young people are the canaries. And yet we keep pushing deeper.

Slavin also names the toxic mindsets these environments produce: performance as identity, toxic comparison, maladaptive perfectionism, imposter phenomenon, self-blame, shame, and what’s known as the Stanford Duck: being calm on the surface, but with your feet paddling like crazy underneath. These aren’t personal failures. They’re the predictable outcomes of top-down, compliance-driven education.

I also had the privilege of meeting Nick Covington and Chris McNutt, cofounders of the Human Restoration Project, for the first time in person. Their work using empathy interviews to collect real-time data from students, and then using that data to reshape the experience of school in the image of the young people inside it, is incredibly powerful work. And they’re doing it in public schools that on the surface seem untouchable. When we change the kind of data we collect, and we have the right intention behind the reforms we pursue, remarkable things become possible.

Huge thanks to Mike Nicholson for organizing this truly incredible conference; the first I’ve attended that pushed meaningfully on the systemic implications of our schooling system with this kind of depth and honesty. And a special shout out to Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang for a keynote that I hope to share parts of in a future episode.

There’s more footage from the summit coming. But for now, listen to what happens when we stop talking about students and start listening to them.

Want to hear more? Breaking The Paradigm will be LIVE, this afternoon, at 4:15pm!

We’ll be talking with the Montessori Public Policy Initiative about their upcoming advocacy day as part of the AMS Conference here in DC. Tune in on Substack, LinkedIn, or Riverside! See you then!

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The traditional education system had its chance.

Now it’s our turn.