KindlED
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED
Episode 46: Why Schools Fail to Innovate. A Conversation with Tom Arnett.
Have you ever wondered if the current educational system truly harnesses the potential within each student? Tom Arnett, a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute, joins us to talk about the significant shifts from traditional learning environments to innovative, technology-enhanced systems that offer personalized education.
What to listen for:
• What do current parent sentiment and enrollment data tell us about the state of education?
• What are the main reasons parents are exploring alternative educational options like microschools and hybrid schools?
• Why is change so challenging within traditional education systems?
• What does the future hold for education over the next 5 to 10 years?
Overall, this episode offers a sneak peek into a future where education is tailored to fit the learning needs of each individual student rather than a one-size-fits-all experience.
So, what are you waiting for? Tune in to gain insights into the exciting possibilities that lie ahead.
About the guest:
Thomas Arnett is a senior research fellow for the Clayton Christensen Institute. His work focuses on identifying the enabling conditions for disrupting the conventional batch-processing model of schooling. He also studies the circumstances that lead teachers, administrators, and families to adopt new approaches to education.
Thomas began his work in education as a middle school math teacher in Kansas City Public Schools through Teach For America and as an Education Pioneers fellow with the Achievement First Public Charter Schools. He has also served as an elected trustee and board president for the Morgan Hill Unified School District and currently serves as president of the board of Compass Charter Schools.
For a full transcript of this episode, go here.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
• Christensen Institute — christenseninstitute.org
• Follow Tom on LinkedIn — https
Got a story to share or question you want us to answer? Send us a message!
About the podcast:
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
Got a burning question?
We're all ears! If you have a question or topic you'd love our hosts to tackle, please send it to podcast@prenda.com. Let's dive into the conversation together!
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There are innovations that are making new models of schooling possible that were never possible before. You go back 100 years when they were coming up with conventional schooling. What were the options for learning? Either you learn from a teacher, or you read a textbook. Some kids love to read, are are a lot of kids that if you told them, ok, school is now going to be read the textbook all day and then write from the textbook, they'd totally tune out. It just would not work for them, right? And so naturally, the answer was, well, we're gonna do teacher-directed instruction because that's the better option than just having kids read textbooks. But the powerful thing about a textbook is that it enables more self-directed learning. Well, fast forward to today and we have tons of technologies that can help students learn that are way more engaging than reading a textbook.
Adriane Thompson:Hi and welcome to the Kindled podcast where we dig into the art and science behind kindling the motivation, curiosity and mental well-being of the young humans in our lives. Together, we'll discover practical tools and strategies you can use to help kids unlock their full potential and become the strongest version of their future selves. Welcome to the Kindled podcast. My name is Adrienne Thompson and I'm here with the beautiful Katie Broadbent. And so, Katie, who do we have on the podcast today?
Kaity Broadbent:Super excited about this one. We're going to be talking to Tom Arnett, and Tom and I met at a conference a while back and I heard him speak and I'm like I just immediately resonated with everything he said and really wanted to have him on. So I've been looking forward to this for a long time. Here is a little bit more about Tom. Tom Arnett is a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. His work focuses on identifying the enabling conditions for disrupting the conventional batch processing model of schooling. He also studies the circumstances that lead teachers, administrators and families to adopt new approaches to education. Tom began his work in education as a middle school math teacher in Kansas City Public Schools through Teach for America and as an education pioneer fellow with the Achievement First Public Charter Schools. He has also served as an elected trustee with the Achievement First Public Charter Schools. He has also served as an elected trustee and board president for the Morgan Hill Unified School District and currently serves as president of the Board of Compass Charter Schools. Let's talk to Tom.
Adriane Thompson:Can't wait.
Kaity Broadbent:Tom Arnett. Welcome to the Kindle Podcast. We're super excited to talk to you today.
Tom Arnett:Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here and be a part of this conversation.
Kaity Broadbent:Awesome. Okay, so tell us a little bit about your background, like what is the work you're trying to do in the world? What are you trying to accomplish, kind of what's your big why?
Tom Arnett:Well, I'll start with saying the big why is figuring out. How do we get past the factory model of schooling? For over a century we've been in a model where we assume that students learn in cohorts, where they move at the same pace through the same content, sitting in a classroom, teachers directing the instruction. And that was probably necessary for 100 years ago. But we live in a time when that's no longer a constraint that we have to do schooling that way, because that's the only way. But we have big barriers that keep us from actually shifting to better models of schooling. So my work is all about how do we get from A to B? How do we transform the systems we have into the systems that our students need and that our society needs?
Adriane Thompson:How did you get to that conclusion? How did you all of a sudden decide that we don't need a factory model of education anymore? Is there like a personal story underneath that? Why?
Tom Arnett:Yes, yes, there is. I'm glad you asked about that. So it really started for me. When I was going through school, I often found myself frustrated with wow, it seems like we waste so much time at school waiting for teachers to start classes, transitioning between classes, doing busy work, and then, as a high schooler like I, was stressed out when I went home and I had mountains of homework to work on, plus all the other activities I was doing, and so to me, that, like it just rubbed me the wrong way. And at the same time, it also frustrated me that I had friends in my high school who weren't necessarily in the advanced classes, the honors classes, and for them it was like this is a joke, I'm just biding my time to get to the other side, and I thought like what a waste of time for them and what a frustrating, like lack of effective learning experience for me. Um, so for a long time I had a sense that I, you know, wanted to, wanted to figure out how to make education better, um, fast forward. When I was in college, I thought I was going to be an engineer I came from a family of engineers but after some life experiences realized that, you know, I'm more interested in figuring out like how do we make the world better than how do we make products and devices better, and so ended up studying economics and psychology and then joining Teach for America and becoming a middle school math teacher after I finished school.
Tom Arnett:I went into teaching with lots of naive ambition that I was going to be that teacher that got to know all my students, that made a difference in their lives, because I really, you know, knew them, knew their families, knew what they needed. And then pretty soon I found myself totally underwater, just you know, trying to find enough time to plan my lessons every day and to grade assignments and put grades in a gradebook, and really was just totally falling flat on having those kind of relationships. And on top of that, you know, conventional education is designed for batch processing, which means you kind of need conformity, you need kids to all sit and do what they're told so that you can cover your material. And I found myself having conflict with students over, you know, their lack of conformity to the system and thinking to myself, like you know, I'm giving the impression that I don't like them or that they're bad students, but I don't really think they're the issue. The issue is that I'm operating a system that can't adapt to and address the needs that they come to my class with.
Tom Arnett:You know I tell often of. In one class I had this one kid who was homeless, only came to school maybe two or three days a week and he'd show up and he was super earnest to get out his notebook ready to learn, and everything to go right over his head because he had missed so much school. It was just confusing to him. And then in that same class I have this other kid who comes from a family where his parents are on top of him every night making sure he's doing his homework, making sure he's on top of his schooling, and he's, frankly, my behavior problem because he's bored, he's like talking to his neighbors and acting up because I'm not challenging him enough.
Tom Arnett:And I just felt like how is it that I am supposed to in one hour, in a one hour lesson, address this huge variety of needs? Those two were kind of the ends of the spectrum. But my students just fell across this huge spectrum of needing different things, both academically and socially and emotionally, and I just felt like I didn't have the capacity to really address those differences and you know, it really tore me. I didn't want to leave teaching, but it was really wearing me down, and I finally came to the conclusion that, you know, I can get better as a teacher and I can get better at meeting my students' needs, getting better, getting to know them, planning my lessons better.
Tom Arnett:There's just a flaw in the way the system is designed and I had a sense that there's got to be better ways to do this.
Tom Arnett:I had, you know, done some, listened to some podcasts, done some research, heard about the cool things that are happening in other parts of the country, but to me the question just came back to like, how do different models of schooling actually ever make it to the classrooms where I'm teaching, in the school district that I'm teaching in? And so that led me to really wanting to work on how do we change the system Fast forward. I went to grad school to try and pivot and figure that all out and came across Clayton Christensen's work and the book he co-authored with Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson, disrupting Class, and to me it was just incredibly eye-opening because they were not just articulating how education could be and how it could be better, they were articulating a theory that said how do we get to better versions of schooling? And so I ended up finding the Institute applying for a job, and I've been here now 11 years working on this research on how do we affect systems change in education.
Kaity Broadbent:I love that whole story because I think you've kind of given voice to what the vast majority of teachers in the United States are currently experiencing and have experienced over the last few decades. So I think that that is very applicable to how things are today. And just to pull out a few little thoughts I had while you were talking, I read somewhere that the post COVID classroom, like grade level competency spread, is it's like five or six years sometimes, especially in math. Right, you're going to have a kid who's really behind and a kid who's really ahead. And in our research at Prendo we interview all of our kids as they come in and roughly a third of kids are saying that like I was the kid who was lost. A third of the kids are saying I was the kid who was bored, and then a third of the kids are like I could manage this and so if we have developed a system that's not serving 60% of the kids, I don't know how we can look at that and not want to change or want to innovate.
Kaity Broadbent:But then, as you're talking, I was just able to kind of feel like the sentiment or like nostalgia behind, like the public education system is like an institution because it's been so similar for a hundred years, and so anytime we're like we want to change this, that kind of really comes across as a criticism. But it's not like when we had typewriters and then we invented computers, people were like no, like, typewriters are better and we should. We shouldn't abandon the institution of the typewriter for this other. You know technology, we don't. We didn't do that for any other innovation. You know, there's always kind of pushback and people that like, like, like to hold on to the way things are, and I think that that's good because, um, there's a lot of wisdom in how things have been done in the past and a lot of good things to hold on to and to learn from. But sometimes holding on to those things can really lead to, like, holding us back, like you're saying, like it's so hard to change the system right.
Tom Arnett:So let me comment on that a little bit and say I think one way in which education is just really different than a lot of other industries is that you know, if Apple went out of business tomorrow and we all had to switch to Android phones, phones or Android went out of business, you had to switch to Apple, whichever you know, switching to whichever platform you don't use like that. That might be inconvenient, but at the end of the day it wouldn't affect your life that much. But schools aren't just products or services. They're communities, and so I think there's a lot of fear around. You know, if schools are communities and they're often hubs for broader neighborhood communities or communities within a city, we don't want to lose that, and so I think I get where a lot of the concern comes from.
Tom Arnett:At the same time, I don't think that transforming education has to mean that we necessarily upend our public school system and get rid of public education. I think it can be done within public education, and maybe we'll get into that a little bit later. But we've got to create the right conditions. It's not going to come from just incrementally trying to improve the schools that we have. We've got to think bigger than that, and that's a lot of what the research I've been doing has been trying to uncover.
Adriane Thompson:Yeah, and Katie said that this is a system that's not working for students. What I'm hearing it's also a system that's not working for teachers, and that's why we're having so many teachers leaving the field, because it's just not working on either end. So can we talk a little bit about what the Christensen Institute is and what is disruptive innovation, and what are some examples of this innovation that you're talking about?
Tom Arnett:So the Christensen Institute was founded by Clayton Christensen. He was a professor at the Harvard Business School and if you've ever heard the term disruptive innovation, he's the one that coined that term. Now, he had a very specific meaning for that term in his research and since the term has been popularized, it's been used to mean pretty much anything that people want it to mean to help them sell the ideas they're trying to sell, basically in Silicon Valley, disruptive can mean well, we've got the latest and greatest and coolest thing and you should pay attention because it's going to change the world. The term comes from in the 80s and the 90s. He was looking at this interesting phenomenon where he saw large, well-resourced, super successful companies that were getting upended by startups in the computer industry, in the disk drive industry. He even traced some early examples back to mechanical excavation equipment for digging holes in basements and to things like the telegraph and the telephone.
Tom Arnett:And he saw this consistent pattern where there were certain times when an innovation would come along and the well-resourced, established incumbent in the industry would do all the right things and still miss it, and at the time the business press would say well, we just had incompetent leadership, they just were asleep, know were asleep at the wheel.
Tom Arnett:They missed the boat. They weren't paying attention, but what he uncovered was that no, they were actually. They were doing all the things that made them successful in the past, and that's what kept them from being successful with new innovations in the future. So he uncovers this pattern, fast forward to the early 2000s, and the theory has had a huge impact on a lot of industries, and he starts to wonder could we also make a difference in areas like education and healthcare and global development by using these theories to look at some of the perennial challenges and some of these more socially oriented sectors and potentially uncovering new insights to solve some of those perennial problems? And so that's what led to the founding of our institute. Like I said, we work across a range of different sectors, and I happen to be on our K-12 education team.
Kaity Broadbent:Okay, so I've been following the Christensen Institute for years, learning from disruptive innovation, and one of my favorites is a book called Competing Against Luck and that's actually driven like the concepts in this book against luck, and that's actually actually driven like the concepts in this book. The whole jobs to be done theory has really shaped how we build products for kids at Prenda and learning experiences, and so I'd love for you to just kind of give us like jobs to be done 101 and explain what that is, how it came about and how can educational leaders take that this jobs to be done framework and use it to rethink education.
Tom Arnett:Well. So disruptive innovation is Clayton Christensen's first big idea. Jobs to be done is his other big idea. Disruption describes how does an industry do things, how does it respond to different challenges and opportunities. Jobs to be done is really about demand, like why do people, why do consumers adopt or not adopt certain innovations or certain products? And it was born out of an insight where Clayton Christensen was looking at a lot of the marketing research that was done at the time and noticing that it really only uncovered correlations. So they'd look at things like demographic data of consumers, they'd look at different product features, they'd run a bunch of statistics and they'd see patterns between the types of products people are adopting and their demographic profiles. And he just had the insight that you know those correlations don't really tell you what's causing them to make the decision, what's going on behind the scenes. And so his big insight was what if, instead of looking at these huge sets of data, what if we drive really deep into a small number of examples to uncover what are the circumstances in people's lives that lead them to make a decision to change something?
Tom Arnett:And so the term jobs to be done it's kind of a funny term, but what it really tries to convey is the idea that all of us, as we're going through our lives, hit moments when we are struggling with something and we're looking for a solution. And when we're looking for a solution, we're trying to hire something that can fulfill that job in our life. So think of like, if you're on a road trip and your car breaks down, you have a job of help me find a tow truck to get my car off the road to a mechanic and then help me find a mechanic. Or say, you come home from work one day and your bathroom is flooded because your pipe's broken and you now have a job to be done of help me find a plumber. Well, similarly, just as we go through life, circumstances come up that lead us to seek out new solutions to solve some of the struggles that we're facing.
Tom Arnett:Probably the best way to illustrate this is a story about their very first research project in this area. It's kind of famous. It's his milkshake story. So Clayton Christensen and his research team had been hired by one of the major fast food chains to figure out how do we sell more milkshakes, and previously the fast food company had done all sorts of focus groups and research to look at. Do people like flavor A over flavor B? Do they like cup design A over cup design B? And they'd made some changes to their products, but it really hadn't done much to improve their sales. And so Christensen and his colleagues went and for their first day on the research. They just watched people going in and out of the fast food restaurant and they noticed this pattern where about 50% of the milkshakes were sold before eight in the morning, which is a big surprise, right? You think of no, you get a milkshake as dessert after dinner.
Tom Arnett:You don't eat milkshakes in the morning. So the next day they started to interview some of these people and effectively asked them what job are you hiring this milkshake to do in your life? What are the circumstances that are leading you to make this odd purchase in the morning? And they found that a lot of the milkshake consumers in the morning were commuters who had a long and boring drive to work and they were in a hurry. They didn't have a lot of time to prep a breakfast, but they knew they needed something that would hold them over till lunchtime. They needed to be able to consume it in their car and they had this boring commute and they wanted something that would give them just a little bit of mental relief, mental stimulation, while they're stuck in traffic. And they realized that the milkshake was really fulfilling this job better than a lot of other options. You know, people could have hired bananas or they could have hired granola bars or they could have hired donuts.
Tom Arnett:But those other solutions had problems. They'd get your fingers problems, they'd get your fingers sticky, they'd get crumbs on your professional attire, they wouldn't hold you over till lunchtime. But the milkshake was just perfect. It could fit in one hand so the other hand could stay on the steering wheel, you could easily consume it throughout the whole drive, and because it was thick, not only did it take you your whole drive to consume it, but then it sat in your stomach and held you over until lunch. So then their insight was number one like milkshakes really aren't competing against other milkshakes in this job to be done, they're competing against all this other stuff and they actually do an exceptionally good job.
Tom Arnett:But if we want to make the milkshake better, it's less about trying to improve the flavors or things like that, and more about making the experience more convenient, like can you make it faster to pick up a milkshake and get on the road? Um, or maybe it's something like making the milkshake thicker so that it takes longer to consume it, so that it lasts your entire drive to work. Or maybe putting in chunks of fruit in the milkshake, not because people want the flavor, but because there's a little extra mental uh stimulation when you have to figure out how to get that chunk of fruit up the straw, um. So this all illustrates that, illustrates that point of you. Know, we hire things, we pull things into our lives when there's circumstances that dictate hey, there's something I need to fulfill here.
Kaity Broadbent:So now let's take that into education, like where do we plug that idea in? What's the job to be done from the teacher's perspective, from the student's perspective, from the parent's perspective, and where are we missing? Maybe?
Tom Arnett:Well, we've done a few studies on why do teachers change their practices, why do administrators adopt new programs or new curricula, and our most recent one was on why do families pick things like micro schools? Where should we dive in? I could talk about all those.
Kaity Broadbent:Should we start with the families? Yeah, let's talk about that. So your most recent research report is called Families on a New Frontier Mapping and Meeting the Growing Demand for Unconventional Schooling. So if you want to go through that and kind of illustrate how jobs to be done, thinking is put into play there, like yeah, let's do that.
Tom Arnett:So this was research we did just this last summer where we interviewed a whole bunch of families to find out what's the job to be done. That leads you to a micro school. And when we do jobs to be done, research, we don't ask people, you know, explain to me why you prefer A over B. We ask them, you know, pretend we're shooting a documentary about your story and your experience, walk us through the events, what happened, and it's in seeing those events in their lives that we start to see patterns across their stories. And the patterns that show up in different stories help us start to see, okay, what are common jobs to be done, or what are common struggling circumstances that lead people to make a change. So through that research, we came up with three jobs to be done, and I want to say up front this isn't necessarily like the exhaustive list of all possible jobs to be done. It was just three really strong patterns that showed up in our interviews. So the first job to be done was one that we call when I disagree with decisions at my child's school and I'm feeling unheard, help me find an alternative that will honor my perspective and values. So let me tell a story to illustrate this job.
Tom Arnett:There's one woman we interviewed who had sent her children to a parochial school and and really liked that. It was a small community, it felt really personalized, really intimate. But the local parish ran into a problem where they just couldn't financially support the school anymore and so they were going to close it. And a bunch of parents came together and said, hey, instead of closing it, why don't you just sell us the building, sell us the facilities and we'll take over the school and we'll run it as a private school, but try to just maintain the same values, the same feel that the school had before. So this happened. Everything seemed good.
Tom Arnett:But in that transition, as the new heads of the school, the new board, had to figure out how do we make this financially sustainable, they ran into issues of how do we bring in more funding? And so they were looking to how do we grow the school, how do we bring in more students and how do we get big donors excited to donate to our school? And what she found was that, as the school was growing and evolving and changing, it was losing that personal feel. But she was a single mom, you know she wasn't. She didn't have a lot of money to donate and because she wasn't one of the big donors, she found that you know, my voice just doesn't feel like it's heard. They're making these changes and the changes concern me, but I don't really have a say, because they're going to listen much more to the people that are writing the big checks, and so that was, for her, the thing that prompted her to say let me go find a different environment where it gets back to that really personal feel that we wanted in our school when we went there in the first place.
Tom Arnett:Now the challenges can be for a host of different reasons that parents might feel that struggle, but that was the common theme is that it was about the parent, the parent feeling like there was a change that was made. They were unheard and they felt like no one was listening. Job to be done. We call when my child is unhappy, unsafe or struggling at school help me find an environment where they can regain their love of learning. So, where the first job was really about the parent struggle, this one really centered on the child's struggle.
Tom Arnett:Now, there could be a range of reasons why a child might struggle. For some, it might be the child is really struggling to read and when they go to school they just get drilled and drilled on more reading exercises and they're losing their love of learning because reading is just this painful thing they have to get through. For another child it might be that they're getting bullied. For another child it might be that they're a little hyperactive and they're getting disciplined a lot and they're getting the message at school that I'm the black sheep in the school. For others they may just be struggling with social anxiety.
Tom Arnett:So there's a whole host of reasons why the child might be struggling, but the common theme here was that that struggle boiled up to a point where parents would say things like I'm so tired of fighting my kid to get them to get out of bed in the morning. They hate school so much that they don't even want to get up and get ready. And then I'm having conflict with my child over their lack of interest in school. So again, the job was really about help me find an environment where they can regain their love of learning and that will end our battle in the morning, right Like there's always kind of yes, yeah, yeah yeah, and that's a common thing.
Tom Arnett:I want to just point out here is that jobs always start with struggle. There's a lot of people that may have struggle, but if it's not struggle, if the struggle hasn't elevated to a certain level, they won't actually change. So there usually has to be the struggle like builds tension, builds momentum to the point where it pushes people to say I've got to try something different.
Kaity Broadbent:Yeah, we see that a lot at Prenda. Like you know, we have we're positing a very different approach to education in micro schools and Prenda in our learning approach, and oftentimes the first people that find us are people who have, you know, their kids or them as parents. The pain that they experience around education is very great, right, we're not. And there's kind of like the next bucket of people who are like, well, things seem fine, right, as long as things kind of seem fine, you're not going to be motivated to like go out of your comfort zone, go seek out another, another option. So, yeah, we see this Definitely.
Tom Arnett:Yeah, and I think this is a reality to I kind of, you know, want to hint at is that I think there's a lot of people that are struggling but they're just not struggling enough, like things may not be great but they're fine. You know, my kid doesn't love school, but my kid still gets stressed and goes in the morning and they may complain a little bit, but it's not too bad. Or they may not have a great experience in the classroom, but they still like going to recess or like going to PE, and so I think there's actually, in a lot of ways, some untapped demand of families that are struggling. They're just not struggling enough to make them make a big leap. And so I think the question then, you know, for a lot of folks that are trying to innovate is like, how do we make the innovations, lessen the trade-off people have to make so that they're more willing to make the jump without having to struggle as much to get there?
Kaity Broadbent:Yeah. So something that I think about a lot here is sometimes we think our kids are fine, but really we're just we've normalized kind of mediocrity. Right, fine, is now an acceptable goal where it's like I don't know if you asked any like start like new parent that just has a brand new newborn. Like what are your expectations, your hopes and dreams for your child? They're not going to be like I hope that they're fine, you know.
Kaity Broadbent:Like they're not the level it's not gonna be fine, but that we are accustomed to, like, well, things are fine, you know, and so we're used to things not being awesome. And so, even though there is this kind of pain, we've normalized or we've become accustomed to that level of discomfort and it's better to stay with the discomforts that you know and that you're familiar with, that you can handle and instead of, like you know, going out to find another option. And then the other thing I think about here is that a lot of times, kids aren't fine, but they're eight and they can't tell you hey, here's why I'm not fine. They don't have the language, they're just. They're also very used to it and they don't know that maybe there's a way to not feel super anxious or have a stomach ache or migraine, headaches, like you know, like all of these things, like that's just their life, that's their normal.
Kaity Broadbent:And so, um, painting a picture for people of, like you know, there there could be a different way to do this. That has, it's like, if you're taking some sort of medication, there's lots of side effects. It's like, well, there's this other medication where there's not so many side effects and maybe you could try it, but there's always this hesitancy to you know, jump ship. So just some thoughts.
Adriane Thompson:There's also a paradigm that kids shouldn't like school. I think that is, you know something in our culture, because what Katie is saying it's been normalized to fine is fine, or even like not fine has turned into fine because, well, kids shouldn't like school. But we're here to say that kids deserve to love school. And so I would love to hear about this third one, because I fit into the first two buckets. I can see where I, my kids were in a very traditional school. They're neurodivergent, the schools were not fitting their needs and it was, I didn't feel heard. But also my kids were definitely refusing to go to school. I would sit in the parking lot with my one son for hours and he physically could not get his body into the school. So it came to the point where we had to find something else. So I'm really curious what this third one is.
Tom Arnett:So these are the families that just have a different sense for what education should be. You know, they look at conventional schools and they say this looks way too oriented around prepping for standardized tests, it looks way too oriented around worksheet, paper-based assignments, and they have a sense that learning should be more about play. Or it should be more about play, or it should be more about intrinsic motivation, or it should be more about exploration and discovery, and so for them it's not so much that, hey, I was in a conventional school and then I hit a struggle that made it not work for me. They just had a sense from the beginning that school should be different and conventional schooling doesn't fulfill what I think education should be. And I want to highlight like this is an important job. But then just to reiterate what I said before, even though this is a job that motivates some families, it's not the job that motivates all families. And this gets to two, where jobs to be done.
Tom Arnett:Again, we don't ask people to tell us why you like A over B. We ask you to tell us our stories, because I think a lot people, once they find themselves in a new setting, will articulate a lot of the things that you would expect from job three of like hey, you know conventional schools like this and I believe that education should be like this. Instead, they'll say those kind of things when they found their new setting. But those beliefs weren't actually what got them there. It's true for some, but I think for a lot of families it's actually job one or job two. I think for a lot of families it's actually job one or job two. It's either the parent is really feeling uncomfortable, feeling tension around the school, or the child is really struggling, and it's those struggles that actually prompt the decision to change.
Adriane Thompson:And that's one and two is what got me to the paradigm of three is I did get to the point of wait. What is education? What should my kids be learning and excited about instead of all the tests? And they did go to a school that was extremely driven on academics and straight A clubs and principals, pride and all their awards for all the gold stars. And I did have to stop and think and go okay, is this connected to our values? But, like you're saying, one and two is what led me to three. I didn't lead with three. I got there eventually seeing my kids struggling.
Tom Arnett:Yeah, I want to point out one other thing too, and that this is a common misperception of jobs is people read our jobs to be done and then they think, oh, these are personas, so like I'm a type one job, one person, or I'm a job two person. And jobs don't describe who you are, they describe the circumstances you're in, and so at one point you may be in job one because of the struggles you have.
Adriane Thompson:Then you find a solution.
Tom Arnett:Those struggles go away, but then life moves on and new struggles come up, and now you find yourself in job two, or now you find yourself in job three because of different circumstances. So people's jobs change, or can change as their circumstances change.
Kaity Broadbent:It's interesting to look at jobs to be done like that they're trying to fill for parents is I want my kids to be like in the 99th percentile and, like you know, like this, this academic competition, the school is assuming that that's what's valuable to parents and then when there's a mismatch in that it's like oh, that wasn't actually the job that I was, that wasn't what I was hiring you to do. That's where we get people kind of shifting. And it's interesting because a lot of teachers go into teaching with a job to be done of inspiring the next generation, right, and they they want to build those relationships, just like you went in there, and that that's their personal job that they're trying to to seek to fill Um. But then the job that they're handed by the district is like, actually your job is to drive these outcomes and it's all about test scores and things like that.
Kaity Broadbent:So we have both a mismatch between what the school is assuming, the jobs we've done is that the parents hiring for, and then we have a mismatch between why, why people are in the, in the teach, the position of teacher, and the job that you know. There there's just mismatches in what we're looking for and what we're being, you know, met with and I think that that drives a lot of change. Maybe that's what drives a lot of suffering is that? I don't know. I'm just kind of like noodling on that mismatch is like, oh, I thought I was getting this and this is what I really wanted, and I'm not getting that, and that's kind of like the root of my discomfort.
Kaity Broadbent:Yeah, I think that's true, that often it's the disconnect between our expectations and our reality that causes a lot of our angst and anxiety in life kids and then there are a plurality of educational options that clearly articulate what you can hire them to do, and then we just have a better you know, a better matching process where it's like you don't just assume that you go to school here because your neighbors do or you know.
Kaity Broadbent:There's really like a concerted effort to help parents become educated and like there's a lot of self-discovery right. That goes on as a parent and like your, your values and and the focus that you have from, like the, your desires for the culture of your family and for the type of people you're raising evolves over time. You get. You get a better sense of that Right, and a lot of parents I talk to kind of start out parenting. They have a fresh five-year-old and they think like we just want to get this kid to Harvard and we try to start pushing super hard. And then we're like, oh, actually we care more about our mental wellbeing and the health of our family and spending time together and making memories and all of these things. Then you know, and there's there's not like a pro and con here, there's just trade-offs, right.
Tom Arnett:Yeah, yeah, that's a big-offs right. Yeah, yeah, that's a big insight too from the jobs to be done. Research is, life is full of trade-offs and you try to find what are the trade-offs that work for you and what are the trade-offs that don't. Something you said also speaks to the one of the insights we had while doing this research, which was that one of the recommendations in our paper, in our report, for folks that are running micro schools is that you need to figure out what job you are focused on, what jobs you are really going to be good at, and then accept that you can't do all the jobs for all people, and this even breaks down within jobs a little bit right.
Tom Arnett:So, if you can imagine, families that are in job two like some may be in job two because their child is struggling to read and they need a more phonics based, you know, program that really walks them through the aspects of reading. Another child may be struggling because school is way, too, is way over structured and they need more freedom. Those are both the same job to be done because they're about the child struggling, but they're like different, slightly nuanced versions of that job to be done, and what a school needs to recognize is it's really hard to do all the jobs for all the students. You can't be a super structured environment and be a super open um, you know, agency oriented oriented environment Um, there are some ways to balance those things right, but a trap that it's easy to get caught into is trying to do all the jobs for all the people that walk in your door and then not being able to do any of them well. So one of our recommendations is like know the jobs you do well, and when people come to you because they're struggling but you can't help them fulfill that struggle, the best thing to do is to help them find the option that's going to work for them.
Tom Arnett:Now I want to go back to the discussion we're having earlier on just education writ large too, is that? I think one of the real challenging things for conventional school district schools is that they're kind of told their public mandate is to fulfill all the jobs to be done, and I think that's part of what makes education so hard in those settings is that they're struggling, they're getting pulled in all these different directions to fulfill all these different jobs to be done. And it's not only the jobs to be done of families. It's also the jobs to be done of school board members and of state legislators, and schools are just doing their best, trying to balance all those competing priorities.
Kaity Broadbent:Yeah, absolutely so. Another concept within the Christensen Institute body of research is a value network, right? Can you tell us what a value network is, because I think you're kind of leading us there. What are the blockers to innovation?
Kaity Broadbent:And when we get a system that is so pulled in so many different directions and is trying to be all things to all people, that's really kind of the heart of why we don't see innovation in schools.
Kaity Broadbent:There's this kind of like paralysis where if I make this change to make these people happy, then these people on the other side are displeased with me, right, and so we're just kind of held at tension and we experienced this acutely at Prenda, because we have a narrative or like a mission that is kind of counter to the normal education, like you know, vibe and but for many years we operated under the charter umbrella here in Arizona and elsewhere, and we felt this tension so acutely because we're trying to make sure that all of the educational regulations are met, we're trying to make sure all of these kids have specific minutes in their learning tools and all of these things. And then the families are hiring us to inspire a love of learning and help their kids explore their curiosities and find their passions and it's like, oh, we feel so pulled. So can you go into that a little bit?
Tom Arnett:So I think, if value networks, maybe one of the easy ways to understand it is by analogy. So if you think about different animal species, right, Like, a squirrel is adapted to live in a forest with trees or an urban forest with lots of high rises and telephone poles, A fish is adapted to live in water. You know, a lizard is adapted to live in a desert setting. Similarly, all organizations have a broader environment or a broader context that they've learned to live within and that they've adapted to live within. So Clayton Christensen, he developed this framework that at first glance may seem overly simplistic, but he said all organizations, their capabilities, boil down to three things their resources, their processes and their priorities. So resources are the obvious things, that's your buildings, your equipment, your human resources. The resources are the obvious things it's your buildings, your equipment, your human resources. The resources are the things that you can buy and sell and trade, and those are the easiest things about an organization to change, because they're fungible, because they can be bought and sold. Processes are the way the organization uses resources to deliver whatever it delivers. So in a school setting, processes would be like how do teachers plan their lessons? How do they manage their classrooms? How does the school go about setting a calendar and setting schedules and picking curriculum? Those kinds of things and processes are harder to change because they have to be learned and unlearned. You can't just buy and sell them. It takes time and it takes effort. And the mark candidly, the mark of really good leaders in a lot of settings is being able to rally people to redesign the resources and the processes when those things need to change. But the third element, priorities. That's the hardest one to change and the reason it's hard to change is it's, by and large, beyond the purview of a leader. When you get hired to lead an organization, your priorities aren't something that you can just dictate from on high. They're actually determined by whatever it takes to survive in the context you live within. And this is where the concept of value networks tie in. Is the value network? Is that broader environment? So for a company, a value network might be your investors, your distributors, your suppliers, your best customers.
Tom Arnett:For a school, your value network includes families, but lots of different families in your community with lots of different jobs to be done and lots of different expectations. It includes your teachers and the way that they may be able to represent their interests through collective bargaining. But it also includes your state agencies that enforce policies, your state legislatures that pass policies, the federal department of education, the federal government and any school. In order to just stay in business as a school, to keep existing and operating, it has to figure out how to balance all of these different expectations that come from its value network. You can't just dismiss your value network because either you'll go out of business, you'll have to close your doors, your families will leave, your state will start enforcing penalties against the way you're operating. It makes your job really hard and it either encumbers your school or it leads to the leader getting fired. So leader can't just say, hey, we're going to shift priorities, because the priorities really come from that broader value network.
Tom Arnett:And so this, I think, gets to the thing you were asking about or mentioning, is that I think of a school as being kind of like if you've ever played bocce ball and you've in bocce ball, you know you throw a ball out there and if there's any kind of contour in the landscape, you'll see the ball will gravitate to certain places, kind of the low point in the landscape. Well, it's the same thing in schools is that you've got all these different competing forces and schools find their way to the natural equilibrium that balances all those competing forces. And then when we complain about schools being hierarchical or the leaders being non-responsive or stubborn or lazy, that's really not the problem. The problem is that those leaders have done everything they reasonably can to balance all the competing priorities for the context that they're operating in, and the status quo is just the equilibrium that does the best they can at balancing those competing priorities. And so the reality is, when you come in and you try and show up and protest at a school board meeting, that's one way to try and move a school right.
Tom Arnett:Or maybe you get a grant and you try to inject a whole bunch of new funding for some new program into the school, and that's like taking that ball that's sitting at a low point and giving it a little push and it may roll up the hill a little bit and then it rolls right back down back to that equilibrium, Because the equilibrium is what balances all those competing priorities. And that's the reality that we've seen in our research is that if we wanna transform schools, we can't transform them by just trying to give them little nudges. Within that broader value network context. We actually have to figure out how do we build new programs? But not just build new programs, build them in a new context, in a different value network that can actually align around a different set of priorities than what conventional schools have been pushed toward for so long.
Adriane Thompson:So are you building those programs?
Tom Arnett:I have to say I just do the research, but I love talking to people like you all at Prenda that are actually doing the work and learning from. Okay, the research and the theory says this what are you finding works or doesn't work in reality?
Kaity Broadbent:Conversations like this are mutually beneficial for both of us to learn from each other. So a good example of this is that a lot of the I don't want to call them like constraints, like all of the regulations, like the standards that kids have to learn, the test scores they have to hit all of those things. I think they were created with really good intentions to be like. Kids should know this. We need to, we need to prepare them Right. So I think that was what they were intended to do. But now for people who have a slightly different definition of what success looks like for their kids, that they're okay with a slower timeline or they need a faster timeline, you know, um, they need a more personalized approach. Those the the constraints of the current value network really make it so they can't get their needs met. And so I know we just recently had a conversation about school choice, or we talked about empowerment, scholarship programs where you're able to get state funds, state education dollars for your kids, and then the parent can then say here's what success looks like to me and here's what my child's education needs to look like. That is something that radically changes the value network, where now we don't have to necessarily have the government define what success is and guarantee everyone's success. We say, hey, parents, you now hold that constraint and that definition and here's the funding to create what your child needs.
Kaity Broadbent:That kind of change radically opens the door to innovation because it changes, it creates other value networks where programs can exist that do different jobs. Impossible for a job three parent to find that within the school setting, the conventional school setting, because of all of the value networks and the constraints that kind of hold that attention right there, the job to be done isn't a priority in that value network. And that's why we see so many people leaving the system right now and we're saying, hey, this system this was, this is supporting millions. There's 55 million. This system, this was, this is supporting millions. There's 55 million kids in America, right Like this is not. There's just this is just the situation we're in and there are levers we can pull here that would make it so teachers would have more flexibility, so administrators would have more flexibility and so that we could, instead of just nudging that ball and then watching it resettle like, actually move where that ball lands.
Adriane Thompson:Where does the Christensen Institute fall in? Like you do the research, and then what happens after that?
Tom Arnett:I'd say we do the research and then we try to work with people in the field to say, hey, we've got some new insights on how you might solve some of your problems. Let's have conversations and figure out both. Can these help you and can we learn more from your context to better inform our theories and our research? So to your question of like have we seen or where have we seen new value networks take form? I'll mention a few examples. One example that I've seen, totally within the district space, are programs like launch high school in Cedar City, utah, or village high school in Colorado Springs. These are programs that operate very different models of schooling, much more oriented around flexibility. They take advantage of online learning to make the learning experience more flexible to students' needs and then they also incorporate a lot more learning that happens outside of the classroom and even outside of the school building into part of the learning experience. But some key insights there are.
Tom Arnett:Number one those programs. Usually they're not out there trying to be the magnet school that is trying to do everything conventional education does and do it better. They're often designated as virtual programs or hybrid virtual programs or alternative education programs or career and technical programs, and that does. I think that does two things for them. One is that, within the constraints of state policy, you can find some flexibility. When you get designated as one of those other types of programs, states often say, hey, look, you know, if you're working with alternative ed, like we understand, attendance is going to be hard. We're not going to hold you to the same attendance expectations and the same test score expectations and things like that, similar things for virtual schools, a career and technical program. So you find the value networks can be different because the state policies that apply in some of those settings are actually different. The other key piece is that they serve. They're not trying to compete to be everything that families want from a conventional school, but better, because the reality is families also form a big part of the conventional value network of schooling. There's a lot of families that may say, hey, yeah, we want our school to be innovative.
Tom Arnett:But when you start really upending some of the core assumptions of what normal school is supposed to look like, families push back and parents say, ah, this isn't what I did. I'm concerned that my kid's going to be off track because this isn't what I went through. I don't know how to help my kids. Something must be wrong here. Same thing with students. You know there's a lot of students that they may not be getting the greatest learning experience, but they've learned how to get by and they don't want you to change the rules on them because they've learned. Hey look, I show up, I do what the teacher tells me to do, I turn in my assignments, I get my grades. It works right. I mean, I love it. It may not be the most engaging, but it's working for me. And so it's even students and families that you try and change what school should be and they'll push back and that's where a lot of resistance can come from.
Tom Arnett:So these settings that are within districts again like they operate under a different set of state policy expectations. They usually need a large degree of independence. In other words, the district office isn't saying, okay, you're a new school, but you still have to, you know, follow all of our practices for curriculum and hiring and schedules. They get a lot of freedom around that. And then they need to serve families that have different expectations. So that's where I've seen the most innovative kind of stuff happen within district schools.
Tom Arnett:Similar thing in the charter school space. There's a school I really like in Plymouth, massachusetts, called MAP Academy. That you know, was started by two folks that were the leaders of their district's alternative ed program and they realized we just can't do what students really need in this setting. In this setting, and then, with the district's blessing, the district said, okay, go start a charter school where you can have a little more autonomy and independence and go figure out how to do things differently. They also worked closely with their state and said hey, you know, don't hold us to the same accountability metrics because this just won't work for our students. Let's figure out different ways of focusing on how do we get students from like totally outside of schooling to engaged in schooling, to on a track with goals and a pathway forward to having a clear, you know next step for their post-secondary education. Like that's what we should be looking at, not, you know, are their test scores on par with everyone else in the state? I think they still look at test scores, but that's just not. The test score isn't the number one priority in that context.
Tom Arnett:So, again, I think you can see this happen within districts, within charter school space, to some degree. Again, though, it's not every charter school, it's not the charter school that's coming in and saying, hey, we're going to be better than your district school, come to us. It's the charter school that's saying, look, we've got something different to offer for families whose jobs to be done aren't fulfilled and for families who accept that, hey, you are going to make a trade-off here. It's not going to be everything you expected from school, but better. There's some things that you won't have that we all think of as being normal school, but this is a different experience that better fulfills your job to be done.
Tom Arnett:But I will say too, I think the micro schooling space I think is some of the most ripe space for developing new models of schooling, because it is so much easier to get an aligned value network, because you're not having to find where's the exceptions and the loopholes in the state policy. How do we negotiate with our district to get, you know, some economy from the conventional processes the district has set up? You really you know you have a value network that is 100% oriented around what do families need and what do their students need. You don't have all those other competing interests and I think that creates a lot of space for interesting innovation to happen as well. So again, I guess my takeaway is that if we want new models of schooling, we've got to figure out how to make new value networks. You can find ways to get in a different value network across the education landscape, but again, I think the micro-schooling space is probably the easiest space to do that within.
Adriane Thompson:And it sounds like it takes an individual, whether that's an admin, superintendent, a principal that is willing to do something different, because I feel like that's the catalyst.
Tom Arnett:Yeah, that's really key too. In all the examples I mentioned, they started with a school leader or school leaders that said we have a very different idea and vision for what education should be, and they were dogged in pursuing that vision, and they also had support from their districts, the superintendent being willing to say yes, we are going to allow you to go do something different. Not no, you just you know, we need you to follow all the processes that our other schools follow so that we can be efficient in the way we do our work and so we can maintain consistency, like you've got to have a superintendent that understands why they need to be different, absolutely. So what do you like? Zoom out a little bit. What do you think the next five to 10 years of education looks like? What's the future of education?
Tom Arnett:Look like no-transcript, and we know some kids love to read, and there's a lot of kids that if you told them, okay, school is now going to be you sit in front of a textbook and read the textbook all day and then write from the textbook, they'd totally tune out. It just would not work for them, right? And so naturally, the answer was well, we're going to do teacher directed instruction, because that's the better option than just having kids read textbooks. But the powerful thing about a textbook is that it enables more self-directed learning. It enables more individualization, moving at your own pace, at your own path. It just it was a very rudimentary basic version of that kind of technology. Well, fast forward to today and we have tons of technologies that can help students learn that are way more engaging than reading a textbook. I think of things like Khan Academy, youtube and the plethora of videos to learn so many different things from so many enthusiastic and excellent teachers many different things from so many enthusiastic and excellent teachers.
Tom Arnett:I think of the potential with AI and the things I've seen where AI is getting used as a tutor, something that when a student's at home working on their homework and they don't have a teacher there to ask and you ask the AI help explain this concept to me and the AI can talk it through with you or even have like a Socratic discussion with you. Again, the AI isn't going to be as good as a teacher, but the AI is available and on demand in ways that teachers can't be on demand, and so I think leveraging all those technologies just opens up a lot more potential for different models of learning, where students don't all have to be sitting in the same classroom doing the same thing at the same time, with the teacher directing the process. We've also got a lot of technologies that help with coordinating new learning experiences, making it easier to both coordinate. How do we get students outside of a school building to learn? How do we ensure that they're safe while they're outside? How do we just make the logistics work? So all those technologies together, I think, are opening up a lot of new potential models for schooling, and I'm pretty confident that in time, those new models will become the new normal in education.
Tom Arnett:Again, though, to go back to timeline, where I'm really reticent is that there's also a lot of barriers that stand in the way. There's some disruptive innovations that happen quickly, like you think of how quickly Netflix upended Blockbuster. There's some disruptive innovations that take a long time, like it was a long time between when the telephone was invented and when the telephone replaced the telegraph, or even even a longer one is like steamships to going from sail ships to steamships, like that was a long time that that evolution and that disruption played out. And so I think it'll happen, but, um, the the timeline of it really depends on how well are we able to address and take down some of the barriers that really stand in the way of being able to transition to these new models of schooling.
Adriane Thompson:And what comes up for me is, as you know, the people that are running the schools now were educated in that very traditional way. So, as that starts to you know, we get more and more kids like Katie and my kids who have been in very non-traditional education environments, and they become the adults that start running these. I think we're going to see more change in that as well, and so this is a question that we ask all of our guests. And so who is someone who has kindled your love of learning, curiosity, motivation or passion?
Tom Arnett:That is a hard question to answer because there's so many people both people that I know, people who have been major influences in my life, like my own parents. Also people I just admire from their work and from the things I've read. But at the risk of sounding a little bit cliche, I'm going to say Clayton Christensen. Let me mention two things about his work. Number one is he had a model that was anomalies wanted and it hung in his office at Harvard and what he meant by that was you know, sometimes academics can take the stance of look, I've come up with these great ideas and my job is to just defend those ideas and tell everybody why they're wrong and why my ideas are right. Christensen wasn't like that. His approach was look, you know, if you have examples and data that contradict the ideas that we're, that we are developing, like, bring them here because we want to wrestle with those. Like reality is what it is, and we all get smarter when we have to wrestle with reality to come to a better understanding of how the world works. But I think he had just this inner sense that if we better understand how the world works, then we can do better at making the world better, and I think that inspired a lot of his work and a lot of his curiosity.
Tom Arnett:The other thing I'll mention is he wasn't just a smart academic, he was also a really great person. He wrote a book called how Will you Measure your Life. That was really his last lecture that he would give in his class, and it was really about let's take ideas and theories and apply them to our own personal lives. How do we decide, you know, how to find work-life balance? How do we decide what's the best way to raise our kids? He tackled those kinds of questions, um, and I think generally he was someone that was interested in like how do we make the world better?
Tom Arnett:He saw even the profession of management. He saw it not as about how you know building companies, he saw it really. As you know, managers have big influences on people's lives the employees that work for them, um, the organizations they influence lives, the employees that work for them, the organizations they influence. So how do we, how do we make sure that there are, you know, people with a strong sense of, of ethics? How do we, you know, help make sure that those kinds of leaders are making a difference in the world?
Kaity Broadbent:So valuable? Yeah, I love that. Okay, how can listeners learn more about your work?
Tom Arnett:Yeah, so one thing to do is go to the Clayton Christensen Institute website it's christenseninstituteorg and sign up for our newsletter. It comes out every two weeks. You'll get to see the latest things we've been thinking about, the latest reports we've put out. The other way would be to follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'll say I tend to use LinkedIn more because there's a lot more good conversation happening there. But those are the places where I post the latest stuff I'm working on and thinking about as well, and if you find me there, feel free to engage to. You know, send me, send me a comment or make a comment on something I posted. I love the conversation and the dialogue.
Kaity Broadbent:Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the Kindle podcast and for helping us learn about all these amazing things. I've loved this conversation. Thanks so much.
Tom Arnett:Thanks to you too. It's been a pleasure.
Adriane Thompson:Well, that was a really fascinating conversation, especially for someone who has not read all these books on disruptive education and value networks. And so what did you get from this conversation, Katie?
Kaity Broadbent:I just love the framing of jobs to be done, cause when I when I first read these books, it completely changed how I look at the world and like human behavior, and so now I can bring that and hopefully our listeners, you guys, can bring this framework to you know, problems that you're trying to solve, people you're trying to help, and I think it's just such an effective way to think about doing something, cause sometimes we have these good intents and we want these good results, and so we make a hypothesis about what the next thing to do, like to move the ball forward right, and so often we're wrong.
Kaity Broadbent:Right, we're well-intended and we create something that's really beautiful maybe, but, like no one signs up for it, it doesn't seem to actually solve the problem. And that's because before we do that work, we really need to understand the value networks that are in play and the jobs to be done of the people that we're trying to serve. And when we can truly step into their shoes and really do that deep work of empathy, then we go and try to build a solution and it is so much better able to serve those needs. So I just think it's such a powerful I like, I think of it as literally like a thought technology that can be, you know, practice and and utilize it's.
Adriane Thompson:It's just been interesting, so I love our conversation with Tom and I hope that it was helpful to everyone, yeah, and I hope this got you, as a listener, thinking about these things and how it just starts with small change that leads to really big innovation. I mean, look where we are today compared to, you know, 1910. And so if this episode was helpful to you, please like, subscribe and follow us on social at Prenda Learn. If you have a question you'd like us to address, leave a comment or email us at podcast at prendacom. You can also join our Facebook group called the Kindle Collective and subscribe to our weekly newsletter called the Sunday Spark.
Kaity Broadbent:The Kindle podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy for you to start and run an amazing micro school based on all the things that we talk about here on the Kindle podcast. If you want more information about guiding a Prenda micro school, go to prendacom. Thanks for listening and remember to keep kindling.
