Read the full transcript of Episode 61 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features departing New View EDU host Tim Fish joining NAIS President Debra P. Wilson to reflect on his 60 episodes of the podcast, what he’s learned from his long career in education, and what he thinks may be next for independent schools.
Debra Wilson: Hello, friends. So good to have you with us today on New View EDU for my first episode. And I could not be happier with the person I have on today, Tim Fish. Many of you know Tim from his 18 years in McDonogh School in Maryland, where he did so much fabulous work. But I know a lot of you also know Tim through the incredible work he's done at NAIS over the last eight years.
Tim has led the innovation work with our schools, and he's overseen much of NAIS technology and a lot of our own new initiatives. His time on the road and with schools is truly legendary, and as many of you know, his curiosity knows no limits, which makes him such a fun colleague and an incredible friend.
So I'm thrilled to have him on this episode today, my first New View EDU one, and I guess Tim's last one. So let's jump into a conversation about Tim's time with New View EDU, his time with NAIS, and just the possibilities in education today.
Tim, this is going to be a ridiculously fun conversation.
For our audience at home, we already started, before we even started recording, about all of the various equipment, the right structure, how do we de-emphasize certain sounds, re-emphasize other sounds. Tim has shared his special microphone setup, his acoustic tiles.
I feel like I'm being left with a good toolkit for taking on New View EDU. Tim, which you started… This is the seventh season, right? You've done six seasons.
Tim Fish: Season seven, Debra, there's no one better to be doing it than you. I am so happy that you're doing it and I'm just honored to join for this first episode.
Debra Wilson: People were like, well, who do you want as your first guest? And I was like, hello, we've got to have Tim, like, this is the official handoff. And, you know, let's get rolling. Let's talk about schools. And you are, I mean, I know you're traveling a lot right now, now that you've left NAIS, but you are, you're looking pretty well rested. You're looking kind of fresh.
Tim Fish: Well, thanks, Debra. I'm feeling great. I'm feeling, I'm feeling wonderful. I'm doing the work I love, you know, I started this organization, Two Chairs Studio, and I'm just doing deep work with a few schools. And man, I'm in it. I'm in the messiness, and I love it. It's like, holy moly, you know, and it is so, it's so fun for me. And just, thanks for everything you continue, you and the team continue to put out. So if there's ever any way I can help with this, this is so near and dear to my heart and I'm so glad that you are continuing it forward.
Debra Wilson: Well, I'm thrilled to take your passion project and keep it going. Let's, I mean, let's jump in. So looking back at the last six seasons, there's gotta be a few favorite episodes out there. Like tell me about a few of them and like, and why did they resonate and do they still resonate with you today?
Tim Fish: Yeah, it's such a great question. Well, the first thing I'd have to say is some of my favorite episodes are the ones that I did in season one and part of season two with Lisa Kay Solomon. I mean, this thing was started with Lisa Kay’s help and inspiration and guidance and frankly, Rolodex. She was able to connect us with people in the first few seasons that was just unbelievable. And also, just having her as a partner going into it, because as you're learning, I'm sure, you know, hosting a podcast is a whole new thing, it's a whole new skill set and having her there was incredible.
I would also say if you asked me like, favorite episode, I mean, the two episodes we did with students, that's there at the top. There's no question in my mind. Those are the two I listen to the most. Those are the two that I reference to people the most. So if our listeners have not heard the episode from season four with the two students from One Stone school, Mackenzie and Ella, man, you just got to listen to that. And then we did one to end season six with two students from Midland School. And you just, just hearing the optimism and the energy and the potential and the opportunity from the voice of young people. Boy, that, that just brought it full, full circle for me.
And then I certainly would say the episodes we did with, with psychologists like Lisa D’Amour and Shimi Kang and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, those were powerful for me personally. I love talking to founders of schools, people like Josh Dahn and Tyler Thigpen and Orly Friedman about like, just starting from nothing and creating a thing. Those were great.
I love talking to authors, right? Jay McTighe. We did a couple of episodes with him, and certainly as I mentioned, Lisa Kay. And Catlin Tucker talking about teachers as architects, you know, there's just some really good, really good stuff. And there's so many others. I mean, there's something I love about every single episode we did.
Debra Wilson: That surprises me not at all, that I bet you could wax poetic about probably every episode. But you've kind of like, underscored to me sort of an interesting tension or trend that we see, you know, so you mentioned having the students on and their optimism and you know, their hope and their energy, but also talking to psychologists about what's happening with kids today.
I mean, like so when you think about that, right? Although I will say the recent data on student mental health is that at least for girls, some of the new data is showing that it's a little bit more hopeful. But, you know, how do you reconcile those, those two pieces? Right. So there's the hope and the optimism in students and then, you know, as adults and adults who care tremendously about students, who are trying to build healthy cultures and environments. When we talk to psychologists, some of those conversations, I mean, they get pretty dark these days. Like, what do you think about that sort of dichotomy?
Tim Fish: Yeah, so it's really interesting. I mean, I think we explored this in deep ways through multiple, multiple episodes. And the one theory, one theme that came through over and over again was the power of agency, the power of student agency, right? That notion that I have some control over what I'm doing. I care deeply, to go back to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. And like, if you don't care about something, you can't learn about it. Like full stop, end of story, that's it.
This idea that like I'm in, I'm all in, I care about what I'm doing in school. It has real consequence for me and for others. There's a real audience. I'm engaged, I have the time to do it. I'm not overwhelmed. And you know, for me, it's also this idea that it's hard, you know? Lisa D’Amour, in the episode we did, talked about like, school's supposed to be hard. Like it's hard, it's supposed to be hard. And we're going to have times when there's stress, but what's good stress look like, and what's bad stress look like for kids, right? And when it's high agency, hard, that's good stress, right? I feel I'm engaged in the work. I care a lot. It's that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi work around flow, and flow is, flow needs to be in flow. You've got to have complexity. You've got to have challenge. It's got to be hard, right? Video game designers have figured this out in brilliant ways.
And so for me, the part also that always gets me about Csikszentmihalyi’s work is that when flow is present, when those things are present, when you have agency, when you care, like it's actually really good for self-efficacy and it lowers depression and it gives you more self-worth and it makes you like, so all like those good things we want about wellbeing, they happen when we're in this environment. And so for me, it's this thinking about, as school leaders, how do we design the environment, how do we create the context for these things we want to see with young people to emerge? That's what I'm really interested in.
Debra Wilson: So let's take that. I adore that encapsulation. As you know, you're singing music that totally resonates.
Tim Fish: I know I'm singing your tune.
Debra Wilson: Well, because I do, I think there's a difference between flow and feeling like your work matters and that you matter, versus grinding it out. And those are very different kinds of education. It's very different thinking in education. So now I want to touch back on your other favorite episodes where you have school founders. And like one of my favorite questions today, my predecessor at SAIS, Kirk Walker, was Head of Macaulay school for a long time. And one of his favorite questions, and I loved his answer, is if you were going to start a school today, what would it look like? Where would it be? Like what would the physical space look like?
And so just thinking about that, and just the deep work you've done around strategy and the work you're doing now with schools, like, I mean, the first time you and I met was at a conference. I think it was an EMA conference and we spent some time together. We were both speaking. I think we had some meals. We were there for a while and you told me, know, Debra, you need to be a head of school. And I still think about that sometimes. I think knowing the heads that I know, I'm like, wow, I'm not, the depth heads have to have—
Tim Fish: You'd be a great head of school, Debra. I still believe that.
Debra Wilson: Well, thank you. Maybe my next round I'll go down that road.
But if you were a founding head of school, what spaces intrigue you? How would you think about building that school? I'm going make it hard. I'm not going to let you hide away in high schools. I'd love it if you'd think about elementary schools out loud a little bit. But let's start at least in middle school.
Tim Fish: I love middle school.
Debra Wilson: I love middle school. I think middle school is a magical place because everybody's terrified of middle school. So like you can do a lot of things with it.
Tim Fish: That's such a great, it's such a great thing. People ask me all the time, like, where are the places where the magic is happening, which really good where, where like, there's this concept that we'll talk about later, I call it the difference between old excellence and new excellence, right? So like, what does new excellence look like, is this thing I've been racking around? Maybe I'll write an article in Independent School Magazine at some point about it, once I fully figure it out.
But it's like this, if I were going to do it, right, I think a couple of things would be true. Number one is I think it would be pretty small. I think it would be in that kind of, I don't know, 175 to 275 students. I don't think I would, if I were doing it now, I love the big schools. I spent many, many years at McDonogh, 1500 students, and there's so many things I love about that. But I think if I was starting from scratch now, think personally, I think it'd be smaller, right? That'd be number one.
Number two is I think we, I’d think really deeply about how I use time and how we use time. And how time pushed us out of our comfort zone with how we think about, like, coverage and teaching and all that kind of stuff. I think I would think really deeply about what's the role of the teacher, right?
So I know today, I think today we're going to talk more, we'd better, because you're so thoughtful on this, about AI. And I think from the grounding, I'd be thinking about how can AI be a learning partner to students and teachers? And how do we do that in a safe way? And how do we do that in a thoughtful way? But that would be part of the design, I think.
Debra Wilson: So when you say that about teachers, our friend Ross Peters talks a lot about proximity, right? And elastic proximity. So when you're thinking about teachers, how are you thinking about that? I know you'd be moving away from the sage-on-the-stage model, but tell me a little bit more about that teacher piece and how would you hire for it today?
Tim Fish: That’s a great question. I think I'd be going more with what Catlin Tucker talked about when we interviewed her on this concept of the architecture, teacher as architect. I've always been really interested in this notion of teacher as designer, teacher as someone— in my conversations with Jay McTighe around this idea of creating the context through essential questions, through design, through how we design assessment, through how we communicate what we're going to be doing.
All those structures are super important. We need experts doing that design work. And then one of the key conditions of the design is that as much as possible, we create the opportunity to get the heck out of the way. Right? So we design to stand back. We design to let it happen.
I had this privilege of, when I worked at McDonogh, teaching a class in entrepreneurship in what we called night block, which was the evening after, after school 6 PM to 8 PM. We thought there'd be an opportunity maybe to do a class in that, kind of like colleges do. Right. So we taught this entrepreneur class. And then the first year I taught with a parent who was a very successful entrepreneur and a wonderful man named Vince Talbert. And, he really was the lead. I was just along for the ride.
First year we had 12 students, two teachers, 12 students. It was good. It was really, it was fun. It was good. The next year we had 18 students, two teachers, 18 students, and it got better. The last year, we had 46 students, two teachers, 46 students. Now you could argue, my gosh, two teachers, 46, you can't meet the needs of each individual, blah, blah. It was the best, like by far, like five times better than any other year, because they were doing it.
We created the structure. We helped, we answered questions, we moved around, we sat with the groups. They were designing their own companies and pitching them. At the end of the term, there was essentially like a shark tank type thing. And so we were there, but our role was pretty minimal. There were nights when we would sit up in the front of the room just to be talking to each other and like, they don't need us at all. And that was exactly, that's when I was like, this is it. When we're sitting up there and they're like, they don't need me, because I've designed so much.
That's the piece that I think in my mind, that middle school would have, there would be times when there were 45 kids working in a room, right? I think we gotta get more flexible in our understanding of small class size. Like sometimes small is amazingly good. And sometimes like with the entrepreneurship class, 45 is a lot better than 12, you know?
Debra Wilson: Interesting.
Tim Fish: So yeah, so that's my, and then physical space, I think it would be, I would, I'd be striving for affordable, right? One of the things I see in my work now is just how much physical space puts a huge burden on the school to have to keep increasing tuition, keep, you know, all this stuff, just to run these massive physical plants. I think I'd be like, really creative about where it was, so that there was stuff I don't have to buy.
Debra Wilson: Right. Sort of using that public space. We have a lot of urban and even some suburban schools that lean into that, right? They have a park down the street. They have access to municipal fields or whatever the thing is that they can leverage. I love that idea of just thinking of the long-term expense, right? I mean, Kirk, again, he was head of Macaulay, a fabulous school in Chattanooga. It's a substantial campus. It's got historic buildings. Like there's, there's a lot going on. And he said, yeah, you know, I'd be in a strip mall, an old strip mall near— exactly your point. And he said, you know, and we would revisit our traditions every four years so that, you know, we have, we just have a check on all of these things. And, you know, we're not just piling on and adding on year after year after year.
So let's, you teed it up. Let's take on the AI question. I mean, I have loved our AI conversations. When we started playing around with Dali, what, 18 months ago now or something along those lines, and you'd end up with pictures of giraffes with hands coming out their heads? Like what these early iterations were. But you know, things are getting interesting, right? Like it's, people are playing around with different models. You're seeing different kinds of regulation popping up as we're thinking about AI, how it'll affect teaching, how it'll affect education, give us a summation of your current thoughts on where we are and where we might be going.
Tim Fish: Yeah, so I'll tell you, I'm reading like, Eric Hudson's work all the time on this topic. I'm just now finishing Sal Khan's latest book on this topic, right? So I would say that I'm standing on the shoulders of some really great thinkers that are helping me shape my thinking on this. Because I'll tell you, internally, I go back and forth. There are times when I'm like, ew, this feels weird. Like this AI thing, I'm not so comfortable with it. And then there are other times when I'm just so inspired about where it's headed.
And so I'm going to sort of draft off some of those great thinkers in my response. You know, one of the things that Sal Khan talks a lot about in his book is this notion of the personalized tutor, that what's it look like when every student has an incredibly high quality personalized tutor who can, who knows where they are, who can help them make progress, who can ask really thoughtful questions. And there's a side of that that makes me go, that's so weird. And like, I don't know. And there's a side of me that goes, wow, like what an amazing thing. And he talks about the evolution of Khan Academy, and how when it was these short videos that were organized in lots of different ways, it was so powerful. And now we're just going to a whole nother level with the ability of the AI to sort of meet me where I am and help me make progress.
So that idea, and there's a whole chapter in the book that he talks about, OK, so then what are teachers in this thing?
Debra Wilson: That's the chapter that I'm on right now. Yeah.
Tim Fish: And it's so good. And he's basically like, they've never been more important, right? They've never been more important, that this notion that AI is going to replace the teacher, I don't think so. I think instead, the concept, it's been banging around my head, has been that I think this is my, my idea, but I might be, might've, I might be stealing from someone. So if I am, I'm, I'm sorry, I just can't remember who it is, but my sort of bumper sticker or, or a T-shirt that I've been thinking about is “School is where human happens.” Right. This idea that AI can free us up to do that incredible round table, Harkness-like conversation about complexity and ideas.
You know, Sal Khan does talk about how we can ratchet up what we can expect students to be able to do when they have their AI partner, right? We can ask for so much more complexity, so much more deep thinking, so much more diving into some, or jumping into some really complex topics. And so for me, it's that human role of the teacher.
And then I look at independent schools and I'm like, this is what we do. This is our good stuff, that climbing into the messiness of every kid's life. I'm like, that's us. That's what every school says they're really good at. And so I think in a world of AI, we can double down on that. We can become even better at that, because we have this new, as Sal Khan talks about, this new flipped classroom partner, we can bring flipped to a whole nother level with students really collaborating with their AI partner in the evenings to be learning the content, understanding their ideas, right? Diving deep into something. And then in the classroom, we can be really interacting it from a human perspective.
Debra Wilson: I find that that's such an interesting set of conclusions to me because when I look at the data, the post pandemic data, right? And what we learned was that a lot of kids actually learned really well from home. Some of them were learning in a flipped way. They were learning from YouTube. They were just learning themselves from books, like however they were doing it. But what we also learned was their logic scores tended to go down, right?
So that, particularly among high achieving girls. High achieving girls actually did better in some ways when they were home, except for in logic. All kids struggled. And that's that sort of messiness you're talking about, right? Like how do we talk things through? How do we reason? Like really getting in deep and it involves that human interaction because you're right, right? We know relationships are, they're the foundation of education. Like we know from the Gallup data what kids do in college. It's all people driven. It actually doesn't have anything to do with what level of calculus you're in when you get there as a freshman, but it really is, you know, how do you interact with people? Do you do extracurriculars? Are you engaged with your professors? Do you have those personal connections? And so I totally agree with all of that.
What do you think about AI as a teacher partner? So we have a school, and they've worked with developers in India, and it's so cool to look at, right? They had their own sort of mini LMS built with an AI chat bot. So teachers can upload lessons and ask the AI to create a multiple choice quiz, which helps in a variety of ways, right? Teachers aren't coming up with a different quiz every year or using the same quiz year after year. Like, what do you think about— So I agree with that classroom structure, but I also, you know, I worry about our workforce. I worry about our teachers. We have just bled so much into their personal time, their personal space, and adding more and more, particularly as we look at some of the mental health issues our students are struggling with, right?
What do you think about just that AI partner for teachers? What does that look like?
Tim Fish: I think it's such a great question. In my head, I almost think about AI as a time machine. And I don't mean something that transports us to the past or the future. I mean something that manufactures time. So we think about it, It's the number one thing. For all my career, 30 plus years, whenever we talk about, wouldn't it be great if we could do this, this, or this? Yeah, but I don't have any time. I have no time. Give me more time and I'll be able to do that. Well, I'm like, AI can actually give us more time.
So this notion of like, I've been doing stuff experimenting recently with like, hey AI, read all this stuff and then give me a summary. It's really, really good. You know, like I have these piles of PDFs that I find that I'm like, I don't have time to read this. I'm like, hey AI, read this PDF and tell me about it. And let me ask more, let me engage in a conversation about that content.
And I wonder about things like, read all these essays and give each student some constructive feedback, right? Or read this and allow a student to engage. And now you could argue, no, it'll never do that. I'm the teacher. I'm the writing teacher. But I see things like read all these essays, compare them to the last five years of essays. Tell me how this class is stronger and weaker in terms of good writing compared to the last five years. So you could say to the AI, hey, here's 400 essays, just read those in the next seven seconds and then give me some feedback.
And I found it's actually really, really good at that kind of stuff. So these things that would be very cumbersome to do as a teacher, right? And even that initial work we do with like, thinking of essential questions, designing a rubric for assessment. We had Jay McTighe work with the team from NAIS and a bunch of teachers in June. We had him in the NAIS office and it was an awesome experience to have him there. I asked him in front of like these 60 people, I was like, Jay, what do you think about AI writing essential questions, right? Which is, and he was like, it's really good if you do it the right way, if you prompt it the right way, it can actually generate very good essential questions. And so that heavy lifting that we do on some of that stuff, we can offload some of that to AI.
Debra Wilson: Well, I love that example. And I do love, you know, the one of the first conversations I had with school leaders around AI, that question came up around feedback on, you know, call it essays, right? And several people said, you know, no, no, like that'll never happen. And then, you know, we, but we've hit the pause and we said, OK, well, let's talk about like, what is feedback for?
And so I'm just waiting. I'm waiting for Canvas to have that. They have SpeedGrader. You can go through each paper. But for them to have that AI, just that, provide an initial round of feedback for me to review. So if you're a teacher and you're reviewing it, you'll still add your own comments, look at the AI comments. But if the purpose of feedback is for improvement, an AI provides good feedback with that human partnership.
I think there are really interesting possibilities there. As a recovering attorney, when I think about the times that I've been writing briefs or memos or you name it, AI can be really helpful in cleaning up the writing and making it smoother. And students will be using that in the real world, right? Once they're out and about earning a paycheck, those communication pieces are getting more important, not less.
Yeah, I'm excited about AI and hopeful that it could improve quality of life for our teachers, but also for staff in general. I mean, heads of school, they do a lot of writing, they do a lot of communicating. To have that thought partner to play with, I think can be so useful.
So let's talk about, as you think about schools, all of the work that you've done, all of the New View EDU episodes, I know you're a voracious reader, your comments on AI actually made me think a lot about Blinkist, which summarizes books, and they've got to be looking at AI too. What are the big strategic questions, these big questions that you think are ahead for independent schools? And then maybe just education in general.
If you think of some examples where people are making particular headway, where are those bright spots out there? Like what do you think those big kind of icky questions are going to be in the future?
Tim Fish: I think it's a great question. I think one of them is, certainly what I'm hearing quite a bit about, is the sustainability of the workforce. How do we attract and retain the best people for this fundamentally human work that we're looking for? And what does that look like? And I actually believe that our work is so purpose-driven. And if we can think about the design and what it means to be a teacher, right? And I am a firm believer, as Sal Khan said, there's never been a more important time for teachers. This is not about self-checkout machines, right? That is not what we're talking about here. We're talking about these incredibly important humans in the lives of children.
And so like, for me, is there an evolution of that, right? You know, one of the things I've been talking a lot about and thinking a lot about is what I said, this idea of what is new excellence? What does new excellence look like for us? Parents will always say, like when I do interviews, jobs to be done interviews with schools, with families. And I say, what are you looking for? Why did you choose? Oh, cause it's, they, really have, they deliver on academic excellence. I'm like, OK, what, what's that actually? What is that?
Debra Wilson: What does that look like?
Tim Fish: What is academic excellence? It's a great question to ask.
Because my sense is that parents are often stuck in something I call old excellence. That sort of excellence from when I was in school, which was largely teacher centered, largely exam based, largely grade based, right? Lots of papers, lots of homework, not a lot of agency, not a lot of engagement. And I think that in the age of AI, in the age of where we are and just everything going on, I don't think old excellence has the relevance it has.
But I also find that parents don't imagine or ask for new excellence that's highly engaged, based in wellbeing, high agency, teacher as an architect and designer, more get out of the way. Parents are going to walk in the door a lot of times. They're not going to ask for that. So what we have to do is we have to help the parents walk across the bridge, walk across the bridge from old excellence to new excellence.
And we do that by showing them what it looks like, by having them experience what it feels like. And so when they come in and their kids have created biography day and they dress up as a character and they do their biography on the stage and they talk about their thing and they're all bought in and they're nervous about it the night before and they deliver this amazing thing, you know, the parent comes back and is like, I love that for my kid. Like, let's do more of that.
They just, sometimes they get stuck in this rigor thing and what rigor looks like. And so one of the things I think we have to do is we have to help families walk across the bridge. We got to be really clear on what excellence looks like to us. And we have to be obsessed with the pursuit of it. And we have to help families get there, help these great families with great kids get to where we are.
Because often, it's just not what's going to happen. And if we don't do a good enough job, they're going to get wiggy. They do. They get all nervous and anxious. And is this going to be good enough? And is my kid going to get into school? And so we have to understand that's a natural reaction, and we gotta help them get there.
Debra Wilson: So how do we calm that down? I mean, I think you've touched on something really…It very much vibrates in a lot of schools, right? A friend of mine says, we have reached the end of the trust me era, right? It can't be, you know, I mean, it was like this a bit pre-pandemic, but certainly post-pandemic, it's no longer the black box of education, right? You can't drop your kid off at the door, say, trust me, I've got it.
And particularly because the education you're talking about, I know from our conversations, you and I didn't grow up with that kind of education for the most part. We had windows of it, but not in the way that we're seeing in some schools today. And as many listeners know, I'm a big fan of Montessori. First time I took my husband through a Montessori school, he almost, it was really uncomfortable for him. It provoked a lot of anxiety, but he really looked at like, what are the kids doing? What are they working on? What does it sound like?
It was just a very different kind of education than anything that he experienced. And my experience had some touches on that, but not really. So how do you show that? Because that last part is the, This is excellence and this is how we know.
Tim Fish: Yeah. You know, one of the examples I really like is the work that Booth Kyle is doing at Indian Creek School in Maryland. And one of the things is they were looking at like, what's going really well? They found that in a few of their grades, they were doing this four times a year, parents would come in for these exhibitions of learning. And they were the evening event with the cookies and the coffee and the kids and the kids ran it. And the parents would walk around and this, kind of imagine the old science fair with the posters and you go around one-to-one and the kids are standing by the table and they're talking about their thing, right? That could be one example of what this might look like.
But what happens was they were doing it four times a year. And what they found is that the parents loved it. They were huge supporters then, when they started talking about what they wanted learning to look like in the future, more engagement-based, higher agency, more student independence. Parents had like a true thing that they've experienced, that they could hold onto.
I have this theory called do, show and tell. Do is like the thing we do. It's what school is. Show is how we help families experience what we do at a very deep level, physically experience it. And tell is how we talk about it to others. Website, emails, social media, all that stuff, that's our tell. And I think we have to do, we have to work on all three circles. We can't just work on the do, and we can't be all wonkalicious about the do. Like when we get out there and we start talking to parents about like, project-based learning and rubrics and like, they're like, what? Like, you know, like we have to, that's super important stuff. And it'll be for 10% of the parents, they're really going to want to know it. But the rest, we just got to show them their kid doing it. Right?
And so that I think Booth is doing is going to expand that to have more and more grade levels, have four times a year where the parents come out, where they experience that, they experience what it feels like through these exhibitions of learning. I think if we do that more and more, we'll have more parents who naturally get across the bridge. They naturally move themselves from old excellence to new excellence, and they'll start telling their friends, right? Like, that's why I love this school, because this is how my kid learns. I love this school because my kid's fired up. I love this school because my kid is challenged.
I would say I'm pro challenge, I'm pro rigor, I'm pro excellence. Like, yes, I do want those things. I just want them to be in the appropriate, relevant way. And I think some of the old ways we did it, I'm not a fan of.
Debra Wilson:
Excellent. So one final question, Tim.
If you could change anything about education. Just snap your fingers. What would it be?
You can only pick one.
Tim Fish: I know I can only pick one. I think the one I might go with. the one that's coming to mind immediately for me, Debra, is what you talked about with Montessori. I think I'd get rid of this age-based grouping.
Debra Wilson: Interesting.
Tim Fish: I just think that's the goofiest holdout. My number two, which I'm not allowed to say because you only asked for one, but might be something with the calendar. The year… move to some calendar that makes more sense. Daily and yearly. If I, then, cause you gave me the power to like change it across the system. Like every, like the world woke up one day, right? It's also one of my favorite movies, Yesterday, where the guy wakes up and like nobody's ever heard of the Beatles.
Debra Wilson: I love that one. Yeah.
Tim Fish: I love it, right. So imagine like we wake up and school’s different, like I think I would change the calendar and I think I would change and move to a different kind of grouping. And there's a whole bunch more, right? Everyone I've talked to has said, look, we're in a moment where it's not about, it's not about little tweaks. We're not in the tweak, like tweaks help, but we got to get at the core. We got to get at how really school works. And over the next 10 years, we gotta fundamentally think about what school is and how it works.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, I find those are the really exciting places in education right now. I don't know if you saw it. We'll add it to the show notes, but Joel Rose wrote an article a while ago about changing the grammar of school. And it was about AI and how we won't fully appreciate, we won't fully embrace, the incredible lift AI can give education until we are looking at things like grouping by ages or like how are we thinking about the pace at which kids are doing whatever it is that they're doing. And I think those are going to be some just, exciting experiments coming up.
Tim Fish: I agree with you. It's a time, and we in our schools and certainly NAIS, we are standing on the edge. There's like, we kind of sometimes are like, where's the, where's it happening? It's happening in our schools. Like we are right there. We are defining, with others around the world, what the future will look like. And so many of our schools, so many of our school leaders, are partners in that invention of tomorrow. Like it's not like, yeah, some of our schools are playing catch up. We're all playing catch up in some way, but we're also right there. We're partners in the creation of the future. And that is just an exciting time to be in our schools.
Debra Wilson: I could not agree more. And it's such a privilege to be able to do the work the way that we're able to do it. Our schools tend to be a little smaller. We've got some flexibility. We can play around the edges. And I think it's awesome to see, it's awesome to engage with our schools in it, just as partners looking forward. And I think you're right. We're on the edge, but we're also in it, right? We are actually living that…You know, we're living the future, creating history. And yeah, I just, I can't wait to see what happens next.
And so, Tim, I've loved this conversation. We clearly need to do it again before too long, as these developments keep rolling out. But just thank you. Thank you for all of the work that you do with our schools, the work you do with NAIS. And I just love that we got to get this time together today.
Tim Fish: Me too. And Debra, good luck with everything with NAIS. And man, I am such, as I wrote somewhere recently, I was a huge fanboy before I joined NAIS, and coming out and now doing my own thing, I could not be more of a fanboy for what you and the team at NAIS are doing. And I look forward to staying in touch and will always be a listener to New View EDU and will wait anxiously for every episode to come out and I will be a huge supporter.
So thank you so much. I am so honored to have been invited onto the show as a guest. Wow, what a cool, cool opportunity. And I just wish you and the team all the best.
Debra Wilson: Fabulous. Thank you so much, Tim, and we'll talk soon.
Tim Fish: All right.