David Price: The Power of Us

Daniel: Can you imagine, as a young person sitting there talking to your career advisor, your counselor, about to leave for secondary education, to move into the world of college university and adult life. You're sure from your soul, from your heart, where you want to go, what you want to do, the passions that you have inside you and your career advisor says, no, that's not for you. That's where we start today's conversation. I'm really honored to have David Price on the podcast today. He's definitely a Ruckus Maker. He makes change happen in education so you'll enjoy this conversation. Yes, we'll talk about that moment. As a young lad, he was talking to his career advisor, but also we're going to dig into his new book. Highly recommend that you pick it up called the power of us, but it will definitely inspire you to think differently and more innovatively around education. Hey, it's Daniel and welcome to the better leaders, better schools, podcast, a show for Ruckus Makers, those out of the box leaders making change happen in education. We'll be right back after these messages from our show sponsors

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Daniel: Ruckus Maker. I am excited to be joined today by David Price. What an honor, and David is a consultant trainer speaker, and the author of two Amazon bestselling books. Open: How will Work, Live and Learn in the future and newly released the Power of Us, how we connect, act and innovate together. David has led innovative projects in education in the UK and Australia. He's an international advisor to the Canadian ducators association, the mastery transcript initiative in the US. Vegas schools in India and the global schools Alliance and cultural consultancy, sparks, and honey also in the US he has advised multinational corporations and government education departments all over the world and is a sought after public speaker. He was awarded the OBE in 2009 by the queen. Yep. That Queen for services to education and lives in North York, Cheryl England, David, welcome to the show.

David: Thank you, Danny. Well, yeah, obviously listeners can't see it, but, we've just moved house and I just, I sent to my wife what happened to the metal the queen gave me, but it's turned up anyway, so that's good.

Daniel: Okay. I'm glad it turned up. Why don't we start there just real quick. I lived in Scotland, so I have a little bit of a sense of what this is about, but, the Ruckus Maker listening might be like, OBE the queen, what are we talking about? So tell us a little bit about that role.

David: It's a very strange and mysterious process. When you get called up and you go and you shake her hand and she said to me, why did you get this? I said to her, well, I don't know. I thought you might know, but she didn't know either. They have these committees that nominate people. It may be that I led a music education project, which is kind of quite innovative and reached around the world and have been in recognition that what could have been work. I did help them to establish the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. That was the only time that she was involved in things.

Daniel: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up music. I know that it's a passion of yours and you shared that passion as a lad with a career advisor, but the response was a bit strange. Tell us that story.

David: Yeah. Well, , I grew up in the Northeast of England, which is very working class area. The town I was born in was called Jalil and it was only famous for one thing, which is that in the 1930s, the unemployment rate was 95%, if you can believe that it's incredible. We were used to kind of low expectations, let's put it that way, but my cousin played in a group called The Animals, who at the time were having a big hit in the US with a song called, House Of The Rising Sun. And so it seemed perfectly feasible to me. I knew somebody who was a professional musician. So when we have the careers advisors, and the guy said to me, so what do you want to be? I said, well, I'd like to be a professional music.

David: And it was a source of great hilarity. And he said, I'll put you down for an administrative job and sure enough, because when you're in those kind of, well you know what it's like being in Scotland in those deprived areas, we're terrible in UK for the kind of tall poppy syndrome, don't get ahead of yourself. Don't think that you're bigger than that. I kind of figured, Oh, maybe I should do this, take an administrative job and I did that in the civil service for two years and I was so bad at it. I was terrible. I thought, no, let's give the music a crack. And so I did it for about 15 years and , it didn't make a great deal of money, but boy, I had a good time.

Daniel: Yeah, that's really important obviously you had a good time, but you followed your passion and in those 15 years what were some of those life lessons or experiences that taught you what you needed that maybe you didn't know at this moment, but you see, what's the connection.

David: It's such a great question because I think you kind of make sense of your life in hindsight. It was when I started writing the first book, Open that I really got interested in the theoretical concept of informal learning because at that point the whole social media explosion was still relatively new and it was a great passion of mine. I thought, I wonder why? I've got this drive and real interest in how we learn outside of school and I thought back to, it was a chance meeting with my cousin, Alan. When it was one of those cringe making events where your mother says play something oyn the piano for Allen. I played some dreadful piece of classical music, which I couldn't play very well.

David: And he said, yeah, it's very good. But did you ever think of playing without the music? And I hadn't, I hadn't even considered it. Once I did, and he showed me a few kind of tips just to get started by playing by ear and that completely transformed my life. I was a shy little kid who never had a girlfriend and then certainly I would turn up in clubs and that kind of thing, sit and play the piano and sing and suddenly girls wanted to know me. Oh, this is amazing. I guess I've been interested in informal learning ever since, but of course at that time we talked about in the seventies, in the UK there were really only two places where you could learn and one was school and the other was the library. Of course now it's a different world.

Daniel: Yeah. I need you to describe the informal learning a bit and what you mean by playing without the music. I'm not a professional musician by any means, but I do have a good ear. I've been playing music my whole life and I can definitely pick up a tune and find that on the guitar, which, uh, worked out nicely playing with Roger in Glasgow, who he take out his fiddle and that was so much fun. I get what you're telling in that story, but I think that's a really great metaphor that we needed to tease out for the list there just in case they don't know what it means to take that music away.

David: Sure. So it is interesting. I mentioned this music education project, which was way later, but in a sense, it was my attempt to say in music education what if we started with the music that young people were interested in. And of course ,I had a lot of teachers, who would say, yeah, but it's not written down the music isn't written down and I'd said, well, you've got a pair of ears you can use your ears and can it get out. We did some research and even then, so we're talking about early two thousands. When young people were asked, if the bands that they saw on TV had been trained or not formally trained to read music, they all assumed that they had been, even rap artists and that kind of genre. And for me, it was just fascinating to see people who hadn't been classically trained, who were then put in a position where they just have to use their ears and they were good at it. It took awhile, but it's like any skill.

David: You know what that's like, Daniel, first you kind of just get somewhere close to maybe what the chords are of what you could hear. something is not quite right in your hearing and then after a while, there's a phrase that musicians where you kind of spot the changes. You know when the court is going to changes and after a while you see certain patterns. It's just like any kind of language. There are patterns, which emerge, but it's as a social currency it's wonderful because now I hardly ever play the only time I play is when family comes around or maybe I've had a few drinks with my wife. If you've got good ears, you can pick it up straight away. Whereas now if you put a piece of classical music down in front of me, it would be truly ugly.

Daniel: I was on our second floor balcony the other evening and we were having a drink, maybe a DRAM of whiskey, and I'm playing some of my wife's favorite music and that's Oliver Mtukudzi . I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but he's really a brilliant guitar player, but his style is in Zimbabwe and it's not natural to me. He played the guitar, almost like a drum. It was like a percussive style, I would say, but we're listening to my favorite song, Ndima Ndapedza and I finally got it. It clicked, I was searching for the cords and everything. I had to grab a cable because he was doing some interesting things and it finally worked in that moment. I threw up my hands, almost dropped my head and grabbed my guitar, but I was like, yes, because I just, I wanted to find that song and something unleashed inside of me there.

David: It's just kind of like riding a bike. I remember, you've sparked a memory for me when I was about 15 and the whole folk revival thing was going on and we listened to Bob Dylan and they have this kind of, what's known technically as a rocking base when you're fingerpicking and the thumb plays, the equivalent of what a base guitar would be. And then the other fingers kind of play around with that. But it's technically, it's quite a tricky thing to get, but once you get it, you never lose it. It's amazing. It was a similar kind of moment, you just think, Oh, that's how you do it.

Daniel: Yeah. Cool. Well, let's get to really the Power of Us, which is fabulous. I highly recommended a Ruckus Maker. It'll be linked up for you in the show notes, if you want to get a copy as well. I'd love to ask first, just, what is your hope with the book? Why did you write it and what do you hope that we get out of it?

David: There's a number of levels, uh, to that. One is I think, we just should simply be more aware of what I call user innovation. When I talk about users, I make a distinction between consumers of products and services, but it's people who actively use it and maybe amended and improve it for their own purposes. This is often quite an ethereal concept people struggle to get their heads around, but in reality, 54% of all new products and services are not invented by the manufacturers they're invented by the users. So this applies as much to education as it would do to health services or product development. I feel like we should acknowledge that there has been something which has been changing economically over the past five years. The governor of the Bank of England described it as the coming artisanal economy.

David: I think with COVID, it's really heightened the need, now that people have to be creative, to make things, whether that's sourdough bread or craft beer, there is something in us, which that is now coming to the fore. The really interesting part of it now, partly through necessity because sadly, a lot of people in the UK are losing their jobs and they're thinking, well, what should I do? Many of them have had hobbies and now it's possible. Passion and through websites like Etsy or Patreon, you can put your stuff out there, whether it's cupcakes or writing poetry you can find an audience for it. I think this will become a bigger phenomenon as time develops and be aware of and we need to prepare our young people as much to be kind of entrepreneurs.

Daniel: I appreciate what you're sharing there and especially this idea of the artismal economy. I want to connect that to education just a second. I'm going to show you something just so you can see it. The Ruckus Maker listening will have to imagine it, but John Luca Ferme was the tech coordinator at a school I worked at in Chicago and during the pandemic, he sent me this David. So here's one postcard. You see the green and Brown sort of Hughes and then this one as well and this was such a beautiful moment for me because it was reconnecting with an old friend during a really tough time. He sent me these postcards that he painted but on the back, he also wrote a poem, which I'm not going to read to you.

Daniel: It's two parts, but it had to do with the idea of farmers because our families have roots being farmers. If you go back some generations, but that was such a touching experience. I'm a creative guy as well. So I love to doodle draw and this kind of stuff. So I started drawing little scenes and painting them with water color. What I do is I send them to leaders I serve in my Mastermind community. I give the postcard a title and I say the story's up to you like you make up the rest. What I hope to do is to inspire those, I serve. That they might be carrying something heavy at the moment they received this postcard, right? Like leadership is tough right now. Life is tough and I want them just to forget about it all and find themselves lost in this story, just for a few moments. And this is something I'm doing. So thank you for allowing me to share that. What I'd love is to hear, so what does that look like maybe in the school experience, right? I like how do you said the innovation comes from the users? How might we experience that or foster that within our community?

David: I think there's a couple of levels. I refer to organizations in the book and by that, I mean, it could be a commercial organization or it could be a school, it could be a not for profit. But for me, the key is creating the right kind of culture where that will flourish, that ingenuity would flourish. I spend a long time being asked by organizations to come in and inverted commerce, make their people a little more creative and I'm sure you've had the same. You observe.

Daniel: David, thank you for allowing me to share that story of these postcards I'm sending my friends and those I serve. I'm curious, how does that translate finding the innovators in this artismal experience within the context of school?

David: Yeah, well, I think there's two aspects to this. One is how do we create an internal culture for educators so that they feel that they can be creative. Sometimes are not great learning organizations and I guess it's because they're so busy they don't have time really to think about that. That's one part of it. But I think the other part is how do we create the right kind of culture and environment for our students so that they feel that it isn't about getting the right answer, but it's about being, being creative and making and producing things because it seems to me gradually over time, we've kind of lost that. I think the post COVID world is going to demand that we bring it back.

Daniel: Right. In what respects do leaders maybe need to check themselves and potentially get out of the way? I have a feeling that a lot of times that the creativity that is inherent in any organization and human being that it might just be snuffed out because of poor leadership.

David: Oh, absolutely. And I'm guilty as charged. I was in charge of a hundred academic staff and I was the kind of, I thought my role is as the leader was to be the person who comes up with all the ideas. Eventually I think people just kind of thought, well, there's not much point in having new ideas because he's going to come along and tell us what to do. I realized particularly as I was writing this book that I probably had inadvertently and for all the right reasons. I'd taken away the part of the culture, which is about autonomy and agency, which I think is just so important these days for our young people. If we look 20 years down the road, let's face it, we've got a climate emergency, which hasn't gone away. The impact of COVID in terms of the recession is going to be pretty severe. So we need a generation of problem-solvers coming through and the only way you can prepare for that is, is to be solving problems in your school career. We need to rethink learning so that it develops what I call a pedagogy of agency.

Daniel: And it's with that idea, I want to continue the conversation agency and autonomy. We'll pause here just for a moment for a message from our sponsors. Today's show is brought to you by Organized Binder. Organized Binder develops the skills and habits. All students need for success. During these uncertain times of distance learning and hybrid education settings, Organized Binder, equips educators with a resource to provide stable and consistent learning routines so that all students have an opportunity to succeed. Whether at home or in the classroom, learn more@organizedbinder.com during COVID. Every teacher is a new teacher. That's why innovative school leaders are turning to Teach FX whose virtual PD is equipping thousands of teachers with the skills they need to create engaging, equitable and rigorous virtual or blended classes to learn more about Teach FX and get a special offer. Visit Teachfx.com/BLBS. That's Teachfx.com/BLBS. We're back with David Price, the author of the Power of Us, how we connect act and innovate together. David, where we left off there was this idea of autonomy and agency, and I think that's a great idea to explore. It can be difficult, right, for a leader to give agency and autonomy to her staff or the teacher to her students. Do you have any ideas on how we can get more comfortable with that?

David: We get into some very personal candidate issues, I guess, here. Um, I work with a school leader and she said to me, I need our people to be more innovative. And so I came in, I worked with them, the whole day and said well, there's good news and bad news. I said, which do you want first? She said, well, give me the good news and I said, you've got a really innovative team here. They've got lots of ideas and she said, what's the bad news. I said, it's that they're don't feel trusted. And without trust, it's really hard for people to feel like they've got autonomy and they can, they can try things out and make mistakes and the world isn't going to come to an end and they're not going to be thrown under the bus if it doesn't work. So I think that's the first thing that we can do. But when it comes to our students, I think we've just got to have them do work that matters. Stuff that they think is socially purposeful and that will give them the context for the learning. Right.

Daniel: Obviously we should talk to our students to find out their interests, like going back to the music story that you shared and having kids play music that they find interesting. So we can go directly to the source and ask you, yeah. What are your interests? What problems do you want to solve? But we don't have a student on the call right now. So David, what are some interesting problems or approaches to the work that you've seen young people do that you find inspiring?

David: I think one of the challenges is that if we aren't careful, we're going to end up where students are leading two separate lives. Let me give you a personal example of this. My eldest son, when he was about 15, I had a terrible job getting him out of bed in the morning to go to school. Eventually I kind of got to the bottom of it and said, what's the problem? He looked a bit sheepish and he said, yeah, I take part in an internet, radio programs, talk shows. And I said, really? I said what are you discussing? He said, well, libertarian politics. At that point, he was heavily into the idea of libertarian politics. I said, but surely you could just record it and listen to it another time. He said, no, you don't understand.

David: I'm a panelist. People ask me what I think. So I have to be, and I said, does your school know that you do this? And he said, of course not. And of course he didn't particularly want his school to know either. I just think that we have a challenge. I have met in the past two years, I've met students around the world, Will Stamp, for example, who discovered three stars that no one had ever spotted before. He did it by kind of hacking into NASA telescopes, a kid who became a world champion golfer in India without ever playing, stepping on a golf course. But he had a YouTube connection watched every video of Tiger Woods. I'm doing a thing next week with a young woman. She's 15 year old from Columbia, she's called Sophia Leon and she's invented this temporary housing. It's like a modern idea of igloo made out of fiberglass, which can be used when people have been displaced through natural disasters and now she did that within the school. That was part of her curriculum. But too often, I think our young people have this drive, this initiative, but it has to happen outside of school.

Daniel: Well, I have a few more, book questions before we wrap up our conversation. I love to hear your thoughts on community versus competition and just a quick story. So I worked at a school, it was selective enrollment, meaning that kids had to test to get in. The short version of the story is there were 12 schools vying, competing for the same kids and each year some students got locked out of the system because they chose the schools wrong. I thought it was just wrong, just morally wrong to market to students and get them excited about a school that they might not ever get in and then get locked out of all the schools. And so I tried to bring the recruiters together and find out, just best practices, what was working for each community and how we might share information more transparently so that as many kids as possible could get into the highest quality of school that matched their skillset, but nobody wanted to meet. They wanted to compete. They wanted to fill their, their school's roster and not share what was working and that drives me nuts. I see that all the time with schools, we want to beat the school down the street, which makes no sense to me. So can you riff a little bit on community versus competition?

David: Yeah, well, once again, because of COVID, I think it's accelerated and highlighted a number of fascinating tensions that we've got. One of the young people that I start the book talking about is a kid who lives just outside Seattle called Abby Shipment. Abby, just been made web person of the earth. He created two websites. One is the corporate tracking website. That's pretty much the authoritative, the US source, Anthony Fauci uses it all the time. The second one happened when the George Floyd protest started and he's now tracking, The Black Lives Matter protests. And now obviously when I spoke to him, he said, I'm a terrible student. I think his grade point average is 1.7. And he said, my attendance is like 60%. And I thought, was this just crazy? He's clearly a really smart guy.

David: And he's doing some really important work at a time when the US government was really frankly, struggling to put together their own or authoritative source. In the UK we've only now got a COVID tracking app that's worth bothering with. We've been doing that for nine months. And the phrase I use in the book is communities are outperforming bureaucracies. And it's partly because young people, as well as older people are networking so much better, they are sharing that information freely. There's this trend, which is starting to emerge now called Cosmo localism. It's an awful phrase, but essentially the cosmopolitan part of it is that through open source information is becoming available to anyone at lightening speed, but the local part of it is that we're checking information and then we're producing or making things or devoting services locally so that there most sustainable. One of the examples I came across in the book is guy called Matt Bortel in Melbourne, who has put together an initiative, which is around creating prosthetic lens. He just added a fraction of the cost to buying one of these arms or legs commercially. And he does it by putting the designs for free on his website, but then invites people to make them locally and it costs like $10 for a prosthetic limb. And that's a good example now of how through collaboration and through cooperation, how the users, innovators are working quicker than governments and manage your pharmaceuticals and major coropations. You're absolutely right. This applies particularly to education. I don't particularly blame teachers because the system of standardized testing is such that it's a competition. I can only score well, if you score badly. And so we're automatically put into competition with one another. Then what we're seeing outside of education and in the world of open innovation more generally is that it's through collaboration and the open source of information that real fast innovation takes place. And that's what COVID showed at the moment the Chinese released the genetic code of the virus was the moment that 240 vaccine drugs were able to start and will complete in unprecedented timescales.

Daniel: Fascinating, conversation, David, and highly recommend, again, the Ruckus Maker, you go out and grab the Power of Us, or click the link in the show notes for you. I'd love to ask you the last two questions I ask every guest. So David, if you could put a message on all school marquees around the world for just one day, what would you put on the marquee?

David: Well, I wish I could claim this as an original idea, but it's not. I have a school which I feature in the book, in Doncaster. It's model is above all, compassion. It seems to me that right now, the times we're living in, that's a pretty good rule to live by.

Daniel: I agree. David, you're building a school from the ground up. You're not limited by any resources. Your only limitation is your imagination. How would you build your dream school and what would be your top three priorities?

David: So by this Daniel, you don't mean the physical design of a school. Do you mean like, how would it operate? How would it run?

Daniel: There's no right or wrong answers. So however you want to take it.

David: Yeah. I'll take it as the second part of it then. So this is probably quite controversial. I'd have no standardized testing. I think it's the thing that drives me nuts, the way the worlds enthusiasm for standardized testing has blocked innovation. I'd have students do work that matters doing socially purposeful work and I'd have mixed age cohorts. And by that, I mean, all ages, there are some schools that I work with who have adults learning alongside kids and it's a remarkable thing to see. It's a great way of emphasizing our young people now that we are genuinely in the era of lifelong learning. I know we've been talking about it for decades now, but it's here. And so they should get used to the fact that outside of school we learned from people of all ages.So why not in school?

David: Well, David, thank you so much for being a part of the better leaders, better schools, podcast of all the things we talked about today, what's the one thing you want a Ruckus Maker to remember? I think that we have a generation of young people coming through. I'm amazed at how lacking in cynicism, they are, even though lets face it, they've been dealt a pretty rough hand, and I think we just need to listen to them and we need to encourage them to make and develop their own work. There's a whole academic theory of self-determination and how that leads to deeper and stronger learning. And I think we've got an opportunity now. I really do. I think COVID has made us question so many things about education. So the challenge for leaders is can we be brave enough to try some of that?

Daniel: Thanks for listening to the better leaders, better schools podcast for Ruckus Maker. If you have a question or would like to connect my email, Daniel@better leaderbetterschools.com or hit me up on Twitter @alienearbud. If the better leaders better schools, podcast is helping you grow as a school leader, then please help us serve more Ruckus Makers like you. You can subscribe, leave an honest rating and review or share on social media with your biggest takeaway from the episode, extra credit for tagging me on Twitter at alien earbud and using the hashtag #BLBS level up your leadership at betterleadersbetterschools.com and talk to you next time until then class dismissed.

Daniel: Yes.