Kelly talks to Aylon Samouha, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Transcend Education. Previously he served as Chief Schools Officer at Rocketship Education. He is the co-author of “Extraordinary Learning for All: How Communities Design Schools Where Everyone Thrives.”  

You talk about designing learning environments that take into account three categories. 

“What’s amazing and very heartening is that even just those 3 categories: what employers and the workplace needs, what science says, and what students and families themselves say they want – they all say the same thing. They want learning environments where young people are engaged; where they’re connected; and where they feel empowered. And it is those kinds of experiences that we think are what set people up to have the skills and mindsets and routines that will make them successful in any career.” 

And a very important thing to take into account is that you can’t learn when you don’t feel safe. 

“Sometimes they don’t feel safe at school. Sometimes they don’t feel safe in their personal lives. Sometimes the lack of safety they have in their personal lives follows them into school or is exacerbated by school. Much of that is identity related. The list goes on and on. But what you’re saying is right. It’s a perfect example of the science thing that I said, where just very basic motivation and cognition, science tells us that when you’re in your amygdala, which is where your kind of reptilian brain or your emotional brain is, you’re literally not in your what’s called your executive state. It’s when you’re in your executive state that you use language, that you use reasoning, that you do planning. And so, when you feel unsafe as you’ve pointed to, you’re literally unable to learn. It’s not like it’s harder to learn. You’re just not even in the part of your brain that is doing the learning.” 

I think the most important things I learned to be successful at work and life – things like collaboration, storytelling, reading a room – none of that happened in my regular school day. 

“Where I learned that stuff – and it sounds like this is true for you too – was in other things. I was part of junior state of America, where I learned how to be part of a student run organization around political awareness, or as a musician where I had to, you know, figure out how to play with other musicians, how to work with them from the technical side of the music business. How to work with owners, etc, right? That’s where I learned that stuff. I didn’t learn it in AP biology.” 

Photo Credit: Jane Rivera