SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, balloons taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education. Welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I'm Dr. Joe Sebestian. Families often ask me how to navigate the maze of college prep without wasting thousands of dollars and years of time, and the answer usually involves finding the people who have figured out the rules of the game that schools aren't telling you. That's why I'm thrilled to have Dr. Jill Alexa Perry here today. Dr. Jill is the executive director of the Carnegie Project on the Educational Doctorate, an international consortium and network working to rebuild the EDD. She is also the first full professor of practice at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Education and a former visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation. This is obviously a personal conversation for me because I actually have my educational leadership doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh. And Dr. Jill is one of those people working to redefine what that degree should actually be. And she was a professor when I was taking classes there at Pitt as well. So we're going to dive into what education reform, why education reform keeps failing, what it actually takes to change the system, and what it means for parents and educators listening. Dr. Jill, welcome to the show. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:36

I'm wonderful. Thank you for having me. So excited to be here and see one of our Pitt grads doing such amazing things.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

I appreciate that. I wear, I wear my Pitt alumni very proudly, although I don't donate. So just FY. Don't tell anyone listening. So I I did buy season tickets for a couple years, so just FYI. There you go. Um but Dr. Joe, we're talking we're talking about education. So kind of like, you know, I give him the highlight reel, but give us the 60-second snapshot of who you are and what specific problem in education or learning you're working on.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

So I am I wear two hats. I'm an executive director of a nonprofit Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate, and I am a professor of practice in an EDD program in the School of Education at Pittsburgh. So I I like to think of myself as a scholar practitioner. I got one foot in administration doing the work, and one foot in trying to train administrators to get better at doing the work. And the problem that I've been tackling for the last 20 years almost, and one that has been around since the EDD was created, is what is the EDD and who is it meant for? And so we have worked over the last 19 and a half years to think through how do we make this a stronger professional degree to give those who want to remain in practice the skills they need to make schools, universities, nonprofits better places and better serving educational needs on the ground.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

So for viewers listening, because I'm often on calls, I'm often asked, like, I'm often, hey, you have a PhD? I'm like, no, I have an EDD. There is a difference. So for the viewers out there, what is the difference between the EDD and the PhD?

SPEAKER_01 3:11

So originally not much, although it was originally designed to be a practitioner degree, to give a terminal degree to educational leaders, particularly when it was invented, it was meant for what we now call a superintendent. Over time, it it took on many different hats. It allowed graduate schools of education to get freedom from schools of arts and sciences and universities where only doctorates could be given away, PhDs. And so some schools of education took it to be their research degree. And so over 80 years, it was confused and really defined by subtraction because we didn't know what professional practice meant in education. Education had largely been a female profession, teachers, principal teachers, and wasn't considered all these other aspects of administration that we have now. And so as we've come along with the Carnegie Foundation, what we've done is we've framed it in the same way you frame other professional degrees. So think of the difference between your MD or DO that you go see once a year for your physical versus somebody who is PhD in biochemistry who works in a lab. Those are two very different jobs. And we wouldn't expect that they would be trained exactly the same way, right? But in education, we've not really figured out what it looks to be an administrator in practice versus a professor who wants to do research and teach in a university. And so that's what CPED has been trying to distinguish. And I think we've come a long way. I don't want to say we fixed it entirely, but we've come a long way in seeing it as something that the skills, knowledge, dispositions that you provide practitioners need to address the kinds of things that you do on a day-to-day in practice and not just give you a PhD light and say you've got a doctorate because that's all we know how to do in schools of education.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

What pulled you into educational leadership research in the first place? Like what were you seeing in the field that thought, hey, we need this needs studying?

SPEAKER_01 5:03

I'm probably not a great example for answering that kind of question. I got sucked into this as part of my graduate assistantship. I have a PhD in international education policy, and I was supposed to be working overseas on educational issues and things like that. But as my graduate assistantship working with my mentor and with the Carnegie Foundation on creating CPED and the work that we're doing, I quickly got sucked in realizing like I'm I'm an administrator. So I thought, okay, here's a problem. We're going to tackle it. We're going to throw some resources, energy time people at it for three to four years and we'll get it fixed. And three to four years passed and we still didn't have it fixed. And I realized, oh, I'm working in higher ed and I'm not working on the administrative higher ed. I'm working on the academic side of higher ed, where faculty like to talk about things for a long time and question things and research things and also don't have a lot of power to create change. I mean, they have power to design programs, but they they don't always come from practice either. So they don't necessarily know what it means to be a superintendent or a community college president. So they're trying to design programs without having that professional experience. And getting change in higher ed is takes a long time. So as an individual faculty member, you don't have a lot of power to walk in the door and say, we're going to do this. You have to bring your colleagues on. And that's just an entirely different process. So as I kept moving up the and working on my own dissertation over on this corner, I was getting sucked into this. We're not fixing it. What can we do better? How can we support faculty in creating this change? And then ultimately, the president of the Carnegie Foundation said to me, Why don't you just do your dissertation on this? And so I reframed my thinking and focused on how do you create change in universities, in schools of education. So my actual research area is focusing on how the faculty go about their own form of leadership and creating change and designing programs.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

You actually became the first full professor of practice at Pitt School of Education. So what does that title actually mean and why did it not exist before?

SPEAKER_01 7:10

So in universities at Pitt, it was you were a tenure-track faculty member or non-tenure-track faculty member. And that basically meant if you were tenure-track, you can't, you got all kinds of resources and support, and you didn't have to teach as much, you didn't have to advise as many students. And then the non-tenure faculty, which is a very pejorative term, were the ones doing the majority of the teaching and mentoring students and advising students. And so there was a big disconnect. And several years ago, it might have been before you came into the program, some non-tenure faculty who were on Faculty Senate really raised uh questions about what does this mean? Are we we less than, we're doing more work than our peers? You're giving us this title as though we don't matter as much. And so there was a shift in the university to change your non-tenure stream to appointment stream. And what that means is you don't have lifelong tenure, but you are appointed in three to five year terms and your promotion is is defined differently. So a lot, a lot of what it was is it's similar to the EDD PhD. Everyone just was treated the same, even though the non-tenure didn't get the benefits that the tenure got. And so now, particularly in the School of Education, we've worked really hard to frame what does it mean to be an appointment stream faculty member? And our former dean, Valerie Kinlock, adopted the term professor of practice, which has been commonly used since CPED, really. It was a term to what it means to be a clinical faculty member, somebody who is a scholarly practitioner and comes with a practice background. And so she adopted that. And you still have promotion, like you start as an assistant, you move to an associate, and then you go to full. But no one had gone up for full in the School of Education. And I think the two that had gone up for associate went under traditional tenure work. And if you're a professor of practice, you cannot do the kind of research that you can if you're a tenure-line faculty member. So there was a lot of work done to redesign what does it mean to be a professor of practice? And then my chair said to me, Why don't you go up? And I said, All right, well, if I can't do it, no one's gonna be able to do it. So I did it and I got it. Awesome. What that basically means is that I have full promotion and uh the work that I do, like the practitioner level writing that I do, counts and it matters, and it's not seen as the best end because it's not in a tier one journal.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Got it. So, you know, you spent a lot of time identifying what's broken at the credential level, like you've you talked a little bit about this earlier. Um, let's talk about what that actually means downstream for like schools, kids, and families. So the traditional EDD, um, the degree most superintendents of principals hold, you you said it that that traditionally it was just created for that role. How is the evolution of it making a practitioner develop so it actually solves problems in education? Like how what is the impact for families with the EDD actually becoming a practitioner degree and not a theory of research degree?

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Sure. Traditionally, what happened is everyone would go into a PhD or an EDD that was really pretty much a PhD, except there were a few left classes that you took. And a lot of students didn't make it past the coursework because they didn't have time. They were working, they had families, and they were supposed to write these 300-page dissertations that were very theoretical on one issue. And, you know, as a PhD, if you're gonna go study that, you want to be an expert on that. You want to be a content expert. But as a practitioner, you don't need to be an expert on one thing. You need to be a jack of all trades, an expert in a whole bunch of things. And we talk about leadership as needing skills to create change, to lead groups of people. And so that was one of the first areas we looked at. What do we mean by leadership? And what do we mean by the kind of preparation that these folks need? What are the skills that they need? And then we looked at universities and said, okay, what are faculty really good at? Faculty are good at research. Students coming into EDD programs are practitioners who are good at problems that they see, being in practice. And so, how do we marry that in a way that what a graduate of EDD program comes out with now are terminal-level skills on how to apply research to practice? And so the EDD should be a degree that transforms practice in the same way that the PhD transforms a discipline. That was a finding by the Council of Graduate Schools back in 2007 when they looked at professional doctorates. So the EDD is meant to give somebody who already has a master's degree, who's already a seasoned professional, the next level of skills that they need to be able to run organizations. So teaching them the tools of research and applying it to practice. So I'll give you a good example. So if you're a district administrator and you're starting to see this problem come around quite a bit, let's say AI, right? So you see AI happening coming into your schools, your students are cheating, families aren't sure what to do, teachers aren't sure what to do. Instead of going with your 25 years of practice and your gut on what you think you should do, we're just going to get rid of AI. Or, sure, we'll just teach teachers how to use it lightly in the losses or how to guide students on what to do. Instead, you'd stop and you'd reflect and say, Let me go see what the literature says. So you'd dig into Google Scholar, you'd go back to your university's library and you'd start searching the way you were taught in your program. What's been written about this? What do people know about this? You'd go into the professional journals, you'd go into Edweek, and you'd read, What's what's the current current events happening around AI in schools? What are people talking about? And you'd synthesize all that knowledge in a way that would inform your framing of the problem before you take any action about it. So something that most practitioners never touch is the academic literature because it's not written for them, it's full of jargon, it's too much. Now you know how to skim read that and get the content that you need to enhance your ability to think about and frame a problem before you take action around it. And then another skill might be all right, what am I going to do? Do I just create a professional development program and bring somebody in from the outside, run a program and say, call it a day? Well, how do you really know if that did anything? So, first maybe I'll go out and talk to some people and I'll gather some informal empathy data, meaning I'll just talk to people who are experiencing this problem and say, students, parents, teachers, tell me what's going on. What are you seeing happening? And I'm going to combine that knowledge with what I'm reading in the literature. And I'm going to continue to frame that problem before I do anything about it. And then when I think about what I want to do about it, I'm not just going to run a professional development session where everyone's going to go, okay, yeah, that was great. I really got a lot out of that. And then they walk out of the room and they never do anything. You're going to frame measures that allow you to say, okay, what did my faculty get out of this program today? What did they learn? How are they using it in practice? We're going to have a follow-up in three weeks. It says bringing everyone together to discuss, okay, we learned this in PD. How is this playing out in your classroom? What are your students saying? Are you feeling better about doing it? What are the problems you're still running up against? So you're using data to inform the way you're solving problems or implementing programs in a way that lets you know, is this trickling down? Is it actually hitting students? Am I actually creating and changing behaviors around whatever the problem is that I wanted to do? So it's learning to apply research to practice from a leadership level and in a way that you're incorporating stakeholders who are experiencing the problem as well.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

So you're actually building the infrastructure of change agents, is what the mission is, is that their scholarly practitioner will be able to make changes inside the system long term, right? And that has to, that that does take time to build up. So schools are a system, and the system is beautifully designed to get the results it gets, as I've learned from first class at Pitt, uh, that schools are a system and maybe really rethink and how we look at solving problems. Now, it's definitely easier than said that's done, but I think, especially in today's climate, there is an outright full assault on the system itself in terms of distrust and education. And there's a lot of people who are very, very quick to point out problems on both sides of the political aisle of the problems in education. So why has it been so hard to change the system of education? Because higher ed has had decades to fix this. And why is it so hard to move the needle there?

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Well, I don't think it's it's a system, right? So it's not just higher ed's problem. I think it's, you know, it's school districts, it's higher ed, unlike medicine, where everyone starts in undergrad doing pre-med or whatever they call it now, and then you work your way up through medical school and then you branch up and specialize. Education is not a streamlined thing, right? It was largely, I said, a female profession that consisted of teachers, then all these other roles started coming along without you didn't have to learn the basics of teaching or learning sciences before you went into leadership. And the person who does a superintendent kind of role is not the same kind of job as somebody who runs a community college or an educational nonprofit. So we don't have a core set of knowledge that frames education as a profession to start. The other piece is I firmly believe that there's not a whole lot of communication between what's happening in the real world and schools of education when it comes to preparing people. Most faculty either have never worked in practice or did 20 years ago. And even though it feels like schools don't change, they do change. And you need to be involved and understand what that means. So there's not a strong connection between schools of education and uh practice settings. And where there are, there's real change happening. But those, those, there's a lot of trust that needs to be built and a lot of practice that needs to happen. We also don't have a centralized education system like in other countries. So you hear a lot of people go, well, Finland, they can do this, and China, they can do this. And sure, that works when everyone speaks the same language, everyone looks the same, everyone has the same culture. Their culture has existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And education, we're a giant melting pot, right? People come from everywhere, and we're a ginormous country, right? So we you and I live in western Pennsylvania, and I come from New England, and you'd think it was a different planet when I talk to people where I come from. Or I grew up apart in Florida, too, very different spaces. So we don't understand education the same way, and we can't treat it the same way in different places, which is why I think largely we're decentralized and it's left up to the states in a lot of ways. So there's a lot of things as a system that are confounding this problem. And we would have to all come together and think through what do we want that to look like. Probably won't happen, particularly where we are politically with the loss of our Department of Education at the federal level. But I think at the localized level, connecting districts to local universities, having more participation by parents, by students, like listening to the stakeholders in terms of what they want, bringing in community. I know where I live, a lot of pushback on our school board and actions of the school board. They're constantly community members are constantly posting about how they feel about that. Those conversations need to happen. We are in a space right now, and there's a multitude of reasons why it's happening where people don't trust education. And that's not okay. I mean, I think our greatest downfall in this country is not going to be that we are going to be bombed by Iran by nuclear power. It's that we're going to be taken over by more educated societies like Chinese and Iranian and Indians who value education and know how to use that to build industry and build an educated society who can. Yeah, I mean I don't know what that's going to take, but I think we need total branding.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

No, I I think it's I think you're absolutely right. I've thought about this a lot, having taught my most longest tenure was in Fairfax County. And I used to say, like, if you don't like big government, you don't want to teach in Fairfax County because Virginia is a very centralized department of education, and Virginia is a county-based system. And at Fairfax, I mean, it was a huge bureaucracy. There was a lot of central administrators, but man, they could move that county in a direction in one year when it takes decades to move school districts because of the centralization of it. And so, yeah, I do look at it as a as we don't have natural centralization. However, having, you know, my wife was kind of a non-traditional college student and getting her healthcare administration degree from Slippery Rock, which she where she finished. And when I was like helping her with some of her coursework, studying just how much the ACA changed healthcare, it added a lot of administration, but it also standardized the practice, probably like never before, where like private practice, you know, one of the negative things is private practices are going away. But one of the positive things is we actually have an electronic medical record for families. And it's like having come out of my master's work in educational leadership and seen what she was going through in her graduate work, undergraduate work for healthcare, there are a lot of similarities where both nurses and teachers appreciation week happen the same week in America. They're not separate. But is that like in healthcare where it's not, there's not nationally centralized stuff that there are left to healthcare systems, they had do kind of have moved towards a standard operating like procedures of care, but education hasn't done that. Do you think it would take, because it's not been successful so far, a more a bigger national reform movement to move in that direction and not tied to funding and assessments like the other reforms have?

SPEAKER_01 20:59

Gosh, I wish I was smart enough to answer this question. I I mean there are smarter people trying to think about it, right? Um I don't at this point, I think it's we got to go to Madison Avenue and get a rebranding of what education means because people don't value it in the same way they value hospitals, right? You're not gonna die if you don't go to school, but you're gonna something worse is gonna happen. You're gonna have an uneducated mind wandering around for the next 50 to 70 years, not contributing to sci society in the ways that they could if they had gotten a good education and had the opportunity to go to school. We also know it's not just kids coming to school and paying attention and getting good grades. They got to come to school ready for school. They got to have the support at home, they got to have food at home, they got to have safety at home. So there's a lot of stuff outside of education that ends up landing on schools to have to deal with when they aren't prepared to deal with that, too, right? So it's a coordinated effort of health care and mental health support and Daycare and parentings, parents who aren't overwhelmed. And so I don't know that it's just an education thing. It's a 360 and how we value preparing our citizenry. But right now, where we are, we don't even care about half of our citizenry, right? So I don't, I don't know where we go. I think it's going to be have to be a lot like what we've done in CPED, right? It's got to be a grassroots effort from local communities who say this is what we want our schools to be.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Yeah, I mean, you are right. I think from an observational standpoint, now I'm I'm going into year eight of my current posting as an administrator. Just like there are so many social problems put on the school, and schools were never designed to fix those problems. And we're the, like I say, like we're the best provider of social services, and we do it terribly in terms of like mental health things. But that's just because the all other social services are either underfunded or cut, they're all falling apart, and there's no integrated system on that as well. This episode is brought to you by Supported Tutoring, where we don't just help students get better grades, we help them become critical thinkers. Whether it's mastering AP exams, maximizing college applications, or building lifelong learning habits, our expert tutors focused on critical thinking, confidence, and real growth. Head to supported tutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. But let's get a little bit more local. Like as you've CPAD and um the Carnegie Institute for Learning, they've actually made changes across the country in educational systems. Can you speak to a little bit of what that looks like? What does it take for a for a school or a school district or a county system to actually implement reform and change?

SPEAKER_01 23:47

So you went through our program and you were trained in improvement science. And improvement science is something that originally came out of business. Deming was the person who said, Edward Deming, that every system is designed to give you what it gets. And so the Carnegie Foundation, under its former president, wanted to bring improvement science, which went from b business into healthcare probably about 20 years ago. And healthcare has done really great with it. It's it's a systematic process looking at how a system is generating the problem. And then rather than just trying to fix the problem, fixing the system. And so you're trying to fix all aspects of a system. And so what the Carnegie Foundation did for many years was brought together big giant school districts or 20 or so community colleges to address some of the big problems that we see in education. And what spun off of that, and there's a lot of research, you can check all over their website for that, but what spun off from that were a couple of major national efforts to continue to do that work of improvement science. Some is at uh a consultancy kind of level where folks are still going out into school districts. Some are school districts who have figured out how to do it. Neonoma Falls in Wisconsin is the one that comes to mind. And um, I think it's Baltimore as well. They have figured out how to integrate improvement science into the entire district and what they do. And really what it is, it's it's a collaborative way of an organization to diagnose the problem, to not just blame it on a department or a person or a role, but to say all of us are contributing to this, and then looking at, okay, where can we begin to improve in this system? And then as you go through that process of improvement, trying out different change ideas, you gather data and you don't just do it once, you do it a couple of times, right? So I like to, I know this could be a trigger, but I like to equate it to personal health and weight loss or something like that, right? You can go on a diet, you can say for a week, I'm gonna eat nothing but broccoli. That might help you lose a couple of pounds, but it's not gonna change who you are. It's not gonna change the system, it's not gonna address whether or not you have some underlying medical issue, it's not gonna change your mental relationship with food, it's not gonna change your water intake. So there's all kinds of things that have to be tried, and they have to be tried over and over in a way that you're gathering data to show is it actually changing? And in this country, we're very much used to a silver bullet solution. If it worked in one district, we're gonna put a lot of money and we're gonna make everybody do it. And when it didn't work, we just say, oh well. We don't gather data to say, why didn't it work? And how could we maybe just tweak it, make it better, try something slightly different? But a lot of it is gathering the proof. And I know data sounds like a big academic term. It's just gathering the proof that something works. Like, how do you know when you're trying to lose weight or get healthy? You know when the thing that you're doing is working, but put it in writing. And a lot of people do. They document what they eat, they document how much weights they lift, they document how much they walk, right? All of that is evidence to show what is working to get your system to where you want it to be. We need to do the same thing as we're addressing problems locally. But that's also a lot to put on districts, right? That's a whole culture change, a whole shift in the way things are done. And that time needs to be set aside to do that. And it has worked in many districts, and it continues to be a thing that is taught in EDD programs, taught in master's programs. And so it's slowly working its way out there.

SPEAKER_00 27:15

But do you think it starts even more granularly at the educator level? Because I, you know, you we mentioned that the respect for educators, just the, you know, education at a whole is attacked. But do educators themselves even look at equals and professionals in the med, as in, you know, in terms of medical practice? Because I would make the argument that they may not, because for the lack of using data to justify it. And it can be for a variety of reasons. I know I wasn't trained in really using data to drive instruction, but through failed educational reforms like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top and Every Child Succeeds, like there has been a push to use it in data to drive that, but it's just so disconnected from what actually happens in schools. And what I mean by that is I've been a part of conversations where teachers feel or you know, feel like there's a problem. Oh, there's a lot of kids in the hallway, or this and this happens, but there's actually no data presented. And what ends up happening, I think, again, at the local level, from what I've seen, both as a teacher and administrator, is we hear things, we feel things, we react emotionally to things. And oftentimes that leads to changes without one, understanding the system and two, addressing a target to address the problem. Do you have you seen that from your experience? Like, do I mean you mentioned earlier the top of this that it's it's the education, the EDD leaders is to identify the problem and gave together data to it. But do you think we've gone astray because we react without necessarily having concrete data in place?

SPEAKER_01 28:56

Well, I think there's a lot of data, right? It's just how we use it. And often in education, data is used as an accountability measure and you know, a proof that you've met some standard that's been established somewhere to say that your school is doing what it's supposed to, but it doesn't actually tell you if people are learning what they need to learn. So measurement in education in terms of reforms needs to be focused on a more practical level. How do we know that what we're doing is actually having an impact? But we gather a lot of data. Think of the keystone tests that we put our kids through and the assessments that happen on teachers. How do we know what you're gathering in terms of data is actually making a difference? But I want to go back to something you said before, too, about whether or not we think of education as a profession. We don't. We don't value it. Teachers don't make nearly the amount of money they should for the amount of work that they do. And I don't know how we change that, but that's that's a much bigger problem until we figure out how to think of it in the same way that we think of medicine and law and uh engineering and other things. We're we're struggling. And it's gonna take everybody, right? It's gonna take one of the things I've said within CPED is we're doing as much as we can at the university level to design strong degrees, but it's also gonna take students saying, I want a degree that's gonna teach me something and not signing up for some online for-profit institution just to get three letters behind their name. You have to demand what you want out of your out of your learning as well. And I think students, parents have to demand what they want and not just go to the school and yell at the principal, but to say as a community, this is what we want our schools to do. I think what gives me hope is that teachers and administrators go to work every day. I mean, they continue to do the job, as do my faculty colleagues in universities, despite this administration's utter attack on education. And I I don't think it's just a traditional put your head down because we are all dragging from the day-to-day stuff that's flying through the air and coming across the news. And yet you show up for the kids. And I think that is one of the reasons I think people who get into education do it because they actually want to have an impact on other people's lives. And that is very hopeful, right? It's not everybody and it's not in every school. But largely if you wake up every morning and it's subject yourself into educating anybody, whether it's kindergartners or doctoral students, you have a vested interest in making sure somebody gets better at who they are. And that is highly respectable and in the end, worth much more than what some other professions do, right? But I I'm constantly a believer in people. People show up when they need to. And I think that's how all of where we are is going to change. But they have to see the value in it. And I think some of what we have to do as those of us who are in here surviving it every day at whatever level we work in, we have to give a little bit more by helping others to see why it's valuable. And everything has been, and I I honestly think some of this has to do with no child left behind, everything is reduced down to grades and numbers and what did you get and how much money are you gonna make? And it's like, yeah, but can you think, right? Can you think clearly? Can you reason an argument? Can you have a conversation with another human being? And that's something we're gonna have to spend some time on is talking to people about what the value of education is.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

For a parent feeling stuck out there that their school isn't working for them and they don't know what to do, what's the most useful frame from your work for them?

SPEAKER_01 32:31

So I know parents don't have a lot of time. I'm a single parent, I get it, but as a former Peace Corps volunteer, my theory has always been you got to go in and you got to listen and you got to get involved. And I know that's really hard because I get the calls to come volunteer here, come do this, come do that. But if you really want to see change, I think you have to spend time with the people who are doing the work and you have to understand their perspective as well. It's a meet somebody halfway, it's finding common ground, it's offering your time and saying, I want to invest in this. I saw a great, I don't know where it was, some social media post that said, you as a parent would give anything for your kid. You would protect them, you would die for them, but you won't go to a school board meeting and speak up when your student's not getting what they need. And that really hit me hard because it hadn't really occurred to me, you know, yeah, sure. If my kid was, you know, a car was flying at them, I'd push him out of the way and jump in front of it. But do I go to regular school board meetings? Do I volunteer to tutor to help out at the school? Do I, do I do what I can do to make sure they get the best? Do I, you know, drag her to the library, drag her to museums, do I do whatever? And I know that's hard. It's hard. Being a parent is hard. And particularly as being a parent who might be a single parent, marginalized community, low income, all the challenges that we all face, it is hard. But change can happen in micro ways, micro little tiny changes every day. And a lot of it is just valuing the humanity and others and getting to a common ground and letting go of the anger that we all have for anything that's going on or others or other people or whatever it is that's bothering us. We have to come together and we have to stop and think about the future of this country, this planet, our children.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

AI is everywhere now, and high in especially in higher ed, right? From from your seat at in Pitt and CPED, how is it changing how we train educational leaders?

SPEAKER_01 34:29

So I was really impressed. Within CPED, we have a bunch of faculty who jumped on this right away and really started to investigate the tools that are out there and what can be done with those tools. And then I've seen in my daughter's school how it's being used. And at Pitt, we've it's been an interesting process because we've not necessarily come up with a university-wide policy on AI. It's been left to the schools to come up with policies, but Pitt has invested in getting flawed AI accounts for everybody, and they've developed their own Pit GPT. So, you know, when it came out, I don't think we all immediately knew what the data centers were going to do. And I think that's a separate conversation. I don't know that we can protest data centers in the way that AI is going to go back into the box, right? And for anyone out there who's old enough to remember when the internet came about, like that was going to end civilization as we know it. And we figured it out. Now, the data centers, that's a different thing. I do think that that needs to be dealt with in terms of the harm that it's causing to communities and people and um what we're having to pay for electricity as a result of that and things like that. But all of that aside, I grew up watching the Jetsons, right? It's amazing to see the kinds of things that we saw on a cartoon actually coming through. But I think it can be useful. And I'm a believer of it's not going to go away, so let's figure out how to use it for good. And I think it can be used as a tool that can get people to reflect on their own thinking and what they're doing. I like to call it a thought partner when I turn to it. I often get stuck as a writer, not knowing how to even get started or if my sentences make sense, so it helps me in those ways. But we it's like any tool that's out there, right? It's like driving. You have to teach someone how to use it. You can't just hand them a car because they're going to crash it or they're going to do something wrong with it, right? And that's what's happening with AI. And it's just furthering this concept of, I don't have to think, it'll just do it for me. And it's very clever, right? It'll come out with a lot of good language, it sounds very eloquent, and you think it's told you exactly what it's supposed to. But if you hand that to somebody who actually knows what it's supposed to say, it's very clear that you're you don't know what you're talking about, right? So you can only really use it in my mind as something that can support your thinking and making you better, as opposed to thinking that it's going to do everything for you. And I've used it from everything to how do I fix the leak on the back of my toilet to uh give me some ideas of what I can do for my Christmas cards, to okay, I need help. I'm putting together this data and I want to think through how do I best organize these themes so I can write something, right? But again, in every way it's just a thought partner. I ultimately say, Yeah, you don't know what you're talking about. I'm not gonna do that. Or, oh, I like that piece, I like that piece. Let me see if I can do something with that. So we've got to get better. It came at us in a way that social media did too. It showed up and we all just wanted to play with it and we didn't know what was going to happen as a result of that. Now is the time to step back and say, okay, this cannot keep going the way that it's going. We got to get better at what we're gonna do with it. But I think that's hard because not everyone agrees, right? Even my own university, there isn't one policy on how we're supposed to use it. So, and I don't think you can tell people what to do with it, right? But you can teach them how to be better.

SPEAKER_00 37:57

Love it. Let's uh shift gears for a moment. We're gonna go into lightning rounds. So we'll just have rapid fire questions, first thing that comes to mind. No thing, no explanation necessary unless you want it. All right. Sound good? Okay. All right. Most overrated piece of education reform advice.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

I'm not sure I understand the question.

SPEAKER_00 38:17

What's the most uh that's that's okay, most overrated piece of most overrated thing that's come out of education reform advice.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

Oh I don't know if this is advice, but the way we look at universities and the way we send our kids to school is that it's gotta be the number one school, it's gotta be the best, it's gotta be a big school, it's gotta have a football team, it's gotta do all of that. I think we shop for universities for our kids in in ways that don't make sense that will set them up to have the skills that they need. So I'm gonna go with the US News and World Reports are things that people put way too much credibility on without really looking into what they want their kid to do.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

But I I just saw a report that says Pitts number one in Pennsylvania, by the way. Uh that came through my alumni. Well, yes, it came through my alumni newsletter just today. I should notate. One book every educator should read on leadership.

SPEAKER_01 39:15

Joel Springs' history of education in the United States from the beginning, last edition I read was through the Obama administration, but it really tells you what each sort of decade and era did in education, how we got to where we are.

SPEAKER_00 39:30

One thing parents overthink about their kids' school.

SPEAKER_01 39:33

That it's supposed to do everything, that the kids have to do everything, that they have to be so booked into sports and activities and extracurriculars to get into college, that it's supposed to that grades matter more than them actually knowing how to build an argument and have a discussion with a human being and think for themselves.

SPEAKER_00 39:54

How about one thing parents underthink?

SPEAKER_01 39:57

The value of relationships, the value of experience, experiential education.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

How about one question every parent should ask at a school board meeting?

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Oof, I need to think about that one. I I don't know if I can answer that because I don't know that school boards are really, I'm not sure that I'm a fan of them. I don't know that they represent what's actually happening at education. And maybe that's the question. What do you know about education and what is your background to be able to judge what is happening in our school?

SPEAKER_00 40:26

How about if you could whisper one piece of advice to a parent who feels the system is failing their kid, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 40:33

Ugh. If you are capable of finding an alternative for your child, then go for it. If you aren't, give them enriching experiences through other kinds of learning, particularly experiential learning.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

All right. Dr. Jill, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate your time so much. For educators listening out there, parents who want to follow your work and uh at at Pitt and CPED, where should they go?

SPEAKER_01 41:03

Most of where I post is on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00 41:08

Awesome. And you have a book, correct?

SPEAKER_01 41:11

I have several books.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

The latest one was improvement, right?

SPEAKER_01 41:15

Two that I uh no, my latest one was how to redesign an EDD program. And actually, I take that back. My latest one just came out. It was an edited version that I wrote with a couple of colleagues on navigating the doctoral journey. I just got that one. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Congrats. And I make it are you on Amazon? Look you up on there. We'll put the links to your books as well.

SPEAKER_01 41:37

I'm on Amazon, yes. And make sure you put the Alexa in anywhere you Google me because there are many Jill Perry's out there.

SPEAKER_00 41:43

I'm sure. I'm sure. Okay. So we'll put the links to that in the show notes and the YouTube description. And before we wrap, what's the one thing you want people to remember from this conversation?

SPEAKER_01 41:54

That education is participatory, and if you want the best out of it, you have to give your full self to it. It's not a it's not a receiving activity.

SPEAKER_00 42:04

You gotta actively participate in it. I love it. Dr. Jill, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. It's great to see you again. Um, good luck. Hail to Pitt. Hopefully we'll stay in touch as well, and uh we'll see you next time on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 42:17

All right, thank you all for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 42:19

Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 42:21

Thanks for joining us on the Supported Learning Podcast. If today's conversation inspired you, challenged you, or sparked a new perspective, be sure to subscribe and share with a fellow change maker. We'll be back soon with more voices, more insight, and more ways to elevate the future of learning together. Until then, keep learning and keep pushing the conversation forward.