Who is Matt Kramer? (02:17)
Cindy:
Matt, thanks so much for being here.
Matt Kramer:
Thanks for having me.
Cindy:
All right, let's jump right in, Matt. I would love for you to set the stage for our audience. So what is the work that you are most passionate about doing and why?
Matt Kramer:
You know, I'd say there's two things that I'm passionate about that intersect with Wildflower's work. The first is about teacher leadership. You know, I spent a lot of my career in education thinking about the conditions in which teachers, the ones who spend the time directly with kids, are able to bring all of themselves, all of their energy into the classroom and into their relationships with kids and families, et cetera. And I think, you know, there's a lot about education that makes that challenging. that affects teachers in ways that are not ideal. And so one of the things that we work on at Wildflower is how do you create the conditions for teachers' leadership to be fully unlocked? And then the second thing is, I'm a Montessori kid, I'm a Montessori dad, I believe in progressive child-centered learning, I believe that kids should be the protagonists of their own educational experiences. And I think there is a interesting... situation in American education about the way the standardized testing and accountability and standards aligned educational efforts intersect with that type of work. And so I'm really interested in the ideas alternative ways to think about about gathering data about what's going on an assessment that would reinforce a more child-centered view of education as opposed to conflict with it.
What is a microschool? (03:51)
Cindy:
I'll have to ask you more about assessment later. I hadn't planned for that. Awesome. So I think kind of the elephant in the room here, you work for Wildflowers. What is a microschool?
Matt Kramer:
It is a term of art that can mean different things, different people. For us, what it means is a school that is... I'm not going to try to define microschool, I'm just going to say what our schools are. Our schools are one or two classrooms, mostly one.
Cindy:
Okay, okay.
Matt Kramer:
So 25 kids, if it's two classrooms, 50 kids. If it's one classroom, generally two teachers, two classrooms, generally four teachers. And so the teachers are both... the folks who spend time with kids and the folks who manage enrollment and the folks who do administration, they're like the whole school. They're not coordinating across lots of classrooms to organize who goes out on the playground at different times or the lunch schedule or whatever. Their class is the whole school. And so that's what our schools are. And for the purpose of, you know, the connection I think to the idea of micro schools is just schools that are small enough that the coordinating functions. that occur at schools, like having a culture for the school as opposed to classroom culture. A micro school is a school small enough that that stuff doesn't exist. That classroom culture and school culture is the same thing.
Cindy:
What need do you see that serving?
Matt Kramer:
I think it serves a few needs. One of them, I think, is in the sort of post-pandemic moment. I think it's occurring to lots of people. I guess two things are occurring to lots of parents. One of them is, I think we've spent a lot of time watching our kids do schoolwork the last few years. And I think lots of folks have a sense that the environment, the curricular environment, the learning environment the kids are in is insufficiently individualized to them. It seems like they're going through like some gauntlet that the worlds have just laid out and they go through. And I think a lot of parents are like, yeah, I think if I were gonna sit down and design an educational environment for my kids, I would probably do something that was more customized to their interests, their gifts, what they wanna do with their life, what they already know how to do, what they don't know how to do. And a much smaller environment allows for much more of that sort of customization with less concern about, well, is it different from what, you know, the guy across the hall is doing, which I think is a legitimately important criteria
Cindy:
Mm.
Matt Kramer:
in big environments. So I think that's one thing. A second thing that pertains to parents is I think it has occurred to a lot of people in the last few years that there are some downsides to sending your kid off to a school with a thousand people in the same building. From just an epidemiological point of view, there's problems to that. And there's other problems like in lots of parts of the country in the US, putting you put kids on... Yellow buses to take them to elementary schools and they ride like 45 minutes or an hour each way You know to go to an elementary school that doesn't make sense To a lot of folks and so I think that's that's one set of problems We're solving how do you create school environments that are small enough to be responsive? Local etc and then for teachers, I think similarly in the last few years You know teachers have been frustrated with their the working conditions, the environment in which they teach for a long time.
Cindy:
Mm.
Matt Kramer:
This is not a new phenomenon. It probably goes back at least to the 60s, that there's been a general sense that the working environment for teachers hasn't been good. And I think the last few years have been brutal on that front. I think the last few years have emphasized to people all over the place that they are not in charge of important decisions that relate to how they do their work. And they feel buffeted by the winds of change coming at them from different sides related to COVID related things related to, you know, now we've got a whole bunch of fights going on in America about social justice issues and what you're allowed to talk about.
Cindy:
Yes.
Matt Kramer:
And I think lots of teachers just don't want that. Lots of teachers want to be in an environment where their own passions, their own intuition, their sense of what's right for their kid are the things that shape what they do every day. So those are the problems that we're trying to solve.
How do families find microschools? (08:20)
Cindy:
It reminds me almost of like a local farmers market, right? It's smaller, it's personalized, it's niche, and it's kind of self-contained in a way. Does that resonate with you?
Matt Kramer:
Yeah, I think it does. And I would say if you extend that analogy and think about what is the argument for industrial supermarkets? There are some, right? Industrial supermarkets are actually better at supplying if you are looking for a niche product. There's more chance that it will be on the shelf. If you have a recipe that has 30 things on the list, you are more likely to find them all at an industrialized supermarket than you are at a farmer's market. And I think if you look back to the period of time 100 years ago when You know, it used to be the case in America, there were a quarter of a million one-room schools, right? And they got entirely wiped out basically between like 1910 and 1940. And if you look at what the rationale at the time for why they were switching to a more, you know, factory-type environment, a more industrial-type environment that they were borrowing from Germany at the time, the Prussian school system, if you look at the rationale, one of the rationales was around expertise. They were thinking like, okay, as we need to get like, you know, we need to have somebody who can teach physics. We need to have somebody who can teach calculus. And we can't expect to have that in every town in America. And that, while that might not be a good argument anymore because of the internet, it was an important argument then, but it was an important argument for a sliver of all of schooling. It definitely does not apply to elementary schools that you can't find educated folk everywhere to do this. And so I think that that same idea of, you know, thinking about the farmers market analogy is the point is not that there's no space or no room for something else. It's just that we decided to oversolve the problem of like, oh, since we have this thought about we're the best place to find like Worcestershire sauce is we're going to wipe the whole thing out and replace everything with this new everything, get everything in one place model. And that that wiped out something important.
Cindy:
And not everybody wants or needs that. That's cool. So is your model similar than to the traditional one-room schoolhouse that it's really, it's mixed age, or is it more like it's a grade three classroom, but it's just a standalone grade three classroom? How does that part function?
Matt Kramer:
Somewhere between, we use the Montessori three-year age bands. So a school slash classroom would be three to six-year-olds, or six to nine-year-olds, or nine to 12-year-olds. Sometimes, I said one or two classrooms, so sometimes it's like three to nine-year-olds in two classes split three to six, six to nine. But that's the Montessori age band convention, and we follow it. So in a community, multiple wildflower schools typically pop up serving multiple ages. families that want to stick in a wildflower environment, you know, when they finish off one school, they'll route themselves over to another one.
Cindy:
Very cool. And how do parents get matched with these kinds of schools? Is it they seek it out or is there a lot of advertising involved? How does that part work? That was a question from our Facebook group from Sarah.
Matt Kramer:
So we operate schools under multiple different types of governance, legal funding umbrellas. So we operate what would be thought of in the US as non-profit child care centers. We operate what would be thought of as independent private schools that accept tuition and also have vouchers for lower income families. And we have charters. And we could in theory also have partnerships with districts. and have in the past at various times. But the core of the idea for us is the unit of the little school, and it has to have two things be the case for it to be sort of like a workable situation for us. One of them is it has to be authentic teacher leadership. The teacher has to be actually in charge. And the second is there has to be a way to support economic diversity. We aim for our schools to be intentionally diverse. to approximately reflect the economic diversity of the country. So something like a third of families having free and reduced lunch level incomes, a third of families having above median incomes and able to pay full tuition if it's a private school slash voucher type of environment, and a third somewhere in between, like sort of below median incomes, but not poverty level income. And so as long as the school can do those two things, support teacher autonomy and support student diversity. economic diversity, then the setting can work for us. The question that you just have now take you back to the question you asked about enrollment. In the environment of charters, it works like charter enrollment works. So in cities like DC, there's the common enrollment process in New York, common enrollment process. Families go through those things and they choose the schools they wanted to go to. And our local teacher leader teams, their job is to have... people know what they do so that somebody signs up. In places like Minnesota, where we don't have centralized enrollment, it's sort of the same thing for charters. You just, they just sign up directly. And then for the other ones, for the places where it's through childcare laws or voucher programs, it's really the teacher leader's job is to get the word out. The schools are so small though, that getting the word out is not very hard. You know filling a school with 25 kids Is not the same as filling a 400 person school that charters are typically trying to fill
Cindy:
Easy.
Matt Kramer:
And geography works in our favor on this front like you know the challenge of a 400 person school is you got to get 400 kids who are willing to drive to the exact same location and And you generally don't have trouble recruiting like the two-block radius around the school It's how you can get the people who are further out our school. We only need the people right around the school. So Our schools generally don't have too much trouble enrolling families. I also think the Montessori brand name is attractive to lots of folks. So we don't put much energy into like advertising or marketing or that sort of thing.
Cindy:
That makes sense. So what other kind of leadership structures need to be in place? Like you mentioned needing the diverse element and needing the teacher leader as the entrepreneur, but what other kind of structures are there in place leadership wise?
Matt Kramer:
I mean, part of what teacher autonomy means is that we don't pull them through lots of other things against their will. So we try to do things that are helpful to the teacher leaders. We provide a variety of tools. We provide opportunities for them to learn from each other, both by directly engaging with each other and by documenting knowledge in one place that can be used in another place. We provide various software packages that have been customized to the situation of our teacher leaders to make things easier for them. We have a direct relationship with the IRS. We have what's called a group exemption. So the 501c3 status of the schools is something that we can grant them directly. It doesn't have to come from the IRS. So we do a bunch of things like that. But like to use the leadership notion, I think conjures up for me the sorts of fellowship programs that a lot of charter networks create. And we don't do that because we think of the schools and the teachers who have created them, we don't think of them so much as our schools, we think of them as their schools, and we think of them as the agents of their own development in the same way that we think of kids as the agents of their development, you know, when they're three years old. You know, one of the things we talk about
Cindy:
Mm.
Matt Kramer:
in the Montessori world is creating a prepared environment. for this child, you know, and at the three year old level, a prepared environment has certain features. And then you kind of set the kid loose with some guidance in the prepared environment. And what we think we're doing in general is a prepared environment for Montessorians to create the schools they've been dreaming of.
More about the Wildflower Model (16:40)
Cindy:
So you're providing the support and the as needed resources, not as much as this is how you become a Wildflower School.
Matt Kramer:
No, we provide a lot of help on the front end. Actually, the part where we provide the most help is from the moment you had the thought of, I think I would like to create my own school, to the point where you've been open for a year and you're filled with kids and you can see the future is, you sort of can envision what happens next. During that window, we call it the school startup journey. We help a lot during that window. Although even then, I would say our experience has been, you know, I would say, this might be true everywhere in the world, but it's definitely true in the US. Our education system here has sent the message to teachers in a million ways that they are not in charge, that they don't get to do things the way they want. And as a consequence, many teachers have internalized that message. And it actually is a little challenging to... send the message of actually, you know, we're not in Kansas anymore, the rules here are different. And, you know, we work hard at sending that message, but also if we do anything that contradicts that message, sometimes even if we give them the option to opt out of their own leadership, people will take it. And so we have to work really hard not to do that. So even though we helped them a lot during the startup process, There's a lot of moments where a teacher might ask us, would you just do this for me? And the answer is no.
Cindy:
Hmm.
Matt Kramer:
Even if they want to, because we know that the range of decisions, the range of freedoms and strategies that they can consider later is related to the degree to which they've got their mind wrapped around the totality of the work they're doing. And so if we, for example, one thing is teachers ask us all the time, would you just manage my budget for me? And the answer is no. because a lot of important decisions get made in the process of setting your budget and managing it, and you won't realize what those decisions are if you've given it to somebody else. It's why a lot of schools would say, well, okay, this is fine, but you're gonna hire a budget person to run it for you if you do it locally, right? And our answer is no, you're not. You're actually the same person who's with the kids all day, manages the budget, because important decisions get made that way, and you need to understand where your money's going so that that can be part of your leadership
Cindy:
Mm.
Matt Kramer:
is influencing that.
Cindy:
So you support that process, but at the end of the day, it's everything is that one teacher's responsibility.
Matt Kramer:
Pairs of teachers, but yes.
Cindy:
That's a lot. Do teachers generally feel a sense of overwhelm in those first couple of years?
Matt Kramer:
Yes
Cindy:
Yeah
Matt Kramer:
I would what I would say is the You know, first of all, there's this is hard You know, we do things to try to make it a little easier, but it is hard. I think It's it's not that this this is not the only hard thing in the world I think you know when you talk to charter school founders, that's hard to When you talk to people trying to manage schools in district environments, that's hard to it's a lot of hard things. This is hard. The other thing I would say is... the people who are going to thrive in this environment. have decided before they start this that it is the only acceptable solution. Right, they have crossed off the other possibilities. So a very common profile for when somebody arrives at our doorstep is they've been teaching for a decade, they're considered very good by families and administrators and others who are around them. And they've gotten to that point in their career where people are describing to them two paths that they choose from. Path number one is You should become an administrator. You're great. You're a leader. Unfortunately, you will not teach anymore once you do that. The thing that it was your calling, your purpose for being in this world, you're not gonna do that anymore. Option two is you can keep teaching. Do the thing that you were put on this world to do, but somebody else is going to be always in charge of you. You're never gonna have the freedom to set the vision for the environment that you have in your heart. And so you get to choose. Those are your two choices. When people come to us, they have rejected that choice. They've just said, those are two terrible choices. I don't want either of them. And so I'm coming into this environment knowing that what you're offering me is an opportunity to work really hard to both teach and lead this tiny school. And because I so deeply want slash need the environment in which I can do that, in which I can lay out the vision for what I wanna do, I can practice Montessori the way I think it's meant to be practiced. I can serve the families that I want to serve, et cetera. Because that is so important to me
Cindy:
Mm.
Matt Kramer:
and because I don't believe I can get that elsewhere, I'm basically willing to do anything to do it. Those are our people.
Who’s in charge here?(21.53)
Cindy:
It's so interesting because often the trend right now is this concept of distributed leadership, right? That everybody in the school takes on roles to sustain. But this is the opposite of that. It's saying one person or a pair of people are taking full ownership for every decision that's being made.
Matt Kramer:
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, there's a thing in the US right now called teacher powered schools. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's created by a group in Minnesota actually called Education Evolving. And they've been on the they've been sort of ringing the bell on schools don't need principals. A council of teachers can run the school. And the way you do that is typically the council of teachers hires an administrator of some sort. to work for them who's sort of a principal but sort of not, but the teachers have more leadership because they're sort of like the governing council of the school. And that's a distributed leadership concept. And I think it's interesting. I think their lessons are that there's lots of good things that does. Our angle on this is a little different. Our angle is that the challenge in traditional schools is not that the principals themselves are not good. Like we don't need to replace the principal with a committee that is a principal. The problem is the principal job is no good. Like the concept of trying to spend all this energy to align the practice of a bunch of classrooms around one culture, one assessment plan, et cetera. That is an enormous amount of work that is largely invented by us, by the structures we've created.
Cindy:
Mm.
Matt Kramer:
And if you make the school small enough that that work doesn't exist, you don't need a principal anymore. And so that's our argument is don't try to replace the principal with a committee. Try to make the role go away by simplifying the nature of the work.
Cindy:
So is there alignment? Is there accreditation in any way? Or is it like a Montessori accreditation? Or how does that work?
Matt Kramer:
So Montessori has accrediting bodies, has two main ones, the Association Montessori Internationale, that's the group that Maria Montessori herself founded a hundred years ago or whatever, and then there's the American Montessori Society, and both of those groups do accreditation. I would say most Montessori schools are not accredited by them, including ours.
Cindy:
Really?
Matt Kramer:
Ours generally don't get accredited. The standard in the Montessori world, the thing that's sort of like more important as a measure of quality, is whether you insist on all the people who teach having gone through full Montessori training programs, and because the Montessori name is not actually trademarked, she tried late in her life to get it trademarked, but she had made it open source for so long before that, that the courts ruled against her, that she couldn't control the name anymore.
Cindy:
Mm.
Matt Kramer:
So there's a lot of Montessori schools that don't have Montessori trained teachers. I would say that is not the kind of Montessori we practice. Our view is this is not about just a philosophy of child-centered learning. It's about a very detailed set of teacher practices and learning materials. The way we ensure we have that is we only take people who have gone through full Montessori training programs at high-quality training institutions. After that, the system of quality support is largely peer-based. work with other schools. And, you know, if a group of teachers thinks that one of the schools in their community is not what they collectively think a good Montessori school should be or a good wildflower school should be, there's actually a process for having a school leave the network. It's actually happened once already. I imagine it'll happen again. But, you know, the teachers are, the teachers have high standards. they share a reputation in a community, and so they don't want anyone to share their reputation who they don't think is taking this seriously.
Cindy:
That makes sense, so it's self-governance almost. So when I think of Montessori, I typically think of early years and maybe elementary, but do your schools span the gamut of K through 12?
Matt Kramer:
Yeah, the youngest ones start at 12 weeks old, the oldest ones are high schools. The large majority are either one to three-year-olds or three to six-year-olds. Together that accounts for something like 75% of all the schools. But we have a bunch of elementary schools and we have at the moment one high school and another one in the works. And I think that is, as you say, that largely follows the... sort of general pattern of how much Montessori there is in the world. Most of the Montessori in the world is three to six year olds, but you know, there's like a hundred Montessori high schools in the US, a bunch more around the world. And I think Montessori had some really important, challenging things to say about middle schools and high schools that are sort of exciting when you take a minute to think about them, and they draw people into wanting to use the general model. for secondary schools as well.
The intention of and problem with standardized tests (27.11)
Cindy:
Do you run into anything as kids get older about like, you know, state tests or requirements, proficiency kind of things? Is that a problem at all or is there a workaround for that?
Matt Kramer:
I mean, there's no work around for it. You get kids that are third grade and older, you take tests. So as we get into the elementary grades, in charter environments and in many voucher funded, ESA type funded environments, and in all charter environments, tests for kids third grade and up are just how it works.
Cindy:
Mandatory.
Matt Kramer:
You know, the conversation we have with authorizers and regulators on the front end. is if your purpose is to maximize test scores, this is not the way to do that. We're not trying to maximize test scores. We are trying to make sure the kids can read and make sure the kids can do math, and that will be reflective in test scores. Like we believe that our approach will produce good test scores. But the thing that would take you from good to great is focus, and we don't do that. We are not focused on the types of skills that show up on the test. in terms of the incremental energy, we are focused on helping kids find their cosmic task, as we say in the Montessori world, helping them work on the things of interest to them, helping them, you know, these are the things that at the margin, helping them build the executive function skills to make choices that are gonna affect their own lives and then bear the consequences of those choices. Those are the things that we are putting that incremental energy into. So we take the tests and if we found out that the kids couldn't read, we would take that seriously. But... but we don't think the purpose of education has much to do with the tests.
Cindy:
Let's say that again, ladder for the people in the back. That's awesome. There's so many times educators talk about that, that tension behind, you know, there is this metric that we're needing to reach, but none of us value that. That's not what any educator got into teaching for. So this is such a, a beautiful alternative to that model.
Matt Kramer:
Yeah, I do think, I think as educators, we all have to remind ourselves that the reason why we have these tests is because of the abomination that existed 50 years ago, where an overwhelming number of the poor kids and the black and brown kids couldn't read or do math at a basic level, and the system had just accepted that. And that was not acceptable. and the tests were created for civil rights purposes, so we would realize the incredible inequity of educational expectations. And they have served that purpose well. And we should not throw that out as we continue to refine the questions about what we mean foreign tests. And so I think all of us in this world, all of us working on education, should say every time we're criticizing tests, we should just, we should say, and I try to remind myself every time. It is still a reasonable expectation that every kid knows how to read and every kid knows how to do math.
Cindy:
Yes, but that lowest bar shouldn't be what's driving the bus.
Matt Kramer:
No, and when it does, when we get obsessed with that, we start doing strange things.
Cindy:
Weird things.
Matt Kramer:
And yeah, that's what I think we see in American education right now, is like we are on the edge of the tail of wagging an entire education system around the needs of the narrow tests.
Moving away from schools as factories (30:41)
Cindy:
So smart. I wanna come back to something you mentioned earlier about this like industrial model of education. And I think many of our listeners are not going to be in a place where they can completely change their entire school and how it functions. But are there some common practices that you see in these bigger schools that are worth challenging and that could be re-imagined, you think?
Matt Kramer:
I mean, there are a handful of practices that are mutually reinforcing, that lead to the situation in most educational environments, and they are hard to change. But I will just call out a few of them. And I think people who are committed can deal with some of these things. It's just like the wind's blowing against you. So one of them is the idea of grouping kids by age, by single age, is... really problematic. It sends the idea to everyone involved, the kids, their families, the teachers, that there is a competition type sense. Like everyone's at a starting line at the same place and they're moving in the same direction and we can evaluate how close they're getting there. That notion is hugely influenced by the structure of single-aged classrooms ever moving along at the same time. If you just switch to two years together in a classroom... or even three years, as we do in the Montessori world, so that in any given classroom, there are people who have been there longer who are the elders and there are the newbies, and people look around with them and not everyone is a competitor. Many of the people around them are not in competition with them in any sense. They're there for them to help or learn from. That is very helpful. That's one big thing I would just say is mixed-age classes really, really matter. A second thing is... The idea that everyone needs to learn the same things, which is reflected in standards, aligned education movements and standardized tests, et cetera, I think you have to shrink the amount of time spent learning the things that everyone needs to learn to a much smaller share of the total. If you, basically, if you set your curriculum for a year and it takes... 90% of energy of everyone involved in time, everyone involved, to learn the things that everyone should learn, like the basic core things. Then that's what you're saying is what everyone should learn. There's nothing left, right? If you want people to learn other things, if you want them to follow their interests, if you want them to figure out who they are,
Cindy:
Yeah.
Matt Kramer:
if you want them to find their path in life, if you want all these things, there has to be a meaningful share of the amount of time that they have during the year that is available to be allocated to things that reflect those interests and choices. And so I think that'd be the second big thing, and I would say, figure out how do you back off the requirement pieces down to a level that there's space for something else. And then I would say the third thing is... If you start from, at every point, if you start from the idea that kids know something about themselves that we don't know and that is important. That the kid themselves has some fundamental insights into what their purpose in the world is. Or what it might be. And what they need to learn more of and what they don't. If you start from the premise that that is in every kid. It will lead you to do some different things as you think about designing lessons and units and the educational environment. And I think we have... I think, you know, I think this is something that we give lip service to in education, but I think in profound ways we don't act like it. We don't act like the kids should have something to say about
Cindy:
Mm.
Matt Kramer:
the direction their life is gonna lead until they're like juniors in high school. And then all of a sudden we're like, does anyone want to do vocational training? And that, to me, is not the right framing of this question. So yeah, those would be the three big things I would say if I were trying to have a more child-centered practice emerge inside of a different type of setting.
Cindy:
So mix the age groups, cull the curriculum, and truly make space for that choice, that sense of autonomy, and not just in superficial ways, but in ways that truly connect to who the child is as an individual.
Matt Kramer:
Yeah, and I think, I just think asking yourself at the beginning of everything we do, have we set, whatever is going to happen next, have we set this up under the assumption that there are important parts of important aspects that influence how all this is going to play out? That are inside the kids that we don't know about? Or have we assumed, have we acted as if we assume we basically sort of got the parameters of this? We sort of know what they need to know, we sort of know what they need to do? when we're going to listen to them a little bit, and we'll do some formative quizzes and exit tickets, whatever, to find out that as we go, that distinction of starting with the humility that we don't know all the things one would need to know to plan the instructional activity that's going to come, that is challenging. In our world of standards-aligned education followed by backwards planning, there's like no space in it for that. You know, you work your way back from the standards and you plan out all the pieces. And when you're done planning out all the pieces, you don't want somebody to mess with your plan. Like you have to ask much earlier in the process, what would it mean if I thought the kids had something to contribute to that? And actually, I'll say one other story. So, you know, I talked a little before I made a reference to Montessori secondary schools, and a colleague and I were talking, I don't know, probably five years ago or something like that, about Montessori middle schools and our desire to create more of them, and we were sort of thinking about whether we're going to lean into this. And my colleague, she went and talked to a bunch of people who had started their own Montessori middle schools. She herself is trained as a Montessori middle school teacher, but she's not, that's not what she's actively doing at the moment. She's working on helping Wildflower Schools start. But she went and talked to a bunch of people, and she said it was, it was remarkable how frequently the exact same story came up in conversation after conversation. People would tell the story of the first year of their school, and they would say, we had been thinking about it for a while, but for one reason or another, it had not made sense to dive in fully and just move on it. And then something happened that made it make sense all of a sudden. Like, something brought it like, right now, like, guys, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it right now. And threw themselves in a start. And the majority, the vast majority of them told the story of... Because of that, when they actually got started, when the first kids showed up for this program, they really didn't have a school yet. And so they spent the first year, the project of the first year was to design a school. The teacher and a half dozen or dozen kids created the school together over the course of the year. And person after person said, that was the best year of my career. That was the most exciting, the kids learned the most, I still keep in touch with those kids. because we created a school because we had real work to do together. And I just think there's a lesson in that that is like not something to brush away and return to the normal way we do it.
Cindy:
Mm.
Matt Kramer:
But I think we do that a lot.
Cindy:
Well, we dominate with our left brain, right? We want to put something into a system and a framework that we can repeat and we know will deliver success. But I think what I'm hearing you say is there's something innately counterintuitive about that in the education process.
Matt Kramer:
Yeah, I mean, I think when we talk about industrialization or the factory model of education, the sort of core ideas of that are that the inputs, the kids, are raw moldable materials, and the process is standardized and turns them into the outputs,
Cindy:
Yes.
Matt Kramer:
and that is buried deep in our souls at this point, right? It's interesting that it is not a very humanistic idea. Like, if you go back a few hundred years, you did not find that idea anywhere. It's a pretty recent idea. But now it is. everywhere. It is like deep in the culture. And so, you know, I just think if you challenge that, and I think when people think about it, they realize it's not right. If you challenge it and say like, okay, actually, that's not the activity we're engaged in here. What we're engaged in is we're taking fundamentally different raw materials in, right? Each kid comes wired from the factory for a lot of things about what they're going to like and be interested in, etc. If we take that and we say this is different raw material, and the process is one of self-development, not of like, yeah, having something done to you, it really would be different. It really would be different.
Cindy:
I love that premise. You're really great with words. You have a very artistic way of speaking and a way of metaphors that makes things so clear in these complex ideas just feel so straightforward.
Matt Kramer:
Thank you. That's nice.
Teacher leaders as entrepreneurs (40.05)
Cindy:
Yeah, I'm curious. So if I'm a leader and I want to empower teachers with this skillset, right? My goal is to produce teachers that can become entrepreneurs that can see themselves as leaders of a school. What are the skillsets that I can help develop while they're under, in my school to then set them free to develop something like this on their own?
Matt Kramer:
Yeah, I mean, I guess the, I think the more important question in my view is, how do you create the conditions in which those skills can actually be practiced? The skills develop on their own. I mean, there's things you can do to help, but like, people have enormous capability to do different stuff, right? Like, when we think about the sorts of things people, like, who knew 200 years ago that every person in America has the capability to learn how to use a computer? Right? But it turns out we all have the capability to learn how to use a computer. And we didn't know until we created an environment in which actually learning how to use a computer was pretty essential to like making your way through the world. I feel that way about a lot of skills. And so when we're talking about teachers, I think it is more important to ask yourself if a teacher had an independent idea about what they wanted their kids to, what they wanted their kids to become. And they wanted to give that a shot. Could they? What would happen next? If the answer to that is they kind of couldn't, I don't think there's a way to practice skills in an environment where you can't apply them. Those people who feel like they can't bring the collective power of their educational philosophy and experience to work on it, to like bring it to bear on their work on a daily basis, those people leave. So that's my challenge is how do you make it an environment that those people don't have to leave? And then you can worry about developing them once you've created the environment where they need those skills.
Cindy:
So where are the roadblocks that stand in the way of someone's capacity to make change, whether that's a student or a teacher?
Matt Kramer:
mean, honestly, I think it is a cultural phenomenon more than anything else, reinforced by things like districts and standardized curricula and standardized tests and, you know, and common core and etc. Like, these things all reinforce it, but on a daily basis, the actual constraints are not necessarily the ones that are like laid out to a letter in a rule somewhere. The actual constraints are like the meaning we make of all those things. And the sense we get that the safe thing to do is like stay in your lane. And there's actually a fair amount of space to get out of your lane. I've heard stories from schools of every type about teachers creating like cocooned schools within schools that do all sorts of things differently. And you know, did somebody tell them no somewhere along the way? Of course, probably a lot of people told them no. But something led them to just be like, we're doing it anyway, right? So I think the actual space to do it exists, and our culture tells people otherwise. And that is what I would just say is like, you have to have a culture, you have to create a culture in the school that not just talks about innovation. In fact, I think talking about innovation is really not that important. In some ways, it's the worst. If you talk about innovation, but you respond to innovation by squashing it. people get a very clear sense about what you really mean by that. And so I just think you have to create an environment in which doing things differently is welcomed. So that instead of people focusing on the degree to which the system locks them into this particular way of doing things, they focus on the zone of autonomy they have within whatever the actual hard constraints are. And I just think there's a lot there that we don't take advantage of.
What makes a Montessori school? (44.04)
Cindy:
Yeah, so stop focusing on our sameness. Like this industrial model of creating something that is the same, that if I walk into one classroom, it will look the same as the next classroom. That sounds like the first thing we kind of just need to let go of.
Matt Kramer:
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because monosority is not a let everyone do what they want situation. And in fact, there's pretty good research on the idea of free schools, where basically kids can do whatever they want. And perhaps not surprisingly, not surprising to me, actually kids do poorly in free schools. They don't learn anything. And that As I said, that doesn't surprise me. There's a reason why it helps to be in the presence of the synthesized and curated lessons that had been learned throughout the history of the world so that you don't have to reinvent them all starting from scratch by yourself. Took a long time to get to where we are. There's a reason why two different people invented calculus like the same year in different parts of the world, but nobody did it for the prior 10,000 years. It's because it's cumulative. Things build towards themselves. So I think the... I think the thing I would say about standardization is two things that surprise people about Montessori. One of them is the, and now I'm mostly focusing on younger kids here, the pedagogical materials, the manipulatives that are in Montessori, they're entirely standardized. Every single Montessori classroom in the world has like the exact same set of materials.
Cindy:
Got the pink tower and the, yeah.
Matt Kramer:
It's got the pink tower and it's got another 600 things after that. And second, and this maybe is even more surprising to people, is... the lessons that the Montessorians use to present these things, like when they explain to a kid how to use the pink power, they are scripted curricula. They are memorizing in their training the presentation. And the reason why is because what Montessorians have learned over time is the key to getting the kids interested in the presentation, in the manipulatives, is having the teacher not talk so much. So what they're memorizing is a very sparse, very... narrow set of things to say to the kid that focus on intrigue and minimal direction and then build into the materials themselves what we talk about in the Montessori world as self-correction. So the pink tower, part of its brilliance in the way it shows the notion of ordering things is if you try to put the blocks in the wrong order, they will not stand up. The big ones fall over. You've got to put it in the right order for it to work. And that is trying to build into every one of the Montessori materials. is a sense in which if you try to use it wrong, it lets you know. Without a teacher having to let you know, because when a teacher, when an adult comes over and tells you, you're doing it wrong, it actually affects you in a lot of bad ways. Right? But when the thing itself doesn't work and you have to change it, it actually affects you in a lot of good ways. And so, Montessori is actually quite structured. The scope and sequence is the same for everybody. The materials are the same for everybody. The lessons are memorized. The practices that teachers use are actually quite standardized. But the thing that they're standardizing on is not what the kids and the way the kids learn. They're standardizing on the preparation of the environment and the thing that is the organizing idea of the preparation of the environment is what would it be like to have an environment where the kids get to be the director of their own path? And so it's standardization around that theme. And so that, I guess I would say is, I wouldn't want people to relinquish the idea of it should look the same in every classroom necessarily. What should not be the case is it should not look the same for every kid. Kids should be doing things that differ based on who they are, what they were doing before, their interests, et cetera. But the environment may be pretty standardized, in my view, in the Montessori view.
Cindy:
So then just to challenge or just to understand
Matt Kramer:
I'm just so embarrassed.
Cindy:
a little bit more, I feel like lower years Montessori makes so much sense to me and I love it. Upper elementary, middle school, high school, is there still a similar cadence flow scriptedness or is it like you learn a set number of skills and then those fall away?
Matt Kramer:
So the idea, this is another thing that I think surprises people, the core idea of Montessori education is not actually the things that we so often attribute to it, which are the particular designs of the three to six year old environment. The core idea of Montessori education is the idea that there are some largely consistent developmental patterns and planes that operate across basically all kids. period of time which loosely follows three to six year old window, you know, not exactly, but kind of similar, where kids, where the dominant features of a kid's relationship with learning during that time is, first of all, they're driven by their senses. They want to touch things, they want to stick things in their mouth, they want to feel things. Senses are the driver of their curiosity about the world. And their curiosity is largely not self-aware. They don't go work on something because they want to learn about it, right? They are drawn into it by something that they can't articulate that pulls them in. And those features are the design features of the three to six year old environment. It's all these self-correcting materials that are designed to be visually intriguing, these short lessons that are designed to sort of hook you in and you don't say to the kid, look, here's the overarching thing we're trying to, like there are no big goals in Montessori at the three to six year old level because kids can't understand that at that age. Like if they're doing it, they're kind of they're they're parroting what somebody else is saying. It doesn't make sense when they hit six years old something flips and between six and twelve years old What Maria Montessori observed is kids are now driven by Curia by an active curiosity. They know they want to learn things and they go to learn them and social factors They want to do the things that the other kids are doing And so the six to 12 year old environments are designed, what would you do with a bunch of kids who those are the features of their interests? And then she talks about 12 to 15 year olds as another plane. And at the 12 to 15 year old plane, there's a different set of common features of the kids. Like the sorts of things that she observed about kids in the 12 to 15 range are, first of all, they're going through a lot of change, physically and emotionally. It's a very fiery period. Second of all, In light of that, they actually need to be held pretty closely by a small group of people who care about them, but not their parents. Their parents actually are the people that they're fighting against in this moment of independence. So there needs to be some substitute parent-like thing around them. So it's sort of crazy when you think about that and then you think about the design of middle schools. We introduced bells and moving classes in middle school right at the moment where actually the developmental needs of kids are for a small environment. Fifth graders would be better off with Bell's moving classes than seventh and eighth graders are. Seventh and eighth graders should have one teacher all day long. Other things she'd observed in 12 to 15 year olds were very motivated by doing real work, don't like the idea that the purpose of school is to be graded, want like they're willing to work very hard if they sense there is a beneficiary,
Cindy:
Hmm.
Matt Kramer:
somebody else is going to use the thing they do. And so, you know, these are the sorts of things she group. And what she said in her sort of final thoughts that she shared late in her life about middle school, is she said, this is what I would do if I were gonna try to run a middle school based on what I understand about 12, 15 year olds.
Cindy:
Racine.
Matt Kramer:
She said, I would go buy a house in their country, I would move out there with them, and we would run a farm. And we would make our own rules, and we would learn why society has rules, because we would make rules to run ourselves so that we didn't bump into each other. and we would do science by measuring crop yields and studying what do we need to do to make a farm. And we would work together and the things we would do would allow us to eat. And if we didn't do them, then we would not have any food. And like, she's like, and those people would become the support environment for each other at this critical moment of social development. And so it doesn't look much like the three to six year old program, except the common features are kids have a lot of agency. and the prepared environment is designed around what the features of kids are at that developmental plan.
Cindy:
So have you had your first wildflower farm yet?
Matt Kramer:
We actually at the moment, we do not have a wildflower farm, although we had earlier on, we had a sorta farm, but we've sorta got a couple in development now.
Cindy:
I wanna go see them. When you have them up, let me know. I'd love to come see you.
Matt Kramer:
There are a bunch of them in the US, if you want to see them. In fact, I think there's a couple of them in Colorado.
Cindy:
Really?
Matt Kramer:
Yeah.
Cindy:
That sounds so cool.
Matt Kramer:
Yeah.
Cindy:
I just love how intentional it is. It's this idea that there's humanity at the core, that we are humans, we're developing, we're just trying to grow, and these are the skills that you need along the way, and here's a Sage Mentor to guide you through that. Like just what education should be, simple, beautiful.
Matt Kramer:
And that fundamentally everyone's interests are aligned, that nobody needs to be forced to do anything, that the teachers want the kids to grow, the kids want to grow, the families want the kids to grow, the families want the teachers to have a sustainable work. Actually, we should all be on the same team. There's no conflicting objectives here.
School Leaders’ Countdown: The Final 3! (53:39)
Cindy:
Beautiful. Well, I think that is a gorgeous place to pause. And I think if our audience is not sold on Montessori, I don't know what else would convince them. But I've got a set of three questions that I ask all the guests who come on the show. Are you ready for our final three?
Matt Kramer:
I'm ready.
Cindy:
Okay, number one, I think I might know the answer to this, but what is a book that has had the most profound impact on your life and or your practice?
Matt Kramer:
Ah, I'm gonna answer the second question, the practice question, because the life question seems so big. So I read a book called Reinventing Organizations about, came out in I think 2014, so like almost a decade ago now, and it was a, it was sort of a survey of the way organizations, you know, the way to use the sort of you know, technical word, like industrial organization, the way people get organized into companies or organizations to do stuff. It was a survey of a bunch of sort of path-breaking ideas that were emerging around the world on industrial organization designs that were very different than what I would say of like the dominant GE system, you know, from 25 years ago of like ranking people and you fire everyone who gets a C and everything's measured in Six Sigma, etc. And so this guy, Fred Okolalu, writes this book describing a bunch of people who are rebelling against these ideas, not by going backwards, but by going forward. Like, we want to take the things that work for the system. We want to continue with them. We want to transcend a bunch of the things we don't like about the system. But we have ideas to solve those same problems in different ways. And it sort of presents what a prepared environment for adults doing work might look like.
Cindy:
Mmm.
Matt Kramer:
And it has really influenced the way we think about Wildflower. Just the idea that the things that we take as like, oh, there's only one way to do stuff, that there's actually some really different ways to accomplish the same purposes about how to motivate employees or how to decide where everyone gets paid or whatever. All these sorts of things. There are different thoughts about that. And some of these thoughts are much more aligned. with what we believe about ourselves, what we believe about other people, certainly what we say we believe about other people. And so that book has really, that book has made a big difference for me in just challenging what I, you know, I feel like I spent the first 40 years of my life learning a bunch of skills about how to, you know, make stuff happen with people at scale. And I spent the last decade questioning those things and realizing I think I over-learned a lot of the lessons.
Cindy:
Yeah, I'm adding that book to my list. What is your degree in? Are you in like organizational psychology? Is that what your background is?
Matt Kramer:
I studied economics, but it was a long time ago.
Cindy:
Wow. Okay. Number two, this is my personal inquiry and something I'm trying to learn a lot more about is this idea of we tend to fall in a lot of camps, at least I see in school leadership, that like some people tend to be more focused on metrics and delivering. Others tend to be more focused on sustainability, creating joyous work environments. So how do we find that, strike that balance between creating both joyous and highly productive workspaces?
Matt Kramer:
I mean, in some ways the answer goes back to the same thing I was saying about reinventing organizations is, I think we tend to overlearn lessons, right? We tend to be like, metrics are helpful in that they show people what a common objective is and they give you information about progress towards the objective. And therefore we're gonna design everything we do with metrics. But the problem is there's a lot of places where metrics actually don't work very well, where they actually create problems. So for example, you know, one of the... common problems associated with metrics is they create the sense that everything that matters is covered by metrics. Nobody thinks that's true, right? But it does practically reflect when you look at how they're used in metrics-heavy environments. You'd see a million little moments of saying, I mean, I'll give you an example of this. So strategic planning is a tool of alignment, right? You know, organizations go through these things every five years and they come up with their big strategic plan and If you think about like, well, why do we do that? What's the purpose of strategic planning? And specifically like, when do we want the strategic plan to make a difference in our argument? Like what decisions do we want to influence? And when I think about that, I think about like, okay, so we're gonna create a big strategic plan. A couple of years from now, some person who I've hired and think is very talented is gonna be facing a challenge. where they're going to be looking at the world, they're going to be sensing the world is calling them to do one thing. And they're gonna look at the strategic plan, the strategic plan is gonna tell them to do a different thing. Strategic planning is the message that when you face that situation, choose the strategic plan. Do not do what the world is telling you, you should do next. Do what we said two years ago. That doesn't make any sense when you think about it, right?
So then the question is like, well, why else did we do this? If we don't want people to make that decision, we actually want them to pay attention. and adjust, be evolutionary in their understanding purpose, then what other things were we solving with strategic plan? And the answer is there are other things, right? We were solving communication. We want to have learning. We want to have everyone in the organization understand the best lessons that have been learned to date. We want to make sure the pieces fit together. Like if somebody is going to use resources here, those resources are not going to be available for usage here. So we should have decided that somebody should decide on purpose that that's good. Like there's things like that that actually aren't intentional. But we can solve those in other ways. And I think the thing I would say about the joy versus metrics
Cindy:
Mmm.
Matt Kramer:
thing is there is something important about metrics. And there is something problematic about metrics. And if you can tell the difference, you can transcend the problems and think about what comes next. And the same is true about joyous work cultures. There is too much of that. There is such a thing as too much of that. And so if the purpose of work is just for everyone to be happy, then. we're not gonna be accomplishing anything. So I think the same thing is true, is like what parts of the joy-centered culture are doing what you want them to do and they need to be like the anchors you don't let go of, and what parts are not working? What parts have unintended consequences? And we can leave those behind and ask the question about what's next. And I just think there is a synthesis on almost every one of these dichotomy questions that pose, they're opposed to each other only because the lens we bring to see the problem. doesn't acknowledge the extra dimension that like brings it all into display. It looks flat. It looks alternative to each other because we lack the ability to see in the space where there's a there's an integrated solution. But we just have to teach ourselves to do that. You have to step back. You have to ask what you're going to keep and you teach yourself to see another dimension. And then you find out later there's more dimensions after that too. Like this is a spiral that is not going to stop. Our job in the window of time we've got is to see farther than what was handled. Yeah.
Cindy:
As deep as we can. That's a cool way of looking at it. Awesome. All right, final question for you. You have such a unique experience in education, your background and just what you're creating now. So what would be one piece of advice that you would give educational leaders that you think would have the most profound impact on their practice?
Matt Kramer:
I think the most important advice I would say is... is to pursue truth in your own sense of who you are and what you do, to not allow yourself to get in the habits of, well, this is how we do things. And, you know, I think, you know, knowledge that has been handed down from other people who, as my seventh grade Latin teacher used to say, what the big Romans told the little Romans, that stuff gets corrupted really easily. doesn't even take a long game of telephone, gets corrupted the minute the second person who didn't invent the rules is trying to apply it, just assumes that what the big Roman said is the right stuff. And so I hate this thing, nothing is as important as like returning to first principles often and asking yourself, like, why do I do this? What do I really believe about people? What do I really believe about curriculum? What do I really... and not accepting the simple inherited wisdom. Because I just think like this is not to... devalue the inherited wisdom. The inherited wisdom was exactly the right solution by a truth seeker in a different environment at a different time. It just doesn't apply exactly to your environment and your time when you're leading. And mine as well, to be personal about it. So I think that's my biggest advice is just, is to dig in on things that you just sort of are taking, that we take for granted that have been handed to us as the right way to do things.
Cindy:
Know yourself, know what you believe and act on it. I love that. Well, this has been such a beautiful conversation. I think it's such a niche thing you're doing, but so many of the lessons are transferable to our audience. So I hope they enjoy this conversation half as much as I have.
Matt Kramer:
I hope they do as well and this is important work everyone is doing here in educational leadership and and my heart is with all of them.
Cindy:
Thanks so much, Matt.
