True North: The Key to Navigating Change in Education

In this episode Amy Edelstein explores what it can meet to root in our True North, our deepest values, when we lean into how education needs to transform.

The questions surrounding education's future form an intricate web: How do we pause and reflect while simultaneously responding to the immediate needs of our students? Who funds it and why? What outcomes do we desire? How do we serve students with vastly different backgrounds and trajectories? 

When confronting  complexity, Amy looks at how returning to a "true north" of universal human values—compassion, care, and recognition of each person's dignity—provides both stability and flexibility. 

This podcast explores the essential paradox of educational transformation: we need time for deep reflection, yet our students continue growing each day, requiring immediate guidance. By embracing both patience and urgency, holding our preconceived ideas lightly while standing firmly in our humanity, we create space for innovations that honor both the passionate curiosity of youth and the thoughtful discernment needed for lasting change.

Chapters

• 0:10 Welcome to Conscious Classroom
• 1:54 Dialogue with Thurman and Kabat-Zinn
• 6:22 Reflecting on Education's Complexities
• 14:40 Key Questions About Education's Future
• 21:14 Finding Balance Through True North
• 26:18 Closing Thoughts and Invitation

Transcript

Amy: 0:10

Welcome to the Conscious Classroom podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teams to create more conscious, supportive and enriching learning environments. I'm your host, amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking. The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfillment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share. Let's get on with this next episode. Hello and welcome to the Conscious Classroom podcast. My name is Amy Edelstein. I am really looking forward to this exploration.

Amy: 1:01

Today, I want to unpack some of my recent experience and also some of the larger questions that I've been reflecting on, which really have to do with dropping into our deeper meaning, purpose and direction, and how we do that when we're in the middle of an education environment where we have to respond day in and day out and the students never stop coming and the students never stop growing and the students never stop needing guidance and to be educated. So how do we pause and reflect and center at the same time as responding to all of the immediate needs that can't wait? Last week, I had the delightful privilege and opportunity to convene and moderate a dialogue with Robert Thurman and Jon Kabat-Zinn focused around the future of education. Both of these individuals are extraordinary in the depth and breadth of their knowledge, their quality of reflection over decades and their tireless commitment to bringing the wisdom of Eastern teachings, the Dharma, into the West. We all owe them a huge debt of gratitude If Robert Thurman hadn't learned Tibetan and become the Dalai Lama's translator for 10 years and hosted numerous Eastern teachers at his own apartment in New York way before it was fashionable, where the Dalai Lama's work and the teachings of that tradition have become so well known and studied in fields ranging from neuroscience to trauma recovery. And he really single-handedly dedicated so much of his life to this that we, if we're involved in any of these, have read any of his books or studied any of these teachings or been exposed to even short videos with the Dalai Lama and been inspired. We really do owe him a debt of gratitude for his service and passion and commitment.

Amy: 3:50

And Jon Kabat-Zinn, when it comes to the world of mindfulness. He is the father of Western mindfulness, bringing it to UMass Medical Center early on, doing research on how it could mitigate the impacts of diseases, starting in 1979. And now mindfulness is more than a household word. Even on your iPhone, for your snooze controls or your focus controls, you have a mindfulness control. I know he never would have thought 50 years ago, when it was so fringy and woo-woo, that it would become so popular, so well-known, so well-used and so well-applied in everything from medicine to education, medicine to education.

Amy: 4:53

So, being with these two giants, I really wanted to hear from them about the insights and principles that they feel are most important for our individual and collective transformation. What is going to help our students mature into wise, compassionate and self-actualized individuals? What helped them? What are the insights that have been mainstays for both of them was just incredibly far-reaching. It was for two individuals who've spent a lifetime immersed in teachings around human wisdom and higher human capacities and mitigating the lower baser impulses of human nature and supporting healing and recovery.

Amy: 5:49

It's very hard to stay on one single train of thought, and when it comes to education, education includes everything, so it's very hard to limit what we're talking about. Sometimes the themes that were surfacing seemed a little bit left of center, a little bit beside the point, and yet, of course, they were entirely relevant. What's our bias for scientific materialism scientism as it's sometimes called, and how does that limit the ways that we can know and intuit? How are we selling humanity and our world short if that's our only acceptable frame of reference? How can we stay present, immediate those who are on the audience and those who are watching online with our own reactions as they're happening, even as we're considering things that are so vast? When they were touching on structural or political issues and one participant insisted that that was at odds with a spiritual analysis and that the heart of our strife in the world today has a spiritual nature to it and we need to return to that which is most important. Certainly a valid viewpoint, and yet only one approach.

Amy: 7:37

Some people left completely inspired, uplifted, optimistic and reassured that we can touch into the better angels of our nature and reach our students and align with our school communities and move forward with optimism and passion. Some people left completely agitated and frustrated at the complexity that there was no clear path, that we were laying out with steps A, b and C, and for me, I left reflecting on both the content and many questions that require deeper thinking and also simply the overarching challenges of feeling like you're making progress on a deep level when you're engaging with the future of education design, when we're looking at the future of education and wondering how we teach students and prepare students for a world that's unknown and unknowable at this point, what are our pathways? When we're thinking about a school system that is reaching millions of young people, all with different needs, cultural habits, family situations, individual learning patterns, aspirations, talents, how do we think about all of it? And there's always a conundrum, because if we pull together thinkers who are deep in the education system, working in the school environment day in and day out, and we talk about how to remediate the situation, we're going to get involved in the nuts and bolts of schools and curriculum, the logistics of moving students in and out, of matriculating them and graduating them.

Amy: 9:50

And oftentimes in those conversations, while incredibly valuable, we seem to stay on the surface of things. Of course the surface is important. If you look at our earth, we need roads and canals, we need topsoil and habitats for all kinds of creatures on the surface of the earth. At the same time, if we're building new roads or revitalizing the topsoil or leveling and replanting a field, we may miss the qualitative shift and the more profound transformation that has to take place at deeper levels, those qualitative shifts that lead to an opening up of the heart and imagination that can open up not just new pathways but profound sense of grace and healing and vision and care.

Amy: 11:01

So these are some of the questions that I was reflecting on how do we have conversations like this that are truly going to go somewhere and illuminate both the answers and the questions that we need to be thinking about? So the more I reflected on it, I really felt that dropping into the spiritual heart of the matter, the essence of what brings care and compassion, of generosity and awakened perspectives and real human to human, in the moment connection, can help us navigate the complexities of thinking about the future of education. Staying grounded in the individuality and immediacy, even while we're thinking about hundreds of thousands or millions of students, even while we're thinking about hundreds of thousands or millions of students, is entirely possible and it comes from that focus on the human connection and the reaching out from care to care, from my care to my students' care, from the educator's care to the administrator's care, and it enables us to really drop into an open and curious, inquisitive and humble perspective as we look at these questions that touch really all of our social structures and, in one way or another, everyone in our world's population. The question of how we educate, who we educate, where we do it, where we're heading with it. What are our goals, our fundamental ones that touch on our heart and our value, how we're caring for our entire world, from the most privileged to the most impoverished. These are some of the questions that I want to hold in our discussion as we talk about them, discussion as we talk about them, and these are some of the questions that I was really reflecting on, and reflecting on how we bring a unitive framework to all of these diverse needs and complexities that we really do have to contend with if we're talking about the future of education. It's just how do we approach it and how do we contend with these questions that is going to make all the difference. So I'm just going to throw out a few of these, and you can see that taking any one of these and dropping in deeply opens up Indra's net of interconnection, cause and effect, and big social structures that really do need changing because they're not meeting the needs of our times and it's not clear how. So let's think about it.

Amy: 14:43

Who pays for education? Why are they paying for education and where are they paying for education? Why are they paying for education and where are they paying for education? What are we educating for? What are the desired outcomes? What do we want our young people to be able to do? What are the personal skills that are needed? What are the needs in our society now and in the future?

Amy: 15:15

How do we serve students from very different walks of life, with different experiences of life, different cultural backgrounds, different economic backgrounds, different vocational trajectories? What's the method to serve farmers and technologists? To serve future social workers and future machinists? Who's going to decide who fits into what category? Who's going to ask the students and penetrate into their needs? What worldview is going to govern what we teach and learn? What's the context that we're educating in, because there always is one, hidden or visible. What are we using, hidden or visible? What are we using? What ruler are we using to measure outcomes and impact, progress and attainment? Comparing apples to oranges what do students need to help them learn? What wraparound services? What is going to make them even able to open their minds and hearts, to be ready to learn, given their life circumstances stressors, traumas, physical needs, neurodivergence?

Amy: 16:41

Should we be keeping students in single-age classrooms? Are they developing holistic skills of care and mentorship and peer leadership and support. Is that system the best system at all? What guidance and discipline and and structures do students need so that they feel secure and have a direction? And how can we do that and leave them free and unsupervised so they cultivate agency, they develop independence, they learn self-reliance, they struggle and cultivate their own problem-solving skills, communication and conflict resolution? How do we let them muddle through in a way that builds their character, their confidence and their conviction in their own self-worth? How do we expand horizons for those who feel that their pathways are very limited and how do we open the horizons of those who feel the world is at their fingertips when yet they don't see the lives of so many of the under-resourced people around the world? What are the universal principles that we want to focus on Love, care, compassion and what are the cultural specificities we need to develop? These are just some of the questions, and there are so many more.

Amy: 18:37

With all these questions and the complexity involved with them, I always seek to adopt a perspective that embraces and includes, that looks at the different perspectives and that opens up from the heart of the matter, which is the cultivation of our higher capacities and the guidance and mentorship of our young people to be the most wise, discerning and caring individuals that they can be. So sometimes that requires stepping back, recognizing what's not knowable yet what's ultimately not knowable, what I don't know, recognizing the validity in opposing points of view or what might be underlying those opposing points of view, and holding firm to the care for all souls, holding firm to caring for the humanity of all souls. With the recent passing, this past week, of Pope Francis, the world's had a chance to reflect on very simple values love and humility, the one-to-one connection between individuals and how, when we individually embrace one another, we connect at a level of life essence rather than position or dogma. What I found so moving and reflecting on many of his actions is the care and fluidity and softness that comes from being firmly rooted in one's deepest values and highest aspirations and, at the same time, not shying away from the complexity of bringing about a better world. A better world. There's no doubt that there are many different pathways to lead us to improve education, educational outcomes and to improve the world that our young people are going to grow. We may disagree, even strongly, about those pathways, and yet the care is for the well-being of everyone, the well-being of each individual, and allowing ourselves to hold preconceived ideas lightly as we consider the way forward helps us find balance around an issue that is just terribly knotted and twisted and complex knotted and twisted and complex and seemingly unsolvable. It allows us to find balance in by standing in our heart, in our humanity, and standing in that which is simple and sacred, that recognizes that which is both singular, individual and symbiotic, correlated, and then we can find our way, allowing ourselves to grow and learn, recognizing wrong turns and moving past them, and moving past them seeking forgiveness and amends when harm has been done unintentionally through our own lack of vision or lack of understanding. It happens when we stay rooted in that true north, in that care for all those students we minister to and for the world that they're going to inherit, we can continue, in spite of many of the challenges and interruptions along the way.

Amy: 23:23

When we contemplate the future of education, the essential paradox that we have to lean into is that there is so much to discover and to reflect on and to parse apart, and yet we have no time, because young people are growing now. They're needing guidance. Now they're needing nurturance and directions. They have questions, changes happening, they have an urgency, which is the urgency of youth, that urgency which wants to know yesterday, and we want to Tend to that and respond to that and cultivate that sense of passion for the possible and take the time that we need.

Amy: 24:14

When we root in that sense of our true north, of those deeper values that are timeless, we find qualities of both patience and impatience.

Amy: 24:32

We can wait and learn and proceed with care and not take any time with connecting with another's humanity, sitting down and breaking bread, metaphorically or actually, to cross borders and boundaries and meet in a shared purpose, which is to bring about a better world, even if we are not sure how to get there or have very different ideas.

Amy: 25:08

So, as all of you, my listeners, know that my passion is to bring about a better world, my channel is education and the future of education, and in my work on projects that will lead us into the future, I am very eager to learn and connect with those of you who have ideas and questions and vision, so we can really pool our resources and get into real conversation about the possible and lean in, ready to adjust course, ready to release what doesn't work, ready to start anew, always guided by that true north, and as we do this, we'll involve our young people in these discussions as well. We'll listen and we'll hear, we'll question and we'll offer, question and will offer, and together we'll lean into a possibility of an education system that brings about the qualities of wisdom and care, so that all those individuals can continue to create a world that we all want to share. Thank you for listening. Till next time.

Amy: 26:58

Thank you for listening to the Conscious Classroom. I'm your host, amy Edelstein. Please check out the show notes on innerstrengthfoundationnet for links and more information, and if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on. See you next time.