Elliot Washor's TGIF 04.10.2026

Are you with me now? AJ Ryder

Hands up!

This Easter, I spent time with friends who are in the construction business on land and sea. This is not unusual for me but this time it was even more meaningful given the grant we received to develop an apprenticeship program called S.T.A.R.T. that will have 18-year-olds enter the carpenters union apprenticeship program upon high school graduation.

My friends are not people who spent their lives in school as traditional academics. They are masters of their craft. They work together to solve problems, reading both situations and text, making calculations, and figuring things out in real time. This combines both our becomes and incomes that our data systems do not measure as outcomes. This is informal learning—learning that is grounded in experience and the senses.

Yet this is precisely the kind of learning most schools and colleges tend to reject. Unfortunately, I continue to hear this narrative over and over from college admissions. In formal education, value is placed almost entirely on written performance, with little regard for how we actually perceive, interpret, and create knowledge through all our senses. Informal learning is about meaning and mattering. Each person drives their informal learning in chosen communities.

One of our biggest challenges is the decline in our ability to use all our senses to make nuanced judgments. Here is where our search for meaning and mattering wanes. Tools like OpenAI can sometimes compound this problem by stripping away ambiguity and presenting complex issues with an unwarranted sense of certainty. In doing so, reason risks distorting everything that cannot be neatly reduced to it. This is not only a large part of our education system but also how we measure and research learning. Garbage in, garbage out.

More on hands on learning from a college

My first stop after Easter weekend was to Lincoln, MA to meet up with Brandon Lane who works at the Met’s Entrepreneur and Innovation Center and MIT professors Ian Hunter and Lynette Jones at their home. When you walk in you realize you are truly entering a Cabinet of Curiosities. Their home was loaded with artifacts, crafts, paintings, and objects that immediately told you who they are. Designed and built by them, the place could be overwhelming if not for the sense of wonder you get by wandering through. Ian is an inventor and entrepreneur with over 150 patent and pending patents. Like his two uncles—Bruce McLaren the Formula One designer, engineer and driver and another who invented the steam turbine—they learn by doing. In our talks, Ian strongly rejected what most schools do to kids all day. He believed their informal learning should guide them and they should go deep into the systems they are interested in learning about. He noted, "These are the students at MIT." They are curious and have know-how, not just know-what. I could go on and on about my visit but I will stop here and just say that in his home lab, he invented materials that take K-12 students at their own pace through hands-on learning that gives them the opportunities to explore and learn about the principles of how things work. There are lots of possibilities here. More meetings are being set up.

On a connected note, Frank Wilson sent me an article in the NY Times – The Sense of Touch at Billboard Scale about conceptual artist Ann Hamilton who uses tactile senses in her large installations. 

“We think through our bodies,” Hamilton said at her studio in Columbus, Ohio, a former auto-body shop with wooden rafters that groaned in the March wind. “If you look at the structure of the brain, so much of the circuity is devoted to the hands,” Hamilton said, flexing her own knuckly fingers. From a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf she pulled a copy of “The Hand,” Frank R. Wilson’s study of that appendage and its role in the evolution of intelligence.

She clarified: “We are our bodies.”

And, by sheer coincidence, Lynette Jones researches exactly what artist Ann Hamilton makes. Her areas of research include Haptics - how the skin detects things like pressure, vibration, temperature, and texture. When I asked Lynette if she knew about Frank’s book, you know what the answer was.

Next, I was off to Winnipeg for the first Big Picture Learning Conference in Canada, where I met up with Taylor, Sonn, Carlos, Chris, Karla, Jeff and Nas. This was three days of just incredible joy.

“This is an instant classic and it just came out.” Nas

The conference started with a very different Leadership Journeys. Three practitioners from the Winnipeg School Division told their stories. Because everyone knew everyone, everything felt even more personal and community-minded. Here there were no big-name education celebrities or authors. These were educators with incredible life stories. The Leadership journeys format brought everyone together. What a way to start a local conference.

“You don’t need to fit in. You were born to stand out.” Kamal

Sonn, Jeff, Taylor and I addressed the entire group at selected points in the conference around different components of BPL. One of Sonn’s major points was addressing how AI can support students finding internships. He brilliantly did this in real time. Taylor and I focused on the leadership qualities of each principal and Jeff gave a brilliant talk on Fannie Lou and his role there as principal for 13 years.

Through all of this there were students like Aidan who were magnificent emcees and presenters. This first day of the conference was a Leaving to Learn and Advisory Day. The next day was a Project Con day where students from schools all over Winnipeg presented their work.

One of my favorites were two young women who took a 16-hour skidoo journey up to the reserve in Churchill where they are from. The temperature without windchill got to -48 Celsius. There were breakdowns and more on this incredible journey to the place they call home. It doesn’t get more real-world in meaningful ways than what these two young women did.

Next week, I’m back home for our big presence at the ASU GSV conference. We’ve been doing loads of planning for this one and I’m sure all will go well. Then, off to New Jersey for our first face to face S.T.A.R.T. Center meeting with all of our partners.

Be well.