Elliot Washor's TGIF 04.25.2025

“Are you with me now” A J Ryder

Heading for the Nearest Foreign Border – Part 2 – This must be da place!

This week Sonn, Scott and I went to Winnipeg where we spent time in the Winnipeg School Division with nine schools and were also at meetings and dinners with a superintendent from Garden Valley District, a college administrator from Red River Polytechnic and did a workshop with our first school at the Seven Oaks School Division where we have a total of three schools.

Where else but Manitoba and Winnipeg do we have someone in the Canadian Parliament who was a BPL principal; a Province (state) education commissioner who 19 years ago brought Big Picture to his district when he was the superintendent of Seven Oaks School Division; a former BPL principal and now superintendent of the largest school division in Winnipeg who wants us to influence the entire k-12 district; a district in Winnipeg with three thriving BPL schools; a 2- and 4-year polytechnic college that is creating BPL-type programming. Nowhere! We haven’t been this close to local/statewide/national influence since we started in Rhode Island only, this time we have loads of practitioners who really know how to do the work and have been at it for a very long time. The work just described was not done with a formal strategic plan. It was a MUDDLER for sure. It was done in fits and starts and is certainly not over. Do our technology platforms help? Certainly, but they are still not the cause of the spread. This was spread through human sensibilities where BPL’s simple language comes from our practice where the humanity hasn’t been stripped away or replaced by edubabble. This is because here language follows practice and is clear, clean, sensible and meaningful.

So why Winnipeg? As we were having our last meeting with school principals today Scott mentioned how the research shows that like BPL, Chinese restaurants spread and scaled in ways where the food and settings are both similar and different in every restaurant around the world without being a franchise. This research was the work of Charles Handy, who also wrote about our own spreading in a similar way. Then through his personal experiences, principal Vinh Huynh of Gordon Bell, a 7-12 school chimed in and told the inside story about how the spread of Chinese Restaurant’s actually happens. Turns out that all the Chinese restaurants close for business on the same day and the owners will drive hours, if need be, to go to play mahjong and while playing will discuss their recipes for specific dishes. I knew the story of the spread of Chinese restaurants but didn’t know the community of practice back story of how the restaurant recipes spread with each restaurant maintaining its own local touch. It was a great story coming from Vinh’s experience about spread and his connections to both the worlds of Chinese restaurants and BPL. There’s always way more to the story but this is a TGIF, not a book.

One more thing on the topic of spreading our work through human connection and community, next week we are taking 40 people to Australia for a trip to explore the International Big Picture Learning Credential (IBPLC) in action. Here’s a photo from 2006 of two students we took to Australia with Eve Gordon then principal of MetWest in Oakland. It was my second trip there.

 The way we started and spread the work back then was with students playing an integral role by talking about their experiences with educators. Now 19 years later, we have over 50 schools. The IBPLC work done jointly by our respective teams in Australia and the US led by Andrea is groundbreaking in and of itself. We have Scott with us to capture the work in words and Joanne from Viv’s team who will video the journey. Away we go!