Elliot Washor's TGIF 08.28.2025

Are you with me now? AJ Ryder

First off, it is always great to be back in Australia with our incredible BPAustralia team who do extraordionary work in the public education sphere. Like everywhere else what should be common sense and easy is not. The photo above from May 12, 2006 is with two students from MetWest and principal Eve Gordon who came with me to Australia on a two-week trip to really show what we have done. At that time in the US there were 54 Big Picture Schools. Twenty years later, there are 66 BPL schools in Australia..

But that is just schools. Remember BPL is Schools, Innovations and Influence. Our practice has always led to innovation and influence

Working Our Way Through College — Johnny Mercer

After a long week, we finally worked through the issues around the International Big Picture Learning Credential (IBPLC) with the University of Melbourne and Northeastern University. The conversations included warrants, endorsements, research, and how all of these pieces fit together. It took a trip to Australia and a full week of face-to-face meetings but it was worth it.

Andrea and I were there with Viv, John, JR, and teams from both universities. Northeastern’s group included an old friend, Connie Yowell, along with Michael Dean and Amy Briesch, and Sandra Milligan joined us from the University of Melbourne. This was not an easy negotiation. There were plenty of issues to work through, but having two universities of this caliber working alongside us on the IBPLC is huge.

Northeastern is an especially interesting partner because its decades-old Cooperative Education (Co-op) program integrates months-long, full-time professional experiences with academic study. In many ways, that is a higher education extension of the kind of real-world learning we have been doing in K–12 for decades. Northeastern also acquired the former Mills College campus in the Bay Area, which opens up some interesting possibilities for our California work.

Beyond the IBPLC, we are also talking with Northeastern about aligning our work around the skilled trades, particularly work on the waterfront. The IBPLC could become part of how we assess and recognize what people actually do and then know through this work.

And our higher education work continues this coming week. We are putting together a proposal around awarding college credit for skilled trades learning, and partnering with colleges toward four-year degrees from the accumulation of these credits.

For far too long, the skilled trades have been treated as somehow “less than” academic learning. Yet anyone who has watched a skilled carpenter, electrician, welder, plumber, machinist, or other craftsperson work knows how much knowledge, judgment, problem-solving, and intelligence the work requires. College credit is one way of giving this learning the status and recognition it deserves.

We already have a glimpse of what is possible through our START Center work in New Jersey. Students at the Eastern Atlantic States Contractors Training Center can earn transferable college credits through their apprenticeship training that can eventually be applied toward a bachelor’s degree with partner universities. Students can also earn 15 college credits for completing Career Connections before finishing high school.

The grant proposal we are developing would take this much further. The goal is to build a system that makes it possible for many more high school students and apprentices to earn college credit for what they already do and know—either free or at a fraction of what college normally costs.

It’s a Sign — Street Art

We all start out playing in the dirt with sticks and stones, manipulating objects and trying to make them do what we want them to do. We make things. We break things. We put them back together. We figure out how the world works using our head, hands and heart.

Then something happens.

As we move through school, that fascination with making and doing seems to give way to abstraction—even when we don’t fully understand the abstraction. Somehow, we have decided that abstract knowledge is more sophisticated than concrete knowledge. One has taken priority over the other.

That’s why I was glad to see two articles in The New York Times this past week that uplifted both the work and the people doing it. One was about the people who make the millions of street signs around New York City.

The other was about the workers who spray-paint the streets to show where pipes, cables, and wires are buried underground whenever someone needs to dig, build, repair, or upgrade something. The author even elevated these markings—these little bits of “graffiti”—to the level of street art.

There is enormous intelligence embedded in this kind of work. You have to know materials, tools, systems, sequences, measurements, safety, place, and how one action affects another. Yet we too often treat this knowledge as “low-brow” because it is concrete and physical rather than considering the abstract and academic parts of doing.

That brings me back to our week in Australia.

As we worked in groups reviewing the BPL Learning Goals, the conversation kept drifting toward assigning numbers to the learning frames and creating progressions that moved, as they so often do, from concrete to abstract. The same thing happens when we talk about durable skills: the higher levels somehow become increasingly abstract.

But I’m not at all convinced that is how expertise works.

When I read the learning described at the beginning of those frames, I’m always struck by something else. Stay with the concrete long enough. Keep working at it. Keep noticing more. Keep refining your judgment, your touch, your timing, and your understanding. Eventually, expertise and mastery begin to shine through.

The concrete doesn’t necessarily lead to the abstract. Sometimes going deeper into the concrete is mastery. Here the knowledge is deeper than we think.

As one of my childhood buddies once told me, “It is better to be thorough than brilliant.”

I’m not sure we see that yet in the way we judge all students—or all forms of intelligence.

’Nuff said.

Next week, I’ll be back in San Diego working on California Secondary School Redesign work focused in San Diego while I’m zooming back to New Jersey for meetings on system operations that will allow our work to scale.

Be well!