Elliot Washor's TGIF 10.09.2026

Are You With Me Now? — AJ Ryder

Here I am with Gloria Oliva Molina in Marbella, Spain. Gloria has been working for probably eight years to make Big Picture Learning happen in Spain. No easy task! But she's persistent, and with Scott's support, she's brought educators to visit BPL schools in the Netherlands and Biella, Italy, to see firsthand what this work looks like.

While we were together, I brought Sonn into the conversation by phone to brainstorm next steps. As we've learned over the years, making this work happen takes time, relationships, persistence, and a few people who just won't give up.

We also talked a little history. Some of BPL's roots can be traced to the Modern School movement started by Francisco Ferrer in Barcelona more than a century ago. So, in a way, bringing Big Picture Learning to Spain is also bringing some of these ideas back home. Ahh! The past becoming the present once again.

You'll probably see Gloria this summer at Big Bang in Puerto Rico, where we're planning a preconference gathering of our international colleagues. Another reminder that Big Picture Learning has never been just about schools. It's about people finding one another, learning from one another, and figuring out how to make things happen wherever they are.

After reading the national report, The State of America’s Skilled Trades, I came away with that all-too-familiar feeling that we're getting more history and accounting of what's happening than a serious look at what needs to change. We're still relying on traditional pathways, traditional coursework, and traditional measures, even when it's clear that much of this isn't working. Yes, the report highlights some excellent programs doing important work, but we're still asking students to keep two sets of books—one for school and another for the real world—while not really listening to what industry is telling us.

What's missing? Early exposure, learning through relationships with mentors, and figuring out how to deal with the insurance and liability barriers that keep young people from getting onto actual worksites. And perhaps most importantly, how do we sustain young people's interest over time by connecting them to work that is meaningful to them, not just training them to fill a job?

This coming week, I'll be at the Teaching With Small Boats Alliance Conference, where I'm on a panel about new measures—or more to the point, what we should be measuring in the first place. I'll be raising these very questions.

Programs like Habitat for Aviation are already showing us what's possible when we approach learning differently. And this week, Beth White and her team are Feeling Fine on Cloud Nine!

It’s been a long haul, but persistence pays off! Beth White and her team at Habitat for Aviation just won a $500,000 Yass Prize. And Habitat for Aviation is also one of our B-Unbound sites. Ahh! Not only do we have something to talk about when it comes to changing how young people learn, we have something to show. And that's what makes all the difference.

Next week, I’ll be at the Teaching With Small Boats Alliance (TWSBA) conference, doing a fireside chat with Joe Youcha, who got this whole thing started, along with a session on measurement and assessment. In both conversations, I’ll be drawing on The Education Pivot: Meaning and Mattering in the Age of AI. Our skilled trades work on land and sea is already beginning to come together, and this gathering gives us another opportunity to connect the people, the work, and the ideas around what really matters.

This week, I also had a long conversation with a woman I know who earned an actuarial designation, one of the most demanding professional credentials around. I asked her what AI was doing to her field. Her answer was simple: You can't take AI at face value, and nothing replaces human judgment. Ahh! There's the high bar. No matter how sophisticated AI becomes, someone still has to know enough to question, challenge, and make sense of what it produces. Which raises another question: If human judgment is what matters most, why aren't we doing a better job of developing and accessing it in our schools? Can anyone say IBPLC?

On Wednesday, our team—Big Picture Learning, Javier Guzman and his Center for Powerful Schools, and Linked Learning—had our 45-minute presentation and conversation with administrators from Los Angeles Unified School District and representatives from the Broad and Carnegie Foundations. We're finalists for a $12.1 million grant to create 6,000 paid student internships over three years. What made this especially meaningful was bringing together three organizations already connected through the California Secondary School Redesign network. Regardless of who wins, this competition has given us something we might not otherwise have had: the opportunity to move beyond talking about working together to actually doing it. That's a big step forward.

We'll know in about a week whether we've been awarded the grant. And once again, this work doesn't look much like what I read in The State of America's Skilled Trades report. We're not trying to do the same things a little better. We're trying to do things differently in the first place.

First different, then better. Nuff said.