Elliot Washor's TGIF 10.24.2025

Are you with me now? A. J. Ryder

Going down the rabbit hole

A couple of weeks ago Andrew asked me to dig up all the research I could find that was done on BPL and our schools. He wanted all of these reports for the research advisory team of Andrew, Jennifer Pam and I led by Eliot Levine to develop a BPL research agenda for the Impact Campaign. Today I sent Andrew over 70 research reports that I and Scott Boldt found. In retrospect, what I learned going through them was from the get-go, we were very clever all the way through. That’s thirty-one years of research on a design that started at the beginning of BPL then known as Big Picture Company, a year before The Met started. To describe how we did what we did researchers coined strategies like:

Squatting

Bouncing Around

Concretizing

Playing Loose

Laying Wire

.

Yep, one of the original initiatives of BPL’s work was the Rhode Island Project as shown above, a report by Elayne Walker Cabral and Joe McDonald

Below is an excerpt that starts one of the chapters

It seems that the very experiences these children seek out are ones we avoid: disequilibrium, novelty, loss of control, surprise. These make for a good playground, but for a dangerous life. We avoid these things so much that if an organization were to take the form of a teeter-totter, we'd brace it up at both ends, turning it into a straight plank. Margaret Wheatley

One great strength of the Rhode Island Project is that it wants to keep the teeter-totter -- both for itself as an organization, and for the entities it creates, like the MET. In our view, given the novelty of its perspective on systemic reform, the complexity of its tasks, and the complexity of the Rhode Island environment, the project could not have accomplished what it has accomplished to date if it had prized equilibrium. On the other hand, the ride has not been smooth. During the first four months especially, some members of the staff had great difficulty tolerating the feeling of what seemed to them an absence of control.

What we did was design for serendipity. We designed both an organization and a school to fit the moment and this does not happen often. This is almost unheard of given that schools are about specific content delivery and specified times. I love when I hear those stories of student serendipity. I almost want to talk about having no pathway and finding your way rather than specifying a certain number of pathways to go down but that is school, not life. Funny, in between the line of  the Bob Dylan song that took on the name of the Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown was With no direction home, 

A complete unknown 

Like a Rolling Stone. Hmmm?

Poets and songwriters understand.

Two other early research reports that caught my attention were the ones done by Scott Boldt and Adria Steinberg. Yep, Scott was with us starting about 25 years ago when he did an analysis of our practice and philosophy comparing our work to the work of Dewey, Freire, Tolstoy and Vygotsky. Different from one another yet, in similar ways to us, we align with each one. The other report was done by Adria Steinberg:

43 Valedictorians

Graduates of The Met talk about their Learning

Adria interviewed all of our students from the first graduating class of The Met. I’ve looked back at this study many times and find something new every time.

Internalizing Standards: Working Harder and Getting Smarter

One student succinctly described in her graduation speech the trajectory that has resulted in her decision to go to college and become a social worker: “I went from hair care to human repair.” Allowed to pursue her interest in cosmetology, she came to realize how much she enjoyed the social aspects of the work, and the degree to which many people use their hair care appointments therapeutically. By her senior year, she was doing an internship with a social worker and committed to pursuing that course of study in college. As her mother commented gratefully at graduation, “Finally, my daughter’s head is stuck to the rest of her body.”

Next week, I’ll be in New Orleans with our Weavers group as we grapple with what the internal workings of BPL becomes as it grows in all sorts of ways. This is a prelude for the upcoming BPL staff meeting in December in Dallas, Texas. Also, the day after Weavers, I have meetings set up at Full-scale.  And, as always whenever I’m in New Orleans, Monday evening is reserved for my time at Snug Harbor with Charmaine Neville.

Be well and Plenty, plenty, bye, bye