Learnlife learners on self-determined, lifelong learning

Lisa: Maybe we can start by talking about what makes Learnlife different from other schools, from other learning communities? What makes it special? You guys start since you’ve come from different places. Gerard, you want to start with your experience from being at a couple of schools before here?

Gerard: So yeah, of course. So I’ve been to three schools before coming here. I went to one in Barcelona. Actually, I went to two in Barcelona. One was a super traditional Catholic school that didn’t really teach much. It was more of keeping you there and forcing you to memorize things. Then I went to another one which was a super international school—well, quote-unquote “super international” because they weren’t really international—in which, yeah, they pushed you to learn things, but they also used memorization techniques that didn’t last long in the brain. So I didn’t really learn much there either.

And then I moved to the States and I went to an art school where I focused myself on art, just photography, videography, drawing, and there I did learn a bunch because they use completely different methods to what I was used to. But they still did exams and they still had traditional subjects because it was a charter school. And after realising that that does not work for me, because I just can’t do that because I’m not a memorization person and it’s just not my thing, I decided that I wasn’t going to school anymore.

And my parents were not happy with that decision, so they looked around and they found Learnlife. And I came here once on a Thursday, I was here for three hours—or actually two hours. I looked around, got introduced to everything. I liked it so much that I started on Monday and it’s been great ever since. I’ve grown so much in the last eleven months. I went from being pretty… from having no guiding/teaching skills to being able to lead my own class and teach in the afternoon programmes here.

Lisa: Wow! Would you say there are some of the big differences when you arrived here? This is learning differently?

Gerard: Well, no exams. That was the first big thing that I was really happy about. No homework. And you could choose what you want to learn. You could sit down and say, “Hey, so this is my passion, this is what I like, and this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” and they help you get there. They push you to it and they teach you how to push yourself and to do things. And they teach you how to learn.

It’s not you sitting down being like, “Okay, so X plus Y equals 3. How am I gonna solve this?” And then you look at a textbook and memorize it, and then three weeks later you’re like, “Huh, what?” It’s more organic. They teach you how to say, “Okay, I want to learn this. I’m gonna sit down for three hours today, I’m gonna sit down for three hours tomorrow, I’m gonna figure it out.” And if I can’t remember in 15 days, I can do the same thing.

Samir: For me, I grew up in Russia and I went first to an international school. And at first I liked it, but then I realised that… I mean, for me, I was happy there because I never knew a different reality than that one. Then my mom decided—my parents both actually decided to move me to a private Russian school, and that was probably my worst experience of school ever for me because the way the teachers treated you there was horrible. They would sometimes insult you, they would tell you what to do if you were right or wrong, and it was just not a place where I wanted to be.

So my parents realised that it just isn’t working like that because, at some rate, the kids, according to the teachers, were so badly behaved every day that they just wanted a parent to come and sit in every class to watch the kids. And my parents then realised that this is not gonna work, and I was homeschooled for about half a year.

And then my parents—first, they wanted to live in Berlin because my dad is German. We speak the language and it was the easy option. But unfortunately, they only had one place in the school we wanted to go, and I have a twin brother, and it wouldn’t work because if I went to school, he wouldn’t. I mean, we could have tried the strategy where I go one day, he goes the other day… We decided to move to Barcelona.

And the first day I went to Momo, which is the partner school of Learnlife, and it was hard for me because it was a completely new way of learning and I didn’t speak the language. But thanks to Momo, I learned Catalan and Spanish in the first year. And then I came to Learnlife, and it was more than I thought. It was much better. I mean, it’s super fun to learn, and the way they teach you—they don’t even teach you, you learn yourself using your own ways.

Some people draw and put their output in a different way. I made an output, a document, like a movie, which I never thought I could do. I started doing so many new things. I started skateboarding, for example. And back in Russia when I tried it, I fell onto the concrete like this, rolled back onto my head, and I thought I’d never do it again. But in general, it’s just been really eye-opening to see that there is another way to learn than just the classic system, and I couldn’t imagine going back to a classic system because that would be like going through hell all over again.

Lisa: I think it’s interesting… Gerard, who is 16, with Samir, who is 11 or 12 now? You’re 12 now, right? Because it’s your birthday.

Sameer: That’s right.

Lisa: And then you’ve also led an Adelante?

Sameer: I was proposing to, but it was too late because Cycle One was finishing and we had our 360s, which are kind of exams—not really. We just show in a presentation what we learned and did through the first cycle, which were three months. And yeah, it was really fun actually making them. But I couldn’t lead another Adelante, which is basically a workshop led by either a learner or a learning guide. And it could be whatever—it can be skating, it can be paper mache, it can be editing, animation, and improv theatre, which Gerard led. It was super fun and funny.

So yeah, and I was going to lead one, but I couldn’t because of the 360s. So I’m gonna probably lead one in Cycle Two.

Lisa: Would like to?

Sameer: We have another learner… It was really fun because Gerard and the other kids that were there, they understand what it’s like to be a learner rather than a learning guide. Because, I mean, they don’t understand what it’s like to be a learner here, and Gerard understood that. And he, like, at the end—even though during lessons, I mean, we would have such fun and just go with the flow—the output was really great. And I think we managed to, like, circulate all the work and everything we learned into one output, and it was really fun.

Devon: And at the end of this two-week workshop, it’s like an hour a day for two weeks, they do a presentation showing what they’ve learned. And they did an improvisation skit, and it was hilarious.

Lisa: Yes. So with something like that, with hosting or teaching an improv class, where do you… so you decide what you want to learn, is that what you’re saying?

Devon: So for Adelante, it’s learner-led workshops.

Lisa: Hmm.

Devon: So the learners decide what skill they have that they want to share with the community.

Lisa: Hmm.

Devon: And other learners are able to join that workshop. It’s one hour a day, and yeah, the learner gets to plan everything out basically. And it can be led by more than one learner, or a learner and a learning guide together, which is actually happening in two weeks, right?

Lisa: And you have projects, don’t you, that you kind of decide what your project’s gonna be?

Lisa: Perhaps both you could talk about what projects you’ve been working on?

Sameer: Well, for us, the systems are different because obviously I’m in the Explorers group, and there are three different groups: Explorers, Creators, and Change Makers. And in the Explorers, we have an Explorer Hour usually nearly every day. And what we do there is there’s a topic—for example, we had a topic on the solar system. And there’s an activity, there’s a pre-learning, then there’s the discovery which we pre-learned for. Then we… the next day we do our three-two-ones, which is basically three things I learned, two things I learned more about, and one thing I could use in the future in my daily basis.

And then we do the output. And the output can be done in many different ways. For example, the solar system one—I wasn’t there unfortunately—but there was one where the output was our own escape room. And it was really fun because I never thought… I mean, designing your own escape room sounded a little crazy to me, and I didn’t think we could pull it off till the end when people were actually doing it and struggling with it. And it was really fun. That’s one of the things about Learnlife where you… like, it’s a crazy idea you never pictured in your head which they actually do and find possible ways to give you like an all-rounded aspect of the world with crazy things you never thought were possible like designing your own escape room, which was amazing.

Devon: You guys’ feedback—I mean, they’ve led… it was so amazing to see eleven to thirteen-year-olds leading adults through an escape room when she was like, “This is so hard for them to complete!” Right? They’re like, “This is adult level. You should charge for this!” Like, this was—you guys were amazing. It was so cool, innovative, like with the backlight, all the different mirrors you had to use to find clues. It was so, so cool.

Samir: Yeah, it was actually super complicated. It took one group—apart from me and one of my classmates, Beard, and Yaron, another of my classmates, made a station where you had to figure out a password for a computer to get in and see a security camera. It took the people so long at first. Like, the first group, it took them about 15 minutes just to get on the fastest part. It took us 20, so yeah, it was… Obviously for me, it was super funny sitting there watching them struggle with something I made. And honestly, it was just such a blast making something like that and people trying it.

Lisa: Yeah, you’re sweet. Oh!

Gerard: Yeah, so I am a Change Maker, which is the more self-led group. We get to choose our own projects and what we want to do. We get four hours a day of studio time, which is time for us to be in the studios in which we get to choose our own project and do whatever we want.

So I am really into 3D printing, and I recently started learning how to play the bass. And I’m a person that needs an emotional attachment to something to actually learn it. So I thought, “Huh, why don’t I make a bass for myself?” So I sat down one afternoon and I decided, “Okay, I’m 3D printing one.” I went on the internet, looked at reference photos, looked at how a bass is supposed to be made, because I had no idea. And in, like, 8 or so hours that I spent here, I had a full 3D design of a bass and I could tweak it and it rocked. It was amazing! It is still amazing!

I 3D printed it—took about 60 hours total. It was made in pieces, so you had to glue it together with a bit of epoxy. And then I got another learner to paint it for me because we really like collaboration here, and I thought, “What a good idea!” Sachi, another learner here, is amazing at painting, and she made some super, super sweet drawings on it. And I have been learning a lot of bass since then. I actually spent about three hours a day during the holidays practicing.

Lisa: Wow! I’m curious from both of you as well, in terms of having been at more traditional schools before this: was it challenging to adapt, or did you take to it quite quickly? Or was it like, “Whoa, what is this?” How did you find it?

Gerard: I never really connected with the traditional mentality. I kind of had the Learnlife mentality from the get-go. I never really saw the purpose in what they do in traditional schools. So for me, it wasn’t hard to adapt to this learning system, but it was hard to get all the terminology down. So learning guides and everything—it takes a minute.

Samir: Well, for me, I moved here pretty much just for the school, from Moscow to Barcelona. And my parents told me a lot about it, and Momo was similar. But when I came here, I mean, it didn’t take me any adapting because I just, like, went with the flow. And it was like, from the minute I started, I wanted to come here every single day.

And like all of us—like, pretty much every learner in my programme, or most of them—they don’t want to be off, or they don’t want to be on weekends. But the first time I actually made like good friends and I actually did a lot of things with them was here. I mean, now I go skate with my friends a lot, and they come to my house for sleepovers. And it’s the first time I have this, and it’s thanks to the Learnlife mentality, so to say. So I think it was a really easy adaption for me because of these aspects and these pros for me and my development process.

Devon: So you see, not all—sometimes it takes, yeah, two months, three months, a year to get their head around it. We have learners still be like, “So, when are the exams? When are the exams?” A week—“When are you gonna punish me?” Yeah, like, “We’re gonna grow your capacity to self-manage and self-regulate, and we’re gonna make you think about your own responsibility within this community rather than hold you accountable in traditional ways.” Like, “Okay, you’re bad, and we’re gonna use ineffective methods like punishment to try to right that behavior.”

So it really depends on their prior experiences. I mean, you went to a charter art school, your parents are innovators and entrepreneurs, and you know, they’re out there in the world. So they, I think they come from different backgrounds. But some kids come straight from traditional school, and it’s tough. That little system really gets engraved into your head.

This might be interesting, given the context of your podcast about work. We talk a lot about executive functioning and what does it mean to actually be a self-determined learner, and how that takes a lot of skill. Because if you’ve been in traditional school all your life, it’s like, “Alright, now create an escape room.” You like, “I’ve been told what I’m supposed to do all my life!” Right? So how do you have the skills… you guys can talk a little about what are some of the challenges you’ve had in trying to really figure out how to be self-determined as a learner? What does that mean to direct your own learning?

Gerard: Sure. I sucked at time management. I could not do something in, like, a million years because I would start, I would work for two and a half minutes, then I’d take a mental break for three hours, and then I’d work for another two and a half minutes. But through being here and through Devon being there like, “Hey, are you taking a break?” and other learning guides pushing me towards not disconnecting from the activity for as long, I got into the mentality of, “Okay, I’m gonna work for three hours, I’m gonna take a break, gonna work for twenty-five minutes if it’s really hard, then gonna take a five-minute break.”

I actually got into using the Pomodoro method, which is working for twenty-five minutes, five-minute break—working wonders for me.

Samir: It at first—it was kind of hard because I had to be way more independent than I was before, in the sense that they, like, explain the activity and the topic, so to say, and then they let you learn and do it in your own way. And I never really saw about my own way because of the classical system.

So, like, the first week or so, I was kind of alone. I was always asking, “What do I do? What do I do?” because I wasn’t hundred percent sure. And then on the weekends, like towards the end of that week, I realised that I can learn my own way now, and no one’s gonna tell me what to do. And that’s when I started making the most out of the actual opportunities you get. I mean, now we’re sitting in a carpenter studio; across the wall is a music studio; we have a multimedia studio. I mean, the school is fully equipped for like an amazing learning workshop—anything, really.

Lisa: Yeah. What would you say at this point in time is the greatest gift that Learnlife has given you?

Gerard: So, one thing that really was—one thing that really shocked me in the mornings when I started here is that I didn’t wake up dreading coming to school. I had pretty bad depression because I wasn’t happy where I was. But after coming here and being here for three months, I had friends for the first time in my life, and I had people that I could count on, so I was happy. So I feel like Learnlife has, in a way, gifted me the ability to be happy and to have a place where I could cook. I basically live here. I come here at 9:00 a.m., leave at 7:30, so yeah, that’s the big gift.

Samir: Well, for me, it was more of the ability to be free here. But also, as I said earlier, the first time that I actually felt that I had real friends who were really committed to being—to pursuing our friendship and just communicating a lot. And it was the first time I felt that because, I mean, in my Russian schools, I had friends, but it would be like, in school we’re friends, and then when we go home, we pretty much don’t really talk about each other. And here it’s different because it’s more like—so much of the programme is based on team building, team working, but also sometimes alone, that it’s pretty much really hard not to have friends when you come here.

So yeah, but also freedom, because it’s the first time I can freely learn in my own ways. And yeah, I think those are the two main things that I mean, I love about Learnlife.

Lisa: I mean, a core part of our model is personal relationships and their socio-emotional development. I wonder if you guys could maybe talk about Real Talk and does that help with the kind of sense of community and connecting with people and feeling like you have…

Gerard: Yes, it does. It does. Real Talk is—well, in my programme, it’s two hours a week in which we all sit down—everyone in the programme, we’re eight people, nine maybe—just have a conversation about a topic that we have previously picked or just comes up in the moment. And we are completely open about it, and we are free to speak our mind. There’s no judgment, there’s nothing. Like, you can be free, and you can say, “Oh yeah, that sucks,” or “I love it.” And you can express your unpopular opinion or just simply hear everybody else’s thoughts or feelings.

And it doesn’t just help you get it off your chest; it helps you see how other people are feeling, and it builds on your empathy. I feel like since I started here, through Real Talk and through just listening to people, my empathy has got so much better. I’m able to sit down with someone and listen to their problems for three hours. I would have never done that before.

Samir: For me, Real Talk is similar in the sense that we can talk about our problems and things like that, and it’s like no judgment. But for me, there—we, in the last cycle, we focused on social skills. And for me, it was really eye-opening how—honestly, how unselfish something—I’ve grown a lot in that aspect. And also, I got—I was surprised by how many people actually think that it’s not useful, when in my personal opinion, it’s one of the most important things to living a happy life because you need to be able to connect and talk with other people to survive on this planet because, I mean, we’re so many people on this planet and you can’t just be alone your whole life. Just like, it’s really hard.

So yeah, it’s really important for me because I’m also—not only self-awareness but awareness of others in your space. I’ve grown in that, in my opinion. So it’s a really important 45 minutes to an hour. But for the cycle, they swapped it around with CCELs, which are Core Concept Labs. It’s like math, numeracy, history, science, thing like that. And now instead of having Real Talk every day, 45 minutes, it’s 2 hours a week. And then we have CCELs 45 minutes every day.

Devon: It’s so quick to be enlightened. We just don’t feel like you need 4 hours!

Devon: Samir’s taught German—Russia, Russian! And I think Johnny, he does definitely speak Punjabi. And I think one more—Russian with another 12-year-old, which was amazing to see two 12-year-olds basically leading a workshop with 16, 17, 18-year-olds.

Samir: But now it’s time for us to do our three-two-ones. You’re gonna reflect on three things you learned, two skills that are transferable…

Devon: You know I was like, “Yeah!”

Samir: And it’s beautiful how the other people respected them. We have such a strong sense of community here that it’s not like, “Yeah, you’re a 12-year-old, you can’t teach me anything.” No, it’s more of, “Okay, what do you have to teach me? What can we do together? How can we grow?”

Lisa: It’s kind of funny. It strikes me that in traditional schools, the kind of pedagogy, like the learning paradigm, is kind of this secret thing that only grown-ups know. And yet it seems like here, it’s like you’re kind of working in Learnlife and on it at the same time. Like, you’re kind of practicing the learning paradigm itself as a learner by teaching others and by understanding how you teach someone something or how you create a learning experience.

Devon: It’s the only way to create lifelong learners—you have to equip them with all the skills of how to learn. All right, and so we are really explicit about “this is the best way to learn.” We did, what was it, once upon a time ago…

Gerard: Superlearner bootcamp.

Devon: If ever—“Learner Bootcamp”—it was all the tools that you need to direct your learning, how to remove distractions, how you focus on optimising, prioritising, all the executive functioning skills I was talking about. So yeah, it should be transparent. I would—I think this is part of a lot of the old systems of whatever that be—law or education or whatever. It’s like you have to wear the garb, and you have to speak the language, and no one has access to it, but that’s silly. Right? If we want the generation of learners and doers, then yeah, we have to make it open.

Gerard: I mean, if we want people to be happy with what we’re doing, we can’t just say, “Oh, you like to do that.” They have to say, “Okay, I like this and I don’t like this, I feel like we should change that.” So we prototype, we iterate, we just adapt to what we need.

Lisa: Hmm, it’s amazing. Well, so because you guys are talking about skills that I’m on this podcast talking to professionals about, and how do we get, you know, adults, professionals to learn these skills, and you guys are learning them now. It just makes so much sense.

Devon: Yeah. Learnlife is—hence the name—it’s not just designed for this age group. We started with the traditional high school age like the 12 to 18 because that’s where the most disruption is needed, right? Primary school, there’s a lot of options, it’s not so serious. But when you’re 12, things get really serious—there’s exams, and you better go to universities. We thought that would be the first space to disrupt. But we imagine it being zero to however old the oldest person alive is, and because people need that across their lifetimes and will continue to need to upskill as they change careers every 5 or 10 years.

Gerard: Yeah, I mean, we talk a lot about lifelong learning, which is pretty self-descriptive—learning throughout your whole life and how to promote that. Actually, in the Superlearner Bootcamp, we had a lot of skills that I have been applying to my life, that I feel that I will be applying till I die because, I mean, they’re just essential to function and, like, not just professionally, in my own life. Time management, there’s eliminating distractions—I mean, I’m cleaning the house, my dog comes up to me? No, I’m cleaning. Go to bed. I can’t be distracted. And how to eliminate them, how to get yourself in the zone, how to have flow in your life. It’s just essential, and it’s better to learn them young.

Devon: More flexibility, definitely.

Lisa: I’m curious as well about—because I mean, all of this is kind of music to my ears, but I imagine to some people out there, it must sound pretty utopian. What are some of the main points that skeptics or main questions that skeptics kind of pose at you, or you know, say, “Well, yeah, but…?”

Devon: Number one question we get from parents is, “What about the diploma?” You know, it’s… and so we have a partnership with an online school in the U.S. so that they can get co-validated for the work that they do here, and then they get the American diploma if they want it. We don’t have a lot of kids who are doing that. I’d say maybe nine out of 60-something who chose that route. A lot of families are like, “No, that’s fine. Like, university’s kind of deflated currency now, and we don’t feel like it’s useful.”

And I think a lot of people don’t want to close that door, though, so they go that way. And that’s the number one question. So we have the answer, and we’re developing a more permanent solution to that, which will be our own kind of learning Vita, which is the appointment of a CV but for learning, and that’s something that you take with you across your life. But that’s in development—but give us a couple of years. And hopefully, we have companies like—I’m sure the kinds of people you’re interviewing who are like, “Yes, we need an alternative to this diploma that means nothing to us,” and so we want to have something that’s meaningful. So that all that’ll help that. But in the interim, we have this stopgap, which is this online school.

The other big thing is, “When do they learn math, history?” Like, “Tell me about the history of that.” And it’s interesting because when we pull back the curtain and we show them actually, we have mapped out, especially for the younger years, like cycle by cycle, what skills they should be learning that are aligned to different international curriculums. But the kids don’t know that because they’re like—they’re learning about an escape room or the solar system or doing something else, or doing carpentry or kitchen stuff, and they’re learning proportional reasoning and single-variable equations and these kind of things, but it’s almost invisible because it’s applied.

And then, what are the other big ones? I think “if you let them direct their own learning, won’t they just slack off? Won’t they just study napping?” [Laughs] At the beginning, right? Like, that’s… it takes a moment for them to detox from traditional schools and feel like, “Oh no, actually, I need to… no one is going to come and force me to do a thing, so I better get it together.” And sometimes they need a month or two to get out of that other system. But I think the more our community grows and the more people like Gerard are doing really cool projects, the more that passion is contagious, and they don’t want to slack off and just do nothing because they see their peers doing something different.

And what’s interesting is, like, learning is the new cool, which I think is… it’s… yeah, we’re building… they’re still right, it’s not a hundred percent set, no, but it’s getting there, it’s getting there. Samir and his brother are taking violin classes, and their mom was telling me it’s like they’re treating the violin like skateboarding. Like, they want to show each other the tricks they’ve recruited to others, and they have this mini orchestra now, and it’s cool to learn and show off what you’re learning.

And so the slacking-off thing is an easy thing—just show the projects. I mean, the parents, they’re disbelievers. We bring them to our showcase at the end of cycle, and they see all the projects and things people have been working on, or one of the 360s where they present their learning for the cycle, and it’s kind of indisputable. Yeah, they’ve been doing really cool work. It’s not just about academic disciplines; it’s about skills you need for life and your own self-awareness and personal development. I mean, that’s what it—you can’t do anything else. You can’t just have them be part—I mean, you could theoretically have them be part of Learnlife… Actually, we’ve had parents be leading Adelantes, and they saw how it was, and yeah, they kind of became part of the community.

Lisa: Hmm. I’m curious to learn a bit more about learning guides and some of the team that support the learners, and how have you built that team, and what are the skills that are valuable for those people to support this kind of self-managed learning?

Devon: Yeah, I mean, like I said before, the core is personal relationship. So it has to be people who are highly relatable. We need people to be able to build quick personal relationships with learners and see them as people and what their needs are, and not kind of whatever their projected need is onto them, which is hard. As an adult, to not feel like, “This is what you need for your future,” and “This is, you know, what’s the right thing for you.” That’s hard to avoid, but still, we see people that come in here, and they really honestly want to hear what the learners have and adapt to the learner, rather than have the learner adapt to them.

Like Gerard was saying, we’re constantly prototyping, testing, iterating on what’s working, what’s not working, based on their feedback, and learners being more and more involved in programme design. And so I think that—and then agility for the team. We—all of the learning guides work across all three programmes and see all the learners by design. The most dangerous thing, I think, in traditional schools is that teachers work in silos. They’re by themselves, single-teacher classrooms. They don’t have a supportive community; they burn out and they leave. Whereas we plan together, we’re constantly collaborative, and we see all the kids. And so I mean, that forces cooperation when you have to co-design things. But just really agile because things—I mean, we’re making the bridge as we cross it in a lot of ways.

All of what we do here is based on, you know, dozens of years of best practices around the world in different schools, but we’re trying to create in a way that works for this context and is an amalgam of those things. And so that’s not easy to do. So I think people are really flexible and agile and willing to adapt to the needs of this community and to the kids.

Lisa: Hmm. What is your personal motivation in all of this? Like, why is Learnlife important to you?

Devon: It’s funny, I think, to, like, the same way… I know I’m gonna make not friends right now by saying a lot of… it’s like how just a little batty, and so that’s why they go to study psychology, to figure out what’s going on with them. I think that, to some degree, a lot of educators have had crappy experiences in school or, conversely, really good ones. It’s they want to—they want to carry it on. But I think for me, traditional school was terrible, and I hated it. And then I had a couple of really amazing, life-changing teachers who showed me you could do it differently. I was like, “Well, why aren’t we doing that?”

And so, motivated by a sense of justice and wanting to change the world, I thought that would be the best place to insert myself because, obviously, what will impact—almost all kids in the world are in school, so what a great place to start. And so it’s really cool. And I think that’s at a meta-level. At the more micro level is just people to have the kind of relationship I have with Gerard, where we can cleverly do things. And that was the feeling I got from that initial teacher that put me on the path of wanting to be in education. He came to me and talked to me like a person. He involved me in the things that he was working on and doing. And we’re still friends to this day—Friedman Tonight, this teacher I had in high school.

And so I appreciate that I can have that. So it gives me personal satisfaction to know that I can work in a community that feels really good and interactive and collaborative, but also know that hopefully we make a difference in the world.

Lisa: To go on this word “community” that we’ve mentioned quite a few times, I know that part of the vision is to have this community. So, for example, I believe you have a co-working place where there are some startups or someone to pronounce that—that learners can interact with. And what’s the kind of vision for that, and how does that work?

Devon: The adults that you’ve—with everyone…

Lisa: [Laughs] Tell me about what it’s like to have professionals in here and some of the workshops they’ve done, or just even having them in the space so that you can talk to them.

Gerard: At the beginning, it felt a little weird to be with adults in a school—quote-unquote “school.” I wasn’t really used to it. But then I started talking to them, and they were all about their life. They shared the same views as the learning guides do, and they pushed learners. Not like—they didn’t—they didn’t even have to interact with them on the daily. They just did stuff in the background that just helped them grow.

And I started seeing that more and more, and then I got into a couple of workshops with Innova, which are a company that pushes young people to innovate and create new things. And we had a couple workshops with them that really showed me that I could take advantage of what they knew, and I could be with them for a bit. And I could say, “Hey, I don’t know—any point in time I can just go up to them and be like, ‘Hey, I need help with this. Could you just sit down with me for 15 minutes at some point this week and teach me about it?’” So it’s a big tool that we have access to that we can exploit at any given time.

Devon: And our co-workers who are part of this innovative education ecosystem, they know when they come here that that’s part of what—I mean, the synergies that happen both ways, right? Like, they often end up getting contracts and things because people want to do work with us, and that’s their specialty, and vice versa. They come in doing workshops with the kids.

What’s really cool is looking out the window now from the digital fabrication lab to the fashion lab. Belen out there is our fashion expert, which is here only twice a week for two hours, and she’s an expert in fashion. She comes from that world, so she’s not a trained teacher. The kids love her. She’s doing all kinds of cool projects. We have that for each of the studios.

So in addition to the co-workers, the learners have exposure to professionals in their field every day of the week. We have someone who’s a music expert, we have an arts director for multimedia, we know a computer architect. For right now, they’re doing a build-your-own lie detector workshop; right now, they’re doing a build-your-own, create-your-own backpacks in fashion. And this, you know, these are experts in their fields doing it.

So I think it gives them a lot of exposure. Unfortunately, as a learning guide, even though each of us are experts in something, we often get this, like, I have—“Oh, well, you’re not—you don’t know… you understand fashion, you’re not from the fashion world.” Like, “You’re not a designer.” I am, actually, but it’s still helpful to have someone who’s like, “Well, I’m in the field today,” you know? And so that’s been helpful.

Lisa: I mean, once you’ve been working with This Dos, maybe you could talk about…

Gerard: Yeah, so But This Dos actually is getting a PhD in the exact topic that I’m super interested in. So he basically taught me from the ground up how to use FPGAs, which are hardships that don’t have a locked-in physical configuration. So through code, you can basically generate an architecture inside the chip, which is amazing. And nobody in the engineering/electronic engineering field knows how to use them well. It’s a very niche topic that can make big bucks.

So I thought, “I’m gonna learn about this,” and he basically taught me from the ground up how to use them. And I’ve been practicing over the holidays; he gave me some super hard exercises to do so I wouldn’t get bored, which was amazing. And they are really positive influence on everybody because I’ve been talking to all the learners, and they’re like, “Oh my god, this is amazing. We have actual professionals that come here, and they can show us how to do it right.”

Yeah, the learning guides are the learning guides, and they know a lot of stuff, but they’re not currently in the field. There’s Wilko, who is my mentor. It’s another learning guide. He has a degree in math and civil engineering. He’s extremely good at math, knows a lot about coding, but he couldn’t really teach me. So then—we go, “But This Dos is here,” and bam! This whole new world was opened up to me. So yeah, it’s pretty cool.

Lisa: Maybe I’m wondering, what for both of you, what would you hope for in terms of the future of Learnlife and in the next, kinda, few years? What would you like to unfold?

Gerard: I want more Learnlifes. I want to be able to go to any country and go in to a Learnlife. I want a vacation to a different Learnlife.

Samir: I actually—I really want to see this place in Hamburg open. Is that…? Okay, so I want to see the new space that we’re making in Hamburg, which is gonna be massive, and we’re gonna have a super cool makerspace open. And I want to work there as a learning guide. So I’m actually kind of training and practicing with leading Adelantes. I’ve led seven, and I’m practicing and working on how to direct people, how to guide people into learning, and that’s really kind of actually pushed me into learning how to learn. So that’s kind of what I hope for.

Devon: Yeah, I mean, our next big push is a Grow programme, where we work with—we bring in teachers and start teacher training and school leader training. I think, more importantly, to get school leaders to want to change, right? It’s really hard because I’ve been that teacher in that school that has no support. And so, getting school leadership on board, bringing teachers to train, and I think it’s starting to create a, you know, a small army of amazing teachers who are ready to go transform their schools is the next big step.

And so we’ve had tons of good feedback with the programmes we’ve run. All right, we only had a few, like, day-long programmes, and we’ve gone to a few schools and helped consult with them, and the feedback is incredible. And so we want to start doing more long-term things where people can come and spend three months here and really get immersed in what we’re doing before they go back and launch their own. That’s the kind of thing that we’re kicking off this year, is starting to grow the number of hubs we have and our growth programme, so people who want to watch their own help and transform an existing school can do that.

Lisa: Yeah, it’s interesting. What would be your advice if there are people listening who work in traditional schools, for example, who may be feeling frustrated, maybe even a bit of despair? What would your—what would you say to them?

Devon: Come to Learnlife. See how we do things. I don’t say that as a pitch. I think, generally, the way that—before I was even involved in this project, before the project was even an idea, I mean, that’s what I was doing as a teacher, was going to as many places for… of inspiration as possible.

Our Chief Learning Officer, Steven, was leading, debatably, the most innovative school in Australia for 20 years. He would take groups of teachers around the world on a vision tour of Europe and other places to see where are the different kinds of changes. So I think there’s lots of ways to virtually or in person go and organise your own kind of vision tour.

So I would say, try to figure out what’s happening in the world. Our model will be open source. I mean, already, your website, you can see the different elements, and they’re linked to research. You know, the research team is really working really hard to create white papers that link to research from around the world that’s saying, “You can go here, you can look at this,” and to get inspired.

So that’s one thing, is to start crafting a vision for what you want. But I think what’s been most important to us is the team, is having—finding that—finding other people, recruiting allies, sharing the vision. I think if you really strongly communicate a vision that’s attractive and appealing and has this kind of “idea whose time has come” feel to it, people are attracted to that, and they want to join and share the vision from there.

And so I think the more that people are opening that invitation… before we launched with the kids, we ran a series of events called LearnX, where we just put out a thing on meetups, said, “Hey, other innovative educators, let’s get together and talk,” because we need to talk. And we had 120 people over the course of five events coming to chat with us about what’s innovative, what’s exciting, what are possibilities for collaboration. And I think in those ways, you feel less alone.

And I know there’s a lot of those in the world now. There’s EdCamps and all these other kind of teacher meetup things where you can just get together with like-minded people. So I’d say, just try not to be alone because there are other people out there who want to grow this vision.

Lisa: Yeah, you… Gerard, it sounds like perhaps you were on a path to become a learning guide in Learnlife?

Gerard: Well, as Devon said, I have had a really bad experience with my prior education, and I want to change that. I don’t want anyone else to go through that. So I want to become a learning guide, and I want to push for a change in education too. So I would like to… I mean, I’m actually working with Wilko, my mentor—my mentor—and Devon on some learning guide things.

Lisa: That’s cool. And for some of the people who are listening who are people working in organisations, maybe they’re CEOs or leaders in organisations around the world. Like, what would you say to them in terms of, you know, if people—if these—if some of these brilliant learners from Learnlife are going to go out into the world and some into some of these workplaces, what do these organisations, these companies—what do they need to do to create a kind of ecosystem that would be, I guess, friendly or conducive to continuing that kind of lifelong learning?

Gerard: You know, all of the skills and the ways of being that you’re learning here…

Gerard: Set up a positive community and try to build on the positive relationships between employees. If you’re sitting in a cubicle with Debra, who you don’t know, and you have no interactions with throughout the day, you’re gonna get bored in five minutes, and you’re not gonna have someone to push you through the day. So having a community and a group of people that can work together on improving something else is a very good thing. Also, having a comfortable space with a lot of light, like we have here, with openness, so you can see, you can hear what’s happening around you, is super helpful. And yeah, those would be my main two tips.

Devon: I’d like—five thoughts entered at once there. I mean, I think of John Kotter, the Harvard professor, his dual operating system model, right? Of having a little bit of a traditional hierarchy so things can just function, but really having a network model so that teams from all over the organisation can work together and innovate and create.

I think it feels really good to be innovative and agile. It takes a lot of retraining for people who haven’t grown up in that environment. But when you’ve been part of Learnlife, I mean, I think if you proposed to Gerard a nine-to-five that was gonna—that, drown in that. And so, how do we get out of the way? How do we really, you know, co-create vision? That’s the word for me, is co-creation. How do we invite people into the process and then allow them to have agency so that they can do good work?

But I think very few people are going to take marching orders from other people. And so, having an inclusive environment that really taps into the expertise, the wisdom of those they’re working with.

Lisa: Hmm. And what would you say are the most kind of valuable, precious skills or gifts that Learnlife learners would bring to an organisation or, yeah, the world of work?

Gerard: Type, rhythm, good looks for us.

Devon: I would hope—we’re still moving in this direction, but that’s one of my goals for this next—not this cycle, but the following—was to really think about how do we address big, hairy, challenging problems, and to have people who can come in and be flexible and fast thinking and divergent and convergent thinking people so that they can solve that.

I think the learners right now are doing the first step to that, which is building a base of core conceptual knowledge so that they know enough to even think about the problem, and then also developing enough technical skills so that once they have some ideas, they can start building a solution to it. But we really want to deepen those skills.

And so I would hope that you could hire a Learnlife learner and say, “We’ve got this challenge. What can we do?” And they—I mean, I think all of our learners can recite the design thinking process for you. They can talk about rapid prototyping. They have all these kind of—they’re developing these skill sets. And so I think that’s what we offer: the capacity to come in, to think quickly, to do good solutions that are based in an empathic process and with a user focus.

Gerard: I completely agree with Devon. Exactly what he said, honestly. It’s just—we’re growing and we’re learning how to be flexible, how to adapt our brain to any challenge, any problem, how to basically switch tasks super easily, how to mold our mind to what’s happening around us. So yeah, that’s something that we could potentially bring to any company.

If I mean, if they have one challenge and all of a sudden, “Hey, this popped up! What do I do?” Well, there’s a Learnlife learner, and we go there, we see, “Okay, you have these set of problems. We can prototype something real quick. We can see if it works, then we can iterate on that, we can modify it, we can make it better.” We could potentially bring the ability to change anything on the fly.

Lisa: So, I guess, in kind of wrapping up, are there any other stories or words or anything else that you would like to share with listeners that we haven’t covered yet?

Devon: Well, I think the voice that hasn’t been represented are the parents, who—I wish we could have had here. But we just had our 360s in December, and hearing them talk about their kids—because we see them every day, we see the growth—but when so many parents, like, in tears, talking about, “I can’t believe how much growth my child has made, and I was totally uncertain about bringing them here, but now I know this is the place.” And hearing the growth that they’ve seen at home…

I mean, Samir’s mom, for example, was telling me just like, “He stops and thinks before he says things now.” And it’s true. I saw him the other day. I saw him in the hall, he’s walking, and this kid offered him a chocolate milk. He grabbed it and started walking—right away, you saw him pause. He turned—I was like, “Thanks so much, Orson!” You know, it was really cute things like, “Oh yeah, I need to…” you know. And the parents notice these things, and they see…

I think one of the most important things is the increasing confidence and self-esteem. Or we have, like Gerard is saying, a lot of learners who come out feeling depressed, feeling like they’ve been damaged in some way. And they come here, and to feel like they’ve been healed to some extent was really cool to have the parent feedback in.

It’s a magical thing, the 360s, to have this chance to get together by a pool in these little island shelters. And there’s… the peer, and there is all the learning guides, and the parents are there. So it’s cool—the whole community comes in, builds you up, and reflects back to you what you’ve learned and what we’ve seen, your growth.

Gerard: I had to be. My mother actually ended up crying in the car after my 360. She was—she was well, she was shocked. She doesn’t really see me all that much ‘cause she works a lot. So she got to see what I do, and she could have never imagined in a million years that I would be able to 3D print a bass without any Lutherie experience.

I would also like to add that everybody here are basically friends with each other. I can go up to anybody but 20… buddy and just say, “Hey, want to hang out for like 20 minutes?” And they’ll be super glad to do so. So we have a very tight-knit group of people that loves to push each other to grow, and I kind of stumbled into it because I didn’t know what was gonna happen. And so yeah, just feeling all the acceptance has been amazing, and I was feeling like myself again. Because in traditional school, I had no friends ‘cause I was typical… “Oh, you’re a nerd. Do you like video games? Oh my god, I’m gonna go do something else.”

So coming into a community in which I can just be myself and be like, “Hey, what if we made this?” And we sit down, we spent three hours designing it, and then we build it. All of a sudden, BAM! I have this group of people that I can be happy, comfortable with, and it’s magical.