Make It Mindful: Insights for Global Learning

Seth Fleischauer (00:00.718)
Hello everyone and welcome to Make It Mindful, Insights for Global Learning, the podcast for globally minded educators seeking thoughtful conversations about how education can adapt to an ever-changing world. I'm Seth Fleishauer, former classroom teacher turned founder of an international learning company specializing in the teaching of global learning. Together we explore the interconnectedness of people, cultures, and systems and how these relationships shape transformative ideas in education. Each episode features educational change makers whose insights lead to

practical solutions and lasting impact. And this week, our guest is Chris Brita. Chris, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Brita.

Chris Brida (00:38.688)
Yep. You did, but I wasn't gonna be like, it's Brida. Yeah, you did. Everyone said it wrong. Brida is like an Irish girl's first name, and that's how it's said. But yeah, Brida is probably like some bastardization of my name, you know, from my ancestors at some point.

Seth Fleischauer (00:40.878)
Okay, run. Did I say, I said it wrong at the thing then too. Wait, did I say it? Okay, okay.

Seth Fleischauer (01:02.21)
Yeah, yeah, we'll take it. Okay. My my like grandpa's brother's track, they're all called Fletcher, because they were embarrassed to fly shower. Okay, bright. Okay. And today's guest is Chris Brita, a district administrator at Portland Public Schools in charge of CTE, AP and IB, the alphabet soup of positions, career, technical education, advanced placement and international baccalaureate.

Chris Breiter, welcome to the podcast.

Chris Brida (01:40.61)
Thanks for having me, Seth.

Seth Fleischauer (01:42.03)
It is awesome to see you again. You were part of the panel on AI and education here in Portland that I moderated about a month ago. So if listeners were listening a couple of episodes back, they may have heard your name pronounced incorrectly as Chris Brita. But I really enjoyed talking to you there. I enjoyed talking to you in our like prep conversation where we got into a lot of the other things you do with your job, which are lots of them.

Chris Brida (02:10.68)
Yep.

Seth Fleischauer (02:11.694)
You know, obviously it's not just the alphabet soup. There's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into even just CTE. And one of the things that popped up that bubbled up in this conversation was your work on public-private partnerships. And this is something that I'd really love to dive into. We're in this age right now where it feels like CTE is gaining popularity, gaining relevance again. And you have a

vision of that where public-private partnerships are a very critical, important aspect of CTE, yet also potentially a source of like systems change. And so I'd really love to like dive into that, not only here in Portland for Portland Public Schools, but ideally in a way that is applicable to school leaders across the globe and how they could potentially leverage public-private partnerships to create better opportunities for their

their students. Sound good? Sound good? Are we on board? Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for being here and maybe let's just start with this like this time that we're in where CTE feels like it's gone through these kind of pendulum swings. It wasn't always called Career and Technical Education.

Chris Brida (03:09.506)
But yeah, I'm ready. I love it.

Seth Fleischauer (03:30.774)
there used to be called apprenticeships. It used to be just what education was. You're right, like just preparing people for the workplace versus what has become or became a more kind of liberal arts approach to education, giving people opportunity in all of these different areas, hoping that from that will bubble up a specialization, whereas this pendulum swing back towards CTE.

is a moment where we're looking more at exposing people to careers earlier in life. Some might argue before they're ready, but I guess that's a question is like, A, you know, when is a good time for CTE to be brought in in your mind? And B, like, how did we get to this point where it is so important? Again, it's on the tip of every educator's tongue.

Chris Brida (04:25.496)
Yeah, think so. So we capitalize CTE really at the high school level. So career and technical education very formalized as a high school sort of specific thing. But I think the sort of reality of doing career connected learning is a K-12 experience. And so I think that we have gotten to this place where the traditional approach that we wait until high school for students to access career

education at all is too late in that process. And so the career connected learning spectrum really spans from awareness through exploration and then preparation and readiness. And so K5 is a perfect time for students to become aware of careers. And that is the sort of play based learning that incorporates problem solving and teamwork being connected to potential careers in that way. And so students are getting exposed to

careers, they know about careers. This is like the old school parents come into a second grade class and talk about their jobs kind of model. Then when students get into middle school, that really becomes about exploration. So that's sort of project-based learning, hands-on opportunities where students are getting connected to industry problems and issues. They have access to guest speakers. There are sort of exploratory opportunities for them to learn more about these careers. And so

this awareness to exploration time is really like, know about all these things and now let me find out a little bit more about them. And then by the time they get to high school, that's really about the work-based learning, internship, apprenticeship, industry recognized credential sort of model. And that is a time for after students have done this exploration to really start to think about, could I see myself on a pathway to this? And I think that's sort of the operative.

word that's happening in career and technical education is that we are trying to create pathways for students to access these careers in the future. And if we don't start that sort of pathway experience early enough, then we run the risk of what is happening now, which is really that entire experience for students happens in grades nine through 12, where they're learning about careers, which is playing catch up, where they're exploring those careers, which is playing catch up, and then we don't have enough time to sort of prepare them for them.

Chris Brida (06:50.038)
I think CTE is coming back into space specifically because it is not an alternative to college. It's a foundation to success in any pathway. And so if you think about some of the programs that we offer in PPS, health sciences is an example that comes to mind where students may be able to earn a CNA license while they're in high school. And that is a path for them to now move on to LPN, RN, doctor, whatever it is. And so,

I think there is this long held perception that what we do is vocational education, but really it's like highly technical, very refined and building these pathways from high school to career or really from the K-12 system to careers.

Seth Fleischauer (07:35.894)
I have like 19 more questions. But I think the one I'm going to start with is at the end there is this idea. Yeah, the vocational school almost had this, this like, you know, stink on it, right? That it was like something bad. And if you couldn't hack it academically, that you would go to vocational school. Obviously the perception around that has really changed. Is, is it, is it just that we see the

the utility of this in a way that we didn't before? it the diminishing ROI of incredibly expensive college paths? Like, why now do we see that this zooming in and doing specific training for a specific pathway as opposed to learning generalized subjects is the best way to prepare our kids for a future?

Chris Brida (08:28.428)
Yeah, I think one of the points that you made about the diminishing ROI, I the cost of college we know is skyrocketed. Students and families are really starting to think about their return on that investment. I think that employers across the country are also sounding the alarm on this major skills gap that is starting to emerge.

There's a lot of research about the sort of middle skills gap, which is the set of jobs that are highly technical but don't require a college degree. So those could be in things like cybersecurity or aviation or manufacturing or construction, where students need some specific technical skills, but don't need the sort of broad-based general curriculum that they may get at a traditional four-year university. That's where there's a growing and emerging gap in our country, and those jobs are high wage and high demand.

And so there is a need, I think, to pivot our system to more align with what the world of work is going to need. CTE is best positioned to do that because its intention is to create pathways to high wage, high demand jobs. And so I think as many of these jobs are opening, as the boomers are retiring from a lot of these jobs, there's just a significant need for

today's students to fill a lot of these positions. And you see this really across the news now is students are seeing the trades as a valuable pathway to living wage and sort of economic mobility in a way that they really haven't before, or maybe since the pendulum swung away from that model, you know, when we call it the vocational education.

Seth Fleischauer (10:13.742)
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because the way we're speaking about it here, it feels like CTE in some ways is the most responsive part of education, right? That like it's the part of the educational system that is is taking actively taking its cues from what is actually happening in the real world. Whereas the rest of education is just sort of like, yeah, this has worked for 150 years. Let's keep doing this.

Chris Brida (10:27.606)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brida (10:42.434)
That's right. Yep.

Seth Fleischauer (10:43.552)
You know? And the reason is because it has to, right? Like that's its job is to prepare people for these careers. When you talk about the skills gap, the alarm that's being sounded by industry, students are showing up without something. What are they showing up with instead? Like what do they have that careers don't need?

And what do they not have the careers do need?

Chris Brida (11:15.766)
Yeah, know, there's a so some of my dissertation research is about a set of schools around the country that have flipped their academic model so that the career focus comes first and the core academic experience comes second. Meaning that let's say you enrolled in a school that has an aviation program in this model. That means your math, your science, your English and your social studies is also about aviation. And so when we think about writing or we think about reading,

there is a very different version of reading and writing that exists in these highly technical fields. Being able to read a novel is very different than being able to read a manual, right? And so even the vocabulary level, the sort of literacy skill required to be successful in a lot of these technical careers is shifting in a way that is going to require students to make the application of their core academic experience to these career paths.

Now the model that we have is very siloed in that, like in a traditional education system, you take English for 90 minutes every other day and math for 90 minutes every other day and social studies for 90 minutes every other day. And there are very few connection points between those things. The reality of career and technical education is that it is and should be part of a student's core academic experience because it is the place where that sort of traditional core academics

plays out in application. And so I think the mismatch now is that students are missing that piece, the place where the skills that they're learning and the standards that they're learning in those traditional core academic classes, they don't have a means to necessarily apply them in the same way that's going to help them be successful in careers in the future.

Seth Fleischauer (13:03.234)
Yeah, I definitely hear that, that like practical application piece. I'm wondering if it's just like, like a different kind of silo though, right? Where it's being siloed into this particular set of skills. And, and, and I think, you know, if I'm reflecting back on like maybe the romanticism around a liberal arts education, it's this idea that you can take these foundational skills and you can apply them to anything you want. Once you have like,

done enough like internal work to figure out who you are and what you really want to do and then you, you you live your passion and you find your, your, thing that is most meaningful that fits your set of skills that you've figured out by the time you're 25 and now we're asking kids to do that at 15. Like is there, is there a concern there that like we're like there, there's a, a button holding process where we're, we're, we're not

Chris Brida (13:49.784)
Mm-hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (13:59.534)
We're expanding opportunity narrowly, but decreasing opportunity broadly.

Chris Brida (14:06.722)
Yeah, I think that's fair. think the way if you do career and technical education well, then the foundation of each of these classes is actually the long term, durable, transferable skills that students are going to need in the future. So it's complex thinking, it's problem solving, it's teamwork, it's adaptability. And so a student choosing a specific career pathway, let's say when they're 15, doesn't necessarily mean that by the time they graduate from high school, that's where they have to persist. It just means that while they're in high school, this is the thing that they love

doing. And so the application of core academic experience, overlaid with something they love doing, makes the sort of desire to attain the skills of English and the skills of social studies and the skills of science, something that students are interested in. And then by the time they get to the end of high school, they have a choice either to persist through that pathway or to pivot.

but the grounded foundational skills of, yeah, sort of what we traditionally have called soft skills, but sort of language is changing to these durable transferable skills. That's the piece that is maintained so that they can make a choice, a different choice into a four-year university, a two-year opportunity, or straight into the world of work, which is also a reality for many of our students.

Seth Fleischauer (15:27.436)
Yeah, yeah. And let's talk about that world of work. Because part of the dissertation you're currently getting at the University of Kentucky, go Wildcats, is in this realm of public-private partnership. And when we were at our session on AI in education, one of the things you said, and I feel like any discussion of education eventually gets to this point where it's like, well, you know, the whole system's kind of broken.

Chris Brida (15:35.53)
Hopkins.

Seth Fleischauer (15:55.406)
And and you know, it was funny too because I feel like the audience was sort of like you guys are educators You can fix this right? We're like we're we're in we're just people up here but but one of the things that you said that I thought was so intriguing was this idea that public-private partnerships could be either part of or a driver of some systemic change within education

Chris Brida (16:03.384)
All right, now do that.

Seth Fleischauer (16:24.812)
And I'd love to explore that. what makes a good public-private partnership? And how can the amalgamation of all of those lead to systemic change in education?

Chris Brida (16:39.766)
Yeah. So I'm going to sort of go back to the beginning part of my career and run the trajectory to like sort of what my belief is. So I was a I started my career as a teacher in Baltimore and I was at a full service community school and at that full service community school, there were 80 partnerships built in and those partnerships mostly were about helping students overcome the barriers to be successful in school. So that could have been the United Way was a partner and they ran a daycare.

where students who had children could have their students in the school building at a daycare that was run by the United Way. Or the Maryland Food Bank ran a food pantry. So the school served as a community hub and the entire community around that school sort of wrapped its arms around this high school and said, this is not just a place where students are going to sort of engage in the 9-12 education world, but it's also gonna be a resource to the whole community.

So that really from the very beginning of my career, I just knew that there were other people outside of the system that I could call on to help support in my classroom should I need or with a specific student or what have you. Another great example in that model was the University of Maryland's School of Social Work put five or six interns in our school. So now suddenly the mental health capacity of our school grew a ton. Students are doing their sort of practical experience in partnership with our

high school and they're sort of treating the mental health needs of a lot of our students. So that was my experience in Baltimore. And then I came to Portland. Portland is a very different context, a very different place and is a bit more provincial in that it's super neighborhood focused. Our schools are very neighborhood focused. And so that is like what wraps around. it has some similarities to the model in Baltimore.

except for the partnership piece. The partnership piece that's missing here is that we don't often look outside the system to the folks who are doing good and meaningful and important work that can play a role inside the system. So I started my dissertation. I'm in year three of this program. And really my interest is in an effort to finish my dissertation specifically about the role and influence of external partnerships in career and technical education.

Chris Brida (18:58.668)
But broadly speaking, I'm really interested in the role that partners play in the system as a whole. And so I think partnerships can be defined in these sort of five categories. In my world right now, really, it's kind of three, which is industry partners, post-secondary partners, and community partners, sort of the nonprofit, culturally specific partners. But then I think there's also a role for governments, depending on the context of your system. And then there's a role for sort of cultural institutions.

And so my interest is really in how to develop a stronger career and technical education system by leveraging the expertise of those partners in the way that we do our work. And so for industry partners, that's really about changing the system to be workforce development. So that whatever three-year pathways that we offer or four-year pathways that we offer at the high school level are the beginning of whatever industry is going to need in the future.

So they now, we've created mutual beneficence between career and technical education and industry by positioning ourselves as being the beginning of a workforce development strategy for industry. Second player is post-secondary partners. They want students who are prepared to enter their institutions. And so again, for us, it's about ensuring that our three years or four years,

leads students to the first year of whatever program they choose should they choose to go the post-secondary route. So that means we think about our pathways as being potentially six-year pathways through the two-year sort of technical college community college system or seven or eight-year pathways through the four-year system. And so if I'm thinking about my engineering programs in career and technical education and PPS,

when students leave or graduate from a high school, are they ready for Portland State University's first year of engineering or Oregon State University's first year of engineering? So it's critical that there's a relationship between the post-secondary partner and the career and technical education team to make sure that that continuum sort of exists. And then the last piece is the community partners. Fundamentally, one of the things that community partners are interested in is economic mobility for the members of their community.

Chris Brida (21:16.224)
And so career and technical education, which provides access for students to get high wage, high demand jobs is a way for that to happen. And so the way that we think about community partners is really about being the guardrails almost for these pathways to help support students with whatever sort of their needs are to make sure that they're staying on these high wage, high demand pathways. And so when we think about partnerships and what makes effective partnerships, it's more

about what the K-12 system does as a partner. Because I think the reality of the word partnership is, in the past, K-12 systems inherently have been takers of that relationship. We look outside to the partners and we say, how much can we possibly extract from this relationship to benefit our students? But the sustainability of effective partnerships is really about ensuring that we're equally part of the equation. And so when we think about framing it as workforce development,

Seth Fleischauer (22:03.117)
Yeah.

Chris Brida (22:15.352)
and we think about framing it as pathways to post-secondary education, and we think about framing it as institutions, sorry, as economic mobility, then we're positioning ourselves to be a partner in return. And so I think that's where the sustainability comes from. And then there's one more piece, but I wanna make sure I give you time to get a question.

Seth Fleischauer (22:33.174)
Yeah, no, that's awesome. Yeah. You know, what I'm hearing is that

First of all, it creates sustainability to make sure that you're not just taking that there's reciprocity, right? And what you're talking about is essentially acknowledging the fact that there is a continuum and simply speaking to the relationships that are necessary in order to make sure that that continuum exists and is not just two halves that are smashed together.

It feels like there's a lot of just information that you need from the first year engineering course at the community college, from the industry professionals in terms of what kinds of skills are needed for those people, from the community in terms of the types of initiatives that they're currently working on that you can help be a part of.

So is it just a matter of like having that information? there and then, you know, within reciprocity, there's something that that you're getting to. And I understand that like just asking for stuff is not the the the way to create a sustainable relationship. But what are what are you getting from the industry partner, from the post-secondary partner that is allowing you to speak to this continuum that if it is established is what is best for the students?

Chris Brida (24:07.49)
That's a great question. And so I think that for what I am interested in building, the sort of long-term vision I have for this entire model is that there needs to be a ecosystem built around each of our pathways. Okay. So the challenge that we have now is that most of the partnerships that we have in career and technical education are very person dependent.

meaning the teacher of any specific career and technical education program is often the one that's finding the partnerships. And then if that teacher leaves or retires or whatever it is, so to go away those partnerships, right? And so the challenge that we have is that we have an expansive career and technical education program in PPS. There are 79 pathways and the partnership model comes too late and the asks of partners has come too late.

and that we should have built them with the partners from the beginning so that they would be teacher agnostic and school agnostic and are more about the program and the pathway itself, regardless of what school it is and regardless of who's in charge of it. So if we think about that ecosystem, then what industry does by participating in the sort of partnership model is that there's a workforce pipeline. It means potentially brand responsibility and corporate responsibility for those.

partners by being connected to K-12 education. And then in return, it's about, or sort of what they're bringing to the district is that they have the opportunity to influence curriculum and they get direct access to other parts of the model. For the post-secondary partners, that's the increased enrollment pipelines from the K-12 system into their universities and some opportunities for authentic engagement with students who will become their students. And then similarly,

For us on our end, working with the post-secondary partners means like an access to enhanced research in these specific areas and what's emerging and what's you know, sort of just building a relationship with them to strengthen connections between the university system and industry, right? So the reality of building this ecosystem is not just that everyone is benefiting from working on CTE, it's that they're also benefiting from working with each other.

Seth Fleischauer (26:31.661)
Yeah.

Chris Brida (26:32.226)
For the community organizations, it's an opportunity to create meaningful community impact. It's an opportunity to advance equity initiatives. It's more visibility for those organizations. And then on our end, it's their direct influence on educational policy to ensure that whatever we're doing in the K-12 system is reflective of the needs of the communities of historically underserved students. It's an opportunity for them to expand collaboration with other community organizations and cultural institutions.

And so we think about this ecosystem model as being the mechanism by which we should build effective CTE programs from the beginning. To that end as well, there's also a major opportunity, and this is sort of the direction of my dissertation right now, is that in K-12 education, we do not have access or opportunity or a way to create cross-functional teams.

So if I look at any problem of practice in career and technical education, and I brought together a folks from central office, there are very few differentiators between all of us. Most of us were classroom teachers, most of us were school-based administrators, and now we all work at central office. And so our lens is education. And so we're going to think about solving this problem from an education lens. But if I am trying to improve the diversity of a manufacturing pathway, then I need to go talk to manufacturing partners.

and I need to go talk to post-secondary partners and I need to go talk to community partners. And so my belief is that the partnerships and developing partnerships are actually a tool to develop meaningful cross-functional teams that can all solve problems of practice that have mutual beneficence. And then you create a relationship between all the people working on that problem so they gain something from each other as well.

Seth Fleischauer (28:18.456)
Hmm. So are you it sounds like what you're saying if I if I can infer that you are the systems change that you're talking about is was represented in what you were just talking about there with these cross functional teams that you're essentially getting the act of getting diverse perspectives into the conversation about education.

Chris Brida (28:37.912)
Mm-hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (28:48.206)
that come from different industries, different walks of life, because something I've always said is that society itself is the largest stakeholder in education. And we saw it at the talk that we did. We had people raise their hands. We asked them, who's an educator in this room? And we had probably 30 people out of 200. And yet, there were some incredibly strong opinions about what we should be doing in education. Everybody has a

Chris Brida (29:02.456)
That's right.

Chris Brida (29:14.05)
Right. That's right.

Seth Fleischauer (29:16.566)
Everybody has some kind of relationship to it. Everybody knows someone who's in the system, right? So it's, it is critical that it succeeds for the health of the society. Yet you're right that like, you know, in your district office, here are a bunch of people who, you know, may have other forms of diversity, but not necessarily diversity of experience because they're coming in with an educational lens and

So your thesis is essentially that some of these systemic issues come from that myopic focus of the experience of the people within education and that if we bring in these other alternative paths to get to where they are, that that will be like the Silk Road of educational reform and we will get a new stronger system as a result of these different ideas germinating with each other. that?

essentially it.

Chris Brida (30:15.692)
Yeah, that's exactly right. The idea that there right now is a significant mismatch between what the education system does and what the world outside of it needs. And so if we're gonna build an education system for what the world outside of it needs, then it's not just about bringing these people to the table for their perspectives, like these partners to the table for their perspectives. It's about leveraging their expertise in very specific and oftentimes nuanced ways.

to help us develop solutions inside the system so that it is a benefit to society. It is a benefit to industry, which has a workforce need. It is a benefit to the post-secondary system, whatever that's going to look like in the next 10 years. It is a benefit to the communities that these folks are living in and the world that essentially these students are going to inherit. And so really,

Seth Fleischauer (30:46.019)
Yeah.

Chris Brida (31:09.62)
education should be this dynamic ecosystem that is nimble enough to pivot with the needs of society outside of it. Right now, is not. It is. We're still doing a hundred year old education, right? It hasn't moved at all. And especially with AI, like things outside the education system are changing so fast, but the education system isn't changing at all. And so there's a need to sort of think about

Seth Fleischauer (31:32.301)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Chris Brida (31:39.98)
both personal, local, and immediate. What does Portland need from this next generation of students? What does the state of Oregon need from this next generation of students? What does our country need from the next generation of students? However, sort of broad or sort of really narrow you wanna make that focus, it's that there isn't a match right now between what we're doing and what's needed. And so the partnership model and this idea of creating these cross-functional teams is to bring new expertise into the system.

Seth Fleischauer (31:56.163)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (32:10.316)
Yeah. And I'll take it one step further. What does the world need? Right? Like that's my field is global learning, right? How do we prepare students for an interconnected world where we are ideally going to have like cross-cultural, cross-functional teams of people solve problems, right? And those cross-functional teams, you know, that's like, I mean, that's a dream of any work.

Chris Brida (32:15.96)
Okay.

Chris Brida (32:26.668)
Yes. Yeah, that's a good point.

Seth Fleischauer (32:33.806)
place, right? Like to be able to have people in these different silos that you inevitably have to organize in order to create a system that is functional. But the the ability of those teams to work with each other to solve more holistic problems. I mean, what a better way to what better way would there be to like prepare people to be able to do that than to like have it happening in at the at the top of the educational system having that bubble down into

the reality of the students through all these different outside partnerships, so that when they do get to the when they do have the opportunity to to work on teams where it is the they are drawing in people with different ideas, different pathways, different experiences, that you have those skills built in of how to navigate that navigate the discomfort, navigate like there's all these like social emotional elements of it, there's

just the organizational management elements of it. mean, it's a whole study, right? But what better gift to the world, right, to be able to give people the opportunity to solve in social groups of diverse people the problems that are facing us in social groups as diverse people, right?

Chris Brida (33:53.406)
And the education system is the upstream solution, right? We're doing this very reactive thing later. Organizations are having to upscale their own employees because there's a skills mismatch or community organizations are working in the community because we've missed an opportunity to really bring them along in the K-12 system. there's an early investment, I think, that will...

Seth Fleischauer (34:20.387)
Yeah.

Chris Brida (34:20.724)
or that industry could make in the K-12 system and that the K-12 system could effectively make it itself by opening the door to a lot of partners, that is an upstream solution so that we're not reacting and we're doing this more sort of proactive approach to like, are we preparing these kids for society, an increasingly global society, a society that has significant needs that we're not meeting? Like we got to that in kindergarten and not.

Seth Fleischauer (34:33.132)
Yeah.

Chris Brida (34:47.576)
once they're out of college or whatever it is. we're doing this too late.

Seth Fleischauer (34:52.718)
And so you're in this position now where you have this impact on a district level. You came all the way back from that school in Baltimore that was doing a really great job of this on a school level. How do you, like you're doing this big systems thinking, but if you go back into the perspective of like, I'm a principal of a school and I'm trying to, I can't pull the levers of the district. I'm just trying to create this for my people.

How do you build something sustainable there? How do you make it so that it's not just a relationship-based thing where when you lose a teacher or when the principal goes to another place, it all crumbles?

Chris Brida (35:35.244)
Yeah, I think it goes back to identifying problems of practice that are going to have solutions that if the school is able to solve it, it will have some impact on society in some way. And being able to identify the parts of society that it's going to impact these problems of practice and inviting those people to the table. So I think a lot of it is just being able and willing to open the door to outside perspective. And that doesn't mean like,

have those folks come in, throw money at the problem and fix it. It means really taking time to understand that in order for this to work, you have to ask outside organizations to bring expertise to the table and then figure out how those areas of expertise work together. And so when I think about like this at scale, at a systems level, I'm even thinking about like, can I take five organizations that do very different things?

and think about how their areas of expertise, if I were just still down any organization into the thing that they do most fundamentally well and pair those things together, so to create this ecosystem, what is the thing that they could solve? So you could think about like, hey, we have these great relationships with the community, what if those organizations came together and worked on something collaboratively? What is that thing? Or on the flip side,

I have this problem of practice that can't be solved by education alone. What is that problem of practice and what areas of expertise am I missing in my building? And then go find those partners because that's how you sort of begin to think about the relationship that diverse perspectives and diverse areas of expertise. That's the impact that can have when those things work together. So I think it's the same at like an individual level as it is all the way to a

all the way to a systems level. And similarly, like that exists in school buildings as well. I think the challenge often that we have is that we distill folks down to their job titles. And so when we think about distilling folks down to their job titles, it's like, well, that English teacher's expertise is in English language arts and that science teacher's expertise is in science. But they have other skills outside of that realm. Maybe it's graphic design, maybe it's, you you name it, whatever it is, like,

Chris Brida (37:59.094)
being able to sort of pick on some of those areas of expertise as well and make the internal system work a little bit better together. Instead of the career coordinator just focuses on this thing, the college coordinator just focuses on this thing, the student attendance coach just focuses on this thing. It's like, how do those three people work together to focus on one thing that sort of benefits all of them, the students at the center? That's the change that I'm sort of pitching is that.

Seth Fleischauer (38:24.61)
Yeah.

Chris Brida (38:25.304)
you know, like there's an opportunity here that we're missing to really start to pair people together.

Seth Fleischauer (38:30.274)
What strikes me about that, that idea, that solution is that it's essentially what we currently ask of our kids, but we don't practice it on our own. know, like we're like teachers are very siloed in their own classroom. Yet here we are like, you should work together. You should practice the curiosity. You should seek out answers from diverse partner, you know, like all this stuff yet. It's like, you know,

Chris Brida (38:40.247)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (38:58.912)
Adolescents, more than anything, are thirsty for authenticity, right? So to hear someone say, essentially, do as I say, not as I do, it would be so much easier if we did. And we could just say, see, this is modeling what we're talking about here.

Chris Brida (39:15.32)
And the sort of real reality, and this is an important one, is that teachers are overworked, they're burnt out, the system isn't working for them anymore, but there are resources outside the system that could be supporting that. And I think that's an opportunity as well. We need to reimagine the sort of connection points that we make in the sort of broader community ecosystem that support some of those challenges as well.

Like think about bringing a bunch of folks outside the district in with areas of expertise that are maybe analogous to teacher burnout and have them work on how to solve teacher burnout. Like then you have a varied perspective on how to do it and not education saying this is how to solve teacher burnout. Because we haven't figured that out, especially post pandemic.

Seth Fleischauer (39:53.218)
Hmm. Hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (40:02.572)
Yeah. Yeah, interesting. I love it. Well, Chris, thank you so much for being here. I think we have reached the attention span of most educators with our with our recording time here. Is there any place that you would like?

Seth Fleischauer (40:25.318)
my phone rang and then my music came on right afterwards. Is there any place that you'd like our listeners to find you on the internet, do have like social handles that you'd like people to check out?

Chris Brida (40:28.472)
Thanks

Chris Brida (40:38.584)
Yeah, find me on LinkedIn. What is my LinkedIn? Is it Christopher Bride or is it Chris Bride? It's such a good question. No, that's it. Don't want people to see a bunch of pictures of my cute 17 month old. So just find me on LinkedIn.

Seth Fleischauer (40:43.374)
I'll put it in the show notes for sure anywhere else.

Seth Fleischauer (40:55.982)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you as always to our editor Lucas Salazar, my advisor Deirdre Marlowe, to our listeners. Thank you for being here. If you'd like to support the podcast, please do tell a friend, follow us, leave a rating or a review. And remember that if you'd like to bring positive change to education, we must first make it mindful. See you next time.