"Growth Instead of Results" feat. Walter Holmes

[00:00:00] You know something, when you get my age, you know a little back and realize that it wasn't the skills that you had that got you to where you want to go.

[00:00:10] It were the deficiencies that you had to catch for where you could go further.

[00:00:15] You know what I mean? We're judged more by what we don't possess than what we do possess.

[00:00:30] Hey everyone, welcome back to the Intelligent Conversations podcast. Today I have the honor to learn from Walter Holmes.

[00:00:36] Walter is the founder of The Village, which is a collaborative student slash community development initiative to address the whole person needs of local students.

[00:00:46] Walter has served in the U.S. Air Force, developed a stock market game that is still used today by many educators and has been leading the charge for educational reform for many decades.

[00:00:57] He wants to use different metrics that encourage student growth rather than student results.

[00:01:03] This conversation that I had with Walter was fascinating, to say the least.

[00:01:07] There's also eye opening. He shared many things that he thinks and problems that the education system has and how we can better serve students.

[00:01:18] I don't want to spoil any of the rest of the show, but without further ado, let's welcome Walter Holmes to the show.

[00:01:25] I even read up on you and you have quite a remarkable career. You've done Air Force, you've done Finance Wall Street, all that fun stuff.

[00:01:36] And then you've also done now what you're doing currently, the education and trying to bring about change there.

[00:01:43] I find that pretty cool. How do you even like those three subjects just seem to not correlate at all? Like, at first glance, how did you get started there?

[00:01:55] Well, it was interesting kind of events. In the late 1980s, as it kind of shows on my age, I had a business that I lost that I shouldn't have lost.

[00:02:10] I made mistakes and I guess I needed some sort of recovery, something to do. So I had an interest in economics and finance.

[00:02:21] So I wound up doing this research paper about economics education and how to learn about stock market investing.

[00:02:30] And it's one of those skills where you learn by doing. You know, it's repetitive. There are things that click when you hear things and understand how stocks are going to react to certain news, that kind of thing.

[00:02:43] And I wanted to move a model that I had in college where someone, one of my professors had the entire class divide up a period of time and everyone had like two weeks.

[00:02:54] And everyone studied what happened those two weeks. And I kind of did that in developing the Wall Street Wiz. I don't know if you got a chance to play the game.

[00:03:02] I did not. I wanted to, but...

[00:03:06] You're off the chart. You're going to love it. It's off the chart. So once I did that, something I'm immersed in education.

[00:03:15] I worked with school districts to fall for school district for one. I was working with sponsors to get it into schools and equal work.

[00:03:24] And, and I began to understand the challenges that school was having, you know, and how I don't think it was actually serving our youth the way it should be served.

[00:03:38] So I kind of got into that. And then when the flip side, I was in the military primarily as a reservist. So I had a life outside where I owned the fifth house company, the company of the fifth house.

[00:03:50] But what we were doing in the military was quality management and human resource development. Human resource development was basically the affirmative action things that were done in the late 1990s.

[00:04:06] And today might be called DEI. But it didn't seem like they were serving a large portion of the students well because a lot of it's tied to economic indicators that are uneven across the board.

[00:04:24] So getting into what I was doing in the military, which had to do with structure and assessment. I began to apply that in education. And when I did, I found out that education and the movement of students through education can be evaluated in three different ways.

[00:04:41] A standard, a value or a rate.

[00:04:46] And a standard as you know, a standardized testing.

[00:04:50] Rate of development is a growth model. So I was promoting a growth model student assessment where rather than looking at students growing to a point where they're tested to see if they attained what was supposed to be attained by that time frame.

[00:05:06] Growth model looks at every student individually and then projects where they should be in a certain amount of time, and then is able to do the analysis of what it will take to get that student there.

[00:05:17] So as an analysis model was much better and more individualized for the student.

[00:05:22] It wasn't until night, I'm sorry, it wasn't till 2005 that Dr. Margaret spelling the Secretary of Education for George HW Bush.

[00:05:32] George W. Bush, I think it's approved the growth model, but no school district or education system has ever adopted one.

[00:05:41] So I was kind of surprised, but that's what I've been doing. And that's what we're creating now in community based education because we have a model to evaluate kids through and we can actually now make a link to education, public education in ways that weren't done before such as cognitive development,

[00:05:58] whole person student development, those kind of things which I think are more important than the academic attainment that they get in testing.

[00:06:08] The guy's your question.

[00:06:09] No, no, that's, that's great.

[00:06:11] I think you're again like just, I think all those things that you did kind of led you to this point right now which I think is what you're doing is cool stuff.

[00:06:23] And this is a question I had while you were kind of sharing that and that's how do you kind of come about and find that there was a problem to begin with, like, obviously, right we kind of sense.

[00:06:35] And most people when you ask them, hey, what's the biggest problem people say education, right? How do you kind of pinpoint maybe the problem to begin with.

[00:06:46] Well, I don't think it's a mystery.

[00:06:48] If you if you read a nation at risk, which is written in 1982 by officials with the Ronald Reagan administration.

[00:07:01] They pay in a very gloomy picture of our education system.

[00:07:06] And all the warnings that they gave all that the ways that things could go bad it seems like that was a script that was written for us that we follow to the team where our kids across the world are being judged very poorly against other nations.

[00:07:25] We created a lot of bad habits such as I remember reading in early 2000s that although our kids were doing poorly and stand by testing across the world in industrialized nations.

[00:07:40] We were requiring our students to learn 400 to 700% more content, which means that the value of what we're teaching them wasn't there.

[00:07:51] We were just giving them this on this additional burden.

[00:07:55] So there's a lot of areas that we could begin to look at for how we could read address education, which is in my book actually called me from the middle me from behind, which chronicles my time in the in the Air Force and how it matches to

[00:08:12] education and what I'm doing now.

[00:08:14] That's cool. So here's a question I just kind of have. I love the approach of a growth model. I think that I mean, aren't we isn't that why we're here right we're trying to grow become better than we were yesterday.

[00:08:27] And my thought is because you said standard is one of them. One of the things I just kind of want to put out there is isn't standards the easiest metric to kind of quantify and say like, okay, like this person knows this.

[00:08:41] Here's like kind of the standard.

[00:08:43] You know, okay, first of all, let's look at look at the structure of education.

[00:08:47] The grade system, which was introduced in the mid 1800s.

[00:08:55] Long time ago, it was basically established so that there could be some sort of judgment as a child being 10 years old should know this amount of information by that.

[00:09:07] But as you begin to go through modern age to today, that's no longer a floor now becomes a ceiling where you're going through grades progressively along with your peers.

[00:09:21] You're being taught what's appropriate for that particular grade, where you may have excelled in something that others in your class haven't your hell back because we have to go through the system that way.

[00:09:33] So I think it's, it's as a growth model.

[00:09:37] We can create models where after every class, a student could go to the next course or next class that would be the next step in their own development where in a high school knife 1011 and 12 graders.

[00:09:52] I can see a class filled up with knife do 12 graders who are at the same level at something at that particular time.

[00:10:01] There should not be a race or competition among students, which is what standardized testing is the competition that everyone has is with themselves.

[00:10:11] You know, are you a better person than you were yesterday? Where do you want to be five years from now and can you get there? Are you on track?

[00:10:18] Is the way education should be designed not a hey I'm going to do all this and teach you all this. And then at this date, you're going to demonstrate that you understood everything I taught you.

[00:10:30] The problem with education also in that model of standards in the demonstration of the skills or things that you're taught is that a lot of times the skill sets you need to demonstrate your proficiency in something are different than the skill sets that you were actually taught.

[00:10:46] A lot of them are cognitive skills like presentation skills, you know areas that aren't graded and can have a direct impact on how someone perceives your understanding of something that they taught you.

[00:11:01] So there's a lot of gaps in there that need to be addressed in the standardized testing model. Plus, it just could happen to be a bad day that you have when that test came.

[00:11:11] Exactly.

[00:11:12] One day they want to judge you. Also, this is one of the things I was able to teach at some point in public school.

[00:11:22] The model is I introduced new material Monday. I give a quiz on Wednesday. I give a test on Friday.

[00:11:28] I give 80 out of 100 questions or eight out of 10 questions right to get an 80. That tells me nothing about what the student has learned.

[00:11:37] And also during a school year period in that model, there may be about 25, 30, 35 outcome indicators that want to average out to determine what the students should get as a final grade.

[00:11:51] In a growth model, the assessments are totally different where we can create as many as 20 to 30 metric outcome indicators for each activity.

[00:12:03] So rather than having 30 or 40 at the end of a school year, we may have 4000 metric indicators so that teachers can look at evaluations on a board and say, that's Mary, that's Johnny, that's Phil,

[00:12:18] because it's measuring the child, not the grade of academic achievement.

[00:12:27] I follow that. I think that's a great idea. By the way, when I was reading your information you sent me, the thing I thought was cool is, I mean, you gave like an example.

[00:12:40] Like, all right, what's collaboration? Like how well did they work, like their teamwork presentation skills, all these skills essentially that are quite frankly useful in the workplace, proficient or like, are they doing and you can kind of look at that and say,

[00:12:57] okay, that person is doing that. And it's more, you're more rating skills. Am I kind of understanding that correctly? Like you're rating skills rather than just, hey, do you know some information?

[00:13:10] You know something, when you get my age, you know, look back and realize that it wasn't the skills that you had that got you to where you want to go. It were the deficiencies that you had to catch where you could go further.

[00:13:25] You know what I mean? We're judged more by what we don't possess than what we do possess. And I find that if we are able to create an understanding of who we are and have the ability to demonstrate that through whatever model we're being asked to demonstrate that in,

[00:13:45] we call upon the kind of skills much more often than the reasoning skills, the presentation skills, the fact of being comfortable with yourself when you're presenting to people. Those are the things that will get you going further.

[00:14:03] Howard Gardner talked about that the, what nine, I think it's up to nine skills sets of individuals, which has to do with the character development with certain types of cognitive abilities that can be utilized to take you to XYZ wherever you want to go in your life.

[00:14:23] They have to have a value in our system, you know, where we value someone's ability to speak in certain avenues such as in religion being a minister or in social media or in acting.

[00:14:40] Those are the skills that take EQ skills, empathy, self-awareness, self-determination, self-regulation. We also added reasoning skills, inductive and deductive reasoning. I think that those skills will take you a lot further than a lot of the academic skills that students are required to know.

[00:14:59] So it just seems like from my experiences, those are the things that make people successful, less knowing content and facts.

[00:15:06] I agree. And not to mention those quote unquote, I don't want to say like facts build upon each other and evolve over time. So like the stuff that maybe you're learning today, right? 20 years down the road when kids are in school learning stuff, it may be different, right?

[00:15:26] And the content changes and maybe we got to train or teach how to essentially adapt when things change.

[00:15:37] You know, it's funny because as I deal with people my age who want to interface with students, there's a lot of stories about how they were able to achieve something.

[00:15:50] And I always have to laugh because we have no idea what the children are going to go through 10, 20 years from now. They have challenges that we could not imagine as I was growing up.

[00:16:02] AI, you know, there are all sorts of health issues that are going to come to light real soon when they're even discovering plastic in our arteries, you know what I mean?

[00:16:12] So things are going to happen that they need to prepare for more than we were when I was growing up. I grew up, I was born in 50s.

[00:16:22] So, you know, that was a really good turning point with we were ascending into a more of an inclusive society. We're not, we're going the opposite direction now.

[00:16:32] Opportunities were growing when I was coming up. Opportunities are diminishing them.

[00:16:38] So their world has to be focused around something that's totally different than my life, where the world was. And that is, they have to work in teams.

[00:16:48] They have to be able to work together and magnify what they have as people, as communities because they're going to be invisible by themselves.

[00:16:58] And that's how it works. So that's part of the community based education system we're talking about, how we develop a strategy in turning into communities so that someone can walk down the street and see something that needs to be changed

[00:17:13] and say I have the methodology to get that done because I'm now working with this group of people to do it. That's where we need to be at. That's what I'm working on now.

[00:17:23] And what we're putting together is has has grown pretty interesting.

[00:17:28] We have something now called Community Public Square, which is going into libraries and churches and community centers where people can come together and it starts with a strategic plan about where the community needs to be like a problem or or

[00:17:44] issues that need to be addressed. And then they do a strategic plan to figure out all the ramifications and all the factors that are involved in it. And then through our web based system, we're now able to engage hundreds of people in the community,

[00:17:58] all taking a piece of this of the strategy to solve these problems and providing that type of structure. I think brings it down to a grassroots level where people now begin can begin to take ownership of their communities, their lives, rather than having someone

[00:18:16] waiting for someone to come down and do it for them, which is often the case.

[00:18:21] That's true.

[00:18:24] It is right and so I'm curious, could you just like provide maybe an example like someone in your like kind of your online group, how they like identified a problem and then went about solving it and like kind of the approach they didn't how they engaged more

[00:18:43] That's funny because I was putting one together for Sussex County in Delaware is a group of people there they had issues like food security, gun violence.

[00:18:54] Actually, this is an issue those two. So for the gun violence, it led up to the creation of a community policing plan.

[00:19:04] I think it's essential for every community, because there are there are policies and their relationships that need to be established. Otherwise you just have people with guns walking through your community.

[00:19:17] And it has to be a total community for you to address these social issues that go along with it not just the violence and parts that you see coming out as as the violence parts of the community itself.

[00:19:29] So, I think it's real important that as a community, I links or becomes collaborative and addressing this. They have to understand what is the problems of community. What are the social issues of community what's the economic issues of community.

[00:19:48] As I taught I thought a lot of kids needed behavioral health problems or issues and how do you identify them and how do you remediate them. The systems that we have to do that don't work.

[00:20:01] So, there are a lot of factors that contribute to the gun violence that a community policing plan will address. And as I wrote it out and now it's online. I think it's probably about 30 to 40 different individual projects.

[00:20:24] They all just come together like a puzzle. And suddenly when you have those things remediated and executed, you now have a community policing plan in place. That's how it kind of works.

[00:20:36] That's cool. So it's like multiple people coming together on them like almost an online public square.

[00:20:42] Exactly. Well, you know, the problem was I would work in organization. I'm saying working communities and there's an issue. So the community will meet someplace at church hall or something like that. You got 100 people in the place.

[00:20:57] Everybody's worked up to a fever pitch ideas of flying all over the place. And then it ends. Everybody walks out and goes home.

[00:21:07] So it's just wasted energy, wasted a whole lot of energy. What we do is come in and do the same that same strategic planning process. We facilitate it once it's executed as a plan in terms of strategic plan of the meeting.

[00:21:24] In about a week. Everyone that was at the meeting who wanted to be a participant has left their name and phone number and email address.

[00:21:33] And then from that, and areas that they want to basically participate in the community with.

[00:21:38] And then about a week later, they're all given emails to show where they can.

[00:21:42] They can log into the system and then it gives them a guideline on how they can then execute this deep. The project they're now meeting or part of.

[00:21:54] So everyone suddenly from that 100 people in that hall from the strategic plan initially, everyone of them is now engaged.

[00:22:02] And that's how you get people to begin to be part of something greater than themselves where they see the efforts that they're doing numerically materialized as a result of their effort.

[00:22:13] It's just something that will motivate people and I found that that's probably the biggest motivator for how you can get a community to become more collaborative.

[00:22:21] It's true. I mean that that idea itself it's that people just want to see essentially their efforts kind of realized almost like to completion.

[00:22:34] Well, let me just say real quick then. And this for you just so you can understand it a little bit better going forward.

[00:22:40] There's a concept called some systemics.

[00:22:44] It's a whole science. It has to do with how organizations and people work collaboratively.

[00:22:51] And when you talk about professional development, lifelong learning, you have to include the concept of systemics as a way to understand how people work together in holistic environments.

[00:23:03] So if you get a chance just kind of read the topic and you'll kind of understand where this is kind of going.

[00:23:11] I think it's a good counter for AI as well.

[00:23:14] So I'm curious though what what is kind of just put it out there, you don't have to answer but what is your view like kind of on AI and why it couldn't either not work for us or could it actually help.

[00:23:31] AI AI is it has an ability to eliminate a lot of jobs and positions. I mean it just it just, you know, it just it's basically human skills, superhuman skills in certain areas that are now filled by by humans.

[00:23:50] You know, you can you can have what AI versus 100 people in a room and get the same results if you know what I mean.

[00:23:57] Yeah, except except there's a component of the 100 people in a room managed well that AI can never meet.

[00:24:09] And there's a certain level creativity. There's a certain immediacy of the moment that I don't think AI can compete with people.

[00:24:19] We just need to begin to accentuate the value of people themselves you know where it's kind of hard to explain this part.

[00:24:29] Everything is new, you know everything like shiny brand new so it becomes the new thing.

[00:24:36] But sometimes it's better to actually create something better something that already exists a wine or different foods or artwork or furniture, fungal things where where those type of investment in human capital yields aesthetic results.

[00:24:56] And I think that are more important sometimes than the new thing like the new social media platform or something. Yeah, I guess it's and we have to get back to that part of it as well you know, there are some things that are meant to last right and should last and there are

[00:25:13] some things that yeah sure like we want to innovate we want to progress. Exactly, exactly. Exactly.

[00:25:20] We're losing that we really are.

[00:25:23] We're kind of like getting on the path of just always the new thing.

[00:25:28] I do think social media probably hasn't helped that because I mean I grew up with that and man, I'll tell you like just the constant like okay something has to be new right.

[00:25:40] I mean actually doing this podcast you kind of realize like no there's some old things like that are really cool and you just need to keep those and there's a reason why they're there to begin with and yeah build things that are meant to last.

[00:25:54] You know, why did they okay this is the way it is because you got me thinking about something when we when we're dealing with kids and youth, we're talking about whole person her whole person development.

[00:26:06] And the objective is in a single sentence for the youth to achieve mastery of self in their environment.

[00:26:18] That is doing that means yeah, so they want to actually yourself is different everybody if we relate to their environment you have to have that part of it as well as a systems approach.

[00:26:30] And at developing youth and that mastery of self.

[00:26:36] We want to concentrate on them as as what are their strengths and weaknesses, how do we improve their ability to survive.

[00:26:45] You know, we also look at what's called.

[00:26:49] I forgot the exact term is, but look at it as a pickup game basketball.

[00:26:56] You could have a whole bunch of friends with and you can have this guy you hate.

[00:27:02] The passion. Yeah, but when the pickup game if he's the best player you're going to pick him first because you want to win and you don't care about that personal things with it.

[00:27:12] Imagine kids who want to do something in a community will begin to pick their friends for projects based on their skill set such as somebody's really good at writing something or, or somebody's good at doing research.

[00:27:25] So I need to be a part of my team. Those are the kind of things that we want to kind of create that are so far removed from our kids now to me in my opinion.

[00:27:36] And that kind of mentality is we're having sustainable development with local within the community. We're calling community based education supporting community based enterprise.

[00:27:47] We're in Baltimore. We had kids who wanted to do something about bike in the community so Baltimore has an excessive amount of abandoned homes.

[00:28:01] And on top of that, the homes been ransacked where anything of value the piping is gone. The moldings are gone the things that are made that value so it becomes just empty shells.

[00:28:14] So what we're doing in Baltimore was to create some sort of wealth or enterprise. We were converting these buildings with solar panels on the roofs.

[00:28:27] We were getting water capture systems energy generating systems batteries and then we were getting PVC tubing and creating vertical gardens.

[00:28:41] So the objective was to create a vertical garden system in all these abandoned homes that would be self sustaining off the off the grid.

[00:28:51] We had john Hockens University Bloomberg School of Engineering and health.

[00:28:58] John Hopkins engineers without borders. We had a justice group in architectural firm and we were able to create what's called scripts that allow us to to proceed what the what the step by step mechanics of that would look like.

[00:29:15] And then those who are participating go through the steps.

[00:29:19] And, and we had documents that may start up with five pages in about three months. We're now 55 pages long.

[00:29:28] Oh, wow.

[00:29:30] And what they were doing where they were able to create all the things necessary to make that a shovel ready project.

[00:29:39] The next step would get funding to do it.

[00:29:41] So that's kind of like how we were looking at community based education supporting community based enterprise, creating opportunities and there are hundreds of different opportunities like that in most communities.

[00:29:53] I like this approach because it moves people towards action. And it's like, rather than a, I mean planning has its place, I will say that, but action.

[00:30:04] Ultimately, that I mean that's what makes it reality. And with that approach, especially with, you know, if we're talking with our youth.

[00:30:13] They write one of the phrases I heard that just totally makes sense to me it's like, we have the generation where they have the most information you could ever want.

[00:30:26] But they're like ill equipped to act and they have like no confidence in themselves. And I'm like, that right there, like I, I understand that.

[00:30:34] And sorry, sorry, go ahead.

[00:30:37] What I wanted to say was was one of the comments conversation I had with friends all the time, you know, I grew up in a civil rights movement.

[00:30:45] You know, and how it was able to move a conscious of the country in a different direction through a very sophisticated coordinated acts of people across the country to do things that like nine of non violent resistance or those things

[00:31:05] that are seen be unconceivable today. They didn't have the sophisticated communication devices that we have today. They were using phones and, and you know, there was not much more than that.

[00:31:19] So the sophistication as we were talking about earlier the new is not necessarily the best. And how everything has happened in social media is just made to isolate us more so

[00:31:32] Yeah, there's a there's a disconnect in our capabilities versus how we utilizing them where we should be further along than we are in areas.

[00:31:43] That's I see it.

[00:31:45] So, would you say we kind of need to move more. I mean you kind of even mentioned this earlier, like we need to move towards more like teamwork and collaboration rather than like kind of isolation and like individual performance, which is kind of how schools are

[00:32:01] right now.

[00:32:02] I'm saying I'm saying it's the only way that the youth will survive. You know, I mean, and there's going to be a lot of changes in the next 10 2030 years that I don't think our youth prepare to deal with if you give the chance to read a nation at risk.

[00:32:19] And all those ills that the document stated we need to avoid. We did every one of them. I mean, you know, we get everyone and we're in the wrong direction.

[00:32:30] And I taught the kids from around the world in different things that I do. And I just find that our kids here are just not equipped to understand what's going on in the world, you know, so in a sense, they're there are much further along than the

[00:32:47] other. But they're not as far as a lot of the youth I see in other parts of the world.

[00:32:53] Gotcha. So there.

[00:32:55] Okay, I see what you're saying now so it's more of a we're lagging behind other countries and we need to find essentially find another way to try and develop some of these things that we need to

[00:33:10] do.

[00:33:11] You know, you have to remember that opportunities are going to be as available to to the youth as they were before investments not available.

[00:33:21] If you start a company and it there are forces in the market now that that will that will work against you.

[00:33:31] So, you know, things a lot of challenges that the youth have in their life going forward that didn't exist 2030 40 years ago. And we just kind of need to understand what kind of impact that's going to have when their ability to survive

[00:33:46] and thrive. So, that's all.

[00:33:48] That's, that's the key part right there thrive.

[00:33:51] Right, we want, we want to thrive not only just survive but thrive as well.

[00:33:56] Walter, thank you. Thank you for coming on Sharon, your knowledge and wisdom with us with people want to get involved with this program that you're doing or just any way find you reach out to whatever it may be.

[00:34:10] What's the best way that they can do that and how can they get involved.

[00:34:15] You can you can call contact contact at village portal dot org.

[00:34:21] Sure about that contact at those poor.org will get me or you go to www.villageportal.org.

[00:34:29] And you can just push contact, and it will get an email to me immediately. So that's their ways that you can find out about the programs that we're doing.

[00:34:39] And if you have an interest in doing something in your community at a library or community center or a church.

[00:34:48] I would encourage you to give us a call and we can set you up because it's virtual it's online it's a web based system.

[00:34:57] And help me help me organize your community as well. So again is www dot village portal dot org and in that you just you'll see contact us and just click there to be able to hold on.

[00:35:09] Awesome. Well, thank you Walter for coming on again and.

[00:35:14] All right, everyone as you can tell that is Walter Holmes. He's a very intelligent person has great things to share.

[00:35:19] I challenge you guys if anything spoke to you or if you're interested in getting involved to reach out to Walter he left some information there for you to do that.

[00:35:29] Stay tuned till next week we have a great guest lined up for you guys. See you guys next week and let's get after it.

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[00:36:00] Thank you guys again and let's get after it.