Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast

# Make It Mindful — Phil Evans — Clean Transcript

*All timestamps are approximate

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[INTRO — recorded separately]
[00:00:00]

Support for Make It Mindful is brought to you by World Savvy, partnering with K-12 schools, districts, and community leaders to prepare youth to thrive in a complex, interconnected world.

We are proud to feature Svitlo School - a free, extracurricular online school in English, that has educated more than 3,000 Ukrainian children since 2022. Children learn from native English speakers in the UK, US and across the world. Visit SvitloSchool.com to learn more about volunteering.

Welcome to Make It Mindful, the podcast about how students learn, who they're becoming, and how new technologies and global experiences reshape teaching.

I'm Seth Fleischauer, founder of Banyan Global Learning. My guest today is Phil Evans, who works on schoolwide adoption strategy for the International Baccalaureate and hosts his own show, Education by Design. He's spent nearly eighteen years teaching and working inside IB schools in the U.S.

This episode of Make It Mindful is brought to you by Banyan Global Learning.

At Banyan Global Learning, we design structured live experiences that connect classrooms to the world.

Banyan Global Cohorts is a 4-week journey in global competence. Classrooms join an international cohort of 3–4 schools and meet weekly during regular class time for facilitated, 45-minute sessions built around a compelling Big Question.

Students explore global contexts through virtual field trips, exchange ideas with international peers, and create a final digital artifact that expresses identity, perspective, and connection across cultures.

If you're curious about what this could look like in your classroom or school, we'd love to talk. You can find us at banyangloballearning.com.

And now here's my conversation with Phil Evans.

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**Seth** (0:00)
Phil, it is wonderful to see you again and to be sitting down here and having this conversation. I'm really excited for it.

**Phil Evans** (0:08)
Thank you, Seth. It's good to see you too. Our chats when we were together really inspired me.

**Seth** (0:14)
Yeah, we met in Denver at the IB conference — I guess it was a Faria Group happy hour, started chatting there and ended up waxing poetic about education in a style that, when I found out you were also a podcaster, I was like, yes, of course, this tracks. This person likes to talk. I want to start off with a tiny little question. What is school for?

**Phil Evans** (0:42)
Ooh, okay, I love this. I think school is purely about learning how to learn and helping students believe that they can learn. Everything else that we do in school does matter, but I think it matters to different people at different times — some of it matters to the students and a lot of it perhaps doesn't, and kids don't know why.

If our schools are really focused on learning how to learn, we are setting up kids to be able to do whatever they're going to do. We've done a really great job, but I think we're probably a little bit too focused on the transactions — the things that are going to happen immediately after, on that pre-K-to-twelve timeline. The rest of it feels unaccounted for by this sector of education.

When I think about when I was twenty-eight years old, the first iPhone was just about to come out. So much has changed — I pinch myself and go, my god, the robots are coming. I played records on a record player when I was a kid. I never would have dreamed I'd be standing here at this time. I watched Demolition Man, I watched Terminator, and was frightened as a child — and all of that was literally done without any special effects. I watched a James Cameron masterclass recently, and it was all physical set. Low budget, he called it — cost them a couple million dollars to make. And it's one of those timeless films we're still talking about and referring to because of the world that we're in.

**Seth** (2:21)
Ha ha ha.

**Phil Evans** (2:42)
So I think school just really needs to come back to how we're engaging students in their own learning — and I think that's the only point of it. Because then everything else, the learning continues.

**Seth** (3:11)
Yeah. I recently did some thinking around this — I wrote a little piece on LinkedIn about it and looked into what the schools of thought are around this, and you teased a couple of them here. It kind of breaks down to three big categories. One is that learning or schooling is a market signal — this person completed this curriculum, this piece of paper tells you that this employer, this college, can trust that this person will show up with a certain amount of expected capacities. When you see the Department of Education get abolished, or greatly reduced, and much of that work flow into the Department of Labor, I think the federal government is planting its flag in terms of that's what school is for. But what you're talking about, and what my personal philosophy also is, is that it's for the learner — for increasing the capacity of the learner for whatever they need to apply that to, whether it be a capitalist venture or something else. And another school of thought is that that something else is democracy itself — that public education especially exists in order to prepare citizens to participate in a democracy, where you need a certain amount of awareness and understanding to do so responsibly. But I agree that if you focus on the learner, you are essentially solving those other two things — if it's about increasing the capacity of that individual, then they can apply that to something else.

**Phil Evans** (4:54)
Mm-hmm.

**Seth** (5:02)
Something that I think about, that I struggle with, is this tension between personalization and scalability. This idea that we can create some sort of educational experience for any given learner that engages them right in that sweet spot of not just what they want, but what they need and what they can find intrinsic motivation to participate in.

**Phil Evans** (5:11)
Mm.

**Seth** (5:31)
And then how do you scale that? When you have 30 million stories across any given country, how does that become policy? This is why No Child Left Behind existed — to reduce people to numbers so that you could take those numbers, crunch them, make decisions from a really high level, and push those down to create some sort of uniform achievement.

**Phil Evans** (5:36)
Yeah.

**Phil Evans** (5:46)
Mm-hmm.

**Seth** (6:01)
Versus, if you go the other way and let states or schools or individuals make choices about their own education, you're going to get a real range of results. Some of those are going to be really bad, and that's what they're trying to pull up with the standardization, the scalability. I know you work within IB on creating new ideas, and so much of the innovation that happens within school these days is toward that direction of personalization, of increasing student agency. How do you think about that tension between personalization and scalability?

**Phil Evans** (6:49)
Well, I think we've been really hung up on content — which is what came to mind when you were talking about how do you personalize. One of the barriers is the volume of content that we're trying to engage in. You can have a curriculum that's a mile wide, with all this breadth and variety — you could take a psychology class and learn the A to Z of all the theorists and have to spit that back on a test. The kind of student that's going to do extremely well in that is someone who's very organized, obviously proficient in their capabilities to read and digest and memorize, and drill and practice. I feel like we end up with a student that's very compliant. And I don't think we live in a world, or work in careers, where that is a skill that is very useful.

**Seth** (7:57)
You don't think so?

**Phil Evans** (7:58)
I don't think that being compliant stands out to me as something that I merit myself on in my work.

**Seth** (8:09)
Sure, sure. But what about a corporate job, where hierarchies exist and you just kind of need to put your head down and work?

**Phil Evans** (8:17)
I think that's a different kind of skill set around interpersonal skills, and respect, and understanding — hierarchies are a part of compliance, but when it comes to tasks, when it comes to performance, if I'm trying to get the right answer or trying to please somebody else without really having a stronger sense of what it is that I do and what I can produce — that's where the agency piece is. If I've developed a sense of self-efficacy around what I can and can't do, I'm able to even very graciously and carefully say no, respectfully — that's not going to be possible for me right now. There are times where we're really flooded with lots of different things going on at once at the IB, and you've got to figure out how to prioritize. Somebody at a higher level of leadership might be asking for something really important, but if I can't deliver it, saying yes in the end means no one wins. Being able to advocate for yourself and communicate well — all of those things are not necessarily part of the curriculum if you're studying for an exam to get a top grade that's going to become that transactional piece, that merit paper you can leverage.

I actually think the tides have turned already. I've got a friend who works in a company that specializes in human resources, and they've been talking about how the whole paradigm has shifted from a job- or role-based workplace to a skills-based workplace — it's less relevant what your role or job title is, and more relevant what skills you have. I think a lot of companies are coming to terms with that in the era of AI, where so much of what we're doing is augmented and supported. I found myself in a virtual working design sprint recently, using AI tools — I was taking screenshots of the task, prompting, ideating, still doing a lot of rich thinking myself, pushing back and saying, no, it's not this, it's that. And on the other end, people were like, how are you doing this so quickly? It's like — we're all going to be doing that in the next — I think everyone's catching on.

**Seth** (9:33)
Mm-hmm.

Not everyone, right? Because what you have in that scenario is the expertise to be able to push back — and especially young people, if they rely too heavily on the tools, they're not going to be able to develop that expertise at all. I'm not sure how old you are, but it's around my age, and I think that people our age kind of lucked out in terms of AI, because we have this deep experience and expertise that we can apply to the usage of it — that really allows us to leverage what these tools are best at. Versus, I can't imagine being a young person right now watching your peers excel with the usage of these tools, whether or not they're using them in a way that's protecting their cognitive development and resisting that temptation, while all of these incentives exist for the usage of it, even though it might be a long-term detriment.

I'm wondering though — were you in Denver at the keynote with Rebecca Winthrop from Brookings?

**Phil Evans** (11:38)
I was, yeah. Amazing. Rebecca's incredible.

**Seth** (11:41)
I'm reading her book right now — she's actually coming on the podcast, which I'm super excited about, ton of respect for her work. She talks about this spectrum of engagement, four quadrants — on one axis is engagement, on the other is agency. People with low agency and low engagement are passengers — they'll do what they're told, they're not really going to fight it, but they're just doing it to get by. People with high engagement but low agency are achievers — they want that gold star, they'll do everything they can to get it, but they're not necessarily going to take control of their own learning. The biggest pet peeve of an achiever is when the teacher doesn't tell them exactly what they need to do to get the grade. On the other end, low engagement and high agency, are the resistors — people who aren't engaged and will let you know it. And the apex of learning, as she describes it, is the explorer — high agency, high engagement, driving their own learning.

**Phil Evans** (12:33)
Mm-hmm.

**Seth** (12:40)
One of the things I love about that framework is how much it checks — everyone I've mentioned it to who's unfamiliar with it says, yeah, that totally makes sense, I was that, in that class I was that. One of the things I want to ask her, because she talks about this in her book too — you can't always be in explorer mode. Sometimes it's okay to be a passenger. I think about these different roles people need to play in any given group, whether at school or at work, within a school community, within a family. Not everyone can be an explorer all the time — at some point you've got to build stuff, it can't just be about finding it. And in order to build stuff, you need some passengers and maybe some achievers, and you need some resistors to poke holes in the design so it can be more resilient.

**Phil Evans** (13:20)
Mm-hmm.

**Seth** (13:37)
In the context of education, it's tricky, because you want everyone to have that explorer mode. We've all seen it as educators — that light come on in someone's eye where they start owning their own learning, where you see the intrinsic motivation turn on. It's beautiful, you'd love for that to happen all the time, but I don't think it's practical. So much of the innovation in education is about pushing kids into that explorer mode, and I wonder sometimes — are we not giving enough credence to the passengers? Are we not teaching how to be compliant sometimes, if you have to be? Maybe that's cynical and traditional and not progressive of me, but I think about these things.

**Phil Evans** (14:20)
Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to listen to you speak to Rebecca about this one-to-one, because I'm excited that you raised this — it was one of my favorite, most-sticking-with-me parts of her talk. I don't think about the passengers and the resistors, the explorers and the achievers, as personas or roles people play in a situation — I think about them as people responding to their learning environment. I don't know that a student would call themselves a passenger even if they're absolutely being one, just coming along for the ride. And the resistors — there's a whole host of reasons why people are resisting. I think about a student who's been really challenged in their socioeconomic context — they come to school, it's exciting for a little kid, new friends and all that, but then you start to realize you're not good at school and you start to fail. That starts to happen in elementary school, and you have to keep coming to school, and then you come to middle school and you're regarded as one of those kids that's just not — and eventually, as a human being, you're going to be pretty angry and frustrated, and you're still going to go in there until you're seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old. That's soul-crushing. Getting out of high school, even with very minimal skills, is a celebration — I've witnessed it. Some of the students I've seen who barely made it across the standards of learning — reading at a fifth-grade level in the eleventh grade, in some cases — just making it to graduation, everybody's there, hair done, dressed up, feeling proud. And as somebody who witnessed where that student was at, and worked so hard to try to get them to feel as though they could participate and take charge of learning when they'd been conditioned to be a passenger or conditioned to resist — I just felt sad. There are aspects of life I struggle in, and I have a master's degree — how are you going to manage holding down a job, raising a family, what's life going to be like, having just made it through high school.

I really like your point around not always being able to be an explorer — sometimes you've got to get things done, you've got to achieve. I feel like there are times in life, at work, where there's so much on your plate that you're just trying to get things done. But maybe I found a groove and a passion — the work I'm doing, I'm super passionate about, sometimes it feels like the lines are blurred between what I do and who I am, which is lovely. We're very lucky people, and I really hope more people can find that, because I think it's possible when you really tune in to your humanity and say, I'm not going to just do this because it's paying well, or because this is what my degree is in — what else can I do with my skills? I think employers are starting to look for that more. Right now I've got a lot going on, and I'm trying to prioritize by what's coming up on Monday and Tuesday if this is a Friday — but I'm also having to employ those explorer elements too, because I'm creating so much and building so much. It's like, how do I want to ask the stakeholders in this survey this time, what did we do last — I'm building something while I'm achieving.

I think it's great to get to a place where you're more in the explorer mode than the achiever mode. But I think what Rebecca was talking about, when it comes to the achievers — they're the people who come through having gotten really great scores, having done the work, stayed up late and studied really hard, remember the things — but without that agency for learning, the application and the transfer and the adaptability isn't there. I hear friends talking about it — living in Washington, D.C., people have very interesting jobs. One of my friends works at the Pentagon and says some of the junior people just want the list of what am I supposed to do at work today, and it's like — I need you to help us, what we did yesterday was what we did yesterday, what we're doing tomorrow is all new. We need you to show up and participate in this as an inventor — even though there are rules, even though there's policy — we're trying to solve problems, and national security is at risk. It's interesting — these people with these jobs didn't just get them because they got a degree, these kids went to really great schools too, they're interns from some of the most leading institutions, and they're doing well in those institutions too. But when it comes to the real world, are we preparing students in that sense? I just think it comes down to knowing yourself. It sounds really corny, but if you don't care about what you're learning but you're doing it anyway, if you're pursuing it because it's expected of you, then you're an achiever, aren't you?

**Seth** (24:03)
Yeah, I do agree that the extent to which you know yourself enables you to find occupations that can be in greater alignment with what you really want or need. What's tricky about any given career is that you're choosing it at twenty-two. Did you know yourself at twenty-two? I've definitely improved in that area in the past twenty-five years.

**Phil Evans** (24:36)
Well, schools are asking kids to choose that at fifteen and sixteen. Sometimes we're talking about college readiness in elementary school. They don't know what they're going to be when they grow up, and maybe still won't when they're thirty-five. Olka Joshi Hansen — have you heard of her? She's a futurist —

**Seth** (24:45)
No.

**Phil Evans** (24:53)
She was talking in a reel I watched this morning about how midlife crisis is very similar to the kind of identity crisis you have as a teenager, without the curfews, she said, and I thought that was hilarious.

**Seth** (25:19)
Yeah, midlife opportunity, by the way — that's what I call them.

**Phil Evans** (25:30)
One of the teenagers — I don't know if it was her son or a friend's son — said something like, "Mum's having a midlife cougar," joking around. What seems to happen is you start to question — who really am I, what am I doing, am I in the right place, are all the things I've worked toward — and people go through this cycle, coined the midlife crisis. But it's not a crisis if you embrace that maybe you're just questioning what you're capable of and what you could be doing with your life — and you've actually got some tools in your pocket in that regard. Again, that comes down to being a learner and being open, saying I'm not tied down to what I picked when I was twenty-one or eighteen and went through that undergrad — I could do something else. Do I want to? Maybe not. But I could. Scary.

**Seth** (26:33)
Yeah. I love that comparison. So much of it has to do with our physical body — in adolescence, you're becoming from a kid into an adult; in middle age, it's that first slowing down, my body's writing checks my mind can't cash. I've got all sorts of issues I've dealt with in the past ten years. I think there's a connection between viscerally understanding that I will be old one day, and the wisdom to understand what truly is sustainable — that's what happens during these midlife crises or opportunities, you are rethinking: how long can I do this when maybe the reasons I chose this aren't consistent with my current understanding of who I am.

**Phil Evans** (27:43)
Whereas when you're a teenager, you don't know what to choose — it's a different kind of, you feel like you've got an infinite future when you're that young. The daunting aspect is I don't know what to do, I don't know who I am. To your point, now that you're a little older, you're thinking — with the time I have left —

**Seth** (28:05)
But I think there is a comparison to adolescence there — as a kid it's like, yeah, I want to be president, truly infinite possibilities. Then as an adolescent, when you see your body change, when you look like the person you're going to be as an adult — my daughter's thirteen right now, it's a trip watching that happen to a human — there's this inevitable understanding that there was childhood and now there's this. And on the other end of this are some decisions. I understand, viscerally, that those decisions are coming and that I'm going to need to make them. Part of the process is trying to understand, very simply, what do I want to do — and knowing that requires knowing who the "I" is in that equation. I feel like schools do a much better job of this now — CTE and SEL are doing these deep explorations of not just, hey, does it sound cool to be a vet, but what are some of the activities in your life that bring you joy?

**Phil Evans** (29:16)
Yeah, they do.

**Seth** (29:30)
And why do those activities bring you joy? How do you know you're feeling joy? How do you know you're doing this for you and not for someone else? I'd love to think that exploration creates an economy where people are really pursuing what they want to pursue. I do think a key, though, is a little bit of anti-consumerism — because if you're stuck thinking I have to earn a certain amount in order to be happy, that's going to detract from a lot of the dreams people have, like I want to be an herbalist, or work on regenerative agriculture. There's not always a lot of money in the things people care about, because it's a market too — there's going to be more people who want to do it because it feels good.

**Phil Evans** (30:22)
Yeah. I think we really need to do something collectively about this, because when I think about how carefree my life was — I didn't have a cell phone when I was a kid, and if there was a time I needed a private conversation, we had a long cord and I had to pull it around the corner into a room and not fully close the door.

**Seth** (30:49)
And your mom could still pick up the other line and listen.

**Phil Evans** (30:51)
Right, yes. You could tell, but that was the rest of the time — we weren't doing stuff like that. Mum and dad were — you can't watch the idiot box, they used to call the TV that — you've got to do something else. That's the way we were raised, and kids now are saturated in content, saturated in imagery about what they should or shouldn't look like, and messages, and people trolling them on the internet, cyberbullying — and when you're thinking about what you're going to be when you grow up, and people are saying, well, am I going to be able to earn enough money to buy a house — I just watched a teacher crying on the news in Michigan because she can't afford a house. I'm a teacher, I love what I do, I care about what I do, but how am I ever going to have my own house? That's what we're facing in the world today. But coming back to your question about what school is — it is discovering who you are. That exploratory aspect Rebecca's talking about ties nicely into this, because we all have — I was really musical, I loved music, I loved musical theater, everything from rock music, Mum would listen to Whitney Houston's records, Dad had another style of music, even some of the stuff my grandparents would listen to — my grandmother used to play the piano, she had long fingernails that would tick-tick-tick on the keys, and she'd sing these old songs. I think about them now and it brings back memories, and I love that. I love that I'm musical — but if I was just musical and didn't have exposure to other things, what would I do with my life if I wasn't going to be a musician and wasn't going to sell records? I'd be a bit stuck, wouldn't I, probably sitting on the couch in Mum's basement. I feel like school should be about helping students leverage their interests and take them further. I think it's prime time, especially in elementary and middle school — maybe we present as if we're sure in our adolescence, but I think we're still pretty open to, maybe I really am interested in architecture, maybe I could be an architect, I'm interested in art and music, or the emotive aspect of music, maybe I'm interested in psychology — that doesn't mean I'm going to be a psychologist, but it could mean I could be all kinds of different things with an interest in the way people organize themselves in community. Are we exposing kids to an education where that kind of interconnectedness is flowing? That's what I love about working at the IB — the answer is yes. We don't design coursework or textbooks that you sell and follow a script — it's the framework we're building from that really ensures students are at the center of the learning, as best we can. There are times they need to do individual work, and time for direct instruction — inquiry-centered, constructivist education doesn't mean that's all it is, all the time. Sometimes you do need that front-loading, that moment of pushing the thinking through exposure to a text you wouldn't go looking for yourself, or a resource, or a case study.

I just feel like that other dimension of learning how to learn is really learning about who you are, and learning about who you are in relationship to others — because that's the world in which you discover what you really care about. If we were focused on that, we'd be more civically minded, more service-oriented, better parents and partners — and we'd be well prepared not just to take on a job, but to go into a role and build it, and create it, and take it where it needs to go as the world keeps changing.

**Seth** (35:44)
Yeah — like those junior folks at the Pentagon. In the work that you do, if this is what school's for — we're teaching students how to learn, providing them with a breadth of opportunities to discover what they care about, and teaching them how to really take agency with those various paths that resonate deeply with them — I'm always fascinated by how quickly the new thing in education turns over. You'd need eighteen full years of education to understand if one approach worked, yet we seem to cycle through them every five years because we get impatient that after five years the eighteen-year plan hasn't worked. And it's a social science that never has a perfect control — these are dynamic systems, we're always searching for meaning within the data, some of which is quantitative and limited, some more comprehensive but qualitative and difficult to standardize. So how do you know what to hold onto, and how do you know what to change? How do you make sure you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to having a progressive mindset toward education?

**Phil Evans** (37:21)
Yeah, I love this — this is really on my mind. I'm going to speak to this not really as a curriculum designer, because it's not my space — there are experts in our organization I have so much esteem for, because I think it's really challenging to consider.

You know, the work I've specifically been doing, I've seen this up close — when I first came to the States, I came to a public school that had an IB program, a center for the arts, a CTE bus schedule taking kids all over the county to other centers. There was the college-prep route for students who were really at entry level and struggling to succeed in school, then honors if they were interested in that, and other provisions like College Board AP, and now probably dual enrollment, since that's become pretty prevalent. That means you're an English faculty of grades nine through twelve, with maybe ten, maybe twenty people on your faculty, depending on the size of your school — and how many of you are teaching the same thing? How many of you have the same assessment values, do you do mixed methods, do you have projects, do you grade across common assessment criteria or make it up, do you use a book — versus everything being end-of-course for other people, other things provided by the district. In that microcosm of a community where we're all teaching within the subject discipline, how do we have a conversation about removing barriers to learning? How do we really make progress as a community, if everybody works on their own?

One symptom of this — we're still friends to this day — this teacher is such an incredible creative teacher, published poet as well. We were in a staff meeting, talking about some creative projects we were doing, and I said, whoa, that sounds amazing — and after the meeting, I asked a few more questions and whether they'd be willing to share the resources, and they said, no, no, I don't share my resources. I felt a little let down, a little intruded on, like, is it me? No, no, it's not you. That was interesting.

Compare that to going to an IB round table for the mid-Atlantic region — multiple states coming together at a school in Fairfax County — and the lead for the subject area had put all of these resources together on jump drives. If they'd printed it out, it would have been almost an inch thick — experienced teachers who'd put together resources and just gave them to us. The difference is we're all working together, even if we're not in the same school, we're all working toward a common framework. We've got the ability to share those resources and think about how to tailor this to the group I'm working with, the students I'm serving — whereas my other colleague has all that creative talent, probably more so, but is doing that entirely on her own, after school, on the weekends, laboriously but willingly, passionately, creating these incredible things, but not in a space where she's ever going to get an exchange from another teacher. No one's going to give her anything, so why would she share her hard work? That's a whole cultural thing people don't think about when we just put more things on top of more things, and have all these choices kids can choose from when we don't know what we want to be when we grow up. What's the best possible learning experience we can have in a math class at the right level? What kind of biology class is going to give me the opportunity to design a lab, test it, analyze the data, critique my own results, and build an entire report that recommends what I'd do next time?

I think what I'm driving at is that we're lacking coherence. What the IB has, that no other non-nationalistic or state system has — some countries do have this — is we've built this coherent process where when I get on a plane and go to France next month for the conference, I'm going to meet a whole bunch of strangers who speak the same language. When we met, you're working in this sphere and connecting with the IB community because what you do is really connected to what we care about, and that's why it matters. I think that's possible in lots of different ways, but we've got to be really careful that as we're trying to reach more communities with high-quality education, what makes an IB education powerful is its coherence — the fact that every teacher, every parent, every student, the whole community can feel connected. I consider it my vocation in life to help make that even more possible in our schools, and to try to advance that even if it's not in an IB school — how do we help more and more schools build around common values, common language, and common practice, so that students benefit? Because it's the neuroscience on this that's really interesting too.

When there's a sense of practice around learning and teaching, students don't have to relearn it every time — we forget you have to learn that. This professor wants this, that professor wants that in college, people want different things from you, and you've got to retrofit the way you approach not just the learning, but what is this professor looking for. Kids are dealing with that going from classroom to classroom in school, and that's a lot of unnecessary mess if we have a shared sense of what learning looks like and what's expected of us, and when we become agents of our own learning and when we need to buckle down. If those things are more expected, we have more brainpower to work on other skill development and retention of knowledge.

I think that's what we need to hold onto and build more toward in education, because a lot of the other times we look at scores and outputs and say this math curriculum isn't working, so let's buy a new one — let's get a new one, this one's got great results, this one was marketed really well. I understand — I might sound a little flippant and sarcastic about it, but teachers are on the other end of that going, why would I invest in this, they're going to change it in three or four years anyway.

**Seth** (48:21)
Yeah, I mean definitely that, but also, a math curriculum is not a system — what you're talking about is having a system that provides enough structure that everybody's rowing in the same direction, but enough flexibility that people can make their own decisions, develop their own agency, learn their own lessons that get put back into the group as the system evolves. It's about a common — you said common values, a visionary leader — these are some of the things inherent to a lot of IB schools that are the reasons I think they thrive. It's tough to replicate that when you don't have that. It's trite to call it a label, but the label IB represents so much, and different people have different levels of understanding of what those representations really mean and how they get translated into practice. But simply the idea of, I know what I am because I'm an IB teacher, I know what I am because I'm an IB leader —

**Phil Evans** (49:41)
Yeah, exactly — and that role is one that's been thought out in the creation of the system, not of an individual math curriculum. It's exciting too. One of my colleagues actually retired, and I called him when he was on the beach and said, can you come work with me? He said, let me think about it — yes. It ruined his retirement. But he said, IB saves teachers' souls, it saves kids' souls, because you get to become something — you are a teacher because that's what you're called and that's your job, but when you actually think about that as a role you're defining and learning about, and the landscape of education is changing, so I've got to change with it, and I'm willing to change with it — yes, it's scary, change is hard, it's never easy, but it's the given, it's definitely to be expected.

I think that's a really cool thing about the IB — we really trust teachers, we trust the value teachers bring as designers and crafters of the learning environment. It's pretty unique to have a global network at large that you might not have full access to — even if you get to interact globally three percent of the time, it's pretty energizing to feel a sense of belonging, momentum, and vitality.

**Seth** (52:00)
Yeah. The meaning, the purpose. Well, I think we may have found the title of the episode — Saving Teachers' Souls with IB. Phil, thank you so much for the conversation. This has been fantastic.

**Phil Evans** (52:11)
No, that's a bit corny. Yeah, thank you, Seth. I really enjoyed it. It flew past.

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[OUTRO — recorded separately]

That's a wrap on our conversation with Phil Evans.

What stuck with me most was the contrast Phil drew between two teachers — one brilliant and prolific, working entirely alone because there was no shared system pulling her work outward, and another operating inside a network of IB educators trading resources by the jump drive because they'd already agreed on a common framework. The difference wasn't talent. It was coherence.

That's worth sitting with if you're weighing whether your next investment should go toward new curriculum, or toward the shared structures that make existing work worth sharing in the first place.

Thanks for listening to Make It Mindful, and we'll see you next time.