The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 133 Transcript

Jennifer Gonzalez, host


Most teachers instinctively know that if students’ emotions are off-kilter in any way, if their stress levels are high or their social lives are a mess, they won’t be able to concentrate on academics. And yes, schools usually hire guidance counselors to support students with these issues, but most of the time they can barely squeeze this work in between all the other things they’re responsible for. Research is telling us that children and teens are experiencing more anxiety and depression than ever before, and those numbers keep going up, so clearly the need for social-emotional support in schools is growing.

Many of us do what we can to pay attention, to tune into our students’ emotional needs, build relationships with them, create safe spaces in our classrooms, and weave lessons about communication, anger management, self-advocacy, and mindfulness into our academic content.

Still, we’re pretty sure this isn’t enough.

Some schools are tackling this issue by providing mental health services as part of larger wraparound programs. Other schools are adding on separate SEL curricula, doing book studies, and giving extra SEL training to their teachers.

Another creative approach, which we’ll look at today, is to designate a space in school that can meet some of these needs. But in this case, we’re not talking about a counseling center or meditation room—although these would be welcome additions to any school. This space does not appear to have anything to do with social-emotional needs at first glance: You’d see a 3-D printer, piles of Legos, books, index cards, art supplies, laptops. You’d see students cutting paper, taping pieces of cardboard together, editing videos. It looks and feels like a makerspace, because that’s what it is. But it’s more than that. 

The Success and Innovation Center is a unique space at Mt. Blue High School in Farmington, Maine. Director Dan Ryder describes it as a problem-solving studio, a stigma-free space where students can go at any time during the school day to work on problems they’re having inside or outside the classroom. In this episode, Dan and I talk about how he started the center, what it looks like on a day to day basis, the impact it’s having on the students at Mt. Blue, and how you can start something similar at your school. 


Before we get started, I’d like to thank Public Consulting Group for sponsoring this episode. PCG is a national organization that supports teachers and school districts in providing high quality professional development. PCG’s online professional learning catalog is approved for continuing education credits nationwide, allowing teachers a cost-effective and efficient way of engaging in professional development, leading to license renewal and pay increase. PCG’s courses range from short 1-hour workshops to in-depth graduate level courses, allowing teachers to create a customized playlist of content to meet their individual career needs. PCG has teamed with leading educational experts to bring you valuable tricks, tools, and strategies for immediate application in your classroom.  You’ll also receive individualized coaching from PCG’s virtual facilitators throughout your course. PCG believes that the learning never ends and they want to help you help your students succeed. Visit cultofpedagogy.com/PCG to find out more and use the code CULT20 to get $20 off your first course.

Support also comes from ViewSonic. ViewSonic transforms classrooms into immersive learning environments. Their education solutions drive engagement, energize and motivate students, and make teaching more fun. From ViewBoard interactive displays and myViewBoard digital whiteboarding software to projectors and monitors, ViewSonic’s award-winning solutions are here to help teachers stay connected and collaborate in their classrooms. To learn more, visit viewsonic.com/education.

The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast is part of the Education Podcast Network. The EPN family is the home of dozens of different podcasts, and each one is focused on education. Check out all of our shows at edupodcastnetwork.com.

Now, here’s my interview with Dan Ryder about his Success and Innovation Center. 


GONZALEZ: I would like to welcome Dan Ryder to the podcast. Dan, welcome. 

RYDER: Thank you for having me. 

GONZALEZ: We, we’ve talked at South by Southwest much earlier this year in March, and you approached me, and you were really, really excited to tell me about this makerspace that you have that is much, much more than a makerspace. And so we’re finally actually getting together to talk about it. And so before we get into the nitty gritty of all of that, tell us just briefly what it is that you do for work. 

RYDER: So I work at Mt. Blue High School in Farmington, Maine, up in the western foothills. It’s where I’ve worked my entire career. And after teaching English for 20 years, I now, or I should say 17 years, 18 years, I now run the Success and Innovation Center at Mt. Blue campus, which is a combination makerspace and human-centered problem solving space.

GONZALEZ: Ah, see I couldn’t figure out how to phrase, I knew it was a combination makerspace and something else, and I thought how are they putting this to students, because you wouldn’t call it a social workspace. 

RYDER: No and we, we were and we, initially, and we, we got some pushback, some very justified pushback. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: From some folks, and also we knew that that wasn’t the best way to describe it. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: The way I typically elevator pitch it these days is it’s a problem-solving studio that takes the best principles of human-centered design and the best principles of social emotional learning and fuses them together so that through our space, the act of making and creating can also help with the other parts of ourselves, besides just academic learning. 

GONZALEZ: Okay, so let’s, go ahead and just sort of rewind a little bit to how this all got started, and tell us a little bit about what your original vision is. You set this up also with a partner, so tell us a little bit about her and her background and how all of this came together. 

RYDER: Absolutely. So my friend Becky Dennison is a, is a licensed social worker and working as the college transitions coordinator for our, for our adult ed program here in Farmington. And she had started working on this vision for a success center that would kind of fill in the gaps between what she was doing in college transitions and what school counselors find themselves having the capacity to do in terms of college searching but also just being academically successful but also being a successful person. Because we have 700, roughly, kids in our regional public high school, and we only have three school counselors. Which for some places, that’s like, what do you have to complain about? And I appreciate and get it. I understand. But traditionally we’ve had more than that. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: And so when you’re looking at students from high poverty, you’re looking at students from a lot of what would be first-generation college, if they went to college, you’re looking at students who are experiencing a lot, a lot of the risks on, say, like the ACEs scales for like trauma informed, you know, and stresses. We have a large population of kids who are experiencing those things as well as a significant population of your kind of what we would call the new middle class, right? People who have, like, regular jobs, regular careers, regular paying, regular employment —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: — and are kind of following what we would call a more traditional track through life. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: We’ve got them kind of in equal measure. So you take like 350 kids with a lot of needs and 350 kids that are kind of going to do okay, split them among three people, it’s a lot. 

GONZALEZ: Got it, yep. 

RYDER: So, and we haven’t traditionally had social workers on campus available, limited, limited numbers of support because we’re not a super affluent community and we serve kids from 10 different towns, each of which have their own sets of needs and kind of their own, kind of cultural values there, and that impacts everything that happens here with the kids that come through the door. So Becky was seeing this need. I, at the same time, have been working with several different teachers at different times. I’m trying to get a makerspace up and running, because I had started teaching my English classes through a lens of making and creating this, especially through design. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: So I have like a mini makerspace in my room that more and more kids from around the campus were using, and I was totally cool with it, like, you know, I got a 3D printer for my English classes. People thought that was weird, and what we were doing is designing fidgets for kids with special, you know, with stress and anxiety. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: And using that experience to then learn all of our English in the context of making, designing, need finding, empathy, research, so on and so forth. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: So what ended up happening was we chocolate and peanut buttered our two visions as a result of getting this access to, or an opportunity to get a Gear Up, you know, Gear Up action research grant. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. Is Gear Up like a brand name? 

RYDER: It’s a fed name. 

GONZALEZ: I gotcha. 

RYDER: It’s a federal grant for postsecondary aspirations work. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: Shows up a lot in rural states. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: And yeah, they came to, they came to a bunch of schools in our region and said, we have this opportunity to develop a multiple pathways program. You design what you think would work for your students, you pitch how much money from this big pot you think you need to do it, we come together, we come up with what the research question is and so on and so forth, and if we think it’s good, we’ll fund it and you need to do some deliverables for us on our side and we’ll see if we can pilot something that works. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: And lo and behold, the Success and Innovation Center was born. 

GONZALEZ: So you sort of knew ahead of time that you wanted to combine both purposes into one space?

RYDER: We knew pretty, I would say we knew relatively soon in the process of me being a part of that conversation, because Becky had already kind of started on the Success Center vision, and was kind of working towards that, and then I found out about this effort from the Gear Up folks who heard about a vision that I had for doing a design studio style teen, freshman teen approach to instruction that I had been kind of trying to get off the ground, but kept kind of getting knocked down —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: — by, by some of the gatekeepers. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: Really liked the idea, they just couldn’t figure out how to make the schedule work. 

GONZALEZ: What, who thought that these two things would work together though? 

RYDER: The little group of people that I convinced would. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. So, well, let’s go back then to the origin point of that. What made you think that this would work? I mean I’m guessing that you may have had some, even if it was a couple of moments while you were doing just the makerspace in your own classroom —

RYDER: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: — that made you start thinking, there’s some social emotional stuff going on here that maybe we want to really, you know, ratchet up. Like, where did you get this idea to layer that on? 

RYDER: I’m glad you asked that question. Is that, that’s the proper, like, podcast-type response, right? You know, that’s a great question. What was happening in my room was kind of, it’s kind of opposite of what I hear happened with a lot of people. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: I started the makerspace in my room not because I wanted kids making things, but because I had adopted design thinking —

GONZALEZ: Yep. 

RYDER: — as like my lens through which I was doing everything, and we needed to prototype solutions to stuff. We needed to make things, and I needed to have the materials available to me. So I kind of went into making in my classes from that place of, all right, we are doing need-finding, we’re doing empathy work, we’re really understanding what someone is like and trying to dig deeper and looking at insights and looking at body language and listening to someone’s words and how does their diction relate to what they’re feeling, and how do our feelings actually align to our actions and what happens when they’re out of alignment? I’d been teaching a humanities class with my buddy Sam Dunbar. We founded it here, and we’ve been teaching it for probably six years at that point. And it, you know, we were combining social studies with English and the conversations and the places we were going were getting into this kind of human condition place, and since we were focused on human-centered problem solving, we were bringing up a lot of stuff. And the projects that started to lend themselves were doing things like designing sanctuary spaces for people. So we read “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson, and one of my favorite projects we came up with was how might we design a sanctuary space for someone else in the room as well as how might we design a sanctuary space for one of the characters in “Speak” who’s not Melinda, the protagonist, who kind of has her own sanctuary. And so while we’re doing that, we’re talking about what makes something safe. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: You know, we’re, we’re, we’re dealing with that, and we’re studying Dan Pink’s “Whole New Mind,” and so we’re looking at right brain thinking. And so we’re talking a lot about, you know, what it means to be inherently human and what it means, you know, what are these feelings we’re having, we’re dealing a lot with kids who are struggling with that, and we’re seeing, when they start making things, an engagement level that they weren’t having before. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: And we’re seeing kids who typically have said, “I can’t,” “I don’t,” “What’s the point?”

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: We’re watching all of that just, like, drop. The number of times kids are going, “Why are we even doing this?” just, like, bottomed out. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: It would be like a couple of kids saying it, and a kid next to him would be like, dude, we’re doing this because there are people who don’t have anywhere to go. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: And we’re like, yeah, that’s why we’re doing it. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. A much bigger reason outside of school. 

RYDER: Right? Like, well this isn’t going to fix it. And the guy’s, and then the next kid goes, shut up, just do it. They stopped asking, you know, why do I have to? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: What’s the point? Because it became inherit by adopting that design, you know, that mindset of design and human-centered design. So I was seeing the effects of that on some of my, I call them the rough and readies? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: You know, like, they’re great kids but wow, school just has not worked for them for a really long time by the time they saw me as a ninth-grade teacher. 

GONZALEZ: Yep. 

RYDER: And I was watching this shift, I’m watching them design tiny houses for the characters in “Of Mice and Men,” you know, we call them “Mice and Tiny Houses” so that designing these tiny, these to-scale tiny houses that meet the needs of George and Lennie and also Crooks and Candy so that we’re not just talking about the surface-level stuff. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: We’re trying to really think about well, what is it they actually need? And that leads the conversations to what you really need, and then they’re building things, and I’m watching just the affect in them —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: — go from like defensive posture, right —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: — to this openness. And so because I had seen that, I’m like, wait, this place could be about one thing, but it could be a problem-solving studio. 

GONZALEZ: Right, right. 

RYDER: Right? We can apply it. And we were using all sorts of techniques in talking about this Success Center, we were using all sorts of methods that I was using with design, you know, the design thinking kids. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Like, wait a minute. This just maps over. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: So I just brought it up while we were sitting around the table, I’m like, couldn’t we do both? You know, couldn’t it serve both purposes? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: And like there wasn’t pushback. It was like oh, yeah, and it didn’t hurt that, you know, Becky’s husband is this amazing artist who does this moving folk art and his pieces are both beautiful and very provocative and thoughtful and her daughter is going into art therapy. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: You know, like, there’s a lot for her to be like, oh yeah. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: Yeah, this could work. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. This is, this is reminding me, I’m not sure if you’ve been in contact with Josh Stumpenhorst at all through the internet or whatever but this reminds of a video that he shared with me once, because he’s now I think a librarian, media center guy. He’s moved out of the classroom and he was also talking about the SEL benefits of, of running that kind of space, how kids will come in and get a lot of their sort of social emotional needs met, because they happen to be in there. And he’s got this video of them trying, they were fooling around, they were trying to stack, I don’t know what it was, boxes or popsicle sticks or something, trying to reach the ceiling. It was really emotional after while seeing how these kids just got into it, and like you could hear the bell ringing, and they were just like, screw it, we’re staying here. And it was, it was kind of the same point, that you can sort of, when kids get really absorbed in something, in solving a problem together, a lot of the walls can come down, and the defensiveness can come down, so, I guess I’m just, I was just seeing a connection there with that. 

RYDER: Absolutely, absolutely. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay. So let’s, let’s get into the logistics of this place, because tell me first off, where is this in your, is it in, in the high school building someplace? 

RYDER: Yep. It’s right in the high school. We took a faculty lounge —

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: — and made it a student space. 

GONZALEZ: Where did the faculty go? “Sorry.” 

RYDER: So our campus recently underwent a massive renovation. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: But we have these faculty, we have three faculty lounges around the campus, so we had these spaces that were kind of like, do we really need these? Turns out we did, because the building was already too small for a lot of other reasons. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Longer story, but basically we only had a couple of faculty we had to displace, and one of whom was the district psychologist who became a regular fixture, until she took a job in another district, she was regularly in here, which was fantastic. 

GONZALEZ: Oh great. 

RYDER: She was forming relationships with kids who were feeling more comfortable talking to her, and when she was doing diagnostics and stuff, they’re like, oh. I know Ms. Chouinard. This is fine. 

GONZALEZ: Okay, so it’s in a faculty lounge?

RYDER: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: Or what used to be a faculty lounge, okay. 

RYDER: So it’s got a fridge, it’s got a sink. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: You know, it’s got a bunch of weird cubicles that we’ve turned into different kind of workstations. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. And when somebody walks in, does it look like a makerspace more than, I mean are there little piles of stuff everywhere? 

RYDER: Piles of stuff everywhere. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: Because I am a slob. But every day kids come in and try to make it better. But no, you walk in, when you first walk through the door, you see tall, like adjustable tables that we only ever keep up high. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: You see tools everywhere, you see tons of flexible seating. We’re down to just one table that’s kind of like the original conference table that was in the room. It’s on wheels. It can split in half, so it’s great. 

GONZALEZ: Nice. Yeah. 

RYDER: The seats are combination of Target finds with the, these like kind of captain chairs that are soft. I just got a couple of buoy chairs just in the last couple of weeks, seats you could say from Steelcase. Lot of, lots of stools. I love a good barstool. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Because it can move around. Lots of wobble stools. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. Do kids just get a pass to show up when they feel like it? Do they wander in before and after school? Is it a class period that they could like, how do kids actually get access to it? 

RYDER: The way it’s working out this year is Periods 1 and 2 are really open to, I should say we have a four-period day. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: Periods 1 and 2 I try to keep it open as a, you need to come down? You know, you can call down, get a pass, I’ll write you a pass, you can come in from your study hall. Your teacher can call down or send me an email and say, hey, can so and so come and work down in the SIC? They could use some help on something or they just need a space that’s not this classroom right now to work.

GONZALEZ: Okay, yeah. Let’s, run through with me the reasons, because I’m assuming you don’t have many kids that are saying, “I’m having some emotional problems right now. I need to go down to the SIC.” Like, is there usually an alternative reason that they give for going down? 

RYDER: Yeah. So the SEL side is like the added benefit and the added bonus. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: And there are kids who come in with that as kind of like their focus. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: We really, we really try to brand ourselves and market ourselves to the student body as here’s where you go when you’re having any sort of problem, academic, emotional, vocational, personal, whatever it is. A problem doesn’t have to be a bad thing. A problem can just be like a question you have or something you’re working on. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: But it’s really for everybody and we especially do a good job of meeting the needs of those kids with a social emotional kind of gap. 

GONZALEZ: How, how do you actually, when you say you market it to them, is this something that’s done through the school newsletter? Do you have commercials that you’ve done for it? Like how did you actually roll this out to the students and explain to them what it was? 

RYDER: Basically word of mouth. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: A lot of going to classes. So the other thing I do besides having individuals come in is I push out, just like a librarian. And really if you think of how a librarian functions —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: — and my wife is an amazing school librarian, so shout out to the school librarians, but if you kind of think of the different ways that a librarian can function where they can push out, do work with classes, classes come down and work there in the library, sometimes it’s a one-on-one, sometimes it’s a small group, sometimes it’s split. Like I based my work and my role on that type of a model. So I try to be everything to everybody. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: Which is hard. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

RYDER: But that’s the idea is, is that sometimes I’m going to team up with a class, and sometimes I’m going to work one-on-one and it’s really going to be what’s available and what’s scheduled. And, but there’s no, a huge part of it is stigma free, no barrier to access. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: So it’s not like well, you’re not doing XYZ so you can’t go. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: Or it’s not, well, you know what, you didn’t turn this in, so you should go there. It’s not a remedial space. It’s not a formalized intervention even though I’m often part of an intervention plan with students. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. Huh. 

RYDER: Because whatever is going on with them, it’s not working. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: So we try to, we try to find solutions that meet the kids’ needs, hold them accountable, we get the academic rigor in there and make sure that that’s not falling to the wayside. And in that process, by just being like a kind of third party that is invested in only the student but not in anything else, we get to have some conversations and meetings and planning around some of these kids where I get to push a little bit and ask, you know, the kind of design questions around well, what is it that we’re really trying to achieve here, and what does so and so really need, and who else needs something in this? You know? Because sometimes by meeting the kid’s need, we’re meeting the parent’s need. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: Right? 

GONZALEZ: Right, right. 

RYDER: And that’s okay. Like, let’s just own it though. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: We don’t, we might not talk about that, usually. It’s always like, well if we’re really here for the kid, and I want to say, that’s nice and good —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: We’re all here for each other, we’re here for ourselves. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: We’re here for lots of people. Let’s make sure that what we’re doing isn’t going to get undermined because we’ve got competing needs. 

GONZALEZ: Right. If I were to walk into the center one day, if it was sort of a typical day, and I’m guessing you’re going to say, there’s no such thing as a typical day, but — what would I actually see? What would kids be doing? 

RYDER: So I’ll give you today as an example. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: I think today, today was a very typical day. You come in. I happen to have a study hall, a small study hall that meets with me on this particular day. So those six kids were kind of in the space that that they tend to habitate, so I kind of checked in with them. I checked in with them and then students from the psychology class down the hall came down. I gave them a little instruction on the collaboration that we’re doing, the psychology teacher, Robert Condon and I, are doing a brain anatomy and basic function, “unit” isn’t really the right way to describe it, but what we’re doing is we’re having them create short videos, one to three minutes that explain all the basic functions of the brain and how the different parts of the brain interact. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: And they’ve got to make a video that someone else could watch and understand and learn from, and he’s got a set of, you know, a set of criteria in terms of what it has to teach and what has to be in there, and I gave them a set of creative constraints. They can either make it out of clay, they can do it as a stop motion drawing, not stop motion drawing, they can make it out of clay, and they can stop motion video or they can make it out of cut paper, like old classic South Park style. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Or they can do it hand drawn. But the idea is it has to have motion and movement, because no one doesn’t want that, it has to be accurate. Needs to have all that information, and it should instruct. People should feel like they’re, should, should learn from it and after they get their videos done, we’re going to push them out so people can follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Watch out because they’re coming next week. 

GONZALEZ: Cool. 

RYDER: We’re going to try to get feedback and see how, how effective their videos are. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: So that is going on concurrently. Had another teacher walk in and start asking some questions for a, a project that we’re doing, Alicia Wolf, one of our English teachers. She and I collaborate a lot, so she had some thoughts and ideas about something we were doing in Period 4 at the end of the day where a student ended up coming in and creating visual representations of short stories. And she wanted to make sure that we were on the same page, and just wanted to check in with me about some of the kids who, who struggle and need a little more concrete, you know, flow and maybe a limit to the number of options available. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: So that they can focus, right? And, so that conversation happened. What I love about what I do is we’re having that conversation, two young ladies who are having a hard time with their video, she said, hey, what if you used one of the Sphero robots? Did you show, and asked me, did you show her the, those new robots? 

GONZALEZ: Wow. This is a teacher from a different class? 

RYDER: Right. Like that’s not one of the options. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: But now you’ve opened that can of worms, so here we go. So next thing we know, these two young ladies are learning how to code a Sphero, and they’re so excited. 

GONZALEZ: Oh, that’s cool. 

RYDER: And they were really struggling with finding any motivation before that. So they’re, they’re like, I’m going to go buy one of these. I’m like, buy a Sphero Mini. You don’t need a BOLT. Like, I got the BOLT and they’re awesome, but you don’t need one, just get the Mini so if you want a toy, get the Mini. But that was Period 1, right? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Period 2, a student who’s new to the school comes in with his special ed teacher and he’s got this book full of art, and it’s amazing. And I said, this is really cool. What do you want to do, like, why are you folks in here today? And…teacher just wanted him to see what’s available. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: And we got talking and I said, hey, I got a challenge for you. You like doing really, this goth punk art? I want you to see if you can make it interactive in some way. Like, I’ve got LED lights, I’ve got button cells, I’ve got [INAUDIBLE]. I want you to make that thing light up. 

GONZALEZ: Cool. 

RYDER: So he started working on that. We were working on trying to make it a switch. That didn’t go well. I’m not, like I’m all jack of many trades, master of none. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Same time while that’s happening, kids are, other kids are coming in. We, I worked on, students with essays, I worked on this student on a, an entrepreneurial pitch. Like, you know, and that’s like a super typical day. Meanwhile there’s three kids, I have a student who is homeschooled for most of the time, but she comes in for a few classes. Her dad couldn’t pick her up. So I said, yeah, you can hang out in here. She figured out how to use her vacuum former yesterday with me. 

GONZALEZ: Wow. 

RYDER: So she was working on that. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: And like, because we just bought a, a Mayku that’s a really simple desktop vacuum former and looking at what we came up with yesterday and planning, like, what we might do later and is, you know. So there’s all these different things all happening concurrently and yeah, and that’s kind of like the whole day was just this kind of, like, all right let’s shift into that mode, let’s shift into this mode. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: And that’s what every day kind of is like. 

GONZALEZ: Is Becky there the whole time? 

RYDER: So Becky actually got a different job. So that’s been an interesting thing since the spring. She got a job as the dean of this great school here in Maine called the Maine School of Agricultural and Natural Sciences. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: And it’s over, it’s about a 45-minute drive from here, 45 minutes to an hour. And she became the dean of their threshold program, which is a really cool program that helps, I’m probably going to get it wrong if I describe it too in-depth, but basically it creates a pathway for students who want to attend MeANS but who struggle with anxiety and other, other conditions that may, or barriers that make it difficult for them to get to campus. And so she helped coordinate teachers that go to their homes and teach them. So rather than it feeling like a tutorial or you’re going online, you get an actual MeANS teacher comes to your home and works with you through the curriculum. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. So there’s not, there is no social, like, pure legal social work happening in this, in this SIC anymore, correct? There’s not people doing case work there? 

RYDER: There never was. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: Background was in that. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: But because of, again, we want to be like really careful, and we also knew that the school was, the district was trying to get into the budget money for a, formal social workers — 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: — and didn’t want to create the image that it was already available. 

GONZALEZ: Got it. 

RYDER: For that reason too. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: So even though the work she was doing was students, she kind of took the social emotional, like, lead, and I took the academic lead when the students were in here. There was this very careful not to step on toes and get, you know, get into somebody else’s bucket, so to speak. 

GONZALEZ: Right, right. 

RYDER: Because, you know, we’ve got people who are experts and very passionate and very good at what they do here on campus, and we didn’t want to upend anything. We really wanted to, from the beginning, wanted to be a support for everyone, including staff. So, you know, you don’t have time to talk to all these kids today. Well, we can kind of play triage. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Like, “Hey, what’s up? What’s going on? Wow, sounds like you really do need to talk.” 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Not this: “Hey, what’s going on? Wow, sounds like you need to get over it.” But not that blunt, but — 

GONZALEZ: Yes, yes. 

RYDER: “It sounds like you just need some processing.”

GONZALEZ: Right, right, right. Yeah. 

RYDER: And so we were balancing that out for quite a while. But she got that other job, so I had a great ed tech, Abby Demuzio, in the spring, was amazing. She came on as kind of, as an ed tech who’s only here like for certain hours during the day, but acted as that, like, point person as kids came through the door, kids just connected with her. And she had a background in behavioral special ed and day treatment, the day treatment program. So a real, so she had a lot of experience with kids in really high emotional and behavioral need spaces. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: And just knew how to talk to kids in a way that deescalated —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: — and also, like, said, all right now. You’re deescalated. Now we got to do some stuff. 

GONZALEZ: Right. Right, right, right. 

RYDER: Which is awesome. And she didn’t come back this fall because she’s like starting a family, and it’s super rad. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: So I’m still waiting for our new person to start. 

GONZALEZ: I gotcha. So there is a need and a defined space for another person who’s got more of that SEL background of some sort? 

RYDER: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: And who can come and take the front on tracking data, making sure that, that we’re keeping track of who’s coming in. I mean I know who’s in. You know, I keep a, I have a sign-in. We had, actually had a student make an app for us that has — this year’s been a little funky but for the last two years we had this app that a student designed for us for sign-in. So I know who’s in here, and I know who has used the space, but keeping track of all the stories —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: — of who’s working on what and how things are going, that alone is a job. 

GONZALEZ: Got it. 

RYDER: Because we have so many kids come through. 

GONZALEZ: And you, do you need to do that in order to keep your funding? 

RYDER: Yes we do. 

GONZALEZ: Okay, gotcha. 

RYDER: In a nutshell, yeah. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

RYDER: And data is important. Data drives decision making. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. So why don’t you, if you’ve got some stories, maybe two stories that you could tell me? Just about the impact that the center has had on a couple of kids, some of the positive outcomes that you’ve seen? 

RYDER: One of our amazing kids, Margot. Margot started coming here as a, we’re in our third year of existence, and Margot started coming here right in the first year, and Margot was really struggling with connecting with people, with kind of being in her own skin, like just — from the beginning, school looked like it was not going to go well. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Became kind of a regular fixture here. Started finding opportunities early on to get involved and really took a, really connected with Becky in some really important ways, and, and I got to connect with her as well. And from that moment forward, started just seeing an opportunity. Like, oh, hey, can I clean this up? Sure. Cool. Oh, hey, can I come down and work on this thing? Sure. You know, just kind of being around. Well then one day walks in goes, could we start an anti-bullying group? What? Sure. So the [INAUDIBLE] group was started, which is an anti-bullying kind of take action group is its intent. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: All kind of out of her own head. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: So help fostered that into existence. Well, still while struggling with some stuff, struggling with some stuff at home, struggling academically a little bit, but starting to find more successes with these other successes. Well, started, went to a youth leadership group, because started that group, right? So we saw an opportunity for her to attend a youth leadership conference. Went, like got all kinds of crazy excited. Year goes by, goes again, ends up like talking in front of 500 people at this youth, youth leadership event. Like this person who wouldn’t talk hardly ever —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: — started doing better in school, gets involved in our Jobs for Maine’s Graduates program. Next thing we know, like this fall, this kid is walking around feeling confident, is looking at potentially being an officer in that group, just created a product that the teacher wants to share statewide with all the other chapters of the Jobs for Maine’s Graduates program, which is just this really cool kind of pathway from, from academic school into career paths. Really amazing organization. And the kid is just like walking around with this confidence, able to talk about whatever the problem is they’re bumping into, got up in front of a group of students and like performed a song about their life. Like, what? 

GONZALEZ: Wow. 

RYDER: And like we were, we were speaking earlier, like to someone else I might be like, so a kid got the, you know, they found their voice. Oh, that sounds typical. Like, right? Like, lots of kids do that, right? 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: But what we were able to do through this space is because we had multiple points of view available to them, and we had different types of resources available —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: — we had, you know, I was able to coach through, hey, here’s how you write songs, right? Like, here’s how, here’s how songwriting works, even though I’m not a songwriter, I have a love for it and a passion for it. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: Mentor that. Like, sometimes you’ve just got to love a thing to learn about a thing. 

GONZALEZ: Yep. 

RYDER: Doesn’t have to be great. It could be amateur hour. Who cares? The fact is you made a thing. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: And you made the thing you wanted to. 

GONZALEZ: Oh that’s great. 

RYDER: And I, oh, today that individual in here working goes, so this is the dumpster project that I made, which is things that just don’t matter. You make it to get rid of it. You know you make it, great, and then it goes in the, in the hopper. She just goes, “It’s not good. I didn’t have time to do it well. But I’m disowning it.” That is huge. 

GONZALEZ: That’s not something a withdrawn kid generally will say with confidence, yeah. 

RYDER: Right? And comes in, you know, comes in, advocates for herself. There was a degree of helplessness that has, like, just shed, and it’s been amazing to witness that. And I could point to probably a dozen students of similar, where you just could see them go from these kind of shell type, like, withdrawn, struggling to find a voice, to at least in this room, feeling like they can assert, you know, say what they need, and then you start to now see it happen in other avenues. And there’s a few that I’m really working on trying to, trying to like bolster. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: To get, to get there, but that’s that kind of, that’s a social emotional learning through the act of doing academic work and taking the time that we can all do and it’s super hard. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

RYDER: It’s super hard to find the time, but we can all start having those conversations about how might we take what you have a passion for and an interest in and allow that to be the vehicle through which you’re going to learn this. 

GONZALEZ: Got it, got it. 

RYDER: Right? 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

RYDER: Like, you can take the time to do that. It’s hard though when you have 36 kids or 40 kids. I get it. You can’t do it for every kid every day. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: And once you’ve opened that pathway to them, they can like find their way to it on their own —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: — in ways that you may not even realize, and then you really are in that facilitator mode that we all like. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. Yep. 

RYDER: Right? You’re not, “All right, kid, here’s one of your five options, let’s — ” They’re showing up going, what if I did this? And that’s where this kiddo has gotten to. 

GONZALEZ: Got it. 

RYDER: And I just, I love it. And really, you know, like every story that I would share, like a potential  [INAUDIBLE] about this place, that’s the, that’s the through line. 

GONZALEZ: Right, right. That they sort of figure out who they are and they gain more confidence and —

RYDER: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: And it’s not at the sacrifice of academic learning. Sure, we’ve got kids that have, like, used this as an escape, they’ve used it as an excuse. I mean we, yep. Like —

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: Do kids ever just try to avoid? Yes. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: We’ve had kids where we’ve had to be like, wait a minute. You told us you were here on a pass, you know, like — you showed us a pass. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Let me see that pass again. I trusted you. You know. The office calls looking for a student. I’m like, yes, they’re right — they walked out, and I didn’t see them go. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Like this is stuff that happens. 

GONZALEZ: Right, right. 

RYDER: It’s an imperfect system by, you know, and we’ve had kids who have struggled, and we haven’t been able to help them. We had a student steal stuff. And we had — it’s not all perfect, rosy, honey at all. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: We just feel really strongly that what we’re doing is filling a space that we otherwise don’t think is getting filled on campus. 

GONZALEZ: If I’m a, if I’m a teacher and I’m listening to this or I’m an administrator, and I would like to try to set up something like this in my school, you’re in Year 3 of this. What advice would you give to somebody in that position? 

RYDER: I would say start with thinking about it like a library, because that’s a point of reference that is, people understand, right? Especially if you know you have good library culture, you know? There, students are, you know, are encouraged to come in and access resources and your librarian interacts with them and it’s very much about, hey, what can I do to be helpful to you today? How can I help you find the thing that you need, right? Because that’s what most librarians do is they’re really there to help navigate a need. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: And help you solve the problem, right? So if you kind of approach it from that point of view, then you start realizing there’s a lot of things you don’t have to have, those things that are in the back of your head. Like, but we don’t have 3D printers. Okay, don’t have a 3D printer, who cares. But we don’t have $3,000 worth of equipment. Who cares? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Right? What you need, I feel really strongly that one person isn’t enough. You really need two people. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: Because you need that person who can, who can take that kiddo that comes through the door and do the deep dive with them and, and even though you can’t deep dive every kid every day, you have that time. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: With at least one kid is going to feel that. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: Right? And that’s huge. And then you have the other who’s kind of acting as the, the facilitator through and is kind of saying like, all right, well, you know, so and so’s going to be available later or let’s, we’ll write a note, let’s write an email to them to find out [INAUDIBLE] or you know, how can I be helpful? All right, you really need to talk to the other one. Okay, that’s cool. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: What might we do now? Like how can we navigate through this and figure that out? So those are pieces that I think are super vital, because it also honors the kids coming through the door with the help. And then the last piece, and this is truly the last piece, you just need two individuals who lead with empathy. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: And they’re, that when they’re coming through the door, the goal is not to get them to think the way you think or to do the thing you want them to do, the goal is to understand where they’re coming from. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: And I don’t brag very often, because I’m a, I’m a schmuck, and I screw up all the time, and I’m a hot mess in so many aspects of life. But I do like to think that when a kid comes through the door, even though I have like goals in mind for every kid, I’m more interested in initially hearing what they have to say and where they’re coming from. And I say a lot of, “So what I’m hearing you say is — ”

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

RYDER: Right? And that makes me think what if. So if you, if you lead with empathy and you approach a space like this from a lens of possibility, then like you don’t need piles and piles and piles of things. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

RYDER: You don’t need, I mean I, I’m really fortunate. I already had a lot for my classroom. I’m really fortunate. I’ve networked with a lot of people, so I already had some people to ask, hey, what should we have? And what would be a really good idea? And I’m tuned in with, with the maker ed community, and I’m tuned in with the design community, and I’m tuned in with the ed tech community. So I know about things. So I did buy a lot of stuff to have available, because I could see a lot of different ways we could use them. But really when you break down what I use in the room thing most often, that I use every day, index cards, markers, Post-It notes. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, that’s not expensive equipment, yeah. 

RYDER: That’s not expensive. Like that’s the stuff I use every single day. Oh, and I will say Lego. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

RYDER: I use a lot of Lego, right? And you know what’s cool? The Legos I have, 95 percent of the Legos I have in the space were all donated by students. 

GONZALEZ: Oh nice. 

RYDER: They were kids who were like, had outgrown them and just said hey, like, do you want these? I said, of course I do, are you kidding me? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: So, you know. There’s a lot with manipulatives and a lot of, you know, just getting kids to realize that if they pause and they plan and they, they think in ways that are not just by staring at a screen, they think of ways that’s not just staring at the pages on the book or staring at the, at the worksheet. The solutions are going to start revealing themselves to them as soon as they start working in a way that’s more, more attuned to, to how they process information in general. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: So it’s a lot of that stuff. That’s not expensive. 

GONZALEZ: Right, right. 

RYDER: You know. I, the expensive part is the people. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. You have documented a whole lot of this journey in your own online spaces, correct?

RYDER: Yeah. Yes. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. So where, where can people go to learn more? Because I have a feeling that once somebody decides they’re interested, they’re going to want to come over to you to, to see it and to ask more questions. So where can they go? 

RYDER: So one place you can go is you can go to my website, DanRyder207.com. 

GONZALEZ: DanRyder207.com? 

RYDER: Yep, 207, like why that number? It’s the zip code, or the area code for the entire state of Maine. 

GONZALEZ: All right. 

RYDER: Because there’s only [INAUDIBLE] of us here. So we, we only have one area code. But DanRyder207.com has links to all my different spaces. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: And going on Twitter I’m @WickedDecent on Twitter and on Instagram. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

RYDER: And I share regularly what I do there. And I’ve got a couple of videos that are, there’s one that’s linked right at the top of my, my Twitter profile, that’s pinned right there that really does a nice job of capturing what we do every day. It’s a little awkward and weird for me to have it there, because I, I, as arrogant as the kids think I am, humility is like the No. 1 value in me. So it’s a little weird to self-promote. 

GONZALEZ: Right, right. 

RYDER: But it’s a video that was made by one of our local news stations that I think does a really great job of capturing it. And I have another video too that was made because I received an NEA Foundation and Horace Mann Excellence in Education award last year, and they made this beautiful video that also really captures what we do. 

GONZALEZ: Yes, I saw that one. That was a great one. 

RYDER: Yeah, it’s great. It’s really about me, so I think it captures the space somewhat. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: But I think this one that’s, that’s on the top of my Twitter profile really does a nice job of capturing what it’s like for the kids. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

RYDER: And the type of work that I do. So. 

GONZALEZ: Cool. 

RYDER: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: Dan, thank you so much for walking up to me at that happy hour at South By. 

RYDER: You have no idea, like, I was so thrilled to finally meet you, because I’ll say it right here: The work that you have done has been tremendously influential on my work. 

GONZALEZ: Oh, no kidding. 

RYDER: Can’t even describe to you how many of your newsletters, how many of your posts, how many of your podcasts, have a direct line to something here, and the No. 1 is the single point rubric. 

GONZALEZ: No kidding. That’s fantastic. 

RYDER: It changed lives. 

GONZALEZ: Wow. 

RYDER: Like —

GONZALEZ: People don’t even understand how hard I fought for that sucker in grad school, and I lost, and now I am avenged, yes. 

RYDER: Oh, you, you win, you win so large. It really, it truly, I, I taught it to undergrad students at the university here, I’ve taught it to colleagues —

GONZALEZ: Nice. 

RYDER: — I’ve taught it to, in workshops when people say, so how do you assess this? And I’m like, let me show you the gorgeousness —

GONZALEZ: Oh. 

RYDER: You know, and I always point to your, your post from several years ago now, that original one. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

RYDER: You know this is the one that, this is, it launched a whole different way of thinking about, about standards-based assessment and really and I’m, you know, I’m not just saying this because I get to be on the show today, it really, holy cow. 

GONZALEZ: Man, that is so great to hear. 

RYDER: I, I feel honored to be able to talk with you today and just to be able to walk up to you at a Carl Hooker event, which is like, you’re already like what is this going to be. 

GONZALEZ: I was too. 

RYDER: Everybody’s like, this is Carl Hooker. He’s going to say things, and we don’t know what it’s going to be. But you know it’s going to be fun and somewhat insane. 

GONZALEZ: It was. It was a fun night, it was a fun night. And hopefully this will now, you know, have a ripple effect and we will see these little centers cropping up in all these schools and kids will be helped and everybody will say, oh, it’s because that interview you did with Dan Ryder a couple years ago. 

RYDER: Oh gosh, I hope so. That’s the —

GONZALEZ: See that? 

RYDER: We’ve got to find her, and I, yeah. If anybody just be sitting on a pile of money somewhere, we are at the end of our grant life. So —

GONZALEZ: Whoa. 

RYDER: Yeah. So that’s, that’s, uh, I’m headed into that work. So —

GONZALEZ: Okay. Well, keep me updated on how that goes. 

RYDER: There we go. I’m feeling confident, and I’m also feeling, you know, like it’s not bad to have a benefactor. I read “Great Expectations.” Nothing can go wrong with a mysterious benefactor. 

GONZALEZ: How about I put a button at the bottom of the post that said if you’re a benefactor, click here? 

RYDER: Yeah, click here.


For links to all the resources mentioned in this episode, and to see photos of the Success & Innovation Center, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 133. To get a weekly email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.