Create the space for dialogue
In preparation for the third dialogue in my free webinar series on AI, I met with guests Claire Amos and Philippa Wintle from Albany Senior High School in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.
We are all set for a fascinating session next Wednesday, and a brief comment by Claire has been on my mind all week. I paraphrase, but it was along the lines of:
Artificial intelligence tools have the potential to reduce student agency.
During December I created the opportunity for my 11 year old son to join me at work. George has just finished primary school and will be going into Year 7 in a few weeks time. I run my own consultancy business called Dialogic Learning and for the last 6 years have been working as an education consultant.
His mini-internship helped me to discover new insights about my work in education and in business, so I thought I would share these with you. First some information about the context.
I have been travelling as a consultant for 6 years. Leaving my family is a cost we all have to shoulder. I wanted George to better understand the work that I do, meet the people I spend my time with and to appreciate the places I have to visit.
Telling him about these things is a poor alternative to actually experiencing them and so the idea of him joining me was born.
At the end of a school day George once asked me:
Why can’t I just go out into the world and learn?
I am pleased to say I have done something about this and given him the opportunity to get out there.
George’s paid mini-internship included the following:
George and I agreed that he was not just there to make up the numbers or sit in the corner. He understood that the expectation was to be fully involved and to participate as much as he could.
I am lucky enough to work with some great clients here and in Sydney who were all really open to having George join us. We spent some time sharing these expectations as we began our sessions and meetings – this helped George hear them again and for the group I was working with align with our expectation.
For the Sydney trip I wanted George to spend some time talking to the school leadership groups – presenting some ideas on his own. We had the idea to share a short presentation, as a soon-to-be primary school leaver, about some things he would like to change about school.
We collaborated on a short presentation that outlined 5 elements he believed are crucial to a successful school. He then used those ideas to develop some questions he put to each of the leadership teams. George ran a short discussion with the leadership teams using the questions as prompts.
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No doubt about it. School can be an important bubble that cossets and protects our young learners, but it is a long way from the world of work and business. Which is OK. That said I think home can also be a bubble.
The whole experience has made me think about how our students might go from home to school, and from school to home. From bubble to bubble. Again that is OK, but for some, at the right time, they need a guided experience of the cities and communities we live in.
Not to participate in a diluted version of what they should expect in 10 years. Not to “get ready” for the world of work. Not as some pseudo-preparation for life. Not to do a project.
But to participate fully as an equal, to experience all the complexity and expectation that might come along with that and to learn by getting out “into the world”.
We achieved one of my main goals, which was for George to better appreciate the work I do and the people/places I spend my time with/in. We were a team for those few days and we bonded in a completely different way than being at home.
He was able to witness me with business partners and share experiences together. We chatted about the work after each experience, about the people and the way they approached everything. I am grateful for the time we spent together.
Now when I say I am going to Sydney to see Jamie or work with BVN, he knows who and where I mean.
This idea has always been on my radar. The hidden curriculum refers to what children learn from school that is not explicitly taught. For example, this might be through the investment in high-quality resources and equipment for sport. Students will read between the lines that “sport is highly valued here.”
This also works in much more negative ways, I just chose a positive example.
Two insights here. One is that George has been highly perceptive of the little details throughout his primary school experience. He shared these with the leadership teams during his presentation and also the shortcomings of those experiences.
I would expect that the student perception of their school and their learning experiences is hugely varied. Importantly though, their perception is their truth.
The other insight is about the shared expectation from the people George encountered during his time with me. He experienced adults working in different industries who were open, receptive, respectful, challenging and trusting of him. I know that has had a big impact.
It reminds me to pay attention to my own disposition, the language I use when first starting a session and to remain vigilant to how others are experiencing things.
The picture of George standing in front of a group of school leaders in Sydney (top image) is definitely a highlight from last year. It has made me think about the way students are involved in the ongoing work of leadership teams.
I appreciate that George’s participation was different than normal, but what is stopping us have students taking up a residency in the leadership group. Much of what is discussed is about the welfare and experience of students – perhaps there are ways they could be more present.
A big insight I had, as George’s guide, was how much the little things I take for granted were important lessons for him to experience in these new contexts.
There were so many different little lessons along the way we experienced together. From social and group dynamics, the way successful dialogue typically unfolds, to planning travel and accommodation.
An important discussion with George was about the cost of our trip to Sydney and how my business earns money. We discussed revenue and cost, his ensuing calculations were much more authentic as it applied to our immediate context and something he was curious about.
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The whole experience was a massive success for us both and also, based on the feedback (and emails for George), for those we spent time with.
I am keen to explore ways that George can participate in some future work days with me as he gets older. I am sure that it will continue to be a valuable experience for him. He is already talking about taking over the business!
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Go and find a copy of your class or weekly timetable and put it side by side with your school’s pedagogical statement. Your school’s pedagogical statement might be part of a teaching and learning model. Or perhaps it is communicated in a different form. Either way place it alongside the details of your timetable. Now consider these questions:
The last one is a provocation I share with lots of leadership teams I work with. It helps us consider the influence of time, and our organisation of it, on the learning experience.
In seeking the ideal conditions for learning, our stewardship of time resources is critical in terms of the daily learner experience. However many of these conditions have not changed in line with our thinking.
These hegemonic constructs[footnote] Thanks to Terry Byers for the “hegemonic” reference below [/footnote] have simply lingered as part of the school experience.
The basic grammar of schooling, like the shape of classrooms, has remained remarkably stable over the decades. Little has changed in the ways that schools divide time and space, classify students and allocate them to classrooms, splinter knowledge into ‘subjects’ and award grades and ‘credits’ as evidence of learning. [footnote]Hofstetter, Rita, and Bernard Schneuwly. “Changes in Mass Schooling:‘school Form’and ‘grammar of Schooling’as Reagents.” European Educational Research Journal 12.2 (2013): 166-175.[/footnote]
Whilst I would contend that more recently there has been a bigger shift in terms of assessment, evidence of learning and learning spaces, there is not enough consistency of change. Most notably the sacrosanctity of the school timetable.
In a recent article from MindShift, Diana Laufenberg, the executive director of Inquiry Schools, explained that, “Our schedule is a function of what we’re trying to create”. Diana goes on to suggest,
Changing the master schedule, while difficult, is a major signal to everyone connected to the school that pedagogy is shifting. “If we don’t match our minutes to our mission, [teachers are] not going to shift.”
https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/10/24/why-a-schools-master-schedule-is-a-powerful-enabler-of-change/
There is a palpable logic to the need to grapple with the time resources ideal for pedagogy change. All too often we want the pedagogy change, we want the experience of learning to shift, but a key resource structure is left untouched.
Alongside highlighting the work of Diana Laufenberg, the article also shared the story of Jerry Smith, the Principal at Luella High School in Atlanta. They are an example of a school grappling with new models of thinking, learning and time.
It soon became clear that one of the biggest obstacles to instructional changes of the sort Smith and his team were trying to engineer was the school schedule itself.
Existing scheduling software isn’t designed to handle the priorities Smith wanted and would “break the pedagogical model” if relied upon to do the scheduling.
I would be the first to recognise the intricacies and complexities of organising hundreds, if not thousands, of learners across a school’s campus. But these software packages have an in built pedagogical bias. They might seem inert, but the lines of code will bring a certain bias to how people might learn and behave.
We shouldn’t offshore our school’s pedagogical identity to a software company.
Smith and Laufenberg point out the difficulty of changing the schedule to suit the needs of the learning experience a school is trying to uphold. When technology intervenes we have the opportunity for greater efficiency from the process of timetabling learning. This releases us to put our energy and time elsewhere. However we have to strike a balance.
When we prise open the housing of the pedagogical clock a little more we see that the use of timetables is a balance between Validity and Reliability. Roger Martin explains that
Reliability seeks to produce consistent, predictable outcomes by utilizing a system that is restricted to the use of objective data. Validity, on the other hand, seeks to produce outcomes that meet the desired objective, even if the system employed can’t produce a consistent, predictable outcome.[footnote]“Validity – Roger Martin.” https://rogerlmartin.com/docs/default-source/Articles/business-design/rotman_winter_05_validity_vs_reliability. Accessed 10 Dec. 2016.[/footnote]
Importantly Martin explains that in order to develop a reliable system, in our case a schedule, we have to drop variables that might lead to different experiences. Perhaps in this instance the variables are the individual preferences of every learner in the community. When and where they want to learn, and for how long.
There are some universal truths about learning that would influence contemporary timetable design. However developing a valid timetable for one learner may be different to another. Multiply that by hundreds and the ostensibly increased effort surpasses the perceived validity.
When we say personalised learning the ideal would be a valid timetable for all learners. In most cases though we attempt to find a balance between reliably moving humans around and offering a valid experience for everyone.
Validity and reliability anchor down opposite ends of a spectrum that defines how systems are conceived and solutions are framed.
At secondary or high school level there is little conclusive research evidence about the extension of lesson length or block scheduling[footnote]DICKSON, Kelly, et al. What is the effect of block scheduling on academic achievement? A systematic review. No. 1802R. Technical report, 2010.[/footnote]. But of course it is not simply about changing the block of time, that alone changes little.
The pedagogical change, the new teaching opportunities that open up are the key drivers here. For example, longer sessions with students so that a greater volume of ongoing feedback can be provided to more students – not just those you can manage in the time.
The Education Endowment Foundation (here is the Australian equivalent) offers a useful summary of the evidence regarding secondary block scheduling. Their questions to consider are worth noting too when exploring timetable development.
- Timetabling changes alone are not sufficient to improve learning.
- Teachers need to alter the way that they teach, and should plan and organise different kinds of learning activities to obtain benefits.
- Have timetabling changes been matched to curriculum goals and teaching and learning objectives (such as longer lessons for science experiments)?
- Have you considered how longer lessons may provide opportunities for other promising approaches, such as improving the amount of feedback that students get from the teacher or from each other?
What we might ascertain from these prompts is that time is a key enabler for different kinds of learning. Used carefully the schedule can become the function of the learning experience as Diana Laufenberg previously mentioned.
Let’s change the clocks for a moment and look at this from a slightly different perspective. As soon as I read the MindShift piece I thought about the importance of challenging assumptions about how school time is organised. My reflections also focused on how this chimes with the ideal conditions for creative and critical thinking.
In “Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention”[footnote]Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. “Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention.” New York: Harper Collins (1996).[/footnote], Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests,
The only way to stay creative is to organize time, space, and activity to our advantage. It means developing schedules to protect our time and avoid distraction, arranging our immediate surroundings to increase concentration, cutting out meaningless chores that soak up psychic energy, and devoting the energy thus saved to what we really care about.
More than 8 years ago I began a long period of Literacy learning with my Year 5 class. The learning centred on using the PC based adventure game Myst 3 as a narrative and inspiration for our own descriptive writing. Once pairs of students were freely exploring the game and stumbling on ever more inventive puzzles, time certainly stood still or moved at an unusual pace.
The problem solving and narrative element of the game, alongside our own creative writing tasks provided a clear purpose for the students. I was able to ensure we had longer sessions, free from distractions and interruptions to work in and with the game.
I also allowed the work to be extended over a few weeks. This allowed the overall arc of learning to progress at an ideal pace for critical and creative thinking.
I vividly recall the buzz as students shared what they had learned or discovered in the game with each other. Fully immersed.
In one of my favourite books Conceptual Blockbusting[footnote] Adams, James L., Conceptual Blockbusting, W.W.Norton & Company.13, (1976)[/footnote], James Adams outlines a range of emotional blocks to the creative process. Behaviours and habits that can stultify our efforts, and it would seem many are directly related to the organisation of time.
- A fear to make mistakes, to fail, to risk.
- Preference for judging ideas rather than generating them.
- No tolerance for ambiguity or chaos.
- A lack of challenge – not engaging enough.
- Excessive zeal – too much speed, pace and haste.
- An inability to relax and to incubate ideas.
Just take a moment to read those through again, consider at each turn the influence of time on why these often occur.
The overall endeavour we face is how much change we can handle. Regarding timetables in schools, how do we challenge the edges of what is deemed acceptable? How do we ensure stability whilst designing a high value personal learning experience?
Crucially as school leaders we need to question the dominance of certain ideas or norms and how they have exerted influence, over decades, on the accepted design of learning. The organisation of time might just be one of the most important barriers to pedagogical change.
Design thinking is a process for developing new ideas and solving problems. It is a series of “design-specific cognitive activities that designers apply during the process of designing” (Visser, W. 2006).
It normally involves:
A key part of my work over the last 6 years has been to help educators, and those involved with learning, explore the ways they might utilise this process in their organisations. In addition to understanding the “thinking like a designer” part.
Commonly we cite the use of design thinking as a problem-solving process that students participate in and regularly see students making and designing products or ideas.
However in the school environment the process and principles of design thinking can be applied to a number of different relevant domains:
As an overview, I want to share with you, in brief, some of my own understandings from facilitating design thinking in these four different ways.
As a problem solving process design thinking has the structure and potential for scaffolding an inquiry process. After all it is commonly used as a way to tackle complex or wicked problems.
A design thinking inquiry or learning process helps students develop empathy for other people who may be at the heart of an issue or topic. Empathy leads to a much deeper more authentic level of connection with what is being explored.
The latter parts of the process, testing and prototyping, emphasise an iterative approach. You may have heard this in relation to product design. The key thing for me is that this is about increasing the opportunities for critique and feedback.
For many school leaders and administration teams design thinking offers a fresh approach to complex school improvement issues.
Appropriately the process puts the learner (old or young) at the heart of everything. How well we understand the learner dictates the efficacy of the process to generate new ideas.
When working with school leadership teams I often start by exploring the assumptions they might have about the school development topic. By challenging assumptions early on in the process we are immediately moving to a more open mode of thinking or mindset.
An additional value when using design thinking is the imperative to release ideas early. Iterative development demands we involve others to gain feedback. A leadership team may develop an interesting solution to a complex problem and share it quickly with colleagues, even in a rough form.
We shouldn’t be locking ourselves away, to build perfectly transitioned slideshows, too soon.
This is about educators exploring problem areas within their own practice and working through a formalised process to learn and address them.
These might include a wide range of topics from implementing new technologies, to engaging reluctant writers, to creating an agentic learning space.
The process of design thinking scaffolds this teacher led inquiry extremely well and can be structured to support a variety of school improvement topics.
The opening phase of a practitioner inquiry would include gathering information:
This works well if educators are working in teams attached to a similar topic. They may well be teaching different age groups but coalesce for various parts of the process, sharing insights and ideas.
The role of the teacher is being recast as a designer of learning. When using a design thinking process our emphasis, once more, is on how well we understand the learner.
When we are designing a unit of learning, or a sequence of our curriculum, we can utilise the design thinking process to help structure our thinking and planning.
An additional application, that is often overlooked, is the use of different phases of the process of design thinking in isolation.
Yes, the process has a mild interdependence to make the most of it. However there has been many occasions when I have facilitated a group to use a single phase along with the associated tools, skills and mindsets.
Adopting a flexible approach to the utility of the design thinking process is an important stance. This also leads to elaborating and extending the phases with what we already know or have been already implementing successfully.
That said when there is a common process shared amongst staff and students you see a powerful shift in practice and in the learning experience.
I recall accompanying a leadership team on an impromptu walk through school to punctuate some facilitated time. We sat with some Kindergarten students participating in a similar activity that we had just explored ourselves. The common language and shared process was an ongoing, tangible, and binding experience for the school community.
Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash
For quite some time now I have had this post brewing on one of my writing ideas lists. Percolating away. It seemed important because I have witnessed first (and second) hand the power of children connecting deeply with a topic and empathising for someone at the heart of it.
That level of investment creates tension with simply being an active participant. And when I pull on my learning designer hat the apparent distinction remains significant, yet intriguing.
They are both phrases I have come across in my working life in education, however at very different times. This is a post to unpack the distinction and see what influence that understanding might have on instructional and learning design.
Engagement and more precisely student engagement was something I grew into the profession of teaching with. I recall it being something that proved an indicator of my practice, a yardstick of my emerging craft. Keeping students “on task” was the order of the day as I learned the ropes. Fellow student teachers would compare notes about how to do this, keeping students engaged for longer and longer periods of time seemed to be the goal as our practical experience extended.
The observations from college tutors visiting me in schools, or from my school mentor, would speak of how engaged the children were, “All the children were on task…” that sort of thing — or the opposite of course. I think I have gone through a few stages in appreciating the influences on student engagement over the years of my teaching, stretching all the way back to during my four years of training in university.
First of all I thought it was just about managing behaviour, there is an overlap here with students being engaged. This is unsurprising in some ways as most people’s early experience of teaching can be dominated by a focus on classroom or behaviour management. I thought it was just about managing the impulses and choices of every student, all at the same time, all thirty of them. Engagement was about them.
I soon began to consider the importance of task or learning design as I got better at it. During my placements I would spend hours planning lessons and sequences of learning, testing ideas and seeing the influence on students of different ages and developmental stages. The emphasis seemed to shift back to me — maybe it was me, maybe I held the keys to getting student engagement right in the classroom?
As my placements extended and the responsibilities increased, I had longer periods of time with students. I was teaching a whole range of subjects with the same group of children, not simply taking the reins for one or two lessons. I was opening the door to them in the morning and chatting with their parents at the end of the day. I was dusting them off when they had fallen and trying to make them laugh with my bad jokes.
I was truly finding my own identity as a teacher. It was during these times when things started to make more sense and I realised it was not just simply about the students’ whims nor my own learning design skills. Engaging learners was, is, based on the quality of relationships you form together.
What does an engaged learner look like, what are the indicators?
[Students] show sustained behavioral involvement in learning activities accompanied by a positive emotional tone. They select tasks at the border of their competencies, initiate action when given the opportunity, and exert intense effort and concentration in the implementation of learning tasks; they show generally positive emotions during ongoing action, including enthusiasm, optimism, curiosity, and interest.
This was taken from one of my lesson observations at university. No, not really, just joking. It is a pretty broad definition from Skinner, E.A., & Belmont, M.J. (1993) of an engaged learner and encompasses some of the emotional signals too. But engagement is not enough as some people say.
I was pleased to recently discover a similar post by Mike Crowley titled Beyond Engagement: Making School Personal. Mike shares a range of interesting ideas and it is definitely worth a read.
He refers to this from Alfie Kohn:
For Kohn the imperative is personal learning, “that entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.”
As you see it underlines my reference to the importance and potency of relationships in terms of influencing engagement but also learning co-design. Mike goes on to share a new course at his school about making a difference in the world, saying:
When we care deeply about something in a personal way we are more likely to act upon that thing.
What surprised me about Mike’s piece was the lack of reference to empathy. Not mentioned once. Technically I suppose he says everything but the word itself, but it is such an integral element of impacting the world around us. Not on some sort of detached “get behind the cause” sort of way, but on a human level. If I was to rephrase Mike’s words quoted above:
When we care deeply about other people, we are more likely to act with purpose, sustain those actions and develop ideas that matter.
As I have shared before, establishing complete empathy for another human being is perhaps perpetually out of our reach. I might walk in your shoes, they may help me learn about your perspective but I can never truly, completely understand it. Walking in someone else’s shoes is as elusive as someone walking in our own.
I think developing empathy for others comes in small aggregated pieces, rarely do we have exactly the same experience to draw from, the complexity of our bias (and life) prohibits this in many ways. It is more a mosaic of experience we build that helps us connect with others, find common ground and shared values.
Empathy is distinguished by two separate flavours. First up we have Affective Empathy or what many people refer to as emotional empathy. This is about our ability to respond with an appropriate emotion to someone else’s state of mind. For example we are sad when someone else expresses their frustration about something. Or perhaps we respond happily when others share a successful achievement.
The second distinct component of empathy is what is commonly known as Cognitive Empathy. This is the capacity to understand another’s perspective or mental state. When we can identify that perspective ourselves, recognise it and perhaps validate it through our own experiences we are exhibiting a level of cognitive empathy.
The physiological evidence of these two distinct components empathy is also clear.
A meta-analysis of recent fMRI studies of empathy confirmed that different brain areas are activated during affective–perceptual empathy and cognitive–evaluative empathy. Also, a study with patients with different types of brain damage confirmed the distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy. Specifically, the inferior frontal gyrus appears to be responsible for emotional empathy, and the ventromedial prefrontal gyrus seems to mediate cognitive empathy. [Wikipedia]
Another great articulation of what empathy is, and especially the difference with sympathy, comes from Dr Brené Brown. (Beautifully animated too.)
We have to connect with an emotional truth of our own to feel with someone. As Brown says we have to look within ourselves, to draw upon our own experiences and emotions to connect with others. As I have said it is an aggregate of our personal truths. In order for us to appreciate someone else’s perspective (cognitive empathy) and offer an appropriate emotional response (affective empathy) we have to connect deeply to our own emotions and perspectives.
For me there is also an exchange on some sort of deeper level I think. When you are exposing yourself in a similar way there is a degree of emotional vulnerability. This takes energy and you have to be open to that happening.
“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” ~Walt Whitman
I first came across the concept of empathy when I was studying A Level Psychology. The Developmental Psych component of the course allowed us to go into some local schools and work alongside some primary age students. It was actually during these times that I first began to understand that teaching was something I was set to pursue as a career.
More recently my understanding of empathy has extended to its relevance to ethnographic and human centred problem solving and design. I try and help people move closer to an understanding of stakeholders so they can solve the right problems, on issues that matter and that address unmet needs.
This has been mainly within the context of school and education. All too often we start with the problem and quickly move to our ideas. The centricity of empathy has helped slow things down, and keep people, other human beings, at the heart of these creative efforts.
An example of a tool would be interviewing with a sharper focus on empathy. Take a look at the quote and resource below from the Stanford d.school.
You want to understand a person’s thoughts, emotions, and motivations, so that you can determine how to innovate for him or her. By understanding the choices that person makes and the behaviours that person engages in, you can identify their needs, and design to meet those needs.
Or even this example of creating Personas from the DIY Toolkit by Nesta. I would highly recommend finding some additional time to explore the toolkit in more detail, some real gems in there.
Personas help ensure that your work stays focused on people, rather than an abstract description of the group they are said to represent.
Another area of my understanding that has matured over the years has been how we design learning that is rich in the opportunity for developing empathy. This has come in various guises as I have sat alongside teachers and in some respect comes back to narrative and storytelling.
When a deeper connection with people at the heart of curriculum topics is designed into sequences of learning, it fosters a deeper level of engagement. Maybe this is what Mike Crowley was saying when he was thinking about “beyond engagement”.
I recall a group of Prep students in a school in Sydney who didn’t just learn about Sustainability but felt something. As a result, they sustained the level of investment they had in that idea for far longer. They wanted things to change, they wanted behaviours to change and they wanted the world to know about their ideas to achieve that.
This was mainly due to emphasising empathy during that period of learning. Positive participation (engagement) is one thing, but sustained commitment to change (as a result of empathy) is another. This meant the Prep students continued discussing the issues and the ideas long after the topic had passed.
The distinction between Empathy and Engagement helps us to better design learning. I now appreciate more fully how engagement can happen as a result of empathy fueled activities. But importantly I think,
Engagement as a result of greater empathy has its own signature.
It is a more significant level of engagement, something that needs observation over time rather than just in a short frame. Engagement can also be short lived and isolated, it is often a means to an end. Whereas empathy is connected into many things over a longer period of time. Increased levels of empathy is also something we should identify as an end, an important outcome of our time with students.
Much of the connection and difference warrants further exploration and I suppose there is an inherent weakness in anecdotal evidence. However these are some of my observations if empathy is emphasised when planning sequences of learning:
We are more inclined to act and try to change stuff. When learners are closely connected to the plight of a group of people, or starkly perceive the needs of another and are in a position to do something, they want to act.
We can’t help but connect the learning experiences to real things.Whether intentional or not, the pure dynamic of empathy is very human and so is very real. The emotional response we have for others, especially, is a concrete thing. Seems strange to describe emotions with the word concrete, but it is certainly less abstract. How does this make you feel? Should be a standard question regarding learning design.
We sustain a level of investment in learning and doing. Noticeably the timeline for thinking, learning and doing seems to extend when there is an emphasis on empathy in the design. Children want to see things through, to make those changes and continue to stay connected. There is a shared appreciation of a perspective and this is sustained — often leading to further learning.
Ultimately this returns to the quality of relationships in the learning space. It is in the intentional design of opportunities for a group of learners to connect, explore and discover another person’s story that underpins empathy rich tasks. That design relies on an ever-improving knowledge of the learner. Know what is in the heart of your learners, and you can create the best possible conditions for them to connect with others.
Photo by Pedro Kümmel
