Chan Zuckerberg's Head of Education on Reinventing Learning Post-Pandemic

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has been one of the major philanthropic forces in U.S. education for roughly a decade now. As schools have reopened and the challenges facing children remain as glaring as ever, I spoke with Sandra Liu Huang, who has served as CZI’s head of education and vice president of product since 2018. In our conversation we talked about some of our shared passions around what's needed to reinvent schooling, what supports children need to thrive, and how CZI is framing its work ahead.

You can also watch the conversation here on YouTube and, while you’re there, subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Michael Horn:   It's good to see you, Sandra. Thank you for joining me.

Sandra Liu Huang: Yep. Thanks for having me, Michael. It's great to be here.

Horn:                So I'd love to start with your personal background because I suspect a lot of folks don't know your own journey toward working in this field of education as it's wound around into to finding you leading the education work at CZI.

Huang:             Yeah. So maybe I can start on the personal side. I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta and grew up to immigrant parents. And I knew that they really valued education for my brother and myself, even though as immigrants, they didn't always understand what was happening in school for me. They didn't really know. But they really wanted us to focus. And that was always very important growing up.

                        But for me, we actually spent some years in Taiwan, where my parents had immigrated from, when I was in high school, and in that experience, had the chance to get to know my extended family, meet my grandmother, and realized that... I knew this, but got to see firsthand that my family, we are farmers. My dad was the ninth of nine kids. My mom's the seventh of eight kids, so huge families. My aunts and uncles, still farmers today in this little village. But it really took an educator, a teacher in my dad's hometown, to really take a really... care, and take the youngest three siblings of this family of nine, and really encourage them through an educational pathway that led them to graduate study and immigrating to the US. And for me, that just always stuck with me, and obviously sticks with me today, that educational opportunity really doesn't just change the life of that student, like my dad, but really changes the life of his family and generations to come, as I've been impacted.

                        And just from a professional standpoint, I've worked in product development most of my career, for about 15 years pre CZI. And for me, the reason CZI came about as an amazing opportunity is I've always loved working at the intersection of different disciplines. Because I think the problems that we face, they can't be solved with just the perspective of a single discipline, and the more that we can think about how do you weave what is known from different disciplines into joint solutions, the more powerful that is. And CZI has been a place that is really thinking holistically across our work.

Horn:                No, it's an amazing... amazing upfront reflections. I'm just struck by, I guess, a couple themes. One, your point about how education just doesn't change the life of the individual, but really, the branch or branches of the family tree. I've seen that as well. And I'm thinking about your own immigrant story and my own wife, whose parents came from Korea, and her dad, who lived through the Korean War, and what that does to a family, and how they do or don't come out of that through education. And then, I'm also struck, of course, by your comment about a lot of these knotty problems and challenges being solved by multiple perspectives coming together. And I think that's right. It's true in every field that the biggest breakthroughs come not from subject matter expertise, but a variety of subject matter expertise being able to look at a problem orthogonally, almost, and these big breakthroughs occurring.

Huang:             Yeah, absolutely.

Horn:                So I want to shift, then, a little bit from... that's your personal story getting into this. But I want to think, as we're starting to... I'm not sure we're allowed to say that. But I think with the CDC guidance, we're allowed to say we're starting to exit the pandemic. There's obviously a ton of focus on a lot of issues. There's a mental health crisis among our youth. There's rampant learning loss. There's a loss of connection with many students and families. There's shrinking enrollment in many traditional schools. I'd argue that there's an outdated schooling system more generally, and so forth. I'm curious, you look at all those things we could list, what do you see as perhaps the biggest challenge facing our youth and their education in this country at this moment? And perhaps, as you think about the role of philanthropy against that, what's the sweet spot where philanthropy can perhaps make the biggest positive impact right now?

Huang:             Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think coming out of these last couple years, we have, in some ways, grappled with realities that have existed for a long time. And the way that I think about that is that our education system really is structured and designed and built to be a bit of one size fits all.

It was built for a different time of bringing students in through this content knowledge that we wanted to impart on them. But during these past couple years, I think we've seen really clearly that students aren't just a brain that comes in, where they're downloading content and that's it, but students are developing adults and humans. And we need to think about an education system that is thinking about how do you really support student wellbeing to help them be able to pursue the academic learning and achievement that we want for them. And I just really think that, as an education system, we should be thinking about how do we equip students well, because that equipping is going to be the fabric of our country for years and generations to come.

                        But the pandemic, this period was a time where it was very, very clear, not just for students, adults alike, that you're a life, and what you do in the school building or in your workplace, those are intricately connected. And if you are not feeling safe, or your mental health is challenged, it is going to impact your learning as a student. And so for us, our vision and hope is that the school system can really acknowledge that as a way to think about how learning can happen better.

                        You ask about the role of philanthropy, and I mentioned it. At CZI, we really do think about how do you bring new tools and new interdisciplinary thinking to some of these problems. And for us, we are really thinking about how do you take what we know about how students learn... Academic research is really learning and understands a lot more than it did 10, 20 years ago about how students develop, how they learn, what conditions need to be in place to help them learn. And how do we take those and make it really practical and useful for teachers.

                        And so our role, I think, because we really think about that problem space, we think about what tools do teachers need to make this really doable and possible. What conditions need to be true to help the leaders of schools be thinking about this as the goal of education, not just imparting the knowledge, but really equipping students holistically, thinking about their learning, and bringing what we know from learning science into classroom practice.

Horn:                That makes a ton of sense. And I love the holistic perspective on this, that we need to really support all facets of a learner's home life as well as their school life, if you will, if we really hope to see the progress that they want to make to being a prepared adult for our complex, evolving society. I'm curious, for those who aren't familiar at CZI, how is your strategy and the grant making and building that you all have done shifted over the course of the pandemic? I assume, but I don't actually know, there's probably a fire drill phase where you just have to help the urgent now, and there was probably some work to be done there. I suspect that then there's been a midpoint, and maybe now... How do you describe that strategy and the work you're doing at the moment, but how that's evolved over the pandemic?

Huang:             Yeah. I think one thing the pandemic... at least for me and the team, we realize the things that we have been talking about and caring about, in some sense, feel really salient, or felt really, really salient during these last couple years because of the different tools that we're bringing to the table. Maybe I can first start with the way that we thought about it, and then I could talk about how that's evolved.

Horn:                Yeah, perfect.

Huang:             A large part of our grant making, we call that team research to practice. It is really thinking about how do we connect what we know about how students learn and develop, and make that actually practically useful and doable, given a classroom and a teacher has tremendous responsibilities and very full plates as it is. So how do we think about the innovations that can happen there?

                        I think in this work, the last two years, we have seen teachers be tremendous sources of innovation because they have had no choice but to innovate, to find their students sometimes. And I just find that something has really exciting energy, even though, as we exit the pandemic stage, there is probably this back to normal pull that happens. But I think we've seen that innovation is possible, and that teachers really see the need to think about student wellbeing as part of their learning package. So that's in our grant making work.

                        The other major part of our work is tool building. I think one of the unique perspectives of CZI is to think about how could software and product development be philanthropic tools. And our team on the tech side is thinking about how do we take what we know about those practices that can work on the classroom, make them into usable, useful practical products that can help teachers do some of these research based practices in their daily teaching and in their daily interactions with students. I would say a lot has evolved in ed tech these last couple years, and so yeah, we definitely have gone through the moment of, hey, what can we do quickly?

                        And I can talk a little bit more about a product we built during that time. One of our largest products is the learning platform for Summit Learning, a really large program, very comprehensive. But we knew, with COVID, that wasn't a moment that a lot of people could take on such big change if they hadn't already started that process. So we're really excited to bring Along, the product's called Along, that really takes this mentoring piece and thinks about how can we bring that practice in to more students and teachers. So Along is a new product that we have rolled out. It is really to help be a teacher-student connection builder. And it makes it really, really easy for a teacher to take research backed questions... sometimes you can think of getting to know someone as a very hand wavy, casual thing, but we bring this framework of developmental relationships to ground in these research questions that are really easy to access and use through this product experience. And so we are really excited to keep working and iterating on this product because we think that teacher-student connection is just an essential piece of the puzzle.

Horn:                No, that's fascinating. I think I'm putting the right link below, you can double check if I have it there, so folks that are interested can check that out. But I think it's interesting... What's that?

Huang:             Yeah, no, sorry. Along.org is right.

Horn:                Good, good, good, good. Okay, good. Got the right one. So check it out for sure.

                        I want to get more into the products and so forth because you all are very unique, it seems, in the philanthropic landscape. You're actually building stuff that gets used. You're not just giving grants to organizations, you're really getting into that nitty gritty. I want to dig into that a little bit more in a moment.

                        But before we go there, you all also are connecting all this research from the learning sciences and things of that nature, along with the lived experiences, if you will, of teachers and students in these school environments. So I'm just curious, your own learning evolution and your own learning journey, or CZI's, maybe, more broadly, what is something that maybe wasn't intuitive, or you've learned along the way, that contradicted previous beliefs and has allowed you to evolve over time as you're building these tools? I'm just curious for you to take us on your own learning journey, in effect.

Huang:             Yeah. I guess what has been interesting for me is some of the things I've talked about feel really, to me, very obvious in some ways. Like, yes, we should take what we know about how students learn, and yes, that should be really usable for teachers. And I think for me, those feel really sort of... that should happen. That should just be the way it is. And I think, through my time at CZI, and really, through my own learning, the team's learning, how we interact with really amazing partners and grantees out in this space, is that just doesn't happen for a number of reasons.

                        I give the example of a lot of schools still use this idea of three cueing. It's a theory around how reading comprehension happens. And it's been maybe over 20 years since that has been debunked as the way... that students are really guessing at words. But that is still being used because we don't really have the mechanisms to update that. And I think, for me, that is something that really pushes us to say, okay, well, wait, education is a complex system, so what are the different pieces that play into the fact that these innovations don't really get to teachers, and obviously, anyone working in education. There are many factors that come into play, and I could talk about our perspective on that in just a second as we go into that building part that we do. But I think that's the piece where we just really think there is a lot of existing research about how students learn, but we need to think about how to unlock that and make that really available to teachers.

Horn:                That's a really good example. So let's stay with that learning science strand and how it's formed your investment strategy. You just mentioned Along, you mentioned Summit Learning. What else are you building right now that you're really excited about that you want to share with folks so that they can go check out?

Huang:             Sure. I mentioned that research to practice grant making portfolio, and the team there is doing a lot of exciting work, I would say a lot of the innovation of where might there be good research learnings to put into practice. Those are the types of innovations that we've been investing in. I'll give a couple examples. We think a lot about wellbeing of students, as we've talked about a little bit here, but if we want to talk about student wellbeing, you also have to talk about teacher wellbeing. I mean, just as an adult who's lived through these last two years...

Horn:                It's been hard.

Huang:             Real. It's hard. But we really have to think about all these real human beings in the building. So there's been a program that came out of a team in Madison, Wisconsin, called the Healthy Minds Innovations. They have built a program that's app based that's really thinking about teacher wellbeing, and really helps teachers go through podcasts and lessons to think about how do they grow in their awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. That's an example of a type of thing we might fund, where there's that innovation that is really practical and that teachers can pick up. After the early studies, after about a month of using this program, teachers both had self-reported feelings of greater calm, less of that distress and stress of life, less disconnection and loneliness. And even in the follow up months later, there's still that persistence.

                        So it just shows how a small intervention packaged in a way that's doable can be really impactful. And again, thinking about how teachers can have better wellbeing, I think, is really essential if we want to talk about supporting our students as well.

Horn:                Totally agree. If you don't have the teachers in place supported, you're not going to get the student success either, for sure. And it sounds like you haven't just funded that group to continue to advance in their own product development, but you've also monitored or funded, maybe, the research alongside of it. Is that correct?

Huang:             Yeah. A lot of our work... some of it is some of that initial innovation work, but a lot of it, we either follow up or pair with this goal of generating more evidence of these practices. And again, a lot of our work is around wellbeing and relationships because we think it's... It's not a cherry on top. It's not this extra thing to academic learning. We think it should be integrated and thought about at the same time. And so in addition to the innovations, yeah, we do a lot of the funding that is, how do we generate more evidence around this to show not just that the research is valid, but that putting into practice in these practical ways can also have impact and results.

Horn:                That's awesome. I find far too much philanthropy doesn't think about that efficacy and research piece, and just sort of throws it out in the wild and hopes it sticks and hopes it does good things. So I'm glad you're doing that, one, but two, I also love that you said the word integrated. Because I guess that's my other piece of this, which is sometimes these different strands are very disintermediated or disintegrated from each other. So you'll support the healthy minds or good social emotional wellbeing and so forth, but it's not in the context of that academic growth, and so you don't see the impact on the other side of it, or vice versa, to your point, you treat it as the cherry on top, and you forget that it's actually foundational to someone having the security, if we think about this as a Maslow context, to be able to think about their progression, self-actualization, and so forth. So that integrated piece strikes me as an important part of the conversation.

                        I think it actually blends right into where I want to go next, which is, you mentioned it, several times, it's not just how these tools work in a vacuum, but how people actually use them on the ground. You had the reading example, which is a great one, of guys, we've known this for a couple decades, but gee, it's not changing in practice. So I'm curious, as you fund these tools, how you think about making sure that they're designed either in accordance with how they're designed to be used, or how do they fit into the progress that people are prioritizing, even if it's maybe different from the conception of progress that you all have as you create them?

Huang:             Yeah. I think that's a really salient question for us. And you mentioned it earlier, as ed tech developers, we're like, hey, if the teachers would only use it this particular way. I think for us, there is a real threading that we need to think about because research is great, but if it's theoretical and not usable, it doesn't have impact. Existing teacher practices may be great, but if we don't take what we know about learning, it's less effective than it could be. I think it isn't right for us to say, hey, teachers, very full workload, figure this all out on your own.

                        And so as we think about tool building, I mentioned Along, I think we want to really blend how do we take the research and make it practical, and that's the task of the tool builders. I think as a philanthropy, it is unique to be building, but there's a couple reasons it's actually quite powerful for us to do in-house. One is to really practice that interdisciplinary weaving. And it's not easy. We speak different languages, we have different goals, different ways of knowing. And so as we build, we get to really share a goal of making it practical and useful with these different components.

                        And the Along example, I think, is quite powerful because we got to work with the Search Institute. They're a partner and grantee. They have worked on this developmental relationship framework. It's research based. It's intentional about how do you actually build a fruitful, positive, productive, developmentally appropriate relationship between teacher and student. So they are the backbone. But instead of that being on a website, you have to go find and figure how to action. We partnered with them to build Along, which has research questions. Those research questions are grounded to that framework. And then we can also work with communities. We've worked with the Black Teacher Collaborative, Character Lab, to get feedback from teachers and students about, well, does that resonate? Because as adults, we can say, oh, this is a great question for my kids. And if you've got students, you know some of the times that does not land.

                        And so if we can help do some of that research work to make it more resonant for students, it's easier for teachers in the end. And so we package all of these things together to make sure, and then to measure and iterate that we can bring the good practices that are theoretical into the classroom in real practical and powerful and valuable ways for teachers and students.

Horn:                Yeah. It occurs to me that learning engineering approach, that because you're developing, you're getting those cracks at it, seeing how it is or is not adopted, getting to adjust and reconcile that with the research base. It transitions where I want to go as we wrap up this conversation, last question, which is, we talked about your work in terms of developing directly, in terms of funding interesting developments and teams building things, your work doing research and efficacy and understanding the use cases, and how does it actually interact, if you will, with the real world. The last piece of this is, though, thinking about, for lack of a better word, how that real world changes, how the system itself perhaps changes to determine what gets adopted. And I'm curious, as you're building and funding tools that have a lot of research behind them, how do you think about moving the market forward toward adopting these tools that have that rigor and efficacy research behind them?

Huang:             Yeah. I've talked about this a little bit less, but when I think about us as builders, there is certainly the product and software component of it. But another big piece of building is actually building the bridges to partner with all the people across the ecosystem that I think are going to have to work together. I mean, this is my theme of working interdisciplinary in interdisciplinary ways. I really think that there are a lot of people who see things commonly that we can do better for our teachers and our students. And in our work, in addition to the building work and all the things that we get to learn from that, we are also making grants that help acknowledge all the insight and knowledge that partners know in their local communities, wherever they may be, and then figure out how do we find common ground to say, hey, we need to shift, whether it's the market for technology or the policies that go into what's happening, that we can thread a needle around holistic student wellbeing and achievement in their academics as one conversation.

                        To give an example, one of our partners is King Makers of Oakland. They are really working very deeply with their local community to think about how do we support Black youth? How do we understand from the community and the caretakers and the families what they mean when they want their students to become leaders and develop well. So that's an example of going local.

                        And then at the same time, we're also looking at how do we create bipartisan coalitions. We're really proud of just the work, to your point, of early in the pandemic, some of the responsive work that we did to really make sure that we were able to, with our partners on the ground, work towards that $7 billion in funding federally to push around the homework gap and connectivity that students were going to need to access during that time.

                        So I think those are just a couple of examples, deep and broad, that we are thinking about how do you evolve that broader market or the policies that drive what's important and what's funded.

Horn:                Gotcha. I know that's super helpful. Last question as we wrap up, I slightly lied, but last question, which is, folks tuning in, following this, they want to follow your work. They want to follow what else you're funding, developing, building. What's the best way for the field to keep up with all these developments?

Huang:             Yeah. That's a great question. I hope I got to highlight some of the amazing work that our partners do.

Horn:                Yeah, I would say so.

Huang:             And our team at CZI, we just... Major theme is we have to work together. A lot of people are going to need to work together to evolve and to build this better future for everyone. And we're really excited if folks want to tune along or reach out to us. Our website, chanzuckerberg.com, has links to the education work. And we also have our Twitter and other social media for updates along the way. But the website probably is a great place to start. And you can hear what we're up to there.

Horn:                That's perfect. I'll throw that in, trying to grab it quickly, chanzuckerberg.com, so people can see it at the bottom here. … And Sandra, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having the conversation. Thank you for what you're building, funding, and doing every day to advance this agenda to help every child make progress in their lives and be prepared for this world in which we're living. Deeply appreciate it. And for all you tuning in, we'll be back next time on The Future of Education. Thanks so much.

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