Meet Drew Perkins, President and Director of ThoughtStretchers Education
Interviewed by Maisie Hurwitz
Drew Perkins, founder of the professional development company ThoughtStretchers Education, didn’t intend to pursue a career in education. With both his mother and grandmother having worked as schoolteachers and principals, he thought of teaching as the “family business.” More than 25 years later—having worked as a classroom teacher, education consultant, facilitator, and coach—Drew has developed a carefully balanced educational model that he believes counters the increasingly polarized, overly achievement-driven culture of today’s classrooms: a learning experience based on critical thinking, objective pluralism, and rich inquiry. We spoke with Drew—who now hangs his grandmother’s teaching certificate from the 1933-1934 school year in his office—to hear more about what these approaches mean, how we can implement them in the classroom, and why they are more important now than ever.
(Educators, stay tuned for the end of the article, where Drew shares the best way to get in touch with him and engage with the resources ThoughtStretchers Education provides.)
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What is project-based learning, and why do you believe in it?
We define project-based learning as students learning through the creation of a product for an authentic audience. The teacher starts with a driving question that has clarity on product, purpose, and audience and then develops a list of things the students need to know and learn. For instance, what can the students create to serve some authentic audience?
The teacher has already planned that out with the consideration of how to guide students in developing the skill of asking, ‘What do we need to know and learn in order to do something well?’ The scaffolding—the teaching, the instruction, the assessment—falls in line throughout the project, all in service of presenting, showing, or sharing something at the end that demonstrates the understanding of the content and skills.
The goal is that students learn the content, knowledge, and skills that the teacher wants them to learn through the process of a project.
Tell us about how you started working in education and the origin of your company, ThoughtStretchers Education.
I tried really hard not to go into education. Both my mother and grandmother were teachers and principals, so you could say it was our family business. I intended to go to law school, changed my mind, kind of flailed about a little bit, and while I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I did some substitute teaching, which ignited the spark to go back and get my teaching certificate, and from there, it sort of all cascaded.
I was in the classroom for 15 years—first teaching special education, then moving into the regular education classroom, teaching psychology and social studies to middle and high school. I was trying to implement project-based learning in my classroom, so I reached out to an organization called PBLWorks (formerly the Buck Institute for Education) for some educational materials. One thing led to another, and I found myself working as a consultant for them, going around the country and doing workshops. At the same time, I was working at a local nonprofit education organization called the Collaborative for Teaching and Learning, helping them develop project-based learning work. This work in consulting eventually led me to start, in 2016, what was then called TeachThoughtPD, which focused on professional development, which I’ve since changed to ThoughtStretchers Education.
One of my very good friends who used to be an academic coach in the school where I used to teach jokingly referred to me as a “professional thought stretcher” because in all the work that I do, I focus on the inquiry process. And I thought that would be a good name to shift from TeachThought, and so that's how the name ThoughtStretchers Education surfaced.
A lot of your work emphasizes what you call a “heterodox approach” to education and the importance of rethinking traditional frameworks. What are some of the traditional frameworks in education that you feel need to be re-examined or moved beyond, and why?
There’s a spectrum. On one end, there’s a very traditional kind of teaching. A caricature or straw-man version of that would be the sort of 'drill and kill,' lecture-test-lecture-test model. At the other end, there’s a very progressive, constructivist, often inquiry-centered and student-centered approach. The caricature of this approach might be what we call discovery-learning, where kids are just learning what they want, when they want, with adults just sort of chaperoning.
As with just about everything in our world right now, there are false binaries and us-versus-them. Most schools are somewhere in the middle. I’m interested in trying to reframe our thinking from “either/or” to “yes/and.” How do we structure and align our instruction with the things that need to be accomplished?
One way I like to think about this alignment is using researcher John Hattie’s Surface, Deep, and Transfer Learning framework. Evidence shows that explicit or direct instruction is efficient in helping build knowledge, which may be thought of as surface learning. To help learners get to deep and transfer learning, we combine that explicit instruction with inquiry methods and perhaps collaborative activities.
Can you elaborate on the different ends of the spectrum and where your work fits into this?
On the traditional end of the spectrum, teachers are typically more focused on delivering knowledge and sharing content using some sort of explicit, direct instruction and assessing. This model is more teacher-centered, where the teacher takes the lead on what the students need to learn, putting it up on the board and directly, explicitly teaching it. They assess it and then move on. I'm not necessarily against this method—which is in service of preparing for a test and building knowledge—I consider it necessary but not sufficient. I’m interested not in replacing these direct or explicit instruction modes but rather fitting them inside of a project-based or inquiry-based learning experience. That is to say, contextualizing and framing them.
Now, on the other end, there are teachers who are more interested in a discovery learning mode: kids just sort of figuring it out on their own, asking ‘how do you do this? This mode is not very efficient either; as you might imagine, trying to figure out how to do something like algebra on your own without a teacher is probably going to be a very slow process, if at all successful. So we advocate for teachers providing more guidance than this end of the spectrum.
As an education consultant, how do you meet the needs of your clients’ educational model while encouraging educators to implement a specific approach, like project-based learning?
We use a mix of approaches depending on the desired academic outcomes. We might focus on a specific set of tools. For instance, we will do a project-based learning workshop, or a knowledge-rich inquiry workshop, or a differentiated instruction workshop. There are a few frameworks that we believe in and that we say are best practices. But at the core of these methods, what we're trying to do is figure out how to meet schools where they are.
There are some schools that, if they want to do project-based learning, have the autonomy and latitude to do all kinds of things. Then there are some schools that may be a bit more traditional in nature—maybe in Texas, where things are much more rigid—who don’t have the latitude to be more flexible. Their project-based learning might look different because, for instance, their accountability testing is really rigid.
If a school places importance on test preparation—which many schools and teachers do—then we will focus more on the things that will meet that. Tools like inquiry-based learning or soft skills -21st-century skills, social-emotional skills, the kind of mindfulness work that Susan has done in schools—may be a bit marginalized and pushed to the edge in a more rigid school because the focus is on content delivery, content knowledge, content assessment, and accountability. So we’re trying to help a school be the best it can be within its educational framework.
What are the main concerns educators and those working with children have about today’s education landscape?
It depends on who you ask. One group is very, very activated—and rightfully so—that students are not getting the knowledge and learning the things they need. Some of that is, I think, justified, especially post-COVID. There’s a big concern with reading instruction right now and the inability to get most kids to learn how to read.
On the other end, the concern—which is maybe a bit more humanistic—is how kids are experiencing the learning environment. These social-emotional learning aspects are very important, but there can also be some excesses there, where the focus can be at the expense of some of the academic learning.
One thing that I'm really concerned about, and keep banging my spoon on my high chair about, is the ability of students, as they turn into adults, to understand and demonstrate what I would call Enlightenment liberalism: being curious about other opinions and perspectives, and getting away from the sort of polarization, the us-versus-them. In some ways, students have not been exposed to the practices of considering and hearing other perspectives.
How do you define Enlightenment liberalism, and why is it important in a classroom setting?
I advocate for the idea of objective pluralism: the idea that we help students—and adults, for that matter—understand the Enlightenment liberal principles upon which our democracy rests. The ideas of liberal science and constitution of knowledge, influenced by thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Jonathan Rauch—basically that no one person, by the dent of their skin color or identity, has any more truth than the others. Anything that is true is only true insofar as we can check it. We need to be able to have speech and listen to other opinions or perspectives—not to say that they're right or equally valid, but to understand what's right and what's wrong.
Not only do teachers and administrators need to understand these principles, but we need to think about how we implement them in classrooms—how we use them both intentionally and intuitively—which we can accomplish through both lesson design and responding in the moment. For instance, if a student says something or asks a question that might be deemed offensive, a response in line with these principles might be, “Tell me what makes you say that?” or “What's the evidence for that?” This mode is really consistent with the inquiry process that we advocate for and implements curiosity while (re)building a reality-based community: asking students why they might think something instead of shutting them down.
What is your relationship with using mindfulness and meditation in the classroom? What role does mindfulness play in the work that you do with educators and students, if any?
In our work with schools, we focus more on pedagogy. The way we think about mindfulness is more in terms of metacognition, or thinking about your thinking: recognizing what your thinking is, recognizing what your feelings are, and how you feel about something. This brings us back to the objective pluralism work, asking “How do you feel about that different perspective? How do you think that person feels?”
Metacognition is something we want to foster and develop in students, and inquiry processes can help with that quite a bit: engagement in open-ended, messy problems, thinking about the thinking, wondering, and questions. This is also, of course, highly connected to social-emotional learning. This way of thinking—recognizing that you’re getting angry, for instance, or that you’re feeling sad—is the piece of mindfulness we model in our social-emotional learning work.
In terms of the importance of not being afraid to ask questions and getting people to stretch their thinking through rich inquiry, how do we nourish rich inquiry? What tools or resources help us develop rich inquiry—in students and humanity?
There are some things that are certainly barriers in the classroom, such as the culture that a classroom and a teacher have. For instance, is it okay to ask questions? Are there other barriers and friction points towards that? In addressing these concerns, I like to think about the intentional and the intuitive. There are things the teacher can design by intention—exercises, question formulation, technique, making meaning routine—that can get students to engage in the inquiry process. A project-based learning experience can accomplish this on a fairly large scale.
The intuitive piece—which I think is probably even harder to develop in teachers—is a sense of knowing when to step in and when to pull back, when to provide a little information, or ask questions, or let the students simmer for a bit in what we would call productive struggle.
So it's a mix of these things: asking students to engage in beautiful questions and think about things that are not just purely academic but intellectually seductive.
In 1983, there was a report issued by the government called A Nation At Risk, which, through comparing our educational system to Russia and other countries who were surpassing us, pushed our education towards a more intentional accountability structure—what I would say is a culture of achievement, versus a culture of teaching and learning. Before then, I think it was easier for a teacher—my mother, for example—to teach in a way that fostered inquiry and had more flexibility. After 1983, with the years of the No Child Left Behind Act and high-stakes accountability, it was harder for teachers to incorporate this kind of approach.
Of course, this comes up in some states and some schools more than others. For instance, when I worked in El Paso, Texas, kids were tested every two weeks, and the scores were compared from teacher to teacher, whereas in some private schools I’ve worked in, it's the exact opposite.
I contend that one factor contributing to our polarization is the decades-long decline in students, now adults, being asked and given the opportunity to engage in a flexible, curiosity-driven, inquiry-based approach in a quality way. As a result, they are less able to decipher and be metacognitive and mindful about when they’re engaging in othering or creating them/us divisions. So we have students that are not able to be clear-eyed and thoughtful about what they believe because they've been told, ‘These are the answers. These are the things you're supposed to know. And go forward.’
How can we balance the emphasis on academic achievement in our striving, goal-oriented culture with the need for social-emotional well-being—in students and in educators? Self-care can be kind of a buzzword, but it is important to have a balance between professional development, achieving and striving, and fostering a healthy emotional inner life. Can you talk about that balance?
I don't know the answer to that or exactly how I feel about it because I think it depends. I've actually had some conversations on my podcast about this (the episodes “The Side Effects Of School” and “Grappling With Student Mental Health” from last year address this).
There are some camps that very much push back on the structure of school, saying it's harmful to kids social-emotionally. There’s certainly some evidence of that, and there's some data that I think is interesting to pay attention to regarding the mental health of kids.
But there's a fragility that I think our society has developed. We don't want anybody to feel bad, and there’s all this anxiety: parents are anxious, students are anxious, and everything is considered harmful or traumatic. I think those things are overstated in an unhealthy way, which Jonathan Haidt’s work supports.
But on the other hand, it’s worth considering what the purpose of school is and what we are trying to do. Is it just academic achievement and a sort of sausage factory mentality of turning out students at whatever expense—suck it up, buttercup, and get to work? I think that depends on lots of factors, like the mental or emotional fragility of the student and the parents and how they react—what students can handle. Just like in sports, some players can be coached really hard and some definitely not.
Fortunately, parents have options, with school choice and even homeschool, which I think is worth exploring. Many students don't feel intellectually nourished or seduced by what's going on in classrooms, and if they're emotionally fragile, then they're certainly more susceptible to becoming worsened by those situations.
You’ve been in the education field for over 25 years, and so much has changed even in that short time, with AI, social media, and so many technological changes. What changes or advancements do you hope to see in education over the next 5 to 10 years? What trends or shifts in education do you see as critical in the near future?
So much has changed in the education landscape over the past 100 years. I have my grandmother’s contract from the ‘33-’34 school year in Erie, Pennsylvania, and for the year, she made $960. This was not uncommon, but she could be fired or released for change in name—which would be marriage—and change in condition—which would be pregnancy. Every time I tell that story, it astounds me—what kind of HR policy is that?
Looking forward, I'm always hoping that there will be a continued move towards developing students who are better critical thinkers—more inquisitive and curious—but not at the expense of an important shared knowledge.
In our work, we talk a lot about preparing students for the modern world. One of the things that we think is really important is the ability to frame problems with the questions that need to be answered. We have to work with students to develop that skill and practice and model it so that when they do get out into the real world, the adult world, they're better able to navigate the uncertainty. Because while we can make some guesses about the future—the jobs and opportunities that will or will not be available—we ultimately don't know what's going to happen.
So when it comes to technology and AI, what can AI do? It can, and increasingly will, think. But—and I could be wrong about this—I don't think there's any danger in the near term of AI or technology replacing people who are really good critical thinkers. It's hard to quantify what that means, but you kind of know it when you see it. Can I get AI to do my accounting instead of hiring an accountant? I think I probably could, or we're pretty close to that. But I don't think we're anywhere close to getting AI to really—pardon the pun—stretch your thinking: to get you to think about things differently, consider other perspectives, and ask important questions.
So, as we think about what education needs to do, I would prioritize inquiry and critical thinking, but not at the expense of building knowledge.
How can people get in touch with you? What's the best way for someone looking to get into this work to engage with your business, and how can people get involved in these resources?
There are lots of different ways that we meet the needs of educators or schools reaching out for support. Most of our work is in person with groups of teachers. Typically, a school will reach out and ask us to lead a workshop, like a project-based learning workshop, with a group of teachers. We help them develop a project for implementation and model the process. These are typically one-day, two-day, or three-day workshops, and then we provide support going forward.
But we’re hybrid, so we also have online courses, and we’ve been able to work internationally. We primarily work in the United States, but we've been all over the world—in 2024, for instance, we've been to Bangkok, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Dominican Republic, and Mumbai—and hopefully, we'll continue to do that.
Our main website is wegrowteachers.com, where you can find all of our work and services, the podcast—such as our episodes with Susan—and blog pieces. We also have a second site, a social-media community we’re developing called ThoughtStretchers Community, which you can find at thoughtstretchers.org. But you can always email me or contact me at drew@thoughtstretchers.org.
For more of my conversations with Drew over the years, check out some of our podcast episodes from 2017, 2019, and just a few months ago!