Insider Series: David Figlio

NULC Insider Series with David Figlio

Dean, the School of Education and Social Policy

March 2019

In this exclusive interview, Dean David Figlio answers Leadership Circle members’ questions and shares how the School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) is making both Northwestern and the world a better place.

Part 1 of 7: Learning, Growing, and Thriving at SESP

Beth Bennett ’97 MS, associate dean and assistant professor of journalism at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, sits down with Figlio to discuss SESP’s mission and find out why students and alumni are sharing their #SESPlove online. 

Conclusion

NULC Insider Series Archive

Transcript

Part 1: Introduction

Beth Bennett: Welcome to this NULC Insider Series. My name is Beth Bennett. I’m a long-time faculty member at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. I’ve been on faculty for about 15 years, and I’m also the associate dean for journalism and a graduate of the MSJ program at Medill. Today, we are fortunate enough to be joined by Dean David Figlio. He’s the Orrington Lunt Professor, and dean of the School of Education and Social Policy, also known as SESP. Dean Figlio is one of the nation's most influential researchers on education and social policy. We also want to thank our listeners for submitting questions for Dean Figlio. We're going to try to get to as many of them as we can. So, let's get started: Welcome, Dean Figlio.

David Figlio: Please call me David.

Bennett: Oh, of course, absolutely. So, you have been dean of SESP for a year and a half, but you also have been on faculty here for 11 years. Tell us about your Northwestern direction, your path here.

Figlio: Sure. Well, I spent my first 13 years post-PhD in disciplinary economics departments, and over time, I was finding I loved my colleagues, I loved economics, but I was finding that I had more fulfilling conversations sometimes with biologists and developmental psychologists than I was with my econ colleagues, because I was focused on trying to make lives better as much as I could. So when the opportunity came up to come to SESP, I jumped at the chance. I came as a professor, then a couple years after I joined as a professor, I became the director of the Institute for Policy Research which is connecting Northwestern researchers from across the University around questions of social policy, and then when the opportunity to become dean of SESP came, it was really a dream come true. I get to spend every moment of my day thinking about ways to help our students, our staff, and our faculty change the world, quite honestly.

Bennett: Can you give us an overview of SESP?

Figlio: Absolutely. SESP is a school with around 700 undergraduates, and about 300 masters and PhD students. SESP is a small school, but it's a really influential one here at Northwestern. So, for example, every year, there are four graduating seniors at Northwestern who are asked to represent the student body. This past year, three out of those four were SESP majors, despite the fact that SESP represented only 7 percent of the graduating seniors. And that's not unusual. Or our faculty, who are really pretty remarkable at all stages-every year we have a dinner university-wide that honors the faculty members who receive great honors at any stage of their career. We represent fewer than 2 percent of all the faculty at Northwestern. This past year, 5 percent of the people being honored were SESP faculty. It's a privilege to be able to lead a school that has so many remarkable students who are true leaders at Northwestern, and so many faculty members- assistant professors, associate full professors- who are making a big difference in their fields.

Bennett: So, tell us about SESP's shared mission.

Figlio: Our mission is to make lives better, quite honestly. We do this by trying to help to create the conditions through which every individual can learn, grow, and thrive at all ages, in all contexts, at all stages of life. That's a big mission, but it's something that really, we take to heart in many ways. Now, we know as a small school we can't do it all, so therefore, what we really focus on is what I like to call "powered by Northwestern." What we do is we're not out there delivering services to tens of thousands of people. Instead, what we're there is, kind of, if you remember that old BASF commercial- that we don't make the products you buy, we make the products that you buy better- in some regards, that's what SESP's really all about. We're not educating hundreds of thousands of students, but we are helping the people who educate hundreds of thousands of students to do a better job. We work with nonprofits, we work with government agencies, we work with school districts in order to help them to be as effective as they possibly can.

Bennett: So, David, I understand there are more than 2,100 Instagram posts with the hashtag #SESPlove, can you explain a little bit about that, please?

Figlio: Sure. Our undergrads came up with that. SESP is so often seen as just such a happy place. Part of this has to do with the student experience, and that I have to give big props to my predecessor, Penelope Peterson, who was dean at SESP for 20 years before I joined. Penelope really worked to nurture a culture of engagement of the students, a unique advising system, a place where people really feel included and at home. And also, I think it has to do with our mission. Every single person in our SESP family is driven by a desire to make life better for people, and when that's your mission, I mean, how can you not love that?

Bennett: Thank you, David, and to see more of this interview, please click on one of the videos below.

Part 2

Bennett: David, in what ways is SESP a force for good in Northwestern's local communities and beyond?

Figlio: So thanks, Beth. We conduct our teaching and research and public outreach in direct service to the world. A lot of people think that you have to make a choice between doing good and doing great work, and we think that's a false dichotomy. We believe that by doing research and teaching that is motivated by practical problems that millions of us, billions of us, around the world face, that we're going to do work that's especially relevant that's going to help us to really make a significant difference, and I think it shows. We have an outsized share of our faculty win all sorts of national and international awards. They get recognized, and in the meantime, they're spending all of their time thinking about how to make life better, working together with partners in government, in local school districts, in nonprofits, et cetera. When I was in Singapore and India, I was meeting with government leaders, I was meeting with alums, I was meeting with organizations to think about the ways in which we might be able to engage our Northwestern undergraduates and graduate students in their work to find ways to carry out more consequential joint research and to think about ways in which that could then feed back to Evanston as well. I was at a joint school board meeting between District 65 in Evanston and District 202, our high school district in Evanston, in which every few months we have a joint school board meeting, and I was there with a number of colleagues talking about the ways in which SESP faculty, staff, and students are collaborating with the school districts, but we also have a lot of programs that are direct service provision. Northwestern University is one of the world's great institutions, and we know that universities are a major force for social mobility. We believe at Northwestern, and we believe at SESP, that Northwestern can help to create the pipeline for college access and success, so we run a number of programs for Northwestern that do just that. The Northwestern Academy for Chicago Public Schools and Project Excite, its school in Evanston, help talented but generally first-generation or low-income students from Chicago and Evanston to be prepared to be successful at the top colleges and universities in the country, including frequently Northwestern, and we've just started a brand-new partnership with High Jump Chicago Public Schools and the Evanston school districts called Project Purple that's taking that work to the middle grades as well. And of course, there's the Center for Talent Development So CTD is a combination of weekend enrichment programs as well as summer enrichment programs, and these are programs that instead of just- I mean we do accelerated coursework- but really the most exciting thing we do at CTD, as far as I’m concerned, is help students pursue and nurture their passions. In the summer that depending on the age range that's anywhere from one to five weeks long, which educates 16,000 students every year and provides an exceptional opportunity and entrée into Northwestern University for many many students. One of the things we've been trying to do then is raise considerable amounts of scholarship funds so that we can have exceptional Center for Talent Development opportunities for as many kids as possible, regardless of their financial need.

Bennett: Thank you, David, and to watch more of this interview, please click on one of the videos below.

Part 3

Bennett: Now let's ask some questions from NULC members. David, SESP is Northwestern's smallest school, but it has impact across the University. How does SESP make Northwestern a better place, especially for students?

Figlio: Sure. Thanks, Beth. So our objective is to help Northwestern students- notice I didn't just say SESP students, but all Northwestern students-not only succeed at Northwestern and post-graduation, but lead. And we do this because just like every school at Northwestern has it's own special role, really, SESP is the school of leadership. Our focus is teaching the 21st century literacies that we need to be able to be highly successful in a globally networked world. So that means things such as cultural competency, change management, team dynamics, and the like. And those are the types of classes that we teach at SESP. And right now, most of the students who take those courses happen to be SESP undergraduates. But I’m actually not happy about that. I would want Weinberg students and McCormick students and Medill students to be able to avail themselves more frequently of those classes. And I’m thinking about different ways, working with my colleagues, to find ways to help to offer these types of courses more broadly. So one of my things I’m most excited about that we do at SESP is called the SESP Leadership Institute, or SLI is what the students call it. And they show up a couple of weeks before school starts. Now, you've all heard of bridge programs. This is not a bridge program. It's more like a rocket launcher, because the whole goal behind this is to help to empower first-generation and low-income college students new to Northwestern to be able to hit the ground running in a major way. Before they finish their two weeks in SLI, they will have actually completed an entire one-quarter course, but they make it through, and they have this enormous confidence as a direct consequence of that. Now, we're the school of learning, as well as a school of leadership at Northwestern. And so, because we're the school of learning, we're constantly trying to figure out how to make learning better at Northwestern. And so, we're the school of organizations, as well. So we shine the light internally at our organization. And the goal with that, then, is to figure out if we can come up with new paradigms for undergraduate curriculum. Then all the other schools at Northwestern can learn from the things that we're learning, and it will make all of Northwestern better. And likewise, because we're a small school, we get to take risks. So that means things like coming out with brand-new technologies for teaching. One classroom I’m really excited to teach in is a brand-new classroom we brought online that was donated by Microsoft and Steelcase. What we did was we took the experts in learning, that was our faculty, the experts in instructional technology, Microsoft, and the experts in space, Steelcase, and put it all together and said what happens if you put pedagogy, technology, and space purposefully together in the same room? My gosh, if you stop by Annenberg 101, that classroom is awesome. I can't wait to teach in it. And my hope is that, then, this will lead-you know, if this works out, then Medill might do something similar, or Weinberg or Comm, and that's what we're all about at Northwestern.

Bennett: Thank you, David. To continue watching this interview, please click on one of the videos below.

Part 4

Bennett: Here is another question from an NULC member: David, can you speak to the impact that SESP faculty are having on education, research, teaching, and learning?

Figlio: Sure, thank you. We have direct impact in at least two different ways. One is through partnerships with states and school districts. We are trying to come up with this wonderful coincidence between the most important questions from a scientific perspective, and the most important questions from a policy and practice perspective. So, joint with, especially the Evanston School Districts through our Northwestern Evanston Education Research Alliance that we've started, as well as through Chicago Public Schools- headed by last year's commencement speaker- Janice Jackson, we are working together with them where they come up with their most high-order research questions that they care the most about, and then we, in turn, shop that around the SESP faculty members, and so what this means is we don't always get all their research questions answered, but if we find that this is a research question that say, Brian Reiser on my faculty really wants to study and CPS really wants the answer to, then it's a win-win. Brian gets to do cutting-edge research; CPS gets their questions answered. One thing we've been successful at, for example, then, is getting philanthropy to help to fund what we're calling rapid impact grants. Now, these rapid impact grants then go and dramatically reduce the amount of time that it takes for research projects that are of top priority for CPS and the Evanston schools to get off the ground. And one of the things that I think is great about this too is that sometimes the expertise is not in SESP. So a third of the rapid impact grants that we've funded so far are actually from Feinberg and Glory faculty members, and that's what one of the things I love about One Northwestern, is that I can be learning and helping Feinberg out, and Feinberg faculty can be helping CPS out, and SESP's the way to do it. We also, then, directly impact education, policy, and practice through our in-service teaching. So one of the things we've started to do is have a set of advanced summer institutes that we run on a variety of questions, such as computational thinking, teaching gifted students, and the like. This summer we're running five of these different institutes, and these institutes then bring in people from all over Chicagoland who wanna improve their craft and learn from the expertise of SESP faculty members. We've been doing this and able to fund this and keep it much more affordable for educators by working on partnerships with leading corporations. We also have a program that's intended to teach biological science better that's funded by and in partnership with Baxter International. By doing these types of things, we get to leverage the expertise from industry, the expertise from school districts and other practitioners, and the expertise from SESP, as well as across Northwestern in order to try to make education as good as possible.

Bennett: David, thank you, and to watch more of this interview, please click on one of the videos below.

Part 5

Bennett: David, here's another question from a Leadership Circle member: We understand that you've been dramatically increasing scholarships that SESP awards to low-income students to attend the Center for Talent Development programs. Why is this so important to you?

Figlio: Thanks for asking. This is really central to my heart. See, top universities are America's leading engine of social mobility today. And I’m really proud to be part of the leadership team of Northwestern because Northwestern is a university that's, under Morty Schapiro especially, has really embraced the role of a top university in college access. The Center for Talent Development, quite honestly, is, I think, a leading force behind that type of work as well. So we know from research that there's nothing that stops a talented low-income or underrepresented minority student from going to a top university like the feeling that they don't belong at that place. Social psychologists call this stereotype threat. One thing that we're learning more and more about is if you get to these talented kids when they're young, before they really form that strong sense- oh my gosh, I don't belong in this place- say in elementary grades or middle grades, we can really make a big difference here. It's really personal to me because, in part, we know that there are enormous numbers of incredibly talented people out there, from all socioeconomic backgrounds. The great example of this, actually, is my colleague, Larry Hedges. Larry just won the second Yidan prize- the Yidan prize is the world's largest education research prize. Think about, there's no Nobel prize in education, but if there were, it would be this. Larry Hedges is a first-generation college student. And it was only because he happened to get an opportunity to experience a little bit about what college is like that he ended up deciding to give college a try. Now he is one of the handful of top statisticians in the entire world. And he’s made a huge difference. I know that there are millions of other potential Larry Hedgeses out there, and I want Northwestern University to be the place where we help to find more and more of them. We can't educate all million of those potential Larry Hedgeses out there, but if we can educate a couple hundred more every year, who knows how the world's gonna turn out? That's why we do it.

Bennett: We've had some questions from Leadership Circle members about gifted identification. Can you tell us more about how the Center for Talent Development does that?

Figlio: Sure. I think this is really important. See, we believe very strongly at SESP that every single human being has exceptional assets. And our goal in society is to help to unlock those assets. And there are many different ways that those assets show up. So, of course, testing is one way that a lot of people think of as far as trying to identify giftedness. And we do that as well. But fewer than half of the people who come to CTD programs come to CTD programs because of tests. Instead what happens more frequently, or just as frequently, is that they'll submit portfolios, for example. They'll have a series of testimonials from trusted educators. Our CTD director, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius literally wrote the book- the book just got published- on how to identify gifted youth. And she then leads CTD by example. So we can get some kids started on the path to be able to be as successful as they could be as early as possible.

Bennett: Thank you, David, and to see more of this interview, please click on one of the videos below.

Part 6

Bennett: We have another question from a Leadership Circle member for David. Now, many students at Northwestern are interested in SESP because they see it as small and nurturing, but sometimes they're hesitant to apply to this school because they perceive that their career options may be limited to education or that they might need a graduate degree. So, what do you say to students who think they want SESP, but they're not sure?

Figlio: The great thing about a university like Northwestern and the type of education we offer, is that the topics that we teach are so transferrable. So, yeah, it's absolutely the case that we have a lot of students in SESP who do end up wanting to pursue PhDs or professional master's degrees, MBA's or MPP's et cetera, but a huge fraction, the majority of out students, actually don't do that, at least not right away. Our students do many things instead. You know, huge numbers, of course, end up working for consulting firms and research firms. They work for consulting firms because they're learning all these 21st century skills and learning how organizations work, for example. And then they can port their knowledge about how organizations work to any number of organizations. So they work for nonprofits, they work for social service organizations, they work for foundations, they work for state and local government agencies, they work in HR, they work in change management offices. They work in all sorts of, all sorts of organizations in that regard. They work in policy think tanks, they work at advocacy organizations, they work in congressional offices. In fact, actually, just yesterday I happened to be watching, like many other people, some congressional testimony. And I looked behind, and I saw a SESP grad right there. SESP students are everywhere. Now, I’m convinced actually that part of the secret sauce for SESP is that we have people who are going into all those different organizations. Because the type of things we try to teach in SESP are how similar these tasks are in the different places. So, think about a classroom for a moment. A classroom is an organization in which you have one teacher who is instructing and leading a whole bunch of little people, right? But then that teacher is operating in an organization themself, for example, that's very flat in terms of its hierarchy. Well, now, the prospective teacher out there is also going to be able to learn from the prospective policy wonk, who's going to learn from the prospective business person. And so that's why I think what happens in SESP is so productive in terms of helping people to be successful. Whether they're going to the boardroom or the courtroom or the classroom- or by the way, the playing field. We have a huge number of Northwestern Wildcats athletes who are SESP students. Why do they do that? Well, actually, exactly the types of things that many people might be wondering about. They know that by taking classes and things like how to handle change, or team dynamics, or working across people who are different from you, that they can be better athletes. And they can take their athletic experience and take it back into the classroom. And then, of course, that together makes them so very successful when they're in the post-Northwestern world. So, come to SESP. If you like the topics that we're talking about, you have unlimited opportunities.

Bennett: Well, thank you David, and if you want to hear more of this interview, please click on one of the videos below.

Part 7

Bennett: We have another question from a Leadership Circle member. David, is there research being conducted at SESP regarding the ecosystems of historically marginalized children? How is SESP preparing undergraduates to serve those communities?

Figlio: Thanks for asking that-I love this question. We at SESP believe very strongly that every single person has exceptional assets and gifts, and it's the role of society to figure out how to unlock those assets. The way we at SESP are working on this is in terms of thinking about how do we design, curate, make better the learning environments where people live, work, play, et cetera. That means at every age, at every stage of life, both in formal learning environments and in informal learning environments- that's where we are. Now, we feel like we have a particular responsibility to work on these problems and these challenges in communities that have been historically marginalized. And so, one of the things that I’m most proud of is an initiative that we've gotten off the ground in the last year. Evanston's Fifth Ward—almost entirely African-American community, low-income community, underserved community—is a place with enormous talent and enormous need. We decided to work together to try to develop, together with a large number of partners, a concerted effort to make a difference in STEAM-that's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics- out of school learning for kids in this neighborhood who are in the middle grades. So here's a great example of a way in which philanthropy really helped out. We had several generous donors who helped to give us a head start in terms of building some infrastructure, but then six of our faculty members-led by Nicole Pinkard, but including Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, Reed Stevens, Mike Horn, Marcelo Worsley- are now leading collaborative research projects and service delivery projects in this community. And this is an example of a place where we think there's a false dichotomy between doing good and doing great research. The National Science Foundation has supported now six different research grants totaling over six million dollars to help to support and deliver this work that's directly making a difference in children's lives, and now our next step is to figure out how to bring Northwestern students directly into this work. We're doing it in the traditional ways, as research assistants, but I’m not satisfied with that. Again, like I mentioned before, we're the school of learning, and let's figure out how to do things differently. So instead of teaching our child development classes in Annenberg Hall, I want to start teaching child development classes in the Fifth Ward of Evanston, where people are learning the theory and practice of child development in an environment in which children are developing. That's an example of how we really want to do our very best to help make our neighborhoods better, by doing the things Northwestern does well, in conjunction with what our partners do well, in the service of society. And our undergraduates are an enormous resource and also exceptionally ready to be able to be a part of this work.

Bennett: Thank you, David, and to see more of this interview, please click on one of the videos below.

Conclusion

Bennett: Well, thank you so much, Dean Figlio, for this interview today and for giving us so much important information about SESP.

Figlio: Thank you, Beth. And thank you all, everybody who's taking the time to watch. Like you, I’m an NULC member, and you, we together, are responsible for helping to propel this university forward. Northwestern is an amazing place to live, to work, to study, and SESP, like other schools across Northwestern, are making a really remarkable difference in the world. We couldn't do it without you. So, I’m personally grateful- whether you're donating to SESP or to Medill or to Comm or Weinberg, or Athletics or McCormick, anywhere across the University. Thank you.

Bennett: And the next NULC Insider Series will be in May. It will be with Liz Gerber. She’s the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and associate professor of mechanical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering. So, watch your email for an invitation, and thank you again for joining us.