Episode Description
What if the biggest problem in schools isn't teachers resisting change, it's that they're never given enough safety to try it?
In this episode, Ben and Steve are joined by Grant Wootten, founder of Edusfere, to unpack why so much of a teacher's best work disappears the moment they leave a classroom and what it would take to stop the cycle.
Grant spent a decade teaching in Southeast Asia, first with a nonprofit in rural Thailand and then at an international school in Bangkok, before founding Edusfere: a platform built to capture and preserve the instructional knowledge teachers create every day. He's recently relocated to the UK to lead Edusfere's expansion into the UK market.
We cover:
- Why teachers become "islands" and how decades of instructional knowledge gets lost every time someone leaves the profession
- The real reason schools resist change and why psychological safety, not disruption, has to come first
- What Grant believes is genuinely the hardest part of being a teacher today
- Why EdTech should meet teachers where they already are instead of chasing flashy new features
- A live debate: should the teacher or the learner sit at the centre of EdTech design?
- Whether human-to-human "formation" is automatically better than a machine's and a story that complicates the answer
- Why fear of conflict is quietly holding back adoption in education
- How to bring your most resistant, most experienced teachers along for the ride
Why listen?
If you've ever watched brilliant teaching disappear into a filing cabinet or a departing colleague's laptop, this conversation names the problem precisely and makes the case that fixing it isn't about ripping up what works, but about giving teachers the safety net to build on it. Expect a genuinely sharp disagreement about whether AI or humans should sit at the centre of education, and a story from Ben that will make you think twice about assuming human-led always beats machine-led.
Chapters
00:00 Highlights
01:30 Welcome back and the Wolfpack community update
03:25 Meet Grant Wootten: from Thai classrooms to EdTech founder
05:25 What is Edusfere and why target the UK market
07:53 Teachers are islands: the knowledge that gets lost every year
08:48 Ben's story: planning in silos at school
10:26 The hardest part of being a teacher today
15:51 Creating psychological safety before disruption
23:51 The role of EdTech in driving culture change
29:27 Should the teacher not the learner be at the centre?
33:26 Is human formation always a force for good?
38:36 Why we're afraid of conflict, and what it costs education
41:42 Bringing veteran, resistant teachers along
46:36 Three quick-fire questions with Grant
Thanks so much for joining us again for another episode - we appreciate you.
Ben & Steve x
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