Karen:
Today's guest is one of the most visionary, joyful, and inspiring
leaders I know. Dr. Adelle Schade is the Vice President of Innovation and
Educational Ventures at Alvernia University and the founder of Total Experience
Learning, a groundbreaking approach that has transformed how students learn,
create, and participate in their own futures. Creative, energetic, brilliant,
and full of heart. Adelle, I am thrilled that you are here.

Karen:
For everyone tuned in today, do you want to talk a little bit about
your role at Alvernia, and then lead into the Total Experience Learning
program?

Adelle:
My role right now at Alvernia is innovation and educational
ventures, but it's really the Total Experience Learning Institute — I refer to
it as TXPL. The institute serves educators and students, and we want to support
innovative classroom practices and frameworks for entire school systems and
districts, so that educators and students feel like they have the support to be
innovative. Setting up innovative environments isn't always an easy thing.

Karen:
It's difficult, especially when you have a way things have always
been done, and trying to do something new is hard — particularly, I'd imagine,
in the educational space.

Adelle:
If you think about education and how traditional it is, it really
hasn't changed much in a hundred years. That's remarkable. We still have the
same schedules. Some of the rooms you walk into, you could take a picture from
a hundred years ago and it would look almost the same, minus the chalkboard and
the dust. Meanwhile, your world has changed massively. So how do we prepare
people for that world in an environment that hasn't always kept pace — even
though the educators want the change?

Karen:
What does an innovative classroom look like in your mind? What are
the key elements of TXPL?

Adelle:
What makes it different is connecting to every student's interest
area while you're still doing what you're supposed to be doing in class. In
education, you have the standards you need to meet, all the test scores —
you're supposed to meet those. If you can connect what people love to those
standards, they understand them better. But that's really hard when you're a
teacher with 30 different kids, seven or eight times a day. How do you, as one
person, reach every student's interest and do what you're supposed to do at the
same time? I took 10 years to study the frameworks and strategies to do that.
That's what TXPL is.

Here's the Eureka moment: I
spent years commuting to Philadelphia for degrees, and at one point Penn's
Wharton had business project management workshops. I went, because I knew
nothing about it as a teacher. I sat in business project management training and
said — teachers are project managers. No one has ever shown us these skills.
You have all of these kids, all of these things they're doing. That's what
project management is: taking chaos and giving it structure. So I mixed that
framework with the research on what's best to educate people. Do we want the
education standards met? Absolutely, and they will be. But we also want kids to
explore, invent, and answer questions they actually have. The real goal is
happy students and teachers walking into a school building every day, excited
to be there.

Adelle:
There were so many people who helped me along the way. If I go back
15 years, there's no way I would have thought I'd be doing what I'm doing
today. My goal to start was to have a really great after-school science club at
Conrad Weiser. Conrad Weiser was such a great place for this to have its
foundation, because there were many supports there to actually take risks and
be innovative — my principal, our administration, the superintendent were all
great with that.

I started with 12 students one
summer, and the research these kids were doing — they were in our classrooms in
the month of July reading 20-page intense published research papers. Teenagers.
In July. Papers adults don't want to read. But they were so passionate about
it. And I thought, if you put opportunity out there, students gravitate toward
it. The question was: how do we make the adults feel like they can handle it?

A funny story anyone in schools
in the early 2000s will relate to. I'm teaching, and this was the era of the
big tube TV mounted in the corner of the classroom. We were prepping for
standardized tests, and at random times during the day a test question would
pop up on the screen, and every class would stop and do that question. Teachers
weren't happy, students weren't happy. It was a real attempt at saying these
standards are important — but relating that to what the students were actually
doing was the missing piece. That's what I wanted to address.

So I started changing how I ran
my classroom, bringing business and industry in a lot. My students got so
accustomed to visitors that they'd ask me on a Monday, Ms. Schade, who's coming
in this week? Is that the CEO of that company? At one point, one of those
visitors said to me, I should have signed an NDA before I saw that student's
work. That was the first time we started to wrap our heads around the idea that
when students are given opportunity, they can create real intellectual
property. Did I have that vision? No. But it was a great byproduct. We're now
up to 15 patents applied for or received by high school students in the last
four years.

Adelle:
There's one young lady — we were on Fox and Friends about a year and
a half ago. She was a Wilson High School grad who started working with us in
fifth grade. She had a grandparent with dementia who couldn't remember to take
medications, and she wanted to make a patch that could deliver those
medications over a month so her grandmother wouldn't need to remember. She did
it. She made a pharmaceutical patch that delivers drugs without needles using
bioactive glass spheres. She submitted three patent applications and received
two. Last summer she won New York State's business competition for the entire
state and got venture funders. She's 18 now, with her own trademarked company
called Patch Life. Of course, we taught her that — protect everything you
create.

We have other students who
figured out how to make a glass product out of chicken manure. The secretary of
agriculture for Pennsylvania came into class and said one of the largest
environmental problems in the state is too much chicken manure sitting in fields,
leaching into the water supply and causing havoc in the Chesapeake. He said,
figure out something to do with this manure that isn't biofuel or fertilizer.
Three sophomore young ladies realized the chemicals in chicken manure are the
same as the chemicals in glass — and the pure chemicals to make glass get
expensive, while chicken manure is about $15 a ton. We went to a glass research
lab, and we did it. That project is still going on under a company now called
Gemelina Glass LLC.

The goal of Total Experience
Learning isn't just to get kids to do that. The important part is that when you
set up great innovative educational environments, you really don't know how
much opportunity you're going to open up, and things will come out of it that
you'd never expect. Who would plan — hey, I'm going to have my class make glass
out of chicken manure today?

Adelle:
Here's a great example. A fourth grade class at Governor Mifflin
School District, with a librarian named Rachel Sebastian, recreated an entire
city. Students broke into teams by interest area and started companies for the
city to operate. They worked with the Greater Reading Chamber and had ribbon
cuttings for the business openings.

Here's the amazing part. I walk
in to see them, and a fourth grader meets me at the door and says, hello, I'm
so-and-so, and I am the head of communications and marketing, and I'm going to
take you to our human resources area. I didn't know what that was when I was
35. None of that language scares these kids — they're being exposed to how
things actually operate, that businesses work in teams, that people specialize.

And they had to build all the
pieces of a company, not just come up with a cookie and sell a cookie. One
group of fourth grade girls studied Caterpillar and their equipment, formed
sustainability engineering teams within their company, and redesigned one of
the pieces because dry dirt was coming up during excavation — they added
moisture coming down on the dirt and a heating unit to pull up the droplets.
That's real engineering. They just won a competition in the county and are
going to Harrisburg to introduce it to the state. Fourth grade, all girls,
saying we're engineers.

Karen:
How many school subjects would you use making that new piece?

Adelle:
Reading, writing, and speaking, yes. Math, yes. The history of that
piece of land and what happened there. They were looking at legislation,
because of the environmental impacts they needed to make sure it was safe. All
of those things.

Adelle:
It's the topic of being able to scale. We're growing outside of
Berks this year, probably much further starting next year, and we're starting
to look into other states. To do that, all the work happens ahead of time. This
past year my leadership team spent significant time working on the business: do
we have the right people in the right seats doing the right things with their
time? If we scale this way, where will our workforce be needed?

When I started and moved Total
Experience Learning out of the school — at the time it was called the Science
Research Institute at Conrad Weiser — I had no idea what would happen, but I
did it. People ask, was that your vision? No. And you didn't know if it would
work. Realistically, it had the potential not to. You're an entrepreneur; it's
risk. But that's also what's so exciting.

It was just me and one
employee, my first hire, Kayla — who was actually a student of mine at Conrad
Weiser, did this her senior year, went to college, interned there, and came
back. She's still with me. Go from the two of us to now 16 full-time employees
and over a hundred part-time employees, and the culture gets much more
difficult.

Karen:
The more you add, how do you keep the integrity of the vision, of
the behaviors? It's hard when it becomes bigger.

Adelle:
When you're a small group, some of that just happens naturally,
especially when you're in the same space. Now we actually need a strategy and
intentional planning behind culture. We've reached the spot where we got
through startup, and now, getting ready to expand, we have to be a real
company.

Adelle:
In the world of higher ed, it's a really competitive industry right
now, because our population of people keeps going down. The number of students
going for that traditional residential four-year degree continues to go down as
well. I believe this year may have been the smallest kindergarten class ever
registered in Pennsylvania since the 60s — that shows you the population trend.
Our population of school-age children keeps going down, which 18 years out
means there aren't as many college students. Couple that with questions about
the value of a degree and the return on investment.

The bigger piece is that having
a student live somewhere for four years and get a traditional undergrad degree
isn't for everybody anymore. It used to be you either did that or you had
nothing, and it doesn't need to be that way now. Most higher eds relied on just
that — that was the business model. So if you don't have that and your whole
industry is based on it, it's time to not be Blockbuster.

Karen:
In business school we looked at Blockbuster as an example of a
company that didn't see what was coming. Now look at how we consume content —
we're on YouTube right now. They could have been part of that, but missed it.

Adelle:
What I really appreciate about Alvernia is how their entire business
model is set up. Years ago they could see these trends coming. You couldn't
wait until this moment, when colleges are closing, to make your changes — you'd
be too late. What they did was create a structure to diversify revenue, so
you're not relying solely on undergrad residential. Business partnerships,
where people can move in and out of education according to what they need to be
successful — that's an attractive new model. For TXPL, we're like a company
running under the umbrella of the university, which means we can make products.
And Alvernia is serious about their mission, so anything in that
diversification has to align with it. That's why TXPL fits so well.

Adelle:
It feels humbling, often. There are times now I go on social media
and there will be people I don't even know, and I'm reading what they're doing
with TXPL. Oh wow, look at what this person did. It humbles you — we need to
continue figuring out how to support what all of these people are doing. And it
drives you, reigniting your own fire. It also really makes you look back at
your team and appreciate what they've done, because they took what started as
an idea in your head and made all those things happen.

All of these people helping
were volunteers, which stands out to me and makes me want to do this for the
next person. I really believe the most precious thing you can give someone else
is your time. If you give someone moments of your life, that is more than any
dollar. And it tells you how important they think education is in this country.

If you'd asked 18-year-old
Adelle what a CEO does in a day, I'd have thought: amazing meetings, doing
whatever they want. What it truly is, is recognizing problems and fixing them
every day — and you never know what the problem's going to be. For me, that's
exciting. You're going for your mission, you're going for your impact, but it
gets messy. It's not this clean, detailed plan about how everything's going to
go. That's not how it works.

Karen:
Thank you for sharing your story, your vision, heart, and
creativity. You're lifting students, educators, and entire communities, and
your journey reminds us that when leaders dare to dream, they create spaces
where others can dream too.

Adelle:
And Karen, thank you for always lifting everyone around you.