Free People

The name of Professor Jal Mehta and Rod Allen’s podcast originated two decades before they would meet, and about a decade before podcasting as a medium even existed. 

In a series of speeches given across much of the English-speaking world throughout the 1990s, John Abbott, founder of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, posed a question: “Do we want our children to grow up as battery hens, or free range chickens?” 

Battery hens are egg-laying chickens that for their whole lives range chickens, however, are adaptable. If the unpredictable happens, they are more likely to survive. More than that, Abbott believed, they are more likely to thrive. 

Abbott’s point — that schools should prepare students to adapt to circumstances we cannot even imagine — heavily informed Allen’s work as British Columbia’s superintendent of learning, as he shepherded through a province-wide overhaul of curriculum, a multi-year process that required a substantive shift in culture and priorities from the Ministry of Education to individual classrooms. 

This free-range concept also dovetailed nicely with Mehta’s research on deeper learning, which describes the skills and knowledge required for students to thrive both individually and as citizens. So, when Allen and Mehta were deciding what to name their podcast, which would delve into similar ideas about learning and education, Allen make a suggestion: Free Range Chickens. 

“Jal wisely said, ‘Well, people might get the wrong idea because … don’t we eventually kill and eat the chickens?’” Allen recalls of the conversation. They went instead with Free Range Humans. 

Meeting of Minds 

Nearly four years later, Allen and Mehta have produced 66 episodes and counting, with plans for many more episodes to come. But that the two educators would host a podcast together — or even meet — was not inevitable. Most of Mehta’s research has focused on American schools, and Allen had spent his entire career in British Columbia. Allen had never even visited Appian Way until a Global Education Innovation Initiative conference in 2017, in which policymakers, educators, and researchers from all over the world gathered at the Ed School to share ideas and lessons learned about 21st-century education. By then, Allen had left the Ministry of Education to serve as a district superintendent, a role he’d held for decades before his government post. 

Mehta remembers being instantly impressed by Allen’s presentation, in which he discussed how his district employed indigenous elders as paraprofessionals, expanding the definition in his community of what it means to be an educator in public schools and made indigenous knowledge an important part of learning and teaching. 

“His presentation was in color, and everybody else’s was in black and white, and I was like, ‘I want to work with that guy,’” Mehta remembers thinking. 

One of Mehta’s students, Amelia Peterson, Ed.M.’12, Ph.D.’20, had anticipated this intellectual match between her professor and Allen while she was researching British Columbia’s curriculum reform. While Allen was in Cambridge, she arranged a one-on-one introduction. The two met in Mehta’s office, and from there, a steady collaborative relationship was born. In 2018, Allen helped bring other Canadian districts to the Deeper Learning Dozen, a community of practice for districts committed to making deeper learning opportunities more accessible for students and educators alike that Mehta co-founded with John Watkins, Ed.D.’97.

But it wasn’t until the midst of the pandemic that Allen posed an invitation to Mehta via a comment in Google Docs. “Curious about a podcast?” he wrote.

Mehta, it turns out, was curious. The pandemic had caused a podcast boom. Creators didn’t have to leave their homes to start podcasts, and listeners were looking for ways to stay engaged with ideas outside of their homes. A podcast also seemed particularly well-suited to two gregarious educators well-practiced at convening wide-ranging conversations. 

“I love to teach in dialogue with people; to me, the best part of teaching is that you never know what people are going to say,” Mehta says. He was mainlining longform podcasts himself, where the hosts were going in-depth on specific topics, unconstrained by the time limits of news radio. “We like to have those kinds of conversations anyway,” Mehta says he remembers thinking. “And so it just seemed like a good meeting point.” 

They also knew what audience they were hoping to reach, Mehta says: “Someone who is dissatisfied in some way with the way that we currently do education and has some optimism or hope about what we might do instead.”

Allen agrees. In his role at the Ministry of Education, he had worked with any group who even touched schools — educators working inside and outside of schools, parents, students, business owners, politicians, and researchers. And he was eager to incorporate their input into the reimagination of how schools in British Columbia could work, essentially to instill a culture of deeper learning. Allen spent a year traveling across the province talking to “everyone and their dog” about how to transform learning. They all wanted students to love learning in the present and be prepared for an ever-changing world in the future, but there was healthy disagreement about the steps needed to realize that goal. Allen was imagining all of these varied stakeholders as he and Mehta began developing their podcast. These potential listeners weren’t unilaterally on board with the ethos of deeper learning, “but they felt that they had a stake in us getting education right,” Allen says. Their podcast wouldn’t just be a vehicle to convert listeners to a specific vision of deeper learning. It would also be a means to listen to people with different ideas, and to collaborate on new ideas, in real time. They had the name, Free Range Humans, and the mission: to explore “how we can make schools fit for human consumption.”

Now, they just had to figure out how to put it all together.

The Ingredients

Podcasting has a reputation for having a low technical barrier of entry: a mic and Wi-Fi, and you can upload most anything to major podcasting platforms. However, making a podcast that people want to listen to — where the guest’s audio is comprehensible and not distractingly noisy; where neither guests nor hosts are too rambley — that takes skill, and not only adept hosts, but a producer. Enter Gino Beniamino, Ed.M.’09. 

Beniamino collaborated with Mehta while working at the Ed School from 2005 to 2014 as an instructional technologist; they were also teammates on the Ed Sox softball team, where Beniamino played shortstop. After leaving the Ed School, Beniamino started his own media production company. Mehta knew Beniamino could help take Free Range Humans from an idea in the margins of a Google Doc to a real podcast that people would return to week after week. Beniamino’s time helping Ed School professors navigate technology prepared him to set up guests for a podcast recording, walking them through technical details that ensure they’ll sound professional quality, while keeping them at ease before the interview begins. Beniamino then also smooths out the conversation after recording, taking care to snip filler words and any tangents. 

“The difference between us having a conversation and having a podcast is Gino,” Mehta says. “It wouldn’t sound like a podcast if it didn’t have Gino’s editing and music and so forth.” 

Together, Allen, Mehta, and Beniamino have decided on their signature format: a conversation with an expert about an education issue, followed by a lightning round. Usually, either Allen or Mehta knows the guest before inviting them on the podcast, while the other one is often introduced to the guest during the recording. The result is a balance of trust that allows for the guest to feel comfortable going deep on challenging topics, and genuine curiosity. 

“We really strive in the podcast to be a conversation, not an interview,” Allen said. The hosts have gotten less scripted as the show has developed. The result is a dynamic dialogue that makes the listener feel like they’re at the table, instead of in the audience of the lecture hall. 

Mehta says that years in the classroom have helped cultivate the ability to make space for that kind of conversation. 

“I think both Rod and I are pretty comfortable looking for the interesting part of what’s coming out,” Mehta says, “and if somebody says something that’s counterintuitive or compelling, building on that or going with that.” 

Educators have to do this all of the time, Mehta says. “When you are teaching in an interactive way, you have a set of points or ideas that you’re hoping will get hit upon during the time that you have, but you also know that when there’s energy around a topic or an idea, you want to let that expand. And if something else has to contract, that’s okay.” 

But the organic sound of the conversations that make for the meat of each episode belies the level of preparation involved. 

“My dad is a theater director, and he would have always said things that appear spontaneous are often the results of a lot of pretty careful planning,” Mehta says. 

Before they get into the virtual recording studio, Mehta and Allen have listened to other interviews with their guest and familiarized themselves with the intricacies of the guest’s work, so they have the context to go deep. While, for the most part, a good conversation makes for a good podcast, there are some accommodations to make a recorded conversation more accessible and enjoyable for an outside listener. In real life, Allen is wary to interrupt — perhaps, Mehta jokes, a byproduct of his Canadian-ness — and he’s learned that longwinded answers, even if impassioned and substantive, don’t always make for easy podcast listening. 

Just as Beniamino helps prepare guests technically before hitting record, Allen and Mehta prepare them for the rhythm of the conversation. Mehta coaches basketball, and says he draws from that well of skills for the podcast, as well. Conventional podcasting wisdom is that hearing the same person talk for more than a minute can make a multitasking listener zone out. So Mehta tells his guests they don’t have to make all their points at once: “Just pass the ball and trust that you’ll get it back.” 

In keeping with Allen’s townhall vision, the nature of their guests’ work is varied. Throughout the course of three seasons, they’ve hosted not only high-level officials and researchers, including many of Mehta’s colleagues at the Ed School, but also high school students and teachers. They’re creative when thinking about the areas of their lives and networks to plumb for the show. They’ve even hosted Mehta’s mother, Louise Mehta, an experienced educator whose career included stints as a teacher, administrator, and associate of the Park School, an independent school in Baltimore, Maryland, whose commitment to progressive education greatly influenced her son. Mehta says that his favorite guests tend to “wear their expertise lightly,” meaning that they’re willing to engage with ideas they might not have encountered before. He knew that his mother had that in spades, and that she was unafraid of challenging him, which would make for a rewarding listen, parent or not. 

The diversity of their two working worlds makes for an interesting mix of voices, Beniamino said. “They’re people that I would have never talked to or interacted with or had a chance to hear from, and they’ve found a way to bring these networks together in a space that’s really productive, I think, for education as a whole.” 

Just as important as their relationship with their guests is the cohosts relationship with each other. 

Ron Berger, Ed.M.’90, chief academic officer for the nonprofit EL Education, is a superfan of the public radio program Car Talk, which won over a dedicated listenership due to the convivial rapport between its hosts, brothers Tom and the late Ray Magliozzi, who were known as Click and Clack. 

Berger has been a repeat guest on Free Range Humans, as well as a co-host in a second-season episode in which he helped Allen interview Mehta. “You guys are to me the new Tom and Ray, which is the highest praise I could offer anybody,” Berger told them during the episode. Just like Click and Clack, Mehta and Allen impart wisdom, but they also crack jokes. Sometimes they impart wisdom by cracking jokes. In many ways, their friendship is as central to the show as their educational expertise. 

Their dynamic isn’t the only way Click and Clack comes through in Free Range Humans. Mehta said in his interview with Berger and Allen that he often uses the Magliozzis as a way to explain the concept of deeper learning. People would call into Car Talk and ask a simple question about their car, like, “Why is it making this weird sound?” The brothers would ask follow-up questions about when the sound happens, at what speed, or in what weather conditions. The result, Mehta told Berger and Allen, was that “you’re witnessing a conversation between someone who has a deep understanding of a system and someone who can only see the symptoms of the system.” 

Similarly, in every episode of Free Range Humans, listeners are exposed to hosts who understand the systems they’re talking about, but who are also endlessly refining their ideas and asking new questions. And as they quickly figure out, deeper learning isn’t just for children, but for learners of all ages — and makes for especially effective podcast hosts. 

Grace Tatter, Ed.M.’18, is a writer based in New York. Her last piece in Ed. was about a documentary focused on teachers trying to make their classrooms more equitable