We recently connected with Chris Anderson and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Chris thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career.

I’ll preface this by saying I began my career as a high school science teacher and have been a school improvement consultant for almost 10 years now; so I have some experience with not only how schools work but what goes on in the classroom. And I think there are three issues at play that keep our kids from consistently having a highly engaging and meaningful educational experience.

The first is that schools have taken on a lot of social services, especially for kids from lower-income families. Schools do a lot more than provide breakfast and lunch; there are clinics in schools that provide a lot of primary care; vision and dental services are often embedded in buildings. Schools usually have at least one social worker and partner with community non-profits to make sure the students or their families have access to other resources, even connecting them with housing if they are experiencing homelessness. All these services are good things and it is critical that kids get them because we know students can’t learn if they don’t have their basic needs met. But it’s also a lot for schools and districts to manage. It takes the focus away from their primary mission which is instruction. We’ve outsourced all these services to schools because that’s where the infrastructure is and it’s a great contact point with the families. I think it would be better if our local governments had more and better capacity to provide these services instead of having them work through the schools so they can focus on teaching kids.

The second issue is teacher capacity. 50 years ago, when our schools were still preparing kids for industrial jobs, the focus was on accurate recall. Could your kids tell you when the Civil War began? Doing things repetitively with accuracy is a key skill for an industrial economy. You even had bells that told you when school began, when you ate lunch, when to go to math class, etc. Just like a factory. But that’s not our economy anymore. Students need to be able to problem-solve, think critically, and communicate. They need to be able to work together in teams. They need to be able to think creatively. However, our teacher training and professional development haven’t reflected this change. A lot of folks in the classroom teach how they were taught: up at the front, sharing information with their kids, asking them if they can remember what they said. We just can’t do that anymore. We live in a world where you can access all of human knowledge from a supercomputer that fits in your pocket. Today’s education needs to be about how you apply knowledge to a unique solution. That’s going to take a huge shift in how we train teachers, how we set up schools, and how we run our classrooms.

And finally, there’s staffing, which is going to be probably the biggest issue in education over the next 10 years. Teaching has never been for the faint of heart, but it’s gotten more difficult. The reality is that teachers can make more money doing something else that doesn’t require working 60+ hours a week or dealing with the stress of managing kids. Teachers haven’t gotten an effective raise in over 40 years and it shows: enrollment in teacher training programs is way down. Some colleges have had to combine programs or eliminate them altogether. And it’s a very difficult proposition to ask taxpayers to pass a levy to increase teacher pay when usually around 80% of voters don’t have kids attending the schools. It’s going to take support from the federal government, but I fear that’s a long way off. However, if we want talented educators to stay in the classroom, we need to compensate them more.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My main project is serving as host and executive producer on OutSCIder Classroom, a web-based video series that teaches students science, social studies, and environmental stewardship through our National Parks. In our bite-sized 5-10-minute episodes, we deliver fun and engaging lessons backed by our featured scientists in some of the country’s most scientifically unique locations. Thus far, we have released around 60 videos as well as over a dozen two-week lesson plans that connect our public lands to what students need to know. All our instructional materials are free to access on our website to teachers (https://www.outscider.org/ and youtube.com/@OutSCIderClassroom).

I think the thing I am most proud of is that we’ve been able to provide educators from across the country with high-quality instructional materials they can use in the classroom for free. Any teacher can look at our YouTube Channel or website for an activity and use it with their students tomorrow. We’ve never wanted to nickel and dime teachers, they are stretched enough as it is, so it’s great that we can share these resources and not have to put up a paywall.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Our goal is to impact as many students as possible. We want to inspire the next generation of scientists engineers and conservationists. The more kids we reach and connect to the parks, the better. This means every video we produce and every activity we share needs to be as useful to teachers as possible. We are not here to go viral or become the next Mr. Beast; we want to get our materials into classrooms because we believe that they’re really effective at getting kids engaged with science.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I am lucky enough to partner with my wife, Mary Ellen. By day, she’s a scientist for Proctor & Gamble but she’s also been our director for all three seasons of OutSCIder Classroom. For 5-6 weeks at a time, we are living on the road together, either in a van or camping, hiking or even backpacking to our film sites every day She runs camera, audio, and sometimes lighting, too. That’s typically the job of 5 people. Any shot of our national parks you see in an OutSCIder Classroom video is because Mary Ellen, not me, captured it. When I say she’s incredible, I mean it.

We’ve been together for about 10 years now. We met in Cincinnati at a prohibition-themed pub crawl I used to run. I was dressed in a tuxedo, leading a bunch of 20-somethings around town, hanging out with a big brass band that played New Orleans jazz covers of pop songs. We joke that it was the absolute best time for someone to meet me.

We count ourselves lucky that we work so well together.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.outscider.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outscider/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisanderson219/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@OutSCIderClassroom