Gwyneth Hagan grew up moving. Air Force family — eight, nine, ten different schools, no one place long enough to put down roots. What she could count on was this: finding some small natural space wherever she landed, some patch of grass or stand of trees, and letting that be enough. Later, she dropped out of college, drove across the country, and spent a year on an organic farm in coastal Maine with no electricity and no running water. It was there — watching a spider cross a field with an egg sack on its back, going somewhere with such care — that she decided to become a teacher.
What came from that decision: a decade at EL Education, where she worked as a school designer, helped build the architecture for professional learning, and watched an organization she loved make the transition every mission-driven organization eventually has to make. From forty people on a shared vision to a system that could be communicated to people who hadn't lived it. From oral tradition to written codification. From wildness to clarity.
*Wild Design for Learning* is her answer to what gets lost in that transition — and what it would look like to get it back. The book, organized around six patterns from the natural world (spirals, waves, fractals, fractures, bubbles, symmetry), publishes in fall 2026. Pre-orders open in June.
In this conversation: what EL was at forty people; what clarity costs; what the forest offers that the factory cannot; why artists have something to teach that educators don't; and what the doubt looks like right now, from the inside, when you've put the most essential part of yourself into a book and are about to let it go.
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NOTES FROM GWYNETH
- Visual Thinking Strategies come from the work of cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen and museum educator Philip Yenawineare
- The full quote about complexity from Charles Mingus (accidentally attributed to Thelonius Monk in the episode): “Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple—awesomely simple—that's creativity.”
- Along the same lines, from Oliver Wendell Holmes: "For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have."
- The Substack article related to complexity and root cause analysis Gwenyth referenced.
- Gwyneth's thinking about planning and presence was informed by adrienne maree brown’s book called Holding Change.
...you can learn more about Gwyneth's extraordinary work on her substack & her website.
The Principal Uncertainty is a podcast by George Laufenberg. It's not about finding solid ground — it's about staying oriented in open water.
