Ron Berger keynote — Mar. 15 2017

twelve years ago was my first year at one of our schools as a teacher I had taught for two years in a comprehensive public high school I taught her a remedial English class I taught an AP English class I taught an English language learner class and I was the yearbook guy and I came to this school when we were opening on one of our schools and to help us get started Ron came and ran I think a one-day PD session where he brought a lot of student work and in that I mean I still really actually remember literally which pieces of student work I was holding I had already seen a fairly famous project from HTH which is on one of the cards that you have it's it's the the the guide to the bay over here is called perspectives a high school humanities class and biology class produced an absolutely beautiful professional field guide to the San Diego Bay my instinct had been that they probably saw a field guide and decided to do that in the PD session with Ron Wood I realized what that was that they were doing a tribute project there was an elementary school that had done a field guide to the local flora and fauna around the school and a middle school had seen that project and done it sort of a tribute to it and done it at the middle school level and then some folks that HTH saw that project and they took it to the high school level and in that same session ron was describing a well water quality project where elementary students were testing well water in their local community and I think sending letters to the homeowners describing what was or was not in the water and that they had followed the standards in the EPA manual and they had done everything as if they were adults their definition of rigor was not like how much they covered but it was to what extent are they doing the work of adult professionals how closes their work to that standard and instantly like literally in under one second whatever the fastest time and the tennis ball challenge was that's how long it took for me it's a plan what became one of my favorite projects ever which was a biology and humanities project where we were testing water from San Diego's beaches rivers and bays and we were acting as a as a nonprofit essentially that tries to find out what's in the water we try to figure out who's responsible for it and we try to accurately tell the story back to either the citizens or other interested nonprofits or local governmental agencies my project really was a tribute project that was inspired by an elementary project and I heard about another project where elementary students were documenting the presence of salamanders in I think was in a forest near their school is that right and they were finding what they found was that basically there was a certain species of salamander that was they were surprised to find was there and they were informed by local adults that that I think was a local adult or was it adults at the EPA in DC the state let them know that they were incorrect that those salamanders were not there and someone from the state went to go see what these elementary school students were doing and they found out that the elementary school school students had accurately documented the presence of a specific species of salamander in a place where no one else had ever known that it lived and as soon as I saw that student work I was like I want to do that so ladies and gentlemen Ron burger Thank You Randy um so I'm Ron Berger I come from New England it's two feet of snow at my house that my wife has been shoveling letting me know that I deserted her but I got out just in time to come see you all so I have a very strangely simple vision of school my vision of school is that students should make things those things should be high quality and then they should be sharing those things and speaking about what they learned in making them and when I say things I'm talking about essays scientific reports mathematical solutions I'm talking about blueprints buildings sculptures all kinds of things things that they're crafting with their hands things that they're using their brains primarily to build things that they're doing by hand craftsmanship and by computer once students are done with school and enter their adult life they are never again judged by test scores for the rest of their life they're judged by the quality of work they do and the quality of person that they are why is it that all we focus on in this country when kids are younger are their test scores when for the rest of their life that's not what matters so my message has been the same simplistic dumb message for 40 years of Education my mission has been can we focus on the work kids do in schools to make it high-quality work and have kids be proud of what they do and share that work some of that work is going to be project work but it doesn't have to even be project work when kids write a poem or an essay or do a mathematical solution that's brilliant that's beautiful that's well done they should be proud of it they should be sharing it beyond their classroom and they should be able to talk about what they learned doing it whatever your discipline is whatever your role is on your school my obsession is not around projects just to say it's around quality it's like can we focus on qua and I'm not talking about quality test scores I was talking about quality work in whatever domain you work in so what I want to do is share with you thoughts today about students doing high quality work I'm going to back up a little bit and sort of tell you sort of where I come from so right now I write books and I speak and I help to run an organization that works or cross the country trying to help public schools we have the organization is called Al education we used to be called expeditionary learning we work with about a hundred and fifty partner schools around the country and we produce free resources for teachers everywhere we're a nonprofit that's just trying to spread the word we're trying to change the conversation about schools so that it's not just about test scores anymore we are trying mostly to change the definition of what student achievement means in this country right now and people say that we use the word student achievement you know what they mean they mean test scores like that's all they mean student achievement means test scores if a newspaper in your town or city has an article about a high achieving school you know what that means high test scores that's all it means we're saying that student achievement actually has three dimensions and so our three dimensional view of student achievement first is sort of mastery of academic content and skills which doesn't mean test scores it means knowing your math knowing your science knowing your history being a good writer but that's only a third of our vision the second part is character what kind of human beings are we creating in our schools our schools were made founded in this country public education was founded in this country to make citizens that would be the people we want to live with that would we would want to have running our country the character of those people matters and lastly high quality work we want craftspeople in our schools we want kids who take pride in what they do the kind of kids that you'd want to hire if you are an adult business person so when we ask our schools to be credentialed by our organization those schools have to bring a portfolio to show their success in all of those areas they have to show that kids are becoming good human beings and that they have high quality work in addition to just doing well on academic assessments and we are pushing every state and we're pushing federally wherever we can to change that conversation high achieving does not mean test scores it means all of these things let me tell you why that matters personally to me I live in the middle of nowhere okay I live in a town that has no streetlights most of the roads are dirt my town has no stores I built my own house in the woods and for 25 years I was the only sixth-grade teacher in this town which means every kid born in that town had me as a teacher which means in my town anyone under the age of 50 is my former student okay so that means that my nurse is my former student my plumber is my former student my electrician is my former student the guy who plows my driveway this morning is my former student the volunteer fire department are my former students the half-time police person in my town is my former student it really matters to me that these are good people who have integrity whom I trust I don't care what their test score was in third grade what I care about is that nurse is the kind of nurse that's going to protect my life that our firefighters in our town are the kind of men and women who are going to save me when I need them to so I'm living that reality where my former students are the people I depend on for my life that's what America is about that's what public schools are about and even though your students may be in your towns are not that small so they spread a little more it's still the students that are being educated now around where you live are the people you're going to be depending on so we need to be thinking about those three dimensions let me show you my town so my town is a typical New England town I live in Western Massachusetts it's got a hill on top of the hill there's a church and a town common in front of it in addition to the old white church there is the post office the post office is also Mary Dillman's home you have to go into her home to get your mail I taught Mary Dillman's kids I taught Mary dolmens grandkids everyone in town knows everybody's business right because all the mail comes right in there's the town hall which used to be a two-room schoolhouse until I got there in the early 70s and the school was built and the only business in our town is the shoot spray Athletic Club there are no elliptical trainers no treadmills in this building this is a bar if you want to know why it's called the Athletic Club they watch a lot of sports in this bar half the year it's surrounded by pickup trucks the other half of the year it's surrounded by snowmobiles like right now when we had two feet of snow last night so let me build on Randy's story it's a cool thing for me to have taught for 25 years in a public school in a town that has no government what do I mean by no government we have no mayor in town when we make decisions in town we have town meeting where everyone in town shows up in the one space that's big enough which is the school gym and they argue all day long about everything and they have to come to a conclusion themselves in a pure democracy so having a town that has no government means we don't have any people hired to do the work that other people in cities and towns do so when the state of Massachusetts said every town in the state we would like you do to an amphibian survey what amphibians live in your town so if you were in Sacramento you would hire a naturalist a herpetologist to go around and do sampling we don't have any money for that we had no money for anything in fact this is just to be clear my starting salary was seven thousand two hundred dollars for a full-time teaching job in 1976 $7,000 I worked as a carpenter for 25 years at the same time as I worked as a teacher just so I can raise a family in this small town so we had no money in this town and yet we decided we had to do with this because the we wanted to protect amphibians in the state so third and fourth grade kids became experts in amphibians and during school after school and on weekends they went into every swamp every wetland every stream every lake every part of woods in town and collected amphibian specimens larval and adult amphibians and those kids learned how to identify every possible amphibian in its larval state and it's an adult state in town they photograph them they weighed them they measured them and when they submitted their report to the state of Massachusetts of all the amphibians that lived in town they got a letter back from the state that said deer third and fourth grade herpetologists thank you for your report you submitted more data than any town in the state of Massachusetts now it wasn't a fair fight right like we had almost forty third and fourth grade kids doing this and everyone else had one person going around doing Sam and these kids did it all every day after school weekends like they were obsessed with collecting amphibians so that was but the state letter also said as Randy mentioned but we actually risk we have to point out that you made two errors because two of the species that you listed in your town don't live in your town and the kids were incensed absolutely incensed so the first thing we had to teach the kids is to how to write a respectful rebuttal letter so they wrote back to the state and they said dear state of Massachusetts environmental protection organization we just want to let you know we appreciate your acknowledgment of our report and we respectfully disagree with your critique of our findings we believe we have correctly identified these species here's our data here are our photographs here's our measurements and we would like to meet with you in person and the state actually did send out a state herpetologist who got lost trying to find our small town eventually made it there the kids brought him through the woods to a bog and of course as Randy mentioned the kids were right they had correctly identified these species and they said Mr burger we're not just practicing to be scientist week our scientists now and it was really clear to those kids as third and fourth graders that they were doing the adult level working now and there's no reason why they couldn't there's no reason why they had to have a lower standard for the quality of what they did then what any adult did and since I'm so old I can tell you that some of those kids are scientists now remarkably they created a field guide to the amphibians of our town this is the cover of that field guide done by a third grader because they figured nobody knows what's in our town except us we need a field guide for the amphibians of our town and as Randy mentioned I took that field guide to Portland Maine where middle school kids then made a field guide to Casco Bay in Portland Maine the students that made that field guide in Portland Maine were from all over the world because it's a refugee settlement City and this particular middle school had all the refugees a third of the kids in that school are born in other countries they speak 31 languages in that school every kid whether they were born from in Somalia or Sudan or whether they were born in Portland did a page in this field guide with some sea creature that they found and wrote about now imagine being a seventh grader in this town and going into the National Park Service gift shop or going into a local tourist shop and saying to your parents or your foster parents this is our book this is the book I wrote with my classmates this is my page I did this research I did that illustration this is me let me tell you I was in public school for thirteen years from kindergarten through twelfth grade there's nothing I did in thirteen years of school that I still have and that I'd want to show you today and yet these seventh graders some of whom were in Somalia two years ago already had something that people were buying in the National Park Service because it was so good that's quality and I will tell you that we didn't allow those kids to make those drawings by looking online and copying a jellyfish those kids had to actually put on wetsuits which we borrowed and use underwater cameras which we borrowed and actually photograph these things under the water and let me tell you Maine water is really tough so these kids became scientists in order to do that high-quality work and it changed who they were as people because already has seventh graders they had done something beautiful something important and as Randy mentioned I brought that field guide around I brought it to the lowest performing middle school in Massachusetts in Springfield Massachusetts they said we need to make a field guide to what was called the dump behind their school which was a bog they cleaned it out built interpretive signs and made a field guide to what's in the bog now within three years that went from the lowest performing middle school in the state of Massachusetts to district average not because of this project because we did all kinds of literacy work with them but this project was the thing that changed those students pride in who they were they were the kids in the worst school in the state and then they were the kids who were in the paper for having produced this beautiful field guide their whole self-image changed because they had done some work of quality and they were willing to dig into working on their literacy and then when Larry was here founding high tech high he asked me to come out and I brought as Randy said my big suitcase full of field guides and scientific papers and essays and projects that kids had done and people here said well if middle school kids could do that what could high school kids do and JE Vavra created the first of many field guides seven field guides I think that have been created here for the ecology and the Natural History and social history of San Diego Bay and if you haven't seen this there's no way you would think it was not done by adults it's a fully highly professional adult product sells for like $25 forward by Jane Goodall made by students here this idea that kids can do quality work and could start doing it now is really powerful but let me jump back to my town for a moment of all the of all the amphibians that kids studied in my town the one that they were most attached to emotionally was this creature the spotted salamander they are an endangered species and they were particularly in danger to because they breed in vernal ponds in the spring they have to migrate down to those vernal ponds to lay their eggs and they get run over by pickup trucks so we had this protocol which we built which was on rainy spring nights when they would migrate we would dig traffic cones and flashlights and the kids and the parents and I would stand out and we stopped traffic and we would carry the salamanders across the road and then let the traffic through so it was a good service project and it was a good sense of kids making a difference in the world but it was really hard to teach the next day when you stayed up all night in the rain carrying salamanders so the kids became a part of an engineering project the world's first salamander tunnels so these salamander tunnels go under the road and the kids helped build drift fences here too salamanders coming out of the tunnel now the kids built drift fences in the woods like big v's that are like cattle fences but they're only 3 inches tall and the salamanders get funneled down and they go under the high under the dirt road in these tunnels this this the salamander tunnels they are the only ones still in the world for salamanders they the kids got the idea from Toad tunnels in England for toad migration and there it there one mile from my house so I'm near this national landmark just to say that this is right where I live there is now a bluegrass band in Western Massachusetts called salamander crossing that are actually quite good we also as Randy mentioned we thought if we don't have anyone in town to do this stuff we're supposed to do when I have kids do it so over the courses of my 25 years there students tested every town every home in town for radon gas and created this report about radon distribution in town radon levels in town and we actually found 14 homes with dangerous levels of radon and work with those families and the state to get raid on remediation done to make their houses safe for their kids they tested the streams in town to make sure that the the streams were safe for fish and we worked with national water I mean state water services to make sure that there was no pollution in our streams and so wildlife would be ok we also tested everyone's well water in town everyone in town including me has a private well and people didn't know if their water was safe we partnered with a college where students used they surveyed everybody in town people talked about where their well was they went they spent three weeks at college working with college students using an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer that one machine cost more than anyone's house in my town and the kids got to use that machine and they knew it cost more than their house and they worked with college students and they came back with this incredible lesson which was even though their parents didn't go to college college was actually easier than they thought and that they could all go to college in fact they said college is easier than an elementary school and I said tell me more and they said mr. Berger I don't want to sell out my college friends that are my mentors but like first of all they sleep till noon lots of days they don't even have classes on Fridays like they they have days where they only have like an hour of a class like they our life is way harder so they were all convinced that they could go to college even if their parents had not and they produced these this is my letter because I live in town the student who wrote my letter who used the mass spectrometer for my data source said mr. Berger do you want the bad news now or do you want to wait for your letter and I said tell me now and she took me out in the hallway and we now have a water filtration system in my home thanks to my students and then they created a website to share their data with the world this is again like just students doing quality work fifteen years ago I left that job I didn't leave my town I still live in the house I built there my wife is still a nurse in town but I was part of the founding of this organization L education expeditionary learning and since that time I've worked mostly in urban and rural settings around the country with public high schools and public middle schools and public elementary schools oh I forgot I because I worked as a carpenter for 25 years just to make a living every one of my students had to learn carpentry and we built so many outbuildings at my school whenever a recycling shed was needed whenever any kind of thing was needed in this case this was a playhouse for the kindergarteners that my students designed and built and after school they just worked and worked to build this stuff because like they wanted to build great things whether it was a piece of writing they were doing or something they were building with their hands it was about are you doing good work are you creating something of value my life is different now because I work with often with urban districts so let me just tell you the story of one urban district the nearest city to me is Springfield Massachusetts you might know Springfield because the Basketball Hall of Fame is in Springfield and Springfield was a thriving industrial city 50 years ago all of that industry has left as you could imagine it's part of that sort of northeastern and Rust Belt time where those jobs have all moved overseas or been eliminated by automation so now it's a city with high unemployment high poverty and a very challenging school system so Springfield has six high schools in five of those high schools only 62% of kids make it to graduation in aggregate that means 38% of them drop out right now in Springfield Massachusetts today on a Wednesday morning not sure it's morning there anymore there are hundreds and hundreds thousands perhaps of high school kids that are unemployed unemployment rate is over 50% for high school teenagers their dropouts what are they doing they have no jobs like what is their life for them there is one high school in Springfield bless you that Springfield Renaissance school that we helped to start in my organization it's a regular district high school it's not a charter school it's not a special school it's not a apply to get into it school it's a regular public high school it's got 700 students there the same low income kids mostly kids of color as all the other schools this school has a different approach kids do quality work in those schools they are obsessed with doing high quality work the water testing project that my students did in my little town these students did with a local pond they did high quality work that they shared regularly with their parents that school has had a hundred percent of its graduates get into college for the last 11 consecutive years we say it again 100 percent of students from this school have gotten into college it's the same kids as the other five high schools in the city with an entirely different life outcome for those kids now I'm going to be clear with you to say that not every one of those graduates goes to college college is not actually the best choice for every kid but every kid has that choice now every one of those kids can choose does she or he want to go to college now or do they want to go into military service do they want to go into a trade do they want to work for their parents business it wasn't society that said you are a kid that can't go to college they made that decision every year I go down to Renaissance the stay they call declaration day every one of those seniors gets up in front of the entire group and everyone the entire school 700 kids and says my name is Jamal here are this colleges I got into this is what I'm choosing to do with my life I'm gonna attend this college or I'm going to attend this Technical Program or I've decided to join military service this is my decision and everybody cheers and their parents cry and the next kid gets up and when you're a younger student a freshman in this school you watch that happen every year and you think that's gonna be me I'm gonna get into college and I'm gonna make my choice of what to do with my life Society is not making that choice for me so I want to show you a short video of that school this video is not a professional video it was made by one of my students at Harvard I teach in the graduate school at Harvard now and I have my students create films about projects this student was interested in a water quality project done by freshman at this high school and he said I want to create a video of it and I said you know that project is so old those kids are already out of college by now you're not going to be able to find them and he said I'll find them I'll make this video so what you'll see is the story of that project and you'll see the kids that are being interviewed now eight years are nine years after they actually did the project [Music] I'm just proud that I actually was part of the school just knowing like all the changes that Renaissance have made in Springfield we finally have a school in town that change everything in the city [Music] for these students this first year at Renaissance was her first time really being asked to do work of high quality for an outside audience I just was brought to our attention we were like what are they expected to do this big pond like we're fifteen-year-old students we felt a lot of pressure they're depending on us to decide if this pond was suitable or not it's kind of like empowering I guess like oh they're you know they're depending on this brand-new school you know it's the first year they're depending on us to give them the information that they're looking for each group had a specific section of the pond that we tested different coops have different areas of the pond that we were figuring out whether or not the pump was safe to swim and that was sort of the ultimate type of responsibility you can give to students told this is important we're doing this for the community you got a responsible and we're gonna present it and some important people were going to come to this assembly and we were to present it as if it was over your study and it was a real study I actually live five minutes away from the pond so I was actually excited to know well we're gonna be the results just because as a kid I used to walk around by the area with my mom and always wander how come that pond was always closed it was both the scientific content because they had to take the state exam at the end of the year but also as a way to really engage them in the community and to be able to do scientific field work I felt that that was an important skill that I wanted my students to have it wasn't just a cool project it was a cool project based deeply in the standards we read primary sources we read secondary sources we read scientific text we read the Massachusetts water quality standards and made sense of them I'm gonna read something I'm gonna understand it I'm gonna use that with my fieldwork and my field experiences and I'm gonna make sense out of that and and apply it through my writing and show what I know through what I write and that to me is deeply embedded in the Common Core State Standards and deeply embedded and what it means to be college and career-ready it got us ready for the real world because me personally I knew that in college that line was very important and part of having a career is knowing that someone is gonna hold you responsible I think that students who were the most ready for college and for careers of students who have a variety of skills that they've learned in high school my pond was an example of a project that gave us different skills whether it's testing water or whether it's writing up the lab reports editing elin of course it gave assumes different skills that they may not have normally gotten at the end of the day like I was proud I was proud of myself I was proud of our class as a whole like I mean it came out really great we presented it to the mayor Springfield and everyone was so impressed with us during my undergrad I had to conduct my own study and I had to go out there get approval and then I had to start I had to collect data do a chart just like we did for this project and then the final goal was to have a final paper and present it to the whole school it was very similar our test results in that first year for the science M Cass they were significantly higher than the rest of the city so whereas people thought like oh you know that crazy school well all of a sudden that crazy school was getting good results I ultimately want my students to believe in themselves and believe in themselves and in a myriad of ways and one of those ways is to believe that that that they're capable of whatever it is they'd like to do I should be in Hawley Twitter of the amount come on class of 2010 let's do something [Music] [Music] okay I'm gonna pivot here to say so far I've been talking about big projects and many of you are disciplinary teachers where you think I don't really have the power and scope to do a big project like that right now and I want to make clear that my message today is not about big projects it's about high quality work if you're an English teacher if you're a woodshop teacher I'm not talking about you have to do something grand right now I'm talking about can you carve out the space for your students to do work that they are incredibly proud of and that they will then share beyond their classroom and that can be small things I'm going to say that one structure that I would say everyone should consider in their schools is do you have a structure for kids to share their learning the things they're most proud of beyond their teacher many of you do have that that could be a student led conference it could be a presentation of learning structure it could be an exhibition structure the Springfield Renaissance school that's gotten every student into college every year those students lead their own student-led conferences multiple times per year as ninth graders as 10th graders as 11th graders and as 12th graders they publicly defend their work and after 10th grade and after high school after 12th grade they have to publicly present to their community their family is there and the community is there and educational experts are there and they have to defend I am ready for 11th grade or I am ready for college let me just show you like 20 seconds of what that looks like with a student who's now in the business school at the University of Massachusetts but was a tenth grader here hello everyone I would like to thank you all for coming to my passage this whole entire presentation is to prove to everyone that is here that I am ready for eleventh grade in many schools with student engaged assessment practices students reflect upon and communicate the scope of their learning and growth at the end of pivotal transition grades through passage presentations students present before members of their community teachers prepare students for success by providing organizers and rubrics and dedicating school time for preparing students share portfolios of work as evidence and the presentations reflect both academic and personal growth it's kind of like you could say trash on puerto ricans my motive is like proving the world wrong I can be Puerto Rican I can be a young woman and still go off to college and be a business manager or anything like that and do what I want to do cuz I work for it though passage presentations share these universal qualities passages take on unique characteristics in every school so I'm gonna stop there just to show you that story of Leonor who's now a sophomore at University of Massachusetts School of Business the Isenberg School of Management who as a tenth grader already thought I can run my own business he or she is already on her way there the things that she shared in that presentation and I was there for that presentation we filmed the entire thing and we couldn't end up showing the entire thing because she started crying so much and the audience started crying so much during her presentation that the video ended up being unusable to personal and too tough so we only have the opening for it in this video but the things she shared in there were just the work from her classes as well as big projects so if you're here and you're a history teacher you're an English teacher you're a teacher of ceramics or wood shop or metal shop or auto repair those are the kinds of things she shared in her in her presentation this is the work I'm proud of this is a work that shows you Who I am this is high-quality work it doesn't have to be grand projects a similar structure is having the parent conferences run by students themselves and let me make clear that this is how parent conferences were in my youth when I was a kid parent conferences happened only in elementary school never beyond elementary school and what a parents conference was meant on one day during the year my mother would go to school while I was home never my father my mother while my father was at work and my mother talked to my teacher I have no idea what they talked about and the only possible outcomes was either I was in trouble or I wasn't and when she came home I learned if I was in trouble or not in contrast in our schools parent conferences are K to 12 and they're run by the students themselves so let me show you a moment of gabriella presenting her work to her father this is a school in Washington Heights New York it's a hundred percent low-income a hundred percent of the families speak Spanish at home this is also a school that's gotten a hundred percent of its graduates into college since the school opened even though not every kid has chosen to go there I should say proudly that one of those students estiven rodriguez was a guest of the Obamas at the his final State of the Union address and was called out in the audience as an example of how an immigrant to America can reach the American dream I should tell you that his mother did not go on that trip to the White House because she was undocumented and she took his brother instead so here's Gabriela as a seventh grader and I'll show you oh this is a twenty-minute parent conference but I'll show you just about a minute or two of it but you can get the sense of her pride in her work you oh this program doesn't bother me my pleasure Foley this is gonna under tell you about how I just have my student that conference it was my dad we were talking about how good I'm doing all my lt's I'm working on my progress and everything I'm doing good in my classes really probably oh I'm really proud of explaining what context those are because it's really simple it is very important to have this conferences especially to learn and to see where our students then as far as I can make a speech right and it also helps us get involved in the education of our kids um this is my contact is quiz see these are learning targets I can define vocabulary words and I'm Gabrielle science teacher I'm also her crew leader I really appreciate student-led conferences because it increases participation greatly our school has a hundred percent participation student-led conferences which is great for every single student to be able to have a conversation with their parents or that family member and their teacher about their progress and employment so select it with a little words to marry me am i right see I've done really good I really missed one question for the finding contact us but either way I look at it I'm a seventh grader and I've done this student-led conferences like about three times so I wasn't nervous but when I wasn't when I was a sixth grader it was pretty nerve-wracking because it's just me talking to my dad while the teacher looks at me so you get a sense of Gabrielle's pride and just sharing the work that she did formerly I wanted to give you an update on on Gabrielle with which is that gabriella is a senior at Washington Heights expeditionary learning school she just sent me a project that she did as a senior I want to just show it to you it's a two-minute video I'm supposed to be motivational but not even I'm motivated to execute this Beach in all truth I'm doing this for you guys for an English grade but since I'm here dedicating about a week to making a 2 minute video I might as well do my best on it now let me tell you a story well now as a freshman yeah one of you I had to do a presentation for a charity I felt deserved a cheque for a lot of money I worked with one of my best friends and a basketball jock which was intriguing considering that I wasn't into sports and he was pretty good with hoops he was actually pretty cool even when we were kind of different anyhow from my presentation aren't English teacher wants to do something out of the box and I reluctantly decided to sing for our presentation because I want to win for us and as much as I didn't want to I kept my word and I sang in front of the entire grade with nice clothing and full on stage right it was everything I imagined it to be awful and vomit trigger but I did it and then we lost everything happens for a reason heard that cool before well it's true and sometimes those things aren't how you wanted things to turn out but it did and it'll bother you and attempt to break you down like homework on your shoulders trying to fight you to the ground or your parents being annoying because they took away your phone for being disobedient but I promise you that everything that happens happens for a reason and that should only make you stronger at this point the grade doesn't matter to me what matters to me is that you guys take something from the speech anything as long as it brings out your best and reflects that onto your grades you are all fantastic and I want you all together when you walk and get that diploma I know it feels far away and I know that means nothing considering I'm already here but I believe in you and you should too okay that was her motivational speech for freshman that she created this year that that piece of work is only a few weeks old but I just got it so I just wanted to share it with you because knowing Gabriella from seventh grade on it's really neat for me to see her as a senior this year um let me pause now I've been sharing a lot of crazy stuff and I'm inviting some pushback now what's what's resonating but equally what just seems nuts to you like there's no way we could do those kinds of things in our school because of this or that sounds really interesting but it doesn't really relate to our challenges our needs is it or maybe you do have a connection of this connects for me we're already doing that and this really is working for us is there anyone I will have some time at the end for questions too but I also wanted to just stop for a moment and say anyone want to push back and please great question so if you didn't hear that the question was the Springfield school why is it not all the schools in Springfield doing this I can tell you that Springfield school gets visitors from all over the world at the end of April there'll be a two-day visitation for the school from people from all over America will come visit you are welcome to visit I will be there for two days and people from all over the country come to admire their success within the city people hate the school I'm just gonna be honest with you it makes them look bad people don't like the school and they have a lot of excuses about why it's not fair and since that school opened the city has been through five superintendents I went to one of those superintendents and talked about our willingness to work with more schools and he said yes I know that that's a great school but we have six great schools in our city and I thought I understand why as a superintendent you'd have to say that in the public but it's just you and me like you don't have six great schools you have one great school and five terrible ones I didn't say that but he said I can't favor one school I can't celebrate one school at the expense of my other schools in this district so it was very challenging there's still only one expeditionary learning high school in that city but there is a movement now the new superintendent is asking us to work with more schools so we're working with in a smaller way with four or five other schools in the city to support them and my hope is that if this superintendent can last which as you know average tenure of a superintendent in this country is about three years it's hard to keep the momentum but I'm hoping we can do it but it's harder than one might think I do want to acknowledge that the incredible beauty you see on this campus of all of these high tech high schools is because of the genius of Larry Rosenstock and Ben Daley and Rob Reardon and Laura and Randy and all the founders and leaders here they've kind of built a wall of protection around this that allows them to do great work and experiment and we don't all have quite that protection where we are so it's going to seem what you'll walk around here and see the students and see the work and think oh my god this is just impossibly good and it's great because of the brilliance of this faculty and these leaders here keeping people out a little bit allowing them some space to be creative and allowing students here to follow their passions teachers to follow their passions and do great things I have not had that privilege in the schools I work with and so Springfield is a perfect example we were able to do it in one school we've struggled to even connect with another school so I wish we had the high tech high cluster in Springfield like is here I mean I come here because it refreshes me to see a place where learning is the way it could be if we could just protect it great great so if you didn't hear the question it was how can you possibly do student-led conferences or presentations of learning when you have 40 kids in a class and 500 to 2,000 kids in your school it just seems logistically incredibly hard it is logistically really hard I don't want to minimize that because I work with large comprehensive high schools and and in public districts where we are trying to institute these things and it is very tough we actually have to fight to carve out the time for these things but it's not impossible it's just really tough let me give an example of a success story in that so large middle school 8th grade wanted to Institute between 8th and 9th grade a presentation of learning structure this is Cooperstown New York which is a rural community it's where the Baseball Hall of Fame is if you've ever been to the Baseball Hall of Fame you know half the income of that town comes from the Baseball Hall of Fame being there and all the Little League fields they've built around it where they have tournaments and the other half is just a farming community so it's one of those places that has a elementary school a middle school and a high school all on one campus that's the entire school district so between middle and high school they wanted to set up a system of portfolio presentations like you see a passage presentation between middle school and high school but logistically they thought we have too many kids we have too much to do so we we work together with them to think how can we downsize the size of the panels how can we fit it all into one day how can we build one release day and we eventually built a structure which was all done on one release day each student prepared all year for his or her presentation and their panel had one teacher could be a high school or a middle school teacher one community member and high school senior and what was really interesting to us was that the eighth graders were more nervous about how the high school senior viewed their work than the adults it's like the real pressure for them was that a high school senior was going to be listening to them because that's the high status when you're an eighth grader and all of those presentations happened in one day all over the school and the seventh graders were the the docents they were the hosts the welcomers they had the refreshments people came in and we just shut down the school and did presentations all over the building for one day long and it was an incredible celebration of student work throughout the town it was like but it was logistically very hard to plan so I don't want to minimize how hard the logistics are to do these things but they're not impossible all right I want to do one thing together with you which is I want to be totally keep my integrity with it's not about the scope of the project it's about the quality so I want to take a particular project that's not anything new anything crazy anything you couldn't do in your school nothing that's connected to high tech high nothing that's connected to a makerspace this is just a piece of high quality work so I have spent the last 40 years collecting high quality work and I built with my colleagues at Yale and Harvard a website called models of excellence with hundreds and hundreds of high quality pieces of student work in it you can see we have resources about how to use quality work we have projects we have writing we have videos and stuff from all over the world in fact your schools could submit work anytime you want for this site it's a highly curated site only the best things are accepted like a poetry journal but we would love to have work from your school if you go to the project page you'll find like 500 different projects from around the world from all different grade levels 10th graders next to second graders next to 12th graders I hope that these models will be useful to you we also have a writing section which is not interdisciplinary projects it's just really good quality writing everything on this site is free and downloadable I want to look together with you at one piece of student writing that we got just last year in the spring that changed my view of what a very traditional genre is a high school history research paper so here's the paper actually it's an eighth grade this one here's the paper if I click on it here it brings me to the page in your booklet you can find this piece it's called revolutionary rum so if you open your notebook to the page I don't not sure where it is in there but this page that says revolutionary rum oh it's in the folder I'm sorry in the pocket folder on the left hand side behind that yellow schedule there is a high school history paper called revolutionary rum I would like to ask you to take three minutes to look at this paper but I'm gonna ask you to do something a little weird here I'm gonna ask you to start with the bibliography so first just read for a few minutes the bibliography and then I'm going to ask you to read the first page of the paper so go back to the bibliography spend a minute or two just reading what's there and take time to read some of her annotations okay now I'm gonna ask you to go and just read page 1 of her paper which opens with Paul Revere's ride okay now I'm going to ask you to turn to somebody at your table where do you notice quality in this piece either quality research or quality writing okay I'm going to pull us back together for a moment so let me get a few volunteers willing to offer an insight where do you see quality either in the research or in the writing here anyone want us great be more specific I don't even know some of these facts that the student has presented great he's from Massachusetts he didn't even know some of these facts let me tell you how much this paper blew me away so this was sent to me by an eighth grade eighth grade girl Kaylin she's now in ninth grade freshman from a low income public district middle school in Durango Colorado she's now a high school freshman and I'm still in touch with her via email she said I'm so honored you thought my paper was good and I said kaylynn nothing I wrote in high school or college or graduate school is of this level and it's not just that there are facts here that I didn't know I thought never in my life did I write a paper with an original historical thesis like this is not someone else's thesis this is her thesis that rum was the cause of the Revolutionary War and I thought here's an 8th grader who's taking a bold step of saying I have a different view of what caused the revolution war than everything you've read and in my paper I'm gonna convince you and when I finish this paper I thought I think she's right like an 8th grade girl changed my entire view of the seminal moment of American history and she opens with Paul Revere's ride and mentions that he stopped to drink rum on his right and you know she didn't make that up right like holy mackerel for an eighth grade girl it totally changed my view of what a research paper could be anyone else anything else you noticed in the research or the writing please it uses a variety of sentence structure that her seniors probably wouldn't do I certainly didn't do it as a senior or college student it reads like an article in a magazine that you want to read I've been using this paper in high school classes even AP History classes around the country since I got it last spring and the students say I've never been interested in a history paper before like I'm not even interested in the history papers I write and this one I I want to like I want to finish this one like this one really is interesting she creates powerful language that draws you in even though it's good history it's also compelling to read the bibliography totally floored me this is what I thought for thirteen years and then four years of college and graduate school I wrote bibliographies that meant nothing to anybody they meant nothing to me they meant nothing to my teacher nobody looked at them carefully when I was in high school they would look through to see how many sources I listed and no matter how many sources I listed everything came from the World Book Encyclopedia anyway right I just had to list other sources today you could say the same for Wikipedia and then the other sources when I read this and then as a teacher I assign bibliographies for 28 years and all I did was look to see did they have a bunch of sources there they were entirely a waste of time for the student and entirely waste of time for me I got this paper in the mail from Kalin wait last spring I read her bibliography and I thought why did it take me 40 years to figure out what a good bibliography could be this people the ography actually shows you what she learned from each piece and you know she read each piece she even lists things and say I didn't actually use this in my paper but it gave me the idea for this or in this piece I got inspired to do this or in this piece I got the idea for that and I thought I'm understanding her as a thinker and a researcher from reading her bibliography I thought this is the way every bibliography should be always and yet I've been in education for years and I've never seen one quite like it now I have to say this wasn't Kaitlyn's idea Kalin's idea to do that but she does it beautifully and it changes the paradigm for me of what a history paper can be so I would recommend that you read the whole paper I think it's a terrific paper my wife who's a nurse she's not an educator has no interest in any of this stuff I do but she really got interested in this paper and she now agrees that rum was the cause of the Revolutionary War my point here is that you're gonna be here in classrooms this afternoon you're gonna look around at projects done by these high tech high students and be blown away there's incredible work here I'm blown away by the students here and the teachers here every time I'm here and it is intimidating but it's not about giant crazy projects it's about quality you'll see quality here we can create quality in our schools even if that quality is just a paper that kids do even if it's the Playhouse that they built for the kindergartners it's about the quality of what kids do not the scope of that work that matters most to us and in order to create engines for that quality having students present their work like Gabrielle did to her dad in that as a seventh grader builds that sense that someone cares that my work is high quality someone is going to look at that work and so whatever your discipline is I'm going to tell you this you have to figure out how to get off the treadmill of coverage to carve out some time to do some things really well everything in society is pushing us to rush and cover a million things way more than we can possibly do and you feel like how could I ever do up anything that well because I always have to cover too much well you have to and pardon me if you're an administrator in this room but you have to like don't even tell your administrator but get off syllabus take a break and do something really well and your administrate your school IDO be so proud when parents are excited and kids are excited that they had the time to do one thing well here's my story about coverage true story of my life my father worked for this in the same chemical plant for 47 years his entire life he worked in the same chemical plant hardly anyone today has a job that they'll have for their whole life almost no young people will do that but back then you stayed in your same job because you got a pension and once you were done you could retire and you were fine so my father worked in a chemical plant for his entire life he retired at age 68 and his plan was he and my mother were gonna travel around the world with his pension he died at age 69 so he didn't have a long retirement life but during that one year when he was retired he and my mother had the best year of their entire life and they actually did travel around the world in different places so they called me up and they said we just got back from Europe you have to come see our pictures now this is before the internet it's before digital photography yeah they meant pictures right like the kind that you get back from the drugstore and they said you have to see our pictures of Europe so I said okay I got in my pickup truck I drove to their house their entire dining room table was covered with photographs and I started looking at them and I noticed that almost every photograph was from a train window it was like framed by a train window and they were all kind of blurry there were castles churches town scenes all like blurry in the train window and then I learned that my parents did a package deal 14 countries in 12 days and so they started sharing you the pictures and they said this is Italy and my father said no I think that was Switzerland my brother was like no no it was Germany I think and that was the way with every picture like they could not tell what country they were in when that picture was taken I they had a wonderful time but if you had given them an assessment about Europe after her they wouldn't have done so well right cuz and I had this revelation at that moment like that was my entire public school education was on that train whizzing by quadratic formulas Civil War colonial era it's like it was just like we were always on that train of covering covering covering and I thought what if my parents had been on that European tour and they had seen five countries instead of 14 and what if they had stopped in Italy for three days and gotten off in Florence and seen the effete Sea gallery and had an Italian meal and met some Italian folks they want to come back and said oh my god Italy's the coolest place in the world the food was so great that people were so great we can't wait to go back to Italy we learned about our own culture from learning about its Hallion culture like even in three days it kind of changed us they couldn't say that to me because they had actually not spent three days in Italy because they were on that train whizzing through Europe here's my message to you it's okay to be on the train sometimes it's okay to be taking your students through country after country some of the time but for goodness sake like stop in Italy for three days sometime do one project in your shop class one paper in your English class one scientific study in your science class where you think nobody's going to know this but I'm gonna take longer on this one I'm gonna do it well we're gonna do multiple drafts we're gonna do critique we're gonna have an audience from it we're gonna do it really well and at the end of the year kids are gonna think I can't believe I did this everything in America is telling you not to do that it's telling you to rush and cover and prepare for tests and get ready and you have to decide I'm gonna hide from there they're all wrong and they are wrong and we are going to spend a few days in Italy this semester so it doesn't mean changing everything you do but it means giving the chance for your students to do some beautiful work in whatever discipline you work in and so that at the end of the year you'll be proud they'll be proud yes please great question so it'll be my last question what about the students who are doing really well who are accelerated who need the challenge you want to speed up I would say the same thing applies to those stronger students which is those stronger students may be able to cover more material but in service of creating what like have them cover more material to create an even greater project an even greater paper something that they are are that proud of it's the like by the end of the year you should think did my students do anything in this year that I am really proud of and they're really proud of it and if you can say yes I think that's where you should be I got here yesterday on a flight and found that one of my former 5th and 6th grade little Torquay kids from my town in the middle of nowhere was here interviewing for a teaching job here and I still have videos of her disco performance back when she was a 6th grader and they said oh my god she was so articulate she was so together and I just thought man it just makes me proud to have this former little country girl who became a disco Queen in my class in my disco lessons that I taught her now applying for a teaching job here at high tech high it's really about like if I showed you that clip you think that girl is a good disco dancer right I mean it's about the quality of what you do and when you do things of high quality that pride changes who you are as a person it just gives you a new sense of what you can do so I admire you all for sticking with public education in this moment where public education is under fire in this country my life now is dedicated to supporting people like you who are standing up for public education when we most need it and I hope that you're gonna find work in your schools that you're so proud of that you're gonna send it to me you're gonna submit it to the models of excellence website and that next year you'll you'll be bringing people online to that website and saying see this project this is from our school see that writing that's from our students I hope that the resources they are useful to you and I hope that any of yells work if it can be of use to you could be used oops sorry so in closing that's my pop sorry in closing we have four books that we've written about assessment about projects we can't give these away I'm sorry because we have a publisher right and they we just do but if those books are ever useful to you these are books about this approach to education that we're trying to spread around the country we have about 200 videos of great instructional practice all of which are free and open source other than our books everything we have is free we're a non-profit just trying to spread this word we have the models of excellence website that I hope you'll want to submit work to and those are the URLs in case any of that would be useful to you so I'll be here for two days very happy to dig in with you on any of this work and I want to thank you for your keeping the flame alive for public education Thanks you

Channel: High Tech High Unboxed

Views: 780

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Ron Berger, PBL, EL Education, EL, HTH, PBL Academy

Id: bb7k3uujA9s

Length: 74min 13sec (4453 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2017