Ron Berger on PBL & Quality Work | PBL World 2019 Keynote

my comments today are called beautiful work I've been in education 44 years and my passion for 44 years has been that I think we vastly underestimate the capacity of kids to do beautiful work and I'm talking about all kids when I talk about beautiful work in project-based learning I'm not a fan of project-based learning because it's the new thing or it's the current thing I'm a fan of project-based learning because that's what life is when our students leave our schools and enter life they will no longer be judged by standardized tests they'll be judged for the rest of their lives by two things the quality of person they are and the quality of work that they do doesn't matter what choices they make whether they're a surgeon or a plumber or raising a family the quality of who they are as human beings and the quality of work that they do is what will matter for the rest of their life and that's what should matter in schools I work with an organization now al education that's a good friend of PBL works and we are trying to change the national conversation about what student achievement means right now our nation has a one-dimensional view of student achievement student achievement means test scores in two subjects on a basic level so when you read in your newspaper this is a high achieving school what does that mean means one thing it means their test scores in math and literacy are good that's all and we would say that three-dimensional student achievement means that kids are doing great academic work and they're building their character and they're doing high quality work that there's craftsmanship in what they do and you can't have craftsmanship without projects to work on this is doing what kids will what will prepare kids for their real lives so I've been in this a long time I started as a project-based learning teacher in the early 70s and project-based learning was really big in the country in the 70s and 80s and then in the 90s it almost went away because No Child Left Behind and state standards and say testing and high pressure pretty soon the elements of project-based learning started to disappear I am so pleased that buck foundation now PBL works in the end of the 90s called me up and said we are going to commit our foundation to one thing in education project-based learning so I flew out here to California I met with John Larmour and John Mergen dollar and John Thomas and Tom Marcum and worked on these early books about project-based learning twenty years ago and at that time it was just a few people as part of this organization and it was not a national movement or an international movement and look at it now look at this group now it's an amazing thing great credit to Bob and Brandon and Dinah and the whole team here at PBL works but also to you you are the ambassadors of this movement and it's people from all over the world here more than a thousand people this is taking off in a way that I don't think it can be stopped because it's what parents want right it's the kind of education we all want for our kids so when I talk about beautiful work I'm not just talking about beautiful artistic work I'm talking about beautiful mathematic work beautiful scientific work beautiful work in every dimension and I'm talking about beautiful acts of social justice acts of equity acts of compassion and kindness and I've spent the last 44 years collecting models of beautiful student projects it's not my wife's favorite thing my entire basement is plastic bins student work but about 10 years ago I started working to scan all of that work and with my colleagues at Harvard and my colleagues at ELN we built a free website where hundreds and hundreds of projects are up as models I'm shamelessly advertising that with you today for two reasons one is I want to tell you that everything you see on screen is free and open-source on that website along with hundreds and hundreds of other models that I hope you will use and share they've been donated by teachers and school leaders and district leaders all over the world so that you can share them and also I'm shamelessly promoting this because I want you to submit your project work to us I can't guarantee that every project will be inducted we have a curation team at Harvard that looks at every piece and see if it's adding something new and if the quality is what we're looking for right now but you won't get it accept it if you don't submit so give it a shot submit the best work of any kind in any discipline pre-k to 12 from your school and we would love to get more submissions from you everything you submit that gets inducted will be shared with the world so we are trying to share what models of excellence can mean to kids that you can go out in the world and do this this morning I'm going to share with you some stories about my particular passion for project-based learning why I've been a project-based person my entire life I do want to acknowledge this is our website models of excellence I do want to acknowledge that my perspective is limited by my identity right I'm an old white guy from New England my perspective is gonna be white it's gonna be male it's gonna be New England II I mean I root for Boston teams right like you can't trust me on everything I even root for the Patriots which is like like you can't get less ethical than that so I know you can't trust that I'll understand your perspective on everything but as an old white guy I hope that I'll have some examples and stories and values that will resonate with you from your place in the world from your work from your perspective and I'm here all day and really happy to engage with you in that before I dive into those stories I want to name one new exhibit we have in the my excellence collection last year we built an exhibit around how do you help your school and your district and your students document the beautiful projects you do really well because a lot of times you guys do amazing projects but then they disappear all we have is the final product we don't have the learning in the process along the way so we have a new toolkit online of how to document your work well and how to have students in the lead on that documentation I hope that's a useful resource like everything else we have it's totally open and free all right let me get into stories the nearest city to where I personally live is Springfield Massachusetts so Springfield Massachusetts is a very typical northeastern city used to have a lot of Industry it's all gone right now high poverty high unemployment it's a pretty tough place there's six high schools in Springfield Massachusetts five of those high schools graduates 62 percent of their kids so we got to be thinking about what happens to the other 38% there's one high school there that's graduating 98% of its kids on time and for ten consecutive years a hundred percent of graduates have gotten into college this is a high school that I was fortunate to help open but I want to name right now it is a regular district high school with no selective admission it's not a charter it's not a magnet it doesn't have anything special you have to do a lottery to get in but anyone in the city can get in it's primarily low incomes of color and every single graduate has gotten into college since the school opened so what's the difference here why is this school succeeding with the same kids as the other five schools are not it's not just projects like right it's the culture of the school too there are daily crew meetings which you would call we call it crew a neo you might would call it advisory meetings every day every kid sits down with her crew of a dozen kids and talks about her life and her challenges and her academic work in that same family for four consecutive years of high school that's a big part of it the relationships in the school are super deep every kid is known every staff is known there's an incredible faculty culture but it is also the projects because the work that kids do in this school has meaning and I will only tell you one example of that this morning but these students ninth grade science students were trained by city engineers to do energy audits of buildings they tested for insulation boilers window treatments electric electrical functions of all the appliances in the building and those kids prepared a report for the city of every city school and where it was losing energy and money and they asked the city of Springfield to invest a hundred and fifty six thousand dollars to retrofit their schools to make them more energy efficient and they promised the city in their report that the city would make back every penny and invested within five years because they did a cost-benefit analysis of the retrofits and they priced out all the building renovations so they did this in public so the mayor had to respond because they did it in a public press conference so the mayor went back to his staff this same mayor that's there today Domenic Sarno went back to his staff and said what do I do I can't not respond here I'm like in a corner right now and they said mr. Saar no mr. mayor you should invest a hundred and fifty six thousand dollars to retrofit these schools we train these kids they're right like this is a great report we believe that their report is correct so the mayor went on television and he said we're gonna invest a hundred and fifty six thousand dollars to retrofit our city schools to make them more energy-efficient because these students in our public school told us that within five years we'll make all of our money back we'll save money for the city and we'll help save the environment then he went to the school and said you kids better be right well within two years the city had saved 160,000 dollars in energy expenses so by then they were making money the mayor came back to the school and he said we just set aside of a quarter of a million dollars for you to be the energy orders for the rest of the buildings in our city when he left the kids said Mr burger this is kind of like slave labor isn't it and we said well yeah yes it is however you're all going to college you could come back here and change the world with your skills like you're on television now as ninth graders that's pretty good now I want to back up and get even more personal this is why project-based learning really means something to me I live in a small rural town in New England when I moved to this town was fewer than 700 people it was a working-class town up in those hills I taught every kid in this tent everyone in my town under the age of 50 is my former student right that's how small of this world is so why does that matter to me because my nurse is my former student because my plumber is my former student because the lifeguards at our town lake are my former students because the entire volunteer fire department are my former students my life is in the hands of my former students if you think about that what are the things you want your students to have it's not just good test scores in third grade so I will tell you my wife had a serious accident I was not home I was building a playhouse for my grandkids in another town I was on the roof of the Playhouse and my daughter came out handed me the phone she said it's the police well every first responder at my home to save my wife's life were my former students so if you think if someone you loved were in trouble and the first responders showed up and they were all your former students who would you want them to be what values what ethic would you want them to have and then you realize why does character and high-quality work mean so much to me because my entire life depends on that now you might not live in a small town but it's the same for you because every first responder every firefighter every nurse every doctor you see is somebody's former student and we should be working on high quality work and high quality character all day long because that's where our lives are in their hands I this is why project-based learning means something to me not because it's the current thing not because it's fashionable but because this is what life is it's about doing projects and doing things well so my town only has seven buildings it's got the church in the middle of the hill it's got the post office which was Mary Dillman's home in fact you got to walk into Mary Dylan's home to get your mail and I taught Mary Dylan's kids and I taught Mary Dylan's grandkids it's got the town hall it's got the volunteer fire shed where the volunteer fire department are my former students and it's got the library that has no plumbing a one-room that's open two days a week and it's got one business the shoot spray Athletic Club there's no elliptical trainers or treadmills in this building it's a bar in the middle of the woods and if you go in and get a beer the bartender is gonna be my former student I'll tell you like that's the life I live and they'll do a really good job and then there's the school so one of the great things about living in a town with no government I mean our government is people coming into the school gym and arguing in the Town Meeting like that's the whole government is that in a town with no government my students basically ran the town so they did demographic studies they did voter work they did like the kids that elementary kids basically did all the work that that people do in cities that are hired to do let me just give you one example when the state of Massachusetts asks each time to do an amphibian census for their town meaning what in phibian is live in your town other cities and towns hired a herpetologist or naturalist to do that and we sent out kids third and fourth graders we trained them how to identify amphibians and those kids went out and collected and measured and weighed and photographed in fib ian's throughout the town during school after school every weekend when those kids sent in their report to the state the state wrote back and said congratulations third and fourth grade herpetologists you sent us more data than any town or city in the state of Massachusetts it wasn't a fair fight you know everyone else had one person we had 38 third and fourth graders but they said but you did make a couple of steaks because there's two amphibians that you identified that actually aren't native to your town and the kids were incensed so we had to teach them how to send a polite rebuttal thank you Thank You state of Massachusetts for acknowledging our research but we politely disagree with your critique of our findings we believe we've correctly identified those two species and we want to meet with you in person so the state was so amused that they actually sent a herpetologist across the state couldn't find our town this is before GPS he had the call from another town we directed him to the school the kids brought him into the woods and of course the kids were right they had had correctly identified these species and after he left they said you know mr. Berger we're not just practicing to be scientists we kind of are scientists you know and I said absolutely so and some of those kids are scientists today since I know what every one of my freakin students did in the world right they also were involved in a service project our favorite amphibian is the local spotted salamander and these guys migrated across the roads and they tend to get run over by pickup trucks so the kids were part of the world's first salamander tunnels where the salamanders get directed underground so they won't get run over and this sign is a mile from my house it was produced by the state DPW but it was designed and drawn by a third-grade girl they also then created a field guide to the local and fibia and that was way back in the early 80s so I brought that field guide to an ell school at King middle school and they decided well why don't we create a field guide to Casco Bay Maine and this school is a public middle school where a third of the kids are refugees so a third of the kids come from East Africa Somalia Sudan every kid in that school no matter what her level of English was was a part of this project they all created pages for this field guide and imagine being a seventh grader and bringing your parents or your foster family into the National Park Service or a tourist shop and saying that's our field guide the one you're buying that's raises money for the day we created that this is my page that jellyfish I did that page like this is my work that's contributing to a better world and none of those kids were allowed to go online and look at a jellyfish they had to go put on wetsuits which we borrowed and underwater cameras which they bar and photograph these things underwater because that's what scientists life is like like that's what a real project-based world is then I brought that field guide to preschools and they created field guides to the parks next to their house and I brought it to my friends who were starting high tech high and they started a series of high school level field guides you might see the foreword here is by Jane Goodall they would print runs of ten thousand copies telling selling this book for $25 each and you can't distinguish this book from adult level field guide you can get entirely done laid out photograph research done by students by high school students because high school kids could do anything we can do in that way I want to talk about one project that second graders in one of our schools did they said we want to create a field guide but we don't know how to get it out to the world so they decided field guides in paper kind of the past let's do an e-book field guide that way it could be available to the world for free so they did a snakes of the world eBook field guide so every page in this book you can seen ashari Davis's page is done by a student and you think oh my god look at the quality of drawings that these kids did and every kids drawing is gorgeous like this but here's what's amazing because it's an e-book and you can download this onto your iPad or get it on their website it's called slithering snake stories and every page if you click on the page you hear the student reading her work aloud and you also hear sound effects that they layered as a separate audio track and you also hear music that sets the mood and the music is music played by the kids and partly composed by the kids and the kids did all the software work to actually create this guide so I'm gonna click onto a page and you'll hear one of the students reading aloud his day in the life forlán Swiper in the Amazon River by Gavin Briggs one June morning the Sun rises over the Amazon River the sound of cicadas and the loud honking of the cause and parakeets consumed the air a warm breeze sweeps into the mangrove forest male bullfrogs and red-eyed tree frogs slowly begin to stop croaking howler monkeys start to call in a mark my territory Choir the winding vines overflow the canopy spider monkeys swing from vine to vine a young 10 inch long fer-de-lance Piper Wiggles out of his mother's belly and streaks out of her way he splitters off into the canopy his diamond pattern scales shine in the sunlight as he slithers off in search of a suitable place to live after a while he curls up for a good nap when he wakes he is hungry so he slithers off he creeps closer and closer to red-eyed tree frog bang within a second he strikes his fangs pierce the frog's skin as he slowly inches his mouth of the Frog slimy body then he rests on a nearby branch to digest he wakes up suddenly as a herpe eagle comes swooping down fer-de-lance freezes BAM he strikes as the venom pours into the Eagles body destroying its veins and arteries the bird gets skinnier and skinnier it falls out of the tree and lands with a thump after a while fer-de-lance finds a hole in a tree near the Amazon River and checks if there's anybody inside it's empty so he slithers into the hole and gets himself cozy soon he will need to shed for now he curls up and sleeps motionless with his eyes wide open okay Gavin is now in middle school gavin is in middle school now he's a little embarrassed by that piece but when my wife listened to these she said my wife's a nurse not a educator she said how old are these kids I said there's seven she's like school's really different today so I can't even do that stuff now so um the last thing I want to talk about is why project-based learning is the right thing for all kids so I want to tell you the story of Jamie who lived right next to the school where I taught for ever for 28 years and the story of a project she created so Jamie lived in a very low-income household single mom household but she was the most sought-after babysitter in my whole town because she was so capable in every possible way and she bought this horse foxy with her own babysitting money we were studying architecture and we did a project where kids were doing a cross-sectional cave home design so it's a cave home for people to live underground this is Jamie's project but I want to tell you as capable as Jamie was she also had profound learning challenges so she had a major special education plan and when she came to me as a fifth grader I had her for fifth and sixth grade she said Mr burger I know the kind of projects you do because you had my older brother and I can't do projects like that because my brain is broken it just doesn't work right I said Jamie you'll be able to do any quality project just like your brother did because it's all about the support like we will do this together and she started crying she said you don't know how hard this stuff is for me well the second day of school when Jamie was a fifth grader we went oh I should say Jamie had an advantage here she went to a project-based learning school so let's look at kindergarten this is kindergartners view of her life in our school I make projects I like to swim and I go to sleep look at her picture and I make projects do you see her hands do you see her smile do you see how capable and empowered she is there like she wouldn't say I make worksheets right it's just not the same thing she is a powerful person and so when Jaime was in first grade you can see Jaime on the Left when she published her first book like this is a project-based school even if she has learning challenges she's going to do beautiful work right away in kindergarten and first grade but in fifth and sixth grade we were studying this architecture and cave homes so we started out by going cave exploring on the second day of school and it was to build the outward-bound teamwork of our group and Jaime was terrific and courageous at being underground but when she did her first draft of her cave design she didn't understand figure-ground she didn't understand cross section so it was really challenged for her and when she finished it she cried she said mr. Berger I I just don't understand it and I don't want you to pin it up for critique because I'm ashamed of it and I said Jaime you don't have to pin it up for critique but you have to get critique from someone so she went to her friend Nicole who react sprained cross section to her and her second draft actually is cross-sectional like this one started to work she said I like this one better we can pin it up for critique and so we did and one piece of critique she got from the kid who was considered the cutest boy in the class was that he really liked those overlapping rocks so her third graph was all overlapping rocks but then she got critique that it didn't have enough space so she took the overlapping rocks from this draft and the space from her second draft and created a fourth draft now with overlapping rocks and more space and then she said but mister Berger my handwriting isn't so good could you teach me calligraphy really fast and I said well no but you can use our light table to trace and so she came before school for a week and traced and after a week of tracing this was her freehand calligraphy so when you look at her final draft lettering it's beautiful too because beautiful work is about hard work it's not about natural talent like she put her mind to it and created a beautiful piece of work that she was proud to do and I just want to tell you since I know every one of my students where they are I went to Jamie's college graduation party she went to high school with a very heavy ed plan let me say but she went to the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts I went to her college graduation party she walked up to me with two Solo cups of beer she handed one to me and she said can you believe I got a college diploma I said I of course I can believe it I always believed in you and she said I have the same freaking learning disabilities that I had in first grade I still reverse letters I still reversed numbers but look at me I'm a college graduate said how have you done that she said strategies and hard work like that's what life's about so she is now manager of a horse farm and two weeks ago there she is with her daughter I went to her daughter's graduation party from high school Jamie runs a horse farm and she works with adults with disabilities and I also want to mention that I taught Jamie's younger brother the little guy with blond hair who came to me as a sixth grader without reading full reading skills he was even more learning challenged and yet that was the year that we tested every home in town for radon and he was a part of this major project to create a radon study for the entire town a study that was so in demand kids had to turn themselves into like a non-profit business sending out copies of this report across the state and across the country and even this fall 20 years later I got a report a request from the Town Board of Health we need that radon report because it's the only report of for our town and the only one in the state so here he is today Mike as an adult he's a stay-at-home dad with three kids and he has a very successful motorcycle repair business in his garage so there are the three kids from that family today I couldn't be more proud of kids they had learning challenges but they are wonderful human beings who have the highest standards for the work they do and that's what project-based work can give us all is the skills we need for a real life I'm gonna close with a one-minute video you remember those kids who studied snakes well they learned that snakes are oppressed in the world and in a world of equity and justice everything deserves equity injustice even snakes so I mean they pointed out that in every religion and every fable snakes are the bad guys so they decided they had to stand up for snakes so they created a music video about why we should stand up for snakes they took the song Born This Way by lady gaga and they rewrote it as snakes are born this way and because this school believes in high quality PBL it's a high quality music video and in fact it's gone viral and it has like 50,000 views so to close here is snakes are born this way and you'll see these kids actually are seven years old [Music] it doesn't matter if you're skating that just open up your heart this makes release born this way [Music] [Music] everywhere around the world [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] that was great [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you Ron [Applause] you

Channel: PBLWorks

Views: 6,441

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: pbl, project based learning, ron berger, education, deeper learning

Id: TvmOqnupdZc

Length: 33min 49sec (2029 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019