Rob Riordan:
We knew that we had to have a rich learning environment for the adults in the setting if we were going to have a robust learning environment for the kids.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Rob Riordan, co-founder of High Tech High, as well as the High Tech High Graduate School of Education and High Tech High’s former Emperor of Rigor. This is our second fireside chat with Rob and Kaleb Rashad High Tech High’s interim CEO. And today we’re talking about how the adults learn at High Tech High. Let’s get right into it. Fireside chat number two, adult learning at High Tech High. Let’s get into the ancient history. Take us back, Rob.

Rob Riordan:
So the question being why did we start a graduate school of education and how did we start it and so on. When we opened High Tech High in 2000, we opened with maybe 12 to 14 teachers, and we knew that no matter how much these new teachers, new to High Tech High teachers bought into project-based learning, most of them would never have experienced it themselves as learners. So we knew that we had to have a rich learning environment for the adults in the setting if we were going to have a robust learning environment for the kids. And the way we structured that was that we built a schedule where the adults, all of the adults, came to school an hour before the kids arrived every day for meetings. And they engaged in these meetings in conversations about kids, curriculum issues the school was facing and questions in their own practice.
And what we saw over the first year was a lot of, because everyone was new to a untracked, heterogeneous situation in their classrooms, even the veteran teachers had stuff that they were thinking about and wondering about just as the new teachers did. So there was a lot of mutual focus in these conversations. How do we do projects with a group of kids who are very different in terms of where they’re coming from and so forth, and what should projects look like anyway? And so what we saw was that as a result of these morning conversations, many of our new teachers really made great strides in their comfort in the classroom, in their relationship with kids, in their ability to design and execute projects with kids. So we were thinking at the same time that we knew that some of our teachers were coming from industry, for example, some of them had PhDs, they were not qualified to teach in public school.
In other words, they had to go to school at night and pay money to learn to teach in ways that we didn’t necessarily want them to be teaching. And so we applied to the state of California to run a district internship program where we could hire teachers, put them in the classroom, and at the same time give them classroom work towards the teacher credential. It took us a couple of years to get authorized to do that, but we got authorized so that we then were running an internship program where we could hire people, put them in the classroom, give them coursework, and give them mentors. And over the course of a couple of years, they would have their preliminary credential at no cost to them, and over the four years, they could get a clear California credential through our internship program. As we were doing that, I think we started that somewhere around 2003, maybe even a little earlier.
But as we were doing that, other schools in the area, some charter and some district schools contacted us and said, Hey, will you do this for our teachers? And we thought we could not. We thought it was only for our own teachers. We learned later we could do it through a memorandum of understanding for teachers from elsewhere. But given that misunderstanding, we said, well, if we want to do that kind of work beyond High Tech High, we need to open a graduate school. And we applied to do a graduate school of education right in the K12 environment. We got authorization fairly quickly to do that, and we opened in 2007 with master’s programs in teacher leadership and school leadership, that later became simply a master’s in education leadership. But as we went along, then we started with people from our own orbit, from the High Tech High organization and then open it up to outsiders.
We did the graduate school for a couple of reasons. One is that we wanted to build capacity within our own organization, a leadership capacity. And the second was that we did want to use the graduate school as an engine of dissemination of High Tech High vision and principles and practices. So that’s why we did it. And then it grew, of course, as we went along. It took us eight years to be accredited by the Western States Association, the Accrediting Association, partly because it took them a while to figure out why anyone would want to have a graduate school of education in a K12 environment.
In fact, during their first visit, their first question was, where’s your building? And we said, well, we don’t have a building. We occupy the K12 buildings in this organization in the afternoons and evenings when the kids aren’t here. And they had a lot of trouble with that. None of the initial accreditors in the visiting committee, there was a group of three or four, were from education schools. They were all from departments in universities around. So we didn’t have that kind of connection in the beginning either. But anyway, after seven or eight years, and there were things we learned too about being a graduate school through our association with WASC. But anyway, 2015, in June of 2015, we finally were fully accredited as a graduate school of education. I would say a couple of more things, and then Kaleb, you can chime in.

Kaleb Rashad:
Sure, sure.

Rob Riordan:
There were a couple of things that we really wanted to do in this graduate school. One is that we wanted to do things with the teachers who were in our programs that they could do the next day in their classrooms. So there was this kind of symmetry and parallelism that we were after. We wanted our pedagogy in the graduate school to exemplify what we wanted our teachers to do and what we were urging teachers from elsewhere to do. So that included things like keeping journals, included things like designing projects, using protocols, and we leaned heavily on the protocols from the school reform initiative around project tuning, around dilemmas of practice and around looking at student work. That symmetry of practice was very important to us. And, of course, it was very important to us to link theory and practice in one program. Larry and I had both taught at Harvard in the graduate school. I had been responsible for a while for the practicum seminar for Harvard’s student teachers.
One year we had about a hundred student teachers in this, and they were with teaching fellows and all that. We had a practicum seminar, and our frustration was that we were engaging these prospective teachers in progressive pedagogy, and then they would go out into their sites for their student teaching, and they would come back and say, well, we’ve been told that we’re not to do that here in my practicum site. So there was this disconnect between theory and practice. Not always, not everywhere, but frequently a disconnect between theory and practice. And one of our aims in our graduate school of education was to really close that gap and to link theory and practice together. For a while, we were saying most schools, ed schools are 80% theory and 20% practice, we’re 20% theory, 80% practice. That did not go over well with WASC. So we ended up, we had learned to say we are 100% theory in practice, and that’s been our aim all the way through.

Kaleb Rashad:
Oh my goodness. Can I just jump in there? There’s so much richness in what you just described, and I, as a learner, and maybe for those who may be listening to this now or in the future, I would love to circle back to something you said at the very beginning about the rich learning environments for the adults. And both in theory and practice in the sense of 100% theory and practice. What practices or principles, given that sense of symmetry that you were describing later on, what are the principles and practices that you would imagine would be important in creating these rich learning environments for the adults, that we hope to see for the young people?

Rob Riordan:
Yeah. In the morning meetings of teachers, or in our classes in the GSE and in our classes, in what still constitutes an internship program, we want people to do a lot of reflection on their own trajectory, their own background, their own learning experiences and so on. For example, we want all of these, the adults in our setting, to have an opportunity to reflect on significant learning. What is significant learning in your experience as a learner? What do you know about significant learning from your experience as a learner? And we like to put people in small groups to write a little bit about that, then share with each other. They’re sharing stories with each other and building community thereby. But they’re also, we ask them to, from these stories, extract the elements of significant learning and to think about what would a place look like where significant learning is going on all the time? What will my classroom look like as a place of significant learning?
And so what we come up with and what they come up with as they extract the elements from their stories are things like there were opportunities to reflect and think about. It was something I was interested in. The teacher believed in me. There was an important audience for the work. The work was valuable in the community in some way. So there are things that people say based on their own experience as learners that really do connect with our design principles. So to your question, Kaleb, what would it look like? It starts with that kind of reflection about what is significant learning, but it situates that conversation in a collaborative conversation. And we then ask our adult learners also to present their work to bring in some student work for colleagues to look at and respond to and help analyze, help think about and so on.
So we engage in reflection, we engage in dialogue, and our classes in the graduate school are dialogical. My hope is that our morning meetings of teachers and the hour before kids come to school remain dialogical, and they are collaborative all with the aim of getting better at what we do.

Alec Patton:
In case anyone doesn’t know what dialogical means, can you give a-

Rob Riordan:
Yeah. So dialogical means that we talk about things. If there’s a question before us, for example, here’s this group of 10th graders, I’m teaching them humanities, what would be some good projects? We look at samples of good projects and people weigh in with advice about what might be a good project, what worked for me, what was a barrier for me, and so on. So that we’re not thinking and working and designing in isolation. We’re engaging in a grand conversation about the work with each other as we go along.

Kaleb Rashad:
There’s so much richness in that. If I can just connect a couple of things from the beginning to the end, this very simple, yet profound seductive move I might call it. When you look… Thinking about designing the adult learning and sourcing from within the learners, their lived experiences or their shared experiences to discern or distill what might be some key principles for learning as you were starting to describe them, that shift from interrogation or wondering about what is already within you and using questions to get at that versus what typically happens in adult learning environments where there is this learning that’s imposed upon you and then asked to regurgitate in some way.

Rob Riordan:
Yeah. And it takes us to the symmetry again, because we’re doing this with the adults and the expectation that they will do the same kind of dialogical work with their students. We had a student in our graduate school, a High Tech Middle school teacher.

Alec Patton:
Quick note, that teacher was Bobby Shaddox, who’s also the person who convinced me I should become a teacher. He now teaches at King Middle School in Portland, Maine.

Rob Riordan:
We engaged in those kinds of conversations about significant learning and project design and so forth. And he decided that he wanted to engage his students in co-designing a project. And so he went with his teaching partner-

Alec Patton:
Shout out to Bobby’s teaching partner, Ali Wong.

Rob Riordan:
… went into his classroom the first day and had post-it notes on all the tables and said to the kids, write down on post-it notes all of your questions about yourself and the world, and we’re going to build our curriculum for the next three months on your questions. So the kids wrote their questions down furiously on post-it notes, and they put them up on the whiteboard. And then they started over three or four days, they started moving the post-it notes around categorizing them, talking and so forth about where we should go together with all of these questions. And they came up with the theme for the next three months of the course in humanities and math science, which was the end, this is sixth graders, the end of the world.
Three months later, they had an evening exhibition where they presented their book, The End of the World Uncovered, which talked about their explorations in groups of the various ways the world might end, tsunami, plague, war, famine, meteorite, all the different possibilities. So they were standing before their work as experts to talk about the ways the world might end and what we might do, and to talk about their process, what they did by way of research into these questions. But it all started with student questions. And, of course, as they did that work, the teachers were able to crosswalk the work to the California standards and find that they were in fact addressing the California standards in English, social studies, math and science as they were doing the work. It was a very inductive dialogical, and it was collaborative. It was engaging the students as co-designers. That to me is a quintessential example of that kind of dialogical work, honoring the questions and the experience of the students and putting it out to the world.

Kaleb Rashad:
I love that so much. In my experience in working with a variety of different schools where I’ve been in some position, role, position of authority, the opportunity to create spaces where adults can learn and do the kind of learning that is dialogical is so profound, especially in places that are deprived of opportunities to think, to reflect with each other about yourself, about our work, about our relationships, who we are, what do we want to create for our young people? How do we want to be of service to our community? These questions remind me that Paulo Freire laid out these, I think he called them foundations or fundamentals of dialogue, and two of them right now are coming to mind for me. One is about humility. The sense that you might not know everything. And so dialogue, as he described, can’t exist without some humbling of one’s self, or recognition of your limited scope of understanding no matter who you might be. I think that’s part one.
The second thing that stands out to me is this sense of, he called it love as a fundamental tenet of that true dialogue. It is this willingness and curiosity to love the world, to love people, to wonder about them. So I think he didn’t… He said a lot of things about love, but I think what he was pointing to, especially tied to this question of humility, is about curiosity, about wondering about oneself, our origins, what we know, how we want to be with each other, and who we might want to become. Every time we, in school communities where we’re doing these adult learning experiences and people are asked to unpack their lived experience sometimes in insignificant learning and impacts on their school lives that shaped who they are today. It’s always rich with emotional textures, and it’s humbling to watch people, whether it’s with another person or in a smaller group, identify those areas of pain and also those areas of promise. There’s A lot of riches that really comes out of that.

Rob Riordan:
Yep. I think that, and of course, all of this cuts against the grain.

Kaleb Rashad:
That’s right.

Rob Riordan:
In most schools and most systems, we teach subjects and students need to learn the subjects, and they’re tested on the subjects, and very often their lived experience is viewed as a distraction. And we try to run counter to that kind of what Sarason would call existing regularity of school and all the stuff around testing and even teacher credentialing and the organization of the curriculum by subjects and so on. What you are talking about, Kaleb, in terms of dialogue and lived experience and love runs counter to conventional schoolings. So as we do this work, we bump into those conventional assumptions and practices all the time. For example, as we’ve tried to have our teachers who may have a degree in English, for example, teach humanities and teach projects that engage kids partly so that if they’re a humanities teacher teaching twice as long, like English and social studies, their load is cut in half of students.
So instead of maybe a 112 students, a High Tech High teacher who’s teaching English and social studies together is teaching 56 students, which gives teachers more leverage and it allows us to group students. So the two teachers have the same students for most of the time. That is totally counter to the way schools operate, where they function around choice and kids choose all different kinds of things. So no teacher has a group of students that is identical with the students of another teacher. So it’s impossible for them to collaborate on projects. Part of our structural aim was to make it possible for teachers to collaborate on project because they share the same kids.

Kaleb Rashad:
Yeah, I would just bang on that too, just say, to me, all this work is in service of trying to humanize learning, trying to humanize what has been generally a dehumanizing experience for many communities, especially in the continental United States. So mostly by almost any imperial empire about the role that education is to take, is to subjugate and to narrowly define what is appropriate, what is education worthy, and to discount any other funds of knowledge or epistemologies or ways of being beyond the western cannon. And so I think the more that we are able to, with adults, bring this back to the adults, to support them in recognizing, oh, no, no, no, no, you actually, you, your people actually have lots of important experiences to bring in terms of learning. And when we do that with you as adults, it supports them in doing it with young people.

Alec Patton:
And I want to add something.

Rob Riordan:
Go ahead.

Alec Patton:
It’s not just about sharing the kids, it’s about that shared time that just you end up with four hours that the kids are going to be with one teacher or another. And so you can go off campus, you can go do things, you can have 40 kids go off campus and 10 kids stay on campus. You can have 10 kids who go off campus and 40 kids stay on campus. There’s this incredible amount of flexibility. You don’t have to talk to 15 different teachers to find out if your kids can all go somewhere.

Rob Riordan:
We’ve had teachers do unbelievable work in astronomy, for example. So where’s that in the sequence, in the science sequence? We’ve had, as Kaleb as you know, four young women at High Tech High wrote an article for the Journal of Double Star Observation where they discussed their findings that what a British astronomer had identified as a trinary system in 1861 was actually a binary system. And they traced what must’ve been his thinking, what he must’ve seen in order to come to that conclusion about… Anyway that happened outside of school, it happened in an astronomy club, but wow, why is this not inside the school and inside our curriculum? That’s the kind of question we’re asking ourselves as we’re encouraging teachers to do projects that connect with kids’ lives and connect with the world.

Kaleb Rashad:
To me, that is the most exciting part of, at least from a school leader point of view, is designing adult learning that allows everyone to practice elements of the craft and get better with that craft over time, for sure. But then there’s also recognizing each one of them has very diverse sets of interests and skills and taste and talents and creating some permission architecture that allows people to explore those things, because when they do, they bring those things back with them. And it is such a rich benefit to the kids. Here’s an example. So we had, I think it was a 10th grade teacher at the time, Rusty Walker was his name. He and Jeff Lowman worked on a project that was about colonizing Mars. Yeah. So everyone, of course, in our school is learning through projects and that sort of thing. So we learned about the craft of that. Yes, no doubt.
And Rusty comes to me and he is like, Kaleb, guess what’s happening at the San Diego Convention Center? There is a NASA conference. Can I go? I’m like, absolutely. He went to this professional grade learning experience with other NASA astronauts, engineers, scientists, government officials, et cetera, and came back heart on fire. And you could see it in the work with the young people. And so to me, I think this double helix of making sure everyone on one strand gets everything we all should be getting, but the other strand is, what do you need and what do you massively fascinated in the world, and how can we create ways for you to pursue that thing? That lights the teacher on fire and that fire is translated to students.

Rob Riordan:
And when you pursue that thing, it will connect with everything else.

Kaleb Rashad:
Yes, a 100%. So good.

Rob Riordan:
It’s not just an isolated thing over here. It connects with everything.

Kaleb Rashad:
And then how about this? How about adults being so excited about learning something?

Rob Riordan:
Yeah. Yeah.

Kaleb Rashad:
They’re like, want to bring it to someone and show, oh, can I show you this? Look, this thing is happening. That thing is happening. It’s unbelievable.

Rob Riordan:
Kaleb, you mentioned encouraging teachers to pursue their interests and passions and so on. I don’t know if people still do it in our adult sessions and so forth, but early on, one of the exercises we would do with our teachers would be the significant learning exercise that I’ve already talked about. The second one would be a project design exercise. We would put people in maybe a group of six, and we’d say, okay, this is one of our early, early sessions. Introduce yourselves and describe for the group a passion or interest that you have. And then the task of the group is design a unit or project that incorporates the interests of every member of the group. That would be the challenge. And people would come up with these incredible project designs and present them to the larger group, again, doing presentations of learning, which they’re going to be asking their kids to do later on. But the notion that we can proceed from our interests and our questions and so forth was something that we tried to infuse very early on in our work with adults.

Alec Patton:
Hey, Rob, can I ask you a question?

Rob Riordan:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
You may or may not remember this, way back when I first came to High Tech High as part of a group from England, we all gave presentations of learning, and you had these instructions. One of your instructions was, I think it was that it had to have a bit of magic.

Rob Riordan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kaleb Rashad:
I love it.

Alec Patton:
Was that it? Is that what you say? Is that the wording? What did you say?

Rob Riordan:
I’m trying to remember, but I think probably you were in groups and the groups were presenting, correct?

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Rob Riordan:
So the group had to present its magic name, so you had to name yourself as a group, but it had to be a magic name.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Rob Riordan:
Something like that.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Yeah. I remember somebody took a piece of chart paper and dipped it in tea to make it look like it was aged and ancient. It was fun. It was-

Rob Riordan:
Yeah. Yeah. Amazing stuff that people come up with when you ask them to do design. And not simply designing projects from interest, but there are various kinds of rapid design projects that you can do, or exercise that you can do around creating projects. And interestingly, when people do it, you do it in 20 minutes or so, they often end up with things that actually become later on, they work on them, they refine them and so forth. They become full-blown projects. But the notion of sitting down and just firing some stuff out that you think there’s something essential about it, something you could be interested in, something you think kids might be interested in. You have an idea for a product or a performance, and for a venue just starting with that.
And then you begin to ask other questions like, okay, how are we going to meet the needs of all students here? The equity issue? How are we going to address the needs of all the students in the class as we’re doing this? How are we going to engage student interests? And all of those other questions that you can ask as you go along.

Alec Patton:
Can you guys speak a little bit to the role of fun in adult learning?

Rob Riordan:
Yeah, yeah.

Kaleb Rashad:
Yes. Cue it up.

Rob Riordan:
Yeah, that’s over to you, Kaleb.

Kaleb Rashad:
Oh, man. Hey, how about this? I think this is the magic, it is, that we were just talking about. There is something about the rote tactic of here’s what you’re going to learn. Here’s how we’re going to know you learned it. Here’s what you’re going to show me. That whole thing. You want to take the mysterious, joyful opportunity to discover something out of it. Lay that whole track out. On the other hand, if you start with what I would call it the Goldilocks question that is a little philosophical, a little concrete, and somewhere in the middle there is something worth pursuing that people get an opportunity to discover for themselves. That fun can come in, in lots of different ways, because not all of it “is fun.” But there should be, to me, a sense of possibility of discovering something that not to the group is not yet known.
And that means that sometimes you’re going to run up against things that are challenging or difficult, you have to persevere through. But in pursuing important, purposeful questions, there is this magic that gets released, this social alchemy, even if it doesn’t result in the thing you had initially hoped for. The pursuit of that thing and doing that thing together, especially with the opportunities to engage in dialogue and discourse about the thing, whatever it’s you’re working on ourselves. As people pursuing this question, I think adults, especially when it comes to adult learning, want opportunities to play. And so the design of the adult learning experience, while it can be a little tacky in my mind to say, you’re going to have fun today, but rather, what is the thing worth pursuing? And then how do we pursue that thing and tie opportunities for joy, for purpose within it and throughout it? It is to me, what attracted me to High Tech High, is watching adults do these things.
Here’s an example. In the spring every year, here in this building, I’m in building 49 right now, the original High Tech High. And every year in the spring, we would do these spark sessions where teachers like Margaret Edler and Lisa Griffin would lead our entire 30, 40 person staff of teachers into ideation modes about upcoming projects. And so part of that ideation, which took probably three to four sessions over about three months for them to get all the ideas out before making any decisions on anything, they would sometimes have to act out different parts of their projects. And so, one of the projects that was at the time that they were coming up with was the semester upstream project. So three or four teachers grabbed, right here in the middle of the school, grabbed paddleboards, they grabbed life jackets, and they just started acting like they were canoeing up the Colorado River.
And there’s no way any one person could have planned what kind of creative expression would come out of that, but there’s always opportunities when you have the lens of what are some ways by which people can show us their ideas. And it was marvelous to see all of our 40 some odd teachers here acting out in different kinds of ways, their early project prototypes. So you can take, this is my last point, you can take a really equity focus, hopeful, inspiring way of learning through projects and make it absolutely boring. That can happen. Okay. And you checked all the boxes, I launched a project, I did the whole thing, and you can completely deconstruct PBL and do it in a way that still has a common element and brings so much life, so much life into the experience, both in its creation, in its execution, in its reflection. And so I think fun is a nice moniker, but there is something deeper around this whole piece around joy for me when it comes to designing adult learning.

Rob Riordan:
Yeah, I’ve seen you do some of that role play stuff, Kaleb, in beginning of the year meetings, for example, and so forth. It’s just a lot of fun, just having a lot of fun together.

Kaleb Rashad:
Yeah. It takes a little extra work, but I’ve also been in places. Before I came to High Tech High where the adult learning was absolutely boring, and the level of engagement was about how you moved, how many people up in the kids raised their hands. And SLANT, for example, is another engagement activity. These things are like soulless, man. They’re mechanistic. Show me with your body that you’re “engaged,” but rather this kind of thing about fun, in my estimation, I would love to hear Rob’s take being the emperor of rigor here, but when I think about fun, it is something that is like you create the conditions by which people have opportunity to creatively express something within themselves in a way that is meaningful to them and to the group that they’re learning with.

Rob Riordan:
Yeah. Song and dance, I’ve seen kids dance meiosis. There’s lots of ways that, not only around content, but also around the classroom routines. We have to take attendance in the morning for our revenue and this and that and so forth. Well, you can make the taking of attendance a really fun thing to do one way or another. Lots of ways, engaging kids and being responsible for the warmup in a class. And that’s always a lot of fun. There are just lots of ways to do it. But to me, Alec, back to your question around fun. Yeah, some of it’s about fun and it needs to be fun, but I think so much of it is about dialogue and getting a chance to speak, getting your questions out there, and feeling that you are heard and that you belong, and that you’re part of this. And so that’s what we’re after at High Tech High, for the adults and the kids, both.

Alec Patton:
Kaleb, right at the start, you were talking about collegial relationships.

Kaleb Rashad:
Yeah. Yes, I was. Are you there?

Alec Patton:
Yeah, I’m there. Just giving you space.

Kaleb Rashad:
Ah, you want me to elaborate on that? Well-

Alec Patton:
Kaleb, Usually you don’t need the invitation.

Kaleb Rashad:
I was trying to be patient. I was giving you space. Yo, at one time I used to think it was just about creativity and innovation, and I used to think it was just about projects. And what I am understanding maybe perhaps more now, that it has always been about, at least in part, the adult to adult relationship, relationships with each other. And when done well, it can help to produce a trust rich environment in which teachers can share their craft with other teachers. I once had a teacher way wiser than me, John Santos, who once said to me, Kaleb, if we are waiting for you to give us all feedback to get better, you are going to be the bottleneck to our improvement. And that resonated with me so deeply. And so out of that conversation, by the way, underscore his, and maybe the groups wanting to learn and wanting to get better and improve at their craft, we created all different kinds of ways by which teachers could learn from other teachers about this craft.
And I’m really thankful to him and to all the teachers who wanted to improve, who wanted to grow, wanted to develop, and they wanted to do that together. And so to me, a thing that is a critical resource for improvement, a critical resource for getting better, for developing, especially among adults and adults with young people, is the extent to which they are willing to take risks with one another, to grow together, to share their craft together, to share what they’ve failed at, and seek guidance and feedback from each other. It’s a powerful thing to watch a group of adults who have high levels of trust and a commitment to the craft in service of young people. That collegial pedagogy piece I think is very important. And I worry about it all the time.

Rob Riordan:
Part of this has to do with how do you bring new teachers into the setting? And early on, what we always aimed to do during our new teacher Odyssey was to have veteran teachers come in and share with the new teachers in small groups projects that they were working on, and ask for help in the design. So the message being you as a new teacher are a full member of the dialogue about teaching and learning here. And then we were always aware that if you’re going to have good collegial relationships and good adult learning and setting, you have to set aside time for it, which is why we set aside morning meetings, why there were five or six days during the year when the kids don’t come to school and the teachers do. And you have to have some ideas about how to fill that time, not with administrative trivia.

Kaleb Rashad:
That’s right.

Rob Riordan:
But with engaging teachers in co-designing the agenda for those sessions and providing protocols for conversation that are safe and structured where everyone gets a chance to participate. So time and protocols for us have been very important. The other piece, Kaleb, you just touched on, it was the notion of peer observation. And we’ve had times during which various of our schools have really tackled the notion of peer observation. And in their morning meetings have talked about and had sessions about what are some good mindsets for observation, and how do we respond to a colleague’s work when they’re in their classroom and so forth? What constitutes a helpful response? How can we get good at responding to each other’s work and stuff like that? So pure observation I think is a really, really critical piece of the work.

Kaleb Rashad:
There was just maybe one more example. I would love to just give a concrete example of some of that on bottlenecking. There were a couple of teachers who had what I thought was a brilliant idea about how to connect newer teachers with more veteran teachers. And some of the veteran teachers would be invited to share a single practice that they use that they find to be powerful lever for either rich work or deep dialogue. And these two teachers, they invited Mark Geary when Mark was with us. And if you know Mark Geary, you know exactly what’s coming next, Socratic seminar. So what the two veteran teachers did was they say, yo, Kaleb, what if we hosted a small gathering of say five to six teachers, maybe once a month at a local place here in Liberty Station for dinner. And in the course of having dinner, they might be able to hear from a veteran teacher like Mark Geary about the practice of Socratic seminar.
What it is, how he started, where it is now, why he does this particular practice, and what he sees as the impact of that work, and what’s the evidence of that. And my job was not to be there actually. My job was just to just come in, just give a little salute and get out of the way. And every now and then I would bring a bottle of red wine, but then I would leave. And through those conversations, newer teachers had an opportunity to access deep funds of trade craft with teachers who’ve honed a particular practice. And that sort of, we call them salons, and these evening salons with dinner, sometimes with music, would have veterans and newer teachers learning together in some very, very powerful ways in a peer-to-peer structure. And it was marvelous.

Rob Riordan:
Sounds like fun, Kaleb.

Kaleb Rashad:
Oh, yeah. It was fun. I wanted to hang out a little bit more so I can pick up some tips. But I knew my job was not to be there, and it was very inspiring work.

Rob Riordan:
And I think right back to the notion of symmetry, these notions of peer observation, learning from peers and stuff like that, this is stuff that we want our kids to be doing as well. Engaging in peer critique, engaging in collaborative design together, and connecting with the world together, learning from and about each other as they go along.

Kaleb Rashad:
I would love to, maybe in another episode, really have a… I’m reminded about the Jeff Duncan-Andrade school, Roses in the Concrete. And while they were not necessarily a project based school, they were absolutely a dialogical school. And so I think for us, we tend to lead with learning through a project and connect that to dialogue. So I would love to have a conversation about the relationship between these two things in maybe some other episode.

Alec Patton:
I think you just gave a trailer for the next episode.

Rob Riordan:
Yeah. I would love to spend some time discussing projects, next time projects, Kaleb, projects that you’ve engaged in or have seen that have been particularly inspiring and-

Kaleb Rashad:
Would love to. Would love to.

Rob Riordan:
… the role of dialogue in those projects. And I’ve got a few I would want to talk about as well, obviously,

Kaleb Rashad:
Let’s talk about projects.

Rob Riordan:
Okay.

Alec Patton:
Let’s do it. All right. Watch this space everybody.

Rob Riordan:
Okay.

Alec Patton:
It’s coming.

Kaleb Rashad:
All right. Thank you everybody.

Alec Patton:
Hey, thank you all so much.

Rob Riordan:
Thanks a lot. Bye-bye. So much more to say.

Alec Patton:
I know.

Rob Riordan:
All right.

Kaleb Rashad:
Always.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Rob and Kaleb for sharing their wisdom. We’ve got lots of good links in the show notes. We’re going to be back with another fireside chat next month. If you have questions you’d like me to ask Rob and Kaleb in that episode, send them to unboxed@hthgseedu2024.kinsta.cloud. Thanks for listening.