Alec Patton:
Hi, everyone. This is Alec, host of High Tech High Unboxed. And this is our first ever Unboxed summer rerun. Here at High Tech High, we’re right in the middle of summer Odyssey, which as the name implies, is a week-long journey into project-based learning for new teachers across our schools. For us, the smell of that first Odyssey breakfast is the sign of a new year and a fresh start. It’s like the first robin of spring. And to honor this magical time when we imagine the future and reflect on the past, we’re rebroadcasting one of our first-ever episodes. My interview with Ron Berger about projects, literacy, the craft of beautiful lessons and the magic of a self-driven classroom, where sometimes, just sometimes, there’s no lesson at all.

[Intro music]

Welcome to High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton. Ron Berger taught at Shutesbury Elementary School in Shutesbury Massachusetts for 28 years from 1975 to 2003. Shutesbury has a population of fewer than 2000 people, which means that Ron has taught a significant portion of them.

Ron Berger:
I’ve lived in this small town for a long time and almost everybody in my town is my former student. I regularly see people in their 30s, their 40s, their 50s, I was their fifth-grade teacher or their sixth-grade teacher, and I still have this incredible bond with them. They remember what we did. They’re still excited about what we did, even though they’re in their 50s. They still have the work we did back in those days because we tested the water for our community, or we planned out the roads for our community, or we built things for the community. They still feel proud about it.

Alec Patton:
This work inspired Ron to write An Ethic of Excellence, a 156 page book that has had more influence on the teachers at High Tech High than any other book in the world. I don’t know how many people were inspired to become teachers by reading An Ethic of Excellence, but I know that I’m one of them. Since he left the classroom, Ron has been chief academic officer of Yale education. The school network that used to be called Expeditionary Learning, which was started when some adventures from outward bound and got together with some professors from Harvard and decided to tackle K-12 education. As you might expect, the theory behind a Yale education is that as they put it, when students and teachers are engaged in work, that is challenging, adventurous, and meaningful, learning and achievement flourish. We published an interview with Ron Berger in the inaugural issue of Unboxed 11 years ago.

This summer we post a special literacy retrospective, and Stacey Caillier interviewed Ron again. This time about how his approach to literacy has changed since working with, as he puts it, the lesson geeks of Yale education. In the interview, Ron was thoughtful and unsparing in his analysis of his own teaching career, which makes the interview a disquieting read for those of us who had our lives changed by reading about Ron’s classroom at Shutesbury. I had some follow-up questions for Ron and he graciously took some time to answer them. You don’t need to have read the interview in order to follow the episode, but you should definitely read it afterwards because it touches on a lot of stuff that we don’t get to here. You can find it in the summer 2019 issue of Unboxed and on the Unboxed website. My first question was about the gaps in his teaching of literacy that Ron has identified since he the classroom. Here’s Ron talking about some of these in this interview with Stacey Caillier.

Ron Berger:
So first of all, I didn’t look over the course of the year. Was I giving kids reading experiences in all the different kinds of modalities and genres and textiles? And was I giving kids exposure to the full range of what they need to learn, how to be good at reading? Because I was so obsessed with each project and what they needed to know for that, that the overview was not something I focused on. Writing activities was the same thing, the writing activities had to fit that particular project. But I didn’t look at it over the course of the year, what are all the different genres of writing that they should be practicing? And did I balance those across the year? Was all of their writing persuasive essay stuff, because that’s what we did? I wasn’t tracking that stuff really closely.

Texts complexity was never an issue that I was carefully monitoring. Intuitively, I used a lot of really complex texts with kids because I love challenge. So I often used adult level scientific texts or historical texts that kids didn’t understand. But when I chose the anchor text for our work, whether it was fiction or nonfiction, I didn’t even think about text complexity. What I thought about was did it have the right angle on the content? I wanted to find a book that would excite them and if the text complexity was really a bad choice for us to be dwelling in deeply for four weeks, I wasn’t even tracking that.

And that doesn’t matter for the strong readers because the strong readers are doing so much reading on their own and their reading skills are pretty good that if the text complexity is way below what they needed, it doesn’t matter because they’re getting a lot of challenges in their other work. But if they’re kids for whom reading is challenging and they’re not getting a lot of outside of school reading in, and I’ve chosen two or three books in a row that are not pushing them in text complexity, then it’s a big disservice to them.

Alec Patton:
This attention to modes of reading and writing and text complexity is really important. It is also, to put it bluntly, a lot of work. So I wanted to know what Ron would have done less of as a teacher in order to make the time to do it.

Ron Berger:
Time is the biggest limitation for us all on this. And I spend an extraordinary amount of time when I was a classroom teacher on planning and preparing things for my teaching. I’ve never had a harder job than classroom teaching. It’s not the most high paying job or the most respected job, but it’s the hardest job I know, if you really do it well. So yeah, I spent an amazing amount of time. I probably spent almost every Sunday for almost 30 years at school, preparing things for my week, getting all these things together so that the week would run well in my classroom. So yeah. I’m a little crazy with how much I put my passion into it. And yes, there’s not a lot of extra time in my life that I could have dedicated to this new task of looking more broadly at standards and looking at the balance of activities and planning performance assessments, but really it’s a balance of how I’m using the intense time I put in.

With no false modesty, I think I was a very good teacher. I put so much of my heart into it and I loved my students, all of my students for 28 years. And I took a very passionate approach to building experiences for kids where it would be exciting and challenging, and that they really make a difference and where they would create beautiful things, like craft incredibly important and significant work. Blueprints and scientific reports and demographic reports and mathematical studies and things that contributed to our local community. I’m very proud of that whole body of work, but I will say that I played to my passions and my strengths all the time, which was all year long, kids were doing super well-crafted, meaningful projects that connected to the community. And the truth is, I could have done a little less of that, a little less of the obsession with crafted beautiful work and contribution and put a little of that time into looking more carefully at the kinds of experiences and standards that we needed to cover.

Although back when I did this, there were not those standards, they didn’t exist. But now in today’s world, I would think to spend some of the time that I put into making every experience, the beginning of some well-crafted beautiful final product, I could do a little bit less of that and balance that toward creating some of the structures for sharper and cleaner lessons, toward building a bank of frameworks and having sort of a quiver of options in my lessons to make them stronger for all kids, especially kids that can’t access information easily and towards making sure that over the course of the year, I have some spreadsheets to show that I’m getting the right balance of things, so kids don’t miss some things. I feel like I was a little indulgent as a teacher because I was so passionate and I tended to spend my time on what I was most invested in and excited about. I could have done a little less of that part of it and spend a little bit more time on the balance of making sure kids are getting the full range of what they need.

Alec Patton:
When I think about when I was teaching, I’ve never really been able to go, oh, I see how this project could be a little bit less rich and still be okay. Do you have a sense of where that was accessible in your projects?

Ron Berger:
I had the privilege of teaching or challenge depending on how you see it in a time from the mid seventies to 2003, where for most of that time, there were not state standards that people had to cleave to all the time. And there were not high stakes tests at every grade level. Then there was a lot more freedom for teachers to pursue projects that kids would get passionate about. And so I did them all the time. However, I even back then, I recognized that there were certain things I needed kids to have that didn’t fit easily into projects that I was doing. And so there would be breaks during the year of a month or six weeks where we’d be in between major projects. And that’s when I would drill down into a lot of the kind of skills and content that we couldn’t get to.

For example, English grammar. I would do a whole unit, which we call word Olympics, where kids would become, represent different countries that they chose. And we’d have all of these digging into language and grammar and words in a ongoing interactive game, crazy time. And it wasn’t really a project, but it was a way to teach rules of grammar and understanding of English grammar in a deep way, in a fun, interactive way. Did the same thing with world geography. I felt like American kids have very little sense of world geography, super important for them to have that overview. And we dove into geography in that same way. Again, not a project, but a deep immersion. So it’s not that I didn’t take breaks from projects to investigate some of the things that didn’t neatly fit into the projects I was doing that year. But when I spent time on projects, I do remember very clearly how I spent that time.

And I would spend an extraordinary amount of time in the woods, collecting red F salamanders and Moss and soil and setting up terraria in the room and getting all the right scientific equipment or out collecting rocks for geology work we were doing and then getting art supplies and setting up places in the classroom where kids could do scientific testing, artistic creation. I loved that stuff. I loved spending all that time, having a classroom that was like an art studio or a science lab that could run itself. So kids would just show up and get to work. They’d be in work at that science lab. What I didn’t spend a lot of time on was planning the kinds of literary pieces that kids are going to grapple with and the texts of all different kinds. When I looked for those texts and I looked for those written assignments, it was always in service of the content that I wanted kids to get in geology in history, to look at multiple perspectives in those ways.

And I didn’t look across the year about, are they getting a balance of kinds of literacy? Are the authors that I’m drawing from, whether fiction or non-fiction, a good, diverse set of people from US and international sources? Is the difficulty level, not just the Lexile level, but the complexity level of text, the right kind of mix for kids to really push them in their literacy. I spent less time on those things and I was less expert in them and were I to go back to elementary teaching now, I would put a lot more time into that. Yes, that might mean a little bit less time in the woods collecting salamanders, or it might mean a little less time trying to find the right art supplies for everything so that I could spend a little bit more time on the planning and researching of texts and tasks for kids in literacy. But I feel like I didn’t do as enough of that. And I’m aware of that now that I could have been a better teacher in those ways.

Alec Patton:
Do you think the spending the time in the woods partly is something you really enjoy doing, but it was also in service of this kind of self running project classroom, which I think is one of the things that most inspired me to become a teacher was this idea of the class of this kind of living organism that isn’t just being driven by you all the time. What worries me is that a teacher who said, well, I’m going to take less time on that. So I then have more time for literacy would end up with a classroom that was less intentionally designed and therefore would have discipline issues that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. And the thing that was supposed to open up more time would-

Ron Berger:
Absolutely, I entirely agree with you that I’m not backing off in any way that the investment in building a classroom that will run itself is the right investment and that preparing kids to be able to understand the point of using scientific equipment well or artistic equipment well, and being obsessive with kids about using that equipment well, and the power of using them well, and then getting kids to have a meaningful project where they’re using that stuff well. After a while, you’ve been good, almost not be teaching when you’re coming into class, because kids are in the middle of something that they’re investigating and they just want to get to school and get working on it. They’re excited about the research they’re doing. They’re excited about the things that are creating and the class truly could run itself. You could leave the classroom, come back an hour later, kids would be working on that stuff. That’s still the ideal for me.

Alec Patton:
One way of conceptualizing this is that there’s this set of things that every teacher should impart to students in the way that the evidence shows is the best way possible. And there’s another side of the continuum, which is a teacher, is somebody who’s driven by their passions, and they share those and impart those passions to a student and a student going through a rigorous, meaningful, authentic project is going to develop the skills that are going to help them become a citizen and a person who leads a meaningful life. Those are both kind of on extremes, but do you think that it’s possible and is it desirable for a teacher to be covering all these bases equally? Or is it inevitable or desirable that a teacher’s going to be driven by a certain thing the way that we would expect if an artist or a scientist for that matter?

Ron Berger:
What I’m hearing you say is to what extent should teachers be able to be passion-driven about things that they are personally excited about and they feel like they can meaningfully light up kids’ hearts and minds about versus make sure they cover all the things on their curriculum that are on some lists that kids have to do. What’s the balance in those? Clearly it’s not a one way or the other. And I think in our nation, we have leaned almost entirely toward this idea of coverage. Most teachers feel incredible pressure to cover things, and they bet on basically a treadmill of coverage. And so it’s very hard for them to ever go deep in things. And so I think where we err as a nation is almost always that we’re on a surface level of teachers for no fault of theirs, just feeling like the pressure is on them to cover material.

And so they’re just feeling like they have no choice, but to keep covering and they have very little time to follow their passions and go deep and do something really well. So I’ve always been a big advocate for much more depth and much more craftsmanship, allowing teachers to slow down and do things beautifully, allowing teachers to follow their passions and sort of ignite passions in kids. But there’s also some balance there too. And I think we need to think about what are the really important skills and content that we have to make sure kids get so that we’re not indulgent in our passions and indulgent and going deep all the time.

Where are the times we have to make sure kids get that? And I don’t think of that as coverage because coverage is a sort of like you’ve talked about it as a teacher. I think what are the skills that we know kids have gotten? Whether they’re getting them from you or you’ve set up an environment where they’re going to get them. So I think it’s really important to create learning targets, but learning targets owned by kids about things they should be able to know and do. There are really important foundational concepts and skills that kids need to succeed in the world that we need to address. And sometimes those are held in the standard. Sometimes not.

Alec Patton:
As you’ve kind of delved into the world of, I think what you sort of affectionately call lesson geeks, what do you see that makes you go, I wish these guys could have come to my classroom and seen these things because this would really enhance their classroom practices.

Ron Berger:
I felt best about my classroom when a project was rolling in a way that after kids showed up, if I had walked out of the classroom and come back two hours later, they might not have noticed I was gone because they were testing water or creating blueprints for homes or working on something important with their scientific research where I was almost irrelevant at that point, other than just sort of making sure the equipment was there and things were running because they cared so much. That was what I felt best about my teaching when kids had that ability to just act like adults, almost, even though they were elementary kids, like they were just taking on real work. And I think that not all of the great lesson geeks that I’ve worked with could even picture how possible that is, that there are great lessons and then the best time in school could be no lesson at all, that you have created a structure where kids care enough and have the skills enough to be self-directed for a good portion of their day, doing really important and good work.

Ron Berger:
So in no way, do I regret that passion and that depth that I was doing. And I feel like some of the super sharp teachers whose lessons are so great that I see, they would learn from coming to my classroom and the other classrooms in my school to see, wow, look at the power of kids, just being self-directed personal writing and research for hours. Like that’s crazy. You don’t need to micromanage kids every minute for a great school. However, the point of my conversation with Stacey is it has been not just humbling, but exciting to see people do lessons beautifully because my real obsession in life is around quality.

Ron Berger:
It’s not around a particular pedagogical focus. In the end, the pedagogical approaches we take should be only in service of really high quality. And most of my time, I’ve been obsessed with high quality student work and high quality projects. But in the last five or 10 years, it’s been great to be obsessed with what a high quality lesson can be. Teachers who really have masterfully built experiences with kids, where every kid’s involved and every kid’s being pushed. And I was not as tight in those ways. I was much sloppier and I’d be way better now, having seen so many good models, I just didn’t know the tightness that you could use structures, frameworks, protocols to make your lesson sharper, tighter, and more effective for kids. So I don’t think it’s a one or the other, even in my days, I had to do lessons and I would be way better at now.

Alec Patton:
I’m very conscious that I felt like I was often figuring out for myself what the moves were that led to a beautifully designed lesson. And it wasn’t something that was culturally embedded, where I was teaching. And on the flip side, I would also have conversations with people where they would talk about things like learning minutes and making sure that that hour is completely stuffed with learning with no slack and just thinking, I don’t know any adult who lives their life that way. And I certainly don’t know any creative, successful adult who lives their life that way. And I’ve always, I’ve had it a little bit of a problem with the efficient use of minutes model of teaching because of that. What do you see going forward to help teachers who are really skilled lesson planners develop that student driven inquiry classroom, where you could walk out for two hours and it wouldn’t have any impact. How can you help people on that journey do you think?

Ron Berger:
And that’s been most of my life work is trying to let people understand that their students are way more capable than they believe, to do important, sophisticated, complex work. One of the main ways I’ve done that is collecting models of beautiful student work. But now I’ve also been trying to shoot more and more video and write more and more about what those classrooms are like. And so teachers can visit them in a video if they can’t actually get there to visit them. I would though differentiate when you talk about the kind of tight instruction where not a moment is wasted, there’s a push across the country right now for this super tight instruction, which has been in response to sloppy instruction. So I understand where it came from. That is way too tight for my taste, this idea that every second has to be used well, and you’d never should waste a minute and you should keep moving.

And that’s not at all. What I’m talking about when I’m talking about is there was a sloppiness that was unintentional in some of my lessons that I’ve now learned to be way better about. Things like how to close the lesson. So there really is a synthesis so that kids aren’t walking out of the room unclear, like how do you make sure you build in structures so that things come together at the end of a lesson with a synthesis advising moment where it’s helpful for them and for you. Things like checking for understanding. I used to do that very sloppy approach of sort of do you get it? Like we all get this, can I move on?

And a couple of kids would nod and I’d move on rather than using protocols where I could actually see there’s so many of those protocols where you can look around and kids use their fingers or the thumbs, or they put out a red, green or yellow thing, or you give them an index card and they give you a quick response and you know where you are, the turn and talk protocols, the triad protocols, the kinds of things that I’ve learned from people to use in my teaching now would have made my teaching then in the classroom much stronger.

It’s not about using every second efficiently, but it’s making sure every kid is engaged, that every kid has a voice, that you’re actually getting every kid’s response. And those take a little bit more intentional use of structures and protocols that I just wasn’t aware of back then. Another example of that is now I’ve seen that the teachers that I admire in their lessons have preplanned a lot of powerful questions going into the lesson. So I always felt like I was good at intuitively coming up with provocative questions during the lesson, but that’s assuming a lot that I’m always going to do that. If I really could in planning a lesson, think here are the kind of questions I want to make sure I get to with kids. Then the lesson is going to be much sharper because I have really thoughtful high level questions ready to go at the right times. So there’s a lot of planning techniques and also instructional techniques that have made me a better teacher without becoming obsessive about using every second well.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge, thanks to Ron Berger for doing this interview and to Stacey Caillier for her interview with Ron, which inspired this episode. And we also used a clip from it. You can find a link to Stacey’s interview with Ron in the show notes. Thanks for listening.