SIMON: I feel like everybody in the program after freshman year, they wanted it to be good. Nobody had the mindset that they wanted to mess around.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ALEC PATTON: This is a High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was Simon who was part of the first group of students ever to do Project-Based Learning or PBL at Cheltenham High School. This is the fourth episode in our series about Cheltenham School district’s mission to bring PBL to the high school. A 135-year-old public school just outside Philadelphia.
If you’re just joining us, I recommend that you start with episode 1. You can find a link to the full series in the show notes. In the most recent episode, you heard about the program’s first year when three teachers and 62 9th graders pretty much figured out how to do project based learning together.
Most of this episode is about what those students did when they went to 10th grade and what those teachers did when they got a new group of 9th graders. At the end, we’ll also get into what the administrators, teachers, and students learned from the first 2 and 1/2 years of the program. And that will bring us up to the beginning of 2020 when all these interviews were recorded.
In March 2020, of course everyone wanted to lock down, and it just felt too weird to publish a series where kids and adults talked about being in classrooms together like it was no big deal. So this story has been a long time coming, but it needs a little more to bring it up to date. So in our next episode, the series finale, we’re bringing together a bunch of folks from these episodes to talk about what happened to PBL when the school moved online and what’s happening now. Now back to year two of child enhanced PBL program, which is to say the autumn of 2018. For Simon, coming into sophomore year, it was clear that the 10th grade teachers had learned from what happened the previous year.
SIMON: I wouldn’t say there were more rules or anything like that, but the projects, they were managed more organized. In freshman year we started a lot of projects and we meant to make them go really far and then we would just finish them really fast or not even finish them and then start another project. So the structure in the actual program was definitely there. We finished every project we started and it felt more consistent.
ALEC PATTON: To find out how the teachers managed to do that, I talked to Linsa Sunny who taught 10th grade chemistry. You heard from Linsa in the last episode. She was officially part of the original PBL team along with the 9th grade teachers with the idea that joining the team at the start would give her an extra year to prepare for when the cohort reached 10th grade. Seeing the challenges of that first year definitely gave her pause.
LINSA SUNNY: I never thought this isn’t for me. I just was concerned like, Oh, no. What’s going to happen next year? How are we going to fix this or how are we going to figure this out?
And I would say probably by the summer when I really got to know my team members better is when I just felt OK this is fine. We’ll be OK because I just got so comfortable with Lindy and Jerome very quickly. We clicked very quickly. That week that we spend in the summer, we just figured everything out.
We had the first month of school planned almost. We had this awesome first project to launch with. We had our schedule figured out for four periods. I just felt very comfortable because I could see, Oh, this is the format that we can establish. And I saw structure within the projects that we were planning.
ALEC PATTON: How did you start the year with the kids?
LINSA SUNNY: We did a lot of team building. We didn’t even launch our first project within those first two weeks, we just spent a lot of time getting to know our kids and doing a lot of team building activities with them. We wanted to make sure that we focused on building relationships with our kids first. So we spent time.
We did chocolate river, we did design challenges. We had the kids do empathy interviews with each other. There’s just a lot of focus on, Oh, we want to get to know you. We’re purposely trying to figure you out and we’re purposely trying to appeal to. who you are and what you can become this year.
ALEC PATTON: So day one, kids walk in, what happens? What do you guys do?
LINSA SUNNY: We introduced ourselves first. We went through and talked about our personal lives. We spent maybe like 15 minutes each just talking about ourselves. The kids were actually really engaged that day, I remember.
They were just interested in learning about us. We just had pictures of our families up. We had pictures of our friends pictures of our educational experiences and our personal experiences up on there. We talked a little bit about what we saw at High Tech High, the vision of the program. We told the kids that first day to, Oh, here’s our plan for the year.
ALEC PATTON: As far as the amount of time you spent on just team building, was that the right amount of time?
LINSA SUNNY: I think it was. Because I do remember we had started a mini project first which was based on the empathy interviews that the kids did with each other and they had to make a 1 minute video about a partner that they chose. And I remember towards the end of that little mini project, they were starting to feel, Oh, when are we doing our actual big project? What’s going on? We haven’t done anything. We haven’t done project based learning yet.
And so we were starting to hear that feedback and we really care about the feedback that our kids give us, but it’s not the top priority, I would say. We still knew, OK, they’re expressing their frustration a little bit. But they’re going to see our vision at the end of it. It’s going to make sense to them once we launch the project. And so I do think it was still the right amount of time, even though we heard a little bit of complaints because since that little mini project pointed towards that first big project, the kids started to get it or the kids got it eventually and it just made more sense to them.
ALEC PATTON: Did that mini project work well?
LINSA SUNNY: Yes, it did. It was a great way for us to get to know the kids too because we got to watch a 1 minute video about each kid that another kid made. So we got to see the skill level that they were at and also learn personal information about each child. And it was nice to see how they work together in a big group.
So we had 40 kids that year, and a lot of the times during that first mini project we were just all together with the wall down between our two rooms just all working together during project time. And so that showed us we might need to make changes here, this is working well for these groups of kids, this might not work well for these other group of kids blah blah blah.
ALEC PATTON: The team had learned from that first 9th grade year and they were running a tighter ship which didn’t sit well with all the students according to English Teacher, Lindy Dubbs.
LINDY DUBBS: That 9th grade year was really meaningful to the students and very formative to the students. So then when we got them as 10th graders, they had already decided in their minds a very clear definition of this is what PBL is and we had a lot of feedback from administration and from some parents that like, Oh. The pendulum has swung too far and it needs more structure or more content. So then the 10th grade team was tasked with reeling it in a little bit.
So in our attempts to do that, we got a lot of pushback from the students at first. At one point I remember, a female student standing on her chair and chanting at us, “This isn’t PBL. This isn’t PBL.” So there was a lot of pushback from the kids probably throughout the whole first marking period because they just wanted it to be exactly how it was their 9th grade year. They didn’t want change, they didn’t want it to be a different way, a new way. But they eventually adapted and they eventually got really into the work and did amazing things with us and for us and for themselves.
ALEC PATTON: So what was she objecting to?
LINDY DUBBS: Structure really. Just doing things differently.
ALEC PATTON: But in spite of the pushback, the structures were working. One of my favorite of these structures is the power team. A structure that goes all the way back to what Linsa says was their most successful team building activity, the chocolate river.
LINSA SUNNY: Definitely going outside and doing chocolate river was a definite home run for us and we did the same thing this year too. And again, that was just great because–
ALEC PATTON: What’s chocolate river?
LINSA SUNNY: Chocolate river is when you’re in a team and you have to get from one side of the fake chocolate river to the other side, but you only can walk on marshmallows that you’re holding. And we use like wooden planks for our marshmallows.
ALEC PATTON: Got it.
LINSA SUNNY: We split up into three teams and we were challenged against each other. And those three teams are power teams, we call them. So each of us had our own set of power team kids and they stayed with us their whole year.
ALEC PATTON: So was a power team like– Was the original power team in a class?
LINSA SUNNY: So we have our kids for an extra fourth period seminar. And that year, half of them were pulled away during fourth period for health class every other day. So every other day we would have half the kids during fourth period. And we would lose the other half for them to go to health.
So then we decided, OK, seminar needs to be a special thing that’s every other day and since we had only half the kids then we realized, Oh, we can do so much things in small groups with them. So that seminar became what we called power hour. We just wanted to call it something different from what it was called in 9th grade. And I really, really loved power hour because that gave me a chance to talk to my kids in small groups.
We would even just talk about personal things that were happening to them and that was the first time I got to do that as a science teacher especially because I never get a chance really to do much discussion with kids. So that was awesome for me. And I really enjoyed that. And that group, I grew so close to those kids, they still come by and chitchat with me whenever they can.
ALEC PATTON: So you had two groups of 20 kids and you split each of those groups in three?
LINSA SUNNY: Yeah.
ALEC PATTON: So you had a total of–
LINSA SUNNY: It was either six or seven.
ALEC PATTON: You had a total of 14 kids who are in your power group but only 6 or 7 at one time?
LINSA SUNNY: Right. And if we did like any big group activities, we would try to split them up in 3 as much as possible so then they were in smaller groups for us.
ALEC PATTON: The power teams helped to build the community, but what really built up the community was the project, the one that had Linsa so excited when the team planned it in the summer.
LINSA SUNNY: Our first project was actually the invisible Americans project. Back then it was called the mirror project. So the mirror project, the two products that the kids have to make were essentially when you put them together, they are supposed to form a mirror. The kids made a mask and a frame. So the mask would sit inside the frame and look like a mirror that’s reflecting back at you and they all focused on a disenfranchised group in America.
Around the frame, that was more the social studies piece. The kids had statements and some research about their disenfranchised groups and on their mask, they included symbolism that they had taken from their poems that they wrote in English and they had made the mass with me in chemistry class. And we also made mirrors in chemistry class too as a chemical reaction. We took glass and formed mirrors from it.
ALEC PATTON: Oh, cool.
LINSA SUNNY: It was cool stuff. And some of the products came out so beautiful. They’re still hanging up in my classroom. I’m looking at them as I’m talking to you.
ALEC PATTON: If you’d drawn up a list of, I think these kids are going to do really well at the mirror project, that these kids aren’t going to make anything that impressive, did the way it play out roughly match your expectations or were there kids who really surprised you?
LINSA SUNNY: Oh, that’s a great question. There were kids that really surprised me actually because we were still of course getting to know them, but also even in their process, it was just very interesting to see, Oh. Your product started off looking not that great, but your end product now I see the vision that you were going for. Or it might have been, Oh. Now I see you tried it a second time and now you got it to where it needs to be.
Since I am the science teacher in this too, I didn’t get to see a lot of the background research that they had done too. So it wasn’t until the final product that I really saw who the focus was for each of these kids or which group of Americans was the focus of. And so there were a lot of kids, actually that surprised me. I would say maybe five or six that I at first would have thought, Oh, no. This isn’t going anywhere, but they just came out and it was such professional looking product.
ALEC PATTON: Why do you think that was?
LINSA SUNNY: I think it’s that artistic piece maybe. I think the first thing that you see is, Oh. The visual appeal of it and this gave them an opportunity to take what they learned and just make it look really good. And even if somebody is not a superstar in class, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have a little special talent to express themselves or to share something that they learned in such a beautiful way. And I think that beauty of the products is what shocked me.
ALEC PATTON: How did that beauty come about?
LINSA SUNNY: Well, I’m assuming a little bit, but I think I’m correct. They had this urge or this drive in the beginning to get where they wanted to be at the end. And so they just kept pushing themselves and some of the kids are just very detailed in their work and so they knew what they wanted and they just stuck to it and just kept going. One girl in particular, she missed the due date, but she just kept going and kept finishing her work because she was really passionate and she wanted it to look beautiful. I didn’t penalize her actually. She was in my group. I didn’t penalized her for handing in late because she was working on it the whole time because she just wanted it to be absolutely perfect.
ALEC PATTON: After the project, the kids evaluated their own work and discussed it in a one on one meeting with their power team teacher. And like anything, reflection was a skill that took time to develop.
LINSA SUNNY: Yeah. At first it was just definitely things just like, Oh, I could have done better and that was it or it could have just been like, Oh. I messed up cutting here. It was just very like superficial feedback that we were getting. But I’m so glad that we did it at the beginning because by the time it came to presentation and learning at the end of the year, they were going very deep into their growth and they had learned what we expected for their reflections.
ALEC PATTON: Those Presentations of Learning or POLs were the big year end event for the PBL team.
LINSA SUNNY: Everything just culminated to those presentations because we had all these artifacts from their projects. They could use pictures, they could use videos and we just had all these files saved on Google Drive and on Google Photos. And the kids just put together presentations. They had to work on professional speaking.
Jerome had his kids dress up professionally to do theirs. And I just loved hearing from each kid and just hearing them talk about their shortcomings, their successes and then we got to talk about each kid to within the small group. So after each kid spoke and presented, us as a group sat and gave them feedback on not just their presentation but how we think their year went based on our observations.
And it was just a really good way for me to give kids encouragement and just give them shout outs for what they accomplished in the year. Sometimes it even got emotional. It was just really, it was really awesome.
ALEC PATTON: So that’s what happened in 10th grade. What about the new 9th grade team? Here’s what Simon saw observing the new freshman from his perspective as an upperclassmen.
SIMON: I’ve seen the freshmen this year and the freshman last year and they’re doing a lot better because the three teachers they know exactly how to handle freshmen now. I asked 9th grade Social Studies Teacher, Mike [INAUDIBLE], what changed after that first year. Here’s what he told me.
MIKE: So by the second year, they had more of a prep time available and that’s when we could at least get started building ahead. The common prep helped a lot. Oh, and back to that. How do we survive? By the spring, we had in that professional habits structure.
ALEC PATTON: Just to clarify, Mike’s talking about the spring of the very first year of PBL. That’s when the 9th grade team implemented the professional habits then they kept them for a year or two. We went in depth on the professional habits on the previous episode. But for now here are a couple of examples from Mike.
MIKE: Cell phones away, sitting at your desk, eyes on the speaker. All those basic school stuff that we all know is important to have. And interestingly enough with that, the kids responded to it well. Meaning, they knew by then that’s what they needed.
ALEC PATTON: And there’s something else that changed after the first year of PBL. English Teacher Brian Smith pointed this out to me. After the first year, they had models of student work to show to the new students.
BRIAN SMITH: You start to have some examples of work that are pretty high quality and you only can go upward at that point. Because the next class wants to do better than the previous class and your models and examples are more impressive. So when students see work that their previous peers have done, they think, a, wow. This can be done and then b, that little competitive edge kicks in where they think let’s make it even better.
ALEC PATTON: When we recorded these interviews at the end of 2019, Cheltenham was in the third year of its PBL program. By then it had extended down to middle school, so it ran from 7th to 11th grade. The following year they would add 12th grade. And at any point during that time, Cheltenham could have said, well, that was worth a shot, but it’s not getting the results we want and pulled the plug on this crazy experiment.
So I was curious to know why they hadn’t. Don’t get me wrong. I think this program is awesome, but PBL programs as ambitious as Cheltenham are still unusual in public education. So it’s surprising it’s still here. So back in 2019, I asked the people in charge of the district how they could tell the program was working. Here’s what the Director of Secondary Education, Charlene Collins told me she sees in the students who’ve been through the PBL program.
CHARLENE COLLINS: I definitely see them as different people than I saw them as freshmen just in terms of their ability to advocate and speak up and communicate and just jump right in and navigate different situations and very independently of their learning space. I’ve seen that growth in them and I was like, I’m pleasantly surprised. I’m very happy to see them developing that way. I can’t say our kids in our traditional program get there. So for me that was huge.
ALEC PATTON: And what about Dr. Wagner Marseille, the superintendent. We haven’t heard from him since episode 1 when he created this whole experiment with Colin McCarthy. Here’s what he had to say when I asked him how he could tell the experiment was working.
DR. WAGNER MARSEILLE: Let me share this. Though we can’t quantify every experience that happens in PBL, we can say that the disparities that normally exist between academic achievement, gaps, discipline, referrals, attendance, when we speak to or look at the data with students who are in PBL and oftentimes those students who have not found success in school, they’ve had the highest GPA they’ve ever had. They have the highest attendance that they’ve ever had.
The discipline referrals for students who are in project based learning compared to their peers who are not are almost non-existent with respect to that. And I want to be clear about discipline referrals in the sense that I’m not talking about the tatties I’m talking about those serious violations that sometimes you think about the aggressiveness, the fighting, the inappropriate language. Those things don’t exist.
And part of that for me is about project based learning has offered an opportunity where students feel connected to what is happening in their school. If there is no connection, there is no relationship. You’re coming because you have to, you’re told to, you’re not finding success. You’re looking at peers who are, you become extremely resentful of that process. You don’t feel like you’re connected, you don’t think your school believes in you.
So I’m going to do what I do best, and oftentimes that is be disruptive and get attention from that. We’re not seeing that. And I think that has helped to bridge some of those equity disparities that we have seen with regards to academic achievement, with regards to discipline. And though we try to find ways to measure engagement in a meaningful way, when you ask students in PBL, they answer differently about their learning experience versus students who are taking a much more traditional route.
ALEC PATTON: And you know how our previous episode was about that crazy first year of the program. Here’s what 9th grade social studies teacher Mike Quads told me about those kids once they got to 11th grade.
MIKE: Whenever you see any of them in the hallway now that we’ve been there for three years and our first 9th graders are now 11th graders, there’s a bond. There is a bond and there’s smiles and there’s hugs and there’s sometimes a laugh like, remember when such and such did this and the whole meeting blew up. So it was a special year.
ALEC PATTON: Simon, of course, is one of those kids. And he told me a story that sums it all up.
SIMON: Over the summer pretty much I did a course at Drexel and it was in industrial design, week long course where we designed and built things. And my mom told me, while I was doing it. She was like, this is going to be really hard. They say it’s an intensive course.
But pretty much when I got there, it seemed really easy to me because the teachers were guiding us through it and I already knew a lot of the things and since then PBL we have to learn almost double as hard because we’re learning with the teachers, I just went through it and just worked hard and it was like [INAUDIBLE]. I learned a lot but also it showed me how PBL is great.
ALEC PATTON: To wrap up the series, here’s some advice from Cheltenham if you’re thinking of trying this in your district. First, here’s Superintendent Dr. Marseille.
DR. WAGNER MARSEILLE: You have to be in love with the methodology and the work and the experience. If it is just another check off, with all due respect to the superintendency, I’m sitting in the superintendency, but if it is just, I accomplished this during my tenure as a way to think about the next gig, that’s not authentic. People are going to see that.
So I think there has to be a love. A love for the abundant potential of what a classroom could look like that meets the needs of every single learner. PBL creates that atmosphere. I’m sure there are others. Second, put your money where your mouth is. You may not have a generous kickstart donation from the Avalon Foundation like we did, but this administrative team set aside dollars and set aside resources specifically to support that work. Avalon Foundation just hyper accelerated the work for us.
Third, sometimes moving slow gets a better outcome. I think we were riddled with challenges as we grew very fast and trying to figure out, how do we put the resources in place to support the needs of all the teachers who are really excited about this, who are also fearful, and who need that type of space. So Avalon foundation provided the opportunity for teachers to have those resources. If it wasn’t for that, we’d be in a very different position because we couldn’t cater to those professional development needs that teachers want inside the classroom.
ALEC PATTON: Was that scary putting the money into this?
DR. WAGNER MARSEILLE: No. It wasn’t scary at all. What’s scary was, where do I find more money? As you grow and you grow and you’re finding success, that is the scary part. Investing in something that you really believe in and you have a core group of people who believe in it and subsequently you have a core group of teachers who believe in it as well, I said, it’s a win-win in terms of the experience.
ALEC PATTON: Now, here’s the advice that Linsa, the 10th grade chemistry teacher would give to her past self.
LINSA SUNNY: I think I would tell myself to not get so worked up I think about deadlines and about the minute school parts. I used to worry a little bit about, Oh. I didn’t create this and the two week time frame or Oh, man. This project is taking us 12 weeks when it should have just took 10. And I would just tell myself, you need to just relax more everything’s going to be fine and great. We’re going to enjoy this year as much as we can.
And I think another thing too that we’re definitely addressing this year is focusing more on challenging those kids who are at the honors level because last year I know personally, for me, I put that a little bit on the back burner with the Honors requirement for chemistry. And it was just like an add in. Like, Oh. We’re doing, we’re all making a giant periodic table. So honors kids, you’re making two pieces of it instead of one. I wish I could go back and spend more time developing the Honors curriculum a little bit more.
ALEC PATTON: I just want to point out that Linsa’s two pieces of advice to herself are to relax more and to do more work which is a contradiction, but it’s also what most teachers tell themselves they’re going to do every year. On a similar note, here’s 9th grade English Teacher Brian Smith.
BRIAN SMITH: It would just be, you got this because I think I’m really glad with the choice I made to join this team even though in my 18 years of teaching, the past three years have been the most exhausting, the most time consuming. And this job has consumed my life more than it ever has in my previous years of teaching. These past three years have also been the most rewarding. Think about this all the time now, night and day. So it’s cool to live for a cause.
ALEC PATTON: We’re going to close with the two students I spoke to, Kayla and Simon.
KAYLA: My advice would be, I feel like, it’s not– I want to say more important, but it’s really important to make a relationship with your students instead of just teaching. With PBL now, I can say that I don’t have a favorite teacher in PBL because I love them so much. They’re all great to me and I have a really good relationship with every single PBL teacher.
So I feel like it’s better to be in an environment where everyone is in a relationship with everyone and a better community. So really trying to make a relationship with your students instead of just trying to teach them. So it’s my advice.
SIMON: Yeah. I honestly don’t know what I would say except for definitely talk to other PBL teachers because they do a really good job.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ALEC PATTON: High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Hershel. You can find a link to the full Cheltenham PBL experiment series in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
TAGS: