Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and this episode is a live recording of a deeper learning Den Talk, hosted by Michelle Pledger, with guests Suzie Boss and Ken Kay. Suzie and Ken have both done way more in education than I can get into here, but most recently they co-authored the book Redefining Student Success: Building a New Vision to Transform Leading Teaching and Learning. And that’s what they’re talking about in this episode. With that, let’s get into it.
Michelle Pledger:
We’re going to jump right in because we have two extraordinary humans here with us. We have Ken Kay, who’s an education provocateur. You figure out what that means, friends. He has worked almost two decades as an education provocateur promoting a new model of K-12 education for the 21st century. So you’re going to get to hear more about that.
And we have the incredible Suzie Boss. She’s an author, consultant, a coach. She helped me with the writing piece that I had a few years back, just an incredible human and they co-wrote a book called Redefining Student Success: Building a New Vision to Transform Leading, Teaching and Learning. And so for this Den, I’m actually going to ask them a few questions about the book and then we’ll turn it over to the audience for questions. Sound good?
All right. Let’s do it. Okay. So Ken, I’m actually going to start with you. Wait, let’s give them a warm round of applause. Yeah. Come on, friends. I know, it’s still morning. Some of y’all were partying last night. I’ve almost lost my voice. I totally get it. So Ken, you started the conversation about 21st century learning more than 20 years ago. What motivated you to want to write this book now in this moment?
Ken Kay:
So I had written a previous book about six, seven years ago with Valerie Greenhill, and we took the 21st century conversation up to the four Cs, which I think we all know what they are. And the four Cs ended up not really being enough enough. And so the starting point from the book was what beyond the four Cs was really necessary to help people change. And so the work we had done the last six, seven years was around a portrait of a graduate, which was to help local communities feel like we weren’t imposing the four Cs on them, but they could start a conversation with the four Cs and come to their own closure.
And so the portrait of a graduate, it seemed to me, needed to be captured. And it’s the starting point for the book, but there’s one other observation, and that is that what we felt people did with the four Cs was often was take the easy way out. You’re talking about critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity. Well, we’ll take the four Cs and we’ll just build them into state standards, right? We’re going to shove a little collaboration or a little communication or a little critical thinking into the state standards. It doesn’t give you the mental image of a fundamentally changed system.
And so what Suzie and I have been able to do is say, and it’s sort of internally inconsistent, which is with your community, you’ve got to come up with a portrait of a graduate that are the competencies that you really value for your students. But in order to explain the real vitality of that, we chose three competencies in the book, self-direction, creative problem solving, and civic engagement, that I think better than the four Cs, create a mental image that people have in their mind of what is the future of education. It’s that every kid is going to be a creative problem solver, a self-directed creative problem solver, and a civically engaged person.
And then we decided to go around the country, we did 250 interviews, to tell the story of what a self-directed problem solver, what the best districts, the best schools in the country currently are doing to model self-directed, creative problem solving and civic engagement. And that’s a mental image that if people have that in their head, they actually know where they want their system to head. So that was the reason for the book.
Michelle Pledger:
That’s so true. And in the book, if y’all haven’t had a chance to read it, it will be on sale right after this Den, what I love about it is that there are so many concrete examples from all of these people that you interviewed and you observed the work that they were doing that people can actually go do in their own context. All right, Suzie, we’re coming to you, sis. Okay. So as a longtime PBL advocate, you’ve kept your focus close to the classroom. Why did you want to join Ken in a project about leadership?
Suzie Boss:
Right, good question. So Ken approached me. This book was his idea. I’ve written other books, but he approached me about this one, and we’ve known each other for a number of years. He wrote a foreword for me on a previous book. And Ken is a leadership guy. He’s been working with school leaders and state superintendents of education, and I’ve been working with teachers primarily.
And so I thought, gosh, I don’t know if I’m the right match for a book on leadership. But then I thought about all the teachers I’ve worked with in multiple different contexts and countries. And over and over again, I’ve seen a group of really fired up teachers get off to a great start around project-based learning or some other methodology that really has potential to transform everything for their students. And if there’s a change at the top and if the new leadership doesn’t get what they’re up to or if there’s pushback from parents because they don’t know “What are you doing with my kids? Why are my kids doing this?” It can just crumble. The best intentions and the best hard work can just become, “Oh yeah, we tried that. That was a pilot that didn’t work.”
And the other thing I’ll say that as a writer, I like to go into a book project with questions. Some people will write about things that they know really well and I respect that. But for me, a really good book project is a chance to investigate and interrogate some questions. And I think there were some good questions here for us to explore together. And so I said yes, and then I will just-
Ken Kay:
Thank God.
Suzie Boss:
At a great coverage. But I will just add one footnote. I said, yes, in maybe late 2019, we were going to get this kicked off. Ken was transitioning and I was wrapping some things off. We thought we’ll get started in early 2020. Anybody know what happened in early 2020? Right? So all the field work we were going to do turned into 200 and some Zoom conversations. So this conference, first time Ken and I have seen each other since 2019 in person.
Michelle Pledger:
Wow.
Suzie Boss:
So it’s been a wild ride.
Ken Kay:
We’ve written the whole book on Zoom.
Michelle Pledger:
On Zoom? Well, we’re happy that we can reunite the two of you here on our Den stage. So can you tell us while you were writing the book, other than the unexpected thing that you just shared, that it ended up being all on Zoom, was there anything else that just, like you said, you go into things just trying to investigate and ask questions. Was there something surprising or unexpected that happened?
Ken Kay:
Well, actually, we obviously plotted some of the parts of the book ahead of time that we wanted to write about. But one part of the book that we didn’t, that just came up through the interviews was this notion of a green light culture. That was not a term that we came up with. It was a term our interviewees came up with. So it happened something like this. There was an incredible example of a project-based learning in Colorado where this sixth grade teacher was asked by one of her students what they were going to do about a lake that was dying in their community.
And she rallied all the other science teachers in the sixth grade, and they took 225 students down to the lake. They teamed with the city to do the testing around the lake, come up with the answers as what happened to the lake and then solutions to it, working with the city council.
And we asked her, “How do you know that you could do this?” And she said, “My principal had given us the green light for work like this.” And then we interviewed the principal and we said, “You gave this teacher the green light for this very brave and huge work. Did you do it intentionally?” “Absolutely.” “Well, how did you know that you could give the green light?” And said, “My superintendent gave me the green light.” And so when we went back over all our notes, it turns out eight, 10 of people said, “I knew I had a green light or I had given a green light.” And so this notion of, do you as teacher have a green light to an experiment and innovate? If so, about what? As a leader, are you giving a green light to an experiment and innovate? If so, about what? That was a surprise to us that sort of grew up out of the book that we really didn’t have any notion of before we started.
Suzie Boss:
And I think our hope, and some of the examples we heard as the book came together, the goal of course is for students to feel like they’ve got that green light. With this Colorado example was a perfect example of a student who couldn’t walk his dog where he liked to walk his dog because the lake was all blocked off and instead of just being sad about it or upset, he went to his teacher and said, “Hey, what’s going on here? Can we do something about it?” So we want students to have that agency. We have lots of different words for that, but I think green light is a pretty good one for students to feel like they’ve got the go sign to ask interesting questions, and that learning is going to be connected to that. It’s going to emerge from that.
Michelle Pledger:
I mean, how many of you out there wish you had a green light culture where you work, where you can just try some things and take some risks and fail forward? Thank you for that. So green light culture is a good takeaway. Now, you mentioned field trips in the book. Can you tell us about a memorable field trip that you took?
Suzie Boss:
Oh gosh. So field trips are what we call the concrete examples of the creative problem solving, engaged students, engaged citizens that we hope to see everywhere, for every student, not just for some kids, not just in some places, but we want all students to experience this. And so we have, I don’t know, 20 something, I don’t remember counting them, but a couple dozen of these really concrete examples.
And one of them that stood out for me, particularly as we’ve watched critical race theory become a big political hotbed, and that the goal of teaching about citizenship somehow becoming a loaded conversation for… I have a lot of social studies teacher friends who are really struggling right now, and how do I teach the way that I really want to teach? So I thought one example in Nyack, New York, this was a district that as a whole district, had developed a portrait of a graduate.
So they had that kind of typical four Cs, but also compassion and citizenship as part of their vision of what they want every student in the district to be able to demonstrate, to be able to live those values by the time they complete their education. So a middle school teacher knew that this was the big vision, and he did that great backwards design move of thinking, well, how do we get our students ready by middle school to what’s the kind of developmentally appropriate thing for them to be able to do by eighth grade? And he started an eighth grade capstone project around citizenship, where the goal was not to learn about citizenship in the abstract, but to really study a problem that you care about, that you can get your hands around locally. It may connect to something regional, national, global, but you want to be able to engage locally with this issue and come up with an action plan.
So he came up with this idea for the eighth grade capstone, and he got a lot of teachers saying, “Oh, I don’t know, full plate, full curriculum, got our unit plans. I don’t know where this is going to fit in.” So the prototype year was around kids who wanted to do it, we’re going to create time and space for you to do this and some mentoring from teachers who were willing to help you in this work. It wasn’t mandatory the first time, but the principal was really wise in doing a share your learning event, to borrow a phrase from here, and had an exhibition for students to show the other kids, the younger kids in their school what they had done in their capstone projects. So typical exhibition style, set up in the auditorium. And the principal asked to have all the exhibits left up because after school, he walked the entire eighth grade faculty through those exhibits and said, “What do you notice? What’s the evidence of learning that you see here?”
And so guess what’s happening? The math teacher is saying, “Oh my gosh, they’re doing data analytics for this project about racial profiling in the police system, and someone else is noticing the science content over here in social studies.” So the teachers get really excited and embrace this and say, “This has got to become part of the core. We’re going to do this in every class, where we want some time over the summer to spend on professional development. How do we scaffold this? How do we support students?” So happens reaches every student in now. So that one for me just really resonated.
Michelle Pledger:
Yeah, Ken, I do want to get your answer, but this is such a great example and we’ve seen that happen with Mary and I work with some schools around here where you don’t need the whole school to want to do something like a project-based learning exhibition. We worked with one school, and there was just one teacher. And when that teacher had that exhibition, did the same thing, invited the rest of the teachers to come and see that, they see how engaged the students are, they’re like, “I want to do that.” And then the next year, the entire school is putting on an exhibition, right? So we don’t need to have everybody, right? If you just start with one or two colleagues that are ready to do something different, I’m seeing some head nodding. Maybe y’all are doing that in your context, but that’s all it takes. Ken, what about you for field trips?
Ken Kay:
Well, there’s several, but there’s this issue of civic engagement. The book has come out, it was written and is coming out in a time where we’re all scratching our heads about where’s the country going to go and how are we going to restate the case for the importance of having our kids engaged civically? And one of the stories really brought this home to me because it’s in a context, you wouldn’t expect it.
So this district has a civic engagement requirement in the first grade, and the kids are supposed to get involved, but in a way that is meaningful to them. So the faculty asked them, “What is it that you want to work on to give back to your school?” And the answer back was, “We really want to reform orientation for kindergartners.” And they go say, “You what? Why?” He says, “Well, because your orientation last year was so scary, we want to redo orientation so that the kids coming into the school aren’t as scared as we were.”
Literally. And so the kids actually rewrote, wrote an orientation book for kids and taught the orientation session from the premise of “This isn’t as scary as the adults would have you believe, and we can explain to you why you shouldn’t be so scared coming into this school.”
So it’s awesome from so many perspectives from a self-direction perspective, but it is an example of civic engagement. What can I do to give back to my community. And I think we have such a polarized sense of civic engagement in the country right now that to go back particularly in the early years and explain to people, what does giving back to your community look like? How do you empathize a problem you had? It’s such a great touching example. How do you empathize around a problem you have and try to make it better for the next generation of kids?
So I think we shared with you that was one of our goosebumps stories. Maybe I should just go ahead and explain it, which is that as Suzie and I wrote, we’d come up with examples like this and one of us would get goosebumps and we’d text the other, “I got a goosebump story to tell you.” And so we’d call and tell the other one, and there’s several more if you want to hear them. But this was one of them. When we heard the story, we just went, “Holy mackerel. What a eye-opening example of the possibilities.”
Michelle Pledger:
Awesome. Do you want to share your goosebump story?
Suzie Boss:
Oh gosh. Let me think about that for a minute. Just as Ken said, there were a lot. There were a lot.
Michelle Pledger:
No problem. You think about it, we’re going to turn it over to Q&A in a second, but I did want to hear each of your favorite quote from the book that you wrote.
Suzie Boss:
I guess I will share one from the example I just shared of the middle school principal. I think David Johnson is his name in Nyack, New York. And he said, “Our young people don’t turn into citizens when they’re 18. They’re citizens right now.” So that really stuck with me.
Ken Kay:
Well, I have two. So one is my grandson. He made it into the book, and there’s a field trip involving a class around… They’re doing shark tank for proposals to improve a 501(c)(3) in their community. And I interviewed him about the… We interviewed the teachers, we interviewed the principal, and then I decided to call him back. This was like two years later. I said to him, “How did you feel about that teaching experience?” He says, “They made me stay in my lane, but within that lane, they gave me a lot of freedom,” which I thought was really an interesting observation about how he looked back at what was a good teaching experience for him.
The other quote though that I wanted to bring up at a leadership level was a quote from a school board. And they had hired a new superintendent who was a numbers person, out of the local regional support agency, and he was known as a numbers guy.
And they hired him because they wanted to improve numerical performance of their district. They wanted all the statistics to go up. And the guy said to them, “I’m going to do a six-month listening tour of the district and then I’m going to come back to you.” And he said to him, “Look, I know you hired me as a numbers guy, but we’re at a fork in the road now because I’m about to tell ask you as a district, what kind of a superintendent you want me to be? Do you really want me to be the numbers guy that you hired? Or as I listen to your district for six months, they’re really looking for something bigger, more important, which is how do we identify the goals other than state testing that matter for your students and your kids?”
And the quote back from the school board was, “We want you to do something bigger than numbers.” And they, as a school board, they have stopped getting numerical reporting from him on test results and asked him every month, every quarter to give them the results on the things that really matter.
And so that’s sort of the book. It was really an attempt to help educators really develop a vision that takes them away from test taking to some bigger vision. And when you find a school board or a leader that sort of sees that moment, seizes that opportunity, it’s very powerful. And that’s got to happen over and over and over again. That’s got to be replicated thousands of times over before we’re really going to get education to look like High Tech High.
Suzie Boss:
And just to follow on that, maybe one of my goosebump moments was talking with one of these bold leaders who had a revelation. I won’t go into the whole backstory, but he had a revelation that all the wonderful work his district had been doing to knock out great test scores after great test score report cards wasn’t really adding up to a whole lot. He had a student really challenge him about what’s the point of all this? And he had one of those moments and started digging in with his district on where is it we’re going?
And they arrived at this goal of more authentic learning, really investigated what does it mean to have authentic learning experiences for our students? How do we teach to that? And he went to every… It’s not a huge district, but big enough. He went to every single teacher and said, “Look, I’m going to double professional development time because there’s a lot we’ve got to learn together to figure this out. And if our state test scores drop, I’ve got your back. That’s on me. That’s not your fault.”
And just thought, wow, that gave me goosebumps. That’s the kind of leadership, if you’re going to lead for transformation, you’ve got to be the one saying, “I’m going to open the doors and I’m also going to have your backs as you go through these doors.”
Michelle Pledger:
And both of those goosebumps circle back to that green light culture from the school board, right, from superintendents. All right. So we are going to turn it over to you. Alec is going to be coming around with the mic for Q&A.
Speaker 5:
Thank you so much for all of your words of wisdom. I have a question in regards to kind of that green light, which we’re all talk about with green light. What advice do you have for teachers, instructional leaders, instructional coaches to kind of assist with if that green light is not necessarily there, or I don’t know if I’m wording that correctly.
We are in a district where a lot of our summative evaluations are tied into testing scores. And so we talk about students having that environment, where it’s okay to fail. But then with teachers it’s kind of like it’s tied into their evaluations. So we have a lot of teachers that are scared to go outside of the rigid resources that they’re given to do project-based learning or different things like that. So do you have any advice for those teachers that don’t necessarily have that control and trying to stay within their [inaudible 00:23:41] of control basically?
Ken Kay:
Yeah, that’s a great question. First, let me backtrack to say most schools, unlike here, so we all love coming back to High Tech High because it’s sort of structured more the way we want it structured. So I don’t know exactly what your district is like, but most districts in the country are in this schizophrenic bifurcated moment in which they still are driven by state test scores.
And that’s not going to change in most places for the foreseeable future, although Covid may push us toward that… is pushing us toward that more faster than we might have suspected. But the good districts that really want to take on transformation have to have this schizophrenic view, which is the test scores aren’t going away immediately. And within that, we’ve got to begin this transformation process. So we are actually going to value things like creative problem solving and self-direction and collaboration, even though that’s not on the state test.
And we’re going to have to do both. We’re going to have to continue to… so I think you’re pointing at that tension, but I don’t think it’s going to… for most districts, we’re going to live in a world in which both are going on at the same time. The great districts in this country are taking on transformation and change, even though they still are in a state system that requires tests. And school boards, more and more, are being open to this other set of criteria in addition to the testing.
So I needed to say that upfront because I think the premise that state testing is going away or that you can ignore it is sort of a false premise for the moment. So having said that though, there are plenty of good transformative leaders that want transformation and change to take place even in that climate.
So the question I think I’ll try to work it both ways. The question for teachers to ask is, and we’ll talk about this for ease of sake purposes, let’s talk about project-based learning because it’s the easiest, most tangible tactic that we all want is, are we really free to engage in project-based learning and does our principal have our back? Does our superintendent have our back? When we leave a conference like this and we see what we see, are we going to have the kind of support?
So I do think it’s fair, within your department, within your school, to ask the question, and this is a perfect question to ask when you get back, do we have a culture that will support project-based learning here? And are we going at this on our own as individual teachers, or are we going to get the support of our department and the support of our principal for nurturing a climate of project-based learning?
And I think over the last two years, the climate’s changing, continuing to change to be more supportive of it. But I think it’s a reasonable question for you to bring up. And I’ve done some facilitating of this question since the book came out with groups of teachers and their principal and their superintendent at the table together, and they’re having very candid conversations about do we have a green light culture to experiment and innovate? And if so, around what? And then the question is, do the teachers feel… Do the principal and the superintendent feel they’re giving the green light? Do the teachers feel they’re hearing it or receiving the green light? And I think that conversation, do we have the green light to experiment around PBL or something else, is a really good conversation for you to have to sort of say, “I’m coming back wanting to do PBL, but I also want to know that you have my back when I do it.”
Suzie Boss:
Yeah, I think I feel your pain. And I have been in that conversation with many schools I’ve worked with and the… it’s this Hobson’s choice, we want to do this, but we’re going to be held accountable to that. And so can you carve out spaces as an interim step? Can we allow for a month of PBL per semester or at least one really intense interdisciplinary project experience in addition to more traditional teaching the rest of the time?
Not many schools are set up for wall to wall project-based learning like you see here. So I think a lot of schools are having to create these both end systems where you’re doing some things in a more traditional way, but where the project opportunities then become those chances to really go deep. There’s content we really want to go deep in. We’re going to have to do the coverage thing, and we’ll just do that because that’s where we’re at and it’s expected.
That’s the system we’re living in right now, but we really want to go deep in particular areas and this project we have in mind for this semester and next semester, that’s the chance where we’re going to go toward transfer application and really take it deep.
And we know that those experiences are the ones that students are going to remember, not just for the test, but beyond. They’re going to be able to use that in new situations and in new circumstances. So it’s tough. And I think another thing I’d encourage your school leadership to do is read our book together as a book study and talk about it. It gives them lots of examples of how have other districts gone about this. There are plenty of other books for that conversation too, but at least get them talking about it and understanding the difficulty it puts teachers in of wanting to do two things at the same time. That’s just a lot of pressure on top of everything else that teachers are feeling right now. So I’m got my fingers crossed for you that things move forward.
Speaker X:
Questions?
Speaker 7:
Ken, you mentioned that an easy way out is to take some of these four Cs and these directives and make them into competencies. What is your recommendation of assessment in that way? I mean, my school changes these things into competencies we use in an advisory program or these other soft skills. Is there’s something limiting in that fact that we’re like, we’re giving them a grade on these strategies, or should it just be part of your philosophy to use to enrich the content?
Ken Kay:
I think what I meant to say was that my concern was that people would think that it’s enough to just include a little collaboration in your state content. I think that what that meant to them was that they would teach the state curriculum, but with some collaboration mixed in.
What I think we advocate in the book, and this will link back to your question, is no, you really actually have to have a deep interactive, engaged project of creative problem solving, not a little piece of collaboration inside a content curriculum. Where that will ultimately head us, I think, is much more interdisciplinary work in which the traditional boundaries of subjects won’t be the structure of school, that the structure of school is going to become big challenges that kids can work on and use math and use science and use English and communication skills in the context of solving that problem.
I don’t think it’s enough to just sort of say, “Well, it’s nice that you’re in that problem, but we’re not going to assess you on it.” I don’t agree with that. I think that the more intentional schools can be about telling students what the purpose of the work is… You’re actually engaged in this project to become a better problem solver. You’re engaged in this project to become a better communicator. You’re enraged in this project to be more self-directed, and we’re going to give you feedback. In fact, we’re going to ask you to self-assess on those skills.
So you have a big project and how did you think you did on self-direction and self-management? How do you think you did on communications and collaboration and problem solving skills? So I think ultimately, the idea that we shove those aside and just treat them as… well, and I think a lot of schools are doing this by the way, well, that project by its nature made you collaborate, but it doesn’t ask the student to actually think about, did I improve my collaboration skills and how could I get better at it?
I’m not a big fan of grades, but I do think that a lot of the schools and districts we’ve worked with over time have incorporated the elements of the portrait of a graduate into their assessment system, so the kids are actually getting feedback on, and their parents are getting feedback on their ability to communicate on their self-direction, on their collaboration skills. I think that feedback and assessment’s important. I don’t think assessment’s a dirty word. I think we’re assessing the wrong things.
Speaker 8:
Thank you. So I’m very curious about this notion of showing versus telling. I think design challenges have been a really good example of creating visibility as to how these skills help problem solving. And I just wanted to get a sense of other opportunities to show folks how the different inputs that schools organize around result in different students’ ability to solve problems in groups.
Suzie Boss:
We saw one really nice example of a school that has really embraced invention as something they want students to understand as a process that they can learn. And then it creates really tangible outputs, as you said. So the input is a whole strategy around teaching the process of innovation invention. And then the outputs are things that are, kids are getting patented in some cases.
There was one example in the book of students who were motivated to come up with something in response to a drunk driving incident in their community that led to the death of one of their classmates. And so they went through the whole invention and design process and came up with a bracelet, like a blood alcohol content in which they got patented. But the teacher who went through that process with them was so… And it was a process from Lemelson-MIT that she learned from, she got coached on. Now she has brought that everything she’s learned to the entire school.
So it’s not just now one group of kids who went through this wonderful experience. Like you sometimes see with design challenges, “Oh, we had a team of kids who learned all about design thinking because they did this challenge.” No, now they’ve got everybody in the school learning what it means to be an inventor. If you want to learn more about this, you can go deeper. But at least everybody’s getting a taste of that and learning that there is a process. It’s not some miracle that happens because a light bulb goes on like in a cartoon strip, but you actually go through a process of figuring out what the problem is and how to solve it.
So I think there are lots of examples like that where a really, a powerful idea can spread, as you said, as kind of an input. We saw similar things around how geography’s being taught with some great resources from National Geography’s education outreach around geo literacy and mapping people and places together and understanding problems that way in terms of how…
But I think the book is also full of resources like this. If you get excited thinking about every kid in your school being an inventor or understanding place-based education, we point you to some resources that are for teachers to get into the weeds with some of these strategies because think we need lots of those. There’s not one… I guess one other message we have is there’s just not one formula, no one size fits all, but there are some really promising practices out there and great accessible resources that we just want people to be aware of.
Ken Kay:
One of the continuums I think in the book is are we asking kids to solve problems that we’re interested in or are we asking kids to solve problems that they’re interested in? And I think you’ll find both of those around the goosebump moments are the moments in which the kids get to decide what the problem is, and the nuance…
I mean, going back to my earlier example, no teacher ever would’ve proposed a reformation of orientation for kindergarten kids. There wasn’t one adult in that school that would’ve recommended that as a civic engagement process. And it turns out the kids had a powerful observation. So our ability to… I don’t know how our time is going, but I’ll tell another goosebump story.
This was a classroom and I got to interview the kids at the end of the day, these were middle school kids and the teacher was teaching at the beginning of the semester, Alexandria Virginia, and was annoyed that these kids were singing a song about mushrooms in the back of the room and she thought they were off task and she called them on two or three times.
And then finally, one of her favorite students walked up to her and said, “Those kids are actually serenading mushrooms in the back of the classroom and you ought to go back there and see what’s going on.” And there were mushrooms and molds at the whole back end of the classroom. And the teacher all of a sudden realized that she and several of the kids in the class had been sick the last two weeks and thought that that was the problem.
So as a result, about 12 of those kids decided that that was going to become their science project for the semester. This started in September, and they presented at the science fair in December and they did a presentation. They had gone to every classroom in the school and did a presentation on the level of mold and mushroom in the entire school. There was a school board member who was there and saw it and asked what she could do to help. There was a city council member there who asked what he could do to help.
Long story short is that 18 months later after the art fair, they passed the first statute in the state of Virginia basically creating a process whereby the existence of mold and mushrooms needs now to be publicly reported, with the school developing a remediation plan in response to it. And you interview those kids today, they still are active and they’re, I guess, they’re now in the beginning of high school. Their lives have been transformed by that experience that they took this little example in the back of the classroom and turned it into a state statute and got it passed.
I would just say that the experience of the book is the closer you can be to something that really is important to them as opposed to important to us, it transforms your ability to turn it into a meaningful learning experience for them.
Suzie Boss:
There was one more question. Jacquelyn up in front.
Jacquelyn:
Hi. I just want to say that I’m a really proud green light director of learning in a district in Vermont, a large district for Vermont, small for many other places. And as I’m listening to you talk, I’m thinking about my role in ensuring that cultural and technical components of our system don’t get in the way of innovation and awesome things happening. And we’ve redesigned a couple of courses and implemented some PBL in our high school, which is a traditional high school, I would say.
One of the things, an area that we found great success is when we talked about data with our board, we talked about both the qualitative and the quantitative, and we had our students help us design how we would measure success. And then we had our board agree to allow these students to come back to the board and report out.
So they were reporting out on what you would consider our core academics, our mathematics and literacy and such, those were numbers, and telling their story. And through telling the students’ story at the board level, our community engagement in this entire process has just increased. And so we started with that just right next step, which is in the one course, and now it has momentum and the student voice has been critical, and that idea data is qualitative and quantitative. So co-designing that with students and with your team has been incredibly powerful for us. So yeah.
Suzie Boss:
Why would we overlook students, right? And how wonderful when they’re part of the solution and moving forward, and part of the transformation. Again, more stories and examples of that where students sitting alongside teachers rethinking assessment. What does that mean? What does that look like? What does it look like at different grade bands? And their voices really carry in public spaces and in school board meeting. So congratulations for doing [inaudible 00:41:57]-
Ken Kay:
What a great story. I think we’re about to end here. I want to put a point on this green light conversation because some of us have this notion that the green light is for any experimentation or any innovation. And in the great districts, it’s really narrowly constructed around the leverage point that really matters. So there could be a green light for PBL.
We interviewed one superintendent who’s now gone on to become the Commissioner in Kentucky since we wrote the book, but he was in a district. He said, “I had a district that had a High Tech High school, a Asia Society high school. We had seven or eight flavors of different innovations in the district, and I had to figure out how to construct the green light so it had meaning for everybody. And the green light,” and I think this will be a powerful for all of you given why you’re here.
“The green light in our district was that we were going to put innovation and experimentation around the task, the task that each student was presented with. And therefore, what we’re looking for, and we’re giving the green light for, is that we want teachers to focus on how do they improve the task that students are being asked to undertake. And that if we do that, it can be in any type of flavor of high school. The task is critical. And my job as leader was to get the entire system to take on the improvement of the student task as our unit of change.” And that’s what he delivered the green light for. So if your green light was, if you were going to work on improving student task, he was going to have your back. So why-
Suzie Boss:
Can I explain kind of what’s next?
Ken Kay:
Yeah.
Suzie Boss:
I think we’re about out of time. I wanted a quick announcement before you close things up. We have some materials to share with you. We brought some books and we were going to sell them, but you know what? We’re just going to give them away. So we have about 20 over there. We’re very happy to chat with you about them. We’ve also developed some discussion guides for parents and for students around what does it mean to redefine student success. So we have those there and along with some other things.
Ken Kay:
And we’ll be glad to sign the book for you.
Suzie Boss:
Yep. And we’ll be over there in just a minute.
Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Michelle Pletcher, Suzie Boss and Ken Kay for this Den Talk. You can find a link to Suzie and Ken’s book, Redefining Student Success, in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
TAGS: