Kaleb Rashad:
A good protocol will save you from the poverty of your good intentions. Nobody cares about your good intentions. The question then is, what protocols, what processes might you use to help support people in identifying their hopes, their dreams, their frustrations, the things that piss them off? Because those are opportunities to create something new. Anger is a very useful tool if we know how to work with it.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and you just heard the voice of Kaleb Rashad, interim CEO of High Tech High. Kaleb sat down with Vista Innovation and Design Academy principal, Eric Chagala, and High Tech High Graduate School of Education President, Ben Daley, to talk about school leadership and how to turn soaring rhetoric into concrete reality. This conversation happened at the 2023 Deeper Learning Conference. The write-up for this session said, “This talk is for anyone who believes that schools have souls and that those souls must be tended to.” And I can’t say it better than that. Here’s the conversation.

Ben Daley:
Good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you. My name is Ben Daley. I’m the president of the High Tech High Graduate School. Welcome to this deep dive den. It’s a den talk. We try to put “deep” into everything. I don’t know. We have with us today Eric Chagala, who’s the principal of Vista Innovation and Design Academy, and Kaleb Rashad, who wears many hats but also currently the interim CEO of High Tech High.
Two things I want to share about these guys before they get started. One is, they’re our most photogenic members of the deeper learning community. I can prove this to you because if you look in your program, you will see that every single photo has one of them in the background. So that’s a true story. The second thing is, my colleagues asked me to moderate a session and I was like, “Oh, that’s fine.” But I was confused why they were asking me to do it, and then I saw who I was paired with and it immediately became clear why I had been given that task. So buckle up. We already asked the sound guy to turn their volume actually negative so that it dampens their voices. So prepare yourself. I’m sure we’re going to have a good time together.

Kaleb Rashad:
Thank you, Ben.

Eric Chagala:
Thanks, Ben.

Kaleb Rashad:
Thank you all for being here. We’re so excited. Eric wanted to do pushups because he was so excited. Wanted to run around the room.

Eric Chagala:
It’s day one.

Kaleb Rashad:
I know. I know, I know. But we want to make sure you are here for some good reasons and we want to try to maximize the learning opportunity for you, and we’ll still probably have a lot of fun with you too. So I think what we’ll ask you to do is maybe take a moment and maybe identify, what was it that brought you to this den talk? What questions do you come in with? What are you wondering about or what are you seeking?
I’m asking you to do this because, well, we both love to hold a mic and we can talk ad nauseum about things, and it seems wiser to me to begin with your questions and to support you on your journey. So will you take just a quick moment and maybe recall, what are the questions you’re coming here with? What are you wondering about? What drew you to this session? And then what we’ll do is, we’ll surface some of those and then we’ll attempt to try to answer them and maybe entertain you a little bit too. So can you take a moment and just surface. What are you wondering about? What drew you to this session? What questions do you have? And then what we’ll do is, Eric and I will come to you so that you can voice the question, the wondering that you have, and then we’ll start trying to answer some of those questions. Is that fair? Okay, great.

So do that now. If you’ve got a question, just lift your hand up and let us know and we’ll come to you. Eric, if you would take that side. And what we’ll try to do is generate three to five, five to seven questions or things you’re wondering about.

Eric Chagala:
Go for it.

Speaker 5:
Okay. The big question that’s been on my mind this year is the unprecedented amount of trauma you’re seeing in schools and just the deeper learning response or how deeper learning is informed by this new context.

Kaleb Rashad:
Thank you for that question. I’ve got one more over here, then you’ve got one there.

Speaker 6:
Hi. My question is, how did you grow High Tech High? How did you grow it from elementary, middle, the international?

Eric Chagala:
Thank you.

Kaleb Rashad:
Okay.

Speaker 7:
Hello. I’m at a turnaround school for three years as a principal, and I want to know how to build a culture of thinking that students can do well in a predominantly Title 1 school, and how I can build that culture for my teachers and be a supportive administrator.

Kaleb Rashad:
Great question. Thank you for that. So we have three right now. Is there maybe one more? You got that one.

Speaker 8:
I’d like to echo that same question, but from the other side. I’m a teacher in a school that maybe doesn’t have the most forward-thinking administrators, and so how do we come at it from the bottom? Hey, they’re not here. I can say that.

Speaker 9:
We’re not selling this.

Eric Chagala:
It’s okay.

Kaleb Rashad:
Thank you. Thank you.

Ben Daley:
[inaudible 00:05:57] some of those questions too.

Eric Chagala:
Thank you.

Kaleb Rashad:
Maybe one more. Excellent. Thank you so much.

Speaker 10:
My question is, how can we get schools and the people who work in schools to be more humanizing to not only the students and the people in the schools, but also to the work that we’re doing?

Kaleb Rashad:
Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you.

Speaker 11:
Come on, come on. Talk about it.

Kaleb Rashad:
Okay, one more and then we’ll get rolling and then we’ll see if there are more questions.

Speaker 12:
I’m in a AP Capstone high school and what people believe is rigor is… Well, that’s another thing. But how do we move people to understand deeper learning without the massive coverage, memorization, study for the AP test?

Eric Chagala:
Thank you.

Kaleb Rashad:
Thank you. Okay, so maybe we can get started with some of those. Would you mind just playing back a few of them? Make sure we got… For the whole group.

Eric Chagala:
Asked about mental health challenges, and is deeper learning responsive to that? Growing High Tech High. Working in a turnaround school, either from the teacher or administrative perspective. How we be more humanizing, human.

Kaleb Rashad:
Yep, yep, yep.

Eric Chagala:
And what about rigor?

Kaleb Rashad:
What about rigor. Okay, so we’re going to just all try, from different perspectives, to address some of those questions and I’d love to have your help, particularly in terms of the growth of High Tech High. I think I would start by maybe the broad question about moving people and the culture that you’re trying to enact.

First of all, I would say there is no silver bullet but there are some common practices that we know actually work. So I’m going to tell a story. I’m going to try to answer it, but then I’m also going to give you some resources so that you can continue learning beyond what you just hear here. So first, I would probably name one key text that was important for me in trying to move a school of teachers, students, parents, and even the district administration who had no idea what I was talking about, and the text is called Change Leadership. Change Leadership, sourced from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Tony Wagner and others. If you want to know the how, I don’t think there’s anyone here that would argue, “We should have more shallow learning in school.” Right? Okay, fair. Okay, so then, if we are working toward a more compelling shared vision, the question becomes, how do you do that? And so the Change Leadership book was my go-to text and literally, it walked me through what to do and the how of it. So I would definitely encourage you to do that.

What I would add, from my own experience in using that text and maybe a few others, is adults don’t change behavior because of data that you show them. They also don’t just think, analyze, change. That doesn’t work. What has a greater chance of working is direct experience, dialogue, and reflection. Those things taken together give you a greater opportunity for people to explore important questions together, develop an understanding with each other because of that shared experience, and then make decisions together.

Now, I would also add to that, as a school leader from that perspective in particular, you have something called role position authority. It is endowed in your position. So then, the literature shares with us… And I’m referencing two texts right now. One is Michael Fullan’s text called What’s Worth Fighting For in the Principalship? A second text is The Moral Imperative of Leadership. And then third… Sorry, three texts. The third text is Six Secrets of Change. And in the literature based upon empirical practice, the person who has role position authority has a responsibility to hold a moral clarity about why we show up, why it is that we care for other people’s children. There’s a moral imperative there. And if you haven’t done the digging, then it’s hard to articulate that.

But sitting with that and being curious about what is our moral imperative, what’s our shared higher purpose, even if it’s not just test scores but maybe there’s something bigger that we’re trying to aim for, the person who has role position authority has a responsibility to not be an empty suit, but to speak truth and invite other people into that truth with you so that it’s not dictatorial but rather democratic.

Last point. And then maybe I’ll ask Eric to share a little bit and then maybe we can flip to the question about how we grew high Tech High. I think the last piece is, Paolo Frieri discusses this piece about what he calls true dialogue. He’s like, “True dialogue.” Why dialogue? Why true dialogue? He describes it in a couple different ways. He describes it as faithful. He describes it as authentic, like we keeping it real. He describes it as hopeful. He describes it as loving, caring, commitment.

So one piece of advice I might offer is that as you are trying to change the culture, and what I would describe is… We talk about this all the time. We’re not talking about Fat Fridays or nachos and cheese on Wednesdays or something. We’re not talking about staff breakfast. When I talk about culture, when we talk about culture, we’re talking about, how do the adults relate to one another? How do the adults grapple with uncertainty together? How do the adults solve problems, address challenges, and unearth opportunities together? That’s a capacity thing.

I was terrible at throwing parties. Not very good at it. Well, sometimes. But what I really try to attend to with my role position authority is how you show up with your colleagues. That, we have a moral responsibility to. Those are some things that I would add to the question about sourcing, how to move folks. What would you say?

Eric Chagala:
I think what I heard within the questions too was this theme around the humanization of schools. We’re in the human business, but so often, we are not in the human business. We’re in the system, structure, and it sucks for everyone that that’s downwind from it. And so as both sitting leaders, and then you may have seen the term “Unlocked” in the description. That’s the nonprofit we have where we do human-centered, liberatory design work with people, and we’ve used it through our school leadership experiences.

So as a sitting leader, the school I’m at, it’s called… Long name, and this name sucks, Vista Innovation and Design Academy. Full of buzzwords. Buzzwords are like the hemlock of public education right now. They say them, I hear them in really high placed people with lots of authority standing up saying words, and then the work that they actually do and the things that shuffle down the system don’t actually lead to what those buzzwords, creativity, innovation, equity, all of them. Really beautiful words that mean nothing, with the way that they’re actually being used in public education today. So that long name of our school, Vista Innovation and Design Academy, we force that because we’re a true story of school transformation, about 30 miles north from here, where we took a school, 98 percent poverty, 100 percent Latinx, 30 percent homeless, 28 percent special ed, 78 percent ELD. All the numbers.

The acronym for Vista Innovation and Design Academy is VIDA. The word “vida” in Spanish means “life”. So we’ve aspired in a school, a true story of school transformation, around how do you make this more about the lives of the people within the system than just school or than just work? And back then, this journey started 10 years ago, we’re in our ninth year, it was design thinking then. Now it’s liberatory design. But the humanization aspect of actually asking the kids, “What in the world do you want to be doing?” How do we take a system that’s being created by white middle class people in our city, and the systems and the structures of white middle class thought, and make it actually where poor Latinx kids can find themselves in it? They have a voice. There’s opportunity, but also the teachers were victims of the system as well.

And so one of the leading questions to a school leader… This became my job to figure out how to make this work, but we asked the teachers, “What have you always wanted to do with kids that you’ve never been allowed to do?” And it was my job to figure out the system and the structure within the system and the structure. And Kaleb always reminds me that constraints build creativity. Constraints of the system actually provide us the guardrails for which to dream and innovate and co-design along with both the children and the adults. Because one of those things around buzzwords that I hear a lot, and frankly it pisses me off, is all the, “Students at the center. Students are the only things that matter. Students, students, students.”

Yes, that’s why we got into the business. It’s about the kids. However, if the adults in the system are bogged down, if they’re not inspired, if they don’t want to jump out of bed every morning and go serve the children because whatever the circumstances are, then the experience for the kids sucks. So we have to co-tangentially design for both the adults and the kids in service of the experience of the children. And I think those are some… We found some easy ways to begin looking at the experience of the kids and the adults to make a better, more human community for everyone.

Kaleb Rashad:
Do you want to say a little bit?

Ben Daley:
Just keep going.

Kaleb Rashad:
Yeah? Okay. Well, I think one thing I would add, related to… Clearly, they’re connected. Teacher, school leader, humanizing. I think in my very first schools… I did not grow up here at High Tech High. I worked in very traditional schools that were frankly dehumanizing. They had top-down leadership from the superintendent, top-down leadership from the principal. The instruction, the teaching and learning, was top-down. Everything was about compliance. And what was helpful in trying to create these humanizing experience for the students was to do that first with the adults, because the adults will recreate what they experience. I’m kind of loud and obnoxious all the time, but I realize it’s not about me. The genius is in the room. The question becomes, how do you help unlock people’s innate talents, questions, ideas, perspectives, tastes, and it helps to have a theory of action to inform what you do.

So I would name three resources for you, as tools to help unlock the genius in your groups that you work with. One of them is clearly liberatory design. So the National Equity Project, which inspired a lot of our work, especially with the Stanford d.school, gives us just a broad framework about how to support humanizing the experience for people. So that’s one fabulous resource, credible, and it just takes time to practice with the tools to become more fluent with it.

A second body of tools comes from the National School Faculty Reform. If you go to NSF-something.com, they have the tools listed there for free. That’s a second source of tools, protocols. A third body of tools is… It sounds like I’m making this up, doesn’t it? Okay, I think I may have lost my thought there. Maybe it’ll come back to me in a second. Oh, here’s another one. Thinking Collaborative. That work comes from the Center for Adaptive Schools, which supports groups of people in developing shared understanding together and making decisions together. We often say that a good protocol will save you from the poverty of your good intentions. Nobody cares about your good intentions, especially when you have role position authority. The question then is, what protocols, what processes might you use to help support people in identifying their hopes, their dreams, their frustrations, the things that piss them off? Because those are opportunities to create something new. Anger is a very useful tool if we know how to work with it.

So Thinking Collaborative is a very, very powerful set of tools and trainings, by the way. Okay, one more. Liberatingstructures.com, I think it is. I don’t get paid for any of this. I really should. I like tools, I like the inspiration, but I want to get stuff done and I want to make sure it’s done well, and I think you do too. So there are three or four resources there to help support you in how to deploy processes and protocols, to support people in identifying shared hopes and dreams, aspirations, and then mobilizing people forward.

Eric Chagala:
Kaleb, can you maybe talk… Because in the description we talked about the arc of creativity, innovation, liberation. Yeah, it makes you happy.

Kaleb Rashad:
Yeah. Okay. Thank you for the question. That was lovely setup.

Eric Chagala:
You’re welcome.

Kaleb Rashad:
Thank you. I would maybe describe my journey in maybe three chapters. The first chapter was all about compliance. Check it out. I thought that if kids, especially Black kids, and brown kids and poor kids and Indigenous kids, if they just mastered the standards, that they would be okay. Isn’t that naive? I was only 22. I was a PhD kid, and I thought that if kids just master the standards, that they would be okay. Well, we know that’s not true. Part one for me, chapter one, is about compliance.

The second chapter was about creativity and innovation. How can we work in such a way that supports the creative and innovative spirit of people to create better things, better experiences? I think the shortcoming of that, in my point of view, is that slavery, for example, was a creative endeavor. It created value for somebody. So you can be creative and lack humanity. You can be creative and have a complete blind eye to another human’s God-given right to exist.

The third chapter for me, where I am now, is about this arc of equity, justice, and liberation, and really reclaiming some things that were lost to me in this country and trying to reclaim them intentionally. And so I might offer to you, wherever you might be on your journey or wherever your community might be, hopefully we’re moving beyond compliance and maybe at least toward developing the creative spirit of people. And depending upon the communities that you serve, perhaps you can develop that creative spirit in such a way as to begin pursuing issues of justice. Because most times, it is a lack of confidence, a lack of belief, a lack of efficacy that a group may have. By building creative confidence through processes, you can support people to take more courageous action in pursuit of justice, equity, and liberation. Otherwise, it could be much more difficult to do so. Want to make sure I’m touching on some of the key questions here.

Speaker 8:
What if you’re a teacher and you don’t have the most forward-thinking administrators?

Kaleb Rashad:
Ah, yeah. Thank you for bringing that one back. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. No, it’s so hard, because we love our work. We signed up for this for a reason, and then we get trapped in this space and we’re like, “Oh my God, is this my life?” And you’re trying to figure out, “What can I do?” So what I would offer is to find at least one other teacher. It can help you not feel so alone, if you don’t have role position authority, is to find one other colleague. They’re like these little, small pockets of resistance. And there’s a beauty in subtle resistance. Maybe you’re not overthrowing the system. It’s okay.

I’m reminded, there’s a beautiful text called Fugitive Pedagogy. Queen mother Lisa Delpit was here with us just before Covid, and she was sharing with us… She’s marvelous and beautiful. She’s one of our elders now. And we were asking, “What do we do in this time where there is such direct oppression, direct suppression of people just being curious about the world and their lives and their ancestry and people’s contributions in the world?”

Well, she said a couple things, which I’m going to share with you. One is, book bannings are not new. School board stacking is not new, and neither is curriculum narrowing. That’s not new. She said, “Kaleb, go back and study your history.” And this is why that history part is so important. Who controls the history controls the present and the future. And there was a time where I didn’t know to go look at my history. I didn’t know where to go find it. So she pointed me to a text called Fugitive Pedagogy by Jarvis Givens. He’s a brother from Harvard, researcher, and he describes the work of Carter G. Woodson. By the way, it’s very embarrassing because I’ve got two masters and a doctor degree, and I had never heard of Carter G. Woodson’s work, on purpose. I’m not supposed to know that.

And what queen mother Lisa Delpit said to us was, “One, study your history, because you’ll know that these things aren’t new. Two, what were your people’s responses? What did the people during that time do in response to the bannings in 1915, when Carter G. Woodson wrote The Negro in Our History, and that textbook was in every school in the south. And then white folks saw, “Oh my God, they got this book in our Negro schools.” Started freaking out and banned the book back in 1915. Well, what Carter G. Woodson did, and his associates like Mary McLeod Bethune and others, what they did was they built a network, they called it the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. They did that in 1915, the same time of the Klan marching in Washington, and Birth of a Nation in the White House, and hanging Negroes left and right, weekly, in this country. That’s what they did in that context.

So every time I get in my feelings like, “Oh my God, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” get out your feelings, fam. Recognize that it wasn’t just Black folks, it was Black and white folks who were working on things together. You see what I’m saying? So then, oh, what they did was they started building networks underground to help support one another. Sorry, it’s a little bit of a bird walk. Apologize. But what I might suggest to you is that it doesn’t have to be everyone. If you’re in a place where you can find one other ally who can be a little respite of resistance for you, find that person and resist together.

What other questions are coming up for you? If not, what I can do is maybe pose a question and then I definitely want to make sure we’ve got time to answer the question about how to grow High Tech High. That was more of a technical question, but maybe there’s a good story there too that you can share. Ben’s been here since the very beginning. Do you want to say a little bit about that?

Ben Daley:
Yeah. I was thinking, what’s the joke? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Is like, how do you grow to 16 schools? One building at a time. So there is a technical answer of, we had a school and then we had a second school and then we had a third school, and there was just a progression around that. But I think, one thing that question made me think about is, what’s been hard about going from 200 kids to 6,300 kids? So we’re still pretty small, but we feel a lot bigger than we did when we were 200 kids and 12 teachers, and now we’re 400 teachers.

And I just think, how do you transmit culture over time? How do you hold onto the things that are important, but also how do you let go of things that you didn’t have quite right? I could think of 1,000 stories about that. There’s just a lot. This would be a long therapy session just for me at this point. But for me, this question of how do you spread really effective practices across a system of our size, but at the same time not having a top down management approach, there’s a lot there that I’m really interested in, and anyone wants to talk about more of that, I’d love to talk afterwards.

Eric Chagala:
I was thinking back to when you were talking about nacho parties and stuff.

Kaleb Rashad:
Oh yeah.

Eric Chagala:
And culture.

Kaleb Rashad:
Yeah.

Eric Chagala:
Because when I look on Twitter, I see the Friday nacho parties and I see all these other things which are great and they bring people together. That’s an important aspect of culture. But when we talk about actual culture that changes the lives of humans within the system, both the adults and the kids, it’s so much deeper. And so I think about the organizational aspects of culture. I think about, why do we actually exist? I think about those protocols that you reference, and how do we have conversations with one another so that I can present something to you and your feelings don’t get hurt and we can have an actual rational conversation around it? I think about why of the work that we’re trying to do.

So even when we use those buzzwords that we talked about, and when people are saying creativity and the ability to push back and say, “That’s fantastic, we want all kids to be creative,” what does that mean to you? What does that mean to us? What does it look like when the kids actually engage in that? How do we foster and grow that within the adults? At our school, we have a slide and we show parents, we talk about it as adults, we talk about it with the kids, because innovation is in the name of our title of our school. Equity’s the worst buzzword because it does so much damage when not actually followed through, because equity is so important.
Innovation as well. People don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve lost friendships with other principals, and to have a friendship as a principal is already a big deal because it’s like island work already, so to lose those friendships is hurtful. But I’ve lost friendships because I’ll see these great things on social media and people are like, “Oh, we’re doing these innovative things for kids and we’re changing…” Our tagline, our school, our public tagline is Innovate, Design, Create. That was hot nine years ago. Now it’s lame. Our behind-the-scenes tag word is to kick the shit out of generational poverty in our neighborhood. And so what are the real things that we’re trying to do? And where I’ve lost friendships over is, I see people put out like, “We’re doing these innovative practices for children.” “Great. I want to know more about that. What are you doing?” “Oh, well, we’re allowing them voice and choice.” “Fantastic. Can you tell me more about that?” No. Unable to go any further than the words voice and… Low-hanging fruit.

Low-hanging fruit is great when we use it to actually fill ourselves and fill the system. But when we just use the words and we don’t have a culture that actually understands where we can ask questions, that is built upon the things, where you don’t have a culture where leadership is decentralized… And you still got to have a person at the top, because when the hits the fan, there’s a person that the press is going to go to. That’s a reality. But the things that actually happen at the school, how are those decided upon? How do you bring the teachers into that, and even kids, to help decide what we’re doing in building the culture?

Kaleb Rashad:
And so let me build on that, especially on answering these questions about culture and stuff. I want to ask you about this one. Clearly, I wonder about how you’ve used design with the parent community. If we believe the community is a central part of co-developing, co-designing the vision for the school, holding that school accountable to the outcomes for their children, how did design, if at all, play into your approach with parents?

Eric Chagala:
So one of the things we talked about with our school Turnaround is where it was, and now it’s this fantastic great place. We’re a political hot potato for the school board because there’s a 800-kid waiting list to get into the school, and there’s all this ugly stuff that rises like, “Well, what about the merit of the children who go? Shouldn’t it be kids who…” Ugly things that the public brings up. And so one of the things that people ask us is…

You talked about moral imperative. We’ve had people come through… We have about 1,000 visitors a year come through the school, and there’s this one tour group, our second year from Douglas County, Colorado, and there’s this principal at the end and he just looked like he didn’t really give a shit about what was going on. And I’m very sensitive, and so I walked up to him at the end. I put my arm around him, I said, “I can tell, you got very little out of the tour that we presented today. Before you go on your way to the next school, is there anything that I can help you with?” Very wealthy district. He said, “No, no, no. Your story’s great. I don’t see my kids in your kids. My building is not your building, and I don’t see my teachers in your teachers.” He said, “You had a clear moral imperative for change. I don’t have that. Our kids test well, they do blah, blah, blah. So I’m having struggle, why would we do something different?”

Fast-forward, year five, he was back on another trip. You ever know these people where you can recognize someone, but you don’t know why you recognize them? So for whatever reason, he came through on another tour and at the end he came up to me. He said, “Hey.” Because we actually… It’s a bad thing. We actually hit gentrification, and so we had to institute district-level policies to make sure that we were serving who we were developed to see. And so he said, “I was here in your second year. Now it’s three years later, and now I see blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids, and you have little bit of different teaching staff and you have some furniture that has wheels on it. I now see more of my school in you. What is your moral imperative now?”

I’m like, “What the F are you talking about?” It turns out, what we did for really poor Latinx kids because it’s the right thing, turns out to be wildly popular with everybody else. And so we have this conversation around what we did… And going to your question, when we developed the school, we used, at that time, design thinking. It’d be more liberatory now. We had to sit down with parents, the kids. We have a 7-Eleven on our corner. Every rough school has a 7-Eleven near it somewhere. We went down and talked to the guys, the owners, who had a lot to say about… It was called Washington Middle School. I always tell people, the older the dead president in America that school is named after, the more issues and problems which it has.

And so we asked. We would actually sit and have conversations. And what came out with our pedagogy, the number one thing, kids were… In our district, every middle school has eight periods. At Washington Middle School, they had created nine periods so kids could have more interventions. Because everyone’s double-dosed, everyone has interventions, everyone has more math. We decided, based on talking with parents and kids and alumni and the guys at 7-Eleven, our first intervention was going to become engagement. That the poor kids, the suffering children, had to actually have an opportunity to see themselves in the school and to be a part of it before anything else would ever matter. And it turns out that when you treat people like humans, everybody really likes that. Everybody. Because it feels good and it feels right.

And so we continue with culture. In anyone’s schools, is vaping still a thing? Okay. So we brought parents in, did a design challenge with parents and kids, tangentially around vaping. What I love about design is the “How might we?” Question. “How” acknowledges, there’s an issue or something we need to work around, and it’s nobody’s fault. Eric, get over your sensitivity. It’s nobody’s fault that the kids are vaping in the bathroom. “Might” is the optimism that there is a solution for it if we all work together to create those solutions. And so we use that frame, “How might we?” And it takes, as the leader, they’re not pointing fingers at me. There’s kids and we’re in society and rough stuff in society. How might we go about improving the lives of everyone here?

Kaleb Rashad:
I think for us… How are we doing on time? You got a question?

Ben Daley:
Four minutes.

Kaleb Rashad:
Okay. But yeah, maybe I should ask-

Speaker 13:
I was just going to say, I’d like to just hear more about the connection between moral imperative and soul of the school. A little bit [inaudible 00:40:23].

Kaleb Rashad:
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. So what I might suggest-

Ben Daley:
Repeat the question.

Kaleb Rashad:
Oh yeah, yeah. Do you want to just say it in your own words one more time?

Speaker 13:
I’d just like to hear more about the connection between moral imperative and the soul of the school.

Eric Chagala:
Real quick, with the soul of the school. We were drinking heavily in my backyard when we came up with that idea. But the thought is that schools have souls and they have to be tended to. And that goes around with that discussion of culture. And the actual root word in Latin of culture is “cultura,” and in Latin it refers to agriculture and tending to the soil and the plants. And so I’m not sure we have a direct connection extensively to moral imperative in that, but that is the genesis of what we mean by tending to the soul of school.

Kaleb Rashad:
When my boys were in third and fifth grade, I noticed… We lived in a very nice neighborhood north of here. It was a nice neighborhood, nice school. But I saw a little bit of their light starting to go out. They were not excited to go to school anymore. One of our co-founders, the great Rob Reardon, would say, “Be the one who notices. Be the one who notices.” He has a beautiful story that he tells about that. And I would just submit to you, as we think about the soul of individual people and our young people, to what extent do we notice their talents, their tastes, their interests, their curiosities, the light in their eyes, and how do we work in such a way as to expand deep and grow some of that?

In my very first school, Mary McLeod Bethune, in Moreno Valley, as I said before, it was a very top-down organization. First we had to attend to the relationships among the students, because there was fighting every day. We had to tend to the relationships among the teachers because there was fighting every day. And then we had to attend to the parents. Guess what? Because there was fighting every day. And we used design to help support. “How might we? How do we address these… Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.” And eventually, we got to a place where we could actually talk about pedagogy, what the learning experience looks like, with young people. In their minds, “We don’t have time for that, Kaleb.” But every Friday, they had happy hour. Well, not drinking, but happy hour like watch a movie at the end of the day if you do all your work.

So what we did was say, “Okay, well, everyone takes this hour or two to just let kids play or watch a movie or whatever. Well, what if we had…” That was back in the day when Google time was a big thing, 20 percent time. Do you remember this? So I was like, “Well, what if we ask the kids, what would they love to do? What would they love to create, make, or design if they had the time to do so?” ,It was a very simple experiment. And we found that there was a day, a Friday with two hours, and all across the school, teachers wrote down all these things that kids wanted to learn about. It was amazing. And then we looked at all of that together and we said, “Okay, well let’s organize a day, a two-hour period, where the kids could explore whatever they wanted to explore with adult supervision, et cetera.”

And the kids did such beautiful things. We had fashion shows. It was really cute too, by the way. They wanted to design video games. They wanted to do coding. They had so many wonderful ideas. And so for that day, all around our campus, kids were making and creating things and sharing their work with people. And the teachers saw, “Oh, wait a minute. That’s amazing. What if we did more of that, and did more of that in systemic ways?”
Now, they could not get to that if I wasn’t PBL-ing their adult experience. You know what I’m saying? So I would never use meeting times… This is a structural thing. I never used meeting times to relay information. That’s boring. Stop doing that. Send that out via email, let people read it whenever they want to. And when people are together, if we believe the genius is here, how are we using that? And so we would PBL their experience and they felt that, they experienced it, and then they would want to do the same thing with the young people. And my claim to them, our claim together, was about, how do we do right by the young people in this community? We have a moral imperative not to just teach to the test.

I would just name one other thing. In engaging in this work with people, this is to the question about trying to build this sort of culture piece, they’re also going to let go of something. There’s a part of your identity that gets wrapped up into the things you’ve done before. There’s a sense of loss. So being aware of how people grapple individually and collectively with loss and while they’re trying to pursue a different version of themselves, this is old school Margaret Wheatley. This is about identity. She calls it something, “Below the green line.” Below the green line. Identity, relationships, and this is Kaleb making this part up, but shared purposes. Higher purposes. And you don’t get to that by mandate. We get to that by dialogue.

See that beautiful brother that just walked in the building… See, I’m going to put you on blast right now. See that beautiful brother right there? That’s Brian Delgado, original High Tech High teacher, designer, in this space. Learned so much from watching him as a project designer. And in my very first days here as a director, I was nervous because they had all these amazing project designers and then they got me, new, trying to lead them to something. And we engaged in constant dialogue with each other. There was a change management question here. And we eventually landed on two things that we wanted to do together related to identity, our relationships with each other, and our shared purposes, and we described it as being excellent to each other and doing badass work. That was our thing. Yes, we have to end right there. And it was was amazing.
Do you remember this, B? Yeah. And here we were in this space together, holding these dialogues with each other. And then I had just had to step back and say, “Yo, I don’t know what I’m doing. Help me. Who do we want to be together?” There were three or four focusing questions that supported our dialogue. There were three or four questions that I might offer to you as you are engaging in these dialogues with your people. One is, “Who are we? Why do we do these things? Why do we do these things this way? Who do we want to become?”

There’s no rushing that dialogue. They’re called focusing questions. And form follows function, follows identity. And for this group, for us, I felt excited every single day to come to work. It was hard. There was a lot of hard stuff. But it was amazing witnessing us, because once we identified, “This is who we want to be…” And there were some things we did not want to be. That’s also a question. But we wanted to be excellent to each other and we wanted to do badass work. Now, when they lifted that up as, “Hey, this is what we want,” now the moral imperative here, or the moral responsibility, is now you’re the custodian of that with your role position authority. You see what I’m saying?

So if someone starts acting out of pocket, not being excellent to each other, somebody’s got to have a conversation, and you stand on the moral collective identification of the group. “This is who we are to each other, fam. So you can’t show up like that.” You see what I’m saying? You got to have that conversation. And if you don’t, then it just ruins your credibility and it erodes the efficacy of the group. There’s no way around that. You just got to do the thing. So can I… I love you. I love you. Can we give him a big round of applause? That’s Brian Delgado right there. One of my greatest teachers, who taught me so much. Thank you, brother.

Ben Daley:
Thanking Eric and Kaleb for a great session. Thanks, guys.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed was hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Hershel. Huge thanks to Ben Daley, Kaleb Rashad, Eric Chagala, and everyone who made Deeper Learning 2023 possible. We’ve got references to the resources Kaleb mentioned in the show notes. Thanks for listening.