Brian Delgado:
So my pitch was like, “This is an opportunity for you to create a legacy.” If this thing works well, if I see engagement, if there’s lots of opportunity for learning, if things emerge that I didn’t expect, then it will be an opportunity for future groups of students. And I think everybody wants to be a part of something bigger. And parents seeing their kids part of that, it’s exciting for them as well.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and you just heard the voice of Brian Delgado. Brian was a founding teacher at High Tech High and he taught physics and math for over 15 years before co-founding the nonprofit Blue Dot Education. Brian’s one of my favorite people in the world to talk about project-based learning with. He’s got this wild expansive vision that he backs up with a wealth of teaching experience, and I’m so excited to be able to share that with you.
We recorded this particular episode because we wanted Brian to explain a couple things that we’d already heard him talk about without a microphone nearby, and we just wanted to share them with the world. So this episode has two parts.
In the first part, Brian explains why you should really think about the first time you do a project as a first draft. In the second part, Brian unpacks a phrase that you hear a lot at High Tech High. It’s a phrase that comes from one of our co-founders, Rob Riordan, and the phrase is, “Let the experience be the text.” If you just heard me say that now and thought, “What on earth does that mean?” I have good news. Brian’s going to help you out. Let’s get right into it.

Brian Delgado:
I think the hardest thing for me as a beginning teacher where we were tasked with doing project-based learning was actually going for it with full fidelity because I was terrified that the things that the students were going to make were going to be bad, and the work is so personal that it would reflect as me. And so it held me up and it kept me from diving in. And I think one of the lessons I give to teachers that I’m coaching now is to work through that thing because I know they’re feeling it, and just get the first thing done, even if they shorten it, the timeframe, instead of eight weeks or instead of four weeks down to two or three, so they can just get through an iteration and have it be what it is. Because at that point you can work with colleagues to figure out how the next iteration improves.
And that’s the deal is we want students iterating through experiences and teachers as well to be iterating through projects because they’ll improve. And by the third or fourth or fifth time they run it, you go from something that looks very raw, but they did it, to students are producing work that is the type that you see in social media posts, which have a certain sort of toxicity for newer teachers, I think jumping into PBL.

Alec Patton:
Can you give me an example of a project that you did, the rough beginnings, to where it got to?

Brian Delgado:
Yeah. Well, as I developed as a project based learning teacher, every one of them, but the first one that shifted me completely was with the astronomy work because we started out with old T3is that we had.

Alec Patton:
What’s that?

Brian Delgado:
A T3i is a Cannon DSLR, and it was kind of the lowest end.

Alec Patton:
That wasn’t an answer.

Brian Delgado:
Oh, a T3i essentially a camera that you can change the lens on, and they have mirrors inside them, and it was sort of one of the first generations that a teacher could reasonably coddle together enough money to buy one for their class. We had access to one from the media class and we had one lens on it, and students began taking pictures of the night sky and playing. And it was really the students that started this and I saw it and it was super raw. And we went through probably I would say five or six years of iterating on that.That eventually got to the point where the photos looked like they could have been taken by professionals. And it was both me learning when I could and students doing a thing where they’d come back and be like, “Look, I tried this. Look what it looks like.”
And I think that’s one of the really amazing things about when you’re able to have a bit of creative confidence, have a bit of a willingness to go for it, is that students will produce some things and move you forward and teach you, that you can then, the next group comes in, and you can be like, “This is our starting point now.” And that’s magical because students realize they’re part of this bigger thing that they’re building.

Alec Patton:
So part of this is just the magic of doing the same project more than one year.

Brian Delgado:
Yes. And as I’ve done more and more coaching, this is something I recommend Highly to teachers that are doing projects is try to find the projects that you’re willing to do year after year and that anchor your course.
An old teaching partner, Mark Igiri, would do a play project every year and he got better and better and better. And by the end, I mean I think he probably did it by about 15 times. He was refining very small pieces of it that really were just fitting the group we had that year. But then it allows you to have a time of the year where you’re like, “I’m trying a new thing, but I know this time of the year I got it down. I know how it connects to my content. It rolls and I can refine at the edges.”

Alec Patton:
So in a way, if you’re a teacher new to PBL, you kind of have to look at it as, “This year is my first draft.”

Brian Delgado:
Exactly. Yeah. And I think there’s an Ira Glass speech, he’s the producer for this American Life, where he talks about any creative work, your first draft is not going to be what your vision is. And so for new teachers out there, just know that the first time you run through the thing, it’s not going to meet your vision, and that’s okay. It is the first iteration and the process is you get to do a second and a third because you get a new group in all the time and it will improve and improve and improve. And your skillset for facilitating it will improve.

Alec Patton:
Maybe not a philosophy to fully share with students and parents.

Brian Delgado:
I would disagree because essentially after that astronomy project, each project that I rolled out, I would let students know, “This is the first go at this and this is going to potentially be a program that takes off at the school that future students will build upon your work.” So my pitch was like, “This is an opportunity for you to create a legacy. If this thing works well, if I see engagement, if there’s lots of opportunity for learning, if things emerge that I didn’t expect, then it will be an opportunity for future groups of students. And I think everybody wants to be a part of something bigger. And parents seeing their kids part of that, it’s exciting for them as well.

Alec Patton:
That’s a great point. So when you’re working with a teacher and you can see that they’re like … they’re just kind of afraid to get their feet in the water. When they’re talking about ideas, what are you looking for to go, “Oh, yeah, that’s the thing you should start as your first draft of”?

Brian Delgado:
I start with where they’ve been successful. So if they have a lesson that they’ve done, if they have a class activity that used to be the culminating point, so they were doing a unit and they’re like, “Okay, at the end we’re going to do this experience or this lab,” something that they’ve already tried a few times is where I want to start. And then I also want to coach them to, as their first project, go smaller, go shorter, get through it to the end and have the students share. Even if it never leaves the classroom space, that’s totally fine. Because once you get through it, then that reflection piece can be the powerful learning for the teacher.

Alec Patton:
Awesome. All right. That’s a shorter episode. We’re done. Next. So now we’re going to go to … We’re going to unpack a beautiful, powerful phrase that most people don’t understand, which is, “Let the experience be the text,” which you’ve heard Rob Riordan say. And we were talking about if you get it, you get it, and it means a lot. And a lot of people are like, “Literally, I don’t know what that means.” So let’s unpack that.

Brian Delgado:
Yeah. And I started teaching at High Tech High and hearing this phrase probably in 2001, and I don’t think I understood it at first, but the way I wrap my head around it now is I think of my own experience as a student. And in every single classroom, I had a textbook, and the textbook was what drove the course content. We would flip the page and go to the next unit. And now all that has shifted to LMSs and things that are online mostly, but that still is the text for the course. And I think as a student experiencing that, that can feel totally contextualist, and there’s no connection to me in this thing.

Alec Patton:
Contextualist, meaning without context.

Brian Delgado:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the “experience as text” phrase in my mind is the fact that a shared experience can serve as the context can serve as the thing from which the course content flows out of. And so instead of reading about a thing, reading about the stars, reading about some ecological process, reading about the development of a community, I can facilitate an experience where the students get to interact with the thing, get to interact with the plants, get to interact with the stars, get to get into a community and experience it. Then we can use that as a jumping off point. And the students, because they know their experience, can then bring their own questions, their own thoughts, their own understandings to it. And then the art of me as a teacher is I want to cover this content and I’m going to slide it in here when this question comes up, or I’m going to slide it in here as we’re unpacking what we just went through.
And then it’s like, “Okay, we did that first generation of it and we did some learning about it. Now we’re going to do a second iteration with a little bit more understanding and we’re going to go deeper,” and that’s going to bring about more questions and more thoughts and more avenues. And so the students then their engagement with that experience becomes the driver for where I can insert content and move the curriculum.

Alec Patton:
So tell me about an experience that you created the opportunity for that was particularly rich as a source of learning.

Brian Delgado:
So I was teaching at High Tech High, which is about three miles from the ocean. And we did an Ocean Studies project. And so we started by getting down to a spot that’s mostly still protected natural area called Sunset Cliffs. And we went down as an opening launch experience to just explore the tide pools. So we had some GoPro cameras. We went at the low tide and they came back with images they had taken with the experiences of pulling up a sea slug and feeling it. These things were just happening. And so they had a lot of interest and curiosity about the things that they’re experiencing. But mostly what came out of it, and I was thinking ecosystems, but they were really interested in waves. And so it shifted my thinking because at the time it was math science.
So I was like, “Oh, I have now an avenue for teaching some really rich mathematics because they’re into waves and they want to film waves, and they want to photograph waves, and they want to understand how those work.” And all of a sudden that blows up into understanding weather systems around the world because that’s how waves get generated in the ocean. And so it drove a whole line of content that I didn’t necessarily think about going in because I was focused on ecosystem, and their interests lied somewhere else, but then I was able to just pivot it out of the experience.

Alec Patton:
And I think it’s interesting what you said about the GoPros, because I think part of what makes that … When you’re using the experience as the basis for your class, if everybody gets back and you’re like, “Oh, I saw this thing. Describe it. I don’t know. It was kind of spiky and I don’t really remember.” If you’re just relying on your memory, you’re kind of … It’s like that’s a kind of tricky thing. But you’ll literally come back with a text. You’ve got video to review, you’ve got photos to review, you’ve got things you can all look at together.

Brian Delgado:
Yeah. You both want to facilitate an experience and you want to document it because that documentation becomes a thing that you can revisit with the class and, exactly, it becomes the thing that you can study from. Our images become a primary source.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. In our show notes, we’ve got links to an article Brian wrote about a time that he and his students sent weather balloons into the upper atmosphere to take photos and to the Blue Dot Education website. Thanks for listening.