Transcript is Automatically Generated

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I cannot let perfection be the enemy of the good. So even from starting exhibitions and accepting that it’s going to look more like a science fair than it is my vision or hope around what an exhibition will be two it locks everything up too much if I try to do perfect cohorting instead. What are the principles here? And what I want is kids to grapple with a hard question and come up with their own answer to it. Yeah, there’s lots of ways to do that outside of that traditional PBL model, so we have to just keep ideating within the reality of what we have.

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This is high tech, high unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Melissa agadelo. Today we’re going to talk about introducing public exhibitions of learning to a school that never had them before. But first, I need to tell you a bit about Melissa. When I came to teach at High Tech High in 2012 Melissa was already a veteran. She’d started as a teacher in 2007 and became a dean in 2009

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then in 2017 she left to become one of two co principals at Lincoln High School this summer, Melissa became the sole principal of the school, but she was co principal when we recorded this episode last spring, so that’s how we’ll be referring to her from here on out. I’ll let Melissa introduce Lincoln High School to you.

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Lincoln High School sits in the heart of beautiful southeast San Diego. We have an enrollment that usually hovers somewhere around the 1450 to 1500 mark. We are a title one school. We are a school that’s about 20% black, about 70% Latino, and the 10% out there is a mixture of Pacific Islander, Southeast Asia and different immigrant communities, what I always say about Lincoln is, you go to a city, there’s often that school that people think they know what it’s like, and they kind of have a preconception of it. And I think in San Diego, that’s often Lincoln. But to use the old MTV statement, right? You think you know, but you have no idea. It’s not at all what I even thought it was going to be when I came in. It is, it’s a beautiful school, very strong community, very strong history, very strong advocacy. It’s a school with a historical legacy of advocacy. Yeah. What do you mean by that? It’s a school that has always been at the forefront of advocating for human rights. It’s a school where, historically, the black community found its home in southeast San Diego, here at Lincoln, and from its inception in the 1940s Lincoln has always been a school that’s had that as the center of its identity is, is its racial identity, and it’s a proud topic. It’s awesome. It’s beautiful to see and to live in. Yeah, yeah. What is your official title? I am co principal of Lincoln High School. Two of us are considered to be principals, and we have different org charts, so we oversee different parts of Lincoln, but along with Dr Stephanie Brown, it’s my privilege to lead Lincoln. Let’s get a little bit nerdy here. What’s on your org chart? What’s your

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so I oversee the 10th, 11th and 12th grade small school program. This is connected to ccte, trying to grow project based learning, give us the ccte Career College and technical education pathways. We have a lot of teachers here who are coming directly out of industry, who are working within the three small schools that we are working to develop, which is Health Sciences, Engineering and Design and Media Arts. So that this all makes sense, I’m going to tell you a little bit more about how Lincoln is organized to begin, every student does ninth grade together. That’s the part that Melissa’s co principal, Dr Stephanie Brown, is in charge of. Then in 10th grade, they go into one of three small schools, engineering and design, health sciences and media, arts and design. This is what Melissa is in charge of. Now, when you say students go to a small school within a larger school, that can mean lots of different things. So here’s what the schedule looks like for 10th to 12th grade students at Lincoln. You have two classes that align, but you also don’t move as a cohort. So it’s not like you are with the same kids in two periods. What we do is we work to align by just small school. So our project based work here at Lincoln is much more an inquiry based project work, rather than like a product based product project work. And we work so that there are things like overarching questions, like for our engineering and design, their overarching question one year was something like, what makes the world work? And that’s a question you can explore in any of those classes through that lens. And so we take more of an inquiry based approach. So no of your four period day two are aligned. Two are not. So two are in your small school, correct, right? And the other two are not. And they could be anything. You know, do you want to take art? Do you want to take more foreign language? Do you want to take whatever? So for me, like I played saxophone in high school, so like, if I were in engineering, which no one, no one would want, but

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if I somehow talked my way into being in engineering, I would do two periods of engineering, and then maybe, I, don’t know, I’d go to foreign language.

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Something, and then I would go to my job, my register, right? Yeah, yep. And your two periods of engineering would actually be, let’s say, like, your engineering class, like, and then that teacher would have been partnered with your English teacher. So your English class and your engineering class would be the two that are actually in your small school, so that the inquiry based work those two teachers have a common prep and they can work together to develop an interdisciplinary project. Got it, but you said that kids aren’t cohorted. So if you can fit 36 kids in a class, it would be the same 72 kids, but they would be different iterations of the periods. So if the engineering teacher is teaching the same class three periods and the English teacher three periods. They’re going to have the same 108 kids, but they might have them in different mixes. Okay, so each kid is going to be exposed to the same conversations, just not necessarily in the same order. I can see that creating some complications in PBL, so imagining that my hypothetical classmate, Sarah and I are in our engineering class together, and we’re working on this thing together in engineering, but then I go to english and I’m working on the same project, but Sarah is not there anymore, right? That’s complicated. So that’s why we’ve tried to take a lot more of like the inquiry based approach. So if in your engineering class you’re dealing with this question of, how does the world work, and you’re working on a project there that tries to answer that question through engineering in your English class, you may be working on the writing that supplements that, or the, you know, the research that goes with that. So it’s therefore, then, maybe not as important that you have your direct partner there, because you each are going to have to do your own piece of writing anyway, right? So what we work to do is to privilege that question like we want every kid in every small school to know what question they’re grappling with, but to acknowledge that the way they grapple with it in the different classes might look different. Yeah, so why don’t you cohort? To be honest, it’s just too hard. It’s just too hard with that many kids and with that many constraints, trying to build a primary schedule, the more constraints you put into it, the more impossible. Yes, well, that’s like, I mean, when people would say with like, High Tech High they’d be like, Why don’t you offer blank class? And I’d be like, because if one quarter of the students had to go to that one class and no one else did, nothing else would work. Correct, correct. That’s exactly what we deal with. Plus there are very talented teachers in a variety of different subjects that kids love. So we also want to honor that our kids want that flexibility. And I’ll go back to what I said before, with the number of kids we have that will come in with Swiss cheese transcripts, we have to be able to make some things work that perhaps aren’t as necessary in other schools with a more stable population. So I love this, because I feel like so often the conversations we have in High Tech High is like, Oh, yeah. Well, at High Tech High, of course, you can do this and you are not operating No,

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no, not at all. And when did you come to Lincoln, four years ago? Did PBL arrived with you, or what was the so when I started here at Lincoln, they had just sort of approved, went through a process of designing and approving their small schools. So I think that my skill set around PBL and around integrated learning across curricula was kind of what attracted me into the position. So PBL was nascent. Here. It was definitely starting. So I was not the first person to bring it up at all, but in terms of helping to kind of maybe focus the small school work, that was the primary reason I came. I really like working in those small school models. You know, when we know kids by name and need it makes a big difference. Yeah, totally. And I think that’s one of the, one of the kind of interesting things that is both obvious and not often done, is you can split a school of any size into small schools. Yes, that’s always possible. Yep, yeah. One of my central like mantras, is I cannot let perfection be the enemy of the good. So even from starting exhibitions and accepting that it’s going to look more like a science fair than it is my vision or hope around what an exhibition will be two it locks everything up too much if I try to do perfect cohorting. And so I have to let that go and instead say, like, instead, what are the principles here? And what I want is kids to grapple with a hard question and come up with their own answer to it? Yeah, there’s lots of ways to do that outside of that traditional PBL model, so we have to just keep ideating within the reality of what we have. When did the small schools become operational? So we just graduated our first class out of them last year, and remember, they start in the 10th grade. So this is the fourth year. So you started four years ago. They started three years ago. Basically got it.

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They started with this concept of inquiry projects, and at some point, and what we’re talking about today exhibition.

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So let’s start with every time.

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Time I write exhibition in anything, somebody says, like, that’s a High Tech High word. Nobody knows what you’re talking about. Say, students sharing the one here publicly. You having been a High Tech High teacher and leader and now in a different place, how do you explain what exhibition is? Yeah, it’s a public showing of student work. It’s a celebration of student work. I am lucky to work at a school that’s in a city with a High Tech High so the word exhibition is not a crazy out there term, and there’s been enough cross pollination of people who have worked at high tech and have gone into different positions in districts and different schools that I do think the term has cross pollinated, at least in San Diego. So when I began talking about education, when we began talking about it, it was not a foreign concept at all, teachers here were pretty clear on it. I think what became the question is, what’s worthy of an exhibition? What do you exhibit? And because we did not have common products, so to speak, like in a cleanly, cohorted environment, we spent some time really grappling. We are still grappling with what goes up on an exhibition. And so where does the story of exhibitions at Lincoln begin? So it begins really in our about two years ago, once we got our first cohort of kids into 11th grade, we began talking about doing exhibition. Our first exhibition was very low attendance. A lot of the kids who were very nervous about this idea of standing up and talking about their work just didn’t come and personally, one approach, yep. I mean, they just were like, not coming. And so then we sat down and we talked about how, you know, at the end of the year, there are so many different competing things that happen, right? Like, there’s this celebration, and there’s the orchestra concert, and there, you know, all the things that happen at a comprehensive high school. So what we decided to do the next time we had exhibition is we did them all on one night, yeah, and we called it big night. So exhibition at Lincoln is now called Big night. All right, I want to go back to this first experience though. Okay, we’re not just we’re not I saw what you did there.

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Where did you first introduce the concept. Was it a staff meeting? How did it? No, I started introducing it when I was working meeting with the small school leadership teams of the source small school teachers have common preps, and so we meet once a week by common prep and we talk about project development. So it was there. So starting to think about, okay, so if this is our overarching question,

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and if this is the work that kids are going to do, what are they going to exhibit? So just starting with that question, you might be surprised, like I was, the teachers have common prep time. Here’s what Melissa says about that. It’s the one thing I’ve tried to stay really dedicated to. Because I do think having teachers together in the same room, you know, at least twice a month like that, if not more hopefully, weekly is such a game changer for knowing kids and for being integrated, but it’s a hard one to hold on to, like all those constraints in building a schedule, that is a hard one to hold on to, and it’s one we’ve been trying really hard to stick with. Yeah, when you first made this suggestion, tell me about the response.

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There was a lot of concern that the students would be very nervous, uncomfortable. Teachers had had kids get up and do presentations in class, but this idea that they were going to stand at a table with their work and anybody could possibly come by and engage them in conversation about it, and it wasn’t a set of note cards in their hands that they were gonna stand up and read through and then sit down. There was a lot of like, how do we do that? The kids are gonna freak out. We’ve never done that before. And along with that, I’ll be honest, there was a lot of like, That’s dope. Like, yeah, how do we get that to work? Like, there was also a lot of positive energy around like, okay, so how do we do that? And questions around, what do you exhibit? So we did, we had rich conversations about what you exhibit, and that has evolved. Different teams have tried different things now, and it’s been a rich conversation around, like, if a student’s work is still an iterative process, but we reach exhibition night. Do they exhibit anyway, even if it’s not in its final stage? So we’ve grappled with those questions, but that’s where it started. Is okay? If this is the question, and if this is what students are going to grapple with, then what do they exhibit? Yeah, yeah. That was where we started. What was the answer? What was the first answer?

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Tri Fold, board reports, research reports, teachers that began to give, well, when do I need to assign them their exhibition assignment? So trying to go to this idea of, like, no, no exhibition should be like an honoring of, like, the theme, like crazy ideas, like, what if they just on a table?

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Like, put out some of the things they did throughout the semester, and they were able to talk about the question they grappled with. So I tried to kind of remove the stress of the product and instead center the thinking. But that felt really like mind blowing as well,

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because we were also grappling with what like, what is an assignment? Like, what do you grade? Those questions became centered. Why is that complicated? Well, I think when you’re moving from more a more traditionally based environment, teachers have questions based on what has made sense to them, like when the classroom was based on production, in terms of compliant based production, moving towards a student centered production, where there’s not a model that they’re reproducing, but rather a question they’re answering on their own. Then the question becomes like, well, what’s the standard? And what does an A look like, and what does excellence look like? And they were new questions we had to grapple with. Where I’m slightly confused is, if you have a class where kids have a question and they make six things that are addressing that question, and you never exhibit, and they just turn it into you, then, like, the only difference between that and one where they exhibit is the second one sounds more fun, but they’re still like, make. Do you see those making the stuff? You’re still assessing the stuff as a teacher, yes, what I’m wondering is, like, why does it get different with exhibition? I mean, I think what I was left with was a lot of very loving teachers who were worried about the risk involved when kids aren’t given a finite answer, yeah, there’s, there’s immense security when you know your students are struggling with so many things, which we struggle with at Lincoln that then to give you an open ended answer, which doesn’t feel like it has a safe thing I can reproduce or copy or recreate. So it felt like I imagine what I what I read from the teachers, was like, Wait a minute. You want me to give them an open ended question, and then you want them to figure it out, and then you want them to go on exhibit and talk about that, and then they’re kind of out there without a net, and if they feel, if they just feel like an idiot, that’s not good. Yeah, correct. I totally get that. If none of the teachers have done it before, and the kids like, I don’t know about this, it’s harder for the teacher to be like, trust me, it’s me fine. Yes, yes, you’re hitting the nail on the head introducing something very new, like that. I felt like, I was like, I promise this is not a huge paradigm shift. And there was a lot of just, trust me, let’s give it a shot. Like, let’s, let’s get it out there. Let’s let kids try offering scaffolding. Like, let’s talk about hierarchy of audience and some different ways that we can scaffold so kids can have a first shot that feels safe and successful. Yeah. Yeah, those questions were really important for us to work through. And then we had our first exhibition, and lots of people didn’t show up, but the kids who did show up loved it, yeah. And that became the proof of concept. And there were kids that were saying, like, that was really cool. Like, they liked that they couldn’t have a wrong answer, because it was their answer, and as long as they could back up their thinking, which they could it was okay if it was at first levels of like, you know, beginning to unfurl that personal thinking. And then we had a personal component to, like a like an SLC, sort of a student led conference, sort of component where kids were also given an opportunity to reflect on themselves that was wildly popular on the same day. No, right? No, we were introducing both concepts. Got it got at the same time, and trying to offer that like something like a student led conference, gives kids a chance to center themselves, like talk about themselves. We kind of introduced both at once, and they ended up becoming, like a nice symbiotic, like partnership of kids being able to say, oh, like a, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it was gonna be. And B, gosh, I actually kind of even, like, liked it, like it was cool. Are there any kids you remember from that who who had a powerful experience? You know, I remember quite a few kids that I got pictures from teachers that said, Look, he’s here. He’s doing it like he’s he’s awesome. Or others that were would send me clips like this kid’s knocking it out the park. I’m so proud of their vulnerability, like it was the little surprises that came in again and again and again that stuck with me. It’s also interesting, because in a traditional context, you don’t often get opportunities to celebrate a kid’s vulnerability. That’s correct, and so that must have been a that must have felt good for you, yes, yeah. And letting the kids have that space for their voice and for their identity to be centered. So this sounds like a real roller coaster, because you must have had, you must have must have had, like, you’re going up. You’re like, it’s all gonna be great. It’s all gonna be great. Then a bunch of kids don’t show up, and you’re like, Oh crap, oh crap, yep. And then you start getting the messages from teachers, like, Oh, this is so amazing, yep. And the teachers were wonderful at asking the kids who had shown up to share reflections, like, what did you think? How did.

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It go, and then for other kids to hear like, Oh, it wasn’t that bad. Oh, well, tell me more. And so I think when we transitioned to the big night model, and kids were gonna have to be on campus for sports recognition or for orchestra, now, all of a sudden, you’re kind of, I want to go for that. Now I’m gonna be there anyway, so I might as well go for this other thing. Yeah, before big night was big night, before the exhibition component was there, were you already, like, putting all these events together or so? This was a suggestion made by one of our teachers here. One of our teachers reached out to me and Stephanie, and he said, Hey, so, so we had done exhibition night, and then I think, like a week later or something, there was a very traditional sort of Honor Roll recognition, yeah. And we had very few people here for exhibition, and we had everybody here to watch their kid get a certificate for honor roll. And he said, kind of infuriating. It well, it was, it was, again, like a good illustration of the traditional system that we’re working to, yeah, to integrate, or to upend, or to, you know what? I’ve been way more fun. You would have been way more fun than watching a bunch of kids get their names right out exhibition. I know, but he was the one who said, what if we do them on the same night? And so, I’ll be honest, I was a little in my feels like of the of the like, how do I troubleshoot this? How do I make this better? And sometimes you don’t see a solution that’s sitting literally right in front of your face, yeah. So it was him. He was the one who reached out and said, Why don’t we do these things together? And we were like, and there was born big night. And so now all end of the year celebrations happen on the same night, which also is kind of beautiful for like, a number of reasons. Yeah. Well, if you looked at the orchestra families were showing up, and then the sports families were showing up, and then the the honor roll kids were showing up. But what happens when you put it all on one night, and we’re a ginormous school, so I got room for all of it, right? Yeah, what happens is you end up with, instead of 15% of the school here, then 20% of the school that you actually end up with, like 70% of the school showing up because they’re they’re coming for a well, then they might as well stay for B and C, yeah. So that was brilliant. And I have to credit the teacher. He knows who he is, who reached out. And we were like, Oh my gosh, why didn’t I see that? That’s brilliant. You can shut him out. His name’s Kiki Ochoa, yeah. It was him. Way to go, Kiki, yeah.

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And then was there a year between the first one and the first big night? Yes. So initially, the first year we did exhibition, we only did it at the very end of the year, yeah. And then we started to open up conversation, because we’re a four by four, so kids are they only exhibited for the four classes they took the second half of the year, right? So that four by four means first semester you take four classes, second semester you take four other classes, correct? So then we started asking the question, well, what are we going to do for about first semester classes? Because there’s amazing work happening there, and there’s integrated work around small schools. And so then we began to ask the question, like, so it so we did exhibition the first time, and then what we did the second year was at the end of first semester, we did our first official Pols. So we had sort of felt it out the first year, but we didn’t really do them. So for the second year, it was Pols at the end of first semester. And for us, a pol presentation of learning is reflective, so like a student led conference, but as a public display using more the big picture learning model of Pols. And so they started first semester with it purely reflective. Here’s here’s the work I’m most proud of. It could have been from any class, and it’s okay if you’re doing it through your small school and you’re most proud of something you did in your Spanish class. Great. That’s the work you’re proud of. So we began with very simple like, what are you proud of? What’s one goal you have for second semester? What’s one obstacle you’ve overcome? Who’s one mentor or safe adult who’s helped you get there? You know, we gave them all kinds of reflective questions. And then second semester of the second year, that’s when we started big night. So it wasn’t until another year, but we were growing towards it, and we were building, like, with a lot of our different stakeholders, we’re going to do it all on one night. And there were a lot of people that were like, all on one night, how? And I was like, Guys, it’s huge here. Like, we can have like, and then great announcements, like, hey, go check out the orchestra. They’re about to play their first set. And then, hey, head over here for 10th grade. Go pick up your certificates for this. And it was just a beautiful I mean, we’re the Hornets, so I’m going to use this word on purpose. It was a little hive of everything going on around here that was really successful. But yes, it was a year later. So you had these, like, you had students who were there who were excited, students who weren’t there who are coming, feel a little bit of that FOMO of like, oh man, maybe I should have showed up for that. You have teachers who’ve seen all this stuff. Was there pushback? Yeah, I think there’s always very good questions that get asked about the amount of time and energy and resources that go into something like.

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And there are always very genuine questions around like, well, what percentage of kids aren’t showing up, and therefore, is it worth it? We’re grappling with questions now about the continuity of cohorting and the continuity of small school, because there is a really big desire and propensity in traditional schools to want to see numerical data that backs up that something’s working very quickly, right? And I get it. I mean, there’s, there’s state pressure for that, there’s district pressure for that. There’s, there’s pressure that comes with that. There’s internalized pressure with that. There’s like, this is what education is, and I should be asking these questions. So we grapple with the questions constantly around whether or not this is working, but like, there’s little things that make me really happy. Like, if you walk around Lincoln now and talk about exhibition, kids can tell you, Oh, this is what I exhibited. Or, yeah, I was in exhibition, or I did this, or Pols. Kids will tell you, like, oh, yeah, my favorite part of pol was whatever. And we started very low stakes. Our first rounds of Pols, the kids only had to present to a panel of two teachers, and they could invite a friend. That’s it. And a lot of people have asked me, like, you didn’t start with parents or no, we started with who was here at the school. We started very low stakes. We wanted the student to feel successful. And then very quickly our small school teachers started asking, like, okay, yeah, they killed that. What’s the next level up in hierarchy of audience? And then we were able to work through that, yeah. So it’s been steady growth. And when you’re working with a population of teachers who love the kids as much as the teachers at Lincoln do, they are always going to ask questions around what we’re doing. Of course they are, Yeah, makes sense, yeah, yeah. All right. So tell me about, tell me about the first big night, ooh, I have a distinct memory of standing up on a patio we have that looks down on our center quad and just

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tearing up like I just remember texting Stephanie, the CO principal, and saying, Oh, my God, there are so many people here. And she was like, Yeah, I remember the pride in one of my engineering teachers who reached out to me and said, Melissa, we’ve got like 95% attendance. Like almost all of our kids showed up. They’re here. We were a bit clunky, so we were trying to use because, like, I told you, everything was happening on campus. So we were doing some cycling out of some exhibitions. And I loved things like some of the teachers like that wasn’t enough time. My kids weren’t done. Rather than kids being like, All right, cool, we’re out. I’m out. Yeah, instead, it was like, there wasn’t enough time. So we created some new problems, but it was a good problem to have, yeah. And just kids were so proud, like I acknowledge that my position can often make me seem really daunting to speak to. You know, you’re the principal in a school of this size, but there were kids that were stopping me. Miss Melissa. Do you want to come see my presentation? Miss Melissa, do you want to hear about my work? And I remember just being like, yeah, I really do, but

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I didn’t want to ask you, because I didn’t want you to, you know, like, because I know we’re growing and and so that was that was very cool. And parents that I remember, the parents that stopped me and said, a lot of the parents families here at Lincoln know that I’m bilingual, so the the Latino families that stopped me and just said, you know, we’re just blown away. Thank you. This was very cool. I don’t always get to see the work my student is doing, so to get to hear them explain was amazing. So that’s what I remember. I remember just walking around on a cloud that night, yeah, well, it’s like, it’s like Ron Berger says an ethic of excellence about Friday Night Lights. Like, imagine a school and imagine a town that feels this way about academics, not just football. Yep, and we have a football team here. We feel that way about so it was nice to have a big night that was just as big as a state championship game. And it felt like that. It felt very just like so everybody on the team was working for the same goal, yeah, just like our football team does, yeah, so that’s beautiful, yeah? It was awesome. So cool.

29:05
And that was last year. That was yeah, we have now had two big nights. So last year we had our second big night, and then this school year, and we continued to refine and grow Pols, and then this school year is the first time that we actually just had a exhibition at the end of first semester. And we’re going to have a second big night at the end of second semester. So we’re actually going to have two big nights. Cool, yeah, first semester. We couldn’t call it a big night because we did that one during the day. We tried a different model. The teachers wanted to try something to have more classes be able to see each other’s work. And because one of the reflections was they we love doing everything all on one night, but some kids are so like, oh, I have to go to this, and then I have to go to this, and they don’t get to see other kids work. So they said, Is there any way, you know, let’s think through that. Like.

30:00
There a way for us to do one of the exhibitions where kids can see other kids work, and then to let our ninth graders spend some time looking at what the small schools are doing while they’re making their choice. So we chose, yeah, one of the things we’ve also started in the last couple of in the last year is a student ambassador program with a leadership team for each small school. So one of the questions that came up is, wouldn’t it be cool if students went into the ninth grade classrooms like the week before, and said you’re going to be coming to our exhibition? Here’s what you’re going to see. Here is Here are questions you can ask us. Here is what we’ve been doing to kind of prime the pump a little bit and to prep them to come in and be ready for what they’re going to see coming in cold was too hard. Yeah, it was too hard. If you could go back in time,

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what would you tell that? Melissa? What would your advice be, yeah, like, right at the start? Well, first, I wish that I had been here the year before, when the small schools were being designed. Remember, I inherited the three small schools and was and I came in at the beginning of their inception. So I would say, first of all, I really wish I had been here for their design. Now, if I accept where I was when I got here, then I would tell that Melissa do more work around the why of why these small schools were developed. Because I jumped really quickly into wanting to all these cool things to be happening. Yeah, but I wasn’t steeped enough in the why. And again, it’s another High Tech High. Ism like I had, I would have reminded myself to go slow, to go fast, because I think I initially wanted to go fast, to go fast, and going fast to go fast does inevitably you crash. It doesn’t work. Why? No matter what my my history or my background knowledge is, I’m still working with a team of teachers, a group of teachers, a staff of teachers who has a vision for this school, who have been here far longer than I have, and who love these children. And it is not about my vision taking hold. It is about creating a collective vision that brings in, yes, I have a body of expertise, but I can only bring in an inspiration, not replication, because this is not any of the schools I’ve ever worked at before. So going slow, to go fast is to make space for that voice. And I don’t, I’m not great at doing that. Like, I want to be clear. I’ve had to, it’s had to be a mantra, a centering mantra for me of like, Melissa, sit your butt down. Like, be quiet. Stop talking like I have had to say that to myself in my head many times. And I think if anybody on Lincoln staff is listening to this, they’ll laugh and be like, I’m surprised you say that to yourself, because I get it. Imagine what it could be like. I know, and I’m actually silencing myself. And then the other thing is, and the one thing I think I’ve done very well is not to let perfection be the enemy of the good. And I do remember walking around initial exhibitions, like exhibition preps happening in classrooms, and thinking to myself, Oh my gosh. Like, I really wish this work was a lot more refined, I really but I had to acknowledge that this was a genuine classroom activity that produced this work. There’s opportunity there for reflection and for growth, and just like going to Ron Berger and Austin’s butterfly, like it’s about learning the value of the iterative and like the teacher said, sometimes you have to tell a kid it’s going out to exhibition anyway, so that they begin to see that exhibition has meaning. You’re gonna stand there with your work, you know? So, yeah, I think those are some of the things I would tell myself. They’re the things I’m telling myself right now. They’re the things as I continue to grapple with I’m telling myself right now, awesome, Melissa, thank you so much. Thank you for having me much fun. Yeah,

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high tech. High unboxed is hosted and edited by me Alec Patton, huge thanks to Melissa agadelo for this conversation. You can find links and resources in the show notes. Thanks for listening. You.