MICHAEL KWAS: Part of me was like will we come back? Will there be PBL after this? Who knows what was going to happen with that.

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ALEC PATTON: This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton. Two weeks ago, we came to the end of our four part series about Cheltenham School district’s mission to bring PBL to Cheltenham High School, a 135-year-old public school just outside Philadelphia. There’s a link to the full series in the show notes. If you haven’t listened to the series yet, start there. This episode won’t make very much sense without it.

That series ended in January 2020, but Cheltenham’s PBO program did not end there. It just changed a lot, like everything else. So last week we got together a group of people who were there for the whole thing to bring the story up to date. I’ll let them introduce themselves.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: Hi I’m Karen Shaffran. I teach 11th grade and 12th grade project based learning at Cheltenham High School.

BRIAN REILLY: Hi I’m Brian Riley. I am the director of STEM for the Cheltenham School district.

SIMON: Simon. I’m a Cheltenham graduate. And I’m a freshman at Thomas Jefferson University.

JOHANNA CELLA: I’m Johanna Cella. I’m ninth grade biology PBL teacher.

MICHAEL KWAS: My name is Mike Kuaz, project based learning social studies, Cheltenham High School.

RANDY SCHERER: Hi I’m Randy Scherer. I work at the HTH GSE and at HTH and professional learning and with the Unboxed team. And I think I’ve been working with the Cheltenham crew since their first visit to Hi Tech High.

ALEC PATTON: We picked up the story from when the district closed its schools in March 2020.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: At first, we thought it was temporary. Nothing happened. We had no school. We were posting assignments such as it was on our learning platforms. And then, I’m not going to remember exactly how long so help me out everybody else, at some point, it became clear that we were staying home. And that we were going to do some version of online learning. If I’m remembering correctly, we didn’t have live classes that first go round, right. We had check-in days that were optional. Is that right?

BRIAN REILLY: Yes. So we were the first district actually at least the first in Montgomery County, I’m not sure about the state. But we were the first to close. And then the governor closed the rest of the state a couple of days later. And that’s when we realized that this wasn’t going to be short-lived. And we went to as asynchronous and remote as you could get because we just weren’t ready for it.

MICHAEL KWAS: I remember Karen mentioning something via email or text. And I was thinking somewhat along these lines, but didn’t really finalize the thought on it, is that this could be our shining moment. But we didn’t know how we were going to get back in touch with the kids. And that was probably the most frustrating thing. And somebody else can jump in there but that’s what I remember about it most.

JOHANNA CELLA: We lost connection with so many students, like actually lost connection with a lot of our students because there was a lack of actual face to face interaction. Some of our students, due to various situations, we barely emailed with them. So I think for many of us, it became survival as opposed to let’s see how we can innovate as much as possible at that moment when we were going through the height of what is asynchronous look like, what is remote learning, what does this all mean? And at the same time, also try to understand how are we going to juggle our own home lives with everything that was happening.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: I think one of the first things we did to try to feel like we were still a PBO cohort was I had seen there was a challenge, an online challenge on Instagram by the Getty Museum– I think it was in LA– challenging people to recreate artwork at home with whatever they could find. And so I got in touch with the Philly Museum and asked if they would sponsor us to start a local version of that using their collection, which was all online. So I challenged the kids to recreate something in the Philly collection at home. They were so amazing what they made, like really beautiful work.

Some of it really simple, some recreated surrealist paintings and photography. I could tell that people were hungry for something to do that felt creative. And then they posted it on a district Instagram page and then the Philly museum posted it too. And that was kind of cool.

MICHAEL KWAS: Now, Karen, was that in the spring or in the fall?

KAREN SHAFFRAN: That was in the spring, I think. Wasn’t it?

MICHAEL KWAS: Because I was not– we were not– I forget exactly how it worked. But I know at least with my subject, and I think it was bio as well and English, where we had to do the same thing as all the other English and social studies and bio teachers when we came back. When we had a month off completely with nothing. And then when they finally got all the pieces together to go online, that’s what we did.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: Oh. I do remember there being a little bit of a kerfuffle about that. And several parents got involved. Because we were– you’re right, we were told to put aside PBL and align with their non-PBL subject area teams. You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.

MICHAEL KWAS: And I remember thinking, oh, this could be. And part of me was like will we come back? Will there be PBL after this? Who knows what was going to happen with that.

ALEC PATTON: And Simon, did you know about this that it was like no PBL?

SIMON: No I never knew that. Well, I knew that we’re kind of shifting towards more of like a normal school learning situation. But I didn’t know that it was like that important. I thought that we were still going to try our best to have projects and stuff. Yeah, for the end of that year, I really don’t remember a lot. Everything’s kind of blurred together. So I get a lot of things in like senior year mixed up with what happened in junior year.

ALEC PATTON: Do you remember making a picture based on–

SIMON: Yeah. That project, I enjoyed that project because it was different than if we were in person obviously. But everybody did something creative. And nobody really like just took like a random picture and used that. Everybody tried on it, which I like to see because in a lot of online school, people don’t try.

ALEC PATTON: What was your picture?

SIMON: It was a painting of somebody holding up a sword. So I used a sword that I built for a project, like a school project back in the day. And I went on Photoshop and tried to make a kind of look like a painting.

ALEC PATTON: OK, so that was the spring. It sounds like fall kind of PBL came back. When did that decision get made?

BRIAN REILLY: To answer your previous prompt, Alec, PBL was nowhere near the front of our thought-process from an admin side. It was a matter of can we get 4,000 kids to learn anything while schools closed. And so that blur of what’s going on continued the spring of 2020 through the summer to the start of the next school year was essentially, in my mind, all one day. We were just doing the same thing over and over and over again, trying to get everybody to a point where we could have some sort of resemblance of what school could be knowing that kids were not coming back. We had known students were not going to be returning, and teachers were not going to be returning to the building to start that school year.

RANDY SCHERER: Can I put someone on the spot really quickly? This is Randy. OK, I remember back in the summer of 2020 wondering what was going to happen with all of the work that you had done to grow a PBL program. And then here comes this. pandemic. And started reaching out to some of the people on this call right now, and I got an email back from Karen. I’m only going to read one sentence of it, which was– this is in August of 2020. Yes, thank God. We are all in on PBL, with an exclamation point. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MICHAEL KWAS: Well, I’ll say this. Like I forgot when we got the go ahead but we were planning– all right. We were planning as though we were going to go ahead, and maybe even trying to ensure that we were going to go ahead, by having a project that might even involve school officials. And I looked at it, again from Karen’s prompt, I looked at it from the standpoint of how can we really make this work? We know what everybody did asynchronously in the spring.

And this can be our moment to shine. So we just started planning. Right, Joanna? And I found it to be a great opportunity to actually get to the– I’ll say, in a sense, the bare bones essence of PBL without the STEM lab, without the traffic of the kids and the backlog of work, the logjam that we would have at times or the bottleneck of work. And we– Joanna, you can chime in here– we kind of focused on the design process and on the gallery walks and the feedback.

JOHANNA CELLA: We really did put our heads together and say that we were going to make this shine as much as we could. And I mean I think that our first project was a success. I think all our projects actually were pretty successful. And one of the ways that we put it, as Mike was saying, we really wanted to remind people that we were here. We’re present. We’re trying to engage students as much as possible and to connect them not just within the school setting, the quote school setting I suppose, but also to each other and to the community, which is what the first project essentially was.

And we did have– and to some extent, Zoom was actually, or whatever we used, Google Meet, was actually kind of helpful because we were able to quote bring in people with some ease actually. And they were able to be part of our classroom with not that much effort beyond just scheduling them into our time, which was pretty awesome.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: Yeah I second that emotion. We were able to have a lot of guest speakers and interactions with people outside of the school community that we would have never been able to coordinate in person.

ALEC PATTON: Who’d you get?

KAREN SHAFFRAN: Well, I wish Avril was here to talk about this. She hooked us up with Johnson & Johnson, who was in the throes of developing a vaccine. We were able to get 10 employees of changing– oh my goodness, I’m turning it off because the– turning my mic off for a second.

ALEC PATTON: It’s all right, Karen, that’s real.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: In case you were wondering, the late bus will be leaving in 10 minutes. So we had kids working in groups of three each with a mentor from J&J from the vaccine team. And their job was to help with marketing, because they had anticipated, unfortunately, accurately, the resistance they would get from certain communities about being vaccinated. So our kids had really front seat view of what was happening in the real world. And we would never have been able to make that happen in class or been able to transport them to J&J’s office. And so that was pretty amazing.

ALEC PATTON: Wow. So were the kids helping to market the vaccine?

KAREN SHAFFRAN: Yeah. So they had to pick an audience that they wanted to reach and develop some kind of tool, social media or I remember a group did a podcast, one group did a TikTok for teenagers. One did a children’s book. They had to learn about vaccines, how they work, interview their mentors. And then we had an exhibition, online exhibition, with all of the mentors, all of the teams. We went through all of their projects.

They loved them. I mean, the J&J people. They were just– I think, not that this has changed so much, I think the best outcome of what we’re going through is that people are more likely I would say to help each other and lift each other up. But the adults at J&J were just so thrilled to have a connection, a touch with young people. And give them a sense of purpose. So it was fantastic. And if I’m not mistaken, they actually used a couple of them, at least internally, to talk about marketing.

ALEC PATTON: That’s so cool.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: Yeah it was very cool. And other things, I don’t know what speakers– I think you guys in nine had some local politicians come in to your classroom virtually?

MICHAEL KWAS: Yeah. We had Napoleon Nelson, our state representative. We had our school board members, some school board members come in because they did a public service announcement. That was the project. And, well, they picked something like the environment or Black Lives Matter, women’s rights, some of your main social causes. And they got to pick what they wanted. And they did some research on it. And they had to do a one like a one minute public service announcement on it, reaching both on intellectual level and emotional level. Hitting the id and going through all of those things. Ethos.

JOHANNA CELLA: And the goal was to also, because it was an election year and we have ninth graders who can vote, we wanted to give them a voice. And to have them enact change in their own way. And to try to put in the forefront some issues that they felt were important. And ones that should really be heavily considered when going into this election.

MICHAEL KWAS: Boy, that was good, Johanna. I’m glad you remember that.

JOHANNA CELLA: I’m sorry. I’m looking at also for our essential question. I think our central question was just who am I.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: I don’t know about you guys or not, but we were teaching to circles. We were not teaching to live humans.

JOHANNA CELLA: Yeah. It did become that. Though we did actually have– in our second project, we did have a pretty awesome everyone on the camera moment.

MICHAEL KWAS: Yes. Yes. I was thinking about that.

JOHANNA CELLA: Was nice.

MICHAEL KWAS: So what Johanna is talking about, it was her project, the food allergy project. And we had a guest chef. The first year we did it, guest chef came into the school. Well, we can’t do that this year. So we had their kids our kids in their kitchens. They went shopping for ingredients. In some cases, I think we dropped some off. Didn’t we, Joanna?

JOHANNA CELLA: We did. We asked the school to purchase food for some students who may be financially strapped. And we either dropped it off or they came to the school to get it.

MICHAEL KWAS: Right. So all the cameras were on. And I remember this because I was trying to capture all this so we had some video of it. But it was great. All the kids cameras were on, in their kitchens, chopping food, stirring things up. You know, frying things. All with this very charismatic guest chef leading the charge. And they were smiling. And that was a great moment.

JOHANNA CELLA: Yeah. That project we did, that has had gone through many iterations. And it was one that we did fully in person. It actually pivoted pretty easily to online because instead of making anything physical or cookbook, we made videos. And we had the students cook. Basically come up with cooking shows on their own. And they produced their own little video, and then we put it onto a website. And that project was pretty successful for us. I think that was a pretty easy pivot for us. I was very surprised, to be quite honest.

MICHAEL KWAS: And as a matter of fact, WeVideo, we utilize that for both projects. And we were afraid it could get a little bit stale after a while. But we would break it up with other things. But there was another benefit, they could record in silence in their rooms at home. We could say, go record something and be back in 20 minutes, which was not as easy to do in a classroom setting with all the kids and all the noise, you know, speaking at the same time.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: I wanted to shout out Kevin Kaufman, who’s our communications director, who came on right around when corona came. But so much of what we were able to do and get out to the community was because he was excellent at posting things and making sure that the community we were here. We were kind of like Horton Hears a Who over here. We’re here, we’re here, we’re here, we’re here. Like, don’t forget about us. And, obviously, the challenge of recruiting new students to PBL was exacerbated by not having show-and-tell. So he has continues to be a great supporter and cheerleader and publicizer of what we’re doing over here.

MICHAEL KWAS: Agreed.

JOHANNA CELLA: Agreed. Absolutely.

ALEC PATTON: And Simon, your senior year. What was going on?

SIMON: Actually one of the main things was the internship, that was definitely one of my favorite parts of high school I would say because, honestly, I got lucky with my internship. I was working with my friend’s dad, who is an artist. David Hart. And it was like a real– I got to actually work on physical things. We were learning about designing furniture. So I built a couple of chairs with him. And we kind of went through just learning the design process and going through iterations and stuff.

But it didn’t really feel like school. It kind of felt like the real world, I would say. So it was definitely a really good experience for me, especially in senior year right before going into college.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: You really killed that internship, Simon. That was amazing, what you were able to accomplish under those circumstances.

SIMON: It was definitely a good experience for me.

ALEC PATTON: So internships went ahead?

KAREN SHAFFRAN: Yes, surprisingly. We had most virtual. Simon said that he was able to have an in-person internship. We had one other pair of seniors who were working with a farmer, and they had an in-person internship. And everybody else was virtual.

A couple were actually probably better virtual. One student was a guest blogger for a website, [INAUDIBLE], who wanted to be a journalist. So it was a really great match. And translated well to virtual.

And just keeping people engaged and connected with their mentors was crazy. But, having said, that everybody did something. And then we had a little window where things seemed safer in the spring. And I’m not even sure in retrospect why that was. But the district allowed us to have an in-person, outdoor, but in-person celebration and presentation of learning for our seniors at the end of the year, which was so great to be together. So good.

ALEC PATTON: Oh wow.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: And really send them off. Our little pioneer class, or first PBL class. Send them off with some fanfare and some we started some new traditions. They have special graduation scarves to denote that they’d been PBL students, it just felt really good.

BRIAN REILLY: One of my favorite efforts I thought from that year was Bella’s work on the board that she was able to hang up outside.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: Yeah, that was tremendous. So, Bella and Xavier’s internship at the farm was cut short for reasons beyond their control. The farmer had to leave the space where she was hosting them. And they had planned to do a community garden on the farm. So they really wanted to keep going with that idea.

And so we thought, well, let’s try to do it somewhere at school. And we have this thing we call the PBL patio, right outside part of the building that we inhabit, that had sort of over a few years accumulated a lot of junk. And lots and lots of wasps. And it had was not well loved, let’s put it that way. It’s kind of like the dirty area where people go out and spray paint stuff or whatever.

So, the end of the year was spent, I don’t know, maybe six weeks, just cleaning that all out. Bella power washed it. And then we got a bunch of broken furniture and pallets. And they made raised garden beds. And then what Brian was just referring to was a mounted outdoor blackboard with a mural on it that opens up so that we could use the outdoor space as a classroom. And then on that day that we got together to celebrate the seniors, they all signed the inside of the door. So we’ll have the classes do that every year from now on. That was nice.

BRIAN REILLY: It was really cool just in terms of the legacy of PBL that you had your seniors create something that hopefully will last a long time. And they really transformed that space out there.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: And Simon [INAUDIBLE].

BRIAN REILLY: Yes. Yes, exactly. But I do think– and maybe teachers can talk about this piece in terms of the challenge– because my opinion is remote is one thing. And we learned how to do remote teaching and learning fairly proficiently. And we know we can do it in person. I think the biggest mode of teaching and learning is the hybrid, where you have some students in front of you, some students at home. And as a teacher, you’re trying to coordinate all that all at the same time. And in terms of PBL, I’m not sure what that experience was really like.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: I think we had the advantage because we co-teach. So we didn’t– I didn’t try to do that very often, have kids in front of me and at home. We took turns. So because we’re all together with them they would have English virtually and the kids that were here and do science with me and then we’d swap that out. I don’t remember trying to do both at once very often.

BRIAN REILLY: Sounds like you’re advertising a model we should do everywhere.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: 100%.

BRIAN REILLY: We’re working on it.

ALEC PATTON: So, well, I’m curious actually about that. Because that year you sent the email to Randy, we’re all in on PBL, were you worried during that year? Just to kind of be totally blunt about it, like were you worried that the plug was going to get pulled?

MICHAEL KWAS: I was.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: I was.

MICHAEL KWAS: I mean, here all of a sudden we were, by the nature of what needed to be done. And one of the reasons that I think that they had us all doing the same lessons, it was explained to us like subject wise, department wise, grade wise, was because they didn’t know how many teachers would be out at any given time. So there had to be some very uniform instruction that they could plug another teacher into.

So I was concerned through that. And who knows what was going to happen with the budget with COVID, right. Because of the economy. That it would just be easy just to have this kind of wither away without people even realizing it. And that’s why I feel the positivity of Karen’s email to Randy. Because when we knew it was definitely a go, it was like yes.

JOHANNA CELLA: I think one of the things that we’re always concerned about, this is something that Mike and I were just talking about a couple of hours ago, are the numbers. Because we are still a school within a school, there are some realities that we’re still facing and trying to grapple with. Our numbers are the telltale sign as to, I think, the true longevity of this program.

And so as the ninth grade team, we do feel a certain level of responsibility to the other grade levels of making sure that we have at least around the same numbers leaving ninth grade as came in. And so I think last year we were really cognizant of that and really trying to make it so that they still felt like they were getting a unique experience. That was– it was innovative, it was creative, they were able to tap into different talents as opposed to just doing the OK, we’re doing this Google Meet. We’re doing these nodes, we’re submitting this on campus.

So I think that the model actually helped us out a lot last year because we had a very strong freshman cohort. And we pretty much retained the entire cohort going into sophomore year, which we felt very successful about. And they were a great bunch, they really were. We love them. And we know that if we had them in person, then they would have also been amazing.

But I think the virtual aspect, like Mike keeps saying, it helped parse out some of the day to day things that may have gotten in the way. Whether it’s just us trying to get into the STEM lab setting norms and regulations, making sure that everyone is where they are, they were on their computers. They were doing our project virtually. There was nowhere else for them to go. So I think that actually we thrived in the virtual setting, which I didn’t expect to be quite honest. I’m always a doubting Thomas. So I did not expect it, but I was pleasantly surprised.

MICHAEL KWAS: I knew when we got the go for PBL, when we knew we were going to do it, that we were going to have an advantage as far as being able to provide something meaningful and unique. It was just a matter of kind of unveiling the different unknowns through that process. But back to what Joanna was saying about the group we got, it was a combination also of the recruitment we did into eighth grade. And the fact that our strong group last year was the group that had– it was the first group to have it in seventh grade when we started PBL.

And I remember when we were doing our gallery walks, and they were doing warm and cool feedback, they were all over it. They knew exactly what to do. And they couldn’t see it because it was virtual like but I was like glowing man, I was just like smiling. And it was a great thing to see.

And I would like to say, going back to the patio, what Bella did with making the patio into that wonderful space is I kind of see it– I was thinking about this while you were talking, Karen– I kind of see this as maybe a hopeful symbol that we’ve really started to make a difference. And from what the patio was to what it is now. And that may be a symbol of what we have for the future.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: That was pretty. I sure hope so. And I think it’s also kind of like we have this footprint now that’s literally labeled as ours.

MICHAEL KWAS: And we’ve learned a lot.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: We’ve learned a lot. Yeah. And shout out Jamboard, because who could have done PBL remotely without Jamboard.

MICHAEL KWAS: Jamboard was awesome. I also want to say that we’ve had a great administrative team as far as support. Like Brian’s here, Matt, Charlene. And we’ve all kind of weathered this together. And Brian, you know, I don’t know if we said it, but it’s just nice to know that we have you there. That gets it and understands it and are there to support us. And Randy, thanks for your support.

RANDY SCHERER: Always, always.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: We miss you guys. We miss seeing you and talking to you and hearing what you think. And hope we can bring that back at some point.

RANDY SCHERER: Hopefully, yeah. That would be awesome.

MICHAEL KWAS: And I have a shout out. I don’t know if you guys realized it, but early on, I spent a lot of time on the phone with Marky here. Mark Aguirre. He was like my PBL guru at that time. And I don’t know if you knew that, but, you know, I just wanted to say how much I appreciate that. When you see him, tell him I say hello.

JOHANNA CELLA: Yeah, and Santos is my go to person. So shout out to him too.

ALEC PATTON: All right, thank you all so much.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: Thank you guys.

SIMON: Thank you.

JOHANNA CELLA: Thank you.

MICHAEL KWAS: Thank you.

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RANDY SCHERER: Bye.

KAREN SHAFFRAN: Bye.

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ALEC PATTON: Hi Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Hershel. You can find links to some of the awesome student work from Cheltenham High School in our show notes. And I want to take a moment to mention the teachers and students at Cedarbrook Middle School, which feeds directly into Cheltenham High School. They have their own PBL program there. And while this series focused on the high school, I didn’t want to end this without mentioning the middle school.

Three Cedarbrook teachers, Isaac Stanford, Kristyn Sanborn, and Debbie DiBattista, actually made podcast episodes for this show last year about teaching and learning during the first year of the pandemic. There’s a link to those episodes in the show notes. Thanks for listening.

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