Jeff Robin:
I worry so often when I hear about project-based learning and people say to me when I get up and speak about it, “Oh, it’s just willy-nilly. People throw things together.” And I say to them, “No, no, it’s done well. Project-based learning is this beautiful thing where kids get autonomy, they have agency, it gets to be about them, and then they get to work with a teacher that really understands the subject area and is able to help them become a better student and a better creator and a better thinker.”
And my biggest takeaway from doing this book is something that I already knew. When I first met Ron Berger in 2000, he said to me, “Jeff, you know what you should do?” And I said, “No, Ron, tell me.” He’s like, “You should document every single thing that your students do and put it on your website.” And I called him my nemesis after that because I went from having a teaching job to having a teaching job and another full-time job of documenting everything that my students made.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton. And that was the voice of Jeff Robin, a founding teacher at High Tech High and now co-author with Jean Kluver, of Changing the Subject 20 years of projects from High-Tech High. And the book is just that. It’s a collection of 50 projects from elementary, middle, and high school going back to 2001 when High Tech High first opened. It’s full of photos of student work. It’s got information about how they exhibited, and about what the students learned from doing the project. It’s inspiring, it’s challenging, it’s beautiful, and I wish it’d been around when I was a new teacher.
So I interviewed Jeff Robin and Jean Kluver to find out more about how they made it. Jeff was a retired art teacher, and when he started High Tech High, he’d already been teaching for 13 years. Jean is a former dean at High Tech Elementary Explorer. She’s one of the founders of Unboxed, thanks Jean. And she’s married to Larry Rosenstock, High Tech High’s co-founder and first CEO. Jean and Jeff are two people who really know the history of High Tech High. So it makes sense that when I asked them where the idea for the book came from, Jean’s answer took us all the way back to the beginning.

Jean Kluver:
There’s a short term story about how the idea came about, and then there’s a long-term story, which is I spent 15 years and Jeff spent 17 years trying to get teachers to document their projects. I started out at Unboxed with our favorite project cards, and I noticed that anytime we went anywhere or anytime any teachers came to High Tech High, that’s all they wanted. They wanted to see examples of projects, they wanted to see what the student work looked like.
So at High Tech Elementary Explorer, I was always the one who was trying to get everybody to document their projects. Oh, wait a minute, we can go back even farther than this. We can go back more than 20 years to Ron Berger, who pre-internet used to carry around suitcases of student work. And I remember the first time when the Explorer Elementary, before we had merged in with High Tech High, and all the teachers were really worried about High Tech High.

Alec Patton:
I need to provide a bit of background here. First Explorer Elementary, which is now called High Tech Elementary Explorer, is the only school in the High Tech High group that started out as a separate institution. And Ron Berger was an elementary school teacher in Massachusetts for 28 years, from 1975 to 2003. And his work, or rather his students work, was among the chief inspirations for High Tech High. Okay, back to Jean.

Jean Kluver:
So I remember I invited them all one at the beginning of one year because Ron Berger was there at High Tech High Media Arts, and he had unloaded all of his suitcases, and there was a huge room of tables of all this student work that he was lugging around with him for years and years and years. Anyway, the light bulb went on for all of the Explorer teachers. They just couldn’t believe it. They were so inspired. They came away with 5, 10, 15 ideas for projects that they wanted to do in their classrooms, and forever after the value of archiving student work, the value of documenting what you do in your classroom, there’s never been anything more powerful, really.

Alec Patton:
And you said there was a long version and a short version. What’s the short version?

Jean Kluver:
The short version is that in 2019, much to his surprise, Larry Rosenstock won a big international award, which is called the Wise Prize, which stands for World Innovation Summit in Education. So every two years they give a prize to an educational innovator. So anyway, much to everyone’s surprise, Larry was chosen for this award. And in the run up to the award, he was called and asked, “If you do win this prize, what would you do with it?” And Larry said he wanted to share the work of High Tech High students and teachers as widely as possible. So then when he did win the award, that’s what sparked the idea for this book and the website that goes along with it.

Jeff Robin:
So Larry told me about it. I was really excited and I made a book every year of my students work, and then do… I call it a teacher reflection project. And so sometimes I would make websites or little animations, but I would always make a book of my students’ work at the end of the semester. And it was cool because they would buy it because it was a personal yearbook of the work they had done. And every year Larry would get books from me and he’d hand them out to people and things like that. So he said, “I’d like to do a book like how you did, except for do it for all the schools for 20 years.” And I was really excited about it. I thought, “Oh, this is going to be awesome.” And I think it did, it turned out so much better than any… I mean, it’s beautiful and it’s interesting and it’s… People have looked at it that aren’t educators and they say, “Oh my God, this school, there’s elementary school projects and middle school projects and high school projects that are just beautiful.”

Alec Patton:
When did the two of you become the team?

Jean Kluver:
Good question. Larry asked us both to do it. So I knew that I could interview teachers and write about projects, but I knew that I couldn’t make the images look beautiful the way Jeff could. So we needed to have both of those aspects.

Alec Patton:
And what surprised you once you got started about making this book?

Jeff Robin:
A couple years back, there was this grant given to do a dissemination grant of all middle school projects. And I remember I got involved with that and I was talking to middle school teachers and we were trying to organize this and get them to do the work, to write up their projects and hand it in. And what we got wasn’t really great because they didn’t know what we were looking for. Certainly when you ask two dozen people to hand in something, you have to have some kind of criteria. You have to have some kind of organization to really make it go together, to curate the stories of the projects together. So having had that experience of abject failure, Jean and I really got together and we talked about, what are we going to do? And she asked for people to nominate great projects.
And we also went to people that we knew had done great projects, and we really asked a ton of people like, “Hey, do you have projects and images from projects that you’ve done before?” And so we got a huge spreadsheet together of different teachers, and then we started interviewing them. And I think interviewing them much in the same way you’re interviewing us and you’re going to edit it and make it seem like I didn’t say um or duh too many times, that’s what we were able to do and show a congruent story so there was symmetry. In every project we asked, “What were your learning goals?” In every project we had, where did the project come from? How was it exhibited? And so we had this plan of the curation of the book, and I think that really was what tied everything together.

Jean Kluver:
One thing that surprised me was the way the projects fell by themselves into the categories, how we ultimately organized them. We just sent out this open call, and we also, ourselves, had remembered a lot of projects that we thought were great because we had gone to exhibitions and seen them. So if people didn’t nominate those projects, and then some of them were people that had moved on and they were teaching elsewhere or they were running schools elsewhere, we tried to track down whoever we could remember. And then we also got a lot of nominations, and we didn’t really think ahead of time about categorizing the projects. We essentially got started writing them up, and when we had about 50 of them and we realized that our book was going to be too fat if we had any more, we looked at them all and we thought, “How are they grouping themselves?” And we were also using this quote from Freire about education being a process of invention and reinvention.

Alec Patton:
Quick note. Jean’s talking about Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educator most famous for writing Pedagogy the Oppressed, and another person whose work inspired High Tech High. Back to Jean.

Jean Kluver:
It occurred to us that the projects really organized themselves into these three big groups, one of which was this invention and reinvention where students are really making something concrete, a product in the physical world. Many people think that that’s all there is to project-based learning, that it’s about robotics and rocketry, and you always have to make a product. But we had many projects that were not exactly like that, that were still amazing transformational projects.
And so our other category was also from Freire, In the World With the World. So this process of inquiry with the world and being in the world, that that’s a whole category of projects in this book, as well, which also is called community service learning, and for us is part of project-based learning, too, where kids are going out interviewing people in the community, they’re going out exploring their community, and they’re creating something of value with that inquiry, whether it’s a service or whether it’s a product. It’s creating something of value.
And then the third category, which is also from the Freire quote, which is this inquiry with ourselves. Those are also some of the most powerful projects. The students are examining their own identity. They’re examining their family history. They’re looking at the community of their school. And so those projects became a third category for us, that they’re looking inward or they’re looking at their relationships, they’re challenging beliefs, and those are extremely powerful projects, as well.

Jeff Robin:
When Jean came up with this, I was just like, “Oh, this is so perfect,” because I was… As an artist, as somebody who makes things, I really thought that you had to do or make things for it to be a project. And I… As a possibly, I can’t even believe I’m admitting this, a macho painter type guy, I didn’t think those are projects. But when I looked at it, when I read it, I saw these are projects. These are the things that you need to do in life where you have to experience things to be a well-rounded student, and kid, and member of society, to think about more than just what I do and what I make, but it’s also about how I think and how I interact with other people. And just one day she said, “Look, we’re going to use this quote, and this is how I’m going to separate it out.” I was like, “Oh my God, this is beautiful. It’s just…” It solved all my anxiety problems about the way we were going to present it. So I was lucky to have Jean working with me.

Alec Patton:
Jeff, is there a particular project that challenged your thinking about what a project could be?

Jeff Robin:
Yeah. So there was this one about… What was the name of the project where the kids did sports in North County?

Jean Kluver:
Dribble and Rebel.

Jeff Robin:
Dribble and Rebel. So Dribble and Rebel, to me, it had a lot of teachers. It seemed ambiguous when I first looked at it. There was no clear cut idea of one thing happening. And the images that I got were a menagerie of all kinds of things that I couldn’t really see a story there. And I was like, “Ah, jean, I’m not sure if this works out.” And it was a school wide project where the students looked at identity, they looked at sports, they looked at how they relate to each other, they looked at racism, they looked at just playing and getting along and doing stuff out on the field together and coming up with new ideas and new sports.
So it was this kind of a monumental thing that could have either gone horribly wrong or gone incredibly well. And now that I look at it, and now that I think back on it, I’m impressed. It had so many moving parts and the kids seemed truly interested and seemed like they really grew from their experiences. And I mean, they worked in so many different layers of things. It taught me something. It taught me to think about not only… I mean, they’re very much into social and emotional, and where social emotional meets project-based learning. If you think about it, it’s the underlying common denominator is empathy and this project really showed it. These teachers worked very hard to collaborate with a lot of different people, and that’s no easy task. So I was pretty impressed by that project.

Alec Patton:
Jean, what was the project that was new to you that you wouldn’t have learned about without this book?

Jean Kluver:
You know, I actually had… One of the ones that stayed with me was the one that Mele Sato did with her students about voting, Does My Vote Matter? I had never heard about that project before, and I had missed that exhibition. But using math and statistics to understand voting, and getting the students to see how unfair various kinds of gerrymandering is, and challenging students to come up with better ways that we could vote and count our votes, just seemed brilliant. And it seemed a brilliant way to get into math and statistics in a way that is so relevant, and seemingly surprised the high school students, because I think many students feel like voting is an area of adult knowledge that you’ll get to at some point, but that adults know everything about it. And I think what was revealed in this project is that adults really know very little about voting and voting methods. We don’t. And so for the young people to learn about it and educate their parents, I think was a great thing.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, that’s an amazing project. I love that project.

Jean Kluver:
One of the things, Alec, that I wish, and you would appreciate this as a Shakespearean, one of the categories, it didn’t rise to have its own category, and I wish that we had captured more projects like this, but I have seen in my life in schools that projects where students create a performance of some kind, and that could be like your refugee simulation, or a dance performance, or writing and acting in a play. I think that sometimes doing performance is for students can be one of the most transformational kinds of learning. The whole process of how closely you have to work together with other people, and how you have to take on somebody else’s character, and the access you have to emotions from acting something out like that becomes very, very powerful. We do have several projects that involve performance, but we didn’t have enough, or we didn’t have the wherewithal to create a category of its own. Anyway, that could be another book, I think, because those are really amazing projects from students’ point of view, I think.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Now, how should teachers use this book?

Jean Kluver:
Well, I hesitate to tell teachers how to do anything. I-

Alec Patton:
Well, Jeff doesn’t, so we’re fine.

Jean Kluver:
We balance each other out. Okay, my hope is that people use the book as inspiration, or to spark ideas, or some of the photographs, or some of the learning goals, or some of the exhibition ideas. Just give them an idea about a project that they would like to do and that they modify it and make it fit their own community, their own school. They adapt it somehow. That’s how I hope people will use it.

Jeff Robin:
I agree with her on all of those ideas. I mean, I don’t want anybody to just see a project and say, “Oh, I’m going to do that project. I’m going to just copy it. I see what it is, and I’m going to do it.” Because I believe to do project-based learning really well, it has to come from the teacher. It has to come from something that you are interested in and that you’re going to share with your students, or it’s something that you at least have done yourself and you’re going to share this activity or this project with them.
Now, I hope that teachers and schools and just people in general see that this book came out. And so it’s 20 years of projects from High Tech High, from all the schools. What I hope that people look at this is that, “Oh, wow, look at these two page spreads, four page spreads, six page spreads. This is the kind of thing that I need to have after my project’s done. I want to document what I’ve done. I want to document it, and that way I can then use it for myself to become better. I can show it to my students to say, ‘look, this is what we’ve done in the past.’”
Administrators can have that and say, “Check out what my school did this year.” This would be a great thing for every school to do every year. Instead of having a yearbook with class clown and most likely to succeed, have a yearbook of the work that the students did. And if you’re a teacher that only gives tests and quizzes, and you give the sample quizzes that you gave out and the median test score, it’s okay, that’s what you’re going to do, but I think I would love to see, “Wow, what the kids made, what the kids…” The ideas that the students transformed and turned into their own projects and their own understandings, and it’s in a book, and it’s every kid in the school that participates because every teacher does.
So I see the book now as an exemplar. We did the project ourself first of what it would be like if you documented all the work that a school has done in a year, and that’s the book. And it’s not a perfect example because it took us 20 years to do it and 16 schools, but I think that that’s something to shoot for. And I think that would change education, that would move the needle in education.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, so there’s an element of what you want. It’s a challenge. It’s like, “Okay, what’s your book going to be?”

Jean Kluver:
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Robin:
Yeah. I mean, I was doing that anyway, but I was doing it in such a crass, angry way for some reason. As a teacher, being the art teacher, it’s like, you have to understand, every single day kids would show up in my room and ask for supplies that their teacher should have bought. So already, if you see an angry art teacher out there, the reason is is because they’re just being deluged with requests. But I was also feeling… I was feeling… When I was doing all those books and making all those things, and people would say, “Oh, but you’re good at that kind of thing.” And it’s like, well, yeah, I wasn’t born good at that kind of thing. I got good by doing it the same way we hope the students will be. So if we’re teachers and we want the kids to document their work they’ve done and revise and improve, and then eventually show a quality work, as teachers we need to model that behavior for them.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jean Kluver:
We’ve also heard from some people that they’ve used the book, or more easily the website, in various different kinds of professional development in the same way that we use project cards, choosing certain projects, having people take them apart, having people iterate something. How could you do something like this in your classroom? What would you want to change about it? How would you make it right for your grade level? So we’ve heard about people using the book that way. We’ve heard about people, let’s say, doing a workshop on how you do project launches, and using several of these as examples of, here’s six different projects and how the teachers decided to start them off. Or focusing on exhibition, looking at six or seven different projects that have really different ways of showing the student work, and using that as a way to get teachers thinking about how they might show student work in their own classrooms. So there’s many ways we hope it’ll be used.

Alec Patton:
Awesome. I think that’s a great note to end on. Thank you both so much.

Jeff Robin:
For sure.

Jean Kluver:
Thank you, Alec. This is-

Jeff Robin:
[inaudible 00:22:51].

Jean Kluver:
… great to have this conversation.

Alec Patton:
I know.

Jean Kluver:
Okay. Take care.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. You can read the online version of Changing the Subject at www.changingthesubject.org. There’s a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.