Ted Cuevas:
The badge came from I was a Boy Scout. There’s Girl Scouts and-

Alec Patton:
How far did you get?

Ted Cuevas:
Oh, I didn’t get very far. I didn’t find it to my liking.

Alec Patton:
But you remembered the badges.

Ted Cuevas:
Yeah, I did because I did the knots badge. I remember the knots badge very clearly, those skills and those are cool to have.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton and that was the voice of Ted Cuevas. Ted teaches ninth grade physics of High Tech High Chula Vista. He’s been teaching since the 1990s, and not only does he know more about project-based learning than almost anyone you’ll ever meet, he also has a moral and ethical commitment to teaching that I find both inspiring and challenging. And it really comes through in this conversation. When we recorded this interview, Ted’s students were in the middle of a project called Light on Literacy, in which they were designing and building solar-powered reading lamps for their first grade buddies at High Tech Elementary Explorer. It’s a great project. Ted has been doing it for years and has been a joy to watch it develop from afar. But what we’re talking about today is how Ted does assessment in this project and every project.

I’ll give you a quick summary of what it looks like right now because it’ll make the whole interview easier to follow. Here’s how it works. As Ted’s students are working on this project, they are attempting to earn a series of badges within four categories of learning, knowledge, skills, processes, and social and emotional learning. Students earn these badges by demonstrating proficiency, either through an actual demonstration or by showing evidence in their work. They do this using their digital portfolio, which then becomes a record of their learning throughout the project. Ted uses a specific platform for digital portfolios. It’s called Inkwire, spelled I-N-K-W-I-R-E. You’ll hear a little more about Inkwire in this episode, but if you really want to get a handle on what it does, you should probably look it up yourself. There’s a link in the show notes. So that’s what assessment looks like in Ted’s class, earning badges by demonstrating your learning.

This doesn’t sound a lot like schools I remembered, either as a student or as a teacher. But as Ted mentioned a minute ago, it does sound a lot like something else the kids do, scouting. This brought me back to another guest on this episode, the Catalonian Eduard Vallory, who as a child did exceptionally badly at school but thrived in scouts. Here’s a clip from that episode. You talked about at school that you’re failing. You don’t understand why no one else seems to understand why no one has any ideas there. And then meanwhile, were things going better in scouting?

Eduard Vallory:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. As I said, I realize now how the two worlds starting to separate in a way that were parallel and distant. And this is because one area was focused on goals that I was unable to achieve for the reasons that they were, and on permanent judgment. And the other world was based on challenges, on love and affection, on sense of community and on permanent learning. It’s like a contradiction that I realize now, but learning should have been the main element in my school experience and it never was.

Alec Patton:
Love, affection, community and permanent learning are at the heart of Ted’s class. And he’s managed over many years to craft an assessment system that serves these priorities rather than undermining them, which is no small feat. One final thing before we get into this episode. Ted mentions NGSS a few times, but neither of us ever say what it stands for. It stands for Next Generation Science Standards. And now here’s my interview with Ted Cuevas. What is assessment?

Ted Cuevas:
Students being able to communicate their learning?

Alec Patton:
Why is it important that kids be able to communicate their learning?

Ted Cuevas:
I really want them to be able to discover by the end of our education here at High Tech High that they’re empowered, that they know they can feel like they can learn anything. And so the more you can talk about your successes especially and your growth, I think you’re going to lead down that road.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. It sounds very obvious to say, but when you design a project or any unit of study, your hope and expectation and desire is that children will learn things from doing that.

Ted Cuevas:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
That’s why we’re all here.

Ted Cuevas:
Right.

Alec Patton:
And so there’s a certain aspect that’s like a happy accident where it’s like, “Wow, it’s amazing that happened. I never thought it was going to go that way.” But if that were your whole thing, that would maybe be an issue of this sort of like, “We’re going to do a thing and stuff’s definitely going to happen.” I know you don’t take that approach. When you’re starting out on a project, there’s what are they going to learn? There’s how are you Ted Cuevas going to know they’re learning it, and then there is, how are they, student going to have the opportunity to articulate themselves what they’re learning?

Ted Cuevas:
Correct. Or documenting also.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Where does that start?

Ted Cuevas:
I’ve started always with what do they want to know? What I want them to know? What are their standards? The NGSS. We talk as staff members. What do the 10th grade teachers in chemistry and science teachers want us to support them so that we pass them on?

Alec Patton:
How do you find out what the kids want to know?

Ted Cuevas:
When we start the project, literally like a KWL kind of thing. What do you know about electricity and what do you want to know? I like to give them a lot of reading. So every week they have to read an article. It could be about solar energy or solar power. It could be about circuits, conductors, and insulators. So as that happens before the project because something they’re going to need to know to be able to create the circuit, then they start asking questions and then in the past, I’ve taken that experience and really just, these are the list. I have a laundry list, which is impossible. And then I kind of go through personally, that’s my professional ability is to go, “I want them to know this skill, I want them to be able to communicate this process. I want them to be able to communicate about their growth as a person, the habits of heart and mind, social, emotional learning and knowledge.” What do I want them to be able to know and be able to express their knowledge of?

Alec Patton:
Yeah. I want to take a quick step back on this list. So with this list, you started talking about what your sources are from that. So I’ve got NGSS, I’ve got finding out from the students what they want to know, what they want to learn. I’ve got getting input from 10th grade teachers about what they feel like it’s important for your ninth grade students to know when they get to 10th grade. What else are you using to generate that list of learning goals or learning targets?

Ted Cuevas:
After each project, I always go back and I create a document of things that I learned, what was important, what were difficult, what was something that maybe I don’t need to emphasize next year and this coming year I’m going to emphasize because they need it.

Alec Patton:
So you’ve got this list of learning targets. Are you organizing them into different domains?

Ted Cuevas:
Yes. So the ninth grade teachers here, about maybe 10 years ago, we had a really good discussion about what we really wanted, the categories of their learning. And if you realize how much we emphasize knowledge in the past, that was pretty much what the emphasis was, “You got to know this you.” And instead we wanted to tease out more process like engineering or the process of writing. How do you start an essay, comparative essay or something like that.

And so we wanted to tease out what those processes were and the skills as well, just being able to graph a line and math. And then obviously, what do you know? What is electricity? Things like that. And the social emotional learning. Those are the four. The ones that we wanted to make sure is we pulled out is, okay, this is important for us to teach, is a process. And that could be the design process, it could be the engineering process. Being able to research is a process in itself. So I would say research. Being able to explicitly teach that so that they can explain how they researched and what they did and what did they learn about their process of research, for example.

Alec Patton:
The way I’m seeing this is that a skill is a single discreet thing and a process is like a skill, but it’s more complex and it combines different stuff.

Ted Cuevas:
Correct. So usually you could use skills for the process of creating or doing research. You have to know how to do a good search or that to be a skill.

Alec Patton:
How to do a good search, how to look at a series of different sources to figure out what they agree on, but then also how to document that, how to take notes that you can then find, how to save the hyperlink so you can find it again, and then how to communicate that to your team. Those are all different skills that fit into research as a process.

Ted Cuevas:
Yes. And that’s something that I think we need to do is be more explicit about what those processes are. There’s a lot of skills we teach them, a lot of knowledge we teach them, but do we really explicitly tell them, “This is how you write a paper.” And I think we do, but can they communicate that process, that series of steps that they took? And I think they can, and I think they do, but can we tease it out as an assessment piece? This is how you actually write a paper or start the paper or whatever.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. There’s also an important thing there about the discernment of when you have the opportunity to use your skill.

Ted Cuevas:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
The number of times with students where somebody would just think and be like, “Remember how last week we learned about how to do a search? Well, you could do that this week too, even though it’s a different task, you could apply that thing to here.” And connecting those dots, it’s much less intuitive to a teenager than you expect it to be as a teacher in my experience. So process, skills and knowledge, those are your three categories?

Ted Cuevas:
And social-emotional learning.

Alec Patton:
And social-emotional learning.

Ted Cuevas:
And that too is assessed and we’re… That’s a challenge, but I’m teasing out some things. For example, compassion is a more difficult have of heart and mind to find evidence for. When have you done compassion? You have, you’re a compassionate person, how can you become more compassionate and how would you be able to assess that? So we’ve coming up with nomination. “I nominate this person because they showed me compassion and here’s the situation.” So then that gets submitted as evidence, for example.

Alec Patton:
What’s a reasonable number of learning targets for a project?

Ted Cuevas:
So there’s a lot. I think what I do is focus on the badges. And that’s where I take a lot of time and this is difficult to do. So eight to nine real, you cannot escape the project. You have to know how to make a circuit. There’s a bunch of skills involved, but you have to know how to make a circuit and what a circuit. Is. So-

Alec Patton:
Is that a process or is it…?

Ted Cuevas:
That is probably more of a skill process, because this making of the circuit is, it’s a product, there’s a lot of skills that are involved, but you have to know how to draw the schematic or from the situation and then be able to model it and then actually do it. So there’s a lot involved and then I kind of break it up by CER. I use that claim, evidence and reasoning, “Okay, this is what I want them to be able to claim about their learning. Here is the evidence and this is the activities and assessments I’m going to provide for them so that they can document that process of proving.” And then the reasoning is a difficult one. That’s another process that’s very important. So putting all of that together takes a lot of time because each badge, for example, needs three, four pieces of evidence, strong pieces of evidence.

Alec Patton:
All right. I’m going to take you back slightly. When you say badge, what do you mean?

Ted Cuevas:
So the badge came from I was a Boy Scout. There’s Girl Scouts and-

Alec Patton:
How far did you get?

Ted Cuevas:
Oh, I didn’t get very far. I didn’t find it to my liking.

Alec Patton:
But you remembered the badges.

Ted Cuevas:
Yeah, I did. Because I did the knots badge. I remember the knots badge very clearly, those skills and those are cool to have. Also, I think I got to give some credit to Sarah Eastlass and Mark Aguirre because she remembers Mark Aguirre actually using the term badges. And so it’s been around.

Alec Patton:
Sarah, so it’s your former teaching partner and also alumnus of High Tech High. So you’ve got this list of learning targets beautifully organized into categories. What’s the process of turning them into badges?

Ted Cuevas:
What I really have always done for many years, since 1997, 98 is the portfolio. We used to do student portfolios with actually portfolio paper. And so that’s what I try to do, is use the portfolio as the means for them to communicate their learning. We have POLs and we have SLCs, we have visitors all the time. And how easy would it be for the students to be able to show their process of doing the project through a portfolio? That way we don’t have to worry about lost papers and all that. So at any one point in time they should have their portfolio of showing their whole process through the project, everything, video, photographs, scans, Google Docs, everything that we have, we should be able to store that in one location.

Alec Patton:
The way that I understand this so far is, they are doing a project and on the basic level their goal to design a solar-powered reading lamp for their buddy based on their buddy’s passions and interests and them talking to them and designing this thing together.

Ted Cuevas:
Correct.

Alec Patton:
And creating this. They’re also attempting to earn a series of badges.

Ted Cuevas:
Correct.

Alec Patton:
And the way that they earn those badges is by demonstrating their proficiency and they do that using the portfolio.

Ted Cuevas:
Exactly. You nailed it right there.

Alec Patton:
Which is like, it’s interesting because that is both so normal sounding and so different from how school normally happens. I hear that, I’m like, “Is there another way of doing it?” That seems like the thing that seems like how you would do it.

Ted Cuevas:
And it’s been around since the ’70s and stuff. All of this stuff isn’t brand new. It’s not new, there were great ideas in the past and a lot of other people have taught me. I’ll get a Sandy Minor and she was a wonderful team partner early on, and she was the one who really taught me about archiving student work, how to do that, how to create the portfolios. And this was with seventh graders a long time ago. And so it’s been a part of my practice or ultimate practice. And so when I came to High Tech High and they had the digital portfolio, I was really, because a nerd, tech nerd and all that stuff, I used to program and I love to do all that. So I was super excited about that. And then something happened where it went away, and I think we need to come back to being able to really think about what we’re teaching, what knowledge, what skills, all these things, what social-emotional learning goals we have for them and how they can document that process in one place and that should be a portfolio.

Alec Patton:
You talked about the badge of making a circuit as a badge. That seems pretty straightforward to me, that you could hold up a circuit that you made and show a video of you pointing out all the things.

Ted Cuevas:
Correct.

Alec Patton:
But obviously, there’s other ones that are going to be more abstract.

Ted Cuevas:
Correct.

Alec Patton:
Can you give me an example of another badge that’s a little bit more abstract and how that gets demonstrated?

Ted Cuevas:
One of them is the design badge, and I kind of took this one because the NGSS is kind of what’s great about it. A lot of some of the goals they have in there is process and how students design their work. So the design process is through research, is through brainstorm. So documenting all that and the empathy interviews, what questions did you ask? What reflections do you have about your experience with your little buddy?

All of that is in. And so it could be, like I said before, the design process, it’s a badge. It could be a mixture of some really important assessments in research and documenting what they documented on that. It could be the empathy interview questions they had, and a host of assessments and tasks that they had to complete or ways to learn those things. And that way they have to be able to show all that in one place. And then it’s kind of like my… I don’t know how I feel about just being me being the last one to go, “Oh, you’ve got the badge.” So I try to build in a lot of student feedback. I really, that is… I can’t do it all. There’s no way. And so I want to leverage each, the students and them together.

Alec Patton:
So are they’re helping to assess each other?

Ted Cuevas:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
So how’s that work?

Ted Cuevas:
It’s awesome. It’s kind of like doing the butterfly story from-

Alec Patton:
Austin’s Butterfly, Ron Berger. You know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, go watch it.

Ted Cuevas:
Yeah. So I think it’s trying hard to find what’s good, what is the quality piece. And looking at models I think is really, really important. Finding models, finding professional models, having professionals possibly come into the classroom and showing, “Hey, this is what we do for real in making a lantern or whatever.” So I think that that is probably one of the important parts. And then the students go back and give feedback. Teaching them feedback is another thing I’m really searching. I need some more resources on how to explicitly teach giving good feedback.

Alec Patton:
Is that a badge?

Ted Cuevas:
It will be. I think it should. But some badges are the whole year you’re in the co-op, you’re in our team, and so it could be the whole year you get that in your TPOL for example. Now we’re starting to talk about it. There we go. And so I think feedback is, I need to do a better, I want to do a better job on teaching feedback. Then they give feedback. And sometimes I learn through COVID. I’m going to take a couple good things away from it. There wasn’t much good from it from my perspective as a project-based teacher. But one of them was being able to have them asynchronously give feedback to something. Because spending a lot of that time in classes really important. But they could do that at home. I don’t give homework really, unless they create their own homework is basically what I tell them. If you don’t use your time wisely, then guess what? You’ve created your homework.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, I always thought of it as you’re doing a project, there’s a certain amount to do. I’m not trying to design this such that you have to do tons of stuff beyond what you do in class because that’s unfair, just like it would be unfair if I were your employer. But if you aren’t getting this stuff done in class, then you’ve made a choice that it’s got to get done sometime. So that makes a lot of sense. So then with this, so if I’m applying, if I’m saying, “Hey, I think I’m ready for my design badge.” I’m submitting evidence, I’m doing it on this portfolio, which just Inkwire is the thing you use for it, right?

Ted Cuevas:
Correct. Yeah.

Alec Patton:
So on this, I’m using this digital platform and I’ve uploaded, I’m guessing I’ve uploaded some examples of the empathy interview questions I did and some drafts I did and I took some notes on conversations that I had with my buddy going back and forth on this iterative process and I’m going to make a video of me talking through all these pieces of evidence and I’m putting that there because I think I’m good to go. And then is it, I mean, would Brent take a look at that as my fellow student and give me some feedback on that or?

Ted Cuevas:
There would probably be giving feedback on more of the individual parts of getting that. So negative and positive space is a skill I really want them to be able to be to visualize and see. It’s not a badge because it is, I think I would spend forever trying to teach it to them, because it’s really challenging. However, they do learn the basics to be able to do the design. But I really lean on the students to be because it would take a long time if they didn’t. I should leverage their expertise, their smart. Never underestimate what a student could do, a teenager can do.

Alec Patton:
And that’s in terms of them helping each other figure out their designs and using negative and positive space?

Ted Cuevas:
Correct. Yes.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Ted Cuevas:
Yes. I think the idea is being explicit. And I want to correct myself, homework. That word, I hate it, I don’t use it. I call it prep. And the reason I call it prep is it should be preparing you for something else. And so everything should have purpose and if it doesn’t, then why have them do it? So if I put these words into my head as a prep, it makes a difference. It really does, and it makes a difference to the way I think and prepare as well as for the students and what they’re doing in class.

Alec Patton:
It’s interesting you say that as prep and prepare because something that Randy Scheer just said to me before we did this, he and Rob Reardon were talking about rather than using the term formative assessment, using the term forward-looking assessment.

Ted Cuevas:
Oh, very clever.

Alec Patton:
So that was cool.

Ted Cuevas:
I think that is.

Alec Patton:
All right. So this is the kind of bummer question, but I think this is always an important one to understand with anything you’re doing like this. If a kid’s just not, for whatever reason, and I’m not putting any value judgment on this kid, but for whatever reason this kid is just not getting it on one of these badges, what happens then? The project’s over, this kid doesn’t have their badge.

Ted Cuevas:
Oh no, they can’t. It’s on me. It’s on me. I’m saying that they have to have it, so it’s directly on me. And so I think finding them resources, people that can come into class. I really use the upperclassmen, the students that were co-op members, our team before, because they already know. And so having them help is critical. So because I just can’t do it all, it’s impossible. And especially projects. So leveraging other students has been…

But I have office hours, they’d have to stay. But most of the time they have to do it to get through the project. So it’s built in. It’s kind of like you just can’t escape without this one because it’s so important to me. And sometimes if a lot of people don’t get the badge or it’s not going well for that badge, then I go, well, why force it? Obviously, there’s something wrong with the badge the way I designed it or whatever that okay, I’m going to back up and reflect after the project.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. So logistically, if I decided I love this, I’m doing it, I know exactly what would happen with the next project, which is that I would get to the, it would be like three days from exhibition and I would suddenly go, “Oh my goodness, these kids didn’t get these badges. I can’t put these kids in badge boot camp because they have stuff to do for the thing.” How do you keep it from ending up shoved out to the end?

Ted Cuevas:
Once again, it’s like when you design the project, you look at what they have to do in order to get there, and then really tease out, okay, they’re going to do this anyway and they have to do this, so how can I make it more explicit about what they’re doing, what the underbelly is, of what they’re doing? It’s a process or a skill or it’s something they have to know.

Alec Patton:
And are you doing regular checks looking at like, “Okay, this kid has five of their nine badges. That’s about what I’d expect.” “This kid has seven of their nine badges. Great. They’re rocking and rolling.” “This kid only has three.” Is that a part of the…

Ted Cuevas:
I really lean on them keeping track as well as their CFF. So the CFF, co-op friend forever is the student. They are matched with the whole year and we have check-ins every once in a while still working on that this year for them to check in, “Hey, here’s my portfolio, this is what I have, this is what I got done, here is what I’ve earned.” And when they apply and get a badge, for example, there’s a little bit of gamification in the platform, all of a sudden it just gives them fireworks and everything like that. And for some reason they love that so much, it’s like the old-fashioned stamps or stars.

Alec Patton:
I get that. Yeah.

Ted Cuevas:
It’s really funny. So you give a sticker to a ninth grader, a 12th grader, they’re going to, “Oh, okay, I want the star.” So just little things like that. But the CFF think is the partnership and their group to… I have regular check-ins with them. So this process that I’ve really been working on for 20 years, is really starting to solidify for myself and it’s still in process, in progress. I have this platform now that I can really capitalize on in terms of me giving feedback as well as the students. It’s meant to make that easy. So I’m still working in how to find teaching time to incorporate me giving feedback on a regular basis That’s what’s important. So the time I used to spend on grading, actually when I’m doing the important thing is that’s giving them feedback and recording that.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And I think one of the interesting things here, I feel like talking about student centered assessment as we’re talking about here, you have a duty of care as a teacher to have a sense of, are kids learning the things that you hope they’re going to be learning and what help do they need in order to do that. But really much more important than your understanding of that is their understanding of what they’re learning and how they’re learning it. Obviously, if as a teacher you don’t have a handle on what kids are learning, “I don’t know if that kid learned anything.” That’s obviously a problem. But if you’re like, “Oh, I can tell you everything about what Sadie has learned this year. And I can tell you detail.” And she can’t, that’s actually a dereliction of duty as well.

Ted Cuevas:
Correct. It’s hard. This whole system I guess, we’re talking about is really, really challenging to really make sure it’s all happening. It’s a lot of dishes in the air and you feel like you’re juggling it a lot. But what I’m trying to do is leverage the people, the students, being able to have them reflect more and see what their peers are doing and everything. That’s another cool thing about Inkwire. It’s kind of shows everybody’s work if it’s appropriate. And they look at each other’s work. And that also kind of boosts, “Oh, oh, that’s how you do it. That’s a great idea.” And so that has also really improved what is happening with the project. And of course they care, they care about their little buddy. They want to do their best and they’re going to.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Okay, so for somebody who’s listening to this, if they’re going, “Okay, this sounds cool, but it’s really, really overwhelming.” What’s one step?

Ted Cuevas:
Try creating four badges in the next unit, whatever you want to call it, project, hopefully. It’s really fits well with projects. And really try to tease out processes too. What are they? What are they for what you’re doing, what they’re doing? And then how are you going to provide them activities, tasks of the project and assessments. The assessments should be for the learning. Don’t make it extra. It’s part of the project. Look at it that way. And then make sure that those are recorded that you have made, okay, here is this, I call it the matrix of badges. Don’t make a laundry list though. I think that’s the temptation is to make, “Oh, they have to know all of this stuff.” No, try to get yourself away from that word and talk, “Oh, what are the skills? What are the processes and what is the social-emotional learning they have to take away, you want them to take away?”

Alec Patton:
Yeah. All right. If we went out to Eastlake and just stopped people in Vons and just said, “Hey, what’s an assessment?” A quiz is likely to be a thing that they would say, “Oh yeah, that’s an assessment.” So you still use quizzes?

Ted Cuevas:
Absolutely. There’s selective response. So there’s also categories of assessment methods. So there’s forms that it comes into. So one, they called it the assessment for learning. Rick Stiggins, a long time ago I was trained by him, is selective response. And that would be the realm of quizzes, multiple choice or fill in the blank or whatever quiz form that takes for you. Then there’s writing, the writing process, actually communicating through writing. And there’s personal communication, okay, that happens all the time, we’re assessing all the time. That’s probably pretty much the bread and butter of our day. Do we record it? Do they record it? That’s the challenge. And that’s what I want to do with the feedback part of the system.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. “Is this kid actually listening to me or their eyes completely glazed over?”

Ted Cuevas:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
That’s an assessment.

Ted Cuevas:
Right, it is. And then performance assessments are, the other thing, is how they can record performance assessments. So there’s those four categories. And so hacking a quiz, for example, Ohm’s law. Well, they have to know Ohm’s law in order to make a circuit because they need to solve for the resistance.

Alec Patton:
This is great. You’ve honed on exactly the point that I stopped being good at physics, so.

Ted Cuevas:
Right. And so that is part of, that’s one of the badges is just Ohm’s law. And it’s a knowledge piece, I want them to know what that means. So how they can use that concept in order to create a circuit is what’s really important. So it’s already built into the process. And so there’s three, maybe four different assessments I use. One is a quiz. I want them to just be able to do that.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. So I’m coming in for a quiz. Right? I would know that there was a quiz on Ohm’s law coming up. I’d go home and I’d study, and then I would take the quiz and I would turn it in and I’d be like, “Oh, I hope that went well.” And then a day or two later, depending on how quickly my teacher was able to get through our stack of quizzes, I would get it back and there’d be a great, and I’d be like, “Okay, I got a B on Ohm’s law. Hopefully I’ll do better on the next one.” And then the next quiz would come around, I’d study for that. That how it happened for you or is it?

Ted Cuevas:
So there’s a couple of things, and I’ve done this for a long time. I was taught there was a teacher, oh my gosh, she was teacher, maybe teacher of the year for California. Anyway, and there’s a book that I read, Time Management for Teachers, is out of print now, it’s a shame, but one of the things is you don’t grade the quiz. Create the quiz for easy grading and you do it in the class. So it’s immediate feedback. So after the quiz is over, I’ll give them purple and green pens or whatever, something that they don’t usually have. And we trade them off and I go through all the solutions and they compare it to what they’ve done.

And that is what they do. They get it immediately. I don’t have to spend three, four days and by the end of four days, “What is this paper?” Okay, I got 80% and then I can’t do anything about it. So what I do then is they have to have 80% or higher in order to pass that quiz. 80% of those correct. And so then it’s, once again, it’s on me. If I say that that’s what’s got to happen for all my quizzes, then it’s on me. How am I going to make sure that any student can make sure to make it up? And they all do. I don’t know why. I don’t know. I’m not doing any magic, I don’t think. But I don’t do a lot of the quizzes because there’s other assessments I use for Ohm’s law, for example.

Alec Patton:
Okay, so let’s say I take my Ohm’s law quiz. It’s a little raw. I hand it to Brent. I’m like, “I don’t know.” Brent gets out his purple pen and he marks it up and he hands it back to, he’s like, “Dude, sorry, you got 50%.” And I’m like, “Ugh, how am I going to get to my 80%?” What do I do then?

Ted Cuevas:
So that would probably be during my office hours. So I have office hours specific times, I want to go home. So I announce these, it’s going to be, let’s say Monday, Wednesday. And those are the times. And if I need to, I’ll sit there and go, “Okay, do you want me to call your family or email your family to tell them that you’re going to be staying after school to either get help?” Okay, maybe they need a lot more help and to take the quiz. So once again, I have several versions. If it takes three to four versions, they’re going to get 80%. They’re going to do it. And if that’s important to me. And in some cases, man, it’s like why do I…? And they keep with it because I keep with it. They see that I’m committed to them and they’re committed in reciprocal. So I think that is important. It’s on me, but I don’t do a lot of quizzes. I don’t do a lot of tests.

Alec Patton:
Well, it would be a nightmare if you did. I mean, if you were doing a lot of quizzes and everyone had to get 80% and everyone was coming after school, it would just be-

Ted Cuevas:
Well, it’s the right thing to do. But you’re right.

Alec Patton:
But I’m saying if you were doing lots and lots of quizzes, and you were just constantly just had your classroom full of… Also, I think at a certain point, engagement would definitely-

Ted Cuevas:
Yes. Yeah. And that’s what’s happening in classrooms across the United States. It’s part of the system and we still do it. We all went through the system, all of us. And so that’s how we teach sometimes. When we’re tight, that’s how we teach. And so really observing other teachers as well as getting some really good ideas from other experienced teachers over the years. For me, I was like, “Okay, man, that’s brilliant to do it this way.” And everybody thinks, “Oh my gosh, the kids are going to… He’s getting an F and everything.” It really doesn’t happen that way. I think it’s really weird when you have, it’s part of your culture to support one another and be supportive and to really have these habits of heart and mind a part of your day, part of what you do in your class, I don’t see it, I really don’t.

I think I risk that, and they risk it. We share our mistakes because we want help. We have dilemma consultancy times where we get together and collaborate as teachers. That’s, “What do I do? How do I do it?” And we’re asking each other. And that’s an important skill. So not to be afraid. And that’s what I was sold on. That’s what I love. Actually, that’s why I’m here to a large degree, is because of teams. I always do projects, even in a more self-contained situation and I always did before.

But with the team, I can actually develop those social emotional learning, and really work with my team teaching partner on trying my best to bring them confidence. I think it’s about that. Basically, that’s it. And if they can solder, they have to know how to solder, trust me, they’re going to be so excited. “Yay, I did it.” It’s kind of funny. And then some of the students, I never would’ve expected to do an electronics project in junior year, senior project, are coming to me feeling empowered. “I know how to do this.I can solder.” “Mr. Ted, can I borrow the soldering equipment?” And I was like, “Do you need a refresher?” “I got this. I know. It’s the [inaudible 00:37:35] method.” Or whatever. “I have this method anyway.” And so it’s basically empowerment. I really want students to feel like they can learn anything. And if they can communicate that, I would love to see our high schools asking that question. “Do you feel like you’re ready to learn anything?” Because you can.

Alec Patton:
I can tell by the sound behind me that we are, in fact in a passage area. Yeah.

Ted Cuevas:
Yes, I have my children here., But it’s okay, they go outside. They-

Alec Patton:
Awesome. Ted, thank you so much.

Ted Cuevas:
Okay. No, thank you. It’s always a pleasure to see you, Alec. You’re one of my favorite people.

Alec Patton:
Oh, thank you so much. You’re one of my favorite people.

Ted Cuevas:
And I miss you. And I was great working at the same school when you were here.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed, it’s hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Hershel. Huge thanks to Ted Cuevas for this conversation and to Brent Spirnack for running sound on this interview. In the show notes, we have a link to the project card for the Reading Lights project, as well as the link to the website for Inkwire. That’s the digital portfolio platform that Ted uses. Thanks for listening.