It was the week before the exhibition at High Tech Middle Chula Vista.
My eighth-grade class had spent the last eight weeks exploring the question “What makes us resilient?” We visited the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, shared our own stories of overcoming challenges, researched important figures in history and wrote spoken-word poems about people in our lives who we admired for being resilient.
Over the next week, we would transform the classroom into a café and welcome guests to experience a Slam Poetry Event. This would take place during Festival del Sol, an annual event where every class in the school would exhibit their projects for a public audience.
Our Slam Poetry Event would have a unique feature: we had invited the people we wrote the poems about as our honored guests for the evening. We also painted portraits of them and would give them as a gift at Festival del Sol.
As we broke up into the final hours of work time, some students scattered into groups putting the final touches on their art piece. Others found a space alone and continued to practice reciting their poem.
One student, Andrea, walked up to me.
“Can I talk to you?” She asked.
We sat down at a table. Andrea started to outline a potential problem she could see with the exhibition next week.
“Well, we have these guests we’ve made the poems and portraits for. It’s really important that they can sit down in the classroom and feel special.”
She continued.
“But the whole-school exhibitions are crazy. There are so many people and I’m really worried that the people we want to hear our poems won’t even be able to fit into the room.”
She really got me thinking. Andrea was right. In the worst case situation, the room would be packed and we would risk not being able to perform for the people who mattered most in this project: the people in our own lives who we wanted to celebrate.
I asked Andrea what I thought she should do.
“Can I take care of it?” She asked.
I thought for a moment… should I really let an eighth-grader take responsibility for this? What would happen if she didn’t succeed? Wasn’t this supposed to be my job to fix this as the teacher? I looked at my growing To-Do list and took a deep breath.
“Yes. Go for it.” I found myself saying.
I half-heartedly asked if she needed anything from me although I had no idea what I could offer.
“Nope, I’m good.” She replied. Andrea ran over to a few friends and got right to work.
A few days later, I received an email from a parent that read: “Can you resend the sign-up link that Andrea sent out for the exhibition?”
I had no idea what they were talking about.
I called Andrea into my office and with a short discussion, her plan became clear. She had organized the Slam Poetry performances into 20 minute time-slots with a 5 minute break in between. She went around to every student and had them sign up for a time. Andrea then emailed a sign-up form to all the parents and featured guests, asking that they reserve a table for the time their child will perform.
Next, Andrea drew a layout of the tables with numbers. She recruited a handful of “hosts” for the evening and gave them instructions on how to escort guests to their reserved tables. Every 20 minutes, the Master of Ceremonies would announce a small break and the guests would be escorted out, making room for the new group. The back of the room was standing room for those coming from the whole-school exhibition.
I resent the sign-up link to the parent, in utter awe of Andrea’s idea. All I could do was support her.
On the night of the event, the plan worked perfectly. The students built a café awning outside the classroom door with a “host podium” for guests to check in. Andrea stood at the podium for the entire night, proudly welcoming guests. It was because of Andrea that the Poetry Slam was such a success. Our students could share their performances with their honored guests… all of whom had a place to sit down and listen to the heartfelt words of a poem about them.
When I reflect on the story about Andrea and our Poetry Slam, I think first about the scale of what she was able to accomplish. After years of teaching with Project-Based Learning at High Tech High, I learned from many veteran teachers the importance of a key principle of project-based learning : Set the floor, Open the ceiling. In other words, it’s important to set a minimum standard for acceptable quality of student work, but you also need to make sure not to limit students’ ambitions. This situation continues to serve as one of my favorite examples of how projects can empower students to take ownership and action beyond what we (as adults) think is possible.
Now I need to make a confession. If I had taught Andrea in my first years of teaching, I don’t think any of this would have happened. In order to open the ceiling for my students, I needed to learn to say a word to them more often: YES.
I started my teaching career in a traditional middle school in San Diego. The emphasis put on classroom management, reaching learning goals and “being in control” taught me to be fearful of giving my students too much freedom. The vision of a noisy and chaotic class made me feel that I might never get them back or they might never respect my authority again. My default answer was “no” to most ideas that students came to me with. It wasn’t because I didn’t value student-agency or because I didn’t want to listen to my students. I just didn’t know how to be a teacher in control and open my practice to the ideas of students at the same time.
So, I started small.
When a student had an idea… I practiced saying YES.
When a group wanted to do something another way? I practiced saying YES.
When a class hated a lesson and was critical but had a better idea for how I could teach it … I practiced saying YES.
I found that these small acts of YES actually gave my students a reason to trust me. Not only because I started asking for their ideas and feedback but because I listened to them and used what information they gave me the next day. Over time, my fears about losing control dissipated. Any authority I had was not built on the inherent (but inherently fragile) teacher-student power relationship, but shifted to be on a more firm foundation of mutual understanding and working together towards a common goal.
As YES became a culture in my classroom, I found students became less afraid to come with bigger, wilder and more ambitious ideas. It was helpful to me to do a simple reflection before automatically saying YES just so I was able to manage whatever scenario came after.
I learned that if a suggestion was a big deviation from the original plan, I asked myself:
If the answer was “no” to both of these questions, I said YES.
Even if I was not sure the student could do it, I said YES.
Even if I was nervous that the rest of the class would want to ditch my plan and do something different, I said YES.
YES is an invitation.
It opens up for ownership.
It creates a relationship built on community, not control.
It’s a simple shift that can create transformative change.
And most of the time?
My student’s ideas were way better than mine anyway.
It was the week before the exhibition at High Tech Middle Chula Vista.
My eighth-grade class had spent the last eight weeks exploring the question “What makes us resilient?” We visited the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, shared our own stories of overcoming challenges, researched important figures in history and wrote spoken-word poems about people in our lives who we admired for being resilient.
Over the next week, we would transform the classroom into a café and welcome guests to experience a Slam Poetry Event. This would take place during Festival del Sol, an annual event where every class in the school would exhibit their projects for a public audience.
Our Slam Poetry Event would have a unique feature: we had invited the people we wrote the poems about as our honored guests for the evening. We also painted portraits of them and would give them as a gift at Festival del Sol.
As we broke up into the final hours of work time, some students scattered into groups putting the final touches on their art piece. Others found a space alone and continued to practice reciting their poem.
One student, Andrea, walked up to me.
“Can I talk to you?” She asked.
We sat down at a table. Andrea started to outline a potential problem she could see with the exhibition next week.
“Well, we have these guests we’ve made the poems and portraits for. It’s really important that they can sit down in the classroom and feel special.”
She continued.
“But the whole-school exhibitions are crazy. There are so many people and I’m really worried that the people we want to hear our poems won’t even be able to fit into the room.”
She really got me thinking. Andrea was right. In the worst case situation, the room would be packed and we would risk not being able to perform for the people who mattered most in this project: the people in our own lives who we wanted to celebrate.
I asked Andrea what I thought she should do.
“Can I take care of it?” She asked.
I thought for a moment… should I really let an eighth-grader take responsibility for this? What would happen if she didn’t succeed? Wasn’t this supposed to be my job to fix this as the teacher? I looked at my growing To-Do list and took a deep breath.
“Yes. Go for it.” I found myself saying.
I half-heartedly asked if she needed anything from me although I had no idea what I could offer.
“Nope, I’m good.” She replied. Andrea ran over to a few friends and got right to work.
A few days later, I received an email from a parent that read: “Can you resend the sign-up link that Andrea sent out for the exhibition?”
I had no idea what they were talking about.
I called Andrea into my office and with a short discussion, her plan became clear. She had organized the Slam Poetry performances into 20 minute time-slots with a 5 minute break in between. She went around to every student and had them sign up for a time. Andrea then emailed a sign-up form to all the parents and featured guests, asking that they reserve a table for the time their child will perform.
Next, Andrea drew a layout of the tables with numbers. She recruited a handful of “hosts” for the evening and gave them instructions on how to escort guests to their reserved tables. Every 20 minutes, the Master of Ceremonies would announce a small break and the guests would be escorted out, making room for the new group. The back of the room was standing room for those coming from the whole-school exhibition.
I resent the sign-up link to the parent, in utter awe of Andrea’s idea. All I could do was support her.
On the night of the event, the plan worked perfectly. The students built a café awning outside the classroom door with a “host podium” for guests to check in. Andrea stood at the podium for the entire night, proudly welcoming guests. It was because of Andrea that the Poetry Slam was such a success. Our students could share their performances with their honored guests… all of whom had a place to sit down and listen to the heartfelt words of a poem about them.
When I reflect on the story about Andrea and our Poetry Slam, I think first about the scale of what she was able to accomplish. After years of teaching with Project-Based Learning at High Tech High, I learned from many veteran teachers the importance of a key principle of project-based learning : Set the floor, Open the ceiling. In other words, it’s important to set a minimum standard for acceptable quality of student work, but you also need to make sure not to limit students’ ambitions. This situation continues to serve as one of my favorite examples of how projects can empower students to take ownership and action beyond what we (as adults) think is possible.
Now I need to make a confession. If I had taught Andrea in my first years of teaching, I don’t think any of this would have happened. In order to open the ceiling for my students, I needed to learn to say a word to them more often: YES.
I started my teaching career in a traditional middle school in San Diego. The emphasis put on classroom management, reaching learning goals and “being in control” taught me to be fearful of giving my students too much freedom. The vision of a noisy and chaotic class made me feel that I might never get them back or they might never respect my authority again. My default answer was “no” to most ideas that students came to me with. It wasn’t because I didn’t value student-agency or because I didn’t want to listen to my students. I just didn’t know how to be a teacher in control and open my practice to the ideas of students at the same time.
So, I started small.
When a student had an idea… I practiced saying YES.
When a group wanted to do something another way? I practiced saying YES.
When a class hated a lesson and was critical but had a better idea for how I could teach it … I practiced saying YES.
I found that these small acts of YES actually gave my students a reason to trust me. Not only because I started asking for their ideas and feedback but because I listened to them and used what information they gave me the next day. Over time, my fears about losing control dissipated. Any authority I had was not built on the inherent (but inherently fragile) teacher-student power relationship, but shifted to be on a more firm foundation of mutual understanding and working together towards a common goal.
As YES became a culture in my classroom, I found students became less afraid to come with bigger, wilder and more ambitious ideas. It was helpful to me to do a simple reflection before automatically saying YES just so I was able to manage whatever scenario came after.
I learned that if a suggestion was a big deviation from the original plan, I asked myself:
If the answer was “no” to both of these questions, I said YES.
Even if I was not sure the student could do it, I said YES.
Even if I was nervous that the rest of the class would want to ditch my plan and do something different, I said YES.
YES is an invitation.
It opens up for ownership.
It creates a relationship built on community, not control.
It’s a simple shift that can create transformative change.
And most of the time?
My student’s ideas were way better than mine anyway.
