Rob Riordan: I've sometimes asked teachers here, how do you want to be remembered by your students? Do you want to be remembered as someone who asked really great questions? Or beyond that, do you want to be remembered as someone who really wanted to know what they think? There's a difference. Asking good questions is a technique. Wanting to know what they think is a way of being. Alec Patton: This is High Tech High Unboxed. I'm Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Rob Riordan. Rob co-founded High Tech High with Larry Rosenstock in the year 2000. For this episode, Stacey Caillier sat down with him to talk about teaching and learning. I'll let Stacey take it from here. Stacey Caillier: Rob, I wanted to have this conversation with you because I feel like more than anyone else in my life, you have had a profound impact on how I want to be as an educator, who I want to be as a person. I think often about when I came to High Tech High 18 years ago, the fact that I was able to work alongside you and essentially make myself your shadow for three years was still, I look back as the most accelerated learning I've ever experienced. Rob Riordan: You're doing pretty well so far, Stacey. Stacey Caillier: Yep, and there are so many times that I find myself thinking, what would Rob do? Sharing these moments of insight that I feel like I've had with you over the years that I just thought it'd be cool to sit down and actually have a conversation about those things. Rob Riordan: I find myself wondering the same thing sometimes. What would I do? What should I do? Okay. Stacey Caillier: One of the things that folks need to know if they're not here and they can't see you, is that even though I've known you for 18 years, this is still very much the same. Whenever you're going to say something that is slightly mischievous, everybody can tell because you get this glint in your eye and a little quiver in your lip. You were one of the first people, I still remember, I'm going to talk about my first experience of your writing workshop, because I think I had only been at High Tech High for maybe a week or two. It was during the New Teacher Odyssey. Rob Riordan: Really? You came to that? Stacey Caillier: Yeah, because I was Your shadow. That was my self-appointed job. Rob Riordan: I didn't realize it was that early on that you had done the writing workshops. Stacey Caillier: Oh, yeah. That was profound for me in many ways because I love to write, even though I was a physics teacher and a math teacher, but I'm a poet at heart. There were so many things about that workshop that have stuck with me. First, it was one of the only times, and first of many times that you cried visibly in front of people with no discomfort or apology. That was so striking to me that I remember afterwards just being like, how does this person feel so comfortable just letting tears being so moved and it made space for everybody else. Everybody cried in that workshop multiple times. I want to start there. How did you get comfortable being moved to tears and being okay with it? Rob Riordan: Well, I've never been very comfortable with that. Stacey Caillier: You hide it well. Rob Riordan: I've come to accept it. Actually, there was a very important moment in an event at High Tech High, a workshop, where there was a person who was there who was Native American from the area of Tucson, had done a lot of work with Native American education, but also, he was a person who, when people were crossing the border, you're crossing the desert, and he would put water out in the desert for people who were traversing the desert. His tribal elders did not appreciate that, but he went ahead and did it anyway. This is a person that I had enormous respect for already. He said to me during this session, "Could you do with my kids what you're doing at High Tech High?" I said that a lot of my career, if you follow my trajectory, it's been going to a place where people said it couldn't be done. You couldn't do this with my kids, so I'd go to their kids and do it. I said that to him, and of course, as I'm doing now, I got emotional and burst into tears. I was crying and I apologized, and he said, "There is no need to apologize." He had studied with the Jesuits. He said, "The Jesuits used to say tears are a gift from God." From that moment I realized that I felt as though, yeah, that happens to me. It's not even something I do. It's something that happens to me and I don't need to be apologetic about it. Stacey Caillier: Well, I wanted to start there because that was one of my first lessons from you. Rob Riordan: Yeah, because you knew I'd break into tears. Stacey Caillier: No, but that was one of the first times when I knew I'm going to grow immensely by being alongside this person. Because you give people a license to feel. Rob Riordan: Somebody came up to me just the other night over at Stone Brewery and asked me, someone who said, "I've been reflecting on my life and who I am and who I want to be and my relationship to my own emotions and my own emotions in relation to other people. I want to know, how did you come about being comfortable crying in public?" He was asking the same question. Things come in bunches, I guess. It was fascinating. I was fascinated that this person came to me with this question to which I really don't have much of an answer except to say, "It's just something that happens and something that I've learned to just accept or let go." I've also been interested in people's response to it, which is very often when that happens, I've given a talk or a workshop, people come up later and say thank you. To me, initially my response was, for what? I cried in front of the group, but that's the response a lot where I imagine the response would be, and I think it is for some people, embarrassment or worry about this guy. Who is this guy? I mean, that's why I sometimes say when I'm beginning a talk, I say, "I might get emotional here, but don't be alarmed if that happens. It just happens all the time, so don't be alarmed." Stacey Caillier: Yeah, I receive it as permission to be moved, which I appreciate. Rob Riordan: Well, that's weird too, that sometimes I'm giving a talk and what I'm saying moved me to tears. Oh, well, what's going on there? Stacey Caillier: You're pretty moving. The other thing that struck me about that first writing workshop. Rob Riordan: Oh, good. We're back to the workshop. Stacey Caillier: We're back to the writing workshop, yes, is I remember you had us look at a sample of writing and I think you asked us to pay attention to where the energy was or what struck us. Rob Riordan: Yeah, what struck you? What struck you about this piece of writing? Stacey Caillier: Yeah. There were many things that I remembered about that, and so I'd love to hear you just unpack that workshop a little bit and what you're hoping people take from it. One of the biggest things that I took from it was that we can treat a student's experience as a text, as worthy of analysis and reflection and interrogation and elaboration. Rob Riordan: Yeah, and elaboration. Stacey Caillier: As any kind of text we might pick up from a book. Just this idea of experience as text, but also this idea of seeing what students are showing you and then finding a way to amplify their voice even more. Rob Riordan: Yeah, and working with what's there, as opposed to what's not there. I ran a school-wide writing center back in my high school in Cambridge for several years, and it was built around peer tutoring. I had these students who were good student writers. Some actually who were, I had some students working as tutors who were bilingual students who were not, because I wanted students from every walk of the high school. I trained them and they ran the writing center. For some of them, I ran a course called Advanced Writing Seminar. That was just my cover to have a real English course that they could get credit for where we could talk about what was going on in the writing center. It was a subterfuge, in a way. We placed that writing center right next to one of the bilingual program classrooms and right in the middle of the bilingual program. A colleague of mine, very dear colleague of mine, at one point brought in this piece of writing and told me what had happened with it. It was a piece of writing by this kid, Jose, who was Portuguese, from the Azores, I believe, who had just come over and spoke very little English. Because she had done some work in the writing center and we had done some work together, she got him writing right away. She asked him to write something about himself, and he wrote something, it was about five lines. It said something like, "My name is Jose. I live with my mother. My house is red. I go to school with my friends. After school, I like to play tricks with my birds." That was what he wrote, and it was riddled—if you're looking for correct spelling—it was riddled with error, but there were some very interesting things going on in it, including around spelling, some things he was clearly trying to do—sound letter correspondence, and other things were around word recognition and so on. Even in this little piece, words evolved from a sound letter to correct spelling and so on. To me, it was just endlessly fascinating, and I wanted to share this writing with people because as teachers, English teachers especially, we are so trained and so disposed to seek out and correct error. To me, that's not what writing instruction is about or writing encouragement is about. When you tell a student what not to do, you're not telling them what to do, and students need to hear what to do. That was part of it. I wanted to demolish that mindset by helping people see something different in this piece of writing. The other thing had to do with the notion that if you're working with a writer, with a very struggling writer, what that student needs is to write more. The question that I posed in the- Stacey Caillier: I remember it now. Rob Riordan: The first question was, what strikes you? There was another question, I forget what it was, but the last question, and to me the important one was, what questions could you ask Jose that would lead to more writing? Then as we got to that, we could understand that the piece that he wrote—people loved that he was there and that he was present in the writing—but the piece that he wrote gives us permission to pursue certain questions, and it does not give you permission to pursue certain other questions. We need to stay close to the text in order to follow up and ask questions that might lead to more writing. One of the things that he said was, "I live with my mother." You might want to ask him more about his mother. There was something about what she cooks too, something. What kind of foods does your mother cook? There were questions like that, but you wouldn't want to say, "Well, you live with your mother. Where's your father?" You don't have permission to do that. The piece gives you permission to ask certain questions to follow up that could lead to more writing. That's why I did that. That's why I loved working with that piece, because especially if you're an English teacher, when you look at it, what jumps out at you is, wow, this is really rudimentary in terms of its skills, its writing skills and so forth. When you dig in a little bit, he's laid out his life. Jose has laid out his life for you, so how do you respond to it? Then I tell the story of how his teacher responded to it, and she had him read the piece to the class. When he read it, one of the kids in the class said, when he read, “I like to feed my birds.” one of the kids in the class said, "You got birds? My cousins got birds." They started talking, and then Jose became the expert on birds in the class. The writing, which was a simple, you could call it in a very minimal term, a diagnostic. It was his ticket of entry to the classroom community. That's another reason that I brought that piece before people, because there was a very interesting story about what happened, what the function of that piece was. I'm so glad you brought that up because to me that's been a very important piece and a piece of the way I think about writing instruction and about teaching and learning. Stacey Caillier: My husband and I, because my husband also teaches at High Tech High, he has attended your writing workshop three times over his time at High Tech High. Rob Riordan: Yeah, I know he took it more than once. Stacey Caillier: We still talk about it all the time, and he teaches music, but he would talk about how when he would have kids write their own music and what it gives permission to and how it gives kids status with each other. Rob Riordan: My son teaches music, teaches a lot of private students. He's a musician in LA. Because he's doing a lot online now, and when he comes down here to San Diego, he teaches from here online, and I'm there witnessing his teaching, and he does a lot of those things. It just makes me very happy. Stacey Caillier: Well, he's learned from the best. Rob Riordan: Well, I don't know if he's learned it from me. He's a natural, let's put it that way. Yeah, he's very good. Stacey Caillier: I want to go back to what you had said about the writing workshop, that one big takeaway that I think sums up something else I've learned from you is this idea of work with what's there, not with what's not there. I have a very distinct memory of being in the car with you. I think it was the first year that we worked together when we were driving all over to different villages in High Tech High setting up collegial coaching. Rob Riordan: Yes. I remember that very fondly. Stacey Caillier: It was so fun. I remember we were driving down to, it must've been our Chula Vista schools because we were driving across a freeway, over a bridge. I had witnessed over the course of months you having so many conversations with people where you were watching their practice and then debriefing with them afterwards, and then sharing things you noticed and asking them questions and helping them to reflect. I remember just asking you, "Rob, how do you get people to take it in and listen and want to run with the advice that you're offering?" A lot of times you weren't offering advice. A lot of times you were just asking great questions and they were getting there themselves. I still remember you said with not even a beat, "Well, first, you have to establish unconditional positive regard, then you can push. There's no pushing before you establish unconditional positive regard." I feel like that has stuck with me so much. I had a tape made that says, like bright spots, we have such a routine here now of before you go into anybody's classroom, you have to go in and find something to celebrate. Can you just talk a little bit about the unconditional positive regard? Rob Riordan: You just said celebrate. To me, the first question for me as a coach is, what can you celebrate? What is there to celebrate and so forth? The most important class I had in Graduate School of Education at Harvard was a course called Counseling for Educators, where we did a lot of role plays. People acted out scenarios and so forth, and we did counseling and so forth. We watched an interesting film of, it's a famous film of three different takes on therapy, from Fritz Perls, with Carl Rogers, unconditional—and then a guy named, I forget the guy's name. It was rational therapy. Anyway, I was really struck by Rogers and by the notion of unconditional positive regard, and we worked at that in this class. I realized how important it was in terms of establishing a relationship where growth happens and development happens. I also realized that what was presented to me in that class as a technique was really more a way of being, so that's where I ended up. I remember other things that in the School of Education also where they were sharing techniques, but it wasn't about doing the technique. It was about what the technique did to you as you did it and how it shaped who you were in the interaction. That's how it came about for me, and that's why I've always felt it was so interesting. I've had lots of interesting interactions and workshops with teachers at High Tech High and so on, one of which has been, and you've seen it where I show a clip of teaching and then I ask people to get in groups of two or three and say what it is that they're seeing. The three questions that I put on the board, on the whiteboard are, What can you celebrate? What questions emerge? and What suggestions might you make, if appropriate? Those are the three. That's the template for observation for me and for response to teaching. What I always have found interesting is that when people get in those groups and start to talk about what they're seeing, they jump right to what needs work and what needs correction and what suggestions they might make. They're not celebrating anything. I go around table to table and I say, "What can you celebrate? Start there." It's a work in progress for all of us, I think. Especially, as teachers and educators and so on, when we're working with colleagues and looking at what's going on and so forth, is we so often see where things aren't quite what they could be. We're self-critical in that way too, and yet we need to ground ourselves in the notion— and this is related to unconditional positive regard—the notion that teaching is enormously complex and difficult work, also rewarding and joyful work, but it's complex and is difficult and worthy of respect, worthy of great respect, and that's what needs to come into our conversations with colleagues around the work, and appreciation and respect for it is the bedrock of the conversation. Stacey Caillier: I related to this, remember doing a workshop with you where you talked about the metaphor of the frozen snowball. Do you remember this? Rob Riordan: I don't remember that. Stacey Caillier: I'll try to tell it and then you tell me how I'm getting it wrong, or what I'm getting right. Given the last comment. Rob Riordan: I know what you're going to talk about. It's something I got from somebody else. It was nothing that—but go ahead. Stacey Caillier: Well, it's been helpful to me, I think. Rob Riordan: Good. Stacey Caillier: The idea of the frozen snowball was that, as I remember it, whenever you are observing something, there's going to be things that you definitely need to celebrate, and there's going to maybe be suggestions or things that you want to offer up as growth. It's important to keep those to what's your main one, get clear on what's the most important thing that you might want to push on. The goal is to hold that behind your back and to ask questions that help the person, because most often they'll arrive at it themselves if they're given the right questions. Rob Riordan: Absolutely, yeah. Stacey Caillier: If they don't, you want to hold it long enough that when you share it, it doesn't hit them like a super hard block of ice. You want it to melt and soften so that when you do finally share that one thing, they're able to receive it and take it in and learn from it without harm. Rob Riordan: That's another way of saying you need to wait until the context is right for sharing it. If the context doesn't emerge, you don't share it. You do more harm than good by sharing a criticism that doesn't exactly fit with the context. It fits with one of your obsessions or predilections or whatever, but it doesn't fit with what we've just been talking about or with where I understand my colleague to be in this conversation and so on. It's interesting, because I also, when celebrating stuff, I sometimes say to somebody, "I love what you did. I love this. I love what you did." I was running one workshop for coaches where we were looking at a clip where I said something like that, "I love that you're keeping a journal"—no, "I love that you're having kids keep journals." Somebody said, and we were talking about being non-judgmental, and so forth, somebody said, "I read somebody in a book said about coaching, said using the word love, that's evaluation. That's an evaluation. That's an assessment." I've thought about that for years. I mean, really that remark and what I've come to with it is that first of all, in that instance, it was like, I love that you're doing this. That's not exactly assessment. It's my feeling about it. I had other remarks that I needed to make and suggestions about how those journals might play out and what a great thing it would be if the teacher himself kept a journal. I had a whole other thing that I wanted that I didn't actually get to in this comp because it wasn't right to go there. The coaching interaction is, it's the formation of a relationship as well, so saying I love this was about a relationship, not about a judgment, not about an assessment, and it's really critical. You don't have to say I love this, or I love that, or you don't have to even use the word love, but you're establishing a relationship with someone that is collegial and respectful, and that's what's key. Whatever language it takes to get there, I want not to worry about whether I'm being judgmental or not. Stacey Caillier: Well, also, one of the other things that I've learned from you is how to offer celebrations. I love that you're doing X because dot, dot, dot. I feel like you are so good at being explicit about why something is important and communicating the purpose behind something. It's never just like, I like that you're doing this because I like this. It's, I like that you're doing this because it connects to our shared values of what we think great teaching and learning look like, and that's important because… Rob Riordan: Exactly. Stacey Caillier: It's like every time we're offering feedback, we're offering a chance to revisit our shared purpose and get clearer. Rob Riordan: Exactly. You've got that right. It's about a relationship around respect and appreciation for the work, and I'm engaged in that, but I am also, as a coach, the custodian of the vision. I need to relate the things that I'm saying, and particularly to catch people doing things that push the vision. It's interesting, I walk about catching people doing things. First three weeks of High Tech High, we had in our summer work, teachers had prepared units and this and that and projects and all that kind of stuff. We had also gone pretty heavy on Debbie Meier's and Ted Sizer's Habits of Mind. We were talking about Habits of Mind as well—evidence, speculation, significance, there's a C and a P in there anyway. Anyway, there are five of them. One should never have five, there should only be three because I could never remember more than three. Stacey Caillier: I love threes. Rob Riordan: Anyway, so I walk into this classroom three weeks in, and the teacher is giving a quiz on The Habits of Mind. What's evidence, what's perspective? Perspective, and so on. It was announcing that there was going to be a quiz at the end of the week on The Habits of Mind. I said to her afterwards, "The Habits of Mind are not something that you test for. They're something that you catch kids doing. When you catch them doing this, oh yeah, that's about perspective. Thank you. You catch them when they're doing it in their daily interactions and you bring to their awareness what it is they're doing when they're doing that. It's not about a definitional testing of any kind. It's about pointing out what's happening as we interact with each other." Anyway… Stacey Caillier: Yeah, I love that. One of the other things that you said on multiple occasions in different contexts, but that has always really stuck with me and that I find myself thinking about often and sharing with others, is this idea that any choice we make is going to create its own set of problems. Rob Riordan: Oh, yeah. Stacey Caillier: You just have to choose the problem you'd rather have. I've heard you talk about this in terms of why we decided when High Tech High was started not to track kids. I've heard you talk about this in all sorts of different contexts. Can you talk about this idea of all choices create their own set of problems, we want to choose the problems we'd rather have, and how that has shown up for us? Rob Riordan: Well, it shows up for me around grouping of kids. When we opened High Tech High, we knew from the very beginning we were not going to track students academically. We would have kids in the same classroom, some with very limited academic experience, others that were top-notch students where they had been before and all that. That would create problems, especially for people who are content-centered. If I'm teaching physics or I'm teaching math and I've got a wide range of kids, how am I going to work with that? We had one teacher early on who was deciding, it was physics and math, he was going to build a boat. No, he was going to build a submersible. He discovered one day that all of his students understood that water pressure is the same in all directions underwater. It's just the same in all directions. They understood that, which is a pretty complex concept, but about half the class didn't know how to compute the area of a circle. You're building a submersible, you need to know the pressure on that hatch and this and that and so forth. The kids didn't know how to do that. Half the kids did know that. We had to figure out how to deal with those who needed it and those who would be bored by it and all. That was our quintessential High Tech High pedagogical problem created by the fact that we were not going to track kids. In fact, we had the second year it was, some teachers came in, a math and science teacher and a humanities teacher came in and said, "For next semester or for next year," I forget which, "let's group the kids this way according to whether they've had algebra or not." This was in a staff meeting. Another staff member said, "Wait a minute, that'll be tracking the kids. That's going to be tracking." The two who had brought it in said, "No. Look at this." They already had the rosters of what the groups would be if you did it this way. "You see, every one of these is a diverse group," and so on. I don't know what they meant by diverse, but “every one of these is a diverse group.” Larry said, "Well, let's look at the grade point averages of these three groups that you've concocted here. If they're all around 3.0 or something like that, no problem. If we've got a group who's already their grade point average is around 3.6, another one around 3.1, another around 2.4, then we need to really think about that." There was an intern of some kind who was there working who took it on to go into the database and concoct all the grade point averages for these groups. Of course, the next week she came in and there they were like a 3.6, a 3.0 and a 2.3. The teacher who had brought it in said, "Well, we can't do it then." He slammed his fist on the table and said, "And we have finally made a decision based on data." It was interesting because that value had already been inculcated in the school. There's this tendency all along, partly because all of our training has been in subjects and we see ourselves as transmitters of subjects, and our kids are going to get good in the subject. That can be tougher to do when you've got a whole range of kids than if you have a group of kids that are roughly the same and all that stuff. Tracking is easier if you're totally content-centered, but it's pernicious because it conveys to kids either that they're very smart or that they're not so smart, and it's all one-dimensional around their academic thing and ignores what else they might bring to the classroom conversation or to the projects that we're doing and so on. This is why I've always said we are an untracked community because we would rather have the problems that come from a diverse classroom than the pernicious results and outcomes when you separate students out. We prefer this set of problems to that set of problems. Stacey Caillier: In a similar vein, I remember when you and Larry would talk about your days before High Tech High and trying to get some of this work going in some of the other contexts where y'all were before this. You had this mantra that I don't know if I'm going to get right or not, but I think of it often as this, and I feel like it's relevant to anytime we're trying to create some change that's going to be uncomfortable, but you don't have to join us, but you can't stop us. Can you say a little bit about that? Rob Riordan: The way we did it, the way Larry did it, Larry was turning the voc program upside down in Cambridge. For example, instead of exploring the shops, ninth graders exploring the shops, two weeks per shop, and then they decide what they want to be for the rest of their lives, Larry said, "No, we're not going to explore the shops in exploratory, we're going to explore the city." Of course, a number of the shop teachers who are very much into their own trade and craft and so forth, didn't think that was such a good idea. They wanted to get the kids in their shop to teach them and then figure out which ones were going to major in the shop. Larry said, "Listen, anybody that wants to do this, explore the city, can do it. Anybody that doesn't want to do it, you don't have to do it, but those that don't want to do it are not going to exercise veto power over those who do want to do it." That was the way it was presented. Larry also often thought, I don't know how accurate this is, but there's a germ of truth in it, that when you introduce something new like that—and this was quite a change, I mean, it was really, really, it overturned the way of doing things in this school—you got about a third of the people ready to go with you and about a third are not going to want to do it, and they're never going to want to do it. There's about a third in the middle that are waiting to see how it comes out. He said, "That's the third that we want to work with. We want it to work. We want them to see it, and we want to grow it so that we can now do something similar in the 10th grade because we now have enough people to do it because they've seen how it worked in the ninth grade." Anyway, so that was the whole thing about how you build a constituency for change in your setting. Stacey Caillier: Rob, will you please tell the story of Phil and be the one who notices, which is now on my wall, it's on mugs. I want to launch a national campaign that's about be the one who notices. Rob Riordan: Well, this is a story that I've told in many contexts in High Tech High, and actually as I've told it, I've understood a couple of new wrinkles about it, which I shared last summer with High Tech Middle Mesa, the group over there, because they were doing a session on advisory. This story is about way back in that hippy dippy free school, freedom school, I had a student named Phil, who I believe at the time was a junior, maybe he was a sophomore or junior. Anyway, he was in my advisory group. The advisory group met every week, and we talked about stuff that was on our minds. Sometimes we had a grab bag of questions that kids had thrown in anonymously, and we'd pick out something and then we would go at that question. We had Advisory Olympics, and I went on trips, like to Cape Cod and so forth with my advising group. We did a lot of stuff together and we talked, and it was cross-age. All of our classes were cross-age in that school. This was a cross-age group as well. Phil was a student, a very bright student who was in and out of school. He'd be there for a few days, and then he'd be gone. He'd be gone for a week or whatever. His parents didn't know even that he was gone for a week because he'd come to school and then he'd boot out around the corner. It took a while for everybody to catch up that Phil wasn't—for his parents to catch. They came in, they were lovely people. They were distraught. I mean, what are we going to do? We talked with Phil and I was the advisor, and he said, "Yeah, don't worry. I'm okay. I'm coming." He'd be there for a few days and then he'd drop away. Then at a certain point, Phil was away for a while, and then he came back and he was there and he just stayed there. He was there and he was doing his classes, he was doing great stuff and everything, Phil was present. In our advising group, one of the kids picked up on that and said, "Man, you've really been around for a while. It's like, where's Phil? But you've really been around." He said, "Yeah, well, I've changed." He said, "Well, yeah, you have." He said, "What happened?" He said, "Well, I had a really bad trip on drugs, and I decided I wasn't going to do it anymore and I came back and here I am." One of the kids said, "That happened and you did that, and we know now it's been happening for a while." He said, "What was the toughest thing about that?" He said, "The toughest thing about it was that I changed and it was three months before anybody noticed. My friends, my teachers, they all thought I was the old Phil. I was the new Phil and nobody noticed." My story to teachers is, I hadn't noticed either. It really dawned on me when we had that conversation in advising group. My message to teachers is, be the one who notices. Aspire to be the one who notices. The other part of the story is that that conversation happened in advisory group. The fact that we had a place where that kind of conversation could happen, belated as it was, it happened because there was a context in the setting where we could have those kinds of conversations. To me, that's why we do advisory in High Tech High and why it can be so important. It can be bonding by boredom, and it can be the last thing on a teacher's mind, or on an advisor's mind. I'm teaching my classes and doing my projects and all of a sudden, oh, man, it's Thursday, advising group tomorrow. What am I going to do? All of that. It can be the last piece, so it can get to feel like a burden. Yet it's the place where people go when they need a place to go. When there was a suicide at- Alec Patton: Hi, folks. We put a gap here because Rob mentioned the name of the school, and that's not something you need to know in order to understand the point he's making. Back to Rob. Rob Riordan: where did people go? They went to their advising groups. It was there, it was a place to go. When I was in college, my sophomore year, this was 1961 or '62, small liberal arts college. We had exams, and I had a classmate who had three exams in two days, like one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the next morning, and he went and threw himself in front of a train. He died. He committed suicide. The pressure had gotten to him. What happened after that was that the college instituted self-scheduling of exams. An honor system and everything, somebody might be taking it tomorrow, you're taking it today. It was the honor system, but the self-scheduling of exams. What happened when he threw himself in front of the train was that at Haverford, it was a Quaker school, you had to go to meeting three Thursdays, Thursday meeting, three times a month. You had to sign in. A lot of us were like, "Oh, man. Okay, so we got to go." You'd go sign in, you'd go back in the back, sit in the back room and read a magazine or something. Some of the professors, Quaker philosophers and so forth, would feel almost obligated to stand up and say something, inner light and all that kind of stuff. You speak when you're moved to speak. It's like connections. Stacey Caillier: I love connections. Rob Riordan: It's actually, a great meeting is like connections. Anyway, when that happened, everybody went to the meeting house. It was like, without a word. It's like there was this trail of people just walking down the path to the meeting house. It was a place that some of us blew off, but it was there when we needed a place to go. To me, that's what advisory is. Stacey Caillier: The last question is another story that I come back to all the time that ends with, could it be love? Rob Riordan: Yeah. Stacey Caillier: Can you share that story? Rob Riordan: Do you want to tell that story? Stacey Caillier: Yup. Rob Riordan: This is a very influential story, a very impactful moment in my life. It was a little bit around the way the unconditional positive regard made me realize something about, it's not about doing a technique, it's a way of being. Which makes me think about, I've sometimes asked teachers here, how do you want to be remembered by your students? Do you want to be remembered as someone who asked really great questions? Or beyond that, do you want to be remembered as someone who really wanted to know what they think? There's a difference. Asking great questions is a technique, wanting to know what they think is a way of being. That moment around the unconditional positive regard was similar to that. It was that kind of moment about doing and being. Doing leads to being, but it might not. Anyway, so where are we? Could it be love? I was in a graduate program, doctoral program, and at the same time, I was working and part of my coursework was fieldwork in this hippy-dippy free school, freedom school. A school within a school in Cambridge, that I helped develop. I came in the second year, but I became a person who was really something of a developer and custodian of the vision. There was a seminar of Harvard graduate students, doctoral students, who were studying this pilot school. There were six or seven students. There were six or seven doctoral theses that got written about this school. There we were in this seminar, and people were starting to talk about this fairly early on, their experience in the school. There was a very wise advisor who was running this seminar. I was working the school every day and I was doing stuff with kids. I was just loving the school and all that kind of stuff. People were saying, "We don't really see what the big deal is with this school. It's like the kids seem to like it there, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot going on. We don't understand what it is about this school that might be important." They said, "We're missing something." I was biting my tongue, of course. I didn't know how to articulate what it was that I thought they were missing anyway at that point. The professor, he says, he leans forward, he says, "This dimension, this hidden dimension of the pilot school that seems so hard to capture, could it be love?" At that moment, of course, I burst into tears. Of course. Of course, it was love. Here we were in an academic setting, and he nailed it by speaking a taboo word. Basically, it was essentially a taboo word in academia at that time, which taught me something about both the essence of a place like that where good things are happening for kids, and also, something about language. I wrote my whole doctoral thesis trying to avoid jargon and staying out of the library, everything. It was all field work and a lot of student voice in it and everything. Something about language and something that I've tried to be unembarrassed, not only by my tears, but by the use of the word love. Not in a smarmy sense, but in a deeply radical sense of relation and vision and importance and what binds us together. Stacey Caillier: I love you. Rob Riordan: That's, that story. I love you too. I want to say one word about, you've talked about things you've learned from me, I've learned a few things from you, Stacey. One of them is, one moment in our work together that I really remember very fondly was when we went into a math classroom together and we observed, and then we came out and I started to talk, or you knew I was going to start the talk with the teacher or something like that. You said, "Rob, will you let me start out?" It was like, and I realized, wow, I'm risking monopolizing this terrain here like that. I need to share this space. What you had seen was when that teacher was going around to groups, because kids were all working in groups. It was all very nice, working on a problem. The teacher was going in to check in with the different groups. The spokesperson for each group was a male. I had not seen that, you saw it. I had not seen it. You brought it up with the teacher who also had not seen it. Really good teacher had not seen, oh, the voices here in this classroom are male. I'm sure that caused him to diversify the voices in the thing. You saw something that I didn't see, and I was really appreciative of that. That's what taught me that I needed to rely on you and on your perceptions of things and to make sure that we shared space with each other. Stacey Caillier: Well, you did a beautiful job of sharing space, I thought. Thank you, Rob. Rob Riordan: Yeah. Thanks for the conversation. Alec Patton: High Tech High Unboxed is hosted by me, Alec Patton. This episode was edited by Ben Krueger. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Rob Riordan and Stacey Caillier for this conversation. We have links to other episodes with Rob in the show notes. If you want to know what Rob was up to in the 60s that's where to go. Thanks for listening.