Kyle Kirby's Digital Portfolio - project slices: training teachers in PBL

What is a Project Slice?

Every year at High Tech High, teachers new to the HTH schools engage in a project as students before they start planning their own projects. Stepping into the shoes of a student is vital to understanding the flow of project-based learning as allows educators to:

feel the joy and relevance of going on outings
engage in real work
prepare their work and products for an authentic audience through rounds of critique and feedback
feel, as our students do, what it's like to get really nervous that other people and experts will see their final products
feel the frustrations and challenges that PBL requires of its students

This week-long experience as a student is called a Project Slice, and throughout the process, students debrief about how elements felt as a student and as a teacher.

Below is a curation of the Project Slice that our new teachers and staff experienced at 5280 High School before the 2018-2019 school year:

In Engineering, our new teachers:

1) researched and ordered "speaker kits."

2) assembled the speaker kits without any help from the teacher.

3) learned to use a soldering iron, and soldered necessary parts.

4) designed speaker boxes with mechanical devices (had to use gears and moving parts) on the front using photoshop and the laser cutter.

5) received feedback and critique from class and teachers on their design and how it .represented the main struggle from their podcast.

6) iterated and rebuilt over time.

In engineering, our main product was to build a speaker box that we could use to play our podcast to our friends and family at exhibition with a mechanical design on the front that represents the main struggle expressed from our podcast.

Joel's group chose to use rope and pulleys to represent the struggle of their subject, Paul Scudo - the executive director of Step Denver. Several weeks later, Paul told the exact same story on Colorado Public Radio. No kidding! We broke that story months earlier!

Bev is helping Lacey learn to solder the wires inside of the speakerbox.

Jenna, Alex, and Joel test their wiring.

Bev, Lacy, Ashley used a system of gears to represent the lessons they took away from Mike Johnston's interview.

In Humanities, our new teachers:

1) learned from experts at Colorado Public Radio how to interview a subject and how to draw a story from the interview.

2) scheduled and recorded interviews with local changemakers.

3) used translation software to create written versions of interviews.

4) cut the interviews and added written narrative to them.

5) did a table read to the entire class where they received feedback and critique.

6) redrafted.

7) did a second table read for local experts (back from Colorado Public Radio).

8) edited for a final draft.

9) recorded audio and cut the podcast together using Audacity.

10) and honed these recordings until students were proud enough to play them to the STEAD community!

Above, you can see Alex and Jenna cutting their podcast using Audacity, an audio editing software.

The pic in the middle was taken in front of Mike Johnston's office. Bev, Ashley, and Lacey interviewed him as a local changemaker. He had a awesome story to tell!

These pictures were from Colorado Public Radio, where we launched our whole project and spent the morning with an editor, asking her questions and learning from her how to interview and create a story.

Ashley in the Audio-recording booth. Her voice is podcast-perfection. No kidding. She recorded her narration over and over and over again to get it perfect!

The whole group is setting up for exhibition by reflecting on the process we went through. For the first round of reflection, we identified where "assessment, professional work, adult world connection" etc. were included in the project (on blue post-it notes), so we could connect the work we did within PBL theory. For the second round, they took their favorite journal entries from the month and put them on pink post-it notes, so that people at exhibition could see what they were writing, thinking, feeling during the process.

(Above) This is a process wall from the exhibition helping people understand the process of creating HIGH QUALITY WORK - from using models of HQW and breaking them down to pulling experts into the process (like CPR) to using feedback and critique cycles where protocols help people get CANDID feedback in SAFE WAYS so they can improve their work and BUILD A CULTURE OF CRAFTSMANSHIP. It's important to add raw and unfinished work so that people can see how much work we did and compare early drafts to late drafts.

(Left) More process wall for our exhibition starting with 2 essential questions:

1) how can we use this experience to implement high quality PBL into our classrooms in a way that is authentic, engaging, and academically rigorous

2) How can we share stories of local changemakers to amplify their impact.