Aim measurement My aim for this project was "by March 2022, a cohort of 10th grade students will report an increase in the quality of character and quality of cohort culture through their project based learning." In order to measure the change, we asked the cohort to respond to the same survey so that we could compare the results. Did we meet our aim? The answer is both yes and no. Overall, we did see an increase in the quality of character and quality of cohort culture. However, some of the key indicators (focus quality) did not meet the goal measurement. Should I be disappointed? No. Did I learn something? Yes. In the next sections, I will share findings that emerged from this improvement work.
Key themesWhat showed up from the glows and grows of the results? What did I learn about what it means to create a culture of excellence together in a project based learning setting? There are five key themes that showed up across the glows and grows of the results and my wonderings: (1) Excellence is diverse, (2) Excellence is iterative and progressive, (3) Excellent teams build excellence, (4) Excellence requires trust, (5) Excellence is a leadership work.
Excellence is diverse What is excellence? What does an ethic and culture of excellence look, sound, and feel like? How can it be defined? Ever since I learned about An Ethic of Excellence (Berger, 2003), I was curious to know more about it. This project was all in all, my search for excellence. In this search for excellence, I learned that a culture of excellence is diverse and is almost fluid. There is no fixed image, sound, or feel. A school or organization can and should have a shared vision of a culture of excellence but what it really looks, sounds, and feels like are different from one classroom to another and even within one classroom from time to time. This is because a culture of excellence is dependent upon students and projects. It looks, sounds, and feels different depending on who is in the classroom and what they are doing. And that's beautiful. Excellence is diverse. Diverse is excellence.
Excellence is iterative and progressive While a culture of excellence may be different from one to another, based on my experience with engaging with students and adults, I did find a throughline to creating and cultivating a culture of excellence. It is about imagining and re-imagining excellence (vision), celebrating what is working well (glows), identifying areas of growth (grows), coming up with safe-to-fail experiments and implementing them (ideas and actions), and then reflecting on actions (reflect), and continuing this cycle again and again. Excellence is an iterative learning journey that works towards the goal, but very much driven by its process.
The key is to hold a space, within the system, to go through this process collectively throughout the school year.
I almost made a mistake. The PD sessions I led on excellence were originally supposed to be only two sessions long. In the first session, we defined excellence and what an excellent team they aspired to be, by identifying glows and grows. Then in the second session, we invited our stakeholders (students, parents/guardians) for empathy interviews. The purpose of the interview was to identify glows and grows from the stakeholder's perspectives. It was beautiful to see what was happening in every classroom, teachers sitting with stakeholders and simply and intently listening to what they said with openness and humility. After this session, there was a buzz from teachers in the copy room. "We should do this more often." "It was a really good experience and I heard a lot of interesting things." But at the same time, there were some pushes from them. "At High Tech High, we do a lot of empathy interviews like this. And then it often kinda ends there and fades away." Oof! So I asked the instructional leader for two more PD sessions to continue this work. One for unpacking the interview experience, redefining excellence, and identifying at least one grow and one change action to implement. Another for unpacking that action experience and thinking forward. It would have been unfortunate if we had done nothing after the empathy interview.
Visioning alone will not get us anywhere. Identifying glows and grows alone will only make us either feel good about ourselves or feel bad about others. Actions alone can make us spin our wheels and not move forward. It alone can also lead us to fall into a pitfall of making inequitable actions without realizing we fell. To make it iterative and progressive, we need to create time and space to meet collectively and reflect. The takeaway was that it did not take a whole lot of time to do so. The PD (agenda linked here) above each consisted of 40 minutes sessions. From 7:35 a.m. to 8:15 a.m.. 40 minutes. That's all it took.
"But wait. How did teachers know that their actions worked or not? How did they know if their intentions were met or not? How did they know that they were making improvements or not?" Great questions. One thing that was missing from this process that is crucial to making this journey really iterative and progressive is measurement. It was intentional that in the PD I did not task teachers to come up with ways to measure the improvements. I could have, but I intentionally didn't. That is because I thought it would be a little too much to do before 8AM in the middle of the week during a pandemic. The upside of that was the feasibility. The process was so simple that it made it easy for teachers to get on board. Or to be more precise, it made it easy for me as a facilitator to get them on board. The downside of that was the absence of clarity. Frankly speaking, as Team Lemonaide, we have a baseline and endline quantitative data as well as qualitative data through students' reflection, but I failed to collect data that shows if the actions themselves worked or not. For example, after the second PD, we identified that our grow was "visibility of work." So we came up with an idea to conduct a "Mid-Project Check-in" with students, where we held a space for students to self-evaluate and reflect on their work and learning with their team members. The intention was good, but I must say that I don't know how effective and useful it was. Thinking back, I could have just asked students to respond to a few questions via a Google form or mentimeter. It would have taken only 15 minutes to create the survey on my end and 3 minutes for students to respond. From this mistake, when a team is coming up with ideas for change actions, I now understand more about how ideas and measurement work and should go hand in hand with each other. I can also see that collected data gives depth to team reflection, and helps build and sustain curiosity. Measurement gives clarity to what is happening and to the road ahead. Data is a great ingredient for in-depth reflection and curiosity.
Excellent teams builds excellence Dr. Berger (2003) says that one's ethic of excellence is fostered by a culture of excellence. Through my immersive experience at a project based school, I noticed that this culture of excellence in the classroom is heavily influenced by groups within the classroom. In our 10th grade project, students were assigned to different groups and each group worked together to accomplish their goals and tasks. When groups function as teams, while ensuring that each individual's abilities are fully realized, it leads to the higher quality in the final product and higher engagement. In other words, an effective team functioning seems to be the major key to cultivating excellence. In The Art of Coaching Teams, Elena Aguilar (2016) defines team as a "unit of people who convene to work together interdependently for a shared, meaningful purpose" (p. 2). In order for groups to function as teams, it is important that every group has a solid, shared, meaningful purpose and that every member within the group not only understands, but owns that. Aguilar (2016) further explains the three dimensions of a great team as follows (P. 2−3):
Product: Something of quality gets done that is valuable, useful, and appreciated.
Process: The group's collaboration skills increase as a result of working together.
Learning: The team experience is a learning experience that increases the skills and knowledge of individual team members.
In regards to process, according to the endline survey results of our focus group of 10th graders, there was an increase in individual collaboration (cooperation). Cooperation was one of the moral characteristics that we aimed to increase. We established that 70% of the cohort would report they connected with others to accomplish the goals and tasks in collaboration as our key indicator. Cooperation surpassed the goal and showed an increase from the last semester by 12.77%. Furthermore, the percentage of students who denied having this quality of character decreased by 10.64%. Under the same endline survey results, in regards to questions on the cohort culture, there was an increase in the following statements:
Most of the cohort care for the quality of work → +5.37%
Most care for each other → +13.64%
Most connect and cooperate → +9.44%
In sum, about 50% of the students think that their cohort cared for the quality of work and took pride in their work; about 70% think that their cohort cared for each other, connected and cooperated; about 75% were proud of their own work and learning. The key indicator was 70% so care for the quality of work did not meet the aim, but the rest did. When a team cooperates and collaborates well, they function well as a team and their individual cooperation/collaborative skills increase as the result of working together. Cooperation is about connecting with and caring for another and caring for the quality of work together.
Excellence requires trust You might be wondering, "So what happened to the gap that you were talking about?" In the end, the gap between individuals and the cohort still turned out to be wide. The gap shrunk by 3.23% but that is not at all a significant difference. Perhaps, the gap is just inevitable. "Isn't it just maybe human nature?", a 12th grade teacher said when I shared with her the data and the finding, "that we tend to think that we work harder than the others?" I am still grappling with this gap and don't have a concrete response. But one thing I can say is that trust is an important ingredient to making excellence. During the grade-level meeting, when all 10th grade teachers and Dean of Students gathered and studied the baseline data together, we were curious about the gap and wondered if students were trusting their team mates. Unless you think the cohort cares for the quality of work, it makes it difficult to delegate work and to hold each other accountable. To build trust, as harsh as it is, one must demonstrate by word and deed that they can be accountable. I noticed that this trust and accountability go hand in hand. As I mentioned earlier, as part of our change ideas, we conducted a "Mid-Project Check-in" with students. The objective of this check-in was not only to create a space for students to self-assess and reflect on their own learning, but also to make their work visible to others so that they would be able to show their accomplishments while holding each other accountable. Visibility of work is, in other words, transparency. Transparency helps to build trust, to hold each other accountable, and to validate each other. Again, it's harsh but, ultimately, students are the ones who have to do the work to earn it. Teachers can't do that for them. But what teachers can and must do is to create conditions and an environment that help students accomplish their tasks successfully and give them enough support so that they can trust each other. For teams to function well, trust is essential. That is why one of the roles of teachers is to help individual students accomplish their task successfully so that they can build trust.
Excellence is leadership work Aristotle said that excellence is a habit. I think that making the process of pursuing excellence a habit is what defines progressive education. Leadership is necessary to make this a habit in both adult learning and within classroom settings. All in all, cultivating a culture of excellence is leadership work. In creating a culture of excellence in classrooms teachers need to exercise leadership by playing three roles: A designer, a manager, and a coach.
As a designer, teachers bring out student voices and lead the process of this co-creation of the culture. As a manager, teachers need to make change sustainable. They also need to check-in with teams to see if they are functioning well and making progress. They will have to help teams get back on the road when necessary. Then as a coach, teachers need to support and encourage individual growth and make it personalized. Damon and Lexi, my mentor teachers, demonstrated these three leadership roles. Lexi was an exceptional designer. One of her many strengths was scaffolding the process for students. "I want depth," Lexi often said. For her, student excellence within the subject of Humanities was depth−depth in questions, depth in research, and depth in thoughts. She did not waiver in these expectations, and did not allow students to be complacent with not meeting those expectations. She guided students to meet high expectations while personalizing their learning and feeding them with intellectual stimulations. Damon was an inspiring leader with charisma. He was exceptionally good at motivating people of all ages. I also found one of his greatest strengths to be giving personalized feedback. He sees. He cares. He reaches out. And he gives words that are necessary for an individual's growth, at the right time, and in language that they can comprehend. He meets them where they are and guides them to where they can be. He was an exceptional coach.
An act of collaboration is vital to the pursuit of excellence. And it is shared leadership that makes such an act possible.