"To change culture, then, is about everyday acts. This means you can start small, try lots of things, and see what works. Not because your aspirations are small, but because this gives you the opportunity to tune yourself to see, feell, and notice what is changing, how it's changing, and for whom." −Susie Wise, Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities
It is not my intention to state that PBL is the one and only method that works for every student, for there is no such thing. However, in terms of collaboration, there is no more effective pedagogical tool than PBL. In this respect, I am a proponent and an advocate of project based schools. That being said, here are my recommendations for creating a culture of excellence in the classroom with and for students in any schools. These recommendations come from my 10 months of observations of and relationships with students and teachers as a resident at a project based school, High Tech High Mesa, with voices of liberatory educators past and present.
With students 1. Cultivate collaboration "Collaboration serves as a multiplier of knowledge and experience which elevates young peoples' and teachers' collective impact." −Dr. Michelle Sadrena Pledger, Liberate! Pocket-Sized Paradigms for Liberatory Learning
Make collaboration a daily, core activity. In order to guide students to collaborate effectively while building their character, cultivate conditions for collaboration as described prior. In the end, "relationships are the deepest learning" (Seidel, 2022).
2. Imagine and define excellence. Co-create expectations and revisit them. Be explicit about how much you care about excellence and why. Define excellence together with students, envision what an excellent team they aspire to be, and co-create norms and expectations that will hold each accountable in creating a culture of excellence. Showing students characteristics of performance and moral character will scaffold them to think and name how they want to become. The key here is to treat character as something that is not innate, but like muscles. Character needs to be trained and developed. When talking about character, invite students to think about what quality of character they value and who in their lives demonstrate that quality. Doing this will help students express their voice and decenter you from imposing onto them what they should become. It will also help students realize and appreciate the existence of others that are dear to them. Another key here is to bring in students' voices and to reflect that in every aspect, while being intentional and explicit about a culture of domination. One of the ways to be explicit about a culture of domination is to name what does not build excellence. This will help you and students de-center from a culture of domination and white supremacy culture (Okun, 2001). In my opinion, the following prevailing values of the culture do not build a culture of excellence.
Perfectionism: To excel does not mean to be perfect. To excel does not also mean to not make any mistakes. It is an "ongoing invention and creation" and celebrates both glow and grows (Designing a Culture of Excellence).
Exclusion and oppression: A culture of excellence will not be achieved when certain individuals are excluded, oppressed, or not respected. It is an inclusive and collective work.
I win; I'm better than y'all: A culture of excellence is not about somebody winning or losing. It is also not about being or doing "better than the other." It is about going beyond the ordinary together.
"Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed" (hooks, 1994). Make a love ethic the center. Make it a throughline to excellence.
3. Celebrate glows and identify grows as a habit; "Make a culture of belonging a habit." Make time with students to notice and reflect glows and grows. Pause to celebrate and appreciate one another. Pause to identify areas of growth, ideate change actions, and act. Personally, this year, I learned about the significance of appreciation and recognition more than ever. As a resident, I had no status, I had no physical rewards, I was literally foreign. More often than not, the feeling of not being useful enough overshadowed my motivation and self-esteem. I am a "contributionist." Contributing brings me a sense of purpose and joy in life and a sense of belonging to the community. Contribution has affected my motivation and self-esteem. It is toxic to me and to others to let that dictate the value of my existence, and I am fighting to keep such a contributionist self from taking over who I really am.
Appreciation and recognition helped me fight the good fight. Appreciation and recognition are important ingredients to creating psychological safety and a positive self-esteem, in other words, belonging (Wise, 2022). Without a sense of belonging, we can't celebrate nor identify grows. Well, we can, but without that, it only feeds into a culture of domination. A culture of belonging is a defiance to a culture of domination.
For students 5. Scaffold Scaffold is a term used to describe "the supports provided to students in order to help them access and strengthen a new concept or skill," Sarah Field (2021), a senior curriculum manager for PBLWorks, says. She calls an effective scaffolding as both an art and science. After observing how my mentor teachers taught, it truly was both−you need to craft content and tasks in a way that meet students where they are and guide them towards where the learning is headed, while tapping into their individual motivation. You also need to do this in a timely manner−not dragging learning out, but not speeding through it either. There are so many ways to scaffold. The teachers task is to select the most meaningful and manageable scaffolds that make sense in terms of the nature of the content, the needs of the students, and the time. Here are examples of different forms of scaffolding that Field (2021) introduces:
Modeling with think-alouds
Breaking a topic into parts
Providing visual models
Activating prior knowledge
Connecting to student interests
Using hands-on activities and manipulatives
Providing analogies/metaphors
Offering verbal cues and guiding questions
Using graphic organizers/mind maps
Showing examples
Pre-teaching vocabulary
Asking follow-up questions
Using stories
Creating opportunities for student conversation/discussion
Providing context
Offering sentence stems/language mode
6. Make time for prototyping, critique, and revision Prototyping may be the most powerful form of scaffolding. Prototyping elevates students' sense of agency and it allows students to see the progress of their quality of work. The art of prototyping and revisions are refined by critique and self-reflection. Kind, specific, and helpful. KiSH was a protocol that we often used in the classroom and in the professional learning space. A protocol like this guides students to engage and make the act of critique meaningful. Note that this critique only works when students are given a chance to make multiple revisions. Conditions matter.
7. Exhibit and curate work Making work public is valuable. Exhibition events leverage motivation and quality of work, and create opportunities for family and community engagement. An effective exhibition is authentic and aligned to the nature of the project. Such an exhibition also hosts guests that are most relevant to the project. However, no matter how the design of the exhibition is relevant and authentic to the nature of the project, unless it means something to students and that it excites them, it won't work−especially teenagers. Curation of work after exhibition is important, too, because it sustains an impact of what students learned through projects and builds a sense of belongingness to the community. Students seeing their own work makes them feel seen and welcome too.
8. Authentic exposure in and out of the classroom Provide opportunities for students to study from real examples, real people, real community. They do this all the time. They are constantly on social media like Tiktok, instagram, and Youtube, learning new dances, Hip hop music, makeup tips, and so on. They learn from models and they do so well. Exposure to examples will help them comprehend where they are headed and will help them create a quality final product. The most powerful opportunity may be a field trip. When a field trip is designed well and co-created by teachers and students, it empowers students-ownership over their learning. While bringing students out to the world is an authentic exposure, that is not the only way. We can bring the world in and have students be exposed inside the classroom. Out of several activities that my mentor teacher designed, I was especially inspired by an activity called "The Gallery Walk." This was a scaffold to an Op-Ed that students were assigned to write about a social issue they are interested in and care about. In the activity, the teacher put printed photos, artwork, historical documents, articles, and definitions of social issue related terms on different islands of desks. She also uploaded all those materials plus videos on the Google Classroom. "You are in charge of your own destiny," she said and students stood up with a pencil and a note catcher and moved from one station to another. "You just turned the classroom into a museum," I said. This delicate balance of creative design and student agency was marvelous. 9. Apply critical care. Relationships are the core. Ultimately, critical care is the core practice of excellence. It should be an ongoing practice that should be prioritized at all times. In order to deliver critical care, data helps. Conducting a quick survey or/and providing a space for students to journal on how they are doing will help teachers find out their needs.
For leadership In order to create a culture of excellence, leaders need to meet teachers where they are and create conditions that empower teachers to bring their full potential and creativity with wholesomeness. Leaders need to humanize the conditions and environment in every aspect. In order to do so, understanding teachers is fundamental. "People, and our understanding of them, are the heart of innovation," said Sandy Speicher (2004), a passionate educator and a former CEO of IDEO. Teachers need to feel that they are cared for as human beings. Teachers need support to do their work with more confidence while growing as educators. Teachers need less tasks on their plates; need more time during their contract time to do the things mentioned above. Teachers deserve to feel validated for who they are and what they do. Transformative education needs transformative leaders who create and sustain conditions for teachers to not only survive, but thrive.