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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-08-31
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K43bvEx_rRM
so I am a cofounder of a place called the workshop school which is a public project based high school located in West Philadelphia we're part of the school tuition Philadelphia %HESITATION and when I was listening to items talk just now and particularly this idea of teenagers pushing our ideas about what activism is about what identity is %HESITATION I found myself asking a question that I've been
asking for ten fifteen years now which is whenever I hear about young people doing super awesome stuff why can't that be school right why is that having to always happen on the margins and so we started the workshop school to try and begin to provide an answer to that question now it's June and what that means for me is that %HESITATION in two weeks our first
cohort of seniors is going to graduate which is very very exciting yeah apply them %HESITATION but because I'm me it also means that is the NBA finals I think a lot about high school innovation I think a lot about my students I think a lot about my family and I think way too much about basketball and so I'm preparing for this talking and thinking about the
work and I'm reflecting on how we got here especially with this first covert graduating and I'm thinking about basketball and these things are winding together in my head and so when I ultimately came to the point of thinking about what lessons might I share Whyte takeaways might I have from doing this work all these years I landed on the Philadelphia seventy six now I'm a Philadelphian
I'd been the Sixers fan all my life I remember nineteen eighty three like it was yesterday that was the last time we actually won anything for those who are from here I'm every two thousand and one oddly enough the same year the no child left behind act passed the Sixers were really good went to the finals the Allen Iverson there and since then Sixers have been
mostly mediocre not good enough to contend sneak into the playoffs missed the playoffs now just kinda in the middle and stuck there unable to get out of that rat of mediocrity that to me is what a lot of high school is stuck in a rut of mediocrity that we cannot get out and so when I started thinking about how might I frame some of these lessons
learned I started thinking about what the Sixers have done over the past few years which a involve lots of losing and we'll talk about that briefly but it also involves actually trying to do something radically different and so they're actually oddly enough some lessons from that experimentalist to be a change agent in high schools in basketball or otherwise first we gonna do a little bit of
background %HESITATION that dude in the center is Simon Hoggart the guy on the right is Michael clapper those are two of my co founders of the workshop we all met working at West Philadelphia high school in the late nineteen nineties they were both teachers fairly early in their careers I was running after school and adult education programs in the building and beginnings log my way through
a doctorate %HESITATION and we connected pretty quickly and had a lot of conversations about what was wrong with the contemporary high school and it really center on a couple things one students didn't see the work that they were doing is relevant if you want to get a kid to care about what you were doing in class you had to build a really strong relationship with the
kid and then kind of trade on that relationship in order to get them to buy into learning about the war of eighteen twelve or the quadratic formula or whatever the standards that you had to teach that we %HESITATION and the second thing was that all of the real student engagement was happening on the margin so you have kids who would come in at six thirty in
the morning for choir practice and then cut school the rest the day or you have kids like in Simon's after school automotive program who may or may not of been train wrecks during the regular classes but we're doing high level engineering work in the afternoon and so again why can't we make that school was one of these questions that kind of stuff with all of us
eventually we shifted from talking about what was wrong with school to what might be right about school and that was where the idea for the workshop school came to be now I'd like to tell you that we just hatched this idea and everyone thought it was awesome and we were off and running we pitched this thing for a good for five years we can get anybody
find it we couldn't get anybody let us start a school %HESITATION we talked a lot about democratic student centered education back then and it turns out district administrators %HESITATION generally are me deeply uncomfortable by the idea of kids running schools and so that didn't go over all that well %HESITATION so we learned we had the likes meat that it you can't disk front load the democratic
student center part you got it you got to come to work out in the back and %HESITATION and so after awhile of not being successful we tried something different we back that we went to the district and we said alright instead of starting a full high school what if we ran an alternative senior year program now one of the hallmarks of a child left behind is
that all of the school accountability for high schools landed in eleventh grade and so the dirty secret was nobody really knew what to do with twelfth graders well I detested we put all the resources into the eleventh grade they're gonna keep showing up rightly gonna drop out you know they keep coming so I think the dishes like we're asking for thirty kids run could hurt right
we raise our own money for it so we didn't ask them to fund it and we took these thirty kids from South Philadelphia high school for NASA high school which is also in south Philly and west and for two years we had his cohorts of seniors who instead of doing the typical senior year routine at their home schools would spend it with us and we had
them design and carry out these projects projects that were trying to take on insolvable world problems in particular in this program we focused on kind of sixteen ability and green technology issues %HESITATION so we had kids doing things like designing and building hybrid powered cars %HESITATION this is one of the ones that Simon and the students %HESITATION have have built that got a lot of attention
%HESITATION and we had a another team this is for our second year that designed and built off grid modular housing could be packed into a shipping container deployed anywhere in the world in the wake of a natural disaster and then assembled in two days on site the used Haiti is their test case after the earthquake %HESITATION and one of the things that they learned was that
these are places that don't have a lot of resources don't have a lot of working infrastructure and billions of dollars of aid are pouring into the country after this horrible disaster and it's all going into these temporary shelters anything in the long term so what if you could take that money instead deploy a whole bunch of these things suddenly you have housing they can hold a
family of four and that has a renewable source of energy and sanitation and water and so you're laying down infrastructure this is our kids who hatched this idea it's our kids who do the CAD drawings in the animations if our kids who wrote the business plan it's our kids you've got to go down in pitch this idea Johnson Space Center at the finals of the Conrad
spirit of innovation awards so this is the kind of thing I would ultimately it's our kids you've got to build a prototype of it at Bartram's garden in southwest Philadelphia so we had a lot of successes in those first couple of years and it was also a real blessing because we got to work out the model on a very very small scale didn't have to think
big questions about like how do you run a high school was just to teachers thirty kids what's the teaching gonna look like what's the learning to look like what's the assessment gonna look like we had time to work our way into having a school the second important thing to happen was that we got to show people this model and not just talking about it talking about
it was really unsuccessful but when suddenly the superintendent or the chair of the school reform commission or journalist or a funder or a filmmaker could come down and hang out and talk to our kids and see the work it changed everything almost overnight and suddenly people could kind of wrap their heads around this idea that %HESITATION you really could create high school it's not organized by
subject for instance you really could create a high school where kids design their own projects and where the work is supposed to get outside of the classroom so that led us here to the workshop school that's our front door not when you're forty eight and while that in west Philly %HESITATION and the school is designed around three pretty simple ideas community first that is the first
principle for a good reason most of the work that we are doing with our students involves building a healthy strong community where kids respect each other where they respect the work where they can struggle where they can make mistakes and where they can see that what they're doing is real we can't get sick and need serious rigorous academic project work if we don't attend to this
first second the work is the work the addendum to this is there are no make up packets our kids by the time they get to us in ninth grade are experts at playing school there's a whole skill set that involves just passing classes or how to tilt the grade from eighty nine to ninety one and the incentives are all structured around the performance of those things
what does it look like to ask questions about how was your work changing the world around hiding rethink success along time ago %HESITATION one of Simon's students gave a talk on a stage similar to this and he talked about his final assessment working on a car with that if the brakes don't work his teacher died right that's a performance assessment right that's authentic isn't it %HESITATION
and so the idea that you are accountable for the work you are responsible for the work but the work also has real world implications and then finally persistent improve for a couple years %HESITATION this third principle was make the most out of failure actually kind of like that one better but that's another one that we learned doesn't go over well with district leadership turns out they
think failures bad so we had to learn with him same idea but you gotta re frame it in a more positive way I'm we've had a pretty good run so far plenty of struggles but a lot of cool work coming out of our first four years %HESITATION huge range of projects that we run so John here is standing in front of a mural that has clasping
it as part of the classroom redesign project most of our classes have redesigned their rooms multiple times over the years so the conversation is what should learning look and feel like in this space and then they can do everything from repaint the room to design and build furniture rearranged it reduced up at staff based on their ideas about what learning could or should look like at
his speed is a model our kids designed and built for a neighborhood solar collecting this is about how do you build out neighborhood base infrastructure to share solar energy so they built these models the research the feasibility of them and they presented them to mayor canning and council president Clark last year every year our ninth grade class writes produces stages markets %HESITATION a play the ninth
grade play was last night %HESITATION for this year it was awesome it was hilarious it was based on a midsummer night's dream I loved every minute of it %HESITATION two years ago our students started to peer mediation program %HESITATION the idea was if students could learn how to mediate conflict with and among each other a lot of that conflict wouldn't escalate to the point where adults
had to be involved and we see a lot less fighting a lot less violence %HESITATION although we haven't had a whole lot of either of those things but a lot of things that could become big conflicts could remain out smaller or be solved so have the students were trained as peer mediators and the other half actually designed and built the room in our school where the
mediations are the schools really small and we don't have a lot of space and so %HESITATION anytime we need more space for something we have to subdivide the spaces Morse we've we've had like three different consists student construction projects now to car more spaces %HESITATION out of %HESITATION the existing footprint of our building %HESITATION students are continuing to get trained for this every year and we're
now at a place where kids actually request mediations of their fellow peers when there are things that are %HESITATION starting to go wrong or concerns that they have and the car workers continue to so this blue car here is called the eight one eight is powered by biodiesel fuel that our students make themselves with waste vegetable oil from federal down %HESITATION a couple of years ago
it smells great Sir that I'm and and full disclaimer I don't know a thing about cars none of this is Simon and those students thing I don't claim any credit for this by %HESITATION but it is really awesome work that they continue to do couple years ago this car got invited along with their students and with time and down to the White House maker faire and
so some of our guys got to meet president Obama which was pretty cool %HESITATION so we had a lot of exciting stuff happen we've learned a lot we had a lot of successes %HESITATION what lessons my I share %HESITATION based on this experience and here we bring it back to the Sixers that's a bad looking guy there is Sam he he he was the general manager
of the seventy Sixers for three years and indie admittedly superficial world of basketball he is indeed a change change is one of these people who thinks very very differently about how the world works and so his job was to get the Sixers from being mediocre to being excellent doing that involved a bunch of things one involved losing lots of games the reason is that the way
basketball works is if you do not acquire a leak top level talent you will never content there's only a couple ways to do that the biggest one is being able to draft great players out of college best way to do that is to lose about chickens so he said we're going to do that at all costs we are going to maximize our opportunity for doing but
he also did something really interesting which is he said we understand that we are super fallible as human beings we make all kinds of assumptions about how decisions will play out that turn out to be wrong it's a way to bring a lot of humility to this process we have to increase the probability that we will be successful even if our first five strategies are wrong
and so a lot of the decisions he made in running the team were based not just on like how do why on earth that one gem somewhere but what is the first six places I look for that Jim turned out to not work out I need to have place number seven waiting for so this was unorthodox and it was criticized and a lot of the media