 Okay. Welcome everyone to our first DL MOOC lens into the classroom session. I'm Karen Fastenpauer with the DL MOOC team. These lens into the classroom sessions will take place every Thursday at the same time. And they're really a chance to take the theory we're talking about each week in DL MOOC and apply it to real classrooms. We've posted the protocol we're going to be using on the DL MOOC site on the blog as well as some more background information. And we hope that you'll take this protocol and adapt it and use it in your own practice as well. There's more information on the site also about the teacher you're about to meet Brandon Cohen and his classroom. If you're watching the stream on the YouTube page, you'll see a link where you can go to the G plus page and put in questions for the panel. So as we're going through the protocol, if you have questions you can do that on the G plus page if you like, but you do need to be logged in to G plus to do that. You can also tweet your questions, comments or thoughts with the hashtag DL MOOC and we'll be monitoring that as well. So now I'm going to turn it over to Laura McBain to introduce herself in our panel. Wonderful. Thanks Karen. My name is Laura McBain and I work here at High Tech High. I've been a teacher here in a principal and I work primarily in our graduate school. So I'm going to be kind of leading our group here today in this online protocol. And I'll be kind of our facilitator and moderator keeping the conversation going and also supporting the presenter who is going to be presenting his work today. So I'm going to ask each of our panelists here to present themselves and then we will jump into this protocol. Thanks. So hi, I'm Alexia. I'm a 12th grade student here at High Tech High North County. My name is Rameez and I'm also a 12th grade at High Tech North County. Hi everyone. My name is Asal Mirza-Hosane and I'm a 12th grade English teacher at High Tech High North County and I'm also working with the DL MOOC as ATA. Hi everyone, my name is Asu Theronis. I am at High Tech Middle and I teach 8th grade humanities. I also teach in the graduate school. Brandon, you're up. Hi, I'm Brandon Cohen. I teach 12th grade environmental science at High Tech High. My name is Issa McGully and I am a 7th grade student at High Tech Middle Chula Vista. Emilia? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm looking for Edric there. My name is Emilia Torres and I'm an 8th grade math science teacher at High Tech Middle North County and I'm one of the TAs. Great, and Edric, do you want to present yourself as well? Sure. I'm still screen sharing everybody. Hi, my name is Edric Caligum. I'm the 7th grade humanities teacher at High Tech Middle Chula Vista. Wonderful. Thanks all. So we're going to be jumping in. So we've got a lot of perspectives in this panel today from teachers, graduate students, as well as folks who are working in our schools. So I'm going to walk you through a little bit about what the protocol is and then we're going to kind of jump right into it. So the first thing within the protocol, obviously, is we're going to go over the protocol. And the first thing, the way the protocol works today, is we're going to give the teacher an opportunity, Brandon, in this case, to give us an overview of his work and show some samples of his work. And we time this session. He only gets about three minutes to kind of really give us a concise, succinct overview of what his work is and also the question he has about it. Then I'm going to give the panelists an opportunity to kind of think, probably just about one minute, to think of clarifying questions. And those are kind of factual based questions. And then we will jump in with questions that we will want to ask him and he will answer those. We will then give ourselves another minute to go and develop kind of probing questions and probing questions are deeper questions, the questions that get at the heart of the issue and the why questions. And he will answer those as well. And then we will ask him to kind of turn his camera off and we will engage in a group conversation for about 10 minutes about the work and about his dilemma. After that, he will come in and give us a really quick response about what he gained from this discussion. And then we will have a debrief about how our process went. How did we do as a group? One of the key things about protocols that we like to say in our schools, never forget the debrief. You only get better at a protocol if you continue to debrief the process, not the content, but really how did the process go. And then we will do a final closing the loop exercise which asks us to kind of think about what to be gained for our own practice in this discussion. So that's the overview of the protocol. And then I'm going to just quickly go over the norms next. Thanks, Eric. If you want to move forward. Thanks. The norms for this discussion are this idea that we're going to be hard on content and soft on people. Brandon here is a fabulous person. I know him well. And he's got some great work. But we really want to push his thinking on this subject. But we're going to do it in a really kind way. The next norm is this idea of being kind, helpful, and specific. I might ask the question, what about in this work can we celebrate? And of course we're going to say the student work, it might be great, but we want to know what within it is actually very good. What can we celebrate specifically about the work? And then this last one is step up and step back. We've got about nine people on this panel, which means there's a lot of people that want to give some thoughts. So we aren't going to be engaging in a real time conversation. So again, monitor your air time. If you're someone in groups that tends to shy away from stepping up and sharing your voice, this is a kind of a place where you want to step up. If you're someone who likes to monopolize the air time like someone like myself sometimes, this is a great opportunity to take a step back and let someone else share the air. So those are the norms for the conversation. And we're going to jump into, now I'm probably going to just turn it right over to Brandon. And Brandon, you have about three minutes to give us an overview of this dilemma, and also talk a little bit about the work. And myself and Edric will time you and we'll probably give you a little heads up when you have about 30 seconds left. Okay, so Brandon, take it away. Thanks so much, Laura. And thanks for having me here. I'm really excited to get some comments on this project. This project span two semesters. And coming out of this project, I wondered if I were to attempt it again, what kind of student work would better enable me to see student understanding of the environmental science content, while not taking away attention and resources from the final product, which was quite ambitious. The tiny house project started with a couple main drives. First, I love to build. And secondly, I have some specific personal environmental science content goals for my students. I want them to understand and evaluate how they interact with the environment, like how they use the environment, and what they put into it, and also learn how to mitigate their impact through changing their lifestyles. As I said, the project span two semesters. I had 42 semester 42 students per semester, first semester I was teamed up with a multimedia teacher. And second semester, I teamed up with an engineering teacher. We have four different exhibitions including a very successful exhibition at the San Diego County Fair, where I'm proud to say that my students earned best to show. This whole project, as I said, needed to start with how my students understand their effect on the environment. So first, I had them focus on the home and how they consume there, how they consume electricity, water, natural gas, and also gasoline moving to and from their house. They went through their house, appliance by appliance, fixture by fixture, making estimates about how much they use it and how much their family members use it. They use what I like to call environmental unit conversions take a single use and extrapolate to the whole family using something over the span of a month. They analyze this data came up with some great pie charts and pinpointed the activities that are the big consumers in their household. In addition to consumption, they looked at their waste. They studied what waste is compostable, recyclable, and landfill bound. This gave them an idea of not only what they use, but also what they produce. From there, we said, alright, let's move from your homes and talk about a simpler and smaller living space. We surveyed existing smaller living spaces like tiny homes and RVs boats and then jumped into design on Google Sketchup of our own tiny house. Each student had their own design. The students voted on the designs and finally came to a final design that we were going to build. At that point is time to decide how we're going to build it with what materials with what systems. So we split the students into 14 groups, three students per group. We studied the carbon footprint of the house, the materials used and how a house functions to help determine which way they want to go. A good example is insulation. There's a lot of choices for insulation. There's traditional choices, the fiberglass, and there's more innovative ones that have appeared in the last decade or so. The students studied the traditional options as well as the green options and then went into a skill building part of the project where they solicited these products. That means that they had to learn how to write professional emails, make professional phone calls, and also find the decision maker that would donate the materials that we needed. They took all this knowledge of traditional materials and systems and green options and created these plaques that you're seeing in front of you right now. There's great example the energy source and gray water where they describe what's typical in a home and what we incorporate into our tiny home. Of course, the most notable piece of student work is the final product. The tiny house was built inside our our school. The whole school got to see it go up. And finally, when it got too big to build here, we took it outside and built it behind the engineering class. Students did all their own work. I didn't get my hands dirty for a semester and a half. It was all directing and using the advice of local experts to get the job done. So students not only have the the student work that included the home consumption study and the trash study, the placards, they also have the final product, which includes their hands on construction. Thank you. Great. So what I'm going to have you restate your question. There you go. And again, if you were to attempt to do this project again, work would be what work would better enable you to see the student understanding of environmental control and not taking attention and resources away from the final product. That's great. So folks, we're going to move into what we call as clarifying questions. Brennan just gave a very quick overview of questions and I wonder if you want to show that slide. As a reminder for all of us in this room, some of us have done this protocol before. A clarifying questions are what we call factual based questions. They are data questions, yes or no questions. I like to think of clarifying questions as very simple questions. If the if the presenter can answer in a very short sentence, hey, very quickly or yes, no, or a very 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, we know that's a good clarifying question, just a gut reaction for that. So I'm going to give our panelists just about one minute to kind of think, always process. So I'm going to time us and I'm going to give us one minute to generate some clarifying questions. And then I will just say let's begin. And one of our panelists would jump in with a clarifying question. So we have one minute to generate questions. Okay, that's just about a minute. And I'm going to ask our panelists to jump to jump in with questions. Go for it. So I was wondering, did you use any supplementary texts or additional resources? The only resources we used were online resources and experts that the students contacted. Cool. Thanks. Hey, Brandon, I was wondering, did students who took the spring semester also take the fall like was it the same students for both semesters? They were different students. So the students that worked on it in spring, did a lot of the structure and the students who worked on it in the fall, the following fall, did a lot more work on the systems and spilling out the interior. Are you planning on doing this project again with future students? Students keep asking me to do it again. So it's a big possibility. I just was wondering the outside help that you said that you had, was that something you set up before or after the beginning of the project? I was fortunate to have a general contractor at my disposal. My father is a retired general contractor. So he helped us out. Other help came through students getting this help based on the contacts that they made. Who or what decided what environmental content you wanted the students to know? What was the measure? How did you decide which content they needed to know for the project? I focused on what would relate to the home. Knowing that we were going to build a house, I thought I focused on how we use energy and how we use water, the waste we produce. And then I left it off there. I didn't have a good idea where to branch out without losing a lot of time on the main project. Based off time, did you feel as if you had enough time to complete this project? It would have been nice to have another semester. Were the activities that, like the processes that were part of the project, were those similar like project benchmarks? The benchmarks throughout the project were definitely steps we had to take to get to the final product. So I definitely did arrange it so that one thing led to another led to another. I didn't think there was a way that we could build a house without figuring out how we use a house. We couldn't build a house without materials, so we had to solicit materials. So there was a progress and those benchmarks did show up in the student board. We do have a question from the audience. If you were to do this again, what changes would you make in the design? I'm not sure if I'd want to make many changes in the design of the house because the students designed it themselves. With the project design, there's always ways to improve it. Little tweaks here and there. Generally, the project design went pretty smoothly. My biggest difficulty is trying to get more student work that shows more student understanding of environmental science concepts. Brandon, can I ask you a quick question? Rumi's asked if you if you could have had another semester, would you and you answered yes, or I think, Alex, you might have asked, I don't remember now. If you felt rushed, where in the project timeline did you feel rushed? That's a good question. We we all felt rushed to get started on building, and then once we were building, we felt rushed to get to a finishing spot where we could exhibit it. I think if we had a whole year with the same students, we could have finished it in two semesters by having to switch students meant that I had to bring the other students up to speed and also go through the home consumption study and the waste study to make the building of the house applicable to the environmental science content. A question from the Google Plus came in is how many hours total do you think this given your week? How many hours did you have per week to work with the teams to do this project? Well, I meet the students about two to two and a half hours a day. Each of the two classes over the course of the semester, the actual building time was probably more like a month and a half of the semester, maybe six to seven weeks. And maybe one last question from the audience. This is from Kenneth Slaseman. Did you want learners to consider why more homes are not currently built with the same environmental concerns in mind? That was definitely a question that students arrived at themselves when they saw the reasonable cost of alternative materials and the no brainer options like greywater cycling. Students arrived there. I have one more clarifying question here is for the individual pieces that you had, those placards, who was the audience for that work? Those placards were on display at all the exhibitions. We wanted the audience to know the innards of the house and why we made certain design choices. Any other clarifying questions from our panelists? All right, seeing none, we're going to move into kind of probing questions. And again, I'm going to give us about a minute to prep for that and probing questions. I remember our questions that get at why this is an issue. And remember that his question is about how does he address individual understanding but at the same time complete this massive project. So as a reminder, probing questions are not advice in disguise. If your question begins with I wonder if you've tried or have you thought of or have you considered, that is a great comment and a wonderful idea. And I'm sure there's a great idea behind that. But save that for the discussion and we'll bring it up in there. Probing questions are much broader. For example, what is your biggest worry about this issue? How are students currently reflecting? Those are just some examples. So again, I'm going to give us about a minute to generate some ideas on probing questions, and we will jump in from that. And again, one minute just to generate a question. Okay, so let's jump in you hear my timer go off. We'll jump in with some probing questions. And again, we'll have about six minutes for that. And I think Emilio is all ready to go with the probing question. Yeah, Brandon, in your dilemma, you talked about attention and resources being taken away from the final product. And I guess I was kind of worrying if you could expand on what resources you envisioned being depleted by student work, and kind of how that ties into your fears with this dilemma, you know, kind of what happened last time that is bringing these fears about. We were in such a rush to get stuff done that I feel like if I had more student assignments that required my attention to them, I wouldn't have been able to give attention to the construction of the house. When we were building the house, I was pulled off and I was leaving the construction team at any given time. So the main resource is obviously time and and my availability to the students. So we have a question from the deal move community from Charlene Dolan in Illinois, and she asks, what types of student understanding do you feel like you are not able to evaluate? It's hard to talk about the types of student understanding. What I can say is that the sometimes I looked at what they did, like the placard, and it's this great explanation of their system and this choices they made. I wonder if that single placard is a good enough description of their understanding that they gained from designing their system, building their system, and also soliciting materials for their system. My question is, what does mastery look like for you? What does it mean for what would that look like for you? If you could envision this, what does mastery look like with respect to student understanding? At High Tech High, when I feel that a student masters something, it's usually on the exhibition night. When I overhear a conversation with a parent or another audience member, and the student just, they know what they're talking about, there's no falsehoods in there. And also they've made the connection from the little scaffolding assignments, like the home consumption part of this or the trash study, and connect that to this final big product that we made. They understand that the whole semester was, it was a holistic semester, where all the parts go together. So if they can show me that they can pull these different pieces together into one clear explanation, that's mastery for my class. So there's another question from the audience about what are the key ways that you assessed student understanding, and how did you feel that worked for you? The major ways I assessed student understanding were through completion assignments, I'd say half of the assignments were completion assignments, either you did it or you didn't. And then the other half were assignments where I really evaluated the level of effort, the level of understanding, and mastery of the subject. The assignments that you're seeing on the slide deck right now are the principal assignments. There are smaller ones in there, like a number of blog posts where they updated what they're doing and shared their solicitation email or the phone call or their call log. We also had group check-ins where we would look at their design journals and they'd show us where they are with that. So the assessment varied between just completion and a more formal evaluation of their understanding. So Brandon, this is Usul. What would you say if you could name the ideal student for this project? What would they look like and what would be some of their characteristics? It's so interesting that you asked that because during this project, I saw some students that I didn't think were going to really buy into it. Love the project. I had a student who sometimes was not engaged in class and with this, they saw the connection to real life and appreciated it. The ideal student would be a student who doesn't mind getting their hands dirty, a student who is willing to go outside their comfort zone and make these phone calls or pick up a tool that they never used and then finally a student who's going to go that extra step to tie together two concepts that have been introduced in different parts of the semester. Brandon, I had a question for you, maybe building off of Usul's question. When did you as a teacher feel most confident or successful with the project and how everything was rolling out and maybe if you want to even speak to the content and when you felt most successful and confident sharing the content with the students? There were a few moments where I felt the project was a success. Those moments usually coincided with exhibition and hearing the students talk about the content. Also, the success of a project has a lot to do with student buy-in and the moment we received the trailer and our first shipment of structural steel, 42 students all kind of said, holy moly, we're really going to build a house. Like this is happening. This isn't all just a lot of hot air. So just that first step of student buy-in was key to the success of the project. Is that when you felt most successful too, like personally as a teacher? You know, yeah, because when I approached this project, it was such a lofty idea. And the only reason I was able to do a project like this is because people like Larry and Rob both say, take risk at this school. So I took a risk and it came true that day that we started getting the materials to at least get a structure built. Cool. All right, another question from the audience. This is from Patricia Simora in San Diego. What causes you to believe that students did not connect deeply with the environmental content if you feel that way? And what kinds of things were missing that you might have hoped to have seen? We did group work in half of the semester and one of my goals in group work is to is to have individual deliverables so that all students are held accountable to the content. But there are some deliverables that were group deliverables and I didn't get to see the student understanding from all students when I talked to them during journal checks. What was the first half of the question? What did you miss? What parts did you not get to study or evaluate as part of the project? Oh, thank you. Yeah, I would have liked to gone deeper into bigger energy and water issues in San Diego. It's great that the students learned about their personal consumption in the home. We also have a bigger issue in Southern California with drought conditions. In previous semesters, we've studied the different kinds of energies and debated natural gas, coal versus solar and wind and all these other alternatives that we're trying to push towards and if they're feasible. So I would like to gotten to bigger picture things, but again, I'm really concerned with students changing the way they interact with the environment. So we're going to move into the discussion and Edric's going to put the question that Brandon had on the board and remember that a discussion is really we're going to be jumping into his question. Brandy, before you kind of leave us really quickly is, is this still your question given the questions that people have asked you, is this still the question you want the group to actually focus on? If I were to attempt this project again, what kind of student work would better able me to see student understanding of the environmental content while not taking resources away from the large final product? I still think that this question does help me get a number of people brainstorming about other deliverables that would show the understanding. I suppose if I were to augment that question, I'd also appreciate any ideas about complementary environmental science content that I could add into this project if I have the time. Great. And my plan is of course and for those people watching at home it's always good to write the question down in front of you on your piece of paper so that you have the question at the forefront of your thinking. If you haven't done so already make sure that you do write it down. We're going to go into the discussion side and I'm just going to pull that slide up. So we're just going to jump in here. What given the questions that he raises and the work that he showed we'd like to start with celebrations. Again, warm feedback. What strengths do we see within this work and in the dilemma? So again, anyone can jump in and of course I would love to hear from our students and then some folks who didn't get to ask questions. So anyone can jump in and of course people who are watching at home feel free to put in the strengths and carry them off as well. And again, anyone can jump in. I really want to appreciate the fact that this is a project that has this awesome amazing final product but that Brandon is really concerned with kind of like how students are connecting to that project and and where their understanding is actually at with that project. I think that's great because again, this final product itself is so impressive that that can sometimes get lost in things and it's great that you're really focusing on it. I think that for me personally, I would love to do that project. It sounds like so much fun and I think that if personally for me, if I were the student, I would definitely connect with the project because I just love hands on projects and things like that. And for this dilemma that you have, something that my teachers do with us for like because we don't have grades, instead we have, we do these weekly reflections on what we've been learning in class. And I think that that might be a really good kind of thing to do for your class so then you could see if people are really understanding your projects. Great. And I'm going to remind our panelists that we're talking about the dilemma, not at Brandon, even though he's not in the room, we're not, we're going to talk about him in the third person just as a reminder as a group here. Other celebrations that we can jump in. I thought it was really. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Remise. Go ahead. So I really enjoy this idea of having like this huge project at the end of it and having these small individual benchmarks leading up to this project. I feel like as a student, like ESA said earlier, I would really enjoy doing this project because at the end, the final project is quite like amazing. And I really enjoyed it. So I wouldn't mind doing this project at all. It was a good project. I just wanted to say that I really appreciated that Brandon's moments of personal success as a teacher were his moments where he saw his students feel successful. And I think that's a really great thing for Brandon to hold on to, even when he may feel that he's not hitting every piece of content or every benchmark or every deadline. I thought that was a really nice thing to share. And like I said, hold on to. I'd like to celebrate just the real world relevance of this project. And I think that's just a tremendous way to get students engaged in things that really matter. I, too, I work. Obviously, I work in this building with students that were building this project. And I think his question is a good one because his question focuses on this massive project that I saw kids building and one day they've got this frame of a house and the next day there's a house there. And so he's balancing this massive construction project that you would see in the real world with making sure that every kid knows the deep complexities of why they're building the house and the environmental issues that go with it, as well as the construction things. And those are very, actually, two different skills to some extent. So he's teaching them the content, but at the same time teaching them the real life hands-on skills that they would need for a world. And so the question is, for me, it's a great question of how do we not only, how do we construct something that is really assessed by the final product, but then also how do we create an assessment or an evaluation of their content? Because sometimes the content, the final product itself is demonstrated through the functioning of the product, but there's actually much deeper content he's getting at that may not be represented in the final project itself. So I just think I appreciate he's trying to balance those two dilemmas because I think many of us who are in this field are trying to do that as well. Content standards versus this really great final product. So I think his question is a great one. Other strengths that you want to recognize or from the audience as well? Yeah. Personally, I think that it's really great that he's focusing on this student's understanding of the content because I think as a student, I know that in big projects it's really hard to grasp your mind around certain concepts when you're really focusing on building something. So I think it's really important that he's really focusing on that students like every student understands like the real concepts behind it because I think that's like the most important part of the project. Even though like the building is like the end product. So ESA started off with some great solutions and recommendations and I think we're about to move on to that. We've got about halfway left. Let's jump in. What recommendations? What gaps? What are things we're not considering? What possible if you were in this situation, what might you do? If this was your project, right? And you're leading this with kids, how might you solve this dilemma? I want to piggyback on something that ESA said because she was talking about the kind of weekly check-ins and I think with a project like this again that has it's an amazing final product. It seems that we sometimes want to put the lens of assessment on the final product when really the process itself is this amazing chance to really look at student learning and understanding. And so I guess for me, it's like how do you capture that process? And I don't know if that's to a blog through using digital portfolios, but you have all you have, you know, however many dozens of students contributing to this final product and then when you go and exhibit it, there's just this one house there. But how do you represent all the individual effort? I guess that's kind of how I'm trying to view this, how I wrap my head around it and ESA, you had some good ideas about that. Yeah. Another thing that I would like to add is that I know just since there are a lot of teachers in here. Also, something that happens a lot with big projects is that naturally I know that the kids start to separate themselves into groups based on their strengths already. And I think that it's very important in a big project for that to not happen so people can learn more about different different skills. So then in the long run, they will be able to do almost anything. So one of the things that struck me when Brandon was talking about student buy-in, and I thought that was a fascinating way that he built this project with buy-in. I wonder what it would look like if the other deliverables were also student-generated notions about buy-in. Like, what is the purpose? What am I going to do with this home now that I have it? The bigger project isn't building it. So I'd like to beg to differ everybody, it's not building it. That is an outcome of the project. The bigger project is what now? And the deliverables could be we need to do what? XYZ, what we're going to do with this? Is it a showcase to inspire other people to build? Is it a showcase to help people understand the difference? I really think that the next steps in this project, or maybe even going backwards to do it again, would be, what do we do with this? How do we move forward? Could we create a company where yes, some are more inclined to do some building? What about the PR people? Who is going to develop a marketing campaign around? How do we utilize this as a tool? I think those big pockets could then report out as come back to each other and say, hey, so I've been working on this campaign and made these community connections, because that's my committee, and here's what we're doing now with this as a community. And then somebody else is like, hey, we're doing this, but we're going to go teach other schools how to do this. And so breaking it down into deliverables that move forward from the end, where they are now and moving forward. That's some of my thinking around this project. I think that a big thing in what Brandon was talking about was separating the project somehow to have more time because he was saying how there wasn't enough time because he had to switch when the semester was over. So I think it's a big thing to see if there's a way to kind of delegate certain sections of the project to kind of what ESA was saying to possibly to not really like the person's strengths in a sense, but just in a sense to try to get more organization in the sense to have the project run more smoothly, I guess. I want to jump on to Azul's point to have this idea of having the kids apply at some things. I think there's lots of opportunities for peer teaching in this project because there's two different semesters. The kids are creating these really great placards that are about their thing. And if they were doing something as Azul described, that's about in their community. Not only are they they could actually present to local students in our school and then actually design something for their own houses, redesign a bathroom, using what they did for their home consumption sheet, of course, and actually design something for their own house and actually teach other people in the school how to do it. I mean, that might be a more application for what he might do the next time is actually having the kids from each semester teach one another about the things that they learned, because I'm sure I don't think there was an opponent there. But then the second piece of going out, I think the other piece to them struck by is within this image, for example, and things that I've seen in other engineering projects. It'd be really great if we saw if each kid had this reflection journal, you know, that started all the way and had all of their design elements and the application and the science behind each step of the project. It'd be really this is just a crazy idea, but sometimes in Google Sketchup, you can do 3D imagery where you can actually break apart a house and actually, you know, click on something and then it explains how it functions. So I could see an interactive picture of this house that actually if you were to click on part of the image, an icon would show up and actually explains how this functions for people in the outside world because we've got this, you know, outside house, but I think some kind of 3D or virtual view of this house that's interactive might be another way of having the kids interact with the final product, not just the physical piece of it. I just wanted to step in. I love all these ideas and I just wonder if Brandon were to take a step back from the project and I guess his identity as a teacher, as an instructor, as a facilitator of learning, like how does he define content and I know that's such a big question to ask, but I think it's a question we need to continue to ask ourselves, especially when we have the kind of freedom we do at a school like high tech high. So I know this doesn't necessarily it's not a solution or anything like that, but I think that asking that question will will really like Azul was saying, lead to filling some of those pockets. But I mean, I know we're beyond the point of questions, but I like to think that it's more important to carry on with questions versus answers. But you know what is content and why so other final thoughts as we move forward. I just want to add on to that. I saw my final thought on that too and I will step back in just a second as well is one of my probing questions was who determines the content. You know, I asked them that because this question of not only thinking about content, but I'm thinking about deeper learning and deeper learning because beyond mastery of content, it looks at collaboration, mindset, critical thinking skills, all this and presenting and all of these things. And so again, the content that you might need for the project and the processor actually slide differently. So other people have thoughts. I think Amelia wanted to jump in and any of final thoughts from our students perhaps you haven't had to say something yet. I'd love to hear from the other folks too. So maybe another comment or two from our panelists here. Well, I was just thinking I really liked what Azul was talking about with kind of what do we do next with this and what what is the purpose of what we've done, right? Having this like kind of purposeful thing that's not just like we created this thing that's efficient. Now what I mean, it could be something like the students making an instruction manual for the next class, but even that doesn't have to be ended, right? That could be the starting point for the next class to begin critiquing what previously was done. And then putting it to the students to start with that question, where do we go from here with this? Other final thoughts from anyone else, particularly from folks, the last students who haven't get to speak yet, maybe? Anyone else? I just want to be mindful. And again, wrapping this up with deeper learning, the idea, I'm really curious. I know he's focused on content, but I'd be really interested in this project of thinking about how does it develop a mindset about perseverance. For me, that's also really inherent in this project, and I can be great to discover that. Any other final comments from our group? Not hearing anyone jump in, I'm going to ask Brandon to come back in to our conversation. He's going to put his wonderful video camera so we can see him again. And he's going to take a couple minutes. I'll put five minutes on the timer. He may not use all of that. But again, this is an opportunity for Brandon to give us his thinking about what he heard. Notice that when you're a presenter, he's not giving us the play-by-play of the conversation we just had. We're not at a football game here. It's really just what new thinking has come up for him. New questions that it raises. Our idea, of course, is to help him solve this dilemma, but we might have raised new questions. So it's, again, any aha moments, not all of them. Do not feel free to, again, remind everyone of what each person said. Don't feel to do that. Just, again, any new thinking that's come up for you as a light of this conversation. And I'll just put the timer on. And Brandon, when you're done, you're done, OK? Great. Wow, thank you so much. There's so many wonderful ideas in there and a lot to get me thinking. Just when I think I did an awesome project, there's enough people saying, hey, what about this? What about this? And give me more ideas. I really appreciate this. First, thanks for all the kind words. The first half of this, I got tons of warm fuzzies. A couple house cleaning things. I believe on the blog that Ryan put together, there is a link to a website where all the students show their design process throughout the project. Although I do like the idea of really incorporating into that more weekly reflections for understanding. That was a great idea. I used to. At the very end, the big question came up of, how do I define content? Or who defines content? And so far, I've approached the content of my class thinking what is the last thing these kids should know before going off to college? And how do I keep their attention as seniors would want to put out the door? And it's always a good idea to kick myself in the butt and remind myself that there's plenty of environmental science content out there that would be beneficial to any high school student, especially high school seniors. That's a big subject we got to get into sometime. I'm sure it's coming up in the MOOC. I love the idea of focusing on the final product, not being the assessment tool, but for the process to be assessment. I tried to do that throughout the project. And I think that there were even more opportunities that I should be looking at to assess the process. And that's a good idea for life, I think. These students are moving on to college where if you're always looking at the finish line, you're going to get frustrated. So maybe there's a way in my classes with these big projects, especially that I can I can get students to enjoy the process and appreciate the process. The biggest piece that I'm going to really be racking my brains on moving forward is the what next question that a school brought up and a number of people talked about. This project is right for getting it into the community, using the house as a demonstration, which is one of the end goals for the house. Trying to find ways for students to bring it back to their own homes, maybe make their own graywater system, maybe do try their own green roof or just change the culture in their house to change the way that they consume energy and water. I'm just looking at my notes here. I got a time to go through. And I think I think it's going to be so cool moving forward now with all projects I do to design a project, look at the final product and then do what a school said and not consider that the end of the project. But what are the next steps even after that final product? And maybe it's maybe it's not a two semester project. Maybe it's a three semester project. Maybe there's more independent projects where the students are reaching out into the into the community and finding these connections that I never really dreamed of. So I love the idea of getting student buy-in based on what could possibly next be next. I try to get student design throughout the whole project and this is a whole new component of student design in a project though with the what next with the final product. I'm going to be up all night tonight and it has nothing to do with my newborn. So thank you. Great. Wonderful. Thanks, Brandon. And so we're going to take now just a couple of minutes as a group to kind of debrief our conversation that we had here today. And thanks. We'll move to the next slide. We're going to just take a couple of minutes to think about how do we do as a group. There is a bunch of us on this panel. Lots of different experiences, lots of different perspectives. And I'd like us to think and kind of share out how do we do with the protocol? Did we follow the protocol? Did we ask good questions? Was there a moment where our conversation, particularly in the discussion, really started to get going? So let's just jump in. How do we feel like the protocol went? Brandon kind of gave us some feedback about the feedback that he got as a presenter. But I also want to jump into any panelists to feel like how they felt with the discussion went. So anyone can jump in at this point. I felt like in the beginning we did get off a little bit off track on the protocol, the timing a little bit. But I felt like after that we got refocused. And I think just having a good facilitator really helped us not lose track of what we're supposed to be talking about. So and the question was really clear and specific, which really made it easier to discuss as well. I agree with Azul. I think it's really important that the facilitation is strong enough to kind of bring us back together. And in comparison to past protocols that I've done, we definitely didn't get nearly as off track as I've seen before. But I thought that it was really helpful that Laura was able to stick with our questions and bring everybody back together. And also remind us that our goal is to consider deeper learning. Along with what we're helping Brandon with, like keeping that as a part of everything, I thought that was really well done. And Rick? I thought it was really helpful that the facilitator went over the protocol at the very beginning. I think that's just a great way to get kind of people focused and especially people who may have not done these tunings before, just gives them kind of an idea of the big picture of what's going on. So I really appreciated that. I appreciated how everyone did follow the protocol and students once again showed that they're with it at our school. I love that we have teachers and students involved in this. One thing as a facilitator being transparent here is Iza when she spoke, she had this great celebration and then she had also this great suggestion. And I was so excited about her suggestion, but I was also mindful that I didn't hear from other voices about their celebration. So I really, I actually directed our conversations back to celebrations because I felt like we only had a little bit of that. So I wanted to continue to push that conversation. So I'm just being very transparent as a facilitator. I specifically posed that question again because I didn't feel we were getting enough of that and we could have gone right to recommendations where we wanted to go. And I didn't think we were ready as a group to get there. So that for me was one of things I was trying to do as a group during that discussion piece. Perhaps from others. That was really useful to hear Laura. I think for me like just thinking about how this protocol works and hearing your reflections as a moderator is really helpful. You know, I can say from watching the whole and doing some of the text standpoint, the real turning point was when Azul made his point. And I think these work best when you're able to kind of turn the conversation in and a few panelists referenced Azul at the end of it. And I think that was a really powerful turning point for me. Absolutely. How about from our students? I know some of you've done this in classes before, but it's maybe not online, which is also a little bit strange. But how did that go for you? Did you find it easier or more challenging? For me, since I did this on Monday, it was really good for me. I enjoy this because it's a great way to kind of get into a very deep discussion. And I think that, personally, it went a lot better this time for me. And I have a lot of fun doing these. Great. As a first-time student, like going into this deal, Moog, I kind of felt nervous. Oh, as a student going into this conversation, I felt a little nervous. I felt like my ideas weren't really, I didn't feel confident enough to go with it. But I feel like if I did it a second time or had a little break into it, I would have felt that my conversation would have been more flowing and I would be able to ask better questions and, in turn, help out the teachers a little bit better. So I feel like for the next, if any other students are doing this for the future, I feel like a one-practice one, like a lot of practices, but like a let-in, and then continue off that one for the other deal, Moog. Because it makes me feel more comfortable. And like, as I said, like she felt more comfortable this time around. I feel like the next time around I'd be more comfortable as well. Yeah, I would agree with Ramees. Thanks, Ramees. You consider yourself invited to another one. So we're going to move us on. Thanks, everyone. I get the idea of a protocol. And for those of you doing this back home, it's always really important to take a moment and think about, you know, if we had lots more time here, if I was with, if you were all my students, I would probably actually have your journal and say what moment, what moment can you celebrate in the protocol that you did well? And what was a moment that you actually think you would want to improve? So going deeper, in the deeper learning protocol, if you will, about your own practice within the protocol is really helpful. So if you're taking this back home, I might even say to have everyone right again, what did you do well in the protocol today and what would you want to improve as a presenter or a facilitator? And again, really thinking through those things because that's how we get better at protocols, not just by doing them but debriefing where we go. So we're just going to close the loop here. And I'm going to encourage our panelists, as well as anyone who's watching online, to answer this question. Given this experience and this conversation today and the protocol, what are you taking away for your own practice and your own thinking? So I'm just going to have everyone jump in. Maybe we'll just go down the line again alphabetically here. And again, we'll just think about the question, what is a takeaway for your own learning, for your own teaching, for your own classroom? Students, perhaps it's a recommendation on teachers that you would like to see in your classrooms but what is a takeaway from this session? And again, folks who are watching at home, we'd love to have you kind of type in your takeaways as well from watching this. So I'm going to just turn it over. And again, we'll just go right down the line here. And you, of course, have an opportunity to say, I pass, or I echo what that person says as well. But feel free to kind of, we're just going to go down the line alphabetically and have everyone share out. OK, so I can start off, I guess. As a student, it helps me kind of focus on not the basic end product, but as the steps that work up to the main product. Like I know at our school, we did like a final presentation on like core exhibitions. And so we kind of focused towards the end of the project, like presenting this to our parents during exhibition. But now I feel as if I should kind of focus more on the individual process it takes to get to the main product instead of the main product and kind of focus on that. That was what I picked up from this presentation. I would agree with Ramees. I also want to add that personally, I feel like I can take away in projects personally when I do them individually. I would kind of kind of do what Ramees did and like specifically going off that certain product that I did last year during junior year. I was very like focused on my specific like role in the project. And so I kind of want to go away from what Ramees is saying kind of do the opposite. Like I want to be focusing on that but also focus on like the end goal and like the larger part of the process of the project. I think for me just continuing to always to push myself to ask like what next? Like what's bigger than my classroom? What's bigger than the projects that we're doing and the content that we're considering and pushing my students to take it beyond just what we are focusing on in the moment and for the final product. And it's a really bad idea to have a bad cough when you are off in the project. So I apologize for that. So I think my takeaway is I wonder if I've captured enough of the failings of a project so that I could reflect because big projects the end is beautiful but all the failings where did I put all the points where we learned the most which is where we usually stumble. And so I've been thinking about that based on because such an amazing project I'm sure he learned so much and sort of the students from the moments that he failed or they stumbled and I wonder if I capture those in my own practice so it's going to make me think about those things as well. Participating in this protocol reminds me first of all that the more heads in the game the better that everyone has something to offer and I should seek advice more often. And also that that question though what next what next. And so I think I'm going to approach all projects thinking well what next what's after that what's after that and trying to get student buy-in and ideas on those what next questions. So I'll go I think the big takeaway for me is just hearing the student panelists here it just really makes me value and it reminds me of how valuable student voice is in these projects not just in executing the project but also in playing the project and sometimes I feel pressure to come up with the perfect essential question when really I can just come to my students with an idea of what I want the product to look like and really help them connect and let them come up with their own questions and how to pursue that project. There, so I muted by Mike. One of the things that I'm going to take away from this process is just the grand understanding that student voice in protocols like this are very important. So just trying to next time I do a project tuning instead of just having colleagues try to invite students into that project tuning as well and do that more often. Great. Brian or Karen? I'll just say especially watching all the chat out in the community first of all I really value the community participation in this and a number of people Kenneth and others had closing comments just to say how blown away they were by this process and I guess the takeaway for me is in DL MOOC I'm really thinking a lot about deeper professional learning and how as professional educators we can experience deeper learning within this MOOC and I think this kind of session is a really good way to do that and I look forward to future sessions and more participation of people. Brian? You know I would just I think powerful facilitation makes for productive conversations and I just have to be floored at how technology enables us to kind of connect from all over San Diego and to share that with the outside community I think that's really an eye-opening experience for me and I'm really you know when you have a good conversation you just feel really excited afterwards and I feel really excited so that's great. For me I think that what I'll take away from this is I think that this will definitely help me with my presentation of learning at the end of the year and I think it's just a great experience to have and I really enjoyed this. Great. Thanks Eza and I'm just going to turn over I'll jump in kind of close this up and then turn over to Karen or Ryan about the course but I'm always struck by when we do these I think Karen really you know kind of touched on this is that we're trying to emulate and do deeper learning practices and I think the question that Brandon asks is a question that we're all asking this question of production of quality projects but the same time balancing content standards this whole conversation we never talked about the Common Core although we could have substituted his content standards for Common Core for any class, for any subject this question of balancing the content standards we have to meet versus the production of quality for a massive project like this and so what I like about these projects is that we're going deep into one project but there's perspectives that we can all bring to this per class whether it's great ideas like Iza recommended about reflections journaling the ideas that Azul brought about who owns the content within this and again how we get at that so I just think one of the values about doing these conversations is that we all have something to gain from this about how we're balancing our own curriculum and then of course bringing in all these multiple voices within this project and the other thing I'm going to put a shout out I love thanks to Ryan for saying great facilitation but I will also say as Karen said that for those of you watching this protocol is online it's open source it's public for those of the communities that are doing some online Google Hangouts take it do it there's no way you can't really get better at facilitation unless you jump up and try it and the whole point of this course is to try to do some deeper learning so know that you will the first time you facilitate it won't go so well and trust that it might go great but it might not but the only way you'll know is if you do it and so we encourage you to kind of take this protocol with your staff whether it's online with kids in person and just give it a shot and see what happens because the debrief is where it really gets better of what we did well together and where do we go next so I just want to thank everyone for participating I want to thank Brandon for jumping up and sharing his work he just as eagerly told us that if anyone wants to work with him or talk to him about the house project he will give his cell phone out to the world for people who call him just kidding if anybody has an email address but again feel free to connect with him we'll make sure that information is shared with everyone on the Google Plus and of course on our website for the people who want to connect and get information on his project happy to share it so thank you all so much for giving your time this evening and Karen, Ryan, I will turn it back over to you thanks Laura great thank you Laura and Brandon and everybody on our panel and everyone in the community this was a really good conversation and I'm just thinking about a tweet that came from Charlene she said sort of midway in this I think in the warm feedback she said I think it's great that Brandon is reflecting on the project and actively seeking ways to make the experience deeper and richer and I think that's sort of that's a great reflection and ties into that idea that we really want to use this this whole MOOC as an opportunity for all of us to look deeper at our practice and this was a great way to do it we'd like to invite any of you in the audience in the DL MOOC community to participate in future lens into the classroom sessions if you or one of your students might want to join us either on the panel or if you are a teacher who has a dilemma that you might want to explore with a group of us we would love for that so just drop us a note if you're interested in that and also as Laura said the protocol is posted on DL MOOC.net on the blog along with the slides from today we would love to hear it if you take this protocol and try it for yourself and if there's anything we can do to support that let us know to wrap up next week on DL MOOC we're going to be looking at students in the adult world including students doing internships and job shadowing and as usual we will have our initial panel discussion to sort of kick that off on Monday at 4 p.m. Los Angeles time and we hope you will be able to join us this session we just completed as well as all of our panels and all of our lens sessions will be archived on the website as well keep those posts and comments coming with hashtag DL MOOC and we will see you soon online thanks everyone goodbye.