 Welcome everyone, it is February 6th and we are here as a part of week 3 of DL MOOC doing Lens in the Classroom session. I'm Karen Fastenpauer, I'm part of the DL MOOC team. I want to welcome everyone, those who are watching live as well as those who are watching the archive. And I'd like to give a special shout out to the students in Alec Patton's class. You may have seen on the G Plus community Alec students are taking part in DL MOOC and posting and have been watching some of our live sessions and we're so happy to have them with us and please engage with them on the G Plus community as you see them. Before we get started, I want to just mention that there is another learning opportunity coming up which is the Deeper Learning Conference. This is going to be happening March 26th to the 28th in San Diego at High Tech High and you can find out more about this premier international event for educators who are interested in deeper learning by visiting deeper-learning.org and we will post that link as well. If you are watching this stream on the YouTube page you'll see an option where you can go to G Plus and if you log in on G Plus you can use the Q&A function to add questions. We will have many opportunities for you to have questions and input as we go through the protocol so that's one place you can do it. You can also do that on Twitter with the hashtag DL MOOC and I will be conveying questions back and forth. As with all of our live sessions, we'll be archiving this at DL MOOC.net and there's also a blog post at that website with more information about internships and the work that our teacher today, Randy Scheer, is doing. With that, I am going to turn it over to Ryan Gallagher to get us started on our protocol. Thank you, Karen. Welcome everybody to our second in the series of Lens into the Classroom Discussions. This year, this day, we're going to be focusing a little bit on student internships before we begin and before we get a chance to review the protocol. I just want everybody to get a chance to introduce themselves. I think we'll start with Emilio and we'll just go down the line and you can just tell us a little bit about where you are and where you teach and we have some students, three or four of them that are joining in one room so we'll let them get a chance to introduce themselves as well. Hi, I'm Emilio Torres. I teach 8th grade math science at High Tech Middle North County which is in San Marcos, California, just north of San Diego. I'm also one of the T.H. for this MOOC. Thanks, Emilio. Students, why don't you chime in and let us know where you guys are joining us from and what your names are. You're muted though. You're all muted. Okay. Can you guys hear us? Yep. Go ahead. So I'm Jonathan Hayes and I am a 11th grade student at High Tech High Media Arts. Where are you interned too? Oh, I interned at the Pharmacology Department at UCSD in the Joan Heller Brown Lab doing circulation research and cancer research. Alright, so I'm Evan Morris, also a 11th grader at High Tech High. I interned at the Natural History Museum in San Diego. I worked in the paleontology prep lab. My name is Ty Jefferson. I am also a 11th grade student at High Tech High Media Arts. I interned downtown at a graphic design studio called Lose the Box Design. I work with content management, website development and design a few graphics for her company. I'm Tiana Tate. I'm also a 11th grader at High Tech High Media Arts and I actually interned in London and I worked with different schools on project-based learning. Great. Thank you, students. And then we'll go to Randy, who's going to be giving our presentation and bringing our dilemma today. Hi, my name is Randy Shear and I'm an 11th grade humanities teacher at High Tech High Media Arts and I'm very interested in internship and I'm very proud of my four students who are joining us today. Thanks, Randy. Rob? Hi, I'm Rob Riven. I'm the president of the High Tech High Glass School of Ed with a long time interest in internships as an internship program designer and teacher. Okay, Tina? Hi, I'm Tina Chavez and I teach 12th grade government and also this year we started an internship program for seniors so two days a week seniors also go out to internships and that's through my class as well. Alright, great. Well, thank you all for joining us. I really appreciate it. So we'll go back to the dilemma protocol. This protocol will look very similar to the one for those of you who joined us last week. Again, it can be modified when you're dealing with dilemmas or concerns or issues like Randy had brought with us today or it can be used for looking at student work like we did last week. Again, Randy will have five minutes and in that time he'll be able to present a little bit of the student work and his thinking around student internships. We'll give a minute for you guys in the audience and everybody on the panel to give a little bit of thinking time to think about their clarifying questions. We'll again ask, we'll have six minutes of clarifying questions followed by another minute of think time. Six minutes of probing questions and we'll keep a slide up there for those of you who are still, as I saw in the G-plus community, trying to figure out the difference between probing and clarifying questions. We'll have a ten minute group conversation in which Randy will kind of mute his camera and again that so that we can talk to each other as a group. Then Randy will come in and share his thoughts with a five minute debrief and at the end we'll do a two minute closing the loop activity. So, we can go to the next slide. I think it's important that we do review our norms and these are the same norms that we use if we're having a face-to-face conversation at High Tech High or we're doing one of these online conversations. That's where we're hard on content and soft on people. I mean, I think that it is important that we push Randy as we did last week with the Tiny Houses Project and really trying to push ourselves and push our thinking on work that were kind, specific, and helpful. That's a mantra that you'll hear at high tech at most of the high tech schools where we're trying to be really thoughtful about the feedback that we're giving and trying to give Randy tangible things that he can bring back and shape his practice. I know we step up and step back. As we do, lots of weeks have a very full panel, especially with our four students in what's sharing one camera. So, we'll just be mindful of monitoring our time as we go forward. Okay? And, Edric. So, I will pass it over to Randy and his dilemma. I'll tell us a little bit about his dilemma and before we begin, I'll just review his question and we'll come back after his question session where we get a chance to have our discussion and we'll revisit this question and see if it's still what Randy is thinking about. And his question is, how does school best help students derive and articulate meaning through the process of an internship experience? So, Randy, I'm putting you on the clock. You have five minutes. Okay. Thank you, everybody, so much for having me and thank you for spending an hour going through this with me. I really am looking forward to improving what's going on in my classroom right now and I have four students with us who hopefully will benefit from this. So, I have kind of a long time interest in internships as well. I've been working on the High Tech High Media Arts Internship Program or with it really intensively since my experience in the High Tech High Graduate School. And internships really strike me as a way that we can bring deeper learning to life, bring our school's design principles to life and bring what are really important through lines that run through all of a student's experience in school to life also. When I say a through line, I mean something like authentic work which should be showing up ideally everywhere and voice and choice in the classroom. I think internships are a great place where that stuff can really happen. But as I wrote in the slide, I really think we're just at the beginning. I'm going to share a little bit with you about the way internships work and I'm hoping that you'll help me uncover ways that I can make this the most meaningful experience possible for the students. As it is, our students get their first real taste of the idea of internships I think as 10th graders when they travel for a day around the county visiting usually four different internship sites to watch 11th graders do internship presentations of learning. And it's a one-day snapshot that a 10th grader gets into what internship might be like a year later. We seek our internships in the fall semester of junior year and it really does take a semester. Kind of an often repeated cliche among the teachers is it's hard enough to get one job and now we're trying to get 100. We really right now are doing this in everything but the kitchen sink method. We retain probably half or more of our internship placements year to year and those become warm contacts that can host new interns and the remainder come through new contacts that teachers bring, parents and families bring or students actually seek on their own and one of the students who's here today, he actually got his internship through cold calling and googling just trying to find a place that would host him. Now while students are out at internship I think that it's important I think that internship is a good way to set off an educational experience in that the students are experiencing something and they're discovering things and it's really theirs and the way I try to help is by having them document it clearly through photography, through blogging which in the old days would have been journaling and through having a structured recorded conversation with their mentor so I know that at least once they do sit down and talk to their mentor in depth. They bring back these artifacts to school and the school's role I think is to help process these things with the student so that the student can really see them from multiple perspectives and really bring something out of it that they want to share with the world. The tangible products that we make are photo essays that are modeled after what you might see in like National Geographic where there's specific photos working with specific captions to tell a story. The next thing they do is transform the recorded audio of their mentor interview into a journalistic print style interview like what you might see in Rolling Stone or something like that with a headline, sub-headline, introductory article and printed interview and in my class we work all of this towards a book called Ampersand and for everyone out there I would love it if you would check out ampersand.hightechhigh.org which has years of internship stuff on it and there's even a how to link on ampersand.hightechhigh.org which gives you an overview of the internship process for anyone, parent, mentor or another teacher who's hoping to start or work with the internship program. Now, I see an incredible variety of experience in these work products and I also see an incredible variety of engagement and quality. Sometimes people, I worry that sometimes people when I say people I mean my students are working at their peak, not at their peak it's kind of coming and going and I can see that we're getting sometimes surface level meaning and sometimes we're really going deep and I feel like casting the broad net has already happened and now what I want is to go for real depth with the internship experience and I think that's about five minutes. Nice job Randy. So in 30 seconds or less can you just kind of tell us your rephrase your question and Edric maybe we can put that slide up real quickly. Being kind of just rephrase your question or what you're kind of curious about after about the internship experience. I'm really curious about how a school can work together so that students go out and have meaningful internships and when they come back to school how we can all work together to help students derive meaning and share meaning. Whatever they find meaningful from their internship experience. Great. Thank you Randy. Alright so we're going to do one minute of just kind of think time and we're going to start we're going to move on to clarifying questions and just to give an idea of what clarifying questions are these should be really short yes no questions an example of it even though Randy did an excellent job of kind of over viewing what internships are the question could be how long do they spend on internships. If he has to spend a considerable amount of time thinking the question it's really probably a probing question so I'll put one minute on the clock and you and the audience can start posting your questions in the Q&A we'll get to those and my panelists here can start thinking about their questions as well. So one minute. When do your students go out what time during the year do your students go on internship and how long is their internship. They go out for the immersion part of internship for the month of January they do a one half a day site visit in December but they're gone for almost the entire month of January and that's the time frame. Randy you have a class you have an internship seminar how many other teachers have internship seminars. Do you mean like when students come back for half a day or are reporting to like a cohort teacher. Well I'm thinking about ampersand the product that you do with kids are there other teachers who also do that kind of reflection and so forth with kids. Outside of my school I don't know in my school I tend to go. You're the one. Yeah yeah it's a humanities project in my class. When do interns meet their mentors for the first time like how soon before their internship starts. Almost all have some contact over email or over the phone almost all have some type of interview and everybody does a site visit in December for maybe an hour maybe half an hour maybe a half a day. Sorry to go back to Rob's question also there in different years we've had varying levels of activity around internship in advisory also but that's been very different every year. What does that look like? Advisors take their 10th grade advisees to the internship presentations of learning on the final day of internship that's consistent. Some advisors help with internship placements. Some seem to want to make internship a real connection to college. But advisory seems to manifest itself differently in every advisor's room so it sort of comes to life differently. There isn't anything set other than the presentations of learning. Are there ever times when students are not placed and ready to go out by January? Yes. What happens with those students? Triage. We have a group of teachers that falls on us. We are sitting with them trying to go through any available contacts that haven't been placed or haven't had interns placed. We're on the phone with them. We're writing emails with them. We're contacting sometimes people in the high tech high community to place them maybe at an elementary school or with someone that we know is open to it. Completing an internship is a graduation requirement, right? Yes. Randy, how many iterations of ampersand have you had? This will be the sixth. Do students can maintain contact with the mentors after their internship is completed? I think you said it was junior year. Are senior years still formal contact through the internship program? Not required. My students have to send their photo essay and mentor interview back to their mentor among some other people. But that's entirely up to whatever the relationship is that develops between those people. Do you train the mentors? We try. We do direct them to all of our resources online. We host a mentor luncheon with varying attendance every year. We try to give them some time to talk to students and other mentors when they're on campus the day of the mentor luncheon. I'm just going to ask Tina real quick if students, I know there are four of you in the room and you do these internships, but do you have any questions for Randy before we jump in with Tina's questions? Hearing nothing, I will move back to Tina. Students, do you want to think about something? I'll come back to you. I think their mic was muted. You mentioned ampersand and maybe I missed it, but what specifically goes into ampersand? Actually, ampersand is going through a redesign right now and that's a really good question. In the past, every student has created a prompt or question that they want to answer for their contribution to ampersand. In the past, it's been pretty tech-heavy. The original idea, a student said that they wanted to have a yearbook of the internships. I think it was mostly because they're not with each other. They don't see each other every day for a month. This year, and originally, it became a very tech-heavy, really a written type of experience for the students, partially because I was trying to hit on some humanities content in terms of writing, partially because of the economic realities of printing books. Now that color printing is so much more affordable, I'm totally back to the beginning of maybe we could make this a more visual experience. I don't know. It's in a redesign phase right now. Randy, what percentage of your kids would you say get their own internships? Get their own, like, from start to finish? Yeah. Not many. Maybe 10 out of the 50 students that I have. Okay. That's if you like it purely on their own. The vast majority are getting some help from some context that we have somehow. Okay. So we have about 30 seconds left, students. I'll give you another opportunity. Do you have any questions for Randy, for your teacher? Not really. I think we're good. Okay, good. All right. So we're going to move on to probing questions and we'll keep the slide up. And so we will take it one minute now, and this is where we just kind of want to brainstorm as a group. And so panelists, I'll ask you to take one minute of just kind of some probing, to question some probing, questions for probing. Again, this is where we're trying to put Randy and his thinking, that you want to kind of resist the idea to jump in with a bunch of ideas that you have to kind of solve Randy and his thinking. This is just about him and us really trying to get at the root of what his question is and what his thinking is surrounding internships. So we'll take one minute right now. And students, I'm definitely coming to you for the first question. So I'm telling you now in one minute, you guys have our first probing question. And then we'll open it up to the rest of them after our minute. Okay. So we'll take one minute and we can kind of brainstorm our questions and then for six minutes of probing questions. All right. So at this time we'll open it up to questions and I would encourage the panelists to if you have a question specifically for one of our students about the internship experience or probing question for them, feel free to ask them a question as well. All right. So students, I'll let you guys ask a question and I think Tina has a question after that that we can address to the students or to Randy. Okay. We have six minutes. All right. So my first question is in future internships, do you plan on encouraging students to be able to find their own? So that it can probably help identify in the future to broaden their mentor, the other mentor special I guess. Absolutely. Students are definitely encouraged to find their own. I think the hard part is supporting that and making it happen because it's a difficult process. So I have a question from our audience. Can you give us some examples of where you've seen deep meaning or examples of the type of deeper meaning that you're hoping students would derive and that's from Eduardo. Yeah. One of the first examples that comes to mind is actually from a student whose internship had a massive amount of layoffs and it happened midway through her internship experience and obviously it was not her fault that her mentor was laid off and the way the student responded in terms of, she wrote about what it meant to be underemployed because we stepped in as teachers and placed her in a different internship that unfortunately was really oriented towards her fulfilling graduation requirements and not so much around her passions or her skills and the way that the writing that she provided about what it meant to be unemployed or underemployed and what I saw in terms of the way she changed and how she viewed everything was amazing. I think another internship really, another experience that stood out to me was a student who was sent on a photography assignment and during it was writing about, she was writing in a journal, this was before the days of blogs, about, she was writing about the people that she was photographing because they weren't much older than her and she was sort of placing herself in their shoes and kind of imagining what her life might be like outside of high school. Those are two that just jump immediately to mind. Thank you. A quick follow-up question from the audience. What led you to this dilemma in the first place? Was it that you saw a varying degree of quality in culminating projects or was it anecdotal observations about what meaning students were making and that's from Megan Cassidy? It's both. And it's also an inability to come up with a prompt, I guess, that drives ampersands even though I know on a non-verbal level what's going on in that project, that it's really about helping students articulate what the internship experience is to them and the role it plays in their education or how they see their lives beyond school. And it's also a gut feeling that the more the school is tied to real work experiences in natural environments and the more the students are not sitting in a 25-person classroom, which I realize is a lot better than a 40-person room, but the more they're placed in the real world doing real work for a reason, I just have a gut feeling that that is extremely powerful or it could be that it has all this potential. Randy, we've talked a lot about the individual benefits of internships in terms of what kids learn and so on and those are documented in ampersand beautifully. I wonder if you could reflect on any collective understandings that you're after or that you have seen emerge out of the internship experience for groups of kids, kind of a collective. You know, that's a hard question to answer. I don't know. One thing I feel like is that it almost becomes meaningful around the time they're applying to college or maybe even after that, like midway through senior year, but there's like this year gap. One thing that I thought about today actually was that I've never really tried to just collect simpler answers to the question of what's meaningful about internship or what does your internship experience mean to you and then I've never tried to collect that and show it back to the students in like a group way. Not that I never have, but I haven't since grad school when I first started really trying to understand what's happening at internship. I have two questions, but I'm going to start with this one. Do you find with your products, because I wrote down that you have three main products, do you find that some internships fit better with those products or is the issue that students, like you said, weren't putting in as much effort or something? I'm just curious. Are there some internships that produce better products? Okay, so number one, I don't know if they're putting in effort or I don't know if the perceivable effort is the reason why there's a variance in quality free product. The products were originally thought of as sort of like a bit of a sequence that would lead you towards going deeper and deeper into figuring out what your internship really was. Yes, definitely some internships lend themselves better to photo essays for sure. The more time you spend in front of a computer at internship, the less exciting your photo essay is. That's pretty much a rule. I think that different mentors definitely have a better understanding of what they could offer in a mentor interview. There are a lot of really short answers to questions from mentors who don't seem to under, I feel like they could do a better job of bringing that student across that bridge. I think that different students, the different products resonate with ones differently. One thing that I think is crazy that's going on right now is this year I didn't require students to take a self-portrait at internship and finding out as I go through the photos they brought back that not a lot of kids took pictures of themselves at internship which just struck me as crazy. I just assumed that they would and so I didn't require it. That one kind of blew my mind. I just thought it would happen. I haven't really figured out why did maybe a third of the class really take pictures of themselves and why did roughly two-thirds of my students do the documenting and not, maybe they felt uncomfortable asking their mentors to take pictures of them or asking co-workers. I know that some of them are really learning about the balance between how do they be themselves at work and maybe they just weren't able to do that or I don't know. I'm going to jump in. I just have a quick question for the students. I'm wondering if you guys could just describe a little bit about your learning on the intern, your learning and your internship and what that felt like coming back. Did you feel like these products that you produced really reflected your learning experience at your internship or did you feel like that was just something you had to do after you got back? I think the students are muted right now. I felt like my internship, I saw internship as an opportunity for me to actually spend school learning about things I want to do in the future. That's why I contacted one of the labs at ECSD because I wanted to actually gain experience in a lab. I didn't look at internship more as a requirement for graduation even though it is, but I saw it as more of a month to learn whatever you want. I took advantage of that in my project I think. I saw mine as an opportunity. I was one of the kids when he was talking about that. I didn't really see any on the list that kind of fit me, so I went out and found my own. I saw mine as an opportunity to kind of get knowledge on what I want to do in the future because I wasn't really sure because I like to do so many things. So I said mine is low. This is a possibility for me. And then I really like the work I did and I really like my mentor. So I think my project reflects that I could possibly do that in the future. My internship actually made me change my mindset of what I wanted to be in the future. I've always had what I wanted. I always knew since middle school and after doing an internship, I'm actually thinking about something else I could do in the future. I think the projects that we do after helps us reflect on what we did in that month because I feel like if I don't talk about it, I'm not going to remember all the small details and when we do projects like the photo essay and ampersand, I feel like I'm putting all the small details out on paper so I can definitely remember it. Great. I've given us a couple more minutes but I know there's like two or three questions that are still out there. So I know Tina, Rob, and then we'll end with Emilio and then we'll move on to the discussion phase. Okay. This is kind of quick. So I know that we do a lot of... Did everyone hear me? I didn't. You want to say it again, Tina? Oh, yeah. We do a lot of projects, 9th through 12th grade and we have students out in the field doing field work like with these projects. How is internship different than field work, in your opinion, Randy? That's a good question. I've done projects that revolve around field work and I think that when I've done projects around field work, students don't have a choice really about the field work. It's more like they're doing something in service of a specific project. And in this case, internships are, I would hope, are highly personalized or they can be in a way that it's really... I mean, we're not trying to fulfill one singular vision beyond connecting the students with life outside of the school. I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah, that totally answers it. Randy, your question was about how the school can support... Yes, internships. And you mentioned from some of the things you said, it felt like you were maybe a little isolated in the support that you provide. I wonder to what degree in your view your colleagues value internships. What is their understanding of what internships are about and are they part of the problem that you're posing? I don't know. Some people, it fits very naturally into their advisory program or into their personal interests or into their class that they teach. I think people who don't teach humanities often... If you're a math teacher, there's a lot of pressure to address math. I think it seems that way. And so maybe it's harder to just make that connection happen naturally whereas for me it's very easy. I mean, 11th grade English and History is a real natural fit. I think that also because each student has their own different internship, at least for me, when I was first starting at High Tech High, it was hard for me to see the unifying vision of internship. And instead it really seemed like a million different experiences. It took me a couple years to get the collective vision. I don't know. I hate to say I don't know but I don't. Can I just probe on that one further? What would you hope to have happen by way of collegial involvement and collegial support? I would like to see a way to get 11th graders out of the classroom at a school-wide level before internship. So that means redesigning maybe part of the schedule or something like that but getting them to internships to test them out or see them. I don't know how that could possibly happen. I don't know how it could happen. But maybe in September or October there's something like that. I would definitely like to see a tighter connection between 10th and 11th or really 9th, 10th and 11th and 12th graders around internship and that might mean redesigning some portion of the schedule or finding time for that to happen. So that 12th graders who had like Ty for example who had a graphic design internship that he found on his own that next year in the first semester he can connect directly with an 11th grader an upcoming 11th grader who's in that same situation or maybe it's not around graphic design but it's more around here are the people who are really going out on their own and here's a student who did it successfully. It took me a long time to figure out how to help around internship in advisory and I'm still not sure if I do a very good job of it. I think advisors have a lot on their plate with all four grade levels and with trying to help their seniors get to college and get their college applications in. So I think finding set aside meeting time maybe in the mornings before school so that teachers can collaborate on really the nuts and bolts of advisory. I think advisors are a good place for internship because it's non-academic and it's really oriented towards the common intellectual mission that we have here and it's really oriented towards personalization. So Randy, I'm going to jump in before you solve the problem for us because you're circling around some of those solutions. But I do want to just point out real quickly that that's a great example of a probing question. It takes Randy a second to kind of really think about it. I think it's a great chance for that. I'm going to go into the group conversation so I'm going to ask Randy to mute his camera so that he's not part of this. He'll still be listening and taking notes and he'll give us a 5 minute debrief at the end. And just to go over his question again his question is how does the school and I think Randy was talking a little bit about this at the end but how can the school with kind of structures and ideas best help students derive and articulate meaning through the process of the internship experience. And so as long as Randy gives us a thumbs up and gives us feedback on, perfect. So we'll move on to our discussion and I'll open it up to the panel and remember with this we like to start with kind of our warm feedback. So what do we like about some of the things that Randy's doing and about halfway through I'll try to push us so we can kind of push our thinking and push Randy's thinking and come up with some real solutions about what he can do to address this question. So I'll open it up to the floor that's going to go to any of the students or any of the panelists that would like to talk a little bit about Randy and his internship question. I... Wait, can you hear me? Yep, you're good Tina, go ahead. Rob talking, but okay. I think that it's great because I feel like you know, we could just put students and internships and kind of leave it at that and say great, like I'm sure they got something out of that but I really like that he's been doing this for a while and he's still looking for what is it that I can do to make this the most meaningful thing I can. Because I think that that's hard and a lot of our students come back also, it's so fast. I think that, you know, three to four weeks is like a really fast time to come back and then be able to really process everything that happened. I really like... Oh go ahead Rob. I really like Randy's answer about ampersand about what it's going to look like and he said I don't know because it's in redesign which speaks to me of students co-designing it. That he's co-designing with students. So I like that that piece of it and I think that that notion might provide an avenue towards solutions to his problem also kind of inviting students into that design problem. I just love the fact that he's phrased it in this how can school support this learning experience. So it's not about how all these kinds of things that we go out and do for our kids are important, it's really like what can we do as a school that's going to help support and really derive this meaning from this really powerful learning experience and I think the students can probably speak to this really powerful learning experience and I heard that in the students too of them articulating like just putting it into words and to being able to express it in something that's significant to them can really help them articulate something. I'd like to hear some of the ideas that students might have about how the school could better support internships. Our students are mic'd. You're muted guys. I think the school supports us really well actually. My only suggestion would be to have us start applying to internships the first week we get back to school because that was the only problem I had with mine it took me forever to line up my internship perfectly to the point where I was really stressing out but in the end I got it which worked out but I think that would be the only way in my eyes. I think something that they could do is either have a little bit more of a grace period before we go to internship and after our winter break because we only have a day to really check back in and just make sure everything's really okay and stuff like that. I think some people could benefit from having more days because some people might not be able to make it or anything like that. I agree with both Evan and Jonathan for students who this year a lot of them didn't have their internship at this set time and date so I feel like they didn't get a chance to choose what they wanted to. They just chose one that was available personally we want to be stuck in an internship where I feel like I'm not having fun or like I'm learning something it's not something that I wanted to do so if we're having more time to pick our internship that would be a good solution I'm adding. I'd like to actually add another thing also I would like them to push people finding or students finding their own internship opportunity and just making the first contact and stuff like that and it wasn't on the list or anything like that but they still had work at Takai before as an institute so they kind of knew what it was all about but I still had to go out on my own power and find that and I think it would help people find things that they're interested in if they push to have students really find their own I mean the list is definitely good for people who just don't know what they want to do so I'd like to see that students kind of like go more on their interests than completing a requirement for graduation I wonder if advisors could play a role on that Yeah Yeah for sure I think advisory should be more focused on internship because I know in my advisory there's not anything specifically set for an internship the only time we talk about it before and after we go visit in 10th grade before and after we visit the R11th grade advisor it's like IPOLs so I think that could definitely be involved more I guess I had a question too and this kind of came up in our panel discussion on Monday which is not about the work and I think Randy touched on this a little bit which is the idea of in 10th grade supporting the 11th grade internship experience which is really trying to involve that into 12th grade so maybe it's not focusing on those work products which I think are really powerful for Randy but thinking about evaluating system-wide how are we building towards these internships how are we testing them in 9th grade, 10th grade or even in middle school as a middle school teacher I've seen some of the questions about how can we have these for kids these experiences so it's really rich and full by the time they're 11th and 12th graders Yeah I feel like what happened we talked to a lot of seniors last year and did exit interviews with them and asked them for the first time what was your most significant memory of high tech high an overwhelming majority of them talked about their internship experience so when we heard that we thought why do we stop this why do we do this for this small finite amount of time and isolate it as like one month and that's it that was kind of my thought in extending it to 12th grade but I also I struggled with this idea of it being such a blocked time like 3 or 4 weeks is tough to do I think reflection because you're in it like you're in it and then you have a little bit of time after so that's why like spreading it out you know 2 days a week but for 11 weeks if you think about it the same amount of like other days are missed from school it's just that it's spread out over a long amount of time so then you're able to like debrief on a they go out Tuesday Thursday and you're able to debrief on a Wednesday and talk about what you want to talk about and you know do dilemma protocols and it's just it's like you're kind of working through it together as a 12th grade team and I was thinking like how do you like because Randy was talking about how do you make that so like what are the stages you know that you need because I feel like 11th grade is beginner internship 12th grade is like intermediate and then like it's like stages of learning how to work I think in real experiences you know listening to the students talk and questioning this role of advisory and the desire for students to have voice and to start earlier and to make this more of a year long process and a school wide process I just start thinking bigger about schools and how school can kind of think of itself as a think tank for community problems or issues that the students can identify in the fall and then what the students can actually do is then research resources and organizations that can help address those issues or concerns and the students then reach out to those organizations and try to involve and that in itself could be its own form in term where the student is the liaison trying to get all the coordinate all these organizations to work together towards one of these issues I don't know if it could be like advisories working on their own issues or however it could structure it but it just seems to I like what Tina said about this kind of three to four week block feeling a little constrained and why not just think even bigger and just have the kids working within the community that way and that way they really are identifying the organizations and resources that they need to solve the problem. Go ahead. Well I was going to say with projects which are a little bit of a purpose right so I think that internships for the sake of internships are good but internships and what I hear Emilio saying too is that giving that audience for that product giving that thing of why are we doing this and I think that I've seen that a lot of internships and even our students here talking about some of the things that they've designed whether it's a website where they feel like they've been of value added to their company where they feel like they've contributed to their company or taken something that reflects that experience a little bit more can help in that and I think a school because getting back to Randy's question is what can the school do to support that is maybe contacting and finding these dilemmas that companies are having and how kids can help support that as well. Just going back to what you said earlier Ryan I think it's probably an issue of consciousness as a thought experiment if we think of internships as preparation for the world beyond school and then we think of 9th and 10th grade as preparation for the internship it can give us a different kind of look at what we're doing in 9th and 10th grade and a lot of our teachers are thinking about real problems out in the world where can we find resources where our organization is working on how can we connect but if those same 9th and 10th graders who are doing that kind of connection could also be aware yeah this could be an internship place also this can lead us to internships I think it could make a huge difference I think consciousness is part on the part of the adults is part of the issue. So we have a comment from Megan in the audience who says thinking back to questions about ideal collegial relationships would there be room to connect with the 12th grade teachers to discuss follow-up reflection about the 11th grade experiences. That's great. Well thank you. So is there any last minute thoughts because I'm going to invite Randy back in the next 30 seconds anybody that's got anything burning alright well Randy you're welcome back from the abyss he's not even in the room Randy are you back with us there we are I was I couldn't find the buttons that's okay okay and Randy I think your camera still muted I don't know if you have it still we can still hear you so you can reflect back I should be here my camera said I can see myself in the bottom there okay good we'll go ahead so you have 5 minutes Randy okay okay I think it's hard for me to not go directly to the point about the spread the concept of spreading internship versus having an immersive internship but before I do that first of all thank you to everybody for discussing this and allowing me to listen and think about it so a long time ago when I was in the GS the high tech high graduate school of education that was actually when we underwent the change from the elongated internship where students left school every Tuesday and Thursday for an afternoon until about 4.30 I think for the course of a semester and we turned it into this immersion one of the things that I do think that has been lost is the opportunity to workshop problems that happen at internship and instead internship has become focused has become set up so that students go out and experience and then they come back and then we process which happens to varying degrees all over the school based on what people are doing or not doing so I there are there are typical issues that show up at internship that are not really skilled based and I really think that the internships are almost interchangeable to some degree that what's really I think that what's really happening is that students are maturing they're learning they're realizing what they've learned about communication and collaboration and project management and all of that and they're putting it to practice in the adult world and I think that's what's really important about internship that's a difference that I see in the students when they come back to engage with those skills not necessarily that they know more about biology or humanities or whatever and I think a little of that processing has been lost in the current internship model I do really like what one of the students have to say about moving internship that we have this one day where they come back in January and then they're gone for a month and we see them for site visits and a few other little things but really they're gone with the possibility of moving it back a week or maybe back a month so we have more time to set them up and that that leads me to think more about how the school really could be this think tank I think that this leads me to something else I mean I've phrased the question around the school but I don't in a lot of ways I don't want to step on any toes because when I look around at the school I see 9th and 10th grade and 12th grade classes that are doing amazing projects and it just so happens that they're not really connected to internship and that could be for a million reasons it could be because the students weren't placed in their ideal internships or because they I think a lot of students go to internship and they realize that they never want to work in that field again which to me is great like we just saved their parents $100,000 you know and maybe we maybe we saved them a bad first year out of college or something so there's all these other pitfalls of internship that are actually good things having a conflict with a mentor can be good if it's processed right I'm not sure if we have the chance to do that I think having an internship that doesn't fit with your personality perfectly can also be good if we unpack that experience and figure out what really happened and I I do think that advisory is a natural place for it I would love it if we had more of a run up into the actual immersion I don't know if the I think that maybe now there's a time to figure out how to deal best with the strengths and weaknesses of the immersion model and how to offset certain elements of it into places like advisory or into traditional academic classrooms like humanities or math and I'm going to shift gears a little bit I'm looking at my notes also I think that one of our problems that I would that that can be addressed to advisory is around students making the first contact to internship it seems sure it seems like if students make the first contact they're going to maybe have they're going to be bought into it more they might have some more say about where their internship actually is I think that in advisory a problem that could be addressed that I feel like exists is the difference between an internship site and an internship project and how a mentor fits in that interning at the zoo for example has does not mean you're working with animals as our interns find out every single year that the zoo does have a marketing department and you can do graphic design and a lot of places that don't have graphic design in the name but that conversation is something that needs to happen with that individual student and it's hard to do that in the 11th grade because there's 111th graders and there's only four core teachers so the creating I think that the advisory is the place where that opportunity can happen or at least it's more likely to happen there because you have fewer 11th graders in our current advisory model all right Randy I'm going to cut you off because you've got your five minutes and I can tell and it's clear to me that you have a passion for internships and it's really great and I think you have you can tell when these are good tunings that there's always a chance for us to kind of expand your horizons about what they can be and I think it's exciting and thanks for letting us be part of that so I just want to thank Randy and all the students for talking about this for the last five minutes we're just going to have a quick debrief and that's where we leave Randy and his question about internships and we just debrief the process so how did this question go and I'll pull up the slide making some questions that can kind of guide this conversation is did we think this was a good question did we stick to the question that's always a great thing sometimes we can go down this rabbit hole of spiraling down and not really getting back to Randy's question were there any particular probing questions that we thought pushed Randy's thinking and I thought there were some great examples personally of that did we get off track were we following our norms and what can we do next time that will make this conversation whether you're doing it online or whether you're doing it with a group a little bit better or more effective so I'll put five minutes on the clock and then we can start the debrief with whoever would like to jump in I think we focused a lot on how does this school help them like how does the school support them in internship I'm not sure that we talked a lot about like them articulating meaning because there was one question that talked about meaning but then I don't know maybe people fold differently I feel like I didn't do a great job of actually sticking to exactly what he was looking for though so I think Edric who's doing our slides brought up an excellent point that our six minute probing question turned into a 14 minute probing question and I don't know I'm interested in what you guys think the reason I did let it read long is because I feel like we had not really fleshed out what Randy's question was and I felt like it was such a rich conversation that was taking place that I let it go a little bit longer than maybe it should have so I'm curious as to what you guys think of it was kind of my prerogative it wasn't very intentional do we think that was a good choice or a bad choice I think it was a good choice and I would say I almost felt more than in previous ones that especially with the online community we were really getting good questions when we were moving on to other things and I don't know how you sort of keep within the timing of the protocol and still allow that because it's just processing time but I think leaving it, letting it go was a good decision I think that's something I was just going to say I think that's something that especially for our viewers who haven't used these protocols or thinking about trying to use them for the first time it's something to kind of talk about with the group ahead of time when you're forming these protocols and kind of tweaking them to fit whatever your model is and we have the benefit of a little extra time here to go ahead and add a few extra minutes but just also the importance of keeping this this idea of kind of respecting what your colleagues need in terms of time especially if these things happen before school or things like that and kids have to get coming into school etc. I don't know of yes and sometimes I'm usually super conscious of the time and especially for each section and I didn't even notice that the probing questions went long and obviously they're more than twice as long as they should have been but when the discussion stopped which was because the discussion time got shorter than it would have normally been I was sitting here taking notes and I'm like why aren't they stopping? I was like keep talking like you're only halfway in out so yeah I thought I will say that one of the questions I love the moment where Rob and Randy maybe you could speak to this where Rob asked this really great question at the end I don't even know what the question was but I could genuinely take you know a good probing question is where someone leans back in their chair and they go huh and they're like I just like that moment that was a moment where I could genuinely think that Randy was really and I think that's a probing question should be really getting it like okay are you sure about this are you sure you want us to discuss this so yeah so that was the question about like systemic school-wide support for the internship program or engagement with it and the you know the reason why I sat back was because I'm not sure even how to begin answering I sometimes feel like hey internships is one of the many things that students do at high-tech high and sometimes I feel like well we're really working towards some goals here and internship really is one of the big things so it's a question of the school's mission and purpose it's a question of an individual teacher's leadership or role or where you know where all of those things kind of mesh and before I get to the students to get an opportunity to maybe talk a little bit about how they felt about the process and it was a little tough I think Tiana was off camera for some of it so we could just see her speaking from the side so I want her to get a chance to get some camera time maybe and talk a little bit about that but you know maybe what this was like for the students how you experienced it was it engaging or was it more difficult with some of the technology issues and your muted students I mentioned that too there's Tiana hi hi sorry yeah technical difficulties but I think the process is actually really cool having us included in it to see a different perspective on what actually goes in to all the work that our teachers are doing great so that's our time I also have to point out that I quite enjoyed Tina's light going off in her room and her having to stand up every time I know waving my arms energy savers so we're going to just close it with our closing the loop and this is just for a chance for you to just say your kind of last thought you're kind of like one take away you can feel free to pass if you don't have anything that's doing it but I definitely want to hear from our students so what's your one take away from this experience and quick just a short couple seconds just kind of thought about this and then we'll let everybody go home I think it's really cool that the teachers care about our perspective on how internship went for us and I appreciate all you guys having us view in and have a little insight on what how we feel yeah it's a great way to reflect even further and just like thanks for having us on it's really cool to get to see this process to you like kind of behind the scenes just improving like the process even more yeah I think internships great and I really appreciate the fact that you guys group together and are constantly trying to improve it what makes it Emilio any last thoughts yeah I mean as an eighth grade teacher I'm just really looking forward to furthering this discussion and figuring out how as an eighth grade teacher I can start getting these kids ready for high school and these questions and these internships Tina I just like thinking about internships as a school-wide experience and not just this isolated thing that happened in 11th grade yeah and I definitely want to just thank everyone for being a part of this thank the students for sure for being a part of this and I'm looking at my notes right now and like it's hard for me not to just restart the conversation so I'm going to end on simply thanking everyone Rob any last minute thoughts I was thanks for including me in the conversation I'm with Tina I think that this conversation kind of points up the need for thinking about the place of internships in the overall landscape of the school and in the overall purpose of the school I myself happen to see it as central but as we've seen schools are very complex organisms and this notion of coming together around shared purpose is an issue of constant renewal it's not something you decide to take one year and then you've got it it's an ongoing conversation that's great thank you Rob you know I think my one takeaway from this too is just to see a teacher that's been doing like Randy that's been doing internships for so long that he still clearly has a passion he still wants to refine it he still wants to make it better and I think that's really the heart of what makes good teaching what makes good practice what makes a school I think effective at reaching kids which is that we're continuing to think like we can do this better and so thank you for bringing that and thank you for an example of that and I will pass it up to Karen who will have some closing remarks great thanks Ryan for facilitating and thank you Randy and everybody on our panel thank you to everyone in the community there were a lot of good comments tonight that we didn't we didn't get to questions as well as comments Sandra, Robert, David we appreciate all your thoughts please continue to post if you would like on the G plus community and we'll all jump on there and sort of continue this conversation through the week there are also more resources on the DL MOOC website about how high tech high supports internships if you're looking for information on that as well as links to Ampersand and a lot of other resources from Randy so please check that out next week we're going to be talking about personalized learning and focusing on student voice and choice and on our Monday panel we'll have Kevin Crowler who's the Executive Director of Edvision Schools Kathleen Cushman who's a journalist and author Brandon Wiley who's the Executive Director of the Asia Society and Allison Cook-Sather who's a professor of education at Bryn Mar as well as some student participants so look forward to that and in the meantime the rest of this week we look forward to continuing to hear from you about your own youth experiences with the adult world through our tweet of the week and how you're putting DL MOOC into practice in your own learning environments whether it's through internships or other topics that we're all discussing so thank you all again very much and we will see you online bye bye everybody