 Hi, welcome everyone. I'm Karen Fassinpower, part of the DL MOOC team, and we're glad to have you here with us, whether you're watching live or watching the archive. There's some bad weather on the East Coast today, so we had a couple cancellations on our panel, but we're grateful to have a few other people stepping in, so Rob will introduce them in just a minute. If you are watching this on the G Plus page, you'll see an option for Q&A, you can put in any questions you have for the panel and we'll relay those. You can also tweet your questions or comments and thoughts with the hashtag DL MOOC, and we'll be monitoring that as well. Before we start, I want to just highlight a few things from the DL MOOC community in the last week. Many of you have been sharing and reflecting on student work from our topic last week. Some like Suzanne Furlin and Bart Miller and others have tried out new techniques for looking at student work, using things like critique and the various protocols we discussed. Taking a hands-on approach for applying what we're talking about in DL MOOC is exactly what we're aiming for with this MOOC, and we especially appreciate your sharing both your successes and your challenges with us. That kind of sharing and celebrating not only our successes but also our failures is how we all learn. This week, we are talking about students in the adult world and we've already had folks sharing out their experiences. We've heard about student experiences on sailboats, at hospitals, planning conferences, answering phones, and even playing the saxophone in a Portuguese wedding band. You can share your experiences through Twitter or G+. With the hashtag DL Adult World. One of our participants, a WCU grad student, H Bullock, shared this on the G-plus community today. I have had an experience similar to this week's Bring an Educator to Work, and I highly recommend other teachers do it. My experience was a combination of business site visits, readings, and classroom discussions facilitated by my local community college. What I learned by visiting businesses converted my thinking. I don't assign homework for its own sake or even for practice anymore, and I spend time teaching students how to collaborate and to use technology to facilitate asynchronous group work. Lookout World 21st century ready graduates are coming your way. And we thank her so much for sharing that comment. Community members in DL MOOC have also been taking the opportunity to make our course even better, just as we hoped that you all would. Simon Fogg has made each week's readings available as e-books, which are posted on the G-plus community, and we're grateful for that. And Greg McVerry converted last week's panel discussion to an MP3 file, so people could listen to it in their car or at the gym. This is a good opportunity to remind everyone that the DL MOOC content, except as otherwise noted, is openly licensed under a Creative Commons CC by-license. And that means that you can reuse, remix, and redistribute this content however you like. And we hope that you'll continue to find new and creative ways to reuse and share this content and all of our experiences with others that you work with. And with that, I am going to turn it over to Rob Riordan to introduce our panel and get us started. Thank you, Karen. It's a pleasure to be here once again. And tonight, of course, we're gonna talk about internships and other ways of being involved in the world beyond school. Bearing in mind that we're connecting this to the notion of deeper learning, as defined by the Hewlett Foundation, meaning content mastery and critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, effective communication, self-directed learning, and academic mindsets. The last two self-directed learning and academic mindsets are lumped by the Rakes Foundation into something that they call agency. But I think that what we'll discover tonight is that internships and other ways of venturing out into the world beyond the walls of the school really provide rich opportunities for deeper learning in all of those elements that I've just iterated. So let's just get right to our panel. We'll introduce ourselves. I'll start. My name is Rob Reardon. I'm the co-founder of High Tech High and president of High Tech High Graduate School of Education. My connection with internships goes back to my days as a public high school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts for about 25 years. Where I worked with Larry Rosenstock to develop several internship programs that linked learning with real work in the early 1990s. Partly as an outgrowth of that work, we now have a school, namely High Tech High, where all students do academically connected internships. Back in our big high school in Cambridge, 90 students out of a thousand possible students were doing internships. And we knew when we got a chance to do a school that we wanted all students to be engaged in those internships. Let's hear from another panelist, Joe. Hi, everybody. So my name is Joe Battaglia. I'm the director of curriculum and instruction at the Met School, the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center in Providence. It was the first big picture school, started about 18 years ago. I had the pleasure of working with Elliot Washer, another person you'll meet on the panel. Our school has all students in internships that are connected to academics or actually the academics are built off their internships from grades nine to 12. And I'm excited to talk more about the specifics of how we set up internships and what students can learn through those. Great. Thanks, Joe. Elliot, another big picture person. Yep. Hi, Rob. Hi, everybody. I'm Elliot Washer. I'm co-founder of Big Picture Learning and also co-founder of the Met in Providence. Been doing this work around real world learning internships for a very, very long time. All of our schools have our students out of school two days a week. In internship for real world learning experiences connected to their academics and as we'll talk about later, developing social capital around their choices of what they want to pursue on the outside that not necessarily are job specific, but get them engaged in school and in academics as well, both in and outside of school. Thanks, Elliot. Ben Daly is with us from High Tech High. Ben? Hey, my name is Ben Daly. I am the Chief Academic Officer for the High Tech High Schools. And as Rob has already mentioned, we have all of our students going out on internships in their junior year and in some cases in their senior year as well. And my primary connection at this point is that I have an advisory group of 16 high school students and I help, I try to help my juniors and seniors get set up on internships. Thank you, Ben. And finally, Katie, how about if you will introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Katie Gavaris. I'm a senior at High Tech High and I recently or last year completed a month long internship in England working to introduce project-based learning to schools in Chesley Street. And I'm also currently planning my internship for the end of my senior year. Great, Katie, thanks. Katie, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about your internship. How did you get over there in England and what did you do when you were over there? Tell us about it. So I started off looking for regular internships in San Diego, but a couple of my teachers had been working with schools over in England previously and introducing the idea of project-based learning. And so I heard through them about their work and what they were doing. And then we brought up the idea about what if we send students over. And so I was the second group of students who went over there. The first was at High Tech High International, who went a couple months earlier than I did. And we all went to different schools and we brought the insight of students to project-based learning. And so I was in England working for three weeks. And the first week I worked with university headmasters and headmasters of three high schools that I was working with to really understand and dissect the idea of project-based learning. And so that was me standing up doing all day meetings and facilitating group discussions about how to incorporate project-based learning into their school systems. The second week I worked with teachers developing projects and how to bring project-based learning directly into their classroom. And the third week I worked with three different classes of students and did a project, a week-long project with them. So it sounds like you were really immersed in really doing work that was of value to that organization. But it's just a word about what do you think out of all of this, what did you learn in doing this? I took away so much from my experience. It's hard to say one thing I learned. But if I had to choose one, it would be probably the all day conferences I did. I learned how to, I mean in High Tech High we've learned how to do presentations and I know a lot of schools are gearing towards that and doing a lot of presentations in school. But it's different to be the lead on an all day thing when people are asking you questions and how to space out the time correctly. And just having the responsibility of being in charge and gearing everybody towards understanding a concept by the end of the day. And I think by the end of that I took a lot away from that experience. A lot about kind of it's like Uber presenting. It's not just leading a group and going somewhere with them. Okay, Elliot, what rings a bell for you and what Katie has said? I know you've been doing internships forever. But the same little word for us about why do internships? What's the purpose behind all of this? Okay, so let me start, Katie. I'm going to ask you one or two questions and then I'm going to respond to Rob after all of your questions. Great. How do you think you did in your internship? That's, I think I did really well. I felt like I really got through with some of the headmasters that I spoke to. And they started, I saw one of the questions was how did schools start changing their timetables? And I think that, and I saw that the schools that I talked to really did make drastic changes within their schools and teachers started it on their projects right away. And so I thought that because I saw such dramatic and quick changes, I thought that I was really getting through to the people who I was talking to and I felt like I stepped up and really represented high tech high and project based learning well so I think I did well on both ends. Okay, so I'll give you two more. That was great. What do you think you want to get better at after this experience? That's a good question. I think there's still, I'd like to get better at problem solving. There were so many problems with not, with like there, because English schools are so structurally different and so we always, during these meetings, we would come across the same problems and I would have a very hard time sitting there, not just getting stuck and kind of pulled down by this like, just this one barrier that we were really struggling with and so I would like to get better at coming across those barriers and not only getting around them but not letting that single barrier stop the entire day and the entire project to be able to find ways to keep working towards the goal while we're trying to resolve the barrier. Okay, and one more. Did you meet anybody that you're going to stay connected to? Yeah, so I met a couple people. I was an exchange student and so I stayed with a host family and made a lot of friends. I became friends with their friends and they came and visited me and stayed with me and a couple of my friends for two and a half weeks as well at the beginning of this year and I have a couple more friends that I made over there that are going to come and visit over summer. So I have stayed connected with a lot of the students as well as my teacher mentor that I was working with really closely with. She's a humanities teacher in England and I've stayed really close to her. She sends me projects she's working on and I do little project critiques as well as asking her how her family is and staying connected personally as well. Okay, so now let me give me a minute, Rob. Is that alright to respond to what David just said that I could do? Yeah, please. I think what I heard and I hope everybody heard these things is that the stakes were very, very high and it was a high degree of uncertainty. This was not school. Katie was outside of school and what she did had to matter to herself and as Rob said had value to that organization and that made the stakes very, very high and that's a big deal and bringing that experience back into school where a school gives you credit for that is extremely important because now what you do matters to you, to the organization that you were working with and to the school back home and mattering is a big deal. Pitting and mattering are all big deals and the other thing is that building of social capital. You know in some we could debate this that learning how to learn things. Katie knows how to social network. She did it and she just proved it. Nobody had to teach her. She knows that stuff. The piece here that's great is that the school knows and it's involving productive and deeper learning. She's going deeper around the things that she wants to do that she made choices around. She decided that she wanted to try to get away and have that travel experience which in and of itself is something we could talk about for a long time. But those are really, really big deals and you cannot get those types of experiences inside of school building or even after school I would say in a lot of ways. Those travel experiences are just amazing. So Katie thanks for those honest answers and Rob those are what I would take away from those questions. These states are very high which produces high, high standards. Elliot, I'm glad you brought up the notion of networking because our experience at High Tech High and then way back in Cambridge too when we were doing internships was that you know it wasn't about learning a career or learning a particular job, the result, the big result for students, particularly students from lower income families with not so many resources was that this was their entry into that world of networking. They were beginning to form their first adult networks. They were meeting a mentor who was going to write their college recommendation, who was recommending them for other jobs, they were pulling in summer jobs, etc. It was really about, it was that networking piece that has been really so important for many of our students. Joe, I wonder if that squares with what you experience at the Met. It sure does. A couple things that what you just said, when we first started internships years and years ago, we call an internship at the Met an LTI and that initially stood for learning through internship which was very intentional as opposed to learning the internship because the point was to learn through the experience of being outside whether it was social networking, putting academics to use transferable skills. Some students may wind up learning very specific skills and tasks in a culinary setting or in an office setting but the goal wasn't to produce that worker in the way a traditional CTE or career and technical education center would. The other piece that I heard Katie saying that, and Katie jump in and correct me if I get this wrong, but the connection to the internship was an organic process. It wasn't like there was a list and someone in a back room matched Katie with this possible opportunity and center there. There was a lot of buy in and discovery on her part and working with the teachers who had their own network that connected her which at the Met that's some of the best ways that those happen. We have thousands of people who have been interns before but we still don't ever match two people without them going through the process of self discovery and doing informational interviews and talking with folks to see is that a fit not just from the topic but a fit for the culture of the place, a fit for the match what Elliot is saying is like do they matter for various reasons at that place at that time. So I think that's a critical foundation for success because then Katie could go off and be successful with who she was and who she was partnered with versus potentially being just thrown into a setting that wasn't of either person's choosing. Right, that whole notion of first of all the buy in, being a participant and getting your internship really critical, very really critical. We have a question from the audience of a couple of questions having to do with structure and content. One of the questions about structure is if you're in a school that's kind of in a traditional setting, traditional context, what kinds of things do you have to do to enable internships structurally by way of the timetable and so on is one question and then there's a related question, how do you, where does, where do internships and traditional school learning interact, what's, is it, you do one and never the twain shall meet, what, how do they interact? Questions about content and structure? Well, if you don't mind Rob, I can jump on content one, one of the roles of an advisor at a big picture school is to make that connection. There are internship programs that send students out to a place and there's an internship coordinator who does that but what I think makes us different in why we have structured our school around the way we have is to make sure that the advisor who is there to visit the internship and the student at the internship and make those content connections, so they're building around the real projects at the site to continue to make them richer and deeper and to know how to ask the questions, the reflective questions because they've been in that setting and had conversations with the mentor so it's not exactly an answer for structure but having someone be able to connect the content and a knowledgeable adult who can really facilitate is, we think is essential. Well, I think, thank you Joe, I think that one lesson for that, from that for schools that want to do internships is that if you're scheduling internships and maybe you'll do them two afternoons a week, maybe as we've moved that high-tech high where now we now do a three-week or four-week immersion internship and so that happens between terms or at the end of the year, there are lots of ways to fit it into the schedule but one thing that's really important is if you're scheduling the kids into internships, schedule their schedule important adults to be able to get out there too, their advisor, their members of their teaching team or whatever. In our case, our juniors are out, their junior teachers do not have students during that three weeks so where are they? They're out on the site seeing what's happening, supporting the students and getting this aha experience of, oh I see some things happening there at the workshop at work site that I can integrate into my curriculum back in the classroom. You know I'd like to just jump on to that Rob. Rob, thanks. So and I think that big picture is really doing more powerful work with internships than we are which is one of the reasons I wanted these guys to be here for this topic but I think one thing that might be helpful to talk about is when we started we had, hey Elliot we can hear you, when we started we had kids going on Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon until four or five for a semester they were going out and doing internships and for a whole complicated set of reasons we decided to shift and now the kids mostly go for three weeks either in January or in June three to four weeks and they go full-time all day pretty much for three or four weeks depends at each of our schools and it's either like I said in January like a midterm kind of thing in January or in June and the reason I think that what I think it might be helpful about that model for people who are in a more traditional setting is I think it's you know really having all the kids go out Tuesdays and Thursdays for four years I mean that's like that's quite a big change to make and having the kids go out even for a semester two Tuesdays and Thursdays that could be a big change but you know it might be a more doable thing to have kids okay the center is testing's over it's the month of you know three weeks in May or June that might feel more doable and it's also kind of easier in the sense that you as you said if all the juniors are gone in internships that means all their junior teachers are actually available to go do something with them so that's one thing that we that's not why we made that change but I do think that might I was just thinking that might be helpful for people there's a question from the from the audience about reflection and what opportunities are built into the internship experience to to assure and to facilitate deep reflection on the part of the students about what they're learning anybody want to respond to that well I can tell you sort of a couple of the goals and structures we have in place the the concept of reflection and documentation is essential to what a big picture of that student does it's part of our real-world learning rubric and their practice most most students have either some kind of LTI journal or a blog and we're working more with more technological solutions to have them take pictures and videos and reflect on those pieces typically what's what's been pretty interesting is the questions that Elliot was asking earlier were the types of questions that in that Katie answered so well those are the types of questions we ask students all the time and it's really essential both there and in their exhibitions or their presentations of learning that they're able to really talk about those pieces and go back and talk to their mentors about them so we do have we have structures of rubrics and scales and scaffolds to help them do that thank you Joe we have an interesting question from from an 11th grader who's tuning into this MOOC Katie maybe you can have a have a shot at this what does an internship provide to a high school that getting a paying job doesn't provide that's a great question the thing that I found was that most paying jobs weren't really an internship they the paying jobs were working at Subway or working just at a retail shop and the internships were in science labs and in schools and things that you weren't really qualified to be paid for and people are more willing to have a high school student help out and really experience some really cool things if they don't have to pay you and so I found and as well as watching my friends go through the process that they got to go to places where more exciting things were happening when they weren't getting paid and so it was a it was a trade-off but in the end it was worth it they had a much more fulfilling experience it sounds like Katie what you're saying is that that the end in the internship the focus is on learning it's meant to be a learning experience and that a paying job is meant to be a paying job that's not to say you can't learn anything on a paying job because you can but but that that the internship is structured and focused on learning with supports for it you know I was wondering if you might you know some of the work that you were doing in Cambridge yeah I remember that there was kind of like you were over there teaching classes at I think at Polaroid yeah and then maybe you could just speak a little bit about that and sort of employees reactions to kind of the support that kids were getting around that yeah interesting yeah thank you Ben the the first internship program that we did in Cambridge was called the Cambridge Polaroid Technical Internship Program and shortly after Larry Rosenstock became a director of ArcEd VolkEd in Cambridge Polaroid called him and said we want to do co-op with your students and Larry said yeah well we'd love to have our students working with you but we're not going to do co-op and they said what do you mean Larry said we want we want to do internships I want to send a teacher over there to teach the kids at on-site humanities while they're working with you while they're working there during the day and they said okay and Larry hung up the phone called me up and said we're in because that he and I have been talking about that what would it be like to have a humanities course situated in a workplace where the where the curriculum for the course essentially was the experience in the workplace and it was and the students would access it and articulate it through writing so Polaroid brought Cambridge kids in to work for half the day and then for another couple hours they would be hour and a half around lunch they would be with me and a seminar room over at a conference room over a Polaroid doing humanities and the interesting thing was that they agreed to pay our students entry-level wage for that internship experience and at first they were saying we'll we'll pay them for their job when they work in the shops they were working in in carpentry plumbing electrical etc in the building and maintenance shops of Polaroid and Polaroid said we'll pay them for their shop work and we said wait a minute you should pay them for the for the other work as well for the for the work they're doing with their minds there and Polaroid said what do you mean we said don't you give stipends to your workers for continued education and they said you're right and they agreed that they would pay they didn't want to give kids the message they're working with your hands is what you get paid for but working with your mind that doesn't really count so they paid they paid for the hope they paid the kids entry-level wage for for all the work that they were doing but that was interesting work because it was really it was real work in a corporation it was a global corporation we can learn lots of stuff about pollution about about the global economy forward with starting a factory in Russia at that time we could ask you know how come it's and they can start a factory now and they couldn't five years ago and all kinds of connections to the world that we could make so it was really a fascinating experience but that was a case of a paid internship the other programs that we had in Cambridge and certainly the program we have at high-tech high now are not are not that they're not paid in touch it's good go ahead Ben no go ahead Joe that was Joe I was just going to talk about mention something about mentors and the mentors that that we work with similar to the Polaroid for folks that you work with one of the the chat the interesting challenges I we found is students often get very interested in a particular topic or area that they want to work in and learn but just as important as the relationship with the mentor and if they that they are on the same page if they can relate well and the mentors you know our mentors and has been sort of pointed out we have a very sort of extreme internship model so our mentors are really giving of their time two days a week for between three and eight months during the year unpaid and so many of those many people ask are they why do they continue to do it well can we get enough people we now have almost 900 students and we every student has an internship and we've always been able to manage that in a small city of 150,000 because the mentors really get something back and not just the additional work they feel like we've had mentors speak at graduation and many of them feel like it's the first time someone valued the work like it resonated with them that someone else thought it was important that they that they were bringing value to the world they're extremely well supported by the students and there's a real deep human connection so our mentors not only give back we couldn't run our school we could not run without the mentors like they're the experts in their field that we send our kids to so they're essential for us Joe did you do anything by way of training mentors we do it's we do a couple a couple of large group school type you know introductory pieces about how to how to sometimes it's like the your introduction to a adolescent you know because some of them haven't worked with adolescents before others are specific about many of them are really about how to take what they do which is sort of Elliot likes to call a tacit knowledge that had our acquired knowledge that people have and how to make that explicit how do you talk people through what you're doing because they are so used to doing it they might not even know but a lot of the training happens one-on-one between the the advisors and the mentors when they go out to see them and they'll see in that particular setting what is the mentor feel like they help with and support them in that way and in our model the advisors out to see the mentor physically out to see them once every three to four weeks and communicates with them weekly so there's a follow-up question from the community that relates to this from Joan Sobel and she says it's really interesting to think about the degree to which the internship serves the student and the degree to which it serves the organization and or the community how do mentors and advisors think about this and how do their colleagues come to understand this I'm so it was well based on what I was saying I think that from the big picture side at least from the the met side right now one is every students required to do a project a real project at the site and the way that we define real is that it has to have serve both the students needs and gaps and it has to be used at the site for some kind of real outcome so for example we had a student just recently who I was talking with who is at a restaurant who is working sort of as a sous chef and their project was to develop a recipe that fit within the the sort of taste profile of the place and and have it priced correctly and all that sort of thing the academic surrounding investigation because this particular student needed to do more social reasoning research was around that history of some of the ingredients the history of the tomato and how it came into Italian cuisine and some other pieces which was pretty interesting but that once that project was done in addition to the work that he was doing at the site that was featured on the menu and that became a part of the site itself and there were sub ports sub parts to the excuse me to the project which were one was to actually source some of the ingredients from a different distributor that they found at a cheaper place and some other pieces so in that way there was a benefit to the site and a benefit to the student and I think you know we had the great question from someone who asked about the difference between a paying job and an internship we often say to the mentors that they really need to even though they're not paying the students they need to treat them like an employee they need to have that level of expectation that the work is going to be high quality and real so that because that raises the level of accountability and rigor for everyone yeah we there was a study done some years ago by Autodesk Foundation about the value of internships and they found that for every dollar by way of employee time etc that that organizations invest in interns they get a return of a dollar seventy or something along those lines so there was a return on investment in terms of the actual work that the that the intern contributed you know one thing I wanted to add a sort of build on what Joe was talking about as he was talking to kind of thoughts came to mind one is that sometimes when students are out on internships we have this problem where they end up sort of doing photocopying or filing and of course you know all of us do some of that kind of work in our life but of course it's not really what we if that's becoming a significant portion of the job or the internship that's really a problem and it happens for us of course and we have to kind of with the work on that so part of part of the challenge and the sort of the work is to have teachers actually you know out at the site see that's going on having communication with the students hearing that you know hey well have you talked to your mentor about this have you know well maybe with the three of us can meet and kind of have a conversation about that so there's just like I think a lot of craft work in in kind of making these work well and such as a piece of it the other thing I wanted to say is to just point about or not Rob's point about whoever said about me treating them like they're an employee you know we do have students who get fired from their internship which I think is a legitimate sort of an it's an appropriate consequence depending on what the circumstances were behind that so I think that's a that's a part in a way of okay you just got fired from your internship we got to find another one that's going to be tricky what are we going to do and you know what have we learned from this and so that's just all part of the I think the real world experience yeah welcome to the real world the other question I saw that Joe Joan from Cambridge has asked about how did hi-tech hi I mentioned that we went from a Tuesday Thursday afternoons to a three-week immersion so there's two reasons that we made that switch one was a financial and one was we were also trying to solve a pedagogical issue so this was about six years ago when California and I'm sure a lot of states funding started really declining and we were looking we had to do something and we decide we had at the time a an internship coordinator a full time position at every high school and we decided to cut that position for financial reasons but the other piece of it was that one of the challenges with the way that we had been doing it at least was that was that students was that because there was an internship coordinator it sort of became like the internship coordinators program and in that way the teachers were not getting as involved in what was actually happening out at the internship sites and so that was an interesting to me kind of piece of what happened was when we went to having now all the junior teachers aren't teaching in the month of June and they're actually able to go out to the sites that was a way that in our structure at least it kind of enabled it to go from being just a program on the side to being more of an interact sort of an interaction between what's happening at the school and what's happening at the internship so I don't I'm not saying you shouldn't have an internship coordinator but that was sort of part of our thinking and I think there's some things that have been lost there was something cool about if you were constantly going Tuesday Thursday over a semester or even a year in some cases there's sort of a longitudinal piece that you gain from that on the other hand there's something about just being there full-time you know 40 hours a week or more and really just feeling the whole rhythm of now you're gonna see them the meeting they have in the morning and then what happens how does the whole what does it feel like to be there all week and so there's just there's definitely pluses and minuses to different models I think it's for us that's been a positive a net positive even though there were some neat things about the way we had before yeah I can give some insight I was hearing you guys talk about how to balance students from just being filing all day and opposed to really doing some cool things and internships and I have two examples of two friends who had very extreme experiences with their internships and one of them was did a internship at a physical therapy for students or young adults with mental disabilities and so mental mental and physical disabilities and so she was working at SDSU San Diego State University and was working with patients doing stretches with them working with them all day and really got to know a lot of students and young adults who and she felt like she had a really big impact on their lives and learned a lot about physical therapy as a profession in the science and came out of that four week experience with nothing but positive words and experiences and just thoroughly loved it and then I had another student do archiving at a museum and she spent her whole day in the basement just filing and really just wanted to pull her hair out at the end of the experience and the key thing that I think set their two internships apart and how they got there was what was the girl who did the physical therapy and internship had a strong connection with her mentor to begin with she described she found the mentor on her own she described what she was looking for exactly what she needed and it wasn't a set program that was already needed the archaeologic the one who did the filing was responded to an ad on Craigslist of somebody saying they need an intern for a museum and so they already had the museum had a preset guideline of what they needed and she didn't have that flexibility and really set guidelines that she needed from her mentor and so and then really didn't get the full experience of what it was like to work in the museum and with some of the more information she wanted to work with so those were two experiences that I got to see firsthand cuz or second hand because they were close friends yeah so it can be buried Joe could you say a word Joe about the range of experiences that your kids are having now through at the map it's at this point it's always been pretty wide but at this point with nearly 900 students it's literally everything from working with professional rappers to being at the aquarium in Boston and nearly everything in between we can't we do our best to match students with their interests and start with their interests there are some cases we can't quite manage like we haven't gotten into professional basketball for a pretty small town we've got kids at the triple A baseball we've got kids at radio stations people at Brown School of Public Health students at mechanical garages it's really the range of those things and what often happens because unlike more traditional CTE programs that have to be in a two or three or four-year program in the same area to get credit of like learning that area we have students jump around a bit like really trying to figure out who they are you know so there they might in I we had a student recently who was at an archaeology and archaeology lab at Brown in the next year she was at a modeling agency and she was able to bring some really she was amazing at both places but very different and again if the point isn't to be proficient at the specific work of that place but to learn problem-solving to learn collaboration to be able to have a foundation to develop academic investigations then in both cases that was really successful I remember one case early you know early my early days Joe I was connected with the big picture and with the Met at its beginnings and I heard a student there give a presentation her internship was in a mortuary in a funeral home and you may have heard this story I mean she when when asked what her interests were she was ninth grader she said I want to find out what happens to the body after death and so she got a placement and an intern home she gave her presentation of learning at the end of that experience and it turned out she was from Cambodia and her parents had been lost in the killing field and she the the impetus for her wanting to know what happens after death was came out of that experience and so someone asked her during that presentation so do you think you're going to go into mortuary science etc she said oh no no I'm done I learned what I needed to learn from this I'm hot there's something else now but it was that that impulse to go there came from very very deep in her own life and experience just a connected idea to that is I think sometimes people think that like the purpose of okay I want to be I know I've known my whole life want to be a doctor and so now I'm gonna go do an internship in the medical profession to prepare myself to be a doctor and I think we and I know the same is true for or I think I know that for big picture you know it's not about sort of narrowly predicting what they're gonna spend the rest of their life doing first of all they're not gonna be doing the rest of their life whatever it is that they think they're gonna be doing anyways it's much more about the a the relationship between the mentor and the student and having a it's one of the things that I tell my my high school my advisees now is like if you have sort of two internships that you're trying to pick between and one is like the thing that you think you're interested in but it doesn't necessarily seem like the mentor is all totally committed to the idea that their boss told them to get an internship and they don't really seem as committed and over here you have this internship that's not really what quite what you're looking for and yet it seems like it's gonna be this really great mentor who's really committed I really tell I think you should really consider this issue of who's gonna be a great mentor to you even more than what the topic is and I and I have found for for my students that has that makes a big difference you know Ben you said earlier the example of a student getting fired from their internship which happens in our situation all the time and is is almost always a great thing it's almost always exactly what should happen and it's a good next step but it it also just brings me to the sort of understanding if you haven't had an internship program before that they're messy like they are not clean systems that the setup if you're really being responsive to kids and responsive to mentors you can you can try to rein it in and create systems to do that and there's always going to be some real messiness and that messiness is really useful and healthy I think but it's hard in the midst of it to believe that some days because it's really like I think you know we when new advisors do it we give them you know that mantra of like what can you what can you control what can you influence and what can you just have a concern about you know because sometimes you get so drawn in and you want to pull them back and give some perspective and say this is all going to work out but it is the root there can be very that Mazarene we have a question about internships for younger students I wonder if anyone would want to weigh in on that I would say that you know that's something that I'm really interested in us getting better at as an organization for us we've really focused on the junior and senior year which I think is I always look to big picture as an example of why what's that's really what that's a good example of why we shouldn't be doing what we're doing because at first in many cases you'll have a student they have this life transforming experience at the end of your their junior year and you feel like well okay this might have been a good idea to accelerate a couple years forward so I feel that's a flaw in our work is we need to figure out how to have earlier students earlier in their high school career and even middle school career doing that work we have not we actually we have experimented a little bit with some eighth graders and seventh graders doing internships last spring I can't really speak to the lessons that we learned from that I wasn't as close to that but we did do it so it is at least possible one thing I was thinking of is we had last spring at the San Diego zoo was redoing a section of the park and so they ended up somehow we found out about this and so a seventh grade life science class ended up taking on this project of the redesign of the park and so I came over as a panelist to hear the presentations at the end and all these scientists from the zoo had they had come at the beginning to say here's what's going on they had come at the halfway point to check in on the plans the students had made and then not that was there at the end to see what they had done and I was really struck by the way that even for seventh graders sort of the rich and the authenticity of what they were working on specifically because these scientists and folks from the zoo were there at the beginning middle and end so it's not an internship but it's a way of thinking I was impressed by that was a good example that I haven't seen a lot of great examples of with the younger students having the adults be involved in that way and that was really terrific yeah getting younger students involved in field studies and in design problems and so forth is it's the it's something we do often and I take eye and I think it's a kind of precursor to internship work later on Joe were you going to say something well the only thing I would add is we I think we've just started to look more thoughtfully at less about age and more about the capacity to do an internship whether it's individual or in a small group because we have we have students who are in 10th to 11th grade who really are not we wind up giving them a series of shadow days or informational interviews they're not really ready for various reasons to take that full internship on and so I do know you know we've had some eighth grade students who come in and they're perfectly ready you know so we're I think we're getting a little bit more of a mindful understanding of what are the qualities and then maybe looking at those pieces to see a readiness state yeah and I would say also just with respect to the question of one of our member of our audience Mark has been asking you know how how do students and in internships how can they do a high level work that they lack the academic qualifications to do one is that we can provide some of that background work and the second is that very often we mispredict what our young folks are capable of doing and capable of quicking picking up quickly when it really means something in real time on the job with some college that you're working with so one of the things that we've learned to do I believe at high tech high is to is to understand that a stretch for a student is a good thing and that and that students often respond to that stretch and do things that even we weren't so sure they were going to be able to do so we like to err on the side of the stretch rather than to to mispredict and say well this student's not capable of that so let's put them over here and so forth it's the stretch that's really important for us I we think so can we hear from Katie about I'd love to know what Katie thinks about this question yeah I was thinking about this and I think that I had a friend go to the Sulk Science Institute and it was one of the like daunting things they have done is walking out on Monday morning their first day on with their internship and the way they survived and then ends up thriving in their internship was learning on site from their mentor and from other professionals on through on the job and the mentor was kind of expecting this and really was hoping for this and so the so the student went in with not knowing much and was very scared about this and I think this happens in every internship not just in the science ones is they learned what they needed to know for the job on the job and a lot of mentors are comfortable having students come in not knowing and then no because they know they will end up knowing it by the time through hands-on work and doing it in the classroom or in the professional setting and so I think it's a it has to be understood between the mentor and the student that that's something they'll need to learn but that's one of the most exciting parts about the internship is learning completely new things that were not in your not in what was expected from you from school Katie thank you that's very helpful I we were drawing to the close of the hour and I want to give everyone on the panel a chance to say briefly that one last thing that they want to say and I want to just remind us all that there are a couple of steps that a question still floating out there in in cyberspace one of them having to do with common core standards and and state curriculum content standards and so forth how do we balance out of the the necessity to meet standards you know content standards up with internships that question is out there what's the relationship between common core and and internships it said what's the interaction between the two those are out there but let's just go around as panelists and have our final word here you can address that question or not dress something else that you want to and then we'll wrap up okay well I'm actually I would love to talk about that curriculum piece for just a second and because it's attention that we I feel like in big Christian schools we've always felt and I think when we first started we were pretty bold and honest at saying we are not a we're not a covered school like we will not cover every standard that it's there's going to be essentially a less is more a deeper focus it's difficult to say that in the political climate today but I think that's really the truth I think in general the work that is done by our students focus is more in depth and it often it aligns to the common core or some variant of something like that and that's connected to the project work but what inevitably happens is we will send students to an internship and they will do incredibly well at the internship and an advisor will say well can we find a way to put X standard in this project and the mentor looks and says well I don't understand why this doesn't have anything to do with the work that we're doing and it's not this kind of standard isn't necessary for for being successful and proficient in what we do and it raises a larger question about what are the standards for and who do they serve so it's a long rambling answer but I think in general our advisors create a specific individual learning plan and set of curriculum for students that's based on those standards but very rarely will it cover all of them but I also have a bias that I don't think they're all covered in the traditional setting anyway yeah yeah thanks Joe can we talk about the fact that Katie has been recruited to move to Australia I would love to just throwing that out there Katie any final words I would just like to say that my internship was one of the most memorable things I've done throughout my life I wrote my college essay about that I got one of my college recommendations from that experience I've met some lifetime friends hopefully from that I mean it's just it's been such a memorable and important part of not just my high school experience but my experience as of who I am now and so if I ever have that opportunity to get to do it again Australia speaking to you I would I would jump on it hands down it's been such an amazing opportunity to do that through high school okay Katie thank you and Ben well I just think just kind of building on what Katie just said one of things that struck me over the years is you know we're doing all this work around designing projects you know all this kind of getting better at teaching all this kind of deep work at it's like a knocking ourselves out and then our students say well the best thing we did as you gave us a chance just to leave this place and go on an internship and you partly feel like hey what about this work that we were doing but it's like it's just like it's just it's such a good reminder I think that just creating the space to allow kids to have that kind of experience is actually it's actually not me yeah it's really hard in a way but it's actually really not that hard in a way especially the way we're doing it now okay you're just allowed to leave the last month of school and then of course there's work we have to do around supporting that but it's not that much work to enable kids to feel like this was this incredible power and of course they don't all go to England or Australia but they are I mean so many of our students are talking about how this was the most powerful experience they had in their four years that had to cry so I just think we all need to be doing more of this kind of work with our kids and I've got a final word first of all I want to thank you all for being on this panel Joe it's great to connect with you I've had such great respect for the things that the Met and Big Picture have done over the years and Katie stepping in at the last moment to talk about your internships thank you so much I just want to say that my experience of internships has been that that the first question that students ask when they go out on an internship is will I be accepted in this new place and can I learn what I need to learn to be successful here but the next question and the big big quit the really important question that they are asking is can I do this job and still be me so I think that internships are really in essence about the expansion of one's identity of incorporating things that you couldn't have done before and new relationships that you didn't have before into your sense of who you are and that's something that is a is a rare commodity in our classrooms as we walk from classroom to classroom but it's there in in abundance in the in the internship experience that to me is the value of of internships with with that I just want to turn it over to and thank you all thanks the panel thanks all to our listeners I want to turn it back over to Karen to wrap up great thanks so much Rob thanks also to all our panelists and especially to the community we had so many questions coming in on Twitter and g-plus that we couldn't get to all of them but I hope everybody will if you have an unanswered question posted on g-plus and our panelists and our whole community will pitch in and we'll keep talking through the week this Thursday at the same time we'll be doing another lens into the classroom session if you missed our last lens session we're using a consultancy protocol to talk about a teacher's real classroom dilemma and the first response the response rather to our first protocol was really great we had a post from Nancy Atterbury that I think nicely sums it up she said thank you for sharing this model it seems efficient and provides valuable feedback for improving student work teachers need time to reflect meet with colleagues and students and discuss opportunities to improve their work and I think you know that's the kind of thing that we're really looking for in deal MOOC is finding those opportunities through things like the use of the consultancy protocol so we hope you'll join us as we sign off for now we just want to remind everybody that deal MOOC is designed so that you can participate however you like including coming and going from week to week so each week is designed to be standalone around the topic that we're discussing so if you miss a week please feel free to jump back in whenever it works for you and come and go and thank you all again very much and we'll see you online