Manifesto

What do you stand for? 

 

I never planned to be a teacher. 

 

Scared that I would be a college graduate without any job, my parents forced me to take education courses so if my dream of being an actor didn’t work out… I could always teach kids. 

 

I reluctantly sat in the back of Professor Purkey’s class called Multicultural Education, convinced that I would never need any of the information. At some point, the professor asked all of us a question that changed my life:

 

What do you stand for? 

 

At the age of 20, I had never been asked that question before. I had been interrogated many times by adults asking me what I wanted to be, what career I wanted to have- but never what kind of difference I wanted to make in the world. I had never considered what kind of an impact I wanted to make or how I could use my skills to actually contribute to the world in a profound way. 

 

The next week, I changed my major so I could become a history teacher. 

 

My mission was simple: never let a student pass through my class without

asking them- what do you stand for? 

 

A few years later, I found myself standing in front of six classes of

42 8th graders each day in San Diego, California. I worked at a

school known for violence and unrest. Over three years, we took the

school to be one of California’s most improved schools through

data-driven instruction and a school-wide discipline approach. We

had really made the school a success. 

 

But something was missing for me. 

 

My role as a teacher was not what I had thought it would be. I was not helping them to find the things they were passionate about or the causes they wanted to commit to. I was not helping them take ownership for their lives or develop their agency to change their situation. I was not listening to their stories and experiences. I was not engaged in any of the important work I thought education was about. 

 

Instead, I became a machine that delivered, assessed and moved-on. 

 

I had lost my own meaning in the role and was close to quitting. 

 

I confided in a colleague about how I was feeling. She told me about a school that was just down the road. High Tech High it was called. She told me they worked with something called Project-Based Learning (PBL) and that perhaps that was a better fit for me. 

 

I looked at the website and without knowing anything about the organization or about PBL, I applied to their Graduate School of Education to pursue a masters degree in Teacher Leadership. 

 

What school should be. 

 

The first time I walked into a High Tech High School, my heart felt at home. The walls and ceilings looked professionally curated with impressive student-work that ranged from a crank that turned wheels to graffiti paintings in the bathroom. It felt like an art gallery located under an overpass on the highway. I struggled to find a teacher. Instead, I came across a group of boys who were sitting on the floor with a computer in the middle of them. They were the same age as my own students. 

 

Hi, what are you working on? I asked. 

 

They were writing a memoir. About a person who was a cancer survivor. They had met the person, interviewed them and were now editing the story. Next week the person would come to an exhibition in the evening where they would be given a portrait each of the boys worked on and an excerpt from their memoir would be read aloud to all of the attendees. They also told me about everything they learned in science about cancer- how it starts, what happens in the body and how people can survive it. 

 

As the group explained their project, I was struck by their depth of understanding… and how much it meant to them. 

 

If any of my own students were asked What are you working on? in my class, the answer would surely be a worksheet our teacher gave us. 

 

I wanted my own students to have that kind of ownership. I wanted them to feel that their work mattered. Like they could contribute to the world and be valued- even as young people. High Tech High was like what school should be for all kids.

 

I started to attend night classes at the Graduate School of Education. Each Wednesday, I met with other teachers from schools in the area and from High Tech High. We didn’t talk about content delivery or about preparing for the state tests. Instead, we talked about things like equity and how to design learning so students experienced agency every day. We dove into Project-Based Learning as a pedagogical method and also a professional mindset. Eventually, we implemented our own Action Research projects. Mine was Democratic classrooms: What happens when I share authority with my students? 

 

At the same time, I was still teaching at the school focused on tests and discipline. I tried to bring the approaches to my own classroom and convince my colleagues that we should integrate more Project-Based Learning ideas. I was met with resistance by nearly everyone. 

 

Kids don’t learn with PBL. 

Our kids can’t do PBL. 

We don’t have enough time to plan or work with PBL. 

It will be complete chaos. 

 

I knew these opinions weren’t true. It didn’t feel impossible at High Tech High even though the conditions were the same if not more difficult than at our school. I didn’t have the experience or the ammunition to prove them wrong. 

 

I decided to leave my school to work at High Tech High. But I also made a promise to myself. I could give permission to myself to move, but only if I committed to eventually, someday, taking everything I learned to kids in totally normal schools. It was those kids who also deserved learning that was meaningful. It was those kids who also had something to contribute with. It was those kids who actually needed it the most. 

 

A promise kept. 

​

I spent six years with the High Tech High organization teaching at

3 different schools and being involved with the Graduate School of

Education. I got dirty with Project-Based Learning. We built haunted

trails based on historical events, walked 80 KM across San Diego in

three days. We designed a playground to memorize the loss of a child

and pretended it was the apocalypse to see if the students could survive

for 24 hours on only the things they built during the last eight weeks. We

read books, went on trips, built communities and built (literal) bridges.

 

All on a foundation of taking kids seriously, learning by doing and showing them they could make a difference in their own lives and in the lives of others. 

 

In 2014, I kept my promise. 

 

Along with a few other teachers, I moved to England to support schools to use PBL in a large double-blind trial to see if PBL could make a difference in 7th grade reading scores and attendance. We were tasked to spread PBL to totally normal schools and it was my first opportunity to ensure every kid could have the kind of education that I dreamed of. 

 

It didn’t take long for reality to hit. 

 

Nearly all of the schools struggled with using Project-Based Learning. Teachers weren’t accustomed to planning together. It was too time consuming. Students lacked basic skills like being able to talk together- how would they be able to collaborate? The organizational conditions of the school made interdisciplinary work nearly impossible and often the staff responsible for the development of PBL didn’t understand it or were too busy to learn. 

 

Maybe the most challenging thing was the mindsets of some teachers. Those who thought that their students didn’t have anything to contribute or those who thought the purpose of school was to prepare students for the exams. 

 

My years in England gave me a crash-course in what it takes to change schools… and the realization that to implement PBL means far more than just doing a project. For most schools, it takes the courage to examine the entire organization including the culture, the practical conditions and the mindsets of staff. 

 

After the project, I thought I was done with school transformation for good. 

 

It was too difficult. It was too complex. The likelihood of any of the schools in England continuing with PBL after we left was slim. I asked myself often, what difference did we really make? 

 

The dilution problem. 

 

It turns out that I was not finished with Project-Based Learning or working with school transformation. I’d spend the next 11 years supporting municipalities and schools with implementing PBL. Armed with the experience from England, I learned that working with PBL must be approached from a holistic perspective. Failure to work with one aspect of a school (like enough preparation time for teachers) means a distinct challenge in another (low-quality PBL). This insight alone has led to the schools I work with having much faster and better success with PBL than the first attempt in England. 

 

But globally, PBL is having a scaling problem. 

 

As more schools across the world have attempted to implement Project-Based Learning, the quality of the approach has been diluted. I first had this conversation back in 2019 when I joined a group of talented PBL consultants on a video call. There were folks who had spent a significantly longer time than me working with schools and they were all complaining of the same thing: schools are saying what they do is PBL, but it’s not. 

 

There were a lot of reasons for this. 

 

One person pointed to the issue of more consulting groups supporting schools without ever doing PBL themselves or really understanding what it was- their goal was just to sell workshops. Another talked about schools doing projects but failing to connect kids with the real-world or provide any kind of meaning for the learning beyond a creative task. Yet another was frustrated with an approach where everything erupted into chaos because teachers thought PBL meant the kids decide everything. One admitted she stopped calling it PBL and tried to re-brand all of it so teachers wouldn’t think it was just a project.

 

The challenges sounded familiar even though we were all in different countries and working with PBL in our own way. 

 

What was clear from all of our collective wisdom was that the quality of Project-Based Learning made a profound difference in the experience kids had during PBL and in reaching the outcomes it promised. 

 

Low-quality PBL was never going to create the kind of change that many schools were hoping for. In fact, calling a project “PBL” when it failed to produce any of the intended outcomes a school was aiming for was a problem. To wrap up the call, we vowed to support each other in ensuring the kind of PBL we were working with was up to a standard that would live up to its potential. And we agreed not to dilute the definition of PBL for the sake of ease and comfort. 

 

So, what now?

 

There is no person or group who has a mandate to determine what Project-Based Learning actually is. There are people and groups who have stronger voices than others in setting a standard of PBL but often each school is left to themselves to determine if they use the term or not. No one will take that away from them or check up to see if what they’re doing is high or low quality. From a scaling perspective, this can be a real challenge. It often sets a standard low and inevitably, schools are disappointed when PBL does not deliver. 

 

It can also be kind of beautiful. Schools really do have an opportunity to take inspiration from an approach and make it their own- adapt it to their context and if they commit long enough, will find much more ownership from their entire community over PBL than a concept dropped in from someone else. 

 

My fear at this present time is that PBL is diluted. And despite the wave of schools using it, it will soon be dropped. I fear that we’re close to Remember that PBL thing we all tried? Yeah, that didn’t work.

 

Not because it’s ineffective or even too complicated- but because the quality of what’s being done is not high enough to produce the outcomes PBL has promised. 

 

I believe that would be a mistake. 

 

It would be harmful for the schools who have already invested a tremendous amount of time and resources on implementation. Deep and lasting change takes a long time- and schools don't have much patience. 

 

But it might also be harmful for the future. To eliminate PBL as a viable way to deal with real challenges like AI would be a mistake. It might be the only way we know right now to equip students with the necessary tools to navigate their lives (personally and professionally) and still exist within the education system that is far too slow to change. 

 

I think there is a critical moment here. And it helps me to go back to when I decided to become a teacher and ask again What do you stand for? 

 

I continue to stand for the empowerment of young people to contribute meaningfully to the world. I don’t believe there is anything more pressing or important.

 

At this moment while there are groups abandoning PBL in search of the next thing that schools will need, I’m doubling down. 

 

I still believe the best vehicle to build the kind of schools that kids deserve lies in PBL. 

 

PBL is not an easy path. It’s the right one. 

 

And a lot of us (including me) are not done yet.

​

I strongly believe the way forward is built on deep relationships, supporting each other to have the necessary courage to take bold actions and to invite schools into radical project-based learning practices that can really change the experience for kids in school.

​

This is my next chapter.