Transcription of Derek Pierce for the show Life Lessons, #104
Dr. Lisa: My mother has been a teacher in the Greely school system for many years, so it has been that I have heard at the dinner table stories of what it’s like to be an educator. Stories of what it’s like to be an educator in this day and age, which I think is pretty interesting. Kind of similar to stories I’ve heard around the dinner table, me and my doctor brothers and sisters, about what it’s like to be a doctor in this day and age.
We’re in this huge time of transition when it comes to education, medicine, a lot of different fields. It’s really great to be able to spend time with people who don’t mind transition, and in fact embrace it. One of these people is Derek Pierce, who is the founding principal of Casco Bay High School for Expeditionary Learning, right here in the Portland area. Thanks for coming in.
Derek: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: Expeditionary learning? That’s something in it of itself. What is that?
Derek: Yeah. It’s a national school reform movement. There are about 160 schools. It takes that idea … actually it’s an organization that’s connected to Outward Bound originally. About 25 years ago, the folks who were involved in Outward Bound said, “What if we applied what we know about how kids learn best in the wilderness to schools?” Meaning, having kids collectively take on great challenges and doing individually things, I never thought they could do, not just in a wilderness setting but do that in an academic setting.
The movement has sprung from there. King Middle School in Portland is one of the founding schools of expeditionary learning. Because of their success, the movement was interested or the organization was interested in expanding in Portland, and Portland was interested in expanding as well.
Dr. Lisa: Why do kids learn better in this way?
Derek: There’s no one way for certain to learn, but I do think this is a means of getting kids to do their personal best that works for our full range of kids. I think it’s because the learning is integrated. The kids see that it’s relevant, that it matters that they’re doing work that’s not just for school or for their teacher, but the world and for themselves. It tends to get them excited both in heart and head, and I think we find when kids are as passionate about something as they are intellectually curious, they tend to bring forth things that surprise even themselves.
I think we spend a lot of time on community and getting to know kids well, so that they feel valued and they feel safe to be who they are. That also enables many kids to go places they didn’t think they could have intellectually or interpersonally even.
I think it’s an emphasis on what we call our three R’s, which are Relevance, Rigor and Relationships. I think a lot of schools are good at maybe one of those things or two of things, but it’s really, really difficult to hold each of those values as paramount. That’s what we strive to do anyway, over the last nine years now.
Dr. Lisa: Give me an example of a child who engaged in expeditionary learning, and what they did and what the outcome was.
Derek: Yeah. Maybe I’ll talk a little bit about our junior curriculum. One of the things I think that’s great about expeditionary learning is that it’s for the all. It isn’t for just this kind of kid or that kind of kid. The curriculum that we do is what’s called heterogeneously grouped. We don’t track students. We want to push all students to go farther than they thought they could go.
In our junior curriculum for instance, we organize … and it’s US history, English, chemistry, typically Algebra II or pre-calculus, so typical course matter but how it comes together is perhaps what’s unique. The organizing question for the year is, “How do we resolve our dependence on fossil fuel?” The kids first do a case study. This past year, they did a case study on coal mining in West Virginia. Then they each picked an aspect of the energy crisis that is of interest to them. Some kids researched thorium nuclear reactors and other kids algae fuel cells.
Then they each had to develop what we call a white paper, like a policy brief that would be given to policy leaders. Then they developed a presentation which they presented as part of an energy symposium to local city councilors, people in the energy industry, experts in the community. They had to present not just what they know but what do they propose happen. Then we had a small grant process where some people are trying to go further with those ideas.
There was for instance a student that was writing about what should be the insurance … how we should deal with insurance after natural disasters given global warming, given that people who live by the coast are more likely to get ravaged, and how do we sustainably finance that over time.
After that the kids study the literature, the music, the culture of West Virginia. We actually took the whole class to West Virginia, and they raised a lot of money for that. Then they did some service down there. They interviewed some senior citizens, many of whom have been involved in the coal industry. Then they created these multimedia oral histories of the folks that they interviewed, using photography, using film, using their own writing, and put together about a two-hour DVD telling these folks’ stories.
Over the course of the year that involved chemistry in the studying of the energy issues, that involved math in their presentation of the statistics to support their ideas, and obviously a ton of English and history to create excellent work. We want kids … they may do kind of fewer test and papers, they do those kinds of things, but what they do, we want every year our kids to do excellent work that requires tons of drafts in which has … could meet professional standards in terms of the quality.
That kind of work I think helps transforms kids’ lives. There was a kid named … I probably shouldn’t say names. There’s a kid who was very much at risk of dropping out that had come from a reform school. When she went down to West Virginia a couple of years ago as part of this junior journey, it changed the game entirely for her. She came back a new student, and she got more credits for senior year than any kid we’ve ever had in history of the school. This was a kid that good money was on that she was going to drop out.
I think when kids have experiences with other kids, first of all that they feel a part of a community that cares about them and matters, and when they feel their own greatness firsthand through work they do, that’s transformative. That’s the goal to get those two things going.
Dr. Lisa: One of the R’s that you described, you said it was rigor and relationships. I don’t remember the other R.
Derek: Relevance.
Dr. Lisa: Relevance, okay. I can see the relevance and I can see the rigor as it comes to academia. What about relationships? This really isn’t something that we focus on in traditional education.
Derek: Yeah, unfortunately. Though I think elementary schools typically do a big deal of it, but it’s sometimes a forgotten concept in high schools, as if that doesn’t matter for teenagers when I think it matters perhaps more than any of our age group.
I think we look at it in a whole bunch of ways. We look at that kids feel meaningfully connected to other kids and across the school. For instance, we have our freshmen each do kind of profiles of seniors. Seniors are paired with a freshman and they write a letter to a particular freshman saying, “Here’s my advice for how you live your high school life.”
We value relationships between students and teachers obviously. We have advisories and other structures which enable teachers to work with kids more deeply, so they’re working with fewer kids but more often and also often over multiple years.
We try also to have kids connected with the outside world with mentors in the community, through internships and other opportunities. We try to make sure we have a meaningful relationship with the parent, teacher and kid. Parents are often shunned in high school. I don’t … kids kind of give that message implicitly or explicit to parents, and schools sometimes send that message to high school parents. We want to partner, because we are all about … all parents, teachers, kids all want the best for their kid. There’s a lot of common interest there that’s typically not capitalized on.
Then I think it’s about the relationship to a community, an individual’s relationship to a community and feeling a part of something bigger than themselves, and something that you care about, and is going to bring out your, again, your best self because you want to better that community – both the school community, and then Portland, and then even bigger than that hopefully.
Dr. Lisa: When we had Billy Shore on our show, and he’s the founder of Share Our Strength, which is a national childhood hunger relief organization, he talked a lot about an individual that is all about the courage to teach. He’s actually written multiple books about having the courage to teach.
I think this is something that we forget, that you can come out of your education and be enthusiastic about teaching and love children, and love learning, and sharing this love of learning, but then over time it really can be very challenging to work within the system.
Derek: Yes. I think teachers too have a tendency to see all the work they haven’t done. They go home at the end of the day and say, “God, I didn’t reach that kid.” Or, “That kid’s still not enjoying my class.” Or, “That kid is still not doing their work that I know they can do,” and not seeing all the glory that they brought to kids’ lives and all the kids who are growing and changing.
That’s something we try to be conscious of as educators, to help one another not just focus on what we’re not getting done. Because the work is never done, and more and more teaching is social work as the social fabric of our world becomes a bit more frayed. I do a lot of social work in my job. We provide food, two meals a day to half of our kids. We’re dealing with health issues, mental health issues a lot more than reading and writing and arithmetic, and that’s wearing.
I think one of the things that we’ve had is we’ve struggled with as an organization is how to efficiently and sustainably care for kids in a way that we’re not owning all of the kids’ collective struggles and dysfunction. That we figure out ways to put a blanket of support around kids in the ways that are going to buoy them, but that we’re not all feeling the need to do that, but we’re doing it better as a team, because you have to be in it for the long haul to see results.
That, I think, there were those … the incredible good fortune and blessing of our work is that you do see lives transformed. That’s what sustains educators, when you see this kid in ninth grade who is just a mess as a human being, not just as a student but interpersonally in their ability to connect with peers and adults and their ability to produce something of quality in their lives, and then you see that kid on a graduation stage sharing wisdom. That’s what makes it all worthwhile and keeps you going.
Dr. Lisa: I can tell that there’s some parallels between education and medicine even from what you’re saying, because I know the doctors often will feel as if that they’re doing a great job with their practice in general but there’s that one patient they’re not reaching. Or you’re sitting with a patient and you’ve known them over many years, but they can’t for some reason change some pattern they really need to change, like stop smoking or get out of a bad relationship.
Then you don’t really know what happens inside of person’s mind. You don’t know when something is going to click. You have to keep showing up and bring present and doing the best that you can because at some point something might change.
Derek: That’s exactly right.
Dr. Lisa: Excuse me. You’re right that to get discouraged too early really just doesn’t achieve anything. How do you keep bolstering that energy and knowing that even though you can’t really see the outcome, there’s probably still something happening.
Derek: Right. I think it is about trying … less about kids learning discreet skills and knowledge, and more about those habits or dispositions towards life that are what going to gear somebody towards success. There’s been a lot of research recently about traits like grit and perseverance and empathy as being the dispositions that lead people towards successful fulfilling lives.
As an educator, you’re in for the long game if you’re working on those things. A quiz is not going to fix that. You have to have that long view, I think, and use your colleagues and use your own … we’ve all seen those. You have to keep reminding yourself of those stories of that kid that I mentioned. Whenever I think about this kid, “What are we going to do? We’re run out of them.” No, we got to keep at it. You have to, because you’ll never know.
You’re exactly right, Lisa, that … and it may not … that switch may not go off until the kid is 25. That doesn’t mean that what you did at 15 wasn’t worth it, because all the time I have kids come back and say to me, “I remember you told me…” I don’t remember that I told them X, Y or Z, but somehow it stuck with them. You never know.
If you keep showering kids with love and attention and, “You can do it, you can do it, you can do it,” something will stick over time for 98% of kids I think. I’ve hardly ever come across a kid that we couldn’t – that I didn’t feel like there was a real positive impact we could do in school for that kid if we just stuck with it and never gave up.
Because often the kids who are most needy are the kids who have experienced a pattern of others giving up on them. Adults have abandoned them and they have that no consistency. You just feel like, “I just want to stick with you. If you let us stick with you long enough, good things will happen.”
Dr. Lisa: What about the arts? You’ve talked a lot about science and math, and travels and all of these things that we think about when we think about schools, but I know that some of my most formative moments took place while I was singing in our school’s madrigals group, being part of the play at our high school. I went on to be a doctor, not a singer or an actress, but these really were very important to my growing years. How do you approach that?
Derek: Yes. It’s similar with sports. I think for many, many teenagers or many, many adults, when you look back to your high school years your most memorable powerful learning experiences happened outside of the classroom; happened in the play, the big game, the singing performance. Our hope is … and those are great. We want those things to happen.
We have clubs and our kids play sports at Portland actually, but we have our own … we have the biggest model UN Delegation in the state, kids write their own one-act play for the One-Act Play Festival and stuff like that. We want those experiences also, those kind of adrenaline transformative experiences to happen through your academics as well, so we try to integrate the arts into the performances.
We have a school meeting every week where the whole school gathers and kids as a big chunk of that perform. We do these courses called intensives, which was involved with the fabulous John, where for instance I worked with him and … the idea of intensives is like a January term. I think Bates for instance has a January term.
Dr. Lisa: You’re talking about our fabulous John McCain, our audio guru who came in and did one of these Intensives with your students.
Derek: Yes. He’s a professional musician among his many talents. He and some other musicians worked with a bunch of our students who had very musical experience. They did nothing but work on songwriting all day every day for a week.
We stop normal classes twice a year and we do these things called intensives. Kids pick from about 15 or 16 of them. This one happened to be songwriting. By Thursday, the kids put on a concert of original songs. We had all these great mentors from the community. These are kids 9 through 12. Again, some come in as great musicians and some can barely keep beat, but by Friday they all have something beautiful in themselves to share.
We’ve done similar things with photography, with filmmaking, with putting on theater productions, but also building solar panels and we did one on Sabermetrics, which is baseball statistics. The idea is that you go these learning expeditions in miniature, so you go from what we call immersion to culmination in a week. You built a boat in a week, you’ve made this movie in a week, you’ve written a song in a week.
Sometimes when a kid has written a great song, then that transfers to English class. They’re back to something, “Oh, back to writing. That’s…” but they have a sense of what … the drafting process, the process of creating or expressing something elegantly can have academic transfers as well, as well as just that feeling of, “Wow. I did something great. I want to have that feeling more often.” That can transfer to French class.
Dr. Lisa: Why do you, Derek Pierce, care about teaching? Why do you care about kids? What is it about these children that keeps you showing up day after day after day? Why the kids here in Maine? Why not anywhere else in the world?
Derek: I’ll start with the second first. I think Portland’s demographics are especially exciting to me, because we do have kids from all over the world. We have kids of all different kinds of socioeconomic status who are comfortable and accustomed to being in school together.
I think there’s some … the possibilities of the American dream seem pretty deadened in other parts of the country where there’s more social stratification. In Portland it feels like there’s some real opportunity for all kids to achieve something excellent. That’s really exciting to me as an educator in Portland.
Why I do this work, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do this work because I love being around kids, I love learning every day, I love being around adults who care and love kids and want to help kids, and it’s very, very … I haven’t had even like a nanosecond of boredom in nine years. I’ve never ever like, “Oh, what should I do?” I don’t know. Like the stimuli and the challenge blows your head off most days, but I feel lucky to have that problem.
I feel like the work we’re doing does matter, and I think that feels really good no matter how hard it is. It feels well worth it because the kids matter so much.
Dr. Lisa: Derek, how can people find out about the Casco Bay High School for Expeditionary Learning?
Derek: You can go to our website, which is part of the Portland Public Schools website. I can’t do the address off on top of my head. If you go there, you’ll find the link fairly easily.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Derek Pierce, the founding principal of Casco Bay High School for Expeditionary Learning here in Portland, Maine. You can actually read more about Derek in the September 2012 Maine Magazine profile on him written by Sarah Bronstein.
We’re very excited to know that there are people in the world like you and like my mother, also a teacher who are out there bringing a really high quality education to the children of Maine. Thank you.
Derek: Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks.