The following transcript has been edited for readability. Timestamps have been removed and minor transcription errors corrected. Speaker comments and context have been preserved.

Opening Remarks

Rich Portelance

So, with me today here on the EdGate podcast is Principal Michael Rubin from Uxbridge High School in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. Michael is a former Massachusetts High School Principal of the Year in 2020, and he's done tremendous things with Uxbridge, but I'm going to let him introduce himself, give us a little background, and then we'll dig into some questions about what's going on over there. 

Dr. Michael Rubin

Yeah, thanks, Rich, I appreciate you having me on, and, yeah, it's kind of funny–like, how does a guy who never really had any intention of being a teacher end up as a principal? And here I am 20-something odd years later. Yeah, I’m in my ninth year as the principal in Uxbridge; I've been a school leader in some form or another for 18 years now. I spent five years as an English teacher, and then the opportunity in the same building where I was a teacher afforded me to move up and become an assistant principal, and I did that for a bunch of years at a couple of different schools, and, you know, in the nine years I've been here at Uxbridge, we’ve, you know, have been able to I think evolve our school in some really progressive, student-focused, and authentic ways that I think puts learning in the hands of kids, and, you know, lets me wear a whole lot of hats, but at the core of it all, is taking care of students and giving them opportunities that perhaps may not have have been afforded to them otherwise. And I'm a firm believer, there are a lot of places like Uxbridge out there. There are a lot of, you know, middle class to working class type schools that have a lot of the same challenges that don't necessarily get the time, the energy, and the resources as things like your, you know, your urban or your really high-performing suburban schools, so it has been sort of a real passion project of mine to kind of elevate the school, and try and do some some really creative things that puts learning in the hands of kids. 

Discussion

Rich Portelance

Well, that's a great setup, because one of the things that we want to accomplish– and I'm just going to remind the audience that we have a webinar coming up on June 20th, Dr. Rubin will be on that webinar; we're going to be talking about smart tech. And one of the things that does separate Uxbridge from the other schools in this type of community, these working-class communities, is the work that Michael has done with some of his partners to bring about change and opportunities for students to get into internships and jobs, and leverage technology to the best of his ability and its ability. And one of the things we want to start to uncover is, you know, what does separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the tech that we're deploying, and why? And we really can't understand that without your perspective, Michael, and since you're one of the leaders in this space, at least from my humble perspective, I'd like to learn a little bit more about that. 

You know, if you're comfortable digging in there, I'd like to ask you, you know, start off by saying… can you give us a couple examples of technologies that you've deployed that have made a difference? And why did you choose those over the competition? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

Yeah, I mean, let me give you– I can give you a couple of really, really concrete answers. One that's perhaps very specific to a program, and one that's a bit more universal. So, as an example of something that we have deployed in a specific program, we use Epilog Laser engravers, and you know, we use Tormachs for bench milling. Those are a couple of tools– there are a couple of hardware tools that are used in our engineering program that may not be appropriate for every single engineering program around the country, and maybe aren't appropriate for every single computer-integrated manufacturing class that is offered around the country. Why it works for us is because those tools connect directly to our industry partners around here, so that when we deploy a student in an internship, they have some background on the very same industry-standard piece of equipment that they will see when they go out into the workforce. 

But the secondary part of that is that they're building transferable skills that connect to things that aren't necessarily that brand or that device. You know, our students who are learning how to code are learning how to code in a very specific language, but they're able to then learn another language or acquire something else when they go off to college or they go off to work. On a more universal level, and that's, again, something like a laser engraver or learning how to use Autodesk Fusion or Autodesk Inventor, that's very specific to our students who are in an engineering program. We use a program called ImBlaze for every single one of our interns, and it's allowed us to track their attendance; it's allowed us to give students feedback; and it's allowed us to have our workforce partners provide feedback. And I share that because there's a lot of tools out there, and for us, that worked. You know, it worked for our internship coordinator; it fit in well with something that industry partners had seen from another partner in this region, so we were able to sort of work together and strategize so that if you're a workforce partner and you're taking on three kids from three different schools, you certainly don't want to have to log into three different platforms. 

So, we try from a strategic standpoint, really, to find things that are useful, pragmatic, and most importantly, lasting, because if you invest in a big piece of equipment, and it fails in a year, or it breaks in a year, or it's traded out in a year, as a principal, I'm going to have to answer some questions to some people who pay– you know, have bigger checkbooks than me. And, you know, I think one of the things that we talked about when we we deployed some of the things that we did–some of our 3D printers, some of our engravers, mills, and lathes, and things like that are in our shops, but also some of the printers that we use in like, our media pathway, and one of the things we talked about was how often is this used in the industry floor? And if it's something that can run, you know, 100 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, with only a couple of minor, like, you know, adjustments here and there, that's good for a high school because that means it's going to last a whole long time, a whole lot of hours of operation for us. So, those are some of the… I think the real “in-the-weeds” conversations we have about whether something is going to be deployed, and then how we're going to use it, because at the same time, you want to tick off a teacher? You throw some piece of equipment at them, tell them to learn how to use it, and then three months later pull it out or say, “Oh, wait, we're going to try something else.” There needs to be a commitment with the staff too, because I'll tell you, the staff members we have are awesome, but they're awesome because they learn how to use a couple of different things, they work with students on how to transfer those things to other areas, but we're not constantly moving the goalposts. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah, that's a great example. It's funny–it reminded me of a story back… it had to be 2008 or so, I was working at a private school and I was asked– I was working in the technology and marketing departments kind of bringing things together, and they asked me to have a piece of software built that would connect the kind of incoming student data with the main SIS (student information system) system. And so we built a custom piece of software with a vendor, and we got all the specifications, and the director at the time of the admissions department was the sponsor of the program, and we launched the system, and within a week, he cancelled it. And, you know, this was bought and paid for, and he didn't get the buy-in from the people on his staff, and they all revolted: “We're not using this piece of software.” And so, to your point, if the teachers don't, you know, take ownership, like what you're doing, and know it's going to be there for a long time, yeah, you're going to create a lot of chaos, and someone's going to have to be accountable for that expense. 

Dr. Michael Rubin

And at the same time, there's no… there’s no– what's the word I'm looking for? You don't build continuity, you don't build consistency, right? Like, when you're trying to create synergy between the inside of your building, the outside of your building, and the student experience sort of in the middle of that Venn diagram, if you're constantly, as I say, “moving the finish line”, or changing the course, it makes it really hard to build a sense of consistency. 

Rich Portelance

Now, and to the other side of that, and, you know, talking about that Venn diagram and getting to the center of it, and some of the things that you're responsible for, another component is, you know, the outcomes that the students have, and you talked about some of the transferable skills. I imagine with the programs that you're building, you need to have some kind of assessment that goes along with it, and so, how do you judge the products that you're bringing in based on the need for assessment? Is there some special metric or way in which you do that? Or how does that come to bear as you choose different technologies? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

So, it's a good question because I think what we've tried to do is model our assessment of skill–on both the durable skill and the technical skill front–on a continuum, with the understanding that feedback is iterative and perhaps nuanced on a kid-by-kid basis. And I say that in that we try to– While we have a rubric and we have a sense of where mastery may end up for a student in using a specific tool, we realize that some students get there at different times. And I think that's sometimes what is… I don't want to say lost, but I do think sometimes when you're in traditional schooling environments where kids are constantly worried about getting 100 on something, they lose the process. And so, what we've tried to do is generate our feedback based on the process so students aren't afraid to fail or aren't afraid to make a mistake in using something. So, that's part of how we use feedback. 

Now, we don't want anybody to break anything. I mean, let's– We, you know, you use a bench mill, and you're using it, and the raw material and the tooling and it doesn't match, you could break something. And we don't want that, but at the same time, it's not– we don't see mistakes as necessarily an impediment to the learning process; we say see them as the learning process. And so, as our teachers are providing feedback along the way, it actually becomes two-way, and one of the things that I'm proudest of as far as our school goes is that you actually may see some opportunities where the student is sharing with the teacher why that feedback is actually either missing its mark or not having the desired result, because that's where real magic happens, right? When the teacher is able to say okay. A lot of times, you get kids that are just “yes-ing” a teacher to death. We want the kids to be able to say to the teacher, “Hold on, time out, I'm not getting this,” and “Give me another sense of how I can learn this.” 

Rich Portelance

I would imagine in a school like Uxbridge, and what you're trying to do, Michael, because there's a lot of personalized components to how you're addressing this, that the role of academic and CTE (Career and Technical Education) standards can sometimes be a juxtaposition here, right? Because those kind of are somewhat rigid, and you're talking about more flexible norms. How do you kind of balance that out? Because they're… obviously, they're there–Massachusetts has a pretty rigid set of standards–how do you kind of balance that? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

Yeah, I think… you know, it's interesting, we're not a CTE school in Massachusetts–we're a comprehensive high school. So, it has been, for us, one of the ongoing dialogues we've had this year is: how do we use the content? How do we use each individual discipline as a means by which we show students… or demonstrate for students the ability to grow in terms of durable skills, as opposed to teaching the durable skills? As opposed to saying, “Okay, today we're going to do a lesson on critical thinking,” or “Today, we're going to do a lesson on collaboration.” We're building those feedback structures in and trying to bake them into each of the classes. 

Now, what we find is, even in some of our technical classes, there are some academic standards that transpose in fairly well, and, you know, to me, one of the proudest moments I had here was probably, you know, a couple or three years ago when one of our engineering teachers came to me and said, “Hey, look, do you mind if we try and find coverage for one of the math teachers? Because there's a ton of stats in this particular engineering class and in this unit, and I know the math teacher can teach it better than me.” And having that math teacher go in and give some examples within this engineering class, it then makes the stats class real for those students as well. 

And so, we do have that level of collaboration here, which is pretty awesome when you think about it, because in a lot of schools, people get into their individualized silos, and, you know, they don't even think about it. But now we're starting to– We saw this year, we saw some cross collaboration between world language and family consumer science, we saw some cross collaboration between English and fine arts, and, you know, I'm really proud when some of those teachers come to me with, “Hey, this started as just an organic conversation, but now we want to formalize it.”

Rich Portelance

Yeah, and because, you know, when you kind of drill down into the rubric and you understand the skills, they are transferable, and they do cross different disciplines, so that's terrific that you're having these individual departments collaborate to teach, because that's the way the real world is anyways, right? We're using these different skills and disciplines to accomplish whatever we want to accomplish. 

Dr. Michael Rubin

Well, I think that's something that we've tried to share with our students, is that none of these skills in this transforms, you know, the way you teach SEL (social-emotional learning) as well, I mean, none of these skills, per se, happen in isolation as a lesson. You know, if you're really stressed out about something, if you're disappointed, or you're upset with– there's an appropriate way to manage your emotions. And that's an SEL lesson, but you have to empower– We try to have our adjustment counselors empower every classroom teacher in the building to be able to have that conversation about managing stress, for example, or managing anxiety, even if it's just looking at the clock and taking a breath for five seconds.

Because SEL, just like any other durable skill, it's when you and I have a situation at work that stresses us out, we don't have time to say, “Okay, time out. Let's bring in the adjustment counselor, and let's try and process this, and…” no. You have to be able to think, learn that, and implement on the spot. And so, it doesn't work as any of this does as a quote-unquote “standalone lesson”. 

Rich Portelance

Absolutely. And so, that I think leads to a question that I have. In your office, you have a sign that's hanging up that says “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible,” and–

Dr. Michael Rubin

Frank Zappa, yep.

Rich Portelance

–I want you to define that. Can you tell us more about why you hung that up? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

Well, it's funny–I don't know– I couldn't name a Frank Zappa song if you paid me. Like, I just, I saw on a magnet once I was in a– I think I was in a Newbury Comics, and I pulled it off the wall, and I said, “Yes, this is it.” What one of my least favorite statements is, “Well, we've never done it that way before,” and education is notorious for doing things the way it's always been done, but the reality is the education system as it's been set up was set up as a matter of efficiency by the First Industrial Revolution; it's very manufacturer-based, it's very assembly-line-based, and our students, for the most part, aren't going to work on an assembly line like they did in the, you know, 1900s. It's just a very different world out there; it's just a very different economy, and the skills that we're trying to accomplish with our students are different than they were 100 years ago. I mean, I was, you know, you look at… you know, you go back a few hundred years, and people would wait six months for a copy of a book, and now there's a new website coming out, like, every, you know, 60 seconds. And so, even the way information is being shared and processed is different, so we can't just follow the quote-unquote “norm”.

One of my passion projects right now has been trying to learn how we can better integrate AI because that is here. And, you know, 40 years ago, people were protesting the graphing calculator, but now we're in a position where, you know, artificial intelligence is very much here, generative AI is very much here, so let's go with the sources of the technology that are with us, because, you know, like I'm prone to saying, “Aristotle taught with a stick. It didn't make him wrong; it just made it different.” So, let's embrace the evolution and the revolution together. 

Rich Portelance

So, recently, you were out– you and I both were out to the ASU+GSV (Arizona State University and Global Silicon Valley) Summit, which is in San Diego, and it stands for the Arizona State University program for edtech. It really is the world's largest edtech consortium or show. There's a lot of investors there, etc., and I think you were a speaker, and I think part of that was talking about AI. Can you give us, like, a recap of what that was like and what your experience was there? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

Yeah, so we were actually on the page for– we were on the stage, I'm sorry, for being one of the top five programs, you know, that awarded for education innovation, and I did happen to go to a couple of the workshops on AI. And so, there's sort of two buckets for AI that I think we have found as school leaders–I'll speak more as an administrator than, you know, necessarily just an instructional leader–I think there's the policy side of it. There's the policy side of, like, what you allow in and how, and then there's the educator side of me, which is the, “How do we integrate this into our practice?” 

One of the things that I was, for lack of a better word, attempting to learn more of when I was in California, was where do these worlds intersect? And the reality of that intersection is that, you know, for a school, again, like ours, that we've tried to continue to stay ahead of the curve–and/or at least with the curve–is… And maybe to go back to some of why I think we were out there is that we recognize for a little place like Uxbridge, and this was in my remarks on that main stage, that for our students, the world is their neighbor. For years, schools like Uxbridge High School really consumed themselves with what the surrounding towns were doing. Like, who you played in football on a Friday or a Saturday mattered more than necessarily the big world around us. And, for me, I respect who we play on Saturday night or Friday night for football, or basketball, or field hockey, or, you know, whatever the sport is. Like, yes, you have your traditional rivals, and you want to be better than them, but at the end of the day, now, the likelihood of our students working with someone who goes to the school next door to us is just as likely as them to work with somebody who's in, like, South America, or Europe, or the Far East. And that's one of the things that I went to those conferences trying to do, is I always try to figure out a way that we can bring a bigger world back to Uxbridge. 

And I think being out in San Diego and being one of the only Massachusetts educators that was there, never mind the first Massachusetts educator who was on their innovation stage, like it was a humbling experience on the one hand, but it was also really validating because it made me realize that there's a lot of programs out there that are really innovative, really thought-provoking, really, you know, sort of forward-thinking, and for us to be in the middle of that is pretty exciting. 

But for us to be in the middle of that is also a little bit scary, because there, for me, there's never really that tap of the breaks and like, “Okay, let's just slow down,” because if you take a year off with any of this technology, if you take a year off with any of these sort of growing trends in education, you fall so far behind that you can't possibly catch up. And I'm out there talking to people who they don't even have an AI policy drafted–our district at least does. We have a couple of vendors with whom we work; we have a couple of things we've had our teachers embrace, but there are some schools out there that it's still very much an “every person for him or herself”, and that is a real risk. That's what happened during the pandemic: everybody picked a different software platform and ran with it, and kids were using a million different things depending on who their teacher was. We don't want to get there with AI–we want to make sure we centralize things and try to put the best tools possible in the hands of our kids. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah. And with so many AI platforms out there, there was, you know, as you know, there was a show at the ASU+GSV convention just focused on [Inaudible], and there were hundreds. I mean, it was crazy. I think they said that there were 17,000 people registered, and it was remarkable. So, one of the things that I was looking at, you know, being part of EdGate is, you know, how many of these tools, you know, really have the weight and gravity to make some impact, and how many of them are leveraging academic standards to align and to make it easy for the academics to pick them. So, you know, if you're looking at a piece of software, if it's not aligned to the Massachusetts state standards, the likelihood of you choosing it is probably slim to none, right? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

You know, it's funny you bring that up. We've partnered with a couple of different platforms, and one that I think of is that we paid for a licensure for every teacher in this building; part of it was about accessibility. It was accessibility for the teacher, and it was going to make some of their practices more efficient. And I like that, I like that with a click of a button, reading levels could be differentiated, or, you know, quizzes that are scaffolded with an answer key could be developed. I think those are the sort of, for lack of a better word, “projects” that we wanted to get involved with on the early goings. Now, on the student side, we've just started to work on a couple of different tools where we're allowing students to almost use AI to generate their own projects and, like, generate their own rubrics, and say, “Okay, now give me a rubric that will give me feedback as I complete this project.” 

And there is so much more out there than just what people think of with the original chat– you know, the chatbots and GPTs and things like that. You know, the fact that you can, you know, go on to something like SchoolAI and, you know, you're doing a lesson on the slavery experience of the 19th century, and you can have a “conversation” with Frederick Douglass, like that is pretty awesome. And again, it's real, it's authentic, and it gives the teacher an opportunity to say, “Okay, did you ask a good question? How did you respond? Now could you turn this into an essay?” Like, that is really the world these students are living in that is very, very different from the schooling experience I had, you know, in the 90’s. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah. You know, while we were developing content, they were developing prompts. 

Dr. Michael Rubin

Right. 

Rich Portelance

It is a completely different experience, and as you say, without staying abreast of some of this stuff, it's easy to fall behind very quickly. And, you know, that's an experience from a designer; as a marketer, we always had this rapid development of technologies–there's always new software coming out, and so we would always joke about, you know, what's coming next. You know, originally it was QuarkXPress, and then it was Adobe, and then it was something else, and that you kept having these new softwares, but now the world is like that–it's just this constant evolution. And so, how do you kind of stay abreast of it and feel like you're at least, you know, on par? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

I think you make peace with not being able to know it all. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah. 

Dr. Michael Rubin

You know, I think that's the first thing. It's funny–I had a professor as an undergraduate who, at the time, was highly, highly involved in what was called hypertext theory. You know, this ability of, like, at the time, it was how you were relinking things on the web so that you could… you know, click between resources very quickly. Something that is so intuitive to us. Like, if you went on this morning and you read an article about Bill Walton, he– I know when this is going to be published, but there was a nice article about Bill Walton, and then there was a link to it about, you know, how he discussed being part of the 1986 Celtics, and it was all intertwined. I had one of the professors who, like, developed that model of writing as an English professor back in the late 90s. And now I think of that as, okay, there's all these sources that are out there, how can I help my students navigate that sense of just… that geyser of information that's out there? 

And to me, it's not about the ability to stay expert with everything. You can't; it's just impossible. I've made peace with that. It's about identifying the one or two skills that I think I can teach more universally, and then allow them to become masters of some of those other subordinate skills, or having other people here that are picking things up in other ways, because yes, there are some ways I can use generative AI really well, but I'm not a gaming person, right? I'm just not. I do know how to play video games, but I have a couple of teachers in this building who have redesigned their entire curriculum around gaming. Like that– to get to the next unit in their class, you have to beat a “boss,” and you have to advance to level two before you can get to level three. The kids love that! The students absolutely love it! But to me, that's giving them a context through which they can just do the work, as opposed to me being a master of the gaming model at all, I let them kind of go off and play with it. And there are certain things I can do with– I think we use Canva for it- there are certain things I can do; they're doing some other things better; it ends up meeting the kids. I've given them the framework by which they can make that exploration happen. 

Rich Portelance

That's terrific. I think there is something to be said for going deep and not broad–I mean, not to say you don't want to give it a comprehensive education, but in certain areas where a child has a passion, you know, encouraging that depth of knowledge, because ultimately, in the real world, like as you're saying, as a principal, you have certain skills that you're going to develop very deeply, but you're not going to be able to know everything. And in this world that we have, it's going to be impossible, so we have to rely on other people and the technologies to fill us in and to allow us capacity to do more– to know more, but we're not going to know every single technology that's out there.

Dr. Michael Rubin

No, I mean like, I played Nintendo Switch. My– I have a friend who plays PlayStation 4, and I mean– or five, I'm not even sure what– he says he's a “PlayStation guy.” You can't possibly be a master of every single platform, even when you're talking about a video game. I still to this day prefer a pinball machine over them all, so, you know, but I think there's some charm in giving people the latitude to become experts of their own quote unquote “domain.” 

Rich Portelance

So, I'm going to just switch topics here for a sec. You know, I know that Uxbridge, there was an Innovative Pathways program, and you guys have been at the forefront of that. I don't know if it's three or four years in a row that you've actually been on that Innovative Pathways kind of leadership space. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how you’re getting students into these roles within the community? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

Yeah, so the Commonwealth of Massachusetts started these back around, like, 2018 or 2019, and we were one of the first… we were one of the first four or five schools that earned the designation back then, and we earned our first designation for our manufacturing program. And what all pathways have as sort of a common framework: they all have a technical course component or sequence, they all have higher-level academics that are built into them, there's a counseling component, and then there's some sort of “summit of experience”. And our summit of experience for most students is an internship, but we do have a few that'll complete a capstone project if the internship doesn't quite fit their scheduling needs. Since that initial program and manufacturing– Oh, I'm sorry, and they're all tied to some level of some industry sector that's in high demand. So, the first one, manufacturing, is connected to manufacturing and engineering. 

Since then, we've added a biomed pathway, an information science pathway, which for us is mostly media, you know, graphic design; it's more of a creative pathway. Graphic design, video, some photos, some computer programming. And then we have a business and finance pathway, and most recently, our most recent designation is in… technically it falls under human services, but it's a future educator pathway. Like a “grow your own education” pathway. What it has done for us as a school is it's given a purpose to what would previously be just called elective programs. Our students get the opportunity to explore careers while they're here in high school before they have to go off to college, before they go off to a job. And the college piece is expensive–we don't want kids to go there for a year or two and then realize, “Uh oh, I didn't like this,” and then they're $100,000 in debt, so we give them those opportunities to onboard and offload sometimes. There are sometimes kids that start the engineering pathway and say, “Wait, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. I'm not sure I really want to be an engineer anymore.” We had a student this year who, after a couple of years in our biomed pathway, had a nursing internship at one of the geriatric care places here–it was not for her. She ended up back at one of the elementary schools doing an internship with one of our elementary school nurses, and discovered she wants to do pediatric nursing–she loved that side. So that's important to us, and that's where our pathways and the sort of the rubber meets the road. 

We find that our students who go into the post-secondary world having studied in these programs are exceptionally well prepared, and they do very well. But we also find that they're prepared even if they're going into a field that is just different enough. You know, we do a lot of manufacturing and electrical engineering here. We've had students that have gone on to be computer engineers; we've had people that have gone on to be mechanical engineers, and they do well. They are successful in our retention rate of kids that go off to college; they graduate, which is also important. 

And I think one of the things that we've seen is that our student discipline rates have improved, our chronic absenteeism has improved, and our failure rates have improved. So, we're finding that giving students a sense of purpose and ownership over their learning, it makes them less likely to act out, it makes them less likely to not show up, and it makes them less likely to disengage academically. 

Rich Portelance

Those are terrific metrics, because I know here– I'm from Connecticut, there's a new study that came out by Dalio Foundation that said there's 119,000 disconnected, disassociated youth between 12 and 22 or so, which is 20% of that population, and for a very rich state, it's a staggering and very sobering number of students that are disengaged, and so we need to find better ways, so I think you're leading a charge that hopefully will take hold. Do you see some of that happening? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

Well, from four schools that earned the designation, we're now in– Massachusetts Innovation Career Pathways is now in a quarter of the high schools in Massachusetts. And we once had, you know, the first, I would say, 10 or 12 kids, and next year, they're tracking it to be about 8,000 statewide. And one of the things I'm really proud of is that… you know, to tell a quick story, because I could talk about this stuff all day, last year, when we went to the convening of the new programs that had earned their designation, everyone that got up to talk about their process talked about coming through our school. And to have had 80 to 90 schools from around the region, around the state, you know, different parts of the country, come through here to say, “Okay, how do you make these elective courses work? How do you make this model work?” 

And then, getting it out of the students. Like, you sometimes wonder as a principal, like, yeah, we talk about this, we have this career pathway, and we have an engineering pathway. But to hear the students talk about it in their words, and to hear them identify as to why they feel like they're part of a pathway, and what that pathway has taught them is really awesome. That, to me, is, again, I use the term “where the rubber hits the road,” but a lot of times, you know, to go back to the Zappa quote, you know, this is deviation from the norm. You know, when you think about the way a lot of schools measure their success, they'll talk to you about AP scores, they'll talk to you about how many kids take the SAT, and how many kids go to college. I really prefer to think of it as like, okay, how many kids here could talk to me about what they've learned, how they've learned, and what they want to do? And how it's embedded in some joy. I worked in a school at one point where there was a lot of intentional pressure put on things like AP scores. I myself am a product of the AP score, you know, I taught AP, I took APs, and I'm not besmirching APs, but very few kids would say they get joy out of practice tests. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah. 

Dr. Michael Rubin

And not everyone who took my AP lit class went on to be a lit scholar. So, it again comes back to that intersection of the why, and if you're going to take this course and you're going to be in this course, why are you doing it, for what purpose, and how is it benefiting you down the road?

Closing Thoughts

Rich Portelance

Well, I, you know, you have so many wonderful examples, and as you said, we could have this conversation and probably be here all day. I do want to be respectful of your time, and I want to remind everybody that we do have a webinar coming up on June 20th with Dr. Rubin. Big Picture Learning will be there, ORIGO Education will be there, and we have a gentleman from Ohio who is running an online learning program. And so, we're going to have some of these conversations about what each of these different players within education is seeing, how we continue to advance, and the role of our new technologies. So, Michael, is there anything else that you would want to add or talk about today before we close it out? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

No, I just– I appreciate the opportunity, and I think one of the things that even things like podcasting, social media, and so much out there can do is just elevate the voice. I think we amplify this voice of just a different way of looking at school, and understanding that, yes, there's a hundred years of tradition and things that worked really, really well. We don't throw it all out, but there's certainly some things we can just do better and differently for our kids, and I appreciate the opportunity that I have on this platform to be able to amplify that voice, as well. 

Rich Portelance

Well, thank you very much, Michael, and I wish you well, and I hope the Blackstone Valley has some nice, cool weather this week as you kind of wrap up the school year. You got a few more days, right? 

Dr. Michael Rubin

As long as our outdoor graduation is as it's predicted to be; in the 70s and slightly overcast, I will be pleased, because nobody needs a blazing, hot sun on turf–that is– that's not fun no matter what time of year. Whether you're playing soccer, football, or graduation on it. 

Rich Portelance

True enough. We don't need any parents fainting on the sidelines. So, well, thank you, Michael. Best of luck to you guys, and we'll look forward to talking to you on June 20th. 

Dr. Michael Rubin

Very good. Thanks, Rich. I appreciate your time. 

Rich Portelance

Anytime.