“The Place to Be”: A Middle School Reimagining Itself

I’ve been enjoying my experience watching the Calcutt Middle School as it looks to reimagine itself and I’m just one of many people who are excited about the possibilities.

Principal Milisauskas and the new outdoor lunch area

Located in Central Falls, Rhode Island, Calcutt has launched a voyage to become “the place to be” in the community. I really like that phrase from new Principal Tim Milisauskas. Its short and sweet but I hear it as a promise to the students and families.

Milisauskas brings a history of teaching in NYC’s progressive schools, a deep interest in inquiry learning and Reggio Emilia and strong expertise in instruction, having been a math coach before joining the ranks of principals. He’s excited to be in Central Falls and committed long-term to the growth of its students and its practitioners.

The Calcutt student body is a beautiful tapestry of languages and heritage, and as with most middle schools, the kids come in all sizes, shapes and flavors, so to speak. To greet them at the front door each morning is inspiring, with their diversity and enthusiasm on full display. Sports, support for new arrivals from other nations, and a strong team that manages after-school activities and tutoring are becoming more central elements of the student experience and fund-raising has begun to add more to the menu, including efforts led by the students themselves. And the faculty have dug into some key aspects of a strategy for raising achievement, which I’ll get to.

But how are they doing with that mission of becoming “the place to be”? One data point from the winter months, a time that can be challenging as cold sets in and days get shorter, was when an estimated 300 families attended this year’s Family Game Night. The evening included all manner of board games, popcorn, pizza and drinks. Even Santa Claus was available for gift requests, small talk and photos with each and every family.

Thinking back, Assistant Principal Katie Gomes felt especially good about the event, recounting inside stories of families enjoying each other’s company, including some recently reunited, eating together and playing board games. Many students whose parents could not attend, came with friends or other relatives, lending the hoped for family feel.  Especially cool was that people were persistent in asking when the next such event would be. While in the past, similar attempts to engage caregivers often resulted in low turnout, the energy this time around was positive and appreciative. Close to three hundred families! Seems to me that one milestone was achieved in identifying the school and its staff as people who want to take good care of this rising generation of Americans.

 I find being around Central Falls to be relaxing and comfortable. These working people are clearly hustling but most take time to greet you, and unlike our home base in the Boston area, they routinely let your car enter at busy intersections. There are some great Latino restaurants and bodegas as well as good burgers. But it also can be said that Central Falls is a community that, to Milisauskas’ point, needs more positive places, given its chronic high unemployment and an ever-growing influx of people looking for a good place to set down roots. Historically, levels of school achievement have reflected low income, lack of familiarity with English, and frequent relocations experienced by many families. (Here is where I have to point out that, since the 1930’s beginnings of achievement testing, the one relentless scientific correlation regarding test performance is with income --one’s ZIP code. If your family has the means, you will be likely be well supported in learning and achieve at higher levels. There are occasional short-lived exceptions, but it’s a given that students in privileged, economically well-off communities outscore others on tests.)

Santa at a Family Game Night

A centerpiece of the Central Falls School District’s improvement efforts is a refreshed and revitalized Calcutt Middle School, including some structural changes and an investment in collaboration and professional learning for staff. I’m pleased to be supporting the Calcutt administration and its newly minted Principal Leadership Team (PLT) as they take stock and plan next chapters. I’m also working on behavioral climate with the school’s Restorative Team and ERC will be assisting with the design of an Inquiry and Innovation Academy, similar to work we have done elsewhere, building on an inquiry-approach to learning and breaking some of the bonds that have limited STEM results in other places.

Students enjoy an “luncheon out with reservations, menus and reading” with teachers Justyna Barlow and Laticia Biggerstaff.

Calcutt’s Principal Leadership Team examines data together

The new Calcutt Principal Leadership Team has worked closely with Milisauskas to employ a Design Studio approach that ERC has used successfully elsewhere to take stock of current conditions -challenges and assets from user perspectives (students, staff, families), identify key levers, research effective solutions and pose potential modifications and pilots for the faculty and staff. The work requires careful analysis and consensus, and of course time, which schools never seem to have enough of. But Special Educator and teachers’ association representative Danielle Laferriere says the school is moving in the right direction after an extended era of challenges, “I think our staff sees us leaving ‘survival mode’ behind. There’s lots of work ahead of us, not just improving academics but coming together as a faculty, supporting each other and growing together, but I’m optimistic”. In addition, a new school-based communications team (SBT) helps to monitor progress and engage the community for input and dissemination.

To guide the Calcutt Design Studio work, Milisauskas posed the driving question, what are the elements of an optimal middle years learning environment? To gain thought partnership and perspective in pursuing that redesign question, members of administration and the PLT have been on visits to other middle schools in the northeast region. Milisauskas has been steely-eyed on the benefits of such visits. Historically, funders and intermediaries have built on visits to other schools, hoping for adults’ conversion to new ideas, replacing old pictures of school with new, and relying on a small group of travelers returning to oversee the dramatic conversion of the sending schools. Being the former leader of a school that hosted hundreds of visits a year, I would say the return on investment was, and remains, remarkably low. Milisauskas however has applied ERC’s School Visit Guide and expanded notions of visiting other schools as a learning adventure, with an accent on metabolizing the adult experiences and take-aways for smart use back at Calcutt.  Link to guide here. The PLT members visited East Side Middle and High School and Lenox Academy in New York City where they were impressed by the students’ ability to pursue their own learning with strong academic habits and language.

As a veteran of many similar “make-over” efforts I’m curious as to how a school re-design quest can reflect newly abundant data about key elements: mental health, exercise and mindfulness, reading science, and positive youth development (PYD), among others. I’m also focused with Principal Milisauskas on the importance of adult mindset regarding organizational behaviors such as intense teaming and collaboration and working with students with starkly different language and cultural backgrounds. As I’m fond of noting in presentations, improvement in schools with histories of low-achievement has been shown to depend a great deal on educator mindset --belief in one’s colleagues, in their students and in the mission--- and on skilled leadership, rather than on more instructional, “technical fixes”, especially in the early stages. Those can come later, built upon a strong set of agreements among elements of the school community.

And then, of course, we’re asking what lore is there to draw on regarding the past century’s history of middle years education? Middle schools have often been a neglected or murky entity since their advent in the 1920’s as “’junior’ high schools”. In 1910, only one out of every ten students were finishing high school. The middle years experience was perceived to be at fault, but that failure was attributed to differing rationales -a rigid, narrow emphasis on academics; a curriculum insufficient in its organization and rigor to prepare students for the upper grades; a missed opportunity for steering numbers of students into vocations; or the neglect of a growing understanding of pre-adult psychology. Some believed junior high schools should be places to prepare students for the academic rigors of high school; while others considered young adolescents to be a group at risk requiring, above all, support and understanding. Tyack and Cuban, in their stellar history of American public education, Tinkering Toward Utopia, describe it this way:

“The very ambiguity of purpose and comprehensiveness of these aims made the junior high school idea a reform to conjure with during successive decades of the 20th century. Although the junior high school did not become distinctively different from the high school and came to be seen as a rather troubled part of the American educational system, it did sponsor changes that became hybridized in various ways.”

Calcutt STEAM workshop

 To Tyack and Cuban’s point, varying visions of effective middle school organization still compete today. The stark differences among students in their size and physicality, social and emotional growth and development and location on the puberty continuum, as well as disparities in developmental reading abilities and academic skills have made it challenging to sustain supportive middle years environments that consistently address such a chasm of needs. Some states and districts, with good intentions, have even divided academic services and support in the middle years into two “levels” -grades 5/6 and grades 7/8, but this often means unhelpfully dichotomized programming, schedules, achievement targets and educator certification requirements. Such delineations too often fail to account for the afore-mentioned developmental and academic differences, can limit creativity and flexibility in teaching and learning, and constrain vertical collaboration among staff --the law of unintended consequences at work.

Calcutt’s Restorative Team reviews data

Back at the school, Noel Grant, who coordinates Calcutt climate with the skilled “Restorative” team, has also noted progress, especially among 8th graders. His notion is that although challenges remain, the investment in strategies that build a healthy climate is beginning to show, and as younger students climb through the grades, they will be bringing positive habits and relationships with them, paving the way for higher achievement.

“Calcutt Reads” -students read before gym class

Two central initiatives were inaugurated this year – “Calcutt Reads”, an effort to make reading central to students’ lives by making it central to conversations in the school, as well as a central focus on vocabulary. Teachers committed to these two vital efforts with vitality, and now, along with candid color pictures of students and teachers that have sprung up in formerly barren hallways, signs indicating what books staff are reading and “key words of the week” are everywhere. Students now answer, most without hesitation, questions about what they’re reading as well as new words they’ve learned and practiced. Again, this in a school with many students new to the language and culture of literacy, so these are purposeful and promising efforts.

WhatIf Math

As one more sign of the school’s renaissance, May visitors to the school were Arthur Bardige and Peter Mili, Co-Founders of WhatIf Math, a powerful new approach to making math problem solving more of a concrete, consistent, and understandable process across the discipline. With the goal of helping students become more able problem-solvers, WhatIf Math is finding a foothold among schools looking for an inquiry-based approach to learning math for the digital age.  Milisauskas, who was a math instructional coach in a prior life, is excited about their approach to preparing students for high school and far beyond and is in negotiations with Bardige and Mili about concrete next steps over the summer.

As a finale to a special new year, the Calcutt staff offered a “Lock-In”, a supervised and fun-filled overnight for students at the school. Adults were there in force, some for shifts and others for the whole night! The social media post below offers a glimpse of the fun.

Calcutt “Lock-In’s” social media post

As an onlooker, as well as a veteran coach of many similar efforts, I’m impressed by the commitment and understanding of school change leadership that Milisauskas brings to the work --he’s a key acquisition for Central Falls- and by the vitality and increasing buy-in of many educators at Calcutt. Key faculty are stepping up –some with special activities in the classroom, others participating in school leadership, others communicating with families. For many, this is what they’ve been waiting for.

All in all, Calcutt is a very different school from the one I visited only a year ago. It’s making parents, students and staff proud to be part of it. It’s a school becoming “the place to be”.

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder

Serious Meddling in New Hampshire’s North Country

Being a school principal, if you work hard enough and enter with the right motivation, can be one of the best possible jobs around. I did it for 21 wonderful years. It’s also relentless, grueling, exhilarating, vexing, work that sometimes seems to defy gravity. Max DePree once defined good leadership as serious meddling in other people’s lives. I think he was right on, especially about leading a school. Its an element of the job that eludes many.

Mike Berry has been doing serious meddling for almost a decade now in a village in the North Country of New Hampshire, principal of a regional high school that has become a mecca for good teachers, new ideas, and most significantly, a place families can count on to take excellent care of their children. That “taking care” of young people, and of each other is something you can feel in and around the school and it takes many forms.

WMRHS Students' inquiry in action

Over the past three years I’ve appreciated the chance to watch Mike’s work and see some of the outcomes. White Mountains Regional High School is a New Hampshire “School of Excellence” and Berry himself was recently named one of five New England NESSC 2018 “State Champions”, an award given to a select group that push for equitable learning for all students. In Mike’s case, I know specifically what that work looks like, doing more for more kids in his words. 

At White Mountains, beware Mike’s serious meddling in your professional life. Its not okay to be complacent. But also expect his energy and support, any unique resources you might need, and pats on the back at just the right time. To work at WMRHS is to choose an active professional life and major commitment to growing your practice in a public setting. That’s some of the magic there, you don’t get to work in private. Berry has converted several classrooms into Silicon Valley worthy collaborative spaces, with all the tech supports needed for documentation, and curation of work. If and when a teacher leaves, their legacy of curriculum thinking and instruction will remain behind in their portfolio of work, intellectual property to be treasured and kept in play.  I’m reminded of the wonderful Ivory Coast proverb, “when a teacher retires, it’s like a library burning”. Its not likely to be that way as much at White Mountains.

Among big ticket items, the school has converted to a Humanities approach in grades 9-11 rather than separate disciplines in social studies, history, literature and language arts. That move was based on Berry’s teaching experience, achievement data from Boston and elsewhere, and the simple notion that big ideas and questions are the best way to avoid learning silos. You can find the arts, classical readings or political theory, social media, contemporary issues and more in those classes.  An Innovation Academy, focused around STEM and STEAM ideas, will occupy a portion of the building next year. The Spartan Steam Innovation Academy (SSIA) is pushing the frontiers of inquiry teaching,  experimenting with alternatives to traditional groupings, scheduling and curriculum thinking, extending beyond the veneer of “PBL” to deeper, more authentic projects, problems and scenarios. Two central ideas of SSIA are, one, to push for more rigorous, long-term individual and small team projects by using the ERC Grand Challenges link as a different and more engaging approach to presenting content; the other is a focus on building each student’s intellectual and inter-personal “tool kit”, skills that help with research, presentation, teamwork, reflection, inquiry and curation.

STEAM faculty Rick Grima and Dan Hubacz, who mentor the new Robotics team, joined by ERC’s Dr. Katrina Kennett

ERC is proud to be consulting to these efforts, as well as supporting Berry and his Leadership Team in their plans to keep growing and improving and maintaining smart risk-tolerance. Mike has really latched on to two of our big ideas --“moving to a culture of learning” (much harder than it sounds), and living out the old innovation mantra, “first different, then better”. He’s taken those notions and is running with them, cooking them into the work of the school with help from lots of eager staff. His team recently presented their work at the NESSC Conference in Norwood, MA, drawing large attendance and great reviews. They talked about the evolution of their work, and how working in collaboration and in a public setting has fueled their work. On that team with Berry were Molly Campbell, Patsy Ainsworth, Abby Roy and Melissa Jellison.

The White Mountains team presentation at NESSC 2019

In more good news, the school learned recently that they will become a regional center for TRRE, a program from the University of New Hampshire that prepares teachers to do high-quality work in rural settings. Practicing teachers from around the region combine 15 months of graduate degree coursework with a full-year teacher residency and initial NH teacher licensure. Having White Mountains Regional High School as a North Country center for TRRE students will allow them to be in one facility under the tutelage of supervising faculty while they focus on creating inquiry-centered classrooms.

And there’s more! Other developments include a new 9th grade Integrated Math & Science initiative, and, one I was pleased to help prompt, a growing collaboration between the school and WhatIf Math out of Boston, see link an exciting new approach to thinking about, teaching, and learning math. Co-founder Art Bardige is headed to the school this spring to work directly with the Math Team and the SSIA. Berry hopes to be among the first high schools in the nation to fly the WhatIf Math pennant, looking ahead to a different, more utilitarian and engaging approach to math.

WhatIf Math is beginning a collaboration with the school.

In another innovation, Berry now employs two school-wide “integrationists”, versatile thinkers and do-er’s with private sector experience who can inject concepts and skills from art, design, music, social media and beyond, to enhance engagement, research and presentation. That’s a job description I hope we will see more of as schools cope with the research on student disinterest in traditional classroom learning. A recently added “elective”, Progressive Styles, taught by Mike Martins, has become a hot spot for students with a range of musical and artistic interests and not one, but two White Mountains students were recently admitted to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston.

The Spartan Van kicks up some dust down Boston way -Berry, on the left, with Jellison, Roy, Campbell and Ainsworth

As you can see in this last picture, the WMRHS Spartan van is getting around. Serious meddling is paying off. And the winners are the students, families and professionals of a school on the move!

Dr. Larry Myatt,

Co-Founder

Education Resources Consortium

THREE STORIES FROM LAST YEAR TO GUIDE US IN 2019: ERC Wishes You a Happy New Year

Greetings--- As we roll into 2019, here are three education stories worth revisiting and talking about with colleagues:

1- Teachers Leaving the Profession at Record Rates

One of the things ERC does regularly is to facilitate school-based “new teacher groups”. They’ve gotten high praise from principals and from participants. We’ve been around and have learned to pay attention to the issues surrounding the attrition of young teachers. We see groups like these as a critical investment. Disturbingly high percentages of educators leave the profession after a brief foray, especially in poorer schools and low-performing settings, and despite a major financial investment in a teaching degree. We base our approach to working with new teachers on the fact that many people leave teaching not because they can’t master the technical aspects – organizing content, planning lessons, using computer programs, etc. but because of isolation and loneliness, on-going anxiety, lack of professional support, and the amount of time and emotional energy consumed by just showing up every day for school. We’ve also noticed over the past 4-5 years more complaints about the grind of getting scores up, a focus on trivial results over more engaging teaching, a relentless march through textbooks and standards to keep pace with demands for “coverage”, and the associated impingement on creativity that led many to consider the classroom to begin with.

 Now we can add meager pay and competing opportunities to that list:

 Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

2-Facebook is not our friend

My instincts always made me leery of Summit Learning. Purchasing that platform seemed too much like a capitulation, an acknowledgement that a school can’t organize its curriculum, design lessons to connect with and motivate students and spark curiosity, or function as a “living system” with the capacity to recognize and address its own shortcomings. The Summit educators I met were largely unable to cite a theory of action, explain their role in making critical decisions about student learning, or comment on how the Summit approach fostered professional collegiality (remembering that adult learning and collaboration are the #1 predictors of a high-functioning organization). I attended Summit events where a common answer to any serious question about teaching and learning was, “oh, just have the students click here”. I also heard thoughtful educators rue the program’s reliance on cartoons and videos to explain and/or teach skills and a trivialization of serious historical and contemporary issues of class, race, gender, and equity.

I wasn’t surprised last year when more reports began to surface about students and families who had those and other issues with the Facebook-backed, Silicon Valley incursion into classrooms. Designed by pseudo-educators to make a buck and expand customer base, its unsavory aroma began to spread. Here's one story, and we think it’s cool that NYC’s Urban Academy, a public high-school bastion of rigorous, inquiry-based teaching and learning and attention to issues of social justice was one of the schools whose students led the way.

Students protest Zuckerberg-backed digital learning program and ask him: ‘What gives you this right?’

3-We Knew It All Along: More Pressure is Not a Solution

 Sadly, but predictably, the “School Turnaround” effort has largely been a costly failure. Few schools have ever turned around, and those that did had short-lived, marginal improvement. Policy-makers under duress, living apart from the reality of schools, have too often tried to address the wrong problems. An emphasis on technical fixes and programs to raise scores, many delivered as part of the proliferation of “school management” organizations (for both charter and traditional public schools), combined with low district capacity to identify and address root causes to make the turnaround approach a major loser for schools and taxpayers (but a boondoggle for “providers” --see Meyers and VanGronigen’s So Many Educational Service Providers, So Little Evidence.) This retrospective look raises questions about whether the meager gains were worth the political controversy, and the educational costs of putting a greater focus on test scores:

Pressuring schools to raise test scores got diminishing returns, new study of No Child Left Behind finds

Looking Ahead

Front-line educators have work to do. We have to do our homework and we need to know our history. We have to ask harder questions, and commit to engage the pubic on the issues that matter to us and to our students and families.

Here’s to a healthy and rewarding 2019.

Larry Myatt and Wayne Ogden, Co-Founders

Education Resources Consortium

EdHistory 101 Project- Volume 2- December 2018- Our Industrial Legacy

Why do schedules, bells and teaching routines in our schools feel so machine-like and industrial? So relentless and repetitive? It’s not by accident. And it’s certainly not good for learning. In this edition of our EdHistory 101 Project, we look back at the roots of some of the unhelpful correlations among time, learning and subject matter that persist today.

One summer a few years back, at a shoreline vacation spot bookstore, I picked up a volume called Six Lives, Six Deaths. The book related the lives, and as the title suggests the manners of ritual death of six notable figures in Japanese history. As the book unfolds and relates stories from the 19th century, it so happens that a favored practice in a late-1800’s, “newly-opened”, Meiji Japan was to send promising military men abroad for study in Germany, England, France, and the United States. Notably these were the world’s major coal-powers, and the goal of these study tours was to keep abreast of exploding Western developments in science and technology.

At that point in time, the accelerating industrial revolution was advancing into new frontiers, including an area that became known as “management science” -the detailed study of work and factory production.

In the first half of the 19th century the requirements for precision in the finishing of machine parts increased sharply as steam engines spread and machine-building developed. This brought about the rapid development of industrial measurement technology. The works of Carl Gauss, who had developed the  method of “least squares”  and  the “absolute  system of units” (CGSE), became foundational. New principles and theories abounded, and the field of metrology was established, including the metric system, to insure uniformity of scientific research and production.

As the new field of management science matured, it quickly developed its own canon and lore, ascending into prominence in the burgeoning world of capitalism. Attention turned to how newly-recognized “improvement principles” in industrial settings (i.e. factories) might be applied to other important dimensions of a nation’s growth and development. Industrial technology science was most often applied first to a nation’s military infrastructure, but then its principles began to branch out to other aspects of public works and government services. It seemed that wherever the Japanese visitors travelled a consistent component in the quest to create a secure, wealthy and high-functioning state was the application of “measurement technology”.

In America, concepts from this field soon began to impact the design of a new wave of larger and more uniform public schools, beginning by impacting the beliefs and practices of the educational administrations that shaped and tended schooling “for the masses”. Reading reports and records from that time period concerning the nature of those “scientific” developments I was struck by their potent impact on end-of-19th century thinking about school.

At the turn of the 20th century powerful metrological institutions were founded in industrially-developed countries where their technologies swiftly meshed with emerging knowledge bases in other fields. Some contemporary educational graduate courses (I hope) still spend time on the impact of thinking from Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) on the organization of our work force, and later, on our schools. He was convinced that with study, observation and analysis -and the application of new concepts in measurement science- the "one best way" to do things in almost any arena could be discovered.

Taylor is perhaps most remembered for his stopwatch time study, the findings of which combined with motion studies (now able to be captured on film for analysis) to become the larger field of “time and motion study”.  Just as with factory machines, he could break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute!  One of his most famous studies involved shovels. Taylor observed laborers shoveling varying weights with the same size shovel. After analysis, Taylor concluded that the shovel load with which “a first class man would do his biggest day’s work” was 21½ lb., and therefore fabricators could design shovels that, for each material , would scoop up exactly that amount.

At this point, it’s worth noting that among Taylor’s aficionados were Elwood Cubberley –arguably the most influential figure in shaping the early 20th century’s school routines and organization (Link to EdProject 101) Cubberley as well as 1930’s-40’s Soviet economists who built much of their social-industrial planning on Taylor’s  ideas and studies. In America, Cubberley, citing the threat from other nations with competing philosophies and economies (and armies), drilled home the ideas of schools as “factories where the raw materials can be shaped to meet the various demands of life”, institutions that demanded “efficiency in all endeavors”.

The extension of that thinking among school-designing policy makers was to use the schools as a “grading” device, so that the top 10% of school performers would become our leaders –the bankers, professors, statesmen, generals, inventors and entrepreneurs – and the rest would be directed where they were “suited”, a paradigm that, despite our rhetoric,  exists today. Other distinct hallmarks of that historic intersection of schooling, capitalism and industry remain largely without examination, such as the “report card” which mimics quarterly reports of production, profit and loss, and stock value to boards and shareholders, and which resembles an accountant’s ledger to quantify “learning” and behavior. Others include the calculation of grade-point averages and the reporting of “class rank”, suggesting the social “class” within which one is likely to fit.

So, there it was, and so it remains. The result of that era’s machine-age thinking was the solidification of an industrial model school, which, as intended, remains separate and apart from daily life, and as Peter Senge articulately pointed out in Schools That Learn, poses the problems which students, families and teachers struggle with to this day. Beliefs from that era include that knowledge is fragmented and arises in separate, distinct categories; that the school should therefore be broken into “pieces” managed by specialists; that there are smart, fast kids and slower, not-smart kids, and when the machine moves forward some students will lag, others fall to the side and require some sort of label addressing their inability or difference. The list goes on, but the upshot of these beliefs is that every day secondary teachers face the impossible task
of addressing dozens of learners in hour-long settings, and consequently, many learners and
their families struggle to fit into a system that is built to impede “fitting in” and a degree of
success for all.

And the brilliant Yale psychologist Seymour Sarason pointed out, the system can degrade the motives and performance of teachers as well. (The Culture of School and the Problem of Change, Sarason, 1996) He writes convincingly that, despite their proximity to children, most educators work largely alone the vast majority of the time, and too many can experience a kind of professional isolation and loneliness. Many suffer the negative effects of prolonged, relentless routine and repetition, similar to those of assembly line workers. Others lose faith by internalizing some of the impact of the failure and “buy-out” they see with many learners, year after year.
As a consultant to scores of schools, these are symptoms that are all too common but seldom discussed, even surprisingly, by groups that represent our teaching corps.

As we close out 2018, growing student disinterest in what we offer as classroom learning is increasingly well-documented. Two decades of flat achievement and our inability to move beyond repeating the same list of failed strategies ought to lead us to look more deeply at the model, and ought to be disturbing enough to make those who guide our policies decide to revisit the 19th-century “science” that has given us the schools we have.

At the very least, we ought to know where these lingering ideas come from.

Larry Myatt, Co-Founder

Now! A More Useful and Engaging Curriculum Framework

We're really excited about some new curriculum thinking that holds huge potential for kids and schools. Here's how we got here.

The first time I got really provoked about curriculum issues was when Coalition of Essential Schools Founder Theodore Sizer visited our school in the early 90’s. He spent most of a day and seemed to have had a great visit, roaming around the school on his own for several hours, asking students about their experiences. On his way out, after a few glowing remarks about the climate, he asked, with a curious look, “You know, schools are funny. I wonder why we’ve decided to offer American History in the morning, but American Literature in the afternoon?” He asked it lightly, in a tone that suggested he wanted me to think on it more than he wanted an answer. That would be Ted.

As a busy high school principal, I didn’t give it a whole lot more thought that day, but it came back to me that evening, and again the next day. That simple question from Ted led to weeks, and ultimately years of thinking about how we order things, how, in Jal Mehta’s words from The Allure of Order, we attempt to “rationalize” human learning and school behaviors. Ongoing deliberation on his question led our school to move eagerly to a Humanities format that included those two traditional fields, or “classes”, that Ted mentioned, but also social sciences, music, art and design, themes re-cast in deep exploration of issues that matter to us all, that go beyond simple notions of “inter-disciplinary”.

A decade later, I, like 15 million other viewers, chuckled and nodded through Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk- “do schools kill creativity?” Of course, they do. We know that. They are meant to instill conformity instead. But in his delightful skewering of our industrial model, he not only reminds us that the traditional curriculum is wildly unhelpful, he traces its origins to the desires of late 19th century policy makers to prepare a small percentage of learners for academia and the professorship, another small batch, the would-be doctors, lawyers and generals, and the rest for work and various levels of drudgery.

So began my long road of nagging doubts about the effectiveness of the traditional “math, science, history and English” line-up. My experiences as high school principal, college professor, school coach and consultant repeatedly unmasked school as limiting and often discouraging. At each stop along the way I was reminded me that people crave connections to their own “mysteries”, want to ask their own questions and chase big ideas, to find out more about things that really matter, not bounce around each day in a world carved into four or five thin slices.

In agreement, and likely somewhat out of pity, a good friend, the late and great Ron Wolk, founder of Education Week (he was an early and persistent Jiminy Cricket of our disappointing “standards” movement) urged me to read Marion Brady’s work. Brady’s rich library of thinking on curriculum and standards added perspective and substance to my own from-the-trenches critique. See link.

That talk with Ron, who had his own rich legacy, inspired me to put my mind in a more focused way to contributing to school redesign. Serious redesign. The kind we imagined with Ted in the early 90’s. Not the silver bullets we’ve seen come, go, and repeat themselves --mastery learning, “PBL”, “blended” learning, competency-based instruction. They’re helpful but insufficient, adaptive approaches that accept most of the current “arrangements” of school. Our schools need the kind of redesign that doesn’t skirt the core issues and problems of our school “architecture”. I wanted to surface the hurtful impact of our industrial approach to school on learners and families, issues such as the false correlations between time and learning, the smothering limitations imposed by age-alike cohorts and overly simplistic cognitive and social/emotional development paradigms, reductive concepts of the locus of learning, and above all, the CURRICULUM. The curriculum that’s like carbon monoxide, that puts us to sleep without our knowing. A curriculum whose origins we can’t cite, that seems to have no agreed-upon aim or over-arching purpose and disregards the seamlessness of human perception. As Brady points out, our traditional curriculum thinking "accepts short-term recall rather than logic to access our memory banks, has few criteria for determining the relative importance of what' being taught, relates only occasionally to real-world experience, and fails to encourage creative thought".

I had a breakthrough moment in 2013. I had the good fortune to read a short yet especially thoughtful article, “Synergies”, by G. Wayne Clough, then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. His insights in to the urgency of organizing human thinking in a collective effort moved and excited me just as they had inspired his colleagues and collaborators at the Smithsonian. Finally, here was a way of making sense of our intellectual efforts, our potential as social and thinking creatures, and doing so in a way to make for a better planet and a better “civilization”.  See link.

The Grand Challenges presented themselves immediately to me as a framework for re-igniting the passion and curiosity kids bring to the early grades but which are mainly lost as they learn to conform and to please, solving predetermined puzzles, a framework that can help us dig out from under the glut of competencies, do-now's, etc. that no one wants to come to grips with, but which is link here to Gallop poll putting kids to sleep.

Over the past two years, my ERC colleague Katrina Kennett and I and a small but growing number of teachers and schools we work with are helping us to deepen our understanding of the potential of The Grand Challenges. We’ve developed powerful visual provocations and entry events that correlate to the Grand Challenge topics and issues, as well as new tools to organize and expand the learning environment. We have imagined a unique learning landscape and developed a glossary of terms that explain those new structures and practices. Our “New Architecture of Learning” includes the elements of an ecology that can sustain more robust learning and activate powerful affinities among people, places and ideas, in the spirit of the original Grand Challenges.

Along the way, we’ve also learned that dissatisfaction with the traditional curriculum is not unique to us, is quite long-standing and comes from a wide variety of historical figures and intellectual fields. Link here. 

This new collective energy gives us increasing hope that people can begin to slowly put aside our tired approach to “curriculum” and replace it with explorations and activities that use the Grand Challenges as a framework for learning, activities that erase some of the unhelpful boundaries and structures that inhibit passionate learning. Whether you use it in an existing unit of study, as a larger scaffold, as an alternating curriculum, or as your basic framework, you’re helping us move the dial.

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White Mountains Regional HS STEAM Innovation Academy

So, if you’re ready, here’s the Grand Challenges “primer” you’ve been asking for, link below. Check it out. Imagine new, place-based, YES IN MY BACKYARD additions to the Challenges that resonate where you are and far beyond. Join our network, connect with others and help us move forward to meet the needs of our people and planet! Link here to see primer.

Serious School Redesign: ERC Efforts Moving Forward

We’re proud to announce that an ERC-led team has been selected to participate in the upcoming Mass Ideas Summer School Design Studio, a three-day working session for teams that want help to create innovative school models (whole-school redesign or new school design). The experience is intended to support teams to apply key levers for high-quality, innovative learning design and develop action plans for continued work following the event.  According to their website, Mass IDEAS “supports bold education thinkers across the Commonwealth to turn their ideas for reimagining school into reality, and with interest in any Massachusetts public school governance options”.

The team consists of ERC Co-Founders Wayne Ogden and Larry Myatt  joined by community partner Michael Dawson of Innovators for Purpose (iFp), strategy advisor Sharon Lloyd Clark, and Kristina Lamour Sansone of Lesley University, College of Art and Design who brings graphic design for learning expertise. Dr. Katrina Kennett, ERC Consulting Practitioner for Technology and Professional Learning, will join the team as needed moving forward.

Many of the ERC team’s ideas are guided by redesign and inquiry efforts well under way at White Mountains Regional High School and Manchester’s McLaughlin Middle School, through a STEM partnership with STEAM-Ahead NH. Both schools are moving ahead with a strikingly different approach to organizing for learning, adopting a novel framework and practices that the ERC Design Team will seek to refine in the Summer Design Studio. ERC in particular is looking for community collaborators seeking more inclusive, high-performing STEM programming and who are excited about new designs to achieve that.

Beginning in 2020, Mass Ideas will offer implementation grants for school teams who are ready to launch their designs. Mass IDEAS is part of an initiative launched by Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC). Since its founding, NGLC has grown to include a burgeoning group of organizational and philanthropic partners who are actively expanding the adoption of innovations that completely reimagine K–12 in their regional communities and nationally. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Broad Foundation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Oak Foundation, and the Barr Foundation are among the key funders.

The ERC group has built its approach around “six big ideas”:

1-the equity challenge: high-quality opportunities for learning are distributed unevenly in Massachusetts (and elsewhere); achievement is unacceptably low in many schools

2-a core challenge in secondary schools is student disinterest in classroom learning; loss of curiosity, choice and engagement explain flat achievement

3-the traditional curriculum is increasingly problematic; the allotment of time, adult roles, assessment schema, student groupings and pedagogy that accommodate it prevent and undermine truly “student-centered”, personalized learning

4-a more engaging curriculum framework is available

5-re-ordering key elements of learning will yield greater student engagement and achievement

• start with curiosity and thrill

• hands-on, experiential activities and multiple inquiry efforts propel learning

• learning with generative, big questions, and the uninhibited pursuit of learners’ “mysteries"

• emphasize skills in a “learning team” context

• unpack and negotiate a more suitable and generative place for standards

6- a new, comprehensive learning management framework is required and is part of our design

For more information on the ERC Redesign and Grand Challenges efforts, please email wayne.ogden@gmail.com.

White Mountains Students Join to Help Bees Prosper

In this time of peril and hope for our global bee population, we can’t help but say that one of our ERC Grand Challenges Network schools is creating quite a buzz! The Spartan STEAM Innovation Academy (SSIA) at White Mountains Regional High School, teaming with the school’s Agricultural Science program, recently was awarded a Whole Foods BEE-cause Grant.   

Things began to hum this past winter, when a White Mountains High School team consisting of plant science and horticulture specialist Rick Grima, SSIA Teacher Leader Melissa Jellison, and science and math specialist Daniel Hubacz joined a bee-keeping workshop at the Rocks Estate in Bethlehem, NH, teaming with White Mountain Apiary and local Beekeeper Janice Mercieri as a Bee Mentor. Beekeeping books, bee-made products, and tools for the hive came from the Savannah Bee Company as a part of the Whole Foods grant through which the program’s students will become co-creators and eventual owners of an on-going project to bring their winged friends to White Mountains Regional High School in New Hampshire’s North Country. Once they have studied where bees are happiest, they will find a permanent and suitable location, measure and clear the land, build the facility, and with their new state-of-the-art bee suits, will activate two new hives to host a bee population provided by the White Mountain Apiary. The goal is to ultimately host 40,000 honey bees. 

Using the Grand Challenges as a framework for exploring past, present, and future challenges to planet Earth, STEAM Innovation Academy students are in hot pursuit of scholarly, experiential ways to understand where bees fit in sustaining our biodiverse planet. See ERC's Grand Challenges Network link here. WMRHS is poised to become the first and only school in New Hampshire to have and keep bees, beginning with a summer work program to maintain the hive when school is out, track bee health and supervise honey production. Grima, who splits duties with SSIA and agriculture sciences, and is one of the Bee program founders told us, “By September we should be in great shape to utilize the hive regularly with students taking over all aspects of the maintenance and monitoring.”

For staff and partners, two chunky Grand Challenge-related learning objectives sit at the heart of all this Bee commotion:

• Improving understanding of and access to the biology and natural history of the species, their evolutionary and ecological place in global ecosystems, and the processes responsible for population declines and extinction.
• Developing concepts, theories, tools, and models that contribute directly to halting biodiversity loss, managing species and their habitats, restoring ecosystems, and mitigating threats to the environment.

Scholarly standards such as these are high, but the kids themselves are just raring to get out there and get with the bees. Front office staff and passing teachers get a kick of Grima and his students in bee suits with bright orange "Bee Buckets" as they had out each morning like clockwork. As word spreads, students have already begun to research and develop products at school and in “home food labs” with the beeswax scraped from the first sampling of the frames, including lip balms flavored, so far, with eucalyptus and lemongrass.

As hoped for, curious community helpers are materializing. Geoff Gaddapee, manager of a local hardware store and a beekeeper himself, provides support, hardware and tools and NH Fish and Game biologist Andrew Timmins visits to work with students and monitor bear activity around the hives. Each hive is expected to produce around 300 lbs. of honey every year, so students will suggest unique labels, flyers and develop marketing and advertising plans for honey sales, all of which will underwrite the on-going hive operations. Popular WMRHS Culinary Arts Chef Matt Holland hopes to utilize the homegrown honey in as many recipes as he can.

Next fall SSIA will kick-off with a survival unit that includes food growing as part of living off the land. The math department will support student team projects revolving on population estimates, calculating population growth in the hive each day, and using scales to track the weight of the hive as the bees build and work inside. Down-the-road plans include working with the local Cooperative Extension and USDA office to create a SSIA Bee-related website, a global resource hub with updated-daily information about local bee keeping, bee projects, bee health and science, explorations of pesticide effect and attempts to rejuvenate bees world-wide. NH Fish and Game could possibly add a link on their site to be managed by SSIA student teams. Although SSIA generally only hosts visitors once a month, staff are arranging for the Lancaster and Whitefield Elementary STEAM programs to visit periodically and work with high school student mentors on several projects across the school year.

All in all, its an exciting time for the Spartan Steam innovation Academy which expanded from its original two-year STEAM-Ahead program, with more students and staff and a range of new learning activities, project teams, inquiry and learning management tools. Principal Michael Berry has been a champion in supporting the effort to create a culture of intense and engaging student learning through greater collaboration among teachers and, with support from ERC, innovative practices in inquiry learning. His motto of more success for more students is increasingly becoming a reality as the school’s reputation grows and continues to attract new, motivated, high-quality professionals to the school.

Keep your eyes and ears open for more news from NH’s newest bee keepers! For more information on the bees and/or SSIA contact jlabounty@sau36.org

School Shootings: Things Overheard

In schools that I visit, here are some things I’ve heard teachers saying:

•  I try not to, but I’ve had to think of how I would respond if I heard gunfire down the hall
•  my wife/husband says good-bye to me differently now each morning
• I have students who don’t want to leave my side
• teachers have speculated about which might be the students who would come after them
• students have been asking me if I want to carry a weapon; if I say “no” I wonder does that mean they think they can’t count on me?
• we say our school perimeter has been “hardened” but in casual conversation we’ve ID’d three easy ways to get into the facility
• where would I keep a gun?
• in the cafeteria, I overheard kids predicting which of their peers is that kind of dangerous
• I never dreamed of discussions like these in my school
• I had “active shooter” training in my undergraduate teacher education program, so its not a new idea to me
• if first responders swarm our school and we have multiple people with multiple weapons, who are they going to target?

Spending a lot of time in many different schools, it’s been impossible to avoid the myriad feelings and emotions brought to the surface by the Florida (and other) school shootings. The reactions have been surprising in their breadth, sobering, moving, alarming, and, frankly, new and unanticipated to a veteran educator who did NOT have to confront such issues while leading my school.

But, on the positive side,  here's a huge reason I believe in our kids and in K-12 schools. Check out this video. Go to link.

Dr. Gil Noam, PEAR founder,  speaking at Albuquerque Sign Language Academy

Finally, for the past four years, I’ve appreciated being a working partner of and  of and with the Partnerships in Education and Resilience (PEAR) Institute. Their work helping schools to know young people is more important than ever. PEAR Founder, Dr. Gil Noam, has responded with this thoughtful piece and I think it’s a critically important perspective. Go to link.

Stay safe.

Dr. Larry Myatt

Co-Founder

Treating Students with Dignity

This past August I had the pleasure of attending some professional development activities organized and presented by educators within the Central Falls, Rhode Island school district. One workshop was being presented by David Upegui, a science teacher whom I knew from my days consulting in the district years ago.

David is a big thinker with a huge heart, always active doing things for young people and the community, see link. He’s well-known in the state, see link and I wanted to make sure I took the opportunity to see what he was up to, what he was saying of late.

His workshop was full of great ideas and his unique provocations. It reminded me of how much work we have to do to nourish the spirit of young people. And how important it is, each and every day, to remember the powerful role we have as educators in treating students with dignity. I asked David to recap his workshop in this following essay.

 Larry Myatt
Co-Founder
Education Resources Consortium

David Upegui

It so happened that I grew up and went to school in the most economically disadvantaged city in Rhode Island. Even more than I realized at the time, I was in dire need of guidance, support, academic discipline and most importantly, a sense that I mattered, that I had a future. I was among the few and the fortunate to find that one special teacher, one that understood how that idea of agency would determine my future.

Now, as a teacher in my very same alma mater, I see it as my turn. I work as diligently as I can with a new generation of students, trying to provide for them that same sense of agency that freed me from economic -and intellectual- poverty. I had left my job as a researcher at an Ivy League university in hopes of igniting minds, in that very same place I had once sat as a student.

My son was born with an extra chromosome in each of his cells. Life with and learning from a young person with Down Syndrome is not what I had expected when I became a parent, but my son has taught me more than I learned in any class. My work became making sure that he would be treated fairly, with equanimity, and that he would have positive school experiences. It reminded me in the most powerful way of the power of each human being, and the fundamental belief that ALL children can and should learn. That’s what drives my teaching now.

So how do we do our best as educators, every day, to ensure that all our students are empowered and treated with that kind of dignity? Here is a short list of things I try to do that have shown positive results for my students --simple but important things—some having to do with the environment in my classroom and others more specially about my content teaching.

I call students by their last name. As simple as this may sound, this enables all of us to address each other with respect. When some students first hear me say “Ms. Rodriguez” or “Mr. Hernandez”, they are confused – it’s new to them. But I tell them that I try to look beyond their current status, that I see them as significant right now, that they will become even more important as they grow in our community.

I greet all students as they come in to the classroom. As an American-Latino, salutations and recognition of the other person were of importance growing up in my household. It may seem like a small gesture, but a smile and a hardy hello can have a profound impact. Even though I teach students that are in their final years of high school, I still begin each class with a “good morning/afternoon” and I expect the whole class to repeat it – it has become our custom. 

Being prepared with lesson plans and materials. This may seem like a no-brainer, but one of the simplest ways to show respect to the students is by being prepared for class. When we are prepared we send subtle messages that let our students know that we are thinking about them outside of class. When we are not, that resonates as “he doesn’t take us seriously”.

Discuss the “rules” for all (including teacher). The rules that I have settled on are very simple: be prepared, be present and be respectful. They apply to everyone in the room, including me (and this is stated). It’s our way of agreeing on how we can be at our best with each other as we learn.

Introduce and value student questions. As a way to demonstrate the importance of questioning, I try to acknowledge and reward “good” questions. I have to make time for them, to go with the moment of curiosity. Over time students begin to notice the significance of questions and provide each other with encouragement.

Play music. This may seem trivial, but music can have a great effect on the culture of the classroom. I select playlists that not only have baroque musicians (studies have demonstrated the effect of this type of music on learning) but also include music that represent the wide variety of background my students bring. For example, I may play Sara Tavares or Mayra Andrade (both Cape Verdean), or Carlos Vives and Pedrito Fernandez (Latinos) and follow that with Air Supply, Olafur Arnalds, and Bach.

Regular communications. Some of these exchanges may be in-person or email, and regardless of method, communicating with students about their work, their academic performance, their strengths/weaknesses, dreams and plans, enables students to feel valued and important.

Explicit democratic voicing. I tell my students not to believe anything and everything that people say (even me!), unless evidence and data are provided. In other words, I want my students learn to be skeptical of “beliefs” and begin to recognize that their voice and opinions matter.

Bring in outsiders to the classroom/bring the classroom outside. Our classroom has many visitors each year. Any given week may include visits from college professors, nurses/physicians, graduates of the school, engineers, a swami (to teach the physiological effects of meditation on the body), or scientists. When visitors spend time with my students, everyone wins. My students begin to recognize that there is a larger world that wants them to succeed. And the visitors are inspired by the potential my students hold. Also, I try to take my students out of the classroom as much as possible – even it is just around the block – they are part of a greater community.

Storytelling/circle time. As unusual as this sounds, I hold “circle time” with my seniors in high school. I stop the action and call my students to bring up their lab stools and sit around a circle so we can all see each other. This works for many reasons including the fact that storytelling is the oldest form of communication and education (as well as being able to see who has their cell phone out). The stories I tell may include specific stories about science like the stories of Rosalyn Franklin, Lynn Margulis, Michael Faraday or Alhazen; stories which speak about perseverance, overcoming obstacles and using curiosity as an empowerment tool. Other stories may be my personal experiences or just about inspiring people such as Wilma Rudolph or Michael Jordan. Regardless, stories connect us as humans.

Specific lessons that address liberation. A powerful examples is what we call “race”. I introduce the science underlying that notion. Skin coloration has historically been used to segregate and discriminate people, but what if we take a look at the data of ultra-violet radiation (UVB) and human skin pigmentation patterns? In this light, students begin to see that skin coloration is based on where our closets ancestors lived: the closer to the equator, the more skin pigmentation they had (as a natural protection from damaging sun rays). Once students appreciate that natural variation, they can begin to question why skin pigmentation was erroneously connected to human capacity. My students leave my class knowing that we are in fact only one human species (otherwise we could not successfully breed and have viable offspring). Undoubtedly, there are tons of lessons in all content areas that can be developed, delivered and shared with our students – we just need to consider them as what they truly are: the future stewards of the earth.

What we do as educators is never trivial. In front of us each day are the future problem-solvers of the world and it is up to us to enable them to recognize their great potential. We have more power than we recognize, and we are either part of the problem or the solution.

A Better Approach to STEM - Interview Part II

We’re really proud of the work our colleague Larry Myatt has done at Manchester New Hampshire’s West High School. Despite a proud history in the Queen City, the school has struggled with declining achievement and one of the state’s highest drop-out rates. It has all the challenges that face many kindred urban schools and communities. Yet, of, late some truly bright spots have emerged. The school’s fledgling STEAM (STEM+) initiative was recently lauded in a University of New Hampshire evaluation link and West was recently awarded a Barr Foundation grant for initial redesign efforts. Link here. 

STEAM Ahead NH Engineering Lab

In an era of flat achievement and declining student engagement, Larry’s work with West High School’s STEAM initiative has shown what is possible --with committed teachers, leadership, resources, and importantly, different thinking about the systems, culture and practices. We wanted to talk with him about it.

Here is Part Two of that interview

--Wayne Ogden and Katrina Kennett

WO- The last time we spoke you were talking about flat results for STEM programming in general. What did you mean by that?

LM- Well, let me say first that I appreciate STEM initiatives. They provide funding and energy when money is scarce and I especially like it because it tends to bring business and industry players to the table, and they can make things happen in ways that school districts, higher education and state departments of educations can’t. So, STEM for me holds a lot more promise than we currently expect from it and push for.

Having said that, I was struck by a detailed Wall Street Journal article a few year ago, and subsequent research that pointed out that after a decade or more of substantial STEM investment in schools, the number of students pursuing degrees- at the undergrad, masters and doctoral levels- had barely changed.  Still more men than women and still fewer candidates of color, but overall, no increased interest in entering fields where science and math are building blocks.

WO- What do you make of that?

LM- Well, to me, on a more superficial level, we portray STEM as for geeky kids building robots and taking all advanced classes. And that’s unfortunate. I actually asked several people who work nearby in Kendall Square, a global tech mecca, what they think of when they think of STEM, and that’s pretty much what they said. Pocket protectors and super heavy backpacks, mostly limited to high achievers.  But I think that the problems that dissuade students from science and math go far deeper than that. I think the roots unquestionably go back to the student experience in middle and high school, where we have all the data mentioned in part one of this interview – greater disinterest in school learning, perceptions that what we ask them to in school is not relevant or meaningful in the long run, more novelty and exciting ideas available outside of school -culminating in the fact that the longer students are in school, the less enjoyable it becomes. Deborah Meier had a wonderful essay on that some time ago, “Why Kids Don’t Want to Be Well-Educated”. That’s a plausible but overlooked explanation for the flat NAEP scores, just one among several other indicators of low engagement.

KK- You mentioned a New Hampshire STEM study as well.

LM- Yes, that students surveyed in 8th grade are turning away from science because of how they’ve experienced it thus far and how they see it being offered in high school.

KK- What is it, do you think, that turns kids off?

LM- Well, first of all, the way we’ve come to think about and organize curriculum has little to do with the ways that we actually learn, or care to learn, the way the brain and motivation co-exist and inter-play. We’ve developed huge lists of “standards” and materials that portray a smooth and steady path to “knowledge”. We ask teachers to dole out little bytes of content and skills each day as some kind of linear, step-by-step exercise and expect students to care about them and be diligent in memorizing them.  What we really know is that learning starts when learners encounter something they wish to learn. And the student voice data suggests that the topics chosen by teachers (and hardly ever by young people) are of diminishing interest, and are taught in un-engaging ways.

KK- The other thing you’ve been saying regularly is that STEM initiatives cannot survive the industrial architecture of schools. Can you explain?

LM- Sure. If you’re asked to spend 50 minutes reading some Romeo and Juliet, then dash off to Algebra for 50 minutes, then on to the Civil War, a 25-minute lunch, then the water cycle or photosynthesis,   topped off by 50 minutes of Spanish or gym or health class, how interested and excited would WE be if that was our diet day after day? A colleague described the traditional curriculum alignment as being like carbon monoxide- its puts us to sleep without us knowing or even thinking about it. Who that you meet in a store or at the gym or the workplace can tell us why its organized and pursued this way? No one! It’s much more of an impediment that we realize, and helps to explain the epidemic of student disinterest.

Furthermore, it’s an impediment to pursuing big ideas and topics, to curiosity, creativity and passion for learning. Ideas in school come in fragmented form and themes are short-lived, truncated, dispensable. Things like “PBL” and thematic instruction are limited in their impact by where we see them able to fit in and how much time we can give them before we have to move on. Marion Brady has critiqued the traditional curriculum alignment quite articulately, by the way.

Getting back to school, as my friend Tony Monfiletto says, we have to find ways to put the thrill back into learning. “Erase the lines” has become a mantra -the lines between classes and courses, between themes and topics, the lines between in school and out of school.

KK- do you have ideas on how to do that?

LM- Sure. Its how we’ve made this progress at the school and how other schools we work with are beginning to think about what happens in the classroom. We’re flipping where the standards fit until further down the road in project design, and not only hoping for but managing and structuring in ways for students to do rigorous work, but work they care about. Diversity is natural, its good, it can be harnessed for the purposes of challenging intellectual work (Newmann). Everyone is reading, writing, curating, presenting, researching -all the standards are there and at a rigorous level. We just don’t start by telling the students what they should care about. And using things like Learning Murals (see link) brings colleagues and especially students into the design process.

Manchester West HS STEAM-Ahead staff members prepare Learning Murals for presentation to their colleagues

KK- It sounds like it requires a different kind of teaching.

LM- Yes, it’s a very different management schema than trying to move 20-30 kids down the road together in lock step but it finally flips the role of teacher from presenter, content expert, entertainer, chooser of topics and materials, to that of coach, connector, advocate, facilitator. Ultimately its more satisfying and more rewarding. That’s the change I mean when I talk about moving from a culture of teaching to a culture of learning. We evaluate successful teaching by focusing only on the adult as the agent and then some test scores down the road.

I prefer to assess quality learning by a focus on what and how students are doing, what they are passionate about and supported in pursuing. We’ve been overdue in making that distinction and supporting it with tools and routines for half a century now. We have those tools now, and a team of teachers working with teams of students can really begin to transcend some of the limitations imposed the traditional high school. Linda Chick at Manchester NH’s West High School STEAM Team says she now conducts “near-constant negotiations” with students and small teams, helping them to pursue the mysteries and passions they have, connections and extension, going deeper, to fuel projects that can last weeks and beyond. I love that word “mysteries” as Roger Martin posed it, the myriad different things that touch us and move us differently as individuals from childhood onward.  And again, now we have the tools and routines that help students learn to do that negotiation and pursuit with less and less provocation from adults and more confidence in their own learning. We can integrate technology regularly and smartly, with contextual uses, such as learning spreadsheet alongside water quality analysis or weather patterns, finally giving the term personalization some true meaning.

WO- How might that impact our thinking within the traditional “school architecture’ as you call it?

LM- Here’s one example. I recently asked a stellar group of thinkers that ERC convened to operationalize more robust school redesign and when I asked them how long a project should last, unanimously they answered, until the curiosity fades. Beautiful! That’s how it works for us and our mysteries. But that simple but brilliant thinking can’t survive when learning has to end with the bell, with the next topic, with the marking period, with the report card.

Another example is that if ninth-grade students are excited about and able to learn skills and content that might traditionally not be presented until “11th grade”, that’s going to mess with our rigid sense of scope and sequence –of who can learn what when. But what a great problem to have! What’s out there that only a 13 year old can learn, or only a 28 or 56 year old? This reliance on the old model of school is killing authentic interest in learning and we have been reluctant or unable, as innovation expert Clay Christensen said, to offer up new models of school.

WO- That’s a lot, but its powerful and positive. Any final thoughts about this?

LM- For sure. One is to bring higher education into these settings, sending new educators for year-long co-teaching with master teachers, moving the locus of “teacher training’ to the school. And not to do what they’ve always done in teacher development but to join in the new construct. Schools and teaching are going to change radically and this is the chance for the new generation of educators to get it right.

Next, my redesign Charrette colleagues reminded me forcefully that documentation is the best assessment. I knew that, of course, from Project Zero, from Reggio Emilia, from my teaching years, and my own children’s learning. But we lose sight of it in the torrent of more simplistic and mechanistic “instruments”. Archiving and curation, interviews, portfolios and presentations will show schools and communities how students are learning.

Fabrication Station

My last two: One, get the “A” for “arts” into STEM.  It’s the biggest piece my schools are missing right now. Student creations and performances of an artwork provide opportunities to clarify what students are (or aren’t) taking from STEM activities. They’re an on-ramp for learning. Designing, creating and interpretation offer high levels of critical thinking and help students to better understand concepts and ideas via a range of learning styles: visual-(learn through seeing), auditory-(learn through talking and listening), tactile -(learn through touch; psycho-motor) and kinesthetic (learn through doing and moving). Arts, technology and design should be integrated into all projects, supported by Humanities and integrated Math/Science as the curriculum pillars. It’s also a chance to finally get a math curriculum together that is meaningful and doesn’t turn students off.

Finally, we need the business community to dig in directly to schools, not through intermediaries. Their energy, brains and resources are critical, and they know by now that current education policies are unhelpful to developing their work force. We need them to help guide us, regularly, at the school level. Left to the traditional conveners, too often STEM investments are for more of the same, such as more AP courses for select students and teachers. Businesses make a difference. When I served at Brown University with Ted Sizer in the 1990’s, business folks were always at the table and investing in a big way, and they understood it would take research and re-design, multiple and diverse ways to re-think school. That was before they lined up with “think tank” policy makers for efforts such as Achieve and other reductive, top-down approaches to improving schools. We need to get them back at the table.

Businesses have a lot to gain from investing in STEAM. Communities as well. STEAM-Ahead NH is a great example of something that’s begun to grow in the ways I think are a model for the future. To me, this transformation is simply not that hard if we have the will. See link. I invite anyone who wants more and better from STEM investments to contact us. We can do better.

Dr. Larry Myatt, ERC Co-Founder

TREK—for more in our schools

 

To the ERC family, Christensen’s commentary is discouraging but unfortunately true. Not that there haven’t been attempts to do things differently, some in the past, others on-going --as someone said, the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.  For the most part, however, we somehow keep trying to get more “results” out of the same core design, as we ride the slack current of cultural and social ideas of school from yesteryear. But we’re increasingly aware that achievement remains flat nationally, most likely because students have been shown to be increasingly less interested in classroom learning than in the world beyond school. What we sense in school-based educators these days is a palpable recognition that we’re repeating ourselves.

As soon as you start thinking of kids as data points, you’re in trouble.
—Sir Ken Robinson

Complicated problems require complicated solutions –a building can’t be improved by paying attention to one pillar. The integration of important elements of redesign –along with active participation and deep understanding in the community-- is a science unto itself. How do we use the guideposts of learning science and human development?  The work is high-touch, scholarly, yet down-to-earth.

It’s uniquely human to want to pass down a replica of what we’ve experienced –to our kids, to the next generations.  Our instincts crave a common bond of experience, of ideas, of values. But we are helping build a world that’s around the bend, one beyond and different from our times, one beyond the bell curve. This is why the work of re-imagining school needs to happen with great care, in particular ways, and with the “whole village”. We have to believe that together we can build something smarter and more humane, engaging, rewarding, and memorable.

TREK

In the early days of the Coalition of Essential Schools, “Trek” spawned many of the great small schools that endure today. To Trek stood for a thoughtful community journey to perform what Theodore Sizer called “the most important educational task of our times:  to evolve the institutions and practices that assist learning”. People read and studied, debated, struggled toward helpful consensus and imagined schools that helped students learn to use their minds actively and well. They connected with small groups of other committed Trekkers. It was a recipe that worked exceedingly well –but that was 25 years ago.

At ERC, we’re convinced that the timing is right for people to TREK again, to gather and to commit to re-imagining what learning activities will best serve young people for a time we may not foresee clearly, but which our children will experience.

These communal learning journeys require support –the work is high-touch, high-skill. The vision and change leadership required to manage the feelings and ideas attached to the social, cultural and intellectual elements of our schools is exacting. If you’re game, we’ll introduce you to skilled facilitators, technology, and leadership coaches –people who know schools as well as they know their individual arts. We offer public engagement support and experienced scenario and school redesign thinkers. We’ll help you seek funds and resources. We’ll connect you deeply with other schools and thinkers who will provoke you, amplify your thinking and serve as critical friends to your efforts.

If you have the will to assemble a TREK team – let’s get started! For more information or to begin a TREK yourself, email today: larry@educationresourcesconsortium.org today!   

Please note: CES schools— if you feel it’s time to re-invent yourselves, you’re especially welcomed! Please email us about our plans for supporting TREK in CES schools.

Thanks,

Larry Myatt

Co-Founder, ERC

A different brand of STEM brings new life, new hope to an urban high school

We’re really proud of the work our colleague Larry Myatt has done at Manchester New Hampshire’s West High School. Despite a proud history in the Queen City, the school has struggled with declining achievement and one of the state’s highest drop-out rates. It has all the challenges that face many kindred urban schools and communities. Yet, of, late some truly bright spots have emerged. The school’s fledgling STEAM (STEM+) initiative was recently lauded in a University of New Hampshire evaluation link and West was recently awarded a Barr Foundation grant for initial redesign efforts. Link here. 

In an  era of flat achievement and declining student engagement, Larry’s work with West High School’s STEAM initiative has shown what is possible --with committed teachers, leadership,  resources,  and importantly, different thinking about the systems, culture and practices. We wanted to talk with him about it.

--Wayne Ogden and Katrina Kennett

WO- Larry, you knew West High School from an I3 grant effort several years ago. What’s happening now that people are shining a light on new, positive developments?

LM- There are some good achievement results and qualitative hints of growing confidence in an ability to change and grow. The secret sauce would begin with leadership at the building and teacher level, accompanied by both a team and leadership culture of willingness to let go of old practices and beliefs. Add to that an energetic fund-raiser and convener –Bob Baines of STEAM-AheadNH, the city’s former Mayor- and at the center, some great young people –the students- who are clearly responding to a more appealing and authentic kind of learning.

KK- How did it get started for you three years ago?

LM- Chris Motika had recently been named the new principal of West at the time STEAM-Ahead was looking for a home. He knew my work from the I3 grant and I knew him to be a thoughtful guy. Based on my prior experiences at the school, I wasn’t sure that promising work could take root in the building but I agreed to an initial session. 

KK- What convinced you to sign on?

LM- For one, I learned that at the outset Chris Motika had been adamant that the program be open to any and all 9th graders, not limited by grades or recommendations as so many STEM programs are. That caught my eye and was a sign of the right kind of against-the-grain leadership. Bob Baines, on the STEAM end of things, got it as well. So I agreed to a first 2-day session and I encountered an interesting mix of younger and mid-career teachers who were energetic, open-minded and anxious to be part of a highly-collaborative team. They were smart and interesting adults, the kind that kids respond to. Voila.

WO- What was the essence of your initial work?

LM- Exploring the cognitive dissonance on the team – how dissatisfied they were, are, with “traditional teaching” as defined by what’s it’s become over the last 15 years.  In conversation we shared a number of things we had all seen that didn’t work but kept reappearing on the menu for them to implement. We looked at exemplars of traditional practices versus more engaging inquiry learning. And I also asked a lot of questions about what they were looking for –as individuals- in a new professional experience that they could largely define. What was their skin in the game, as they say.

Key to those first two days was also to get a sense of how much support and latitude (i.e. trust) Chris could provide for their efforts - which turned out to be a good deal. Those “pioneer teachers” brought will and commitment, and a stout talent level, to make good on that trust. We began pretty quickly to agree to let go of things –as a team-  that we knew got poor results and to replace them with sound practices emerging from a different orientation. And of course pushing hard on high levels of teamwork and collaboration to support their new work was key –and the team welcomed it .

WO- This is where our leadership lodestar Bill Bryan would chime in that a high degree of adult learning and teamwork usually correlates to high performance. That the psychological contract is strong.

LM- Yep.  And this is a case of him being right again. Leadership at all levels was a key to the launch and in the first year, and when, in year three Chris left for a new position. Fortunately, new principal Rick Dichard is not only equally committed but sees STEAM as a harbinger of what the entire school might look like in a re-imagined form.                                              

WO- You’re not necessarily the “STEM” type, am I right?

LM- You sure are. I had to do some homework. But I knew from my teaching principal days that one key element would be making the shift from a culture of teaching to a culture of learning. People haven’t thought a great deal about why that’s a critical re-orientation. We tend to give only second thoughts to what students will DO, but we’re almost maniacal about the granular behaviors of teachers, as evidenced by our evaluation rubrics and procedures. I’ve worked hard, along with both of you, to redefine and support the spread of more engaging practices, activities that require a different mindset and some different skills from our current ideas of what it is to be a good front-of-the-classroom teacher.

KK- Any other thing you had to dig in to as far as STEM goes?

LM- For sure. I looked at great STEM projects that provoke and inspire lots of different explorations,  solutions, research, designs, models, etc. -not the pursuit of one pre-determined outcome, but generative, suggestive frameworks that present students with “mysteries”, to use Roger Martin’s terminology – questions and ideas that appeal, that make you curious to know more, explore more.

The other thing I researched was how STEM efforts were faring regionally and nationally. There’s been over a decade of solid investment in STEM, but it turns out that results are not so good – nationally or regionally. Last year’s New Hampshire Charitable Fund report on STEM efforts in the state was consonant with outcomes in many other states – they found that students are turned off by the way they experience math and science, far too many of them by the end of middle school. The Wall Street Journal reported on the flat numbers of those entering STEM careers at every level. I saw the problem as starting earlier than that, and not being so much about the kids but what the school -and math and science-- have become. Tightening up what we already do in STEM is not an answer.

See Technical Challenge graphic here.

KK- You’ve identified other studies that talk about why kids are less motivated as they enter high school, right?

LM- Yes. And so much of it is about sitting and listening. When I was working in Rhode Island there was a local study of student experience in urban high schools, and those two words –“sitting” and “listening” came up all the time. 90 % of students said they found their classes uninteresting and unengaging. Words that hardly every appeared were “doing” or “making”.

It’s important to note that the class of 2016 was our first all-NCLB/standards-and-testing cohort. And guess what? Kids are saying they don’t enjoy school as much. Link  My mission along with the West STEAM team began, and remains, to put the thrill back into learning. And we’re just getting into the groove. The teachers have been open-minded, willing to try new things and highly collaborative, really refreshing and energizing to work with, and Rick Dichard as well.

WO- You’ve also drawn a fairly major conclusion about STEM efforts, correct?

LM- Yes, and I think it helps to explain why STEM interest is flat – it’s that STEM  can’t thrive in a traditional, comprehensive high school environment.  The experience is too fragmented, the learning activities too flat, and the architecture and programming too out of sync with what we know about learning and motivation. There are other, far more promising things we could be doing with STEM programming. I actually think that STEM -with an added “a” for arts and technology-  could be the Trojan Horse for the school redesign we’ve been saying we’ve wanted for almost 50 years but, as Clayton Christensen said, we haven’t done much about.

WO- So, you’ve agreed to a “part two” of this interview. and we’ll talk about that more specifically next time. As well as some things that the program is still striving for, right?

LM- Right you are and thanks for having me!

Dr. Larry Myatt, ERC Co-Founder

Stay tuned for our next e-newsletter-: Part Two - STEM as an engine for school redesign

Amy Biehl charter says grade makes no sense

Amy Biehl HS,  a familiar and cherished partner, offera a compelling argument for abandoning school report cards. Go here for more info. 

Summer in New Mexico’s Progressive Small School

Santa Fe plaza

I spent a good deal of time this summer in two of our “new” states –New Hampshire and New Mexico. (More on NH in an upcoming post)

I’ve had the good fortune to work in schools over recent years in The Land of Enchantment. New Mexico faces some stiff economic challenges and a department of education that has not been friendly to new ideas and diverse approaches, but I continue to find schools and networks that studiously embrace all learners, reach out into the community and strive to learn from each other.

One of my first summer stops was Amy Biehl HS in Albuquerque, a school I had collaborated with in its early years. The school is located in the city’s old Federal Court House in a gorgeously restored setting. Humanities teacher Frank McCullough is now the school’s leader, and along with Dean of Students, Mark O’Gawa, I had a chance to work with their very skilled Student Support Team. Over a decade ago, the Amy Biehl SST offered an early model of how to bring social-emotional support out from behind the counseling curtain and share ideas and practices school-wide. We spent a full day taking stock of the team’s role in a very mature school, sorting through challenges and assets, and identifying milestones through some appreciative inquiry.

Amy Biehl HS Indaba Hall

Next, my travels took me to Santa Fe to facilitate a leadership retreat for the Albuquerque Sign Language Academy (ASLA), an innovative, dual-language school open tuition-free to the community and region. ASLA is a great story, “the little school that could”. Sensing a lack of non-residential educational options for deaf and hard-of-hearing young people and their families, the school was created by parents, educators and collaborators less than a decade ago. The school now offers grades K-10, and approximately 60% of students qualify for special education services and 85% of students have a link to the deaf community. Under Rafe Martinez, ASLA’s Director, two partnerships have increased the school’s capacity and raised its profile --one with the University of New Mexico which welcomes new and practicing educators to learn and study at the school, and a second with the PEAR Institute which will guide wellness programming.  

 ASLA Executive Director Rafe Martinez and legislative collaborator Rick Martinez

The school’s own increase in student enrollment (a waiting list has grown), inquiries from other schools in the region, and their own ambition to provide state-of-the-art services to the community, signaled the need for the executive administrative team to look ahead to new leadership strategies and key upcoming milestones. I joined local consultant Everette Hill of the Social Innovation Strategies Group in guiding the team through a set of activities that will provide a road map for the upcoming year as they grow programs and partnerships and lead the faculty in concert. Facilities options, board development, developing a revised professional development calendar, and identifying key benchmarks and support required to get there all surfaced in the intense three-day retreat.

Early August brought me back to Albuquerque for on-going collaboration with the New Mexico Center for School Leadership. It’s “Leadership High Schools” network includes a focus on re-engaging older students who had left school but now wish to return and need an environment specifically designed for them. Based in part on the design of the New York City Young Adult Borough Centers, the Network’s Re-Engagement Schools provide an afternoon-early evening schedule, social workers and counselors, connections to growth industries and employers and hands-on learning in the areas they require to meet state graduation standards. Key to the mission is shaping the community’s understanding that different types of students require a diverse and substantial portfolio of educational options, and then designing forward.

 Albuquerque Sign Language Academy leadership team members, Leticia Archuleta (left) and Jennifer Blythe (right)

School leaders and wellness pillar administrators from the network schools came together to assess the efficacy of current efforts and to begin a more intensive study of the needs of older students, implications for design and gathering promising practices. The Center’s doctoral Intern, Rachel White, presented the findings of her research in the current state of the network’s evening Re-Engagement programs. A new partnership with local youth development agency NMCAN will assist the Center and the schools in leveraging resources in support of re-engagement programming.

Rachel White presenting Re-Engagement Research                         

That same week the Leadership HS Network administrators and boards joined forces for a retreat to focus on policy development, good internal board practices, and support for school leaders. Held at the new Siembra Leadership High School, nearly thirty people from three schools gained some big picture take-away’s and promising practices before going into school-based teams to assess current efforts and upcoming opportunities for focus and growth.

 Leadership High School Network boards retreat

My final NM summer outing was a day-long retreat with, and for, new amigos at the Media Arts Collaborative secondary school. The school seeks to prepare students for an education in the media arts at the university and community college level, as well helping students and families to understand the global role of media arts and how people’s lives are shaped by them. I was fortunate to meet Glenna Voight, the retiring Media Arts principal, at a CES conference last fall, and now count new leader Jonathan Dooley as a friend and colleague. I’ve also quickly grown fond of the school’s diverse, open-minded and accomplished staff.

 Media Arts Collaborative secondary school.

Working with Media Arts’ middle and high school staff, the day was a mixed bag . We began by exploring concepts from learning science (most at odds with today’s linear learning, standards and testing regimen), exploring the not-so-hidden effects of industrial age schooling, and reviewing current national achievement data for context. We transitioned to hands-on project design through visual provocations of the kind I do in STEM schools, some re-imagining of teacher roles in that kind of inquiry-based learning motif, and finally, sharing personal milestones for the upcoming school year. An intense and rewarding day.

New Mexico has a number of small progressive schools proudly peeking out from under a layer of bureaucracy that has not resulted in achievement gains or social-emotional improvement over the past eight years. They’re holding their own conversations and moving forward smartly. They’re worth a visit, your interest and your support. Adelante, New Mexico. 

Albuquerque Convention Center Plaza

A School District That Sees the Whole Picture

Ken Facin poses a question in the Skype session

I’ve been working with Superintendent Ken Facin and his Hoosick Falls NY team for several years now. We featured Ken in one of our ERC e-newsletters a few years ago as one of a small band of heroes seriously committed to wellness and social emotional development in schools, despite more than a decade of underfunding and relative de-emphasis in most school districts.

I first met Ken and his team in our home base of Cambridge when they were in town to attend a Harvard School of Education conference on instructional improvement. I walked into their hotel conference room to find test score charts and graphs taped up on 3 walls from floor to above my head. Despite the intense two days their team had experienced at the conference, focused on the minutiae of standards, progress monitoring, feedback on pacing outcomes, etc., we had an instant energy re-set when we began to talk about young people and how best to support their readiness to learn. Ken was quick to embrace the idea of social-emotional support as a prime achievement strategy and since then has been off and running. His district has steadily advanced in state and regional rankings, but more importantly there is a tangible sense of kindness and concern in the schools. He has put his mind to influencing both inside and beyond the schools to create a community that sees readiness to learn as the lever for almost everything else.

Hoosick Falls is a small rural district northeast of Albany, rich in tradition, but also experiencing many of the mental health and family challenges that come with low-income demographics. Add to that the academic pressures and myriad top-down mandates and policies that come with New York state’s heavy testing and teacher rating schema (one that seems to have shown little benefit, I must add) and one wonders at how Facin has so successfully nurtured the growth of a top-flight wellness team that has developed a high level of expertise and works seamlessly with school administrators. Over the past three years a focus on mindfulness has paved the way for a daily meditation session for everyone in the school and just ahead, planning with teachers for a restorative morning meeting for all students and staff in the middle and high school. It was this planning that brought me out to Hoosick Falls for a recent day-long session.

I was the presenter for the first of the day’s four phases, organized by Facin along with Dean of Students Mario Torres.  I focused my time on the foundations of building a culture of authentic relationships. I shared with the K-12 team of administrators, counselors and mental health professionals my contention that this kind of work, by its very nature, changes the “atomic structure” of schools, the fundamental relationships and “psychological contracts” between and among students and adults. I reminded the team that every day, each and every student is making a number of calculations about how much their teachers know and care for them, assessing how interested each adult is in their learning and well-being. When you strip away the academics, and along with them the power of the gradebook, the veneer of control, the compliance and teacher-pleasing orientation, it can be an unsettling, even raw experience for many teachers. Kids know right away when things are for real, as we know, and teachers are often already under the gun to cover far too much content and address test items.

Larry Myatt leading his session

I do a good deal of work helping schools tackle “classroom management” challenges and trying to salvage moribund or downright failing advisories. I learned as a school leader that when we attempt to introduce such ideas as advisory, mindfulness, or restorative practices, the success of those initiatives rests squarely on authentic relationships between adults and young people. Schools must provide the structures, opportunities for practice, language and modeling for students in order to learn that all good discipline is self-discipline. This is the “atomic level” work I talk about. Simply using a manual to learn a few group routines or convening kids in a circle does not go deep enough into exploring what adults and young people have a right to expect from each other. Adults must revisit, in supportive, collaborative settings, their personal commitments to the work and the impressions they convey each day, be they intentional or not. I left them with some big ideas to ponder, a number of readings, tools and activities to begin work with the teaching staff, who will also be invited into the planning of what the next steps will be.

I was followed by a presentation from Caitlin McCormack from the PEAR Institute, the Harvard School of Medicine and McLean Hospital initiative that supports schools and community organizations in understanding human developmental needs and employing a common language to communicate the strengths and challenges of children and youth.  I was pleased to be the matchmaker between the Hoosick Falls schools and PEAR, and over the past two years the collaboration has grown and provided a centerpiece for the work of the school’s leadership and wellness staffs. Caitlin is a Lead Facilitator for PEAR training and professional development programs and provides super helpful interpretation sessions for PEAR’s landmark Holistic Student Assessment. She shared group development theories and strategies with the Hoosick Falls team, walking them through one of the PEAR group approaches linked to HSA results in a fun, informative and inter-active session.

HFCSD Staff at Higher Ground Farm

The last element of the morning was a Skype conference for the participants with Dr. Gil Noam, founder and director of The PEAR Institute and former editor-in-chief of the journal New Directions in Youth Development: Theory, Practice and Research. Dr. Noam has become well-known to the school’s team, hosting them in Boston and communicating regularly as their partnership grows. For nearly an hour, Dr. Noam fielded questions about theory and implementation and shared thoughts about the on-going roll-out of social-emotional programming in the schools.

True to form, Facin had yet another novel activity for the afternoon, a recent added expansion of the restorative programming which has helped the school to raise achievement levels, make the schools safer and more supportive environments for students and staff, and raise its profile in the region as a district on the move.  The team adjourned at midday to travel to the Higher Ground Farm where equine specialist Janet Botaish led the group through a version of the Hoosick Equine Connections Program. Janet’s program is affiliated with the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association (EAGALA) a leading international nonprofit association for professionals incorporating horses to address mental health and personal development needs.

Through their new partnership, the Hoosick Falls schools are developing a program that brings young people to the farm for activities designed to provide a peaceful, purposeful and therapeutic setting in which clients can experience change and growth, often more effectively and quickly than in traditional clinical and psycho-educational approaches. As Janet shared with us, the notion of working with horses is engaging, real time and hands-on. The experience is immediate and fully felt and I can testify that I was thinking of the activities and encounters with my new equine pals for several days.

Next up in Hoosick Falls is a 3-day Summer Retreat this coming July to advance the ideas of authentic relationship, a daily restorative ritual, and continued merging of the skill sets and perspectives of the wellness staff and the academic community. I’m looking forward to working with teachers and staff as we continue to restore to schools the idea that attending the whole child matters at each step along the upward path through the grades. And I’m looking forward to seeing what the next big ideas are from Ken!   

Dr. Larry Myatt, Co-Founder

Finding a Foothold for STEAM Inquiry

Larry Myatt, ERC Co-Founder

The first time I heard mention of McLaughlin Middle School STEAM, I was part of a series of keynote remarks at a STEAM-Ahead event organized by Bob Baines, founder and Executive Director of STEAM-Ahead NH. It was held at Dyn, Corp. in Manchester, an early and passionate support of STEAM-Ahead. Here we were, assembled on the very cool work-floor meeting space of a major high-technology firm –community leaders, educators, policy makers and business and corporate representatives—easily a crowd of over a hundred. 

As part of the event, two McLaughlin students were asked to speak briefly about their learning on the school’s brand new STEAM team. Not only were these two 13-year olds poised and confident, they were able to speak in detailed, mature ways about their intellectual growth in a way I seldom hear (sadly) from middle-schoolers.

After the audience rewarded them warmly I went over and listened in as the students reconnected with their waiting teachers. I was impressed right away with the relationships among the small group and the very STEM-like debrief of form and content they conducted right away, informal but structured. “Something is going on over there”, I noted.

At that same event, the next group of students, from a STEAM team at Manchester’s West High School, not only talked about their project activities, they tasked the audience to engage on the spot in some table-based hands-on design challenges. Another home run with the crowd.

The kids I met there that day were not all the typical “best-and-the-brightest”, pre-screened into the programs, but, I was told, a very mixed ability groups of kids. Yet each one I met was capable of a level of “meta” thinking that told me these are capable, growing young people. I would have loved to have had my own kids in this kind of school setting.

Much to my delight, I got an email not too much later from Bob Baines, asking if I could accompany him to meet McLaughlin teachers and Principal Bill Krantz on my next visit to STEAM at West. The meeting was great. We exchanged perspectives and ideas on where we thought things stood and how they could develop. I could tell right away these teachers were game, had an appetite to grow and learn, and inquiry teaching and projects had rejuvenated and inspired them.

Baines brought key ingredients, a vision of connected programming in the city and incentive funding from the NH Department of Education grant and the local Bean Foundation, for release time and the needed high-touch coaching and professional development as the school planned for growing the STEAM program. The meeting resulted in a commitment for me to begin work there this past winter.

I’ve just finished a recent couple days there on an arc of deep conversation that the teachers engaged in quickly and intensely. As usual, we talk about the constraints of traditional school structure and flaws in the design, and how they mitigate against deep learning. We move on to productive practices, sharing what they notice about their students’ learning, what things feed them as teachers to endure the relentless pace, and milestone achievements they hope they can pursue. Wherever I travel, sharing ideas is most often cited as one of the highlights for teachers when we do our debriefs. So many teachers are hungry for a chance at serious, meaningful conversation that they don’t get often enough.

McLaughlin founding STEAM-er’s Callahan Goulet and Christina Stavenger brought a thoughtful and research-based DIY approach to early STEAM. They traveled and visited people doing similar work in and beyond STEAM-Ahead NH. They began to use their energy, collaboration and commitment to work differently with kids.

They opened up their classroom dividing walls; students sit in small teams facing each other, Chromebooks at the ready, orderly yet buzzing on the days I visit. Things are often hands-on here, connected to important issues in the world, and pursued in a team fashion that closely mimics the “21st century workplace environment we espouse but seldom replicate in most schools.

In our sessions we’ve worked to grow cognitive dissonance (and put it to best use), conducted charrettes to plan projects, mapped out big ideas and questions from their standards,  created and unpacked Learning Murals via our Visual Provocation Protocol. We created an early draft of a year-long array of projects and activities, smartly blended with direct instruction, drill and practice, lecture burst, etc., hallmarks of more traditional teaching. It’s a nice mix of pedagogy that invites different learning styles. Much of what they do is really good for learning, but to many it’s different and unfamiliar. It’s different for some students, and to teacher peers, and for some parents who want to see “teaching” that they recognize and consider good instruction from their school days. The STEAM teachers understand the reasons behind this range of opinions as accept it as part of trying to do business differently. Their job is to help more kids grow and be successful without putting traditional learners at risk, something far better done through inquiry teaching than by other means I find, and research suggests.

Our adult work is scholarly. I push. We talk a lot about the need to erase lines –the lines between subject matter and big ideas, the schedule and the pacing that move things along in a way that makes it hard for many kids to thrive as thinkers, as growing adolescents finding out what they may capable of. The STEAM teachers respond with thoughtful ideas and questions. To me, it’s what “PLC’s” (I dislike acronyms) could really be like. It’s the kind of intellectual work I recognize from being a teaching principal at Fenway High School, and the kind of intellectual work that experience, research and neuroscientists tell us is good for our brains and is the way more schools are going to do business.

I add here that I don’t like the acronym “PBL” either. Too easy to see it as an idea grafted loosely on to conventional teaching, as “dessert”. Instead, I like wrapping all these ideas up as inquiry learning, part of the overdue yet irresistible shift from the culture of teaching to a culture of learning. I see inquiry learning as an effort to get beyond the persistent mental model that one gains knowledge by “the presentation of established facts” -a mental model that portrays a false but appealingly smooth path to knowledge.  Whether it’s posing big questions, building and making, pursuing problems or wrestling down real-life scenarios, I see these as kindred brands of inquiry learning. These are the ways in which learning opportunities surface in the “real world”, quite different from those that are briefly granted on the academic conveyor belt, a set of sorting processes within a setting that remain intentionally apart from people and daily life.

But programs like STEAM need different conditions, more like the “real-world”. The track record of support for these efforts is poor in many districts and schools. Work of this kind can happen more routinely in affluent, independent settings, but in public schools it often bumps up against the predictable obstacles –history, culture, systems clash. (*For a great primer on these issues, see Charles Percy’s acute “So Much Reform”). Programming like STEAM is routinely unable to grow and thrive inside the traditional architecture of our secondary schools, sooner or later being sucked back into the traditional schedule, contract, instructional motif, culture and belief system. Add to that budget cuts, larger class sizes, and a teach-to-the-test mind-set and calendar that constrain deeper learning, and it’s not easy going for a seedling to emerge and plant itself firmly, be it Manchester or elsewhere.

I’m rooting for everyone at the McLaughlin. I see the STEAM program as good stuff for kids and teachers, connected to practices and perspectives that we sorely need given the poor results of our last 15 years of policies and mandates. If standards and testing was the right recipe, the private schools would have joined in long ago, right? The STEAM brand of teaching, just like that at their sister school, West High, can be a good fit for the high-achiever, but not only him/her, but also for the newly-emerging thinker who wants to take school more seriously than it takes him/her, for the student who likes to build and tinker rather than listen, and for the curious kids who like to ask what it all means. That’s why colleges and employers are after students who have some STEAM experience in their education. And it’s good for the teachers I see and work with--they get to plan, to grow, to take each other seriously as people and professionals. Here’s hoping the McLaughlin program can grow and prosper.

If you have more questions about what inquiry learning can look like , projects and achievement, etc. you can go to these Web links:

Positive brain development from hands-on learning:
http://news.stanford.edu/2015/07/06/symmetry-math-schwartz-070615/

Inquiry and projects in the private school world: https://www.hudsonlabschool.com/blog/2017/4/1/studies-demonstrating-the-benefits-of-project-based-learning

Inquiry learning with high-challenge schools and students: http://www.educationresourcesconsortium.org/news/2015/11/15/change-at-the-roots-level-anatomy-of-an-urban-school-renewal?rq=urban%20

Math in the middle years:
https://www.bie.org/object/document/pbl_in_middle_grades_mathematics

STEAM Ahead NH:  http://www.steamaheadnh.com/

Volume 1, ERC EdHistory 101 Project

Ellwood Cubberley (1868-1941)

Applying industrial management theory to school leadership was the signature idea of Ellwood Cubberley, giving rise to what we experience as modern school administration.

Cubberley was born in Andrews, Indiana, and was educated at the University of Indiana and Columbia University. After brief stints as a classroom teacher, college instructor and president of Vincennes University, Cubberley became superintendent of schools in San Diego-a position that influenced his long career as professor and dean of the School of Education at Stanford University.

At the outset of Cubberley's career, school administration had little or no theoretical or scientific basis. There were no formal textbooks from which to teach educational administration. Administrators were expected to learn solely from experience. Indeed, educational administration posts were routinely political plums, requiring little, if any, formal training in education.

Relying on new industrial management science theories, Cubberley designed an “administrative” system for schools, led by a professional class of superintendents and principals. His hierarchical model professionalized school leadership at that time and became the standard.As head of the Department of Education at Stanford, Cubberley trained cohorts of administrators in the “science of school management”.                       

To some, Cubberly is a controversial figure in the history of education. He has been criticized for his emphasis on efficiency and bureaucracy to solve complex educational problems. For example, Cubberley wrote: “We should give up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are equal and that our society is devoid of classes. The employee tends to remain an employee; the wage earner tends to remain a wage earner.”

In the 1934 edition of Ellwood P. Cubberley’s Public Education in the United States he is explicit - a statement occurs in a section of Public Education called "A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence," in which he explains that the coming of the factory system, which has deprived children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave, has made extended childhood necessary. With the breakdown of home and village industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its extreme division of labor, an army of workers has arisen who have little or no knowledge.Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers.”

According to Cubberley, with "much ridicule from the public press" the old book-subject curriculum was set aside, replaced by a change in purpose and "a new psychology of instruction which came to us from abroad." That reference to a new psychology refers to collectively-developing practices of European schooling particularly common to England, Germany, and France, three other major world coal-powers investing heavily in military and industrial science.

His influence extended far beyond the nature of training and certification of administrators. His writing was powerful and influential concerning what constituted the best situations and arrangements for learning from childhood into adulthood. Communities across the nation strived for decades, as a matter of public pride, to adopt the practices and systems that he espoused. 

For better or for worse, Cubberley’s influence on American schools has been deep and lasting. He is the father of professionalized school administration, and his beliefs regarding the acquired knowledge of the times and the ways to apply it to America’s citizenry influenced learners, parents, teachers and administrators through the Second World War and beyond.

Thanks to PBS School & the Odysseus Group

In NH’s White Mountains: STEM, Inquiry, and Technology—an Integrated Platform for School Change

Katrina Kennett, ERC Consulting Practitioner

Mike Berry is a man with a plan.

Although he has some constraints ---he’s pretty far from a lot of places, he’s limited in his pay scale, and other schools like to “borrow” his staff— he has shared a vision that is catching on. “More success for more kids” is his simple driver.

With support from his district administration, and with smart convening of local business and community members to explain and gain support for his ideas, Berry is bringing his North Country school to prominence and setting up to transform its design from the 19th to the 21st century.

White Mountains Regional High School is an exciting place to work. You can come here to grow as an educator. For me, it’s a return to my roots – I grew up in Concord NH --and it’s great to see this kind of work flourishing in the Granite State. We’ve had a decade-long run of master planning, testing and conventional thinking. Some people are betting on performance assessment, blended technology approaches, competency-based grading, or yet another (!) revival of mastery learning. None of these change the fundamental arrangements of school, arrangements that no longer serve us. As someone who plies her trade helping schools to plan super-thoughtfully and involve students in deep ways, it’s exciting to find this kind of work.

STEM as one launching pad

Among other things, Berry caught on to the promise of STEAM Ahead-NH and has invested in a new vertical STEM initiative coordinated by Mellissa Jellison. Next year, they will add a new grade cohort and, with the addition of an arts/design component, become STEAM.  Central to Jellison and her colleagues’ work is inquiry teaching and putting the “thrill” back into students’ daily experiences.  Mike is totally on board with that shift as a lever to achieve his mission of more success for more kids, and is using ERC tools to move it forward, flattening out leadership, and inviting others who are excited to help grow and contribute.

I made my way back to NH from Illinois when Mike Berry was looking for STEM professional development and connected with my colleague and ERC Co-Founder Larry Myatt.  Berry says that potential vendors for STEM p.d. came out of the woodwork, but in a conference call he and his people recognized Larry’s breadth of experience and proof points, and his “DIY” approach to renewing schools resonated with them. By DIY, we mean that we believe that schools don’t need the pre-packaged, highly prescriptive “how-to” manuals to be great, but that school people can believe in themselves, marshal their resources, and grow their own capacity to improve and flourish.

Mike Berry at Fall Forum

Upon arriving, Larry connected right away with staff, brought in some new “big ideas” and framing that resonated with Berry’s own philosophy.  Larry also helps to coach the administrative team on moving the changes forward.  Says Berry, “The mantra that we’ve taken from ERC is the need for shift from a culture of teaching to a culture of learning, and all that goes with that. We believe we can build it right here, and do what’s been almost impossible for high schools to do up to now – take a traditional model and transform it for students who’ll take over a world we adults can’t even understand.”

Teachers as Learners

My work with Berry has been in supporting his staff as they learn about technology and integrate it to support inquiry practices in their classrooms. In interactive, large-group workshops (in-person and remotely), I invite teachers to have fun being learners with new tools and platforms, even when it’s frustrating or confusing, as new technology can be. This means they do all the things we want students doing – working hands -on, discovering, struggling, and reflecting, then applying their experience and knowledge to their own ongoing work.

In my conversations with teachers as they learn with new tools, I keep bringing them back to three critical questions: What do you want your students to walk away knowing? What kinds of questions would you like your students to be asking?  What’s the “so what,’ and why is it important? 

Mellison Jellison and STEAM 9 students

Not a ‘one-and-done’ version of learning with technology, our sessions provide devoted time to look at a variety of tools for curating and archiving student work. And, I use research-based instructional strategies that bring together teachers’ learning over time. One of my favorite strategies is the use of EdCafes, (See link) which almost always raise the levels of energy and creativity in a collegial setting that transfers directly to work with students.

However, direct support of teachers isn’t enough to sustain meaningful school-wide change. My sessions need to be part of a larger, overall story of change within a culture of learning – instructional, cultural, intellectual (for both students and teachers), and developmental.
 

It’s big and it’s challenging, but that’s what it takes and that’s why I love this work. To help the instructional leaders work both on-the-ground and at the 10,000 foot level, I coach them to keep their sights on those three core questions as they work with faculty. This coaching involves assessing ongoing school PD rhythms and routines, helping folks to keep an eye on outcomes, and continuing to create authentic situations for teachers to present their ongoing practice. I see it as solid and intentional instructional design. White Mountains’ administrators and coaches have joined me in “thinking like a teacher” as they support the intellectual and creative growth of their staff. 

Down the Road

There are other moving parts to the White Mountains DIY plan. Ron Danault, a veteran computer instructor is thriving in an on-going MIT-designed coding seminar that helps him to teach programming by becoming a coder himself. That work is part of “TeachCode Academy”, a partnership among the Governor’s STEM task force, STEAM-Ahead NH,  the Manchester School District, UNH-Manchester, and Dyn Corporation. To me, Ron is a great example of a sharp teacher taking on new challenges.  Berry has also invited CTE people from culinary arts, horticulture, and pre-veterinary studies, among others, to join STEAM professional development activities delving into inquiry-teaching and being a part of project design and tuning. Myatt recently worked with the entire high school staff for a big picture exploration of instructional design of their own making and flavor, using an inquiry approach to build teacher and student curiosity and capacity.

In early December, Berry presented a portion of his plan at a national Coalition of Essential Schools conference in Providence, RI.  Joining him there for an intense three days of workshops, networking and progressive education history were Jellison, Ryan Patterson, science teacher with the STEAM team, and Jeanine LaBounty, who now supports teachers at the school in addition to her teaching. I was there to see Mike’s pitch and it reminded me why I’m excited about my work with WMRHS. They believe in themselves! They are invested in developing their own capacity to decide what and how to teach, how to turn more over to the students, and in each other. It’s a great story at a time when other schools think they have to buy blended learning platforms and color-coded diagnostics to make their schools better.

Larry addresses White Mountain staff

In the near future, Berry envisions more External Learning Opportunities (ELO’s) to connect students with their passions and with resources beyond the confines of the school. He sees opportunities for more plentiful and robust internships, coordinated by teacher Patsy Ainsworth.  Part of the big idea is to be intentional about bringing community members into the high school to work directly with students. He is also interested in networking with other ERC schools that are committed to projects and inquiry, becoming a regional “center of activity” – a place where people recognize that they can learn from the thoughtful things that are happening. Under consideration is hosting a summertime school development and re-design institute with instructional, technology, and leadership strands. I’m counting on being a part of that!

I’m rooting for these proud and independent educators and am pleased and proud of their commitment to Mike Berry’s words, making school a place of more success for more kids.

STEAM 9 classroom with Ryan Patterson coaching a forensics examination

For more on this story – contact katrina@educationresourcesconsortium.org

Greetings and Happy New Year from ERC

All signs point to 2017 being an interesting year.

We’ve been asking our colleagues and friends in different parts of the nation about the mood in their communities and schools. Some of the concerns we heard weren’t surprising: anxiety over what we can expect from the incoming administration, and from the Congress; more debate on charter schools; how to meet the demand for services to struggling children and families. We also heard about trying to find more helpful, and more worthy, accountability approaches than school report cards (that’s been a refrain for a while now); how to honor the demand for personalization in standardized school environments; how to keep the excitement of learning in a time of standards and testing, etc.

In the face of these many issues some school people, good soldiers they are, will gear up for yet another proscribed run at success, likely guided by a master plan that emanated from a state department of education, a well-intentioned philanthropy with its own pet framework and money to lend , or a think tank associated with someone’s agenda.  Or some hybrid of all three. However, as we urged last fall, (see link) other folks are beginning to coalesce around a “DIY” mentality, feeling that this is a good time to break from the cycle of the last 15 years,  to think more transformationally, to believe in their own capacity and skills.

In keeping with our belief that there is no time like now for school folks to take matters into our own hands in 2017, we will be featuring stories of schools on the move, and adding some cogent topics as a part of EdHistory 101 Project – a new effort to revisit some key historical events and perspectives that continue to shape schooling in this country. We believe that knowing our history – the issues, beliefs,  and language of other times-  presents opportunities for us to reframe and reimagine.  

To accompany our EdHistory 101 Project we continue to offer coaching, expertise, strategies, speakers and facilitators and TREK (see link) resources for schools wanting to look at serious redesign.

If you’re curious and want to connect with us and others who want to have a different kind of conversation about the future of schools in your community, please contact us.

We wish you an energetic and rewarding New Year in your work with schools, communities, partners, parents and students.

See Wayne's New Year's resolution link here.

Larry Myatt and Wayne Ogden    

Co-Founders

My New Year’s Wishes for School Principals and the Kids They Serve

I know what you’re thinking, New Year’s resolutions are ridiculous and unattainable! But, that can’t keep me for wishing for things that would make the lives of students, teachers and principals better.

So, here they are—MY seven wishes for 2017—for every overworked and under-resourced school principal on the planet.

Supply every school principal with a budget he/she deems worthy of the kids they serve.

Grant each and every school an instructional coach for every eight classroom teachers. These coaches are to focus exclusively on working with teachers to improve learning and teaching.

Provide each school with sufficient professional staff to promote the social, physical and emotional health of every student since we know that “intact”, healthy and resilient kids learn better.

Lengthen the school day to ensure that there is time for students to study the fine and applied arts , as well as participate in “extra curricular” activities.

Provide a full year moratorium from unfunded (or lightly-funded) state and federal mandates related to education.

Provide an additional one year moratorium on the high-stakes testing of kids and let’s see if anyone suffers.

Provide every student with a facility that’s as nice as a room in one of our President Elect’s 6 star hotels.

What would you add if this was your New Year’s Resolution and you were dreaming big for our children?

Wayne Ogden