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Subject matter was disconnected from class to class, the staff lacked a common mission, and students reported that their assignments failed to challenge them.
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The Pennsylvania Department of Education announced new grants for high school
reform, and Freedom seized the moment. This would be no off-the-shelf quick fix,
says Hickey. "We wanted to completely change our high school."Principal Robert "Rusty" Staub spent the bulk of the $70,000 grant in 2005-06
on professional development, sending small groups of teachers to exemplary high
schools around the country, including JEB Stuart High School, in
Falls Church, Virginia, and New Technology High School,
in Napa, California.It was expensive, says Staub, but it inspired the teachers to make radical
changes. "When they came back," he says, "they wanted to flip the tables
over." -
Based on what they'd seen, a steering committee of teachers, administrators, and
other staff decided to revamp curriculum, instruction, and assessment, with
project learning as the crux of the reform. Using another $70,000 from the state
in each of the next two years, Staub again emphasized professional development,
hiring experts in project learning from the International Center for Leadership
in Education and the Buck Institute for Education, in northern California, to train
teacher leaders who then trained their peers.
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Will RichardsonTo bolster these efforts, Freedom has enacted more changes. It switched to a block schedule, nearly doubling its class length from forty-three to eighty-four minutes. Students built benches to line the hallways as spaces for group work. This year, the sch
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