scott klepesch's List: School Redesign

• I am unaware of any cases in which successful buggy-whip makers made the  transition to successful manufacturers of automobile-engine starters."⁴ The presence of the Net Generation on  campus and the growing acceptance of their "ways" in the external economic and  social communities have yet to stimulate widespread transformation; traditional  processes continue leading to traditional outcomes. Like the buggy whip, the  traditional classroom lecture, the cultural values, and even the edifices  associated with higher education seem to belong to another place and time.
• Faculty, students, administrators, and campus leaders are the agents of change.  Technologies, tools, and techniques are the instruments the agents have  available to enable change in their realm of influence. Roles, relationships,  and perspectives change as the technologies empower the agents in new ways. For  example, students use e-portfolios to manage and own their learning, and they  use wireless to discover new knowledge even while engaged in a traditional  classroom experience. New technologies, tools, and techniques fundamentally  change the nature of the academic program. Technology is enabling the formation  and enhancing the effectiveness of many different types of communities that now  coexist on campus. New communities form because members are using the tools. The  interaction of agents using technologies, guided by rules in their roles within  communities, has the potential to produce unanticipated, and often  transformational, outcomes.

• • High school example — Harvey Daniels and Best  Practice High School, Chicago  
     
    • Cross-disciplinary unit on fast food and how it connects to health,  economics, popular culture, etc.  
    • Read Fast Food Nation and connected it to content in  biology related to nutrition, digestion, etc.  
    • Students then chose from magazine articles about the fast food industry —  animal cruelty, locations of fast food in low-income neighborhoods, etc.  
    • Went to restaurants and kept anthropological observation journals of patrons  and employees  
    • Some became activists around the issue  
    • Did they test at the end? No… they kept portfolios of letters, pamphlets,  and other materials that they created
• • We often think that AP courses are the best courses in the high school  because they are “accelerated”  
  • It almost always works out that when we are trying to “raise the bar” and  “close the gap,” we have kids who are poor who are being given more drill and  skill while the rich kids are doing more real learning.

• This content area provides a context in which children can explore the connections between self, family, community and the world at large.  Each area of emphasis within Human Studies and Global Citizenship plays a critical role in deepening children’s understanding of how their world works. Exploration by teachers, children, and families extends into the study of how people can most successfully communicate, collaborate, and connect within the context of the community.  As with other curriculum areas, teachers look for and create opportunities for relating this content to real life. Exploring identity, relationships and the ways we interact and communicate integrates social development, empathy, and the pursuit of understanding one another throughout the daily life of the school. Children expand these opportunities by reflecting upon the characteristics and experiences, past and present, of diverse cultures and populations of the world.  As the children mature, this area of the core curriculum supports their ability to grasp increasingly abstract concepts and complex ideas about human beings and the world at large.

  • There is a need to move away from the compartmentalized approach to social studies. Course cannot be separated into US and World history. Course are constructed around themes and overarching ideas.

• 21st Century Assessment: Does traditional letter grading continue to be effective as a measurement and an incentive for what we want students to learn, or does 21st century learning require new-format assessments? If so, what assessment techniques are required for 21st century learning?

  • This is such a critical point. Are we living under an outdated assessment system? When is the pressure going to build to challenge the current grading system and push for a system that honors progress and skill development
• What are the characteristics of a 21st century teacher?

  • It is the teacher viewing themselves as a learner.

• at St. Gregory we are moving to an expanded report card, implementing digital portfolios, and publishing on-line much more student work at the same time as we are using two new testing tools in very high profile ways, the CWRA and MAP, to demonstrate our commitment to a truly highly academically demanding program.  Our 12th grade students last spring median performance was at the 97th percentile of all college freshman– that is proof positive of an academically demanding program.
• I fervently believe: our students ought to have every opportunity to use the best available tools to research, to pursue their intellectual passions, to communicate, to create, and to collaborate: how can we deprive them of digital tools if we want them to do these things?
• or our educators to be teachers in the digital age they should be learners in the digital age

  • Profesisonal Development first has to start with each teacher and their desire to be progressive.
• One of my major themes in my speaking this year is the message that our transformational age requires us all to adopt the growth mindset, and requires us all to develop 21st century skills, and requires us all to be innovative– and requires us all to model this for our students

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• Traditional highs are obsolete. Most of our students do not leave our large comprehensive high school with what they need and deserve.  Nearly third of our students leave before they graduate including nearly half of the economically disadvantaged students of color.  The old discipline based approach isn’t working; there is no focus, no integration, limited application, and it’s boring.
• ood schools expect students to produce work that demonstrates research, communication, problem solving skills and an understanding of the civic and scientific concepts necessary to be a contributing citizen.
• nterdisciplinary study of human development so that students will be well prepared for further learning and civic contribution.
• These four boundary spaces will provide a framework for the curriculum as outlined below.
• Rights and responsibilities:
• Right and wrong:
• the study of human development is largely about how societies innovate and share new ways and presumably better ways of doing things.
• They will study important topics in depth and be asked to apply their learning to new challenges.  Students will show what they know through frequent and varied demonstrations.

  • Depth over breadth. Application of knowledge to solve contemporary complex problems.
• he school will be organized in two divisions of not more than 300 students: lower division and upper division, each of approximately 2 years in length.  While in each division, students will complete a project in each of the four themes and participate in four seminars:

  • Building the capacity within students as they progress through school. Examining growth within the various projercts.
• They will conclude the project with the presentation of a research summary, persuasive essay and leadership application.

  • Importance of public exhibitions
• Common scoring rubrics will allow the school to aggregate and report the results of project work to the school community (along with required tests).

  • Common rubric- based upon a core set of principles.
• Each division will be staff by a team of 10 teachers that will each advise 20 students and teach one seminar.  All teachers will be skilled in reading and writing instruction and project-based learning in a standards-based technology rich environment.
• Approximately one third of the space will be devoted to individual student work spaces (each to be shared by an early shift and a late shift student), one third to seminar space, and one third to presentation and team work space. 

  • Creating space in schools for students to collaborate and work on products.

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• It has the potential to be created, managed, read, critiqued, and organized very differently than information on paper and to take forms that we have not yet even imagined
• . But as David Weinberger and Clay Shirky have demonstrated, networked digital information is fundamentally different than information on paper.³ And each digital innovation seems to shake us free from yet another assumption we once took for granted.
• Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time, challenging our traditional space-time based notions of information as a “thing” that has to be “in a place.
• Wikipedia has taught us yet another lesson, that a networked information environment allows people to work together in new ways to create information that can rival (and even surpass) the content of experts by almost any measure.
• nformation is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in.
• Our old assumption that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can find us
• we begin to recognize the importance of the form of learning over the content of learning. It isn't that content is not important; it is simply that it must not take precedence over form.
• • Our worldview is  not natural and unquestionable, but culturally and historically  specific. 
   
  •   We are globally  interconnected in ways we often do not realize.
   
  • Different aspects  of our lives and culture are connected and affect one another  deeply.
   
  •   Our knowledge is  always incomplete and open to revision. 
   
  •   We are the  creators of our world. 
   
  •   Participation in  the world is not a choice, only how we participate is our choice.
• he new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions.
• n the best case scenario the students will leave the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to inspire

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• That’s why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.
• The students also designed their own curriculum, deciding to split their September-to-January term into two halves.
• During the second half, the group practiced what they called “the literary and mathematical arts.” They chose eight novels — including works by Kurt Vonnegut, William Faulkner and Oscar Wilde — to read in eight weeks. That is more than the school’s A.P. English class reads in an entire year.
• They also each undertook an “individual endeavor,” learning to play the piano or to cook, writing a novel or making a podcast about domestic violence. At the end of the term, they performed these new skills in front of the entire student body and faculty.

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• But Flex Academy also has teachers of core subjects—English, history, math, and science—on site, who meet with small groups of students throughout the day to troubleshoot areas where students are lagging, based on information collected by online assessments.
• Albero Berul, a junior, likens it to an office setting: Students work independently and with others on projects, and meet in small groups with teachers
• is the realization that if our expectation is to educate every single child successfully, then we need structures that can individualize and personalize, and there’s no way to do it in the way we have historically approached this.”

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• But when you watch children – undeniable natural learners – they create different solutions: play, discovery, interaction. They observe the world, they stick things in their mouth, they touch things. They connect with the world to learn it. They experience it through their senses. And in discussions with the people around them, they create language and meaning and amazing new ideas and interpretations that the rest of us get the benefit of learning from.
• school day designed around these notions of how we naturally, and individually, learn. Designing the day around discovery of information, connections to real world challenges, discussions digging into our experiences with the world.
• They have created a portfolio of adaptive learning technologies which allow students to access ninth-grade content while learning basic skills. It’s not “Drill and Kill” — they’ve integrated technology into the daily experience by helping students learn to create with it.

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