Tag: A Year at Mission Hill

(Extra)Ordinary People

Posted on | by Sam

There’s an anecdote the Calhoun School’s Steve Nelson likes to share when he speaks to teachers and parents about the purpose of education. “We should think of our children as wildflower seeds in an unmarked package,” he says. “We can’t know what will emerge. All we can do is plant them in fertile soil, give them plenty of water and sunlight, and wait patiently to see the uniqueness of their beauty.”

At a time when too many students are still being planted in highly cultivated gardens – trimmed and pruned to resemble each other closely – it is incumbent upon all of us to stand on the side of the unmarked package. And at a time when we stray further and further from our democratic roots – from Chicago to DC – it is essential we heed the words of Mission Hill founder Deborah Meier, who reminds us that “democracy rests on having respect for the judgment of ordinary people.”

These two visions – of a school filled with unmarked seeds, and a democracy fueled by ordinary citizens – come together in the tenth and final chapter of A Year at Mission Hill. We see a montage of children in various states of joy. We hear teachers sing the words of poet Kahlil Gibran at their school’s graduation ceremony (“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”). And we watch principal Ayla Gavins tell her staff she will refuse to administer new testing requirements under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.

As Mission Hill plans for the challenges of a new school year, we should pay attention to the principles its principal is willing to risk her career to protect: Trust and transparency. Experience. Variation. Autonomy. And, as she puts it, “celebrating the humanness in all of us, and trying to build on human potential and not stifle it.”

Some will have watched this series and concluded that schools like Mission Hill are little more than inspiring one-offs, with a singular vision of schooling that can never be scaled. Yet there are already hundreds of schools – from the Expeditionary Learning network to the New York Performance Standards Consortium – that assess their students similarly (and a handful of states that are following suit). There are already thousands of teachers with the ability, given the right supports and surroundings, to be just as masterful as the ones we’ve observed at Mission Hill. And there are already streamlined structures in place, from the pilot school model in Boston to the statewide funding system in Vermont, that are empowering public schools to be more innovative, inclusive, and effective.

To be fair, it makes sense that people are searching for the best way to scale the ideas in a school like Mission Hill. After all, the more children that can have experiences like the ones we’ve watched over the course of this series, the better off our society will be. But the best way to spread ideas in a democracy is not by scaling up, like McDonald’s, buy by scaling across, like farmers markets. In the first example, the goal is to make everything so uniform that walking into any store anywhere in the world should feel – and taste – exactly the same. In the second, the goal is to create a forum for people to access what will make them healthier, and to come together in a spirit of community. As a result, every farmers market shares certain common design principles. And each one also demonstrates the myriad variations in how those principles can get applied.

A Year at Mission Hill is a visual testament to the pedagogical power of the second approach. It’s a place that treats the learning process the same way a skilled gardener would nurture a package of wildflowers: by preparing the soil, planting the seeds, and waiting for the unique beauty to emerge. And it’s a place that reminds us that when you invest deeply in the capacity of ordinary adults to do their jobs well, they are capable of extraordinary things.

“The freedom of teachers to make decisions about their classrooms and their lives is essential, “ Meier adds. “The whole point of an education is to help you learn how to exercise judgment – and you can’t do that if the expert adults in your school are not allowed to exercise theirs.”

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

A Tale of Two Schools

Posted on | by Sam

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

There are two current storytelling efforts about two different schools that, if you’re not careful, might feel like the American version of a tale of two cities.

In the first, a 10-part video narrative about a year in the life of the Mission Hill School in Boston, we’re treated to the best of times: a place where every children is known and cared for, where learning is experiential and engaging, and where the adults are both extremely skilled and highly collaborative.

In the second, a two-part This American Life series about a high school in Chicago, we’re given a glimpse of the worst of times: a place where 29 current or former students were shot the previous school year, where some students spend their entire high school careers avoiding social relationships out of safety, and where every member of the football team has dodged gunfire at least once in their young lives.

On one level, these two stories do provide some stark, uncomfortable contrasts: at Mission Hill, there are good days and bad days, but on balance the school is steady, secure, and consistently supportive of its students. And at Harper High School, there are moments of personal transformation, but on balance its students are forced to survive in a Sisyphean environment filled with fear and uncertainty.

On another level, however, the stories of Mission Hill and Harper High provide the rest of us with a clear message about the state of public education as it is – and as it ought to be. In fact, it’s impossible to hear these two schools’ stories and not see three clear implications for school reform going forward:

1. Our nation’s schools need to do a lot more than improve reading and math. It’s fitting that Harper High School is a “turnaround school.” That means the U.S. Department of Education has given it an additional $1.6 million annually “in order to raise substantially the achievement of students.”

If you haven’t been paying attention, anytime you see the word “achievement” you can just replace it with “standardized reading and math scores.” In other words, the only explicitly stated goal of our federal turnaround funds is to raise student performance on tests. That’s not just myopic – it’s tragic, particularly when you hear the story of Harper High and you meet young people like Thomas, a young man who had witnessed multiple murders, and who already worried he would hurt a lot of people soon.

Not surprisingly, the story’s reporters met Thomas in the school’s social work office, where he was usually found. “Sometimes I just need to talk to somebody,” he tells them, avoiding all eye contact, “and that’s why I come here.”

Don’t get me wrong – every school in America should set high academic standards for their students. But let’s be equally honest about something else: in communities like Thomas’s, young people often have just two places to escape to – the streets or the school. And when we threaten the ongoing existence of safe havens like a social worker’s office – as Harper will be forced to do when its looming budget cuts take effect – we increase the likelihood that Thomas will take a wrong, perhaps deadly, turn.

2. Our nation’s children all need the same things. It’s impossible to watch the Mission Hill series and not see the value of ensuring that every child feels known, loved and supported by at least one adult in the school. Once again, this is a foundational element of the schooling experience that transcends academic content. As Mission Hill 3rd grade teacher Jenerra Williams puts it, “You have to know them to teach them well. And once you do, you just naturally become their advocate.”

We see the same lesson at Harper High, where social worker Anita Stewart says goodbye to a young person running off to class with these words: “You are a person. You are valuable and you matter.” Indeed both of these remarkable educators understand something the bulk of our education policies chooses to ignore: that unmet social needs become unmet academic needs.

This observation should inform everything from how schools are evaluated to how teachers are prepared. Once again, however, our desire to engender measurable school reform on a political timetable (as opposed to one that actually reflects what we know about how organizations can implement lasting changes) has left us with empty discussions of schools that “boost performance” and teacher preparation programs that act as if a deep understanding of child development is a luxury, not a necessity. And once again, we can do better.

3. Our nation’s teachers need and deserve our support. There’s no escaping the fact that in the last several years, we’ve painted a general picture of America’s teachers as lazy, protected, and inferior. But the stories about Mission Hill and Harper High reveal a different picture: of adults who are highly skilled, highly committed, and highly valuable to the communities they serve.

To be sure, there are teachers out there whose unions have protected them from sanction, and whose ability to impact the lives of their students has long since passed. I had some of these characters as colleagues, and in my experiences working with schools around the country for the past decade, I would say they account for no more than 5% of the profession.

By contrast, the educators we see and hear at Mission Hill and Harper are masters of their craft, and models for us all. They are more than heroic; they are ambassadors of a profession tasked with the most important goal of a democratic society: to help children learn how to use their minds well, and how to harness the power and uniqueness of their own voice.

For these reasons, A Year at Mission Hill and This American Life are exactly the sorts of stories about public education we need. In Boston, we see a school in which both old and young are struggling to actualize a Dewey-esque reflection of the ideal learning environment; in Chicago, we see a school in which both old and young are struggling to escape a Dystopian reflection of our national culture of violence. And in both schools, we see personal stories of hope and transformation, and a real-life reflection of the social and emotional foundations of a healthy school.

The rest is up to us.

How to Tell a Good Learning Story

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on How to Tell a Good Learning Story

(This article originally appeared in Education Week).

Last week, at the New Teacher Center’s 15thannual conference in San Jose, I urged more than 700 educators to start telling their own stories about teaching and learning, and to stop letting outside forces pigeonhole public perceptions of the work that they do

The talk went well (view the Prezi below and decide for yourself), but I worried afterwards that all I’d done was suggest a compelling path forward – and provide little else.

A friend in the crowd confirmed this. “Everyone loved the ideas,” she told me collegially, “but I’m not sure anyone understands how to tell their story more effectively now than they did before.”

I think that’s right. So let me do here what I didn’t do there – by offering some specific suggestions about how to provide a more hopeful, solution-oriented lens to our work.

Decouple and Recouple: Let’s face it: most education coverage is boring. That’s because we’re always doing one of two things: we’re either reporting on reports, or we’re trying to explicate promising practices. The result of this is a sea of stories about education that are heavy on the facts and the how-tos – and light on the personal narratives and the professional inspiration.

This “emotion gap” presents us all with a huge opportunity, as long as we realize that a great story needs to do two things well: it must touch us, and it must teach us something new.

In the modern world, we don’t have to touch and teach in a single video or article. Instead, we can decouple the inspiration from the edification – and then recouple them online.

As an example, consider what we’re doing with A Year at Mission Hill. Every other week until June, we’ll release a new 5-minute video that tracks a year in the life of a great public school. The purpose of these videos is to help you feel the power of a healthy school culture by letting you observe how it unfolds and develops over time. Invariably, you’ll see lots of promising practices in the course of the series – teachers co-constructing curricula, children developing higher-order thinking skills, etc. – but any explanations of how to do these things well have been decoupled from the story itself, and then recoupled online via a rich set of wraparound resources for anyone that wants to go deeper and initiate similar efforts in their own school.

We should do more of this in education: elevate the stories of the people in our schools – the children, their teachers, and the larger community that supports them – and then look for the ideas underpinning that work and flesh them out separately.

Serialize and Sustain: Before there was ever a single copy of Bleak House, there were the twenty monthly installments Charles Dickens published across 1852 and 1853. Point being: the appeal of serializing a story goes back a lot farther than “Must See TV.”  It is, in short, a great way to build and sustain an audience, and to create enough breathing space to let a set of characters develop and deepen over time.

For some reason, however, the idea of serializing our own stories about education never seems to have taken root (and no, a three-part series reporting on a new report doesn’t count). But it should: indeed, there is no other way to capture the scope of that nonlinear journey of personal transformation that is at the heart of powerful learning.

What if we told more stories about teachers and students and classrooms and schools in this way? Would we find better ways to build an audience, reflect the complexity of modern schooling, and inspire a better set of questions to guide our work. Again, A Year at Mission Hill is planning to find out; other schools and communities should do the same.

Reshare and Repurpose: A great story can and should serve multiple purposes. Case in point: the charter school in DC that contracted with a local filmmaker to produce a 20-minute video about their school.

First, this school decided that rather than produce a general overview video (“Welcome to . . . We are . . .”), they would select an illustrative sliver of their work and use that as the viewer’s point of entry to understand who they are and what they value. Because this school is a member of the Expeditionary Learning network, they chose to have the filmmaker follow its Kindergarten class through a three-month learning process that would culminate in a public presentation of their work.

Next, the filmmaker focused in on a few individuals who could be the human faces of the story: the classroom teacher and two of her students. Others were featured, of course, but these were the people through whose eyes we were allowed to see the work unfold. The goal, in other words, was to touch us as much as it was to teach us.

And finally, this school realized that a video like this could serve multiple purposes at once (it’s being finalized right now for a Spring 2013 release): it could be used to help parents at open houses understand what makes the school special; it could be used in fundraising efforts as a sort of visual calling card; and it could be used to spark larger community conversations about teaching and learning (plans are underway for a public screening and subsequent live radio conversation about the state of teaching and learning in DC).

Clearly, this school understands something the rest of us need to understand as well – that the stories we tell must have an appeal beyond just our own internal audience, or our own distinct community. After all, as John Merrow recently pointed out, 80% of American households do not have school-age children.

How will the opinions of those “inadvertent viewers” be shaped in the months and years ahead? How will we restore a balance to what we value in children and each other? And how can we make sure that the stories of 2013 are about more than just content, conflict, and catastrophe?

I believe these three design principles are a good start. What do you think?