Tag: Learning

Is it time for schools to rethink, well, time?

Posted on | by Sam

On a recent weekday morning in Washington D.C., several hundred teenagers hurriedly made their way through their high school’s hallways in a frantic effort to get to class on time.

I know – nothing new there. Except that in this particular school, the hallways had ubiquitous electronic clocks that measured time in bright red numerals down to the second, and these particular students had just three minutes to move from one class to another. “They had five minutes last year,” principal Caroline Hill told me, in between passionate exhortations for her students to keep moving. “And it was a complete waste of time.”

Admittedly, Hill – the founding principal of the E.L. Haynes Charter High School – is a little time-obsessed. That’s because she’s also obsessed with making sure that the most timeless experience in American public life – the school day – jettison its anachronistic habits and enter the modern age. “We can’t transform school,” she continued, “until we transform the way we think about time and its relationship to learning.”

Ostensibly, Hill’s school is as good a place as any to try to bring about such a mindshift. One of D.C.’s most sought after public options, the Haynes high school building reflects a mixture of traditional and innovative roots. Formerly a neighborhood public school until it was closed in 2008, Haynes secured the right to the building a year later, in 2009, and launched an ambitious renovation plan soon after. The end result is a $25 million, space capsule-style addition to the original building – and more than 46,000 additional square feet. The main entrance opens onto a sun-filled atrium that feels more like a university student center than a high school. And although the pace of the day still feels a lot like the high school you and your parents (and your grandparents) probably attended – with classes in fifty-minute increments, spread across a seven-hour day – what happens during those classes feels a lot different. That’s because E.L. Haynes is determined to rethink the two most important parts of the high school experience: ninth grade, and the way students start; and twelfth grade, and the way they finish. “And what we’re learning,” Hill told me, “is that in order for those experiences to be meaningfully different, adults and young people first need to completely rethink what it means to be a teacher or a student.”

Hill’s interest in reimagining the entry and exit points for her students was piqued shortly after the school welcomed its first group of ninth graders. “We had assumed that all of our high school kids would come directly from our lower school,” she explained, “but three-fourths of them were coming from other schools across the city, which meant the skill-levels and expectations each student had about what school was about were all over the map. Meanwhile, our ninth grade was structured as this typical one-size-fits-all experience, regardless of where the kids were at individually.”

Hill and her faculty quickly decided that if they wanted to ensure that all students were ready for life after high school, they had to get serious about closing those gaps. “And it’s really hard to create a more personalized high school experience when you have constraints on time and talent, and all these pieces that say you have to do ‘school’ a certain way.”

In particular, Hill means a timeworn way of thinking about school in which, simply put, time is the constant, and learning is the variable. Typically, American schools are structured this way, such that if a student doesn’t master the material presented in the allocated time, he or she fails the unit, the class marches on, and whatever skills or information were supposed to be acquired simply get left behind. Sound familiar?

But Haynes and a growing number of other schools around the country are trying to flip the script by making learning the constant, and time the variable. “If we’re not willing to have a revolving door on our talent and our students, then something’s going to have to change in the way we do ‘school,’” she said. “Why not, on the first day, give students everything they need to succeed, as opposed to this lesson today, and that book tomorrow. Instead, say these are the books we’re going to read this year. Here. Have them. These are the lessons and models we’re going to do in math. Here. Have them. And then spend the rest of your time tending to individual needs and letting everyone proceed at their own pace.”

Of course, that sort of culture shift is easier said than done. American schools have conferred degrees based on Andrew Carnegie’s century-old notion of the “Carnegie Unit” – aka the credit hour – for generations. This is especially ironic since the Carnegie Unit was never supposed to be a measure of learning; instead, its original purpose was simply to measure how much teachers were working, as a way to differentiate high school from college – and as a method for determining teacher pensions. If learning is to replace time as the constant, however, our methods for evaluating each individual’s learning must become much more nuanced and precise. And yet once again, time looms large. As Lee Shulman, president emeritus of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, puts it: “The reason students fail . . . is not that they’re not smart. It’s that they need more time to succeed, and time is precisely what educators fail to give them.

“Learning should never result in a normal curve,” Shulman argues. “It should result in a kind of ‘J curve’ in which most students end up clustered at the successful end of the continuum. And the only way that can happen is if we permit time to vary.”

I saw firsthand what this looks like after entering Shane Donovan’s ninth grade physics class. An early adopter of this approach, Donovan received the Citybridge Foundation’s Education Innovation Fellowship, a yearlong program that introduces teachers to promising innovations in personalized learning, as well as the chance to pilot personalized learning models in their schools. While Donovan surfed the room, his students – all but two of who are either designated as special-needs learners, or English-language-learners, or both – worked in small clusters based on whichever standard in the curriculum they were working on.

Occasionally, Donovan would address the entire room, but it was only to remind them to monitor their own needs. “If you’re not done with Standard Seven by the end of the period,” he bellowed at one point, “you have homework. If it’s just a matter of time, finish it on your own. But if you’re stuck, come find me so you can get yourself unstuck.”

Donovan is bouncy and bound, with glasses, a lanyard around his neck, and rolled-up sleeves. After the period ends, I asked him what it takes to run a class this way. “I spent the summer making screencasts of all the traditional lectures I would have to give this year,” he said, “but the hardest part has been learning to let go so I can let the kids do, without the typical minute-to-minute feedback.

“For me,” he continued, “the important question was not how to make school self-paced; it was how to stop getting crappy projects that didn’t show depth of understanding. How can we shift what we do as adults so that if kids are doing assessments, they’re doing them well?”

Since making that shift, Donovan says something surprising emerged: a much clearer demonstration of high-impact life skills that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with physics – skills like learning how to organize your time, keep track of your own progress, and get help when you need it, but not before. “I’ve come to believe that the most important thing happening here isn’t the physics; it’s them understanding how to correct their own mistakes. We still have kids who are always pressing the ejector seat – ‘I need a teacher! I need a teacher!’ – but it’s much easier now to see who got it and who didn’t, and who knows how to organize their time, and who doesn’t.”

That transparency is key for the school’s plans to reimagine twelfth grade as well. “We need to teach our students how to work with independent time,” Hill explained.  “If they’re flailing with us, that’s a gift, because it means we still have some time to teach them how to manage their time before they leave us and have to do it on their own. It’s like peeling back an extra layer of the onion.”

Donovan agrees, and is surprised by how much it’s changed the way he thinks about teaching. “In a way, I don’t really care how much physics they learn,” he admitted. “I want them to learn how to correct their own mistakes. That can make it harder – to see kids struggle – but if our boys don’t graduate, we know what the statistics tell us will await them. So helping them learn how to struggle and become more self-aware matters much more than, say, Standard Twelve in the ninth grade Physics curriculum.

“To teach this way is definitely messy and weird,” Donovan said while welcoming his next group of students into class. “And I’m definitely never going back.”

(This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The social origins of intelligence

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on The social origins of intelligence

There’s a fascinating new study out in which researchers studied the injuries and aptitudes of Vietnam War veterans who suffered penetrating head wounds. Among their findings? That “the ability to establish social relationships and navigate the social world is not secondary to a more general cognitive capacity for intellectual function, but that it may be the other way around. Intelligence may originate from the central role of relationships in human life and therefore may be tied to social and emotional capacities.”

Let me repeat that: cognitive intelligence is not separate from social intelligence. In fact, our capacity to deepen the former is dependent on our ability to be deeply grounded in the latter.

For anyone who has spent time as an educator, we’ve always intuitively known this to be true. As the saying goes, unmet social needs lead to unmet academic needs. Or, put more simply, the three most important words in teaching and learning are Relationships, Relationships, Relationships.

And yet the recent flood of cognitive research that confirms this intuitive truth is striking, especially when one considers how slowly it has made its way into the minds of our nation’s policymakers. Indeed, as lead researcher Aron Barbey put it, “the evidence suggests that there’s an integrated information-processing architecture in the brain, that social problem solving depends upon mechanisms that are engaged for general intelligence and emotional intelligence. This is consistent with the idea that intelligence depends to a large extent on social and emotional abilities, and we should think about intelligence in an integrated fashion rather than making a clear distinction between cognition and emotion and social processing.

“This makes sense,” Barber continues, “because our lives are fundamentally social. We direct most of our efforts to understanding others and resolving social conflict. And our study suggests that the architecture of intelligence in the brain may be fundamentally social, too.”

So what would the next generation of education policies need to look like in order to be aligned with the emerging consensus about how the brain works, and how people learn?

They would need to start incentivizing the conditions that support holistic child development and growth, and stop disproportionately weighting literacy and numeracy.

They would need to start crafting policies in concert with other departments, from health to housing to labor, as a way to try and systemically support our country’s poorest families.

They would need to ensure that teacher preparation and evaluation programs are grounded in the latest neuroscience, not our traditional notions of what teaching looks like and requires.

What else?

Summer, once the time for reflection, now the time for radical redesign

Posted on | by Sam

Tanesha Dixon vividly remembers the first summer she spent as a teacher – as part of a service program in Uganda, just before her senior year at Notre Dame.

“I had my heart set on being a forensic psychologist,” she told me recently, amidst the busy midday shuffle of downtown Washington, D.C. “Then I felt what it was like to be part of a place that was changing people’s lives. And I decided I wanted to keep being that person.”

Eleven years later, Dixon has become that person for scores of young men and women at the Wheatley Education Campus in the D.C. neighborhood of Trinidad. In that time, she’d observed that the stereotype of how teachers spend their summer – a.k.a seventy-seven consecutive Saturdays – never corresponded to the reality of her and her colleagues. “Summer is always the time for reflection, for the research you can’t always complete during the year, and for doing the work you have to do to make the next year even better than the last.”

This year, however, Tanesha Dixon is still waiting for her first moment of summer respite. “Every day,” she confessed wearily, “I work all day, go home, eat something, and then work until three in the morning. I feel like I’m building Rome and the road to it, simultaneously.”

Tanesha’s principal at Wheatley, Scott Cartland, knows what she’s talking about. Six years ago, his first summer at the school coincided with the DC government’s decision to install military-like checkpoints throughout Trinidad to try and stop a spate of murders. He remembers well the first school assembly he tried to organize that September. “We couldn’t get the crowd quiet enough to say anything,” he recalled. “Security guards were chasing kids around the aisles, other kids were screaming – it was complete chaos. You realize you’re outnumbered, and the kids don’t know you or trust you. We were in for a long year.”

Since then, with the help of teachers like Dixon, Cartland had helped engineer an impressive culture shift at Wheatley. But even though crucial factors like trust, attendance and student achievement had risen considerably, “it still wasn’t fast enough. Most of our kids don’t have a lot of social supports in their lives, so it’s especially important here that they start to really assume control of their own learning. And dragging a whole class of kids through the same curriculum over an entire school year clearly ain’t the way.”

For educators like Cartland and Dixon, then, the conclusion was clear: summer could no longer be the place to reflect on how to get better in a system that was never going to meet the needs of all their kids. It had to become the laboratory for something radical – a complete redesign of the structure and purpose of schooling. “What we decided,” Cartland told me, “was that the best place to start was by shifting toward a competency-based model of learning, and putting every kid in a position to be able to determine their own pace and progress, all year long.”

Although the phrase hasn’t entered mainstream conversation, “competency education” is on the mind of lots of educators and policymakers. It emerged out of the logic that if you want to make learning more personalized, you can’t continue to assign credit hours to students based on Industrial-era notions like “seat time” or “Carnegie Units.” In response, a growing number of schools and states are starting to organize learning not by credit hours, but by competencies – or the extent to which a student can demonstrably transfer knowledge and skills in and across content areas. In such an environment, each student is allowed to move through a curriculum at his or her own pace, and no one moves on until s/he can demonstrate mastery of the core concepts.

“To do that well,” Cartland explained, “a school like ours has to rethink just about everything – from grades to tests to professional development to the structure of the school day.” And to do that at all, Dixon adds, requires a reorientation that calls into question just about everything that she and her colleagues find most familiar about their chosen profession. “Some days I feel like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future,” she confessed. “I’m in my DeLorean, and it’s the 1950s again, and I’m fighting Biff. But the future is now. We have more people coming out of DC with HIV than we do with four-year degrees. We have to be courageous enough to hold up a mirror and describe what we see. And if we’re being honest, I think we have to conclude that the whole way we do school is wrong. Teaching to the middle is wrong. Moving kids through the same curriculum at the same pace is wrong.

“Educators today have a choice to make: are we willing to be like those early civil rights activists who chose to sit at the lunch counter, or do we want to stand and observe from a safe distance so we can run when the cops come? I understand where the impulse to protect oneself comes from. I feel it, too. But this is what it means to be a teacher today, and we need to be accept the challenge of behaving in some very different ways.”

I saw evidence of Tanesha’s claims recently during a two-day workshop for her school and five others in DC – a mixture of existing neighborhood schools like Wheatley, and new charter schools that haven’t yet opened their doors. Each school had received a grant from the Citybridge Foundation (full disclosure: Citybridge has asked me to write a series of articles about school reform issues in DC) to reimagine its school in ways that make learning more personalized for each student. “The best and worst feature of competency education is that it never looks the same,” explained Rose Colby, a national expert on the subject who kicked off the meeting. “But let’s begin by letting you all share your most pressing questions or wonders.”

Scott Cartland raised his hand first. “At Wheatley, we’re struggling to design the right performance tasks for kids, and we’re wondering how we’re going to be grouping kids and allocating time. This model requires a much more open-ended system, and we’re still working in the old model, which breaks the day into lots of periods but pushes kids through that day in rigid groups.”

“At some point,” Rose replied, “we have to acknowledge that tweaking the old schedule won’t really work. The only way forward is to begin by thinking about what kids need, and then aligning everything to flow from that.”

Every night, late into the night, that’s exactly what Tanesha Dixon is trying to do. “We’ve built systems of curriculum that are basically grade-based and fixed. Starting this fall with our 6th graders, we’re going to try and do the opposite: to lay down the entire curriculum at the start of the year, and let kids move through it at their own pace. But meanwhile the education world is obsessed with standards, and the switch to the Common Core.”

Dixon took a deep breath. “The thing is, standards are not competencies – they don’t rise to an equal weight. Competencies are the transfer; they’re the performance component that bundles lots of standards together into one demonstrable concept. It’s big. It’s right. And I like that at Wheatley we’re not shying away from the challenge – but some days I wonder how we can pull off such a massive shift when so much of the old way of thinking about all this remains in the minds of so many.”

Cartland agrees. “Right now, I feel like everything we’ve done has been one giant sprint to the starting line. The summer has been invaluable. But this fall is when the real work will begin. That’s when we’ll find out if it was all worthwhile.”

(This article originally appeared in Huffington Post.)

Positively Deviant School Reform?

Posted on | by Sam

If you had six months, little to no resources, and a clear mandate to solve a chronic country-wide problem – knowing that, if you failed, you would be asked to leave that country altogether – what would you do?

I ask because this was precisely the challenge Save the Children was faced with, in Vietnam, in the early 1990s. And the way they succeeded has great relevance for those of us who continue to struggle with other intractable problems (like, say, comprehensive school reform).

In 1990, two-thirds of Vietnamese children under the age of five were suffering from malnutrition. A string of typhoons had decimated the country’s central food staple: rice. Consequently, traditional supplemental feeding programs offered little more than a temporary solution.

Under these circumstances, Save the Children (STC) was asked to help Vietnam solve its widening problem of child malnutrition – and told that the solution could not come from more food, more money, or more resources of any kind: the people were going to have to solve the problem themselves. And if STC couldn’t help them figure out how in six months, its visa would not be renewed.

In response to these desperate circumstances, STC decided the first thing they should do was see if any of the country’s poorest families had children who weren’t malnourished; surely, if there were, something valuable could be learned from them. As STC’s Jerry Sternin explains, “Aid workers visited households, asked questions, and, most importantly, observed how mothers and other family members fed and cared for their well-nourished kids.” And as it turned out, “in every instance where a poor family had a well-nourished child, the mother or father was collecting tiny shrimps or crabs or snails (the size of one joint of one finger) from the rice paddies and adding these to the child’s diet, along with the greens from sweet potato tops. Although readily available and free for the taking, the conventional wisdom held these foods to be inappropriate, or even dangerous, for young children.”

Other atypical habits emerged. Most families fed their young children twice a day – in the morning, before they left to work in rice fields, and in the afternoon, after they returned. But because small children have small stomachs, they could only eat so much of the available rice at each sitting. By contrast, the outlier parents had instructed an adult in the house (usually a grandparent or older sibling) to feed their children regularly – as much as five times a day. As a result, even though every family had the same amount of rice, some children were getting twice as many calories as their friends and neighbors.

Armed with these insights, STC worked to help the parents of the malnourished children change their behavior. Within weeks, the early morning trip to the rice paddy with a small net and empty tin can – for retrieving the shrimp, crabs and greens – had become routine. And by the time STC’s six months were up, more than 40% of the children who participated in the program were rehabilitated; another 20% moved from severe malnutrition to moderate malnutrition; and Save the Children received another six-month visa.

What explains STC’s remarkable success? A strategy called Positive Deviance (PD) – or the idea that in every community, there are already individuals and/or groups behaving in a way that will engender better solutions to community-wide problems.

As the Positive Deviance Institute explains, the PD approach “is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.” And as Sternin suggests, “because PD is based on the successful behaviors of individuals and groups within the socio-cultural context of each program community, it is always, by definition, culturally appropriate. It is very much an ‘approach’ not a ‘model.’”

As someone who cares deeply about American public education, I believe the PD approach could yield great returns for our ongoing reform efforts – but only if we become clear on what it is that constitutes “positive deviance.”

Currently, we celebrate the teachers or schools that demonstrate unusual gains in reading and math scores. But that’s like trying to solve malnutrition by focusing on whether children eat out of bowls or on a plate; it’s related to the goal, but only indirectly.

What, then, is the central goal of American school reform? I would suggest it’s creating a system that is capable of supporting the development and growth – cognitively, socially, emotionally, and ethically – of every child. And if that is our goal (or close to it), then our examples of positive deviance must come from schools and communities that, despite limited resources, are helping children to holistically develop and grow.

That means no private school examples will suffice – and it means no highly unique, highly expensive models like Harlem Children’s Zone. It probably also needs to mean only public schools that do not screen for certain types of students – so, no magnets, either. We’re looking for places that are positively deviant even though they have the same resources as the rest of us.

So who fits the bill? For districts that are reorienting themselves around the personalized needs of every student, we might want to spend more time looking at what RSU2 is doing in Maine, or what superintendent Pam Moran has helped engineer in Albemarle County, Virginia. For individual schools that are attuned to the holistic developmental needs of kids, we can look to Malcolm Price Lab School in Iowa, or The Project School in Indiana. And for networks that help their members focus on the right combination of inputs and outcomes for kids, we should study Expeditionary Learning, New Tech Network, and James Comer’s School Development Program.

There are, in other words, lots of examples of positive deviance in our current system – and lots of places that are refusing to be limited by the current myopic definition of what constitutes “success.” And while none of these places are perfect, together, their examples of positive deviance just might add up to the perfect plan for American public education going forward.

What other examples are you aware of — and what is the positive deviance your example brings to light?

(This article originally appeared in Huffington Post.)

Sleepless in Seattle? My interview with the Seattle Times

Posted on | by Sam

The Seattle Times’ excellent education reporter, Claudia Rowe, published a nice summary of a long conversation we had about school reform when I was in town for an event at the public library. See what you think (and check out the original link here.)

First he was a private school teacher in New York City. Then, briefly, a public school teacher. After that, Sam Chaltain spent years studying schools across the country trying to determine what qualities were common to the very best.

In Washington, D.C., his current hometown, Chaltain got an unusual opportunity to examine two vastly different models up close. For nine months, he observed a new charter program struggling to get off the ground, and contrasted this with the daily ebb-and-flow of life at a 90-year-old neighborhood school. The result is Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of Choice.

Chaltain, 43, insists that he never intended to compare and contrast the schools in order to anoint one better than the other. Rather, he strives to present on-the-ground realities in each, with a mind toward suggesting a path forward. As Washington state prepares to open its own charter programs next year, his experience may have particular resonance for public school parents faced, for the first time, with a choice.

What follows is a condensed version of a conversation between Chaltain and The Seattle Times. He will be discussing his book at Powell’s in Portland on May 21.

Q: As you know, Washington is set to open its first charter schools next year. Can you share any lessons learned from your observations of a first-year program in action?

A: I’d say get away from the false notion that the solution relies on either more — or less — charter schools. Charters and public schools need each others’ strengths. What districts need most is a greater sense of innovation, the ability to think in new ways about old problems. Charters have all those things in spades — by design, everything is up for re-creation, all the way down to report cards.

So ask: How can you ensure that not everything is up for reinvention? Are there structures that can connect district schools and these autonomous charters?

Q: You were a teacher yourself. Why did you step away from the classroom after six months as a public school educator? What was unworkable there?

A: In a word, everything. But it was less about that school than my realization that teaching is really unsustainable work. What made it unsustainable were inefficiencies that overwhelmed any sense of reward you got from the kids. We were so clearly undervalued. Think about it. First, there are the pressures of trying to be a good teacher, 180 days a year, five presentations a day, working with 100 to 200 students. Add their parents into that, and it’s managing up to 200 relationships. Teachers are being asked to do things that they’re not fully equipped to do.

Q: You knew a lot going into your year-long school observation project. In the end, did anything surprise you?

A: Yes, the degree to which schools are almost entirely staffed by young, single women who had basically accepted the idea that the way to solve our problems in education was with a disposable work force. That’s insane. You would never have Doctors for America, doing two-year stints as a pit stop on the way to some other career. Yet in teaching we accept this. Part of it has to do with the ongoing misogyny of our culture. Teaching is still seen as women’s work, a sub-profession. Not only is that incorrect, it’s a horrible strategy for dealing with the one institution that offers the closest thing to a silver bullet that we have in American society.

Q: What’s common to good schools — whether publicly or privately funded?

A: The truth is most schools are pretty good. Very few are truly great. But among those you see again and again that they create a culture among the adults that is collaborative, transparent and empowering. Kids pass through. Adults are the keepers of the culture. The way that you make lasting change is by valuing and supporting the adults, the educators. We may give lip service to this, but we lack sufficient examples of how to do it well. The reality is, we’re still more likely to be persuaded by the illusory hardness of the quantitative proof — test scores — even though there is an overwhelming consensus that reading and math scores are not enough.

Q: You seem to be advocating that we take a few breaths and decide, first, how we define success. Then, how to measure it. But isn’t the glacial pace of innovation part of the problem?

A: The question is not: Are charter schools the answer or the problem? It’s not even, how do we close the achievement gap? The question is, what does high-quality teaching actually look like? What all of us need to do is spend some time thinking about what are the old habits that we need to let go of in order to let new ideas come into being? It’s about being clearer in the questions we ask.

Q: About the national picture, are you optimistic? Worried?

A: All of the above. I’m optimistic that we’re starting to shift from the job of the kid is to adjust to the school, and toward the job of the school is to adjust to the kid. After that, I’m worried. We overvalue the things that we can quantifiably measure. We continue to speak in oppositional, two-dimensional terms about one another. You’re either working for the righteous or the damned. But it’s not about pro- and anti-. It’s about to-what-end?

Want to Get Smarter? Be More Childlike.

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Want to Get Smarter? Be More Childlike.

Interesting piece on NPR this morning in which Shankra Vedantam reviews some of the recent research in neuroscience. You can listen to it here, and you should because it highlights something simple and significant — that the best way to keep learning over one’s life is to keep hold of the boundless inquiry that characterizes early childhood.

“Using mathematical techniques that allow researchers to disentangle the effects of genetic and environmental influences on individuals,” Vedantam reports, researchers “noticed that kids who had higher IQs to begin with seemed to have an extended period in adolescence during which they retained the ability to learn at a rapid pace, just like much younger children.

“I found that twins that had a higher IQ were showing a more childlike pattern of influence during adolescence,” said one of the researchers, Penn State’s Angela Brant.

If that’s true, it would make sense to structure learning environments for children that are proactively designed to unleash each young person’s inherent sense of wonder and curiosity. And yet, here in DC and elsewhere across the country, we are doing the opposite. It’s true — too many young people are arriving in school with extreme deficits when it comes to literacy and numeracy. And it’s true — those things matter. But the best way to help all children thrive is not by making Kindergarten resemble a 10th grade honors class; it’s by making that 10th grade honors class more like Kindergarten.

That’s something educators have known for a long time. Now they have the research to boot.

(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.)