Posts filed under ‘Design Concepts’
The Seven-Period High School Day
A creative solution to the short school day and the conflicting biorhythms and agendas among school constituencies could be the seven-period high school day. Some could come early, some could come late, and a few motivated participants could do both.
A consensus is forming about the school day being too short. However, resources are short as well. In addition, there are many conflicting interests to address in school timing. Teenagers stay up late and need to sleep later in the morning. Teachers accustomed to early start times may not wish to move their lives back an hour. Sports, after-school jobs, and family commutes may not allow for an altered school day. As a result, a seven-period, flexible school day may be the best way to solve at least part of the problem.
Some thoughts on the details….
- A seven-period school day would begin at the usual time but end an hour later.
- Faculty and staff could express preferences for starting their days with first or second period.
- Students would be allowed to attend all seven periods, but they would only need to attend six or even five if they had accumulated enough credits.
- Students could come later, for example, if they wished to sleep later or needed to help siblings get to school before they started their own days.
- Some special scholastic or extracurricular activities could be planned for first or seventh period, and faculty staying later could support community volunteers offering extended day services.
- One period for peer study support, virtual courses, or unstructured time could be proctored by ancillary staff for students attending seven periods a day.
- Many opportunities for electives, dual enrollment, or extracurricular activities would be available for students.
- Teachers wishing to explore a new course or engage in common planning time would have more flexibility in their schedules.
Of course, there would be the added duty for administrators in the building. However, some of that time could be found by talking less about instructional leadership off site and spending more time engaging in it within the building…might even help cut some of that costly district overhead.
Third Grade on the Line
There seems to be little argument about 3rd grade as a benchmark year for children. Basic reading and numeracy skills acquired by the end of the 3rd grade are essential to their success in school, perhaps even life. If this is such an important milestone, why not reorganize schools and appoint leaders accountable exclusively for grades PreK-3?
Have you ever had a small child look up at you in genuine fear reporting back from an abandoned trip to the bathroom? “There are big kids in there.” They are terrified. K-8 schools make sense in some ways, but the age and size spreads can be daunting. Never mind the cognitive and emotional rollercoasters faced along the way. The search for connectivity from the first day of school through puberty is a noble one. So is the child’s need for belonging within the local community of family and friends. But these exigencies can be met without diffusing responsibility for the academic benchmarks to be achieved or unique psychosocial needs.
Historically, the movements from junior high (7-9) to middle school (6-8) to elementary school (K-8) have been driven by the needs of early adolescents. However, the youngest members of the school have gotten a bit lost in the shuffle. Placement of fragile, security-oriented children on a collision course with the largest and most narcissistic cohort can overwhelm them and obscure their needs.
Children between prekindergarten and 3rd grade make the transition across two stages of development and acquire the skill necessary to move from play-based learning to the milieu of applied academic industry. That is enough for one school team to accomplish. In fact, the work done in the early elementary years is so crucial to future achievement that researchers are beginning to tie failure to meet these benchmarks as hallmarks of failure to finish high school and loss of access to successful careers in adulthood. Clearly, a strong case could be made for a PreK-3 school where children had the advantage of a focus on their specific needs and educators had exclusive responsibility for bringing all the children to a single level of competency.
Optimally, neighborhood schools for PreK-3 and 4-8 could be in sight of one another and share many services, such as food and transportation. Combined school communities are better able to underwrite shared facilities for the arts, technology, or physical education. In addition, elementary school children benefit from sheltered contact across grade levels. Smaller children enjoy mentoring by the older children. Young adolescents profit from learning about child growth and development as a context for their own maturation processes as well as training to assume childcare responsibility as babysitters. But they still need their own small learning communities.
(Prior post…Finding the Best Split for K-8 Elementary Schools)
Reinventing Schools – Without Charter District Conversion
Incredible work has been done in New Orleans and elsewhere demonstrating how charter schools can reinvent public education. Decentralized funding and managerial autonomy were two factors that proved essential to that success. Reformers are clamoring to duplicate the model of charter school funding and governance in wholly charter districts. The question arises – does this mean that every school in a district has to be a do-over?
After Katrina, the New Orleans schools were in shambles. Replacement charter schools seized the opportunity to implement education reforms. The experiment has resulted in strong achievement for the students. Rarely do such opportunities present themselves outside of war zones or natural disasters. So, how can the essence of this demonstration project be duplicated in other regions?
The process of breaking up every school in a district has a cost that does not need to be incurred. However, any program designed for successful dissemination of innovation in school funding and governance must be implemented thoughtfully. The dialogue could be developed around two essential questions…
- How can a district achieve an orderly transition through gradual release of money and power to trained school managers with the least disruption to the children as their achievement grows.
- What does the training for these new school leaders need to entail?
Drawing on strengths yet addressing urgent need would suggest a combination of breaking up the worst schools while implementing new management innovations in the best district schools. The former must achieve change as quickly as possible; the latter presumably have the organizational vitality to thrive under conditions of change.
In the short run, the answer to the second question seems moot. The time for change is now. Turnaround teams and managers of change demonstrate a special kind of leadership. Transition teams from outside of education need to be inducted into the industry quickly as partners in the process. At the same time, traditional school leaders would benefit from general management training and greater community engagement.
In the long run, however, a new model of school leadership will emerge that has a general manager running the overall organization, and instructional leaders and community liaisons managing collections of small learning communities. Each will demonstrate excellence in his or her discipline. As the model evolves, overlapping training would allow career mobility across the education complex.
Subsidize PreK for Children at Risk
The kinds of practices seen with Early Intervention and PreK programs would probably be good for all children. That does not mean that the government needs to subsidize them for everyone. Good things already happen in most US homes. Save scarce government funding for the children for whom disability, language barriers, or poverty interfere with their early childhood development.
Pre-kindergarten is becoming a feature of elementary education out of necessity in pockets of need across the nation. In the meantime, it has long been a purchased service for many children whose parents choose to give their children a head start in education or to combine education with needed daycare services. The latter cases need not be subsidized by the US government. In fact, doing so would probably add to the achievement gap for children who are at risk.
Adequate nutrition, stimulating play activities, and listening to stories and music would seem to be a birth right for every child; likewise, a warm, safe bed for sleeping. For the fortunate, they are. However, the number of children who are at risk is growing in trying economic times. In addition, a disturbing number of children are demonstrating devastating disabilities that seem to have at least part of their foundation in the language acquisition process. Many continue to be challenged by attention disorders or specific learning issues. Early intervention with food, supportive play, and targeted therapies offer the greatest hope in the long run. Introduction of early education services that cannot happen at home are part of the solution as well.
Services to young children have enormous lifelong benefits, but they are very expensive. Also, the children with the greatest need are the most likely to fall through the cracks. Often their parents are overwhelmed in life and cannot advocate well for them. The delivery system for Early Intervention continues to need to develop in the direction of creating access through awareness for families in dire need. Similarly, PreK offers a lifeline that may be invisible to the most crucial beneficiaries.
Generalizing free public access to PreK programs would distract service providers from the necessary work of finding and enrolling the neediest children. Billions would be spent on children whose parents were savvy users of services, and populations for whom the program was initiated would continue to fall through the cracks. Government subsidies must be based on need. Our mission must be clear: eliminating the achievement gap for at-risk children by finding them early and serving them as often as needed until equal access to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is theirs, too.
Finding the Best Split for Neighborhood K-8 Schools
Early intervention programs have overloaded K-8 schools. But the model for educating children in neighborhood schools through puberty remains a fine idea. Movement to adjacent schools offering PreK-3 and Grades 4-8 seems like a better idea than going back to the old middle school concept.
The K-8 elementary school model created continuity for children as they evolved from concrete learners to more complex thinkers, keeping their core identities intact as they came of age as young adolescents. The milieu provided a wonderful blend of physical and intellectual growth within the context of a nurturing community of educators, families, and other supporters who knew each child well. However, early intervention programs have front-loaded elementary schools with crucial new programs for younger children who are at-risk for developmental and learning disabilities. The schools are straining under the burden of too many missions.
Some have advocated for a retreat to the middle school model for the upper grades. However, new information suggests that grade six may hold too great of a transition challenge for the children. Indeed, a study from Harvard University found that movement into middle school in grade six had a greater negative impact on student outcomes than the transition to high school in grade nine. The middle years clearly need special attention, but existing models no longer fit.
A win-win for elementary children could be a neighborhood-based solution that splits schools in fourth grade. The buildings could be physically adjacent and continue to share resources such as libraries, playgrounds, cafeterias, and athletic facilities. Still, the smaller learning communities could address the unique needs of divergent age groups. Communication across faculty groups would be facilitated, and the children could continue to benefit from interaction through programs such as mentoring between younger and older students.
A school for grades 4-8 would recognize the movement from basic skill building to applied learning that is most significant in grade four. In addition, it would shift the change in school to an age that is less complicated physically and emotionally. Children could solidify their identities based on emerging intellectual strengths prior to tackling the upheavals with the onset of puberty. By grade six, their introspection and social development could occur in a safer and more familiar place.
The New Urban Academic Campus
Heresy…today’s small high schools are building blocks for our future, crucial transition elements that, like scaffolding, must fall to reveal the 21st century high school.
Future shock? Large urban high school campuses will comprise at least a few small schools, athletic facilities, an arts complex, a tech center, and various culinary enterprises. Students will have options off campus for dual enrollment in college, distance learning, and work study. Community service will be mandatory, and civics lessons will transport students to government centers. Students will engage in exploration, but the pursuit may be a thesis, not necessarily hands-on learning. Small learning community leaders will have reinvented the assistant principal role. The campus will have a general manager running the operation.
Small high schools are helping to address the achievement gap in urban education. They seek to ensure that students are no longer falling through the cracks, and that they are getting smarter through exploration-based learning. However, pedagogically, they are too close to very good middle schools. This strategy must be temporary by design. In addition, small schools keep class sizes low by limiting administration to a small number of micromanagers with a yen for multitasking. Electives and extracurricular activities often depend on the skill set resident in the core content faculty, not student choice, and team sports are cobbled together with partnering schools in borrowed or substandard facilities. Sacrifices are made to preserve academic priorities.
Failure is not an option. Important investments are being made for our children to achieve equity in college preparation and access to the American dream. What, then, with success?
What key elements of this experiment must be preserved? Surely, a personal connection to school is a must for every student. Small school nurturing and student-orientation must survive. But is the pedagogy that has bridged the achievement gap equal to the task of taking students to the next level in high academic achievement? Strong mathematical and scientific thinking depends on algorithms and abstract thought. Writing for college must be quick and carefully composed, not formulaic or endlessly edited. Broad knowledge of culture and historical perspective set students apart. Facility with technology and spatial navigation must be assumed.
Collections of small schools will benefit from affiliation to underwrite expanded opportunities for their students. Personal choice is as important to academic motivation for students as the best intentions among their teachers and mentors. Once core competencies have been achieved, exposure to a menu of options will allow students to explore their interests and broaden their perspectives. For the more fortunate, it will unlock a passion for study in a newly discovered discipline.
This new high school exists in some wealthier suburbs today. I can only ask for at least as much for urban students. And it is not too soon to include this vision in our plans for their future.
Thoughts on English Language Learning
In the world of multiple intelligences, linguistics is NOT one of mine. However, I try to pay attention to any dialogue on language acquisition or management of English Language Learners (ELL). After many years of listening to proponents for bilingual education, full immersion, or sheltered immersion programs, I have designed a couple of hybrid models for 1st year ELL students.
The first, CharterAmericas creates a community center based charter school that assimilates the speaker of limited English with a very strong primary language. The program celebrates the intersection of the cultures of the Americas and provides a combination of bilingual and sheltered immersion learning. Further, it seeks to engage the local community in a shared value of multilingual language fluency.
The second, a Cultural Studies program, focuses on native language instruction of topics across the curriculum to students with very little understanding of English and significant gaps in knowledge from very significant absenteeism. In this latter program, the goal for students is to achieve foundation content knowledge and improve skill in language arts while studying their own culture and native tongue.
Common themes with both programs include…
- Strong language arts studies in the student’s native language
- English taught as a foreign language credit
- Emphasis on native language for new academic content, English instruction for rehearsal of familiar concepts
- Living arts content in English with vocabulary training and hands-on learning opportunities
Option 1: A charter school that serves as a one-year intensive academic transition program for newcomers with modest English proficiency. The school is part of a community center that serves the extended family as they adjust to life in an English-speaking world.
CharterAmericas
Languages of the Americas, Year 1 ELL program
Language Arts – Primary language at grade level with learning standards comparable to ELA. This course is intended to develop deep knowledge and appreciation of reading with comprehension, writing by genre with appropriate mechanics, and vocabulary growth in the students’ native language.
Co-teaching at Grade level with interpreter – in English + primary language translations with after-school tutoring in primary language
- Math
- Social Studies
- Science
Electives – bilingual with English vocabulary learning standards, oral and written assessments, and performance tasks for content
- English I as a Foreign Language credit
- The Arts – fine art, music, drama, dance
- Living Arts – Culinary arts, fashion, woodworking, handyman
- Technology – Keyboarding, Office Software, Graphics, Web Design,
- Health and Physical Education
Community links
- Lifelong learning – tutoring support after program completion
- Whole family success planning (ESL, career counseling and training, adult education)
- Leadership series – multilingual lectures, debates, cultural events
- Part-time interpreters from community
- Feeder schools in local district
- Universities with cultural links – Latino and/or Caribbean studies
- Performance series – student and community productions
- Support services – counseling, health links
Languages supported
- Creole
- English
- French
- Portuguese
- Spanish
The Paradox of Success
How success in urban middle schools has muddied the waters for high school educators
In leadership meetings…“What’s going on? The data looks good, but the kids are a mess. This must be a bad cohort year. And that’s what I thought last year…until I met this group.” In the halls…”What’s wrong with these kids? They’re smart but they’re so spacey. They’ve got no ability to focus or follow the simplest direction. It’s those damned video games.” Or, in the teacher’s lounge…“It’s those charter schools…skimming all the good kids. This is what we’re left to deal with. Can you believe it?” Fault-finding missions may be obscuring early signs of student success, costing us our faith in good programs and the insight to preserve their long-term benefits for students.
Sometimes progress takes strange forms. Suppose…
- The student who suddenly seems unclear on any concept is merely overwhelmed by emerging abstract thought at an earlier age than we have come to expect.
- A high-risk student returning to school after heavy absenteeism feels like a fish out of water and is tempted to give the social cachet of rebelliousness or underground cultural experience priority over the challenge of catching up academically.
- Students who follow others are trying on personas without the insight to back them up. They support the cultural shift at their grade level but are genuinely clueless.
- Concrete thinkers who are more independent form cliques socially as a defense mechanism, some finding refuge in adult guidance while others spin out of control.
Each of these cohorts responds to a different set of coping strategies, and recognition of their motivation is crucial to successful intervention.
As a special educator, one of my greatest privileges was to witness the convergence of knowledge, maturity, and stamina evident in students with emerging abstract reasoning. It was the surest sign that they were ready to clear one of their toughest hurdles, the high school graduation exam requirement. Often they were juniors or seniors before they finally “grew up.” But what is happening with the children in general education who are arriving at that intellectual age at a younger chronological age?
As urban adolescents begin to catch up with their peers elsewhere, teachers and administrators must make accommodations to stay head. The range of skill levels, especially in ninth and tenth grade classrooms, creates a greater need than ever for differentiated instruction. Students regressing behaviorally as they cope with that giant leap into the world of abstraction need greater academic challenge combined with help getting organized. The returning drop-out needs respectful and private remediation along with leadership opportunities. The concrete thinker benefits from scaffolding to create a bridge to abstract concepts as well as peer tutoring to stay connected with student leaders. Every student needs a chance to share his or her strengths in class.
Beyond the classroom, advisories and activities must offer opportunities for students to reinvent themselves as young adults with positive identities in meaningful communities. Alienation abounds. Students drop out of school not only as a self-fulfilling prophecy of academic failure, but also to protest their failure to find their voice in the setting. Even the most engaged students need safe ways to challenge authority, assess risk, and test boundaries. There must be rewards for carrying the burden of greater knowledge at a younger age, the chance to apply it in freely chosen ways.
Progress is being made. New management challenges are the price of that success. Many current frustrations in education replace complaints such as, “My students are so concrete they could sink a ship.” Or, “I quit teaching math because I felt like I had to start over each year. The students never remembered anything.” Those were not the good old days.
We cannot turn our backs on math and literacy basics yet. However, the new model for the urban high school must include a broader range of options for academic content, electives, and extracurricular activities. Talented and well-educated youths need opportunities to grow in multifaceted ways as they explore their interests. They must become leaders for their own cause as they reach for new possibilities in careers and higher education.
Middle School Remedial – Part 1: Mission
Many students who ultimately will drop out of high school demonstrate a similar pattern of absenteeism and academic failure by grade six. This program builds a cohort of seventh and eighth grade students who are overage, provides remedial education, and fosters new learning habits before they enter high school
Mission:
- To engage students who are overage in grade and/or underperforming due to significant absenteeism by grade six and prepare them for academic success in high school.
- To diagnose knowledge gaps that may be contributing to academic performance and support remedial learning.
- To provide accelerated access to age appropriate content through intensive content focus, learning across the curriculum, and social learning opportunities.
Beliefs:
- Students who have experienced academic failure and/or absenteeism are likely to continue to struggle unless this pattern is altered early in adolescence.
- Access to academic success is the most effective path to behavioral change.
- Adolescents grow intellectually as a result of group processes with their peers, families, and communities that is either social or academic in focus.
- At risk students may benefit from more comprehensive chunking of academic content (as opposed to spiraling) and recover credit at a somewhat accelerated pace.
- High school readiness is measured in academic, developmental, and social/emotional benchmarks.
- Informed decision making depends on concrete evidence, analysis of facts and risk factors, and either democratic or independent choice.
Targeted Solutions for Students Not Attending High School
I am interested in working on alternative education programs and gathering data to assess their effectiveness. The concept is summarized below…
This proposal seeks to explore ideas for students who have experienced difficulty succeeding in traditional high schools. The model is more of a program than a school, but it might fit into a transfer school or borough center. Initially, my program would target one of three cohorts of high school students:
- Students who have earned most of their high school credits but have one or two specific content area deficits preventing them from graduating (e.g., math or science),
- Students who function below grade level as a result of cumulative absenteeism and would benefit from a period of remedial skill development to catch up with their peers, or
- Students (ELL) who have delayed enrollment in high school and have little experience with national or local curriculum frameworks.
While many students initiate their return to school, I am interested in developing a small collection of programs and recruiting students who have not been attending school to test their effectiveness.
Academic programs would comprise short cycles of full-time immersion in a content area. Each curriculum would be tailored for remediation and comprehensiveness to meet the needs of students. In addition to attending classes, students would have the option of spending part of each day either pursuing online course work and independent assignments or getting more individual instruction in a skills lab environment.
Students who have been caught up in failure cycles need multiple opportunities for success early in the change process. Compact course modules allow then to accumulate credits relatively quickly and to experience deeper understanding of content that once mystified them. From an instructional perspective, content focus allows for greater flexibility and creativity within the curriculum while meeting specific learning needs.
Both the remedial skills program and the ELL program would focus on universal skill sets for content areas. The first would create a bridge to the curriculum by honing prerequisite skills. The latter would introduce the overarching goals and common skill sets for each content area within the context of advanced cultural studies in the student’s native language.
My reasons for creating a program rather than a school are twofold. First, the immersion courses would target relatively homogeneous groups of students to solve specific needs – a model that would be unsound for education in general. Secondly, traditional high schools have more options for elective courses and fine approaches to college preparation. The goal of my program would be to set the students on a path to success that would allow them either to earn their diplomas relatively quickly or earn enough credits to return to high school in good standing to complete their studies.
