Have schools forgotten they were supposed to prepare kids for success in the world?

I came across this excellent post from the Innovative Educator and thought I would share it since the author is suggesting that schools move in the direction that our Smaller Learning Community grant seems to be taking us! Here's a brief snippet from the post,

"Why is it that artificial, meaningless-to-real-world tests and grades are the way we think we prepare students??? How about preparing students by providing real-world opportunities to explore careers through internships, apprenticeships, and/or part-time jobs? Why not assess students on their experience and what they learned rather than test them in their ability to memorize and regurgitate facts which in many cases don’t matter and aren’t remembered? "

You can read the entire post here....

Happy Reading and Thinking!

Developing our 9th Grade Program!

Wow! What a fantastic day of professional development! Today’s work was facilitated once again by Michelle Swanson and dedicated to developing our 9th Grade Hui Program. The Hui teaching teams were supported by Vice-Principal Diane Ayre, Counselor Terri Christensen, Special Ed Department Chair, Fred Rivera, our PCNC, Nancy Borilez and Mason Chock from Leadership Kaua’i.

After introductions and questions/concerns were discussed, Michelle shared a Ted Talk by Sir Ken Robinson making the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning and creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.

From here, the group jumped into thinking about student outcomes and norms to guide our collaborative work. We broke into teams, brainstormed and reported our findings out to the larger group. After lunch, Michelle recommended that we break into three groups. One would take charge of creating a working draft of norms, one would take a stab at drafting student outcomes and one group would work with Michelle to learn about ConnectEd. They provide a wonderful curriculum mapping tool to facilitate more effective and collaborative cross-discipline curriculum planning.

The student outcome group came up with the following working draft to guide our work. This draft will be refined as we move forward.

Student Outcomes

By the end of 9th grade, our students will:

1. Be active and respectful members of our academic community.
2. Meet literacy standards across all subjects.
3. Have a purposeful sense of direction.
4. Actively contribute to the greater community by completing a service project.
5. Demonstrate self-direction, self-management, self-monitoring and self-modifying skills.
6. Be comfortable using a wide variety of technology tools in an ethical manner.
7. Problem-solve and think critically.
8. Articulate how they are nurtured, supported and valued.

Teacher Norms – The 3 P’s

Professionalism
• Honesty and respect with empathy
• Communication and interaction with humor
• Honor each other’s strengths and challenges
• Limit Multi-tasking

Preparedness
• Structured planning and collaboration
• Spirit of collaboration with a sense of purpose to contribute to the group – “Giving Your All”
• No complaining without solutions
• Step Up/Step Back: No Hogs or Logs

Purpose
• Establish Expectations
• The heart of our work is guided by the best interests of the students.
• Consensus drives decision-making keeping the mission of the Hui in mind.
• Meaningful Meetings


As the day drew nearer to a close, we began some rich discussions about how we would frame our program by coming up with agreements in the areas of assignments formats, student materials & organization, homework and late work policies, and classroom behavior norms/expectations.

Michele closed the day by sharing a new lens through which to view curriculum planning and design in order to better achieve our college and career readiness goals for our students.

Much to think about and consider but we finally feel like we are taking concrete steps and moving from talk to action. We are really hoping Michelle can come back and help facilitate the continuation of our work on our two planning days scheduled for May 16th and 17th. Mahalo to all participants for an inspiring and productive day!

Academy Design Update

Today we were fortunate to have our Academy Design Team spend the day working with Michelle Swanson, our SLC Design Consultant. She started the day by asking us our burning questions and issues, which ranged from “How does Math fit in to all of this?” to “How do we decide which academies we should have?” Michelle then gave us an overview of key issues that we will have to consider moving forward including the following:

1.Defining our structure for 11th and 12th grade is only 30% of the battle. The other 70% includes improving instruction. In most schools there is too much low level input and not enough high-level output. How do we know our students are passionate about learning?
2. Maintaining a focus on rigor & relevance. We need a curriculum that does not hold anyone back while not letting anyone fall through the cracks. At the same time we need to teach kids that both effort and ability matter. In high school, we tend to reward just effort and then students get to college and drop out when they realize effort isn’t enough. They should be able to demonstrate the skills and knowledge needed to succeed before leaving high school.
3. SLC’s are about college AND career readiness, not one or the other. We are developing SLC’s to ensure that ALL students are ready for BOTH college and careers.
4. We need to be thinking big. We have never really asked teachers to think outside of the box, their classroom or their department before. This is tough work.

After some discussion, Michelle then walked us through our six CTE pathways against the academy certification criteria set out by Linked Learning, an organization that supports the development of academies. Together we analyzed whether or not each existing CTE pathway at Kapa’a High School met the criteria in the areas of:

1. Enrollment - Does the pathway have enough students enrolled in it at this point?
2. Personnel - Do we have the staff to expand the pathway and offer a full academy in this area?
3. Kaua’i Office of Economic Development Target Industry Clusters - Are the programs in the pathway aligned with these clusters (Food/Agriculture, Energy, Arts, Technology, Sports & Recreation, Health & Wellness)
4. Partners - What are the potential and existing partnerships with local colleges and businesses?
5. Projects - Is there potential for interesting, student-led projects?
6. Connecting Subjects - What other subjects could support this academy?
7. Pathways - What other CTE pathways could support this academy?

After this exercise, it became clear to the group that we should start with the four most developed pathways when creating our academies. Our best thinking at this moment is that we would have two broad academies with two main pathways in each academy. The pathways could have more than one program. The two remaining CTE pathways would be embedded into the all of the other pathways for something like this:

	HOPES (Health Occupations, and Public, Entrepreneurial Services)		IDEAS (Industrial Design, Engineering, Arts & Sciences)
Primary CTE Pathway	Health Services	Public and Human Services	Arts & Communication	Industrial & Engineering Technology
Program (s)	Health and Wellness	Hospitality & Culinary Arts	1. Fine Arts 2. Performing Arts 3. Digital Media & /Graphic Design	1. Auto 2. Building /Drafting 3. A+
Connecting Subject Areas	Science PE JROTC Health Business	Science Social Studies Business	English Social Studies Business	English Math Science STEM Business
Partnerships	Mahelona Wilcox UH American Red Cross	KCC	KCC Hoike HMSA Business Partners	KCC Cisco
Kaua’i Economic Cluster Area(s)	Health & Wellness Food & Agriculture Sports & Recreation	Food & Agriculture Sports & Recreation	Arts Technology	Technology Energy
COMMON TO, AND EMBEDDED IN ALL ACADEMIES	ENTREPENEURSHIP
	NATURAL RESOURCES/SUSTAINABILITY
	WORLD LANGUAGES

Our steps are for the Academy Design Team to reflect upon and develop this framework more fully. Ultimately each Academy will have a mission and vision statement, a description and course sequencing recommendations from 9th – 12th grade that will include both overall academy and specific program requirements. Once this has been developed, the Academy Design team will present this to the Smaller Learning Communities Leadership Team for review and approval. At the same time, we will also be working with Mike Neubig who is a Smaller Learning Communities scheduling expert on May 24th to ensure that we can indeed make this model work on a schedule. One big piece of successful SLC’s is cohort scheduling. This means teams of teachers and groups of students get to work together in the academies. We will be striving for purity, meaning that students from the same program in each academy will be scheduled together for at least 50% of their day (4 classes on a 7 period schedule) starting in Fall 2012 with our 11th graders.

Our day ended with a visit from Christel from the National Academy Foundation. Christel is friends with Michelle and spent the morning at Kaua’I High School. She shared with us about the possibilities and potential benefits of partnering with the NAF. She is working with several other schools in Hawaii so we were happy to make a connection with her.

All in all a great day and I want to thank everyone for their professionalism, hard work and dedication to ensuring that all students at Kapa’a High School are college and career ready.