One of the things that we have been really lucky to have at SLA is express permission to experiment. We are expected to do things differently… and it’s because of that freedom and, honestly, responsibility, that we have been able to create such amazing things so quickly. And that’s what I want to write about… what it is about that combination of freedom and responsibility that creates a culture that encourages innovation.

We’re really only a few weeks away from publishing a ton of the content that we’ve been creating so far, and now that we finally got the Moodle-Elgg integration working, we should be able to start publishing digital portfolios, with students choosing what pieces to make public. (Now, if only Elgg made a podcast player built in…)

And we’re having a ton of fun with it. We’re all learning as we go, and everything is new, and every lesson, every unit, every project is building on the lessons we learn on the fly. It is insanely hard work, as the tired eyes we all have this week will attest, and it’s even harder because with each step we take, we have to step back and examine what we did… how we might do it better, how we’ll explain our choices to new faculty… to parents… to people outside of the school… to people in the district… to other educators who may want to make similar choices.

And that’s the freedom / responsibility dichotomy. We’ve been given the task of reimagining the core curriculum in Philadelphia. We’re mapping our curriculum to have the same set of skills and content as the School District of Philadelphia, mapping back to them and to the state standards in our staff development meetings. We certainly believe that we won’t be short-changing our kids come PSSA time. And we do believe that our students will do well enough in this model to knock AYP out of the park. (I hate any term that would measure my students’ learning with the phrase "adequate," but that’s another blog entry…)

We know we have to do this well. We know that many eyes are on us, but I have felt from the district immense hope and good will that we will do this well and justify the exemptions we have. There are a ton of folks who are very happy to watch what we do, support what we do, and then figure out what lessons can be learned. But that does give us not just a mandate to attempt to innovate, but need to. We have to keep looking at how we learn, what we learn, why we learn so that we can be a model worthy of study.

No pressure, right?

But hey, good pressure. I love that we are transparent. I love that I would welcome any visitor to come in on any day and get a tour, without ever needing to look to make sure that "good" classes were going on. I love that we open up our school and show who we are, without apology. And I love that our kids are already used to seeing folks come into the classrooms, ask questions, take pictures and observe what’s going on. Good pressure.

We have to live up to the hopes we have for ourselves.

But that kind of pressure is very different than the pressure put on so many schools all over the country today. With NCLB and the pressure to conform, to pass the test, to teach to the test, so many schools, adminstrators and teachers have no incentive to innovate, in fact, they often have a disincentive to do so. With the focus on "Research-based curriculum," many folks fall back on what has been done before because there’s less risk in doing so. With so much content in the average state standard, too many teachers just try to get through all the content and think, "I’d love to do new things, maybe in the two weeks after the [Insert State Test here.]"

And that culture of fear that is slowly gripping the American educational system under the current version of NCLB will kill us. It will drive out innovation. It will drive out the brilliant, exciting teachers who want to take the lessons they’ve learned in their lives and bring it to the kids. To take the NCLB mandate in its most charitable inception, we have created a system where we were so concerned about raising the floor, that we have lowered the ceiling.

We’re lucky at SLA. We have a district that has created a number of small schools to be a test-bed. We have supportive administrators who are thrilled to work with us and who cheer our every success. In that environment, we are free to innovate. We are free to take some risks. We are free to create.

My question is this… if everyone sees us as a success, will we be able to show powerful that notion is.