But only barely. I scored 35.3% on the test.
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(and yes, there are some serious things to write about, but hey, there’s time for some sillyness too.)
A View From the Schoolhouse
But only barely. I scored 35.3% on the test.
(and yes, there are some serious things to write about, but hey, there’s time for some sillyness too.)
I had the opportunity to visit Perkiomen Valley High School today. They just built another wing onto their school. It’s beautiful — a brand new several thousand square foot food court, an amazing gymnasium with seating for 2,000, three full courts and a press box, a pool, a two story weight room, and — of course — twelve state-of-the-art science labs. (And other stuff as well)
All their classrooms had smart-boards, DV equipment, etc… the science labs all had the latest and greatest equipment… the school hallways were wide and spacious and the general feel of the school was professional and top-notch. The teachers and students we spoke to clearly valued the chance to be in that kind of environment.
I don’t begrudge Perkiomen Valley the right to have a school like that. They had the opporunity to create something with the potential to be truly transformative for their students, and they did it. It really is a wonderfully designed building that shows so much thought and planning — in addition to money. I wish every school in America could be like that. I especially wish the Science Leadership Academy could be like that. And make no mistake — as urban schools go — I think we’re building an amazing school facility, and I believe that the School District is committed to building a state-of-the-art urban school.
But — and this is not the fault of Philadelphia or Perkiomen Valley — Philly doesn’t have the money (or the real estate space) to create the kind of schools that the wealthier suburban schools can create. But I wonder what the effect of that is. Do city kids accept that their schools won’t have the kind of facilities that suburban schools have? Does that matter?
In a city like NYC where the line between city and suburbs are more clearly divorced into different worlds, it feels less important, but in the rest of the world (like Philly) where the suburbs and city blend pretty powerfully on the edges, it somehow seems more important.
For city schools, it seems like — when it comes to the funding piece — we always are in the position to have to stretch the dollars, do as much as we can, make do with less, be creative, whatever. And even with that, the teaching and learning I’ve seen in cities is as powerful as anything I’ve seen in suburban schools, but it never does quite feel like a level playing field.
I wonder what the real effects of that are. I don’t know how to measure it, but it doesn’t quite feel right.
I had a meeting yesterday with some really amazing Philly folks yesterday who both have worked with and and for the school district at various points in their career, and we had a really far-ranging conversation about SLA. It was the kind of conversation that resonates for weeks, with ideas from the meeting percolating up into blogs and conversations and documents for quite a while after. The best part about the meeting is that these folks quickly understood what I’m trying to do, agreed with the general principals and then hammered me about every as yet unfilled hole in the philosophy. So if you see posts in the coming weeks that seem like "Hmmm… Chris hasn’t really dealt with that issue explicitly before…" you probably can chalk it up to something that was a topic of conversation in that meeting.
To wit… after looking through a lot of our early planning documents, one of the gentlemen said "You know… I understand what you’re talking about, but you never explicitly state what you want your students to gain from having gone to SLA. What do you want your students to become?"
Great question — right? I mean, on some level, it’s the ultimate backward planning question — and it’s what should inform everything we do. And I think he knew I had a clear idea in my head to the answer, but it wasn’t on paper anywhere. The closest we come is probably that last sentence of the mission statement:
At the SLA, learning will not be just something that happens from 8:30am to 3:00pm, but a continuous process that expands beyond the four walls of the classroom into every facet of our lives.
And what’s interesting is that when I wrote it, I deliberately constructed the sentence so that it wasn’t "students will understand that learning isn’t…" because I wanted the learning to include all members of the community — myself included.
But that still begs the question — what do want our students to become?
My first instinctive response was this, I don’t want to deliberately create the ’21st Century Workforce.’ I think if that’s your goal, you shoot way too low. I want our students to be the ’21st Century citizen’ in that they understand how to thrive in an ever-changing world. I want them to have the cognitive tools and energy and passion not just to react to the changes around them, but to help to shape those changes. We really don’t know what the next fifty years will look like — and that really is the span of time we’re looking to prepare current high schoolers for — the next fifty years. (That’s actually a bit scary and daunting just to write.) So the best thing we can do for them is to help them develop their ability to analyze, communicate, create and adapt. And that’s the capstone project. That’s inquiry-based education. That’s behind the language of the five core values of SLA — inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection.
And we tossed all those words around for a while before getting me to the statement of "I want our kids to be able to have the skills to adapt to a changing world." And then, this morning, Christian posts this:
Can I hear an amen from the crowd?
Schools need to refocus their efforts to reflect the lessons of the outside world and to help create what Resnick calls adaptive learnerspeople who can perform effectively when situations are unpredictable and task demands change. Adaptive learners are not likely to be developed in an isolated academic cocoon.
Source: Ronald A. Wolk, "Worlds Collide" editorial, 1.1.06, Teacher Magazine
Amen.
And again — to hammer home a favorite topic of mine of late — where this really gets powerful is that a conversation in my office now ties into a conversation in Texas and who knows where else. If we do this right — if we all pull off this high-minded idea that we can transform our schools into places where kids think on their feet and show us what they know with the work of their own head, heart and hands, if kids come to understand, internalize and celebrate that meaning is not just found in a book, but found in the space between reader and text, and person and person, and in the intersection of classroom and world, our kids will be passionate, adaptive learners and citizens. And in the end, that’s what I hope they become.
Thoughts?