My latest post on LeaderTalk is about my thoughts on good hiring practices.
Hiring Practices: Latest Post on LeaderTalk
My latest post on LeaderTalk is about my thoughts on good hiring practices.
A View From the Schoolhouse
My latest post on LeaderTalk is about my thoughts on good hiring practices.
So we’re ending up our first year, and we’re in this interesting time where we still have a ton to do to finish up the year, but we also are starting to look forward to planning our second year. So one thing we’re trying to do when we have staff time together is reflect on the year with an eye toward doing things better next year.
I keep finding myself — and our teachers — balancing that line between looking back with a ton of pride with what we did and recognizing that we have to be better next year if we want to keep improving.
So one of the things that we need to do better is doing more collaborative reflection about our individual planning process. In our last meeting, we talked about how we used Understanding by Design, and we talked about how we could do it better. What we came up with was giving more time to cross-talk, sharing unit plans, and seeing how a group of teachers across multiple subjects all interpret the tool different.
Now, that seems easy to say we’ll do. But it does require a few things… first and foremost, is that it requires folks to have their unit plans up to date and ready to share. Many teachers "sketch" their unit plans — I certainly was guilty of that from time to time — but when that kind of sharing becomes part of the process more than just once or twice a semester (which is about how often we did it this year), then every unit plan has to be detailed so that it’s worth the time to go over with colleagues.
Moreover, it requires me to really work more to develop tools to enable good cross-talk among teachers. And it requires me to make sure that meetings run efficiently, because this kind of work takes time, and all the things that took up our time this year aren’t going away. And it also requires me to be more organized because too often this year I allowed our agendas at meetings to be dictated by what was on our mind the most at any given moment, and that method of agenda-planning by definition keeps thinks like thoughtful, reflective practice from appearing on an agenda too often.
And again, with all of this, I’m proud of how productive our staff meetings were this year. (And for the record, one of the ideas that came out of our last meeting was that they should be called workshops, because that’s what they felt like to us.) But they can be better and more productive next year. And, year two of a school, the idea of constant improvement should still be top of mind.
I’m realizing that I think one of the terms that should be banned from the educational vernacular is "comprehensive high school." Somewhere, packed into that statement is the idea that a high school can be all things to all kids. To me, that’s where we get into trouble, especially in our cities.
There’s a lot of pressure to be all things to all students, especially as you try to build a reputation as a school. There are two examples I can think of with SLA that really speak to this. AP Classes and World Language classes.
Right now, AP courses are the rage, and while we’re starting to see some backlash, everyone wants schools to have AP courses. Jay Matthews at the Washington Post has gotten a lot of mileage out of his Challenge Index which is a way to rank high schools based around the number of students taking AP courses. So naturally, a lot of people, both prospective parents and district people, have wondered when we’ll start offering a lot of AP courses. And the answer is — senior year. Maybe one or two junior year. But the other answer is that we are a test where every class — every quarter — ends with projects. On a very basic level, AP courses — classes that by definition end in a test — run contrary to the rest of the curriculum at SLA. But there’s another reason that we can’t really offer them until senior year. We prioritize interdisciplinarity and community, so we stream our courses — having kids take their science, English and history courses as a cohort. It means students have fewer curricular choices outside of their electives, but the teaching is more cohesive across disciplines — and, with an inquiry-driven, project-based curriculum, students have more choices within each class. But offering tons of AP courses would make streaming impossible, and we believe that it is something that is fundamental to what makes SLA so special. And in a city like Philadelphia, with so many colleges around, I think having students have dual enrollment opportunities, taking courses at Drexel and other schools, means much more to colleges than AP classes will.
With World Languages, again, we have received a lot of requests to offer multiple languages, but we just can’t. One, as a small school, we’d be building departments of one or two teachers, and I don’t know if I think that’s a great thing to do. But also, with streaming comes a lot of scheduling mandates, and we would be de-facto tracking classes by language choice, and that’s not something we want to do.
But to say no to these things is to admit that we cannot be all things to all students. If a student’s biggest desire is to take French in high school, s/he shouldn’t go to SLA. Fortunately, there are other schools who offer French. And if a student — or a family — feels that the only way to get into college is with two dozen AP credits, they shouldn’t go to SLA. I’m o.k. with that, because I want to be very good at the things we do. And I want to find students who believe in our kind of education, and so far, we have.
But, for us, it meant having to admit we are not "comprehensive." We don’t offer everything because we can’t. And I believe most schools can’t. Just as Ted Sizer argues that "Less is More" inside the classroom, I believe sometimes that is true for the entire school as well. The choices we make have to mean something. When we create mission statements that are about more than educational platitudes, then those ideals have to exist in every classroom, and in every choice we make administratively as well.
I’m not saying that every school should stream kids. I’m not saying that no school should offer AP classes or only one language. Those were the choices we made and those choices have ramifications. We found what we valued and then we built a school around those values, even while understanding that that meant we may not be able to do everything people wanted us to do.
There’s no such thing as a panacea in education. Every choice creates opportunities, but it also creates limitations. Recognizing them and both embracing (fewer AP courses, mostly in 12th grade) and mitigating (dual enrollment opportunities starting in 10th grade) them is important as we think about what our schools can be.