Ideas Worth Borrowing

Charlie Roy, blogging at Souly Catholic, describes how teachers and administrators have rallied to dramatically cut the rate of students failing courses at his Illinois high school. Their goal was an ambitious 50 percent reduction, but they're on track to do much better. So far, they have reduced course failures by 75 percent compared to last year.
The successful game plan starts with student support teams that include an administrator, counselor, and two teachers. As soon as a student starts slipping academically, the team responds with a fast plan of action that includes strategic interventions, measurable goals, and regular follow up. The individualized, student-centered approach seems key to success. As Roy explains, "The effectiveness of the interventions was tied to the strength of the relationship created between the team and their students."
Not only are students achieving positive results, but staff are experiencing the benefits of collaboration. Regular team meeting times and online collaboration (via Google docs) support ongoing conversations. They've shifted from worrying about kids to putting their collective energy into designing ideas that work, from mini-courses to peer tutoring. When you see staff members making friendly side wagers about their ideas, you know they're invested.

Lessons from Chicago

President-elect Barack Obama’s announcement this week of Arne Duncan as his pick for Secretary of Education has me reflecting on my own visits to Chicago Public Schools, where Duncan has been CEO for the past seven years. Chicago is a mandatory stop for anyone interested in education reform. In 1995, when the Illinois legislature gave Mayor Richard Daley control of the nation’s third-largest district, CPS became ground zero in the battle to fix the nation’s public schools.

Chicago already had a long history of failed school reform efforts by the time the mayor took charge. A previous Secretary of Education, Bill Bennett, breezed through the Windy City in 1988 and declared the city’s school system “worst in the nation.” Bennett even singled out one school—Goudy Elementary—as the worst of the worst. (Note to Duncan: That’s the kind of negative publicity stunt that doesn’t help schools or kids.)

When I was researching urban school reform in 1999, I made a bee-line for Goudy Elementary. I wanted to find out if anything had changed from a few years earlier, when a somber Chicago Tribune series began, “Welcome to Goudy, where the future dies early.” I was greeted by Patrick Durkin, the no-nonsense principal brought in to fix the mess. Education wasn’t Durkin’s first love. This fast-talking father of eight was a former fire captain who shifted careers after being badly burned. But from the purposeful way he walked through that building, greeting teachers, students, and parents by name, it was clear he’d found his passion.

Durkin found a way to make school work in the high-poverty Uptown neighborhood, where immigrants were accustomed to being served poorly by public institutions. He introduced a schoolwide focus on reading (including the use of the Reading Recovery program to boost literacy), and was ingenious at finding space for personalized instruction in an overcrowded building. I remember him showing off one cubbyhole used for one-on-one tutoring; it used to be a walk-in safe. And he had zero tolerance for what he called “foolishness.” His first day on the job, he was waiting outside to greet his new students when rival gang members from a nearby housing project got into a fight. Durkin jumped in to break it up himself.

Clearly, leadership was something Durkin understood. But he also knew this: “When a place is failing, you can do anything you want.” That’s what he told me when I asked him about the support he had received from headquarters to turn around this one-failing school. Goudy didn’t get any attention, he said, until its students began to thrive. (Eventually, the story of Goudy’s turnaround became the opening chapter in Making Schools Work.)

A few years later, I made a return trip to Chicago to interview some exemplary teachers about how they were integrating technology into instruction. I was staying at a downtown hotel and needed to grab a cab to get to my interviews. I remember asking the doorman, a young African American man, for help with directions. He took a look at the address, took another look at me, and said, “What are you doin’ going to that neighborhood?” I explained that there was a school there I wanted to visit. “I know,” he said. “I went to that high school.”

At the doorman’s alma mater, I met a smart social studies teacher who had ideas galore about how technology could help her students. Only problem was, her kids had virtually no access to computers. The district was rolling out ambitious plans for professional development around technology use. But decisions about hardware were being made by local committees. So access varied widely from one neighborhood to the next. At her school, she had a principal who didn’t much like computers and few colleagues who shared her vision of 21st-century learning. And her students? They shared the doorman’s sense of the place: Why in the world would anyone choose to go there?

As our incoming Secretary of Education prepares for his challenging new role, I’m thinking again about those Chicago schools. I heard through the grapevine that Principal Durkin passed away a few years ago, but Goudy Elementary continues to serve its diverse children well. It’s now a technology magnet school. Not sure what’s become of the doorman’s alma mater. I’m willing to bet, however, that CPS remains a mixed bag, with some pockets of excellence and some places where no kid should have to spend time. That’s not unlike what Duncan will find if he looks closely at the state of public education across the country today. His challenge—the nation’s challenge—is figuring out how to make excellence the new norm.

Join Us for Educon 2.1

Learning that Sticks: Make It Memorable with Projects that Matter
Join the Conversation at Educon 2.1 with Suzie, Jane and guests

If you can't join us in person we'll have a way you can participate at a distance.
Here's our session:
What do you hope students will remember—years from now—about what they learned with you? This conversation is about real-world projects that push beyond traditional PBL practices to engage students as community leaders and change agents. We plan to use a variety of media to share powerful examples and facilitate a discussion that will include students as well as teachers. For example: What happened when students in South Central Los Angeles took on the role of citizen scientists to investigate—and publicize—local pollution levels in their own neighborhood? Why do students in rural Kentucky care so much about preserving the memories of their coal-mining families? What’s changed in the lives of Seattle teens since they collaborated with youth from South Africa to make videos about the meaning of compassion? After participants hear about these projects, we will invite them to talk about: --Why are projects like these still the exception? --What barriers stand in the way of real-world learning? --How can we maximize technology to overcome challenges and leverage opportunities? --What can we do collectively to make sure every student has opportunities for this kind of engaged, meaningful learning?

Unlocking the Toolkit

How often does this happen? You learn about a Web 2.0 tool and start imagining how you could integrate it into classroom activities. Then you remember: Oh yeah, my school (or district) blocks these tools. And that's too bad--for teachers whose creativity is limited, but even more so for students who miss out on opportunities to learn.
In this Edutopia article, Los Angeles high school teacher Antero Garcia goes beyond the arguments I usually hear about why the toolkit needs to be unlocked. He argues that keeping technology away from low-income students is a social justice issue: "Sooner or later someone is going to expect my students to be able to quickly and effortlessly post to a blog, add to a wiki, or collaborate via some sort of social-networking protocol. And once again, my school will have failed to prepare them for such a task."
That's what motivates Garcia to find ways around the barriers. What works for you? Please share your strategies for unlocking the toolkit.
Illustration by Adriano Gasparri, Creative Commons

Star Light, Star Bright...

...How many stars can you see tonight?
There's still time to take part in the Great Worldwide Star Count, continuing until Nov. 3. This is an opportunity for your students (and their families) to contribute their night sky observations to a global database. By adding their findings, citizens scientists from around the world are helping scientists understand the effects of light pollution. Check out the Great Worldwide Star Count web site for details, along with more information you can use for further investigations of astronomy, geography, mythology, and more.
Photo by Ben McLeod, Creative Commons

School of Everything

From "active retired people, to teenage whiz kids, to hobbyists in their garden sheds", the UK's School of Everything imagines removing the space between those who know and those who want to know.

"At School of Everything, we believe that learning is personal, and starts not with what you 'should' learn but with what you're interested in. So we're building a tool to help anyone in the world learn what they want, when, where and in a way which suits them. Putting people in touch with each other, not with institutions. Our goal is to do for education what YouTube has done for television, or what eBay did for retail: to open up a huge and fertile space between the professional and the amateur. A space where people teach what they know and learn what they don't."

The School of Everything launched in September. It is the work of the Young Foundation, a charitable trust which carries on the work of Michael Young, founder of Which Magazine and the Open University. Imagine how this might play out!

I think I'll seek a tatting coach.

Project Resources to Chew On

Looking for a project idea that integrates math, science, and global awareness with the added benefit of real-world service learning? Consider focusing a project on hunger, an issue with local as well as global implications. In the U.S., one in 10 families faces food shortages. Around the world, hunger kills every 3.6 seconds. What can kids do about this big problem? Plenty. This recent Spiral Notebook post pulls together a list of classroom resources for tackling hunger. Comments from teachers offer more ideas. A teacher in Washington, D.C., for instance, describes how her seventh-graders responded when they took on hunger as a policy issue: "It exposes my students to the idea that they can communicate with officials and the media and that their ideas and opinions matter." Seems like a lesson worth repeating.
Photo by Michael Glasgow, Creative Commons