Deconstructing School Design - Gabriella Duran Blakey

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Health Leadership High School is a new high school opening in Albuquerque, New Mexico committed to providing the best education to the students who need it the most. We will serve poor students and from low socioeconomic families that are between 14 and 24 years of age. The school anticipates that most of the students will be under-credited and off track to graduation and we expect that 80% of all students enrolled will fit this profile. This demographic of young people need a relevant highly personalized approach to learning. Many studies have documented the need for relevancy and purpose in their learning for at-risk students and the school is committed to making school directly related to their future ambitions to work in the health care sector.

This is the time to re-engineer career preparation in high school. The health sector is changing at an unprecedented rate and we face an unknown future. However, we know that in an era of scarce resources, a well-educated and skilled workforce is our best chance to shape a healthy future for our communities. Regardless of the job any of our graduates hold, they will need a broad understanding of the determinants of healthy communities, families and individuals. They must also understand the systems that can improve the services that support the health of our citizens and that have the capacity to actually serve their clients well. Finally, they will have a diploma with currency in the workplace and be prepared for a career in the sector directly after graduation and/or continue to college after they graduate.

As an experienced principal, I felt confident running the day-to-day operation of a school, working with teachers and students, developing relationships with families, and even working with a tight budget.  However, as I took the move into opening up a brand new charter school, I knew I was going to need to push outside of my comfort zone of schools to build a school schedule receptive to the needs of students and reflective of work in the industry, develop relationships with industry partners, and create a project-based curriculum responsive to our industry partners yet intriguing to students.  Eagle Rock Professional Development Center came to my aid to be not only a thought partner in this new work, but a mentor to me as I worked to through deconstructing school design and redesign a curriculum relevant to students who are disengaged in the current system of school.

Eagle Rock Director of Professional Development, Michael Soguero and Dan Condon, Associate Director of Eagle Rock Professional Development Center sat down with me to engage me in a conversation about vision, redesign, and re-engaging students.  I was inspired by their confidence and enthusiasm in the work ahead of us at Health Leadership High School.  Rather than instruct me with a recipe of what to do with the design of the school, Michael and Dan posed questions to me in my vision and mission of the school.  Their ability to push me in my thinking enabled me to come up with a concrete plan for my own professional development goals as I developed the school.

Based on our conversation, I developed two professional development goals. The first goal included creating a PBL project based on the health sectors outlined by the industry and the needs of the community.  The second goal was to engage our industry partners from the health field in the development of our projects.  This work was important for me to obtain relevant information to inform our projects and demonstrate the value of our industry partners in school design.  With the constant listening ear of Dan as he thoughtfully pushed me in my thinking to ensure I was true to what I laid out as the goals of my work, we were able to develop three PBL projects to share with industry partners. 

Sharing curriculum with industry partners is exciting, cutting edge, and frightening.  Sometimes as educators we share a finished product, but rarely do we engage with industry partners at the layer of curriculum development and design.  I was a bit hesitant to share the information, gather input, and redesign as needed by the industry.  Yet, with the help of Dan having honest conversations with me about outcomes for students and sharing protocols to guide the discussions with our partners I was able to facilitate a successful curriculum meeting with 12 partners from the health field.  Industry partners responded that they had never been part of such progressive curriculum design, nor had they ever had the opportunity to ensure the curriculum was directly aligned and relevant to their industry.

As I followed up with Michael and Dan on the success of our creating curriculum with industry partners, I realized I was in a place to start organizing the daily schedule to reflect the work of the curriculum.   Thoughtfully, Michael and Dan asked me to articulate the essential elements we need to add in the school and without the constraint of time discuss what a day in the life of a student at Health Leadership High School would look like.  As they listened carefully to my vision, Michael was able to help organize a weekly schedule with me in a way to reflect the cutting edge work, align to the vision and mission of the school, and transfer onto paper in a way graspable to the daily work of students and teachers.

The work of Eagle Rock Professional Development Center allowed me to begin putting ideas of school design centered on student re-engagement into reality.  Their ability to listen, organize ideas, and provide tools applicable to my work was of astounding service.  Their work and passion is admirable and inspiring.  They have shared their knowledge in a way to encourage me as I embark on this new venture to create a healthy, meaningful learning environment for our students who need it the most.

Mastery is Not Seat Time - Tori Stephens-Shauger

ACE Leadership High School was built with a clear belief about student learning. Part of this belief, or philosophy, is that students will work towards graduation through demonstrating mastery of skills and concepts. When hiring teachers, we don’t ask them to come with the same belief but they must be able to embrace it as a foundation of the school. Because our teachers are truly dedicated to this philosophy, they want to ensure they are do things the right way. Hence, they are always sharing their thoughts, questions and practice which allow us to stay fresh as a school and keep learning about our practice.

Yesterday in our professional development session our teachers were asking sophisticated, important and deep questions about how we assess students and how we attach credits to projects. We were in our second session of project development for trimester three and I was telling the teachers they needed to “land” their ideas and begin their project overview documents including creating the learning outcome guides for the project. This documentation includes what content was going to be covered and what credits were going to be attached to the project and it was due to me before they left for the day. A very high expectation but nothing they couldn’t handle.

Before getting started, one teacher asked a great question that needs more exploration than the answer I gave on this day. The question was regarding the difference between mastery, awarding credits and how much credit to award, defining proficiency and reporting a passing grade. Yes, it was big. This question spanned school policy, philosophy, founding ideas of the school and individual professional experiences. The beautiful thing about ACE Leadership teachers is that they understand the philosophy behind mastery. They understand that our students must demonstrate that they have learned the intended skill and that they understand the intended concept to earn credit. There is no confusion around this and that is a great place to be. However, everyone is at a different place in terms of practicing mastery. This was the first time the distinction had been made between belief and practice and a demonstration of how sophisticated ACE Leadership teachers are. To believe and understand something is different than being able to realize it in the classroom with students. What I mean is that for an entire school to be fully interdisciplinary, project driven and all learning assessed based on mastery, everyone has to be on the same page and have the same expectations for the practice of mastery.

The practice of mastery at ACE Leadership is not described in a flow chart. There is no one answer, one strategy for being successful at helping students demonstrate that they have mastered something. This practice is much more nuanced than that. Don’t expect outline of a bunch of concrete best practices. That’s not going to happen and this is the way it should be. If we deeply understand what we mean by mastery, then we can apply it to each student as an individual learner. ACE Leadership teachers are professionals and they know their content as well as their learners. Acknowledging this fact and allowing the teachers to work together to determine how to practice mastery is the best practice.

With that said, let me describe what I am talking about. There are times when a student is working on an outcome like being able to graph coordinates using an equation that she generated for example. She has produced evidence that she can do it, but the project teacher adds another opportunity to demonstrate mastery through an Exit Slip at the end of a project block. It is not that the teacher distrusts the students’ work rather she wants to ensure that the skill has been learned beyond the initial learning experiences. This need could have resulted from observing the student struggling to produce all pieces of evidence or that the initial evidence was not clearly and consistently meeting expectations. I trust that the teacher can speak to the learning of the student and she will determine how much evidence is needed in general but also personalize that evidence for students when needed. The situation could have gone the other way and after one piece of evidence the teacher determined that the student was ready to move onto the next skill. The important part to remember when practicing mastery in the classroom is that mastery is not about seat time.

On that day and still today my answer is this: You are professionals and you know your content. You are not alone in determining the expectation of mastery and mastery is not about seat time.