Mainstreaming Students

Take a look at a student term paper on mainstreaming autistic and Asperger's students:

Mainstreaming Term Paper

Akiva Mattenson's Graduation Speech in Which He References SparkNotes

          7:50. First day of school. I step over the metal threshold, gripping the shoulder strap of my ragged backpack. A wonderfully amicable, yet firm handshake – what is to be the first of many over my subsequent four years – greets me there, along with a smile and a name: Barry. A fine beginning. Still nervous, though. I hurriedly scuttle across the entrance hall, glancing upward only to avoid colliding with the menacing and frightful builds of juniors and seniors. I continue down the hall, through the double doors that lead beyond the business and academic offices. That is when it happened. Collision. Not with a junior; not with a senior. No. With the one, the only, Dr. Stein. See, in my ignorance I was unaware of the door that leads from his office directly into the hallway. He was pushed back a few inches by the impact; but nothing compared to the blow my self-confidence took. There I was, looking up at a grimace, a scowl, the likes of which I had not encountered in my short life. No words, just that hair-raising, blood-curdling facial contortion. I tried every formulation of “I'm sorry” I could recall in that moment of terror. Then I wandered off, keeping my head down as if he would a bore a hole in my skull if I dared turned back.

            That was my first day. And then I thought potentially my last day. And yet, I stand before you on this stage preparing to graduate from The Frisch School with one of the most wonderful cohorts of people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. So, I think it is safe to say I am in the clear. Nevertheless, I will take this final opportunity to apologize to you, Dr. Stein, for that incident that has been weighing down on me all these years.

            With that out of the way, I can proceed with my talk.

            In my freshman year, I was certainly a different person. One of the most distinctive features of freshman Akiva was his attire. Each and every day, nearly without exception, I would walk into school sporting a red fleece zip-up sweater. To demonstrate to you just how devoted I was to this red sweatshirt, on the night of Shiriyah I chose to wear it over my t-shirt. So, yes; pretty devoted. Which is why, when I discovered that Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye, would often don a red hunting cap, I immediately fell in love. I was so excited, that when I got home, I ran to my desk and began reading...the Sparknotes online summary. It was marvelous. It was insightful. It was perfect for passing the upcoming test. And, as you are soon to discover, it would do just fine for a graduation speech.

            Sparknotes highlights three major themes in the book: alienation as a form of self-protection, the phoniness of the adult world, and the painfulness of growing up. Tonight, I will focus on only the latter two. On the phoniness of the adult world, Sparknotes provides the following insight: “Phoniness is Holden's catch-all for describing the superficiality, hypocrisy, pretension, and shallowness that he encounters in the world around him. Phoniness, for Holden, stands as an emblem of everything that’s wrong in the world around him and provides an excuse for him to withdraw into his cynical isolation.”

This is a sentiment that I think resonates with any 21^st century individual. In this era of social media, ipads, iphones, etc., one finds himself inundated with “superficiality” and “shallowness”, if not lasciviousness and immodesty. As William Wordsworth observed over two centuries ago,

           

            The world is too much with us; late and soon,

            Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

So consumed in its consumerism, so indiscriminate with its indulgences, society has become a breeding ground for phoniness. What then are we to do? How then are we to respond?

            Holden provides one model, that of “cynical isolation.” This is an atittude that has come to expression in one stream of Jewish thought. In the words of Saul Berman, “[it] starts with the assumption that the two worlds [of traditional religion and modernity] are so radically opposed that the only way to safeguard the Orthodox worldview is to maximize separateness.” In this Weltanschauung, the outside world is so polluted with superficiality and materialism - “phoniness”, so to speak – that it has become completely unconducive to spiritual life. As such, Judaism must become a cloistered endeavor. While this is certainly an answer to the above questions, it is not the only one. As Modern Orthodox Jews, we must take a different stance in the face of the “phoniness” of the world. We must recognize that the world is not compromised by pervasive phoniness; there is still much the world has to offer, and we should engage it so that we may enhance and enlighten our Judaism. Modern Orthodoxy is not easy. It requires constant attentiveness to the maintenance of Jewish wholeness in the face of the distraction of material excess and pure self-gratification. It necessitates struggle, duality, dialectic, tension. It asks for commitment to an often times complicated life. It is easy to be Holden Caulfield, to shrink into oneself. Not so, to be Modern Orthodox. But we must, in Shakespeare’s words, head “once more into the breach, dear friends. Once more” – for though the struggle is immense, the spoils are innumerable.

            Let’s turn now to the second theme – ‘the painfulness of growing up’ – a topic I imagine to be near and dear to the hearts of all those sitting upon this stage, myself included. Holden, as Sparknotes perceptively notes, “is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman [a coming of age narrative] because his central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself.” In Holden, we might see something of ourselves. As we stand at the edge of the rye, graduating from the Frisch school, perhaps we don’t wish to leap into the vast unknown. Perhaps we hope to be collected by the warm embrace of the “catcher in the rye,” letting us delay our departure for a little longer. Understandable. Yet, it is not to be. Time, indeed, waits for no one. So tonight, we must not turn inwards and deny change; rather, we must recognize the truth in the words of Remy of Pixar’s Ratatouille: Change is nature. Frisch has been a wonderfully nurturing environment – a glorious rye field, if you will. I know that much of who I am today is due to the faculty, and more importantly, my friends, at the Frisch School. But the time has come for us to leave the rye and embark upon the journey of life together.

I close with the words of Walt Whitman:

Forever alive, forever forward,

We go! We go! I know that we go, but I know not where we go;

But I know that we go toward the best – toward something great.

Reimagining High School with The Future Project

Teachers at The Future Project are called Dream Directors,
and the school has a Curiosity Director. We love that!

Last night, Penina Warburg, Pearl Mattenson, Jeff Kiderman and I [Tikvah Wiener] went to a workshop by The Future Project entitled Reimagining High School. From the moment we stepped into the building on Front Street, the office The Future Project shares with, appropriately enough, an animation studio, education felt different. The "office" is a warm, fun environment; it looks like a house, with its brick walls, fireplace and wood floors, and it's decorated with playful and thought-provoking objects, such as an ornately framed portrait of a wide-eyed baby, twisted iron masks with student-made portraits beneath them, and a wooden sled. The decor of the building reinforced the notion that the visual stimulation students receive in their learning environment is crucial to igniting curiosity and excitement about learning.

The Panel

The evening began with a panel comprised of Tony Wagner, author of Creating Innovators; Scott Kaufman, who recently published Ungifted, a post-Howard Gardner book about the need to redefine intelligence so we don't penalize children with labels; Iltimas Doha, a student we hope to work with on his education reform projects; and another amazing and articulate student, a senior who has already created her own company. The panel participants, each in their own way, drove us to imagine what high school would look like if, in The Future Project's terms, it was a place of dream building and curiosity creation, rather than a warehouse for standardized testing. RealSchool also loved the fact that a Harvard Fellow, Tony Wagner, was onstage with students not even out of high school. Go, #stuvoice!

By the way, have you seen Tony Wagner in action?

The Audience

Tim Shriver, CEO of the Special Olympics, moderated the panel and got the audience talking about how we're already reimagining high school. We were energized by the ideas we heard:

* One woman said her Muslim school begins the year by having all the students walk to the school garden where they bury the word "CAN'T." They mourn and lament the word and then return to the building whereupon can't is a bad word, and school is a place where there's no cursing. Therefore, if a student says, "I can't," she'll get a response along the lines of "We don't say that word in this school!" You get the picture.

* Angela Maiers said she had just left a school in Philadelphia that's having its seniors come up with a solution to a real-world problem. Students had to find something in the world that breaks their heart, come up with a plan to solve the problem and then submit genuine proposals to relevant organizations. Obviously, such a project is right up RealSchool's alley.

* Another audience member pointed out that a lot of schools have already reimagined high school and are doing exciting and innovative things with their students. The schools this participant mentioned included:

      Science Leadership Academy, which we wrote about after we visited
      The Met School, in Providence, Rhode Island, created by Dennis Littky, an awesome educator and visionary
      Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx

The Sessions

At the end of the panel, Tony Wagner charged us with the task of coming up with a new way to explain what having a high school diploma means. If a HS diploma is no longer going to mean students have "served a certain number of hours of seat time" or taken x number of tests, what should having a high school diploma certify? We were directed into the "Visions Tables" we had selected online, prior to the night of the event. 

Making as Learning

I had chosen Making as Learning, so our group's task was to decide on how creation was going to be a process of the high school experience. The result of our session was that we felt a high school diploma should mean that:

Students have engaged in the process of making with the self and with others and have also engaged in the process of teaching what they have learned and accomplished to others. Students should understand the purpose of making and should have created an artifact(s) of importance to them and/or to the world.

Thus our competency emphasized the need to master creation as an individual, in a group and as an instructor.

Community-Based Learning

I also liked what Penina's group came up with. She was in a session entitled Community-Based Learning, run by Daniel Petter-Lipstein. That group's angle was so different from Making as Learning's, but just as important. Since Community-Based Learning was looking at a high school diploma through the lens of the community, they emphasized a competency that required students to have empathy, though we all acknowledge that's a difficult thing to measure.

Social and Emotional Learning

This group's competency was also deeply important. It emphasized students' needing to demonstrate self-awareness and social awareness; the ability to recognize feeling states and to self-regulate their feelings. It required students to be in touch with body, mind and spirit and to have experienced a relationship of deep trust that would enable them to take risks, endure failures and express the vulnerability that leads to being known, seen and heard. 

Amazing.

Last Things

We also heard some comments during the night that we loved:

One woman said she starts her year wishing her students lots of failure. She tells her students, "I hope you make a lot of mistakes, because mistakes are how you learn."

We know that! That's why we made our failure wall: FailSafe: RealSchool Failure Wall

Here are some of our favorite recent additions:

That moment 7 hours ago when you thought you were going to do your homework.

I was trying to teach youngsters how to throw a frisbee and I hit an old woman in the face with said frisbee. True fact.

Another thing we loved was a comment during a discussion about reassessing assessment. When process is more important than a final answer, we can appropriate from the language of gaming and start-ups:

We need to learn when to pivot and when to persevere.

Great stuff from a great night. Thanks to The Future Project for being such an inpiration!

The Digital Badge Learning Network

Check out the badge learning program Sarah Blattner has created and the schools that will be piloting a badge program in the 2013-14 school year:

TAMRITZ LAUNCHES NATIONAL DIGITAL BADGE LEARNING NETWORK

Four schools selected for 2013-2014 pilot to develop badge-empowered learning programs

Portland, OR—June 5, 2013—TAMRITZ, a digital badge learning network for Jewish Day Schools, announced today the first four schools selected to pioneer its connected learning community. The following schools will form TAMRITZ’s 2013-2014 cohort:

• Kehillah Schechter Academy, Norwood, MA
• Krieger Schechter Day School, Baltimore, MD
• The Moriah School, Englewood, NJ
• Seattle Hebrew Academy, Seattle, WA

TAMRITZ will provide schools with in-person training, a networked community of practice and ongoing coaching to design and implement their own badge learning programs. Beginning with a summer professional development course, Digital Age Teaching, cohort teachers will be immersed in a badge-based experience, focused on learning in the digital age, relevant research and connected learning. In the fall, schools will partner with TAMRITZ to co-facilitate a badge-based digital media literacy course for their middle school students. Schools will begin to roll out their self-designed badge learning programs semester two, 2014.

Digital badge learning takes a traditional system of awarding badges for achievements to a new media level. Guided by their teachers, students explore their own interests and acquire knowledge and skills. Each digital badge they earn becomes an electronic credential that contains not only what the student understands and has accomplished, but also the methods used and data about the institution that sponsored the learning experience. These badges can then be shared through social media from a digital backpack, providing transparent transcripts for students’ skills and achievements.

Selected schools demonstrate an innovative spirit and readiness for transforming how learning happens, according to Sarah Blattner, TAMRITZ’s founder and executive director. “These schools are willing to experiment and explore how digital badge learning can engage students,” said Myrna Rubel, chief advisor for TAMRITZ’s Advisory Council and principal of the Epstein Middle School. Rubel is the pioneer of Epstein’s badging program, where she has discovered that “true learning takes place when students have choice, create meaning with their in-school and out-of-school lives and connect and develop relationships with teacher advisors.”

TAMRITZ, meaning “incentive” in Hebrew, seeks to ignite collaborative learning between Jewish Day School teachers and students through its digital badge learning network. Through the support of the Joshua Venture Group’s Dual Investment Program and the AVI CHAI Foundation, TAMRITZ will match the program fees with in-kind support for each participating school for the first year of engagement.

TAMRITZ scaffolds its learning network with exemplary instructional practices, including project-based learning and teacher-as-coach, to give students a chance to create their own meaning. "We believe that every child has a spark within them: A spark of passion, creativity and excellence. Badge learning will help us nurture each child's spark, personalize their learning and gauge students’ understandings of Habits of Mind through our Beit Midrash program,” said Dr. Nitzan Resnick and Rabbi David Paskin, co-heads of the Kehillah Schechter Academy, Norwod, MA. “Our school will implement a badge learning program that offers new courses and differentiates the learning experience for our students, said Katie May, principal, Seattle Hebrew Academy. “Our teachers are excited to move in this bold new direction.”

Read more about badge-empowered learning and the TAMRITZ Badge Learning Network.

Contact:

Sarah Blattner, Executive Director, TAMRITZ

678-296-5143

sarah@tamritz.org

www.tamritz.org

Kehillah Schechter Academy, Norwood, MA

Rabbi David Paskin, co-head of school

781-769-5555

dpaskin@ksa-ne.org

http://www.ksa-ne.org/

Krieger Schechter Day School, Baltimore, MD

Shelley Hendler, Head of Middle School

shendler@ksds.edu and lbrook@ksds.edu

410-486-8640

http://ksds.edu/

The Moriah School, Englewood, NJ

Dr. Elliot Prager, Principal

201-567-0208

eprager@moriahschool.org

www.moriahschool.org

Seattle Hebrew Academy, Seattle, WA

Katie May, Principal

kmay@sha613.org

206-323-5750

http://seattlehebrewacademy.org/

Musings on the Frisch Fashion Show

As part of their end-of-year requirements, a group of seniors chose to blog about their experience planning, organizing and/or helping out with the Frisch RealSchool Fashion Show and Dance Performance. Here is a selection of their thoughts:

Here is Danit's post. Danit was one of three students last year who came up with the idea of having a fashion show at Frisch. This year, she once again was one of the organizers of the show:

A fashion show is such an easy thing to say you're going to plan. People think it's an easy process, but really it is one of the most stressful and difficult things to organize. For the past two years I have organized a fashion show in my school. I worked with my classmates and two amazing teachers. My experience was unique and enlightening.

To be honest, I have usually been the type of person to give up or quit or wait for my parents to help me when I have something I need to do. The fashion show was one thing I did all by myself -- well, along with the help of all the other great people involved, but you know what I mean -- and got done successfully. 

My desire to create a fashion show started last year when my best friends and I became obsessed with a fashion blogger named Man Repeller. We started to dress like her, and we wanted the Frisch community to be influenced by her as well, so we decided to create a fashion show that would have clothing combinations Man Repeller would be proud of. The uniqueness of the fashion show for me was doing something I was passionate about, with my best friends, and being able to mix and match all different styles of clothing the way Man Repeller did!

Some crazy Man Repller outfits that inspired the look
of last year's fashion show!

Creating a fashion show was enlightening for me as well, because I learned so much in the process. For instance, I learned how to speak to high-end companies, to organize and plan events, and to try my hardest! This show brought out the best of my abilities, and I was so happy to have shared it with fellow Frisch faculty, students, and community!

One of the things I enjoyed the most about being one of the organizers of the show was knowing about everything going on in it, from beginning to end. Even though it sometimes felt overwhelming to have people coming to me and asking me what to do, where to go, how to do something, etc., I truly felt like a leader. I'm the youngest in my family and am usually the one asking for help and looking up to everyone else; it was great to take on a leadership role in the fashion show and have people be able to depend on me to help them!

My fashion show experience was an experience I wouldn't trade for anything, and I hope some day other Frisch students will get to experience the same feelings I did! 

And here is Jojo's post about his role helping out for this all-female event:

As my senior year of high school was ending, I decided to do something that I never would have ever thought about doing in four years of high school: I decided to help my English teacher Mrs. Wiener and other fellow classmates with the 2013 Frisch Fashion Show. I, along with seven other classmates, was asked if we wanted to participate as part of the requirements of completing my senior year. When I first heard about the project, I was skeptical about it and thought I would accomplish nothing and just follow orders. I did not want to be part of the show and was even thinking about taking a classic English final in order to finish my course requirements. Then it occurred to me that I always wanted to be a helpful person and writing a traditional English class essay would prevent me from doing that. So I decided to help with the fashion show as my final assignment.

Women helped by Somaly Mam!

The Fashion Show was raising money for Somaly Mam, a foundation that works to stop female slavery in Southeast Asia. How did this show raise the money? Well, that’s where my classmates and I came in. Part of our job was to get the merchandise that would be sold by the fashion show in order to raise the money. A classmate and I had to scour Bergen County in order to locate and buy kosher fair trade coffee and chocolate to sell at the show. If you enjoyed any of the fair trade food at the show, you have us to thank! Our efforts helped Frisch raise awareness of and money for Somaly Mam, and for that I feel like I accomplished a great deal at the end of my Frisch career.

Occupy Standardized Testing: The SAT Essay

We already told you about some advice the College Board book gave about the SAT essay, which to sum up was: thinking is dangerous on the SAT and will get you in trouble.

Here's some more advice, this time from online SAT test prep resources:

You may have qualms or otherwise “sophisticated” thoughts at this point. You may be thinking, “I could argue the ‘agree’ side pretty well, but I’m not sure that I 100 percent believe in the agree side because. . . .” Drop those thoughts. 

The examples you choose to support your argument and your development of those examples is a big part of how well you write. But there’s no SAT rule or law that says that the examples you use to support your arguments have to be true. If you’re in a bind, however, remember that you can bend the truth a bit and use your personal knowledge and experience to generate examples that prove your argument.

Forget about trying to write an essay that changes the world. When the SAT says to you, “Here’s 25 minutes, write an essay,” what they’re saying between the lines is: “Write a standard essay that does exactly what we want.”

What We Learned at Science Leadership Academy

Akiva, Penina and I in front of the SLA building
Across the street is a sign pointing to all the museums and institutes in the area,
including the Franklin Institute, where many SLA students do their weekly internships

One of the highlights of edJEWcon was Chris Lehmann's keynote address about his unique public school in Philadelphia, Science Leadership Academy. We'd been trying to visit SLA since the beginning of the year, but Hurricane Sandy derailed our plans. Hearing Chris speak, though, motivated us to set a date and get the trip done before another moment was wasted. Penina contacted Jeremy Spry (@jspry), and yesterday RealSchool went on a road trip with the TechRav, Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky; Rabbi Eli Ciner, Associate Principal at The Frisch School; Jeff Kiderman of AJE; and Mrs. Holly Cohen of the Kohelet Foundation. Representing RealSchool were RealSchool Pioneers, Penina Warburg and Akiva Mattenson, and me [Tikvah Wiener].

Rabbi Pittinsky has already blogged a great summary of our visit, so I'm going to focus on different parts of our tour.

School Culture

From the moment we walked into SLA, I easily gained a sense of the school's culture. 

The above sign makes it clear that students are responsible for their learning and must respect the environment in which it takes place. Those values don't prevent the school from being a warm and friendly place, however. The school offices were hopping, with faculty and students who mingled together with ease and camaraderie. I immediately liked the laid-back feel of the school.

Everyone at SLA had a big smile for us and for each other. On the right is Jeremy Spry,
who, by his own admission on Twitter, "makes stuff happen at SLA." To his right is Deannna,
our student tour guide. Jeremy is wearing the"More Than a Test Score" t-shirt we brought him;
don't worry, Deanna, we won't forget to send you one, too!

The warmth and caring the faculty feel for the students is apparent in the way the teachers greet the students when they walk into class and in the shared language of the school, which always had teachers answering, when we asked what they taught, "I teach students history," or "I teach students math." I know this may sound like a small thing, but when you hear the same response from every teacher, it leaves an impression.

My eighteen years as a teacher have all been spent in a private Jewish high school and the school where I currently teach students, The Frisch School, is about the same size as SLA: Frisch has about 550 students, while SLA has a little less. Frisch is warm and caring as well, but that's to be somewhat expected in a yeshiva. Parents are sending their children to us partly because they want their kids in an environment that shows concern for the whole child, especially his/her religious, spiritual and emotional well-being.

One of the things that impressed me most about SLA was that Chris and his staff have managed to create that nurturing environment for kids who are coming from very diverse backgrounds. Frisch has a natural shared language because all of our students are Jewish, but SLA has unified their kids with its clear mission and philosophy -- as well as its effective advisory program.

Students praise each other on an "Encouragement Board" 

Advisory

Each student at SLA spends an hour after school twice a week in advisory. One teacher is responsible for the academic and emotional welfare of about 20 students, and during those two meetings a week, students form a bond not only with their advisor but with each other as well. Students remain in the same advisory group for their four years at SLA, and the faculty member takes charge of everything pertaining to his/her students, from letting teachers know if a student is having an issue that needs to be handled sensitively to initiating and helping with the college application process. The advisory program, which Dennis Littky employs in his Met Schools, is one large way SLA addresses the whole student and creates a nurturing environment. 

Inquiry-Based and Project-Based Learning

Of course, we also came to SLA to learn about the cool pedagogies Chris is employing. The shared language is once again apparent in the school's more academic components. As Rabbi Pittinsky mentioned, the school's core values are posted throughout the school. Those values are: 

1) inquiry

2) research

3) collaboration

4) presentation

5) reflection

The school does not use bells or announcements, but as Rabbi Pittinsky mentioned, the students we saw knew what to do in each of their classes as soon as they walked in, were engrossed in their work and happily shared their projects. (The students used the shared language of the school when describing their work, proving again how effective the school has been in implementing its vision.)

RealSchool loves inquiry-based learning (IBL) and project-based learning (PBL) and always wants student work to have relevance in the real world. We saw examples of PBL where students were given clear guidance and benchmarks by the teachers and IBL where the students had freedom to explore and develop their own ideas.

PBL

RS Health and Environment loves this one: SLA's BioWalls Project, where students have to make walls made of plants that filter the air in an environmentally friendly way. Here's some information on the project:

BioWalls at SLA

What we love about this project, aside from the fact that it's green, is that the walls have to work in order for the project to be complete, so students need mastery, not just completion, and the walls are for an office building, so they have authentic purpose. All freshmen complete this project. What a great way to illustrate to new students in the school the idea that work needs to be executed successfully and has real meaning.

In a freshman and sophomore math class, students demonstrated their ability to apply their newly acquired knowledge of algebra by writing questions about the state's education budget cuts and how they could be worked out mathematically. The math teacher explained that the students had crunched the numbers on the budget, so if an official was reporting that the state was saving money by cutting a certain item, the students could rebut, "Well, that only saved you $20,000. Is that enough of a savings to be significant?"

We love it!

Another thing we loved about the school is that it doesn't make students afraid of failure. Rabbi Pittinsky mentioned that students may repeat Standards, quizzes they take in subjects such as math, in order to show they understand important material. 

Here's another example that shows SLA wants students to be learners, not test takers who regurgitate information to be forgotten the day after an exam. Here's a link to a blog post about the failures one group experienced as they made their BioWall:

BioWall Failures!

IBL

Students are given opportunities to pursue their own passions at SLA. One afternoon a week students have an internship of their choice, one they set up with Jeremy as part of their Individual Learning Plan.  I personally love the idea of an ILP as opposed to an IEP. I've gotten many student IEP's, and I'm uncomfortable with the fact that so many modifications need to be made so all students can sit in one type of classroom. An ILP seems so empowering; a student doesn't focus on how s/he or the teacher needs to change so a traditional classroom is somehow more user-friendly but not quite the environment in which the student will thrive. Rather, s/he decides on a field of interest, one where s/he can explore a passion and hone not one skill but many. RealSchool loves the idea!

Students also told us that while many of their projects were chosen and planned by their teachers, the students had choice in some parts of the projects' executions. It wasn't uncommon to hear a student say, "I chose this essential question to answer" or "I chose to write this type of poem."

Of course, the biggest choice students are given is for their senior Capstone project, which they do on anything they want. One senior, who said she was passionate about engineering, had taken some type of engineering course all four years in the school, and who was going on to study engineering in college, said for her Capstone project she designed a water pump for a village in Malawi she had visited. 

Another student we heard from was busy painting a gallery space and curating an exhibit (we love doing that in The Arts team at RS!), saying "art is a great way to bring a community together." Here are pictures from that work-in-progress:

Rabbi Pittinsky mentioned a mural that one student had made for her Capstone project. Again showing the type of community Chris and his team have built is the fact that the student chose to beautify that particular wall because it was where she and her friends had eaten lunch every day. The student also painted one area with whiteboard paint, so other students could add to the wall. Here's that mural:

Integrated Learning

Of course, I'm a big believer in and proponent of interdisciplinary learning. I was delighted to discover that SLA has themes for each year, also posted clearly in each classroom. Those themes are sometimes mentioned subtly and sometimes overtly to show students the meaning of their work, how it connects to the world and themselves.

Frisch's ninth grade theme is also Identity, a logical one for freshmen

Students in Mr. Josh Block's history class studied this theme
by analyzing the factory model system and its treatment of workers
 in the past and today (Uh, oh, Apple)

The themes, like the ones at Frisch, reflect the course of development in high school

Social and Emotional Learning 

Another thing that struck me greatly was how personal the learning became for the students. Rabbi Pittinsky already mentioned a project one girl did on Vietnam because her family was from that country. Another girl's project on the power of language was about her role as family interpreter because her parents and grandparents were immigrants, many of them non-English speaking. 

One sophomore girl read a poem she had written about heartbreak and then told us that she had been encouraged to share her rough past in order to help herself deal with it as well as to help others who were also struggling. The student was unself-conscious about revealing this information and showed insight and self-awareness about her pain and how she had dealt with it. This same student told us her commute was an hour long, and she had chosen to give up a spot in a prestigious art school in order to attend SLA. She said she was happy with her decision.

After her presentation, she sat down with two other students who said they were each other's support group, collaborating on work but also being there for each other and growing emotionally together. 

Is PBL and IBL for everyone?

Of course, RealSchool loves PBL and IBL, and I truly believe it is for everyone. SLA has worked hard to shift student thinking so the kids know they must own their learning and take responsibility for it. That's one thing that must happen before implementing PBL/IBL. I can see that in my own implementation of it. Just today, in fact, when a project was due, a student said, "But my partner was absent yesterday," so I replied, "You knew the project was due today. You had to take responsibility for getting it done. Do you see that?" A cultural shift has to take place among students, who are mostly trained to be baby birds who open their mouths and say to a teacher, "Feed me."

The other thing I think has to happen is that we have to trust students, though you could say this is the same point as the one in the previous paragraph, but there's more. Yes, we have to trust students to own their work, to get to a class on time if a school has no bells, but, more importantly, we have to trust students to tell us what they want to learn and how they want to learn it. Whether teachers decide to have greater control of learning through PBL or make it very free in IBL, we must listen to what students want to do. Students aren't unmotivated because they're born that way. I think school plays a large part in creating unmotivated students. They don't want to learn a lot of what is taught because it's not interesting to them or it's taught in a way that doesn't excite them or that doesn't allow them to express their natural talents. 

It's our job as educators to tap into the talents and interests kids have, so they can use them to show us what they've learned and what they're good at. Again, I absolutely believe all students can shine in an environment that takes into account what kind of learners they are and what they're passionate about.

Finally . . . 

Cost

There was nothing overly fancy about SLA. The laptops are expensive, but the school looked like a normal school. The Bergen Academies has its own trading floor, some of Finland's schools look like Le Corbusier designed them. SLA looks like a normal school. In fact, the advisory system seems like a good way to save money by having faculty act as academic and emotional mentors. Integrate English and History, and you could save even more money by having a Humanities teacher as opposed to two English and History ones. Cost shouldn't be a factor in developing a JDS school as innovative and special as SLA is. 

One cost-saving plan being implemented in SLA was the use of Rosetta Stone to teach Spanish. State budget cuts had forced the school to fire the Spanish teacher. More than one person mentioned the fact that this blended learning model was unappealing to students and teachers, though some students were enjoying the computer program. Interesting.

I was grateful for the chance to visit SLA, especially with students Penina  -- who planned the trip! Thank you! -- and Akiva, and I can't wait to continue implementing more and more PBL and IBL in my classroom and through RealSchool. Thanks to everyone at SLA for making us feel so welcome.