Not So Distant Future

As I sift through my thoughts from the site visits this past week, the theme that keeps recurring to me is the different ways the schools we visited supported either their teachers or their students, or both.

Every school we visited had a non-traditional schedule, including our last site, Mt. Carmel, which I haven’t had time to write about.  This provided for both tutorial time for students within the school day as well as teacher staff development time within the school day.  

I really liked that model for a number of reasons.  As we try to build in more 21st century learning opportunities for our students and more technology as part of that, we all need time to work together on learning new web 2.0 tools and troubleshooting them as far as classroom use.  These alternative schedules provide for that.

Also, a couple of the schools we visited had more opportunities for cross curriculum connections, particularly High Tech High, which is built around that whole concept.  So by having more planning time, teachers are able to make that work across different disciplines.  As a librarian, perhaps because I work with teachers from across the school, I was really taken with the possibility for more cross curricular collaboration. 

At High Tech, students work with a humanities strand and a math/science strand, and the two teachers of those strands work together with the art teacher as students complete projects.

So for example, the students were building a plexiglass, interactive museum box with help from the engineering teacher on the building side and physics teacher on the concept side.   The boxes were designed by the art teacher to fit exactly into the window frames in the building, and he worked with them on the design of the box.   So all three teachers helped students complete the project.

Another project entailed students in physics explaining how something “worked.”  They then designed an art print in concert with the art teacher, using good design principles to demonstrate their understanding, and those were displayed in the hallways.

The biotechnology teacher works with students each year on a project to design a field guide for the San Diego Bay(which is then sold on Amazon) and they worked with local experts as well as national figures like Jane Goodall. 

Again, web 2.0 tools, like chat, wikis, email, collaborative documents on Google Docs, Skype–these tools could allow us to collaborate easily across classrooms and class periods, but also with teachers and students in other schools or experts like Jane Goodall on projects like these.   And again, staff development time in the school schedule as well as a vision for what we want to do, really contributes to these ideas being successful.

Our schedule will afford us some of that flexibility next year, so I’m excited about the possibilities.   And perhaps we can use some of the contacts we’ve made at other schools to make some  cross-state connections as well.