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.

   I was reading a new book, Wikinomics, on the plane, which is about how the new collaborative and connective nature of the web is changing our culture.

To me, that is what the site visits were all about.  We’ve made connections with all kinds of different schools and teachers in another part of the country, and they are connections we can draw on to bring new ideas into our school, and the other schools got ideas from us as well.  We have become resources for one another, and we’ve all broadened our experiences, and I think having a broader perspective helps us envision new possibilities. 

We saw a lot of fascinating ideas and courses, like biotechnology and engineering, digital film(which I’ve mentioned), and combinations of subjects across the curriculum, as well as interesting programs for supporting students.

I’m looking forward to sharing more and seeing what we all can create with all of these ideas! 

We talked to them about their senior project which is a culminating experience to the senior year, and which students work on with their social studies and English teachers.  Students are connected with a business mentorship in the community as part of this.

Poway also has a unique teaching internship, where they pair upperclassmen with teacher mentors at their own campus.  The students learn about assessment and lesson design, and work with ninth and tenth grade students as classroom assistants.  The principals teach the course.  It’s slightly similar to our teen teaching program.

Another unique program was their wellness program, which is funded mainly by grants.  They have a student support center where students can go to talk to the counselors, hang out with peers if they don’t have a “home” on campus, and you could see that it was a really important aspect of their campus.

They have a really excellent digital graphics, digital animation, and digital film program, as well as an excellent librarian who is also into wikis and blogs, etc.

We have made a lot of connections at these campuses that we can draw on as we work on new courses or want to share ideas or learn new things.  Sometimes we have been sharing ideas as well as learning new things, so it’s been a really valuable experience. 

The second site we visited this afternoon was High Tech High School, which is a charter school in
San Diego.   It was somewhat mind-blowing in that it is all project –based learning across the curriculum.  Students are taught by teams of teachers who share the time with students. 

Students were actively moving from room to room as they worked on projects—there were students in the hall using power tools to build projects, mounting their art on the walls as they finished it, and many many cross-discipline connections.  For example, the art teacher was working with the engineering teacher and physics teacher to design a project “box” about a physics topic that would fit in the frames of their windows.   Students were finishing them and actually hanging them up in the windows as we were leaving today.

When you asked students to explain a concept, they were able to explain all of what they were creating in great detail and explain the science behind it.

The architecture and design of the building was also really interesting which you can see from the photos. The design of High Tech really challenged our thinking.

There is a lot to process about all the different things we’ve seen, but this is a quick snapshot.  One school was much more traditional than the other, but we got so many valuable ideas from both.

Their schedule is somewhat similar to ours, but they attend classes only four days.

One of the most striking things there was a beautiful art gallery, and they also use it to showcase a local artist often.   It convinced all of us even more of the value of having an art gallery.   The gallery also has a mounted flat screen for video art, which was a nice feature.  

The school offers a digital film course, and they gave us some dvds of their films.  They invite a different person from feature films to speak at the campus each year when the student projects are completed, which is another idea we could emulate.

They also did a wonderful job of portraying their school in their handouts, literary magazine, digital film festival, etc. There is much more that I want to share, but not enough time to write about it…so that will be my “school snapshot” for now.

–Gunn has “departmental” secretaries–a group of teachers over several departments share an assistant who is stationed at a location where students or teachers can access their help.  They also have an assistant who sets up the labs for the science teachers (and both Palo Alto and Gunn have beautiful lab spaces for that).

–Looping–Gunn “groups” 9-10 graders in their English classes and 11-12 graders, and the students move through four semesters in varying order, but they are mixed grade level classes.  Interesting….though I’m guessing it makes for difficult scheduling, but they said they like the benefit of the mixed levels in terms of student discussion.

–Both Palo Alto and Gunn have a lot more electives than we do, but they are content area electives, like History of the Cold War, or Women Authors, or Escape Literature, etc.  They both have 7 period days, so that makes that possible.  California has no state requirements for graduation credits, other than what the University of California system requires, which guides most schools like theirs.

–They use both Macs and Pc’s at both campuses, across the board.

–They both have teacher driven inservice planning–they have unusual schedules and one hour of the afternoon each week has a slot for department meetings or teacher inservice.  Palo Alto has a list of “class offerings” for teachers on those days over a variety of subjects they previously identified.

More impressions later, and Vicky is posting on the Site Visit Committee’s site too.

Today we are going to Harvard Westlake, a private school in Los Angeles–check out their website to see what we’ll be seeing!

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/185472365/in/set-72157594172818697/