A few things that stood out from our visits yesterday (this is quick because we have to get to the airport early this morning!)–
–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!
I am excited to hear more about the non-traditional schedules the students are offered. I would love to have more electives offered at Westlake. Did they say how these are funded? Do they face the same challenges we do with state funding? It was also interesting to know that the state does not have a minimum number of credits for graduation. I want to learn more about this system.
Palo Alto is beautiful. I am looking forward to learning more about the schedules and the large number of electives offered. How is their school system funded?
Laurie,
Some of their programs are funded by something called ROP, which I think is similar to Carl Perkins funding, but it’s provided by the state of California, specifically for career to work types of courses, from what I could tell.
Also, several of the schools used grant money. Poway was using money from the drug-free grants, tobacco free grants, and other grants, for example, to fund their student center.