Posted: February 19th, 2010 by stephen
Here, in a photographic nutshell, is the fulfillment of the central purpose behind the USI Network’s 2009 Winter Trip to Boston: informed conversation amongst school leaders and teachers concerning what lessons can be learned and applied from their visits to successful Boston public schools that have faced similar challenges for a longer period of time. Discussion was frequent and in-depth during the Winter Trip, which took place from Sunday through Tuesday, December 6-8, 2009 and included administrators and teachers from 17 of our 19 network schools. The topics discussed included everything from school culture to curriculum models to teacher buy-in. Billed by trip co-facilitator Jeff Nelson as a retreat, it was indeed a time to examine, compare, decide, and make plans to adjust school practices based on the classrooms, teachers, and principals that were seen on the trip.
After arriving in Boston on Sunday, participants visited one school on Monday and one on Tuesday. Schools included two elementary schools, Mason Elementary School and Young Achievers Science and Mathematics Pilot School; a middle school, Clarence R. Edwards; and two high schools, Boston Community Leadership Academy (BCLA) and Fenway High School. USI Network members were able to meet with the respective principals, visit classrooms, talk with teachers, and in some cases, sit in with academic and guidance counseling departments. Charged with the task of identifying how their own schools need to grow and focus their learning, participants spent time in a variety of Boston classrooms watching teacher instruction and student interaction, examining classroom environment, and in some cases having a quick word with students to find out their ground-level perspectives. This account will focus on first-hand knowledge from shadowing two of the schools on the trip; on Monday, Disney II magnet elementary school; on Tuesday, ACE Technical High School.
On Monday, elementary administrators and teachers visited Samuel W. Mason Elementary School. Mason was, in 1990, the “least chosen elementary school” in Boston. With the leadership of Principal Harolyn Bowden, Mason transformed itself via the 1993 Charter One Act and has gone on to win various awards, including the U.S. Department of Education Model Professional Development Award in 1996 and the National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence Award in 1997. Supported by committed teachers, staff, teacher interns, devoted parents, and a strong school community working collaboratively and learning together, Mason has found great success teaching students in a fully inclusive rigorous classroom, working to meet the needs of each individual child. Participants at Mason got a chance to meet as a large group with Principal Bowden, and then to visit a variety of classrooms in small groups. After each class visit, groups took a moment to discuss what they had seen and how it compared with their experiences and practices at their own schools. Following these classroom visits, the principals and administrators met in a small group with Principal Bowden to discuss the difficulties of advancing progressive policy as a new principal, detailing the ways in which she was able to create positive school change without alienating her staff. Bowden stressed that “everyone owns these kids,” by which she meant that administrators, staff, and parents all take active responsibility for the success of the students.
USI Network administrators visit classrooms at Mason Elementary:
Bogdana Chkoumbova, principal of Disney II Magnet School, took part in the visits to Mason Elementary and Young Achievers, and she shared her biggest takeaways as well as Disney II’s plans for the future. She admired the schools’ “new creative staffing models.” Examples included hiring teachers with dual certification as well as allowing teachers to teach only core classes during their school day, and enlisting teacher assistants, parent volunteers, and community partners to teach non-core subjects such as art, music, and dance after 3 P.M. These creative models “capitaliz[e] on the relevant budgetary autonomy of the model.” Thus, Bogdana, as a principal, wanted to exploit the freedom to create unique models for hiring strategies and professional development regarding her teachers. Similarly, several principals and administrators on the trip echoed Bogdana’s desire to explore how their situation as contract or performance schools, affords them some leeway for modification of existing school models and creative new strategies, which could lead to greater efficacy and productivity in their schools.
In addition to staffing models and teacher use, Bogdana noted two takeaways specific to content area. The first concerned mathematics, specifically Young Achievers’ use of guided math groups. “Our team has been having this discussion (concerning the use of guided math groups) for some time, and we finally observed a working model,” said Bogdana. “The big question of ‘remediation or re-teaching’ during math group time will focus our further discussions.” Bogdana and her team from Disney II—as was the experience for various school groups on the trip—were delighted to see a working model of an idea with which they had been toying. This is one of the greatest virtues of the facilitated school visits on the Winter Trip: by witnessing how more veteran schools have enacted programs that they wish to execute in the future, Network schools can suitably adopt or modify those programs to fit their own needs and concerns. There is also the simple thrill of encouragement: this can be done, because others have done it!
The second content-specific takeaway Bogdana identified concerned literacy. Disney II has been researching programs or models to support the phonics skill development of their PreK-2 students, and so they were pleased to see the creative use of the Foundations curriculum (Clabaugh & Rozycki) at Mason, as it could be conducive to the Disney II model and philosophy. Bogdana says the Language Arts Committee at Disney II will continue exploring the Foundations program as an option for the next school year. By seeing how other schools adapt available material and programs to their specific needs, Network school administrators found inspiration for their own processes of adaptation.
“Everybody owns these kids.”
—Principal Harolyn Bowden
On Tuesday, secondary school administrators and teachers visited Boston Community Leadership Academy, the first traditional Boston public school to convert to pilot school status. Headmaster Nicole Bahnam has overseen an impressive change of fortune, with the school receiving a Civic Leadership Award from the Boston Foundation in 2004 as well as being a two-time finalist for the School on the Move Award (2006, 2007). Bahnam, in addressing USI Network members, stressed the importance of hiring teachers who are masters of their subject areas, especially at the ninth-grade level, when students are in the critical first stages of high school learning. In order to insure the attraction and retention of highly competent teachers, Bahnam decided to use her budgetary autonomy to devote 97% of her funds to teacher salaries. She explained the importance of having talented adults in front of students rather than spending more on computers and other classroom materials. BCLA has a full academic college prep curriculum that emphasizes community and leadership as well as habits of mind and academic expectations. These pillars require that students focus on improving their communities as well as developing their minds. BCLA asks its students to investigate, develop, and master community issues and then to display their scholarship through portfolios and senior exhibitions. BCLA uses an inclusion model that includes co-teaching to support students in inclusive classes. The hope is that BCLA students develop the scholarly attitudes, habits, and skills necessary to succeed in college and to lead fulfilled lives as informed citizens.
Representing ACE Technical Charter School, Maria Gonsiorek, Michele Stefl, and Kate Beazley said their biggest takeaways from visiting BCLA (and, on the first day, Fenway High) were that positive school culture, seminar programs, and the use of one’s advisory department are all integral to success. BCLA demonstrates well the interconnection between a positive school culture (of excellence and achievement) and increased teacher buy-in, which enables the implementation of seminar programs and thus, greater rigor for the students. ACE Tech visitors also noted the importance of presentation and speaking skills, and returned to their school with the hopes of encouraging students to present and defend arguments before their fellow students. Some Network members had the pleasure of sitting down for a brief session with BCLA’s advisory department, and were impressed by its well-honed and extensive team of counselors.
USI Network Program Manager Melissa Goodnight and Baba Fred Kheperu from BSICS Sizemore visit a classroom at BCLA:
On both days, following the school visits, administrators and teachers gathered in their small groups to discuss what they had observed and learned and to identify their next steps. This time for joint discussion and reflection was essential, because as Jeff Nelson said, if you don’t commit yourself to taking one or two concrete steps moving forward, you run the risk of not taking any steps at all. Reminded of the importance of decisive team planning, the trip participants came up with strong, explicit plans for what their schools would do next. Numerous schools, including Disney II, Sizemore, and Woodlawn, set the use of data to drive instruction as a primary goal going forward. Improving school culture was on top of the agenda for several schools, including ACE Tech, Perspectives Calumet, and Power House. Other next steps included setting time for teacher collaboration (Catalyst Circle Rock and Catalyst Howland); revamping the structure and efficiency of meetings (NKO); displaying student work exemplars (Urban Prep-Englewood); increasing teacher empowerment through developing Instructional Leadership Teams (Urban Prep-East Garfield). At the end of the second discussion group on Tuesday, each school had one team member stand up and give a presentation detailing the fruits of their discussion: the details of both what they learned and what comes next.
“Unless you work in a lighthouse, you’ll never work alone.”
—Kyle Westbrook, quoting a math teacher from Edwards Middle School
USI Network Director and Co-Founder, Sybil Madison-Boyd confers with Jeff Nelson and Assistant Superintendent for Pilot Schools for Boston Public Schools, Sonja Brookins Santelises:
Representatives from the Network schools present their top takeaways from the trip:
Trip co-facilitator Jeff Nelson consulting with USI Director of Secondary School Supports, Kyle Westbrook:
Hopefully the schools visited on this trip offered a view into the ways in which wise leadership, talented teachers (and teacher buy-in), highly effective curricula, and the use of data to drive instruction can lead to impressive strides forward in achievement. At the same time, the shared learning experiences and discussion forums allowed USI Network participants the chance to learn from one another. Through communication, collaboration, and cross-school learning—using these gracious Boston public schools for inspiration and comparison—each of our schools can move forward towards reaching their goals in providing a rigorous education to all of their students.
—Stephen Dierks
Posted: January 11th, 2010 by stephen
“We believe. We are the young men of Urban Prep.”
These are the opening lines of the Urban Prep creed, a stirring statement of purpose recited by all the students and faculty at Community, a daily 20-minute gathering held each and every morning in the gymnasium. The students of Urban Prep form lines in the gymnasium based upon their “prides,” which are support groups that follow each student through his four years at the school. Community is a ceremony whose aim is the reification of togetherness and shared purpose, a chance to start each day in awareness of oneself as member of a greater whole, as strengthened by one’s beliefs and the sure knowledge that one’s peers and mentors share those beliefs. Another component of daily Community is the distribution of ties to a few students who have done exemplary work during the preceding week. On the morning of the “Seeing is Believing” event at Urban Prep on October 29th, the very first seniors in Urban Prep-Englewood’s young history to receive acceptance letters into college enjoyed special recognition during Community via red and gold ties that they are to wear for the rest of the school year. The walls echoed with cheers and music as the honored young men strode up to the stage to receive their ties. Tim King, the president and CEO of what is rapidly becoming a network of high schools, offered his congratulations and encouragement to the school and to its much-fêted inaugural senior class before handing the microphone over to co-principal Dennis Lacewell. A palpable feeling of celebration, of promise, of excitement was in the air.
Central to the Urban Prep vision for their students is the notion that college attendance and completion must be a standardized, expected norm. In their efforts to motivate the young black men that compose their student body, Urban Prep’s leaders have worked to create a model for academic and career success that motivates their students to defy negative statistics about young black men not graduating from high school or not completing college. They want to give their young men the confidence that they can and will graduate from high school, get into college, and earn a degree. With this kind of confidence and the structure and curriculum and mentoring to back it up, Urban Prep has some promising statistics to point to: 79% of their students are on track to graduate; there is a 93% daily attendance rate; and their students outperform minority males district-wide in all ACT subject areas. There is reason to believe that Urban Prep’s students will reach the goals the school has set out for them.
Urban Prep expects that 100% of its students will enter and complete college. In order to lay the ideological groundwork for that kind of group and individual achievement, Urban Prep inculcates in its young men the importance of an investment in community and self, both now and for the future. The leaders of Urban Prep—King, Lacewell, and co-principal Benjamin Blakeley—hope to motivate their young men as well as provide them with all the tools and opportunities they need to succeed. Motivation and inspiration occur through a variety of means, one of which is the one-on-one tutoring/mentoring program. While tutoring or mentoring are not uncommon at schools, what may not be so common is the sheer abundance of black male role models that comprise much of the faculty and staff at Urban Prep. Urban Prep seeks, as they note, to respond to the fact that many of their students do not live with their fathers and may lack sufficient male role models. Urban Prep hopes that the presence of black male teachers and administrators at the school will help the students believe that they too can achieve at a high level.
Another Urban Prep practice that helps to create a sense of community is the aforementioned ”pride.” A pride is one’s small group as a student at Urban Prep. Freshman through senior year, a student belongs to the same pride. The pride meets daily and provides the chance to encourage and support one another. The Urban Prep student starts out by being mentored by older senior students and by the time he graduates he will have mentored the younger students in his pride. Thus, the student at Urban Prep has support from faculty, staff, and his fellow students and feels a sense of belonging to Urban Prep as a whole as well as to his pride. To further encourage the feeling of self-worth and possibility, as well as to indicate the seriousness and respect for oneself, others, and the learning that goes on at school, Urban Prep enforces a dress code of blazers, khakis, and ties. This helps to provide a visual reminder that serious work is underway. Additionally, Urban Prep has its students and staff refer to one another as “Mr.” and that person’s surname as opposed to the standard first name address. This also helps to drive home the idea of mutual respect.
But Urban Prep doesn’t just want its students to respect one another, oneself, and one’s future; they also want to provide the structure and opportunities necessary to achieve and be ready for college. To that end, there are four arcs in their approach to comprehensive education. One is the Academic Arc, which requires twice the average number of English credits. This is in the interest of focusing on reading, writing, and public speaking skills, which are crucial to college readiness. In addition to a focus on English, there is also a longer school day, 8:30-4:30, which helps to keep students busy and safe during the time of day (late afternoon) when crime is most prevalent. Along the same lines, the Activity Arc at Urban Prep mandates that every student must participate in two school-sponsored afterschool activities per year, whether it is membership in a sports team or a club. By keeping their students in school longer, Urban Prep ensures that they are engaged, productive, and safe for a great percentage of every school day. On the safety front, there is a parent committee whose members volunteer to carpool and watch out for the students in the neighborhood.
The remaining two arcs at Urban Prep are the Service Arc and the Professional/College Arc. The Service Arc deepens the students’ understanding of and responsibility for community issues by asking them to identify community needs and problems and having them participate in volunteer programs in order to address these concerns. The leaders of Urban Prep definitely want their students to defy negative statistics and stereotypes by graduating from high school and college, but in addition to that, they seem intent on changing minds, on broadening their students’ viewpoint of themselves and those who surround them. By reciting the creed—especially the line “We have a responsibility to our families, community and world”—the students remind themselves that it’s not just about their one life and the importance that college readiness, acceptance, and completion will have for their future career success. It’s also about the impact their achievements can have on their families and communities, how they have the capacity to inspire and uplift those around them, to give back, to mentor the next generation, to set an example, and in so doing, to make a real difference for others.
The Professional/College Arc includes an offering of summer programs for students as well as access to the college application center. Urban Prep’s summer programs include academic, professional and service opportunities. One of the most exciting opportunities for Urban Prep students is the chance to take college-level summer courses at universities around the country. These opportunities give the students a chance to become comfortable with what college will have to offer them as well as giving them wonderful experience for their college applications. During their senior year, students spend a class period every day in the college center, a quiet room with banks of computers reserved especially for college applications. This is to ensure that issues like a lack of computer or time at home after school do not impede a student’s college application process.
As has been demonstrated, Urban Prep has the structure, the practices, the curriculum, the summer programs, and the inspiration and support in place to greatly increase the odds of its young men attending and completing college. The hope is that Urban Prep graduates will go to college and then go out into the world with a strong sense of their own worth, of the responsibilities they have to themselves and their families and communities, and more generally, the responsibility they have to their futures, and they will look back on a prep school experience that emphasized these things, they will look back on a place where they were their “brothers’ keepers”, where they promised to “never succumb to mediocrity, uncertainty or fear,” a place where they learned to believe. Many of these notions find their expression and their daily affirmation in the Urban Prep creed. The creed emphasizes, above all else, this belief in oneself, in one’s future, in one’s fellow students, and in Urban Prep. This is the creation of a culture of belief, but it is based not only on ideas but also on actions and principles and practices. The first cohort of Urban Prep graduates is on the horizon. The seniors are beginning to receive college acceptance letters. What does the future hold for Urban Prep? From the evidence on display, in addition to Urban Prep’s opening of two more campuses in East Garfield and the South Shore, the future looks bright for America’s first all-male charter public high school. Discipline, support, mentorship, targeted curriculum and programs, and above all, the nurturing of its students’ belief, belief that leads to self-respect and respect for one’s community and for one’s future, that, abiding belief, is the radical thing Urban Prep has taken great pains to give its students.
—Stephen Dierks
Posted: October 7th, 2009 by melissa
Sybil Madison-Boyd and Melissa Goodnight presented a paper, Making practice public: Sharing challenges and successes in enhancing student learning through cross-school learning walks (Madison-Boyd, S., Westbrook, K., Zimmer, T., & Goodnight Stippler, M.; 2009) at the annual meeting of the Mid-Western Educational Research Association in St. Louis on October 15th. The paper outlines the USI Network’s Learning Walk process and what the Network has learned as a result of this practice over the 2008-2009 school year.
Abstract from the Conference Paper:
United by a common set of beliefs about effective urban education, the schools of the Urban School Improvement (USI) Network share practices, tools, resources, and lessons learned. They are part of a professional community of Pre-K to 12 educators committed to ensuring that all their students are prepared for success in college and careers. This presentation outlines one of the Network’s thriving professional development practices, learning walks. Learning walks are implemented by USI Network coaches to facilitate cross-school sharing by making schools’ classroom practices public to other network colleagues. Teachers and school leaders participate in evidence-based observations (focused around a specific area of instruction) by walking through classrooms. Learning walks provide schools’ instructional leadership teams with valuable information that informs their plans for improving instruction and enhancing student learning. This presentation highlights both the practice of learning walks and the professional learning that has resulted from them during the 2008-2009 school year.