iSchool iThink

Ms. Shah so beautifully summed up many of the ideas that were sparked from our visit to the iSchool yesterday. I would like to reiterate that at this point in my career visiting other schools and getting a sense for the possibilities and of the excitement out there is invigorating. It is amazing to me each time I visit another school how much tunnel vision I have accumulated in my home school. The PERSPECTIVE that opens up is refreshing. I am "up on the balcony" for sure. I won't repeat the same take-aways as Ms. Shah even though we took them away together... Instead I offer three more iThoughts:

1. Market Our Classes - This is an idea that has been tossed around before at UNMS, but I was happy to see it in action at iSchool. The idea is simple: create course names and more specific goals for each course. This was most evident in the iSchool's "modules", which are investigative, interdisciplinary inquiry courses around a contained theme or issue, which Ms. Shah discussed in her post. Imagine if at UNMS instead of students just having a class called "Science" for three years, each year, or better yet, each semester or quarter was named a specific course, such as "The Human Body" or even something catchier like, "How do humans survive?" Essentially, for a course like science or math, instead of having units inside the class that get stretched out, blended, and diluted, these classes can be named after catchy and memorable essential questions or inquiries. I believe this would help both teachers AND students gain clarity about goals and be more excited about content.

This idea also has unique implications for the humanities department, which I have been thinking about and playing around with for the past week. One challenge the humanities team has faced since implementing the program five years ago is how to manage the immense amount of content and skills that lie within ELA and Social Studies. Inevitably each year a pendulum swings back and forth between competing areas of content (e.g., history vs. geography; economics; writing notebooks?; nonfiction writing?; GRAMMAR?; vocabulary study; independent reading; open-research and inquiry projects, etc...) In short, something gets shortchanged each year. Splitting the course back "to normal" between ELA and Social Studies is not the answer to this dilemma. Instead, I think the creation of smaller more targeted "mini-courses" within humanities could offer a solution to make sure we target the skills and content we value most at UNMS. Which leads me to my next point...

2. Consider Implementing Concrete Quarter Semesters This is another idea that floated around the UNMS cloud a few years ago. There are two good reasons why this is something worth considering. The first is that it unifies the school in a number of ways. Imagine that the entire school is involved in a 9- or 10-week quarter course and all teachers and students are working on the same pacing throughout these weeks. This means that students would be getting repeated practice with certain "learning skills", such as how to build background knowledge, how to conduct inquiry, and how to demonstrate knowledge and reflect upon it, at the same times. Professional discussions would be enriched by having common ground on which to speak, and students would feel a surging sense of learning and accomplishment as each quarter ended in a variety of meaningful project-based learning demonstrations. This would also help us get on the road toward a long-term goal of UNMS, to create more interdisciplinary projects and learning opportunities.

The second benefit of such an idea is a tightening of school culture and practices. For example, as is often the case, units could not bleed over intended ends and drag on to a slow death; teachers would have to "stay honest" and keep learning targeted and small.  In addition, marking periods would actually measure specific chunks of learning instead of landing more arbitrarily in-between this or that unit in different classes; the school could create celebrations and benchmarks in each quarter as every student and teacher travels along the same quarter-long path. For example, maybe each quarter ends with a day of portfolio roundtables and a field day or a spirit week, or some such event.

Here is an example of what a modified humanities course MIGHT look like. (Obviously this is really just a draft of possibilities not an actual proposal.)

3. Be Deliberate About Standards I'll keep this part short since this is something that we already know we want to do, but seeing a school doing it (and a school that is not completely deluded by the sometimes arbitrariness or hard-to-measure-ness of the standards movement), gave me hope that we can do it too. In the humanities team, with the help of the more streamlined National Core Standards, we can identify all of the skills and content we want students to master at UNMS and create a master spreadsheet to track learning. Simple as pie, right?