“Where they stand: the top 5 schools in college prep…”
“International School: This small Bellevue school, which includes grades 6–12, graduated its first class of seniors in 1997, and college prep experts this year gave it the highest rating of any public school. Many classes are advanced or honors although the school only offers a handful of Advanced Placement classes. About 90 percent of its students go on to college — the highest percentage of any school in the Puget Sound area. Because it is so popular, admission is by lottery.”
— Mike Lindblom, Seattle Times*
“Bruce, the proof of any teacher’s effectiveness is in the performance of his students, and you and I both know that the work your kids have produced is superb. Their observation skills, their ability to use language to vividly describe their observations, and their rapidly increasing understanding of syntax and sentence structure are among the most impressive I’ve ever seen as an English teacher, principal, or superintendent in any school at any grade level or program.
The fact that you have produced this level of accomplishment with such young kids is incredible.”
— Bellevue Superintendent Mike Riley visits 7th-grade Humanities at Bellevue International**
We teacher founders of Bellevue International School believed that public schools have the potential to perform miraculous feats:
They can introduce students to the satisfactions of acquiring and applying new skills (see Mastery Learning Writing Curriculum).
They can lead students forward to surmount new challenges that are built upon previous learning.
And they can help students piece together their understanding of a fascinating world.
When learning activities are connected from class to class and from year to year, and when what “has been done” is a platform that can be applied to “what needs to be done,” then students know that what happens in school is essential.
Centering the “now” of classwork between what has occurred and what will come next creates a level of interest and participation that disconnected, unit-by-unit curricula cannot provide.
When this link-up becomes the expectation for each and every instructional day, students find that they are at the center of a continuous learning journey.
Because they are challenged to carry information forward rather than jettison it after a unit quiz, their ongoing classroom experiences are imbued with value, personal challenge, and meaning.
If a thing is to be taught and to occupy a space in the curriculum, then it must possess some informative relevance and connection to content and skill practices in all other levels within a subject area.
A study of the American Revolution, for example, is pointless (from a student perspective) if it is taught as a stand-alone unit.
Instead, key principles and processes of this historical event must be raised from the particular to the universal, and must later be successfully re-applied to future studies — either as a guide to understanding or comparing other events separated by culture and epoch, or as a disconfirmation that points up human and political variety and unpredictability. But the carrying forward — and the comparison — must always be present.
If the American Revolution is taught as a stand-alone, with no theoretical lessons to be gleaned and later applied, then this study of the American Revolution does not deserve a place in an essential curriculum.
Think of a journey through a curriculum from a typical student’s perspective: “Now we study this and take a test. Now we study that.” If the information and insight gained during a particular study cannot be carried forward and used meaningfully by the student, then what is the point of studying any of these?
And most important, when students are frequently called upon to demonstrate understanding of the linkages in the learning sequence, they quickly acquire the pride and self-confidence that comes from knowing and from mastery (see Improving Teacher Effectiveness).
An essential, seamless curriculum is crucial for student success.
Yet, in most secondary public schools, a teacher-centered curriculum often prevails. Teachers have their own biases regarding what is important and what is worthy to be taught, and their students must fit this Procrustean bed of individual instructional preferences, and then savor the curricular disconnect that often ensues.
This bewildering smorgasbord of content occurs in part because teachers often practice without knowing what their neighbors in the next classroom are doing.
Within large high school academic departments, authentic agreement about the skills, competencies, assessments, and learning sequences that should be emphasized by all teachers at each grade level is rare. Within these same departments, clear linkages between courses, concepts, high-quality instructional practices, and learning activities — say between 9th and 10th grade — are almost nonexistent.
Confirmation of this can be found in the lengthy course descriptions that are on file in Curriculum and Instruction offices at the district level. The cut-and-paste of learning expectations from course to course is de rigueur, and often creates an illusion of coherence and instructional quality from teacher to teacher and classroom to classroom.
But this is an illusion only, and only the strongest students can game the irrelevant curriculum, whereas those who need motivation, meaning, and application are forced to choose between dropping out, turning inward, or acting out their dissatisfactions and becoming disciplinary problems.
How do we create schools and curricula that are essential?
What are the keys to dramatically improving school effectiveness?
Two important tasks must be accomplished.
First:
Departmental teams must become engaged in the task of identifying their values, their expectations, and in crafting a curriculum that is not a random sequence of courses, but a well-orchestrated assault upon fundamental competencies and essential questions — a coherent three- to four-year design that focuses on developing a student who has the knowledge, experience, capabilities, and intellectual temperament that the program has described as its outcome or goal.
This refashioning occurs when teams are engaged in the task of asking questions like:
What is important?
What knowledge and capabilities do we want our graduates to have?
How can we design learning sequences and activities that will logically and deliberately lead to this end result?
What key skills and essential understandings must be taught and reinforced at each and every level by each and every staff member?
Second-order change requires staffs to answer questions like these, and then to commit without reservation to following through in support of each other as the program goes forward (see Becoming an Effective Teacher).
Second:
Teachers must be introduced to — or re-learn — instructional strategies for student-centering their classrooms. They must learn to create authentic learning experiences for all students, and they must accurately assess whether what they have taught has been learned — and can be used — by their students.
In sum, essential learning is imaged as a ladder or scaffold: an ever-unfolding basis from which all new learning emerges.
To use an example from the humanities content area, a work such as Beowulf would not be taught merely because it was an early work, or because it was one of the teacher’s personal favorites, or because it was on a college reading list.
None of these alone would be a sufficient justification for teaching the work.
Instead, it would be taught because it was an advanced commentary on previous learning experiences, and because it developed anew key ideas that have been carried upward from previous works, as well as carried forward to future years.
It would occupy a niche in a curricular sequence because it was essential for it to be there. To arbitrarily remove it from this location and place it somewhere else would be analogous to removing a species from an ecosystem or a food chain.
This is the premise behind the two-year humanities curriculum that I offer on this website.