Vital Collaboration for the Future: Independent and Public Schools

I’m sitting at a conference table with eight colleagues.  We’re planning a second annual professional development seminar for this April 19 & 20, 2012.  We’re talking about projects that are going on at each school that have to do with WATER. Bob Dillon, MRH Middle School Principal, pipes up, Well, we should have our aquaponics project going by spring. Your WHAT? asked Tim Wood, TCS Sustainability Coordinator. At the end of Bob’s explanation, Tim turned to Sheila Gurley, Head of TCS, Well, Sheila, looks like we need a fish production center, too. She nods in hearty agreement.

Oh, BTW...MRH is Maplewood Richmond Heights School District and TCS is The College School in Webster Groves.  MRH is public, somewhere in the 60-70% free and reduced hot lunch demographic.  TCS is an independent school, somewhere in the 5% free and reduced demographic.

These folks are at the same table.  They’re sharing ideas.  They know they have much to learn from each other.

One of the great myths in the field of education is that independent and public schools do not collaborate.  I imagine that many of us think that public schools are inferior to independent schools.  Most of us think even think that if independent schools seek to interact with public schools that they are in competition with each other; that they’re trying to BEAT each other.

Most of us don’t consider the actual root of the word competition: from Greek, com petre; petre: to strive; com: together; to strive together to get better.

Here in St. Louis, over the past twenty years, Louise and I have experienced this original, interdependent, co-constructive meaning.  We have been a part of an ongoing history where independent and public schools collaborate to create dynamic professional development opportunities, both for themselves and for educators coming here from all over the country (and Canada, Australia, Korea, Japan, and Sweden).

In fact, the reason Louise and I came to St. Louis from Vermont (via Reggio Emilia, Italy) was because Louise was hired by Jan Phillips, Head of The College School at the time, to be their first ever "atelierista," and to work with Brenda Fyfe at Webster University to initiate a city wide educational investigation of The Reggio Approach in ten diverse school settings.  It was Jan and Brenda’s vision from the beginning that a grant from the Danforth Foundation would support independent and public schools working together on this initiative.

After twenty years of growth and evolution, many new avenues have opened up for the schools involved.  And, at the core remains the exciting element of collaboration between public and independent schools.  A recent example was last April’s professional development seminar, We’re NOT Waiting for Superman, Learning for the Future in Action.

Current examples of public-independent collaboration will be featured this April 19 & 20, 2012 at our second annual seminar, Myth Busters: Challenge Assumptions and Learn for the Future, sponsored and led by the collaboration of MRH and TCS and Cadwell Collaborative.  The educators and students in both schools will share their respective practices in the areas of systems thinking, expeditionary, theme-based learning, and design thinking; and their curricular projects that revolve around food, water and play-based learning.

The April seminar will be filled with these stories, practical knowledge and skills and joyful learning and collaboration among all of us.  We invite you to join us!

For more information and registration forms just email Ashley.  The seminar is limited to 75 educators.

Reflecting on 2011

We are in Vermont this week between Christmas and New Years at the farm where Ashley grew up.  This morning there is a dusting of sugar snow on the ground, a clearing sky and flat light and the dogs are running joyful circles in the yard.  The oven is on and bread is baking.  What could be better really? In less than a week 2011 will be gone and we will be launched into another year.  Cadwell Collaborative has been up and running for three and a half years now. Ashley and I are enjoying our work and our collaborations with schools and educators in so many productive and happy ways.  During this month we have been updating our website and blog and we are almost finished with this round.  A wonderful friend and colleague, illustrator and graphic artist, Penny Dullaghan, is helping us.

This morning I came across an idea on a photographer friend's blog to reflect on the year in photographs, Beautiful 2011.   We will do that in this post, sharing several of the new photos that are up on our website and a few other favorites from our work in schools this year.  With continuing thanks to the schools where we have worked as part of learning teams in 2011: The St. Michael School; The College School; Maplewood Richmond Heights School District; Indianapolis Public School Butler University Laboratory School; and Opal School.

Designing a New School for the 21st. Century

Designing a New School for the 21st Century

To an educator is there anything more exciting (or daunting) than starting a new school?  I don’t think so.  I’ve done it twice (if you count the complete renovation of The St. Michael School, both the building and the curricula).  And now, I’m privileged to be a consultant to another new school in the making, Bennett Day School in Chicago.

After six months of working with the creators of Bennett, I realize that, in their process they are using the very 21st Century skills that they plan to engender at Bennett.  In brief, here are a few.

The excitement is palpable in the innovators who are designing Bennett, Shuchi Sharma and Kate Cicchelli.  They are a great team, working in a collaborative way from the start, modeling a practice essential to their objective: to create an innovative school for the 21st Century.

Shuchi and Kate are also a bit of an odd couple, in a really good way, sort of yin and yang.  Shuchi, the Director of Operations, comes from the business world and she picked up the gauntlet on this project thrown down by Cameron Smith, a Chicago financier.  Kate, the Head of School, is a veteran educator, presently a fourth grade teacher.  They model another key to 21st Century education, understanding multiple perspectives.  They are open to each other and to many new ideas.

In their research phase, Shuchi and Kate have discovered several innovative sources for inspiration, including: the Reggio Emilia Approach, Peter Senge, Grant Wiggins, Ron Berger, and Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound.  In addition to adapting the big ideas from these sources, Kate is completing the puzzle of fundamental skills curricula.  This is problem solving and systems thinking in action.

They have also begun to grapple with the more intangible aspects of school design, for example, creating school culture.  Kate spent a couple of days with me in St. Louis, visiting four schools where Louise and I consult: The College School; Maplewood Richmond Heights School District; The St. Michael School; and Clayton School District.   She reflected later, Understanding school climate, and more, the development of school climate, is difficult work.  It's like trying to grasp air.  Having the chance to observe four different examples of creative and collaborative school cultures was powerful.  Creating a vibrant school culture can be like trying to grasp air and yet, there are many fundamental ways to ground and build successful school cultures.  And, creating school as a community is an essential ingredient for the 21st Century school...like the air we breathe.

The Power and the Pleasure of Curriculum Mapping

The Power and Pleasure of Curriculum Mapping In this post we will share some of our experience and practical ideas about what is called Curriculum Mapping.

Curriculum Mapping is the collaborative process of documenting, discussing and improving curricula through creating visual "maps" of the essential understanding, skills, experiences and assessment that shape courses and projects.

This practice was pioneered by Grant Wiggins who wrote Understanding by Design, and Heidi Hayes Jacobs who wrote Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping. This process is invaluable as it clarifies for everyone, including students, teachers, and parents, the essential "big ideas" that curricula is built on, maps the journey of learning that students and teachers will travel, and specifies the form that the results of the learning will take.

In schools where we work, we strive to create conditions for students to create exemplary work for a real community audience.  Here is an example.  We worked with The St. Michael School of Clayton faculty to articulate and assess the enduring understandings and skills that kindergarten through sixth grade students gain through richly integrated, creative project work.

About a year ago, Anthony Huberman, chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, asked The St. Michael School educators to organize a day on creativity that would be open to the public, involve The St. Michael School students as leaders and teachers and focus on family participation.

The faculty and administration of The St. Michael School and Cadwell Collaborative decided to create a curriculum map that would articulate the critical 21st century skills and habits of mind that The St. Michael School students were learning and that the visitors that day would be introduced to.

The maps that we composed outlined and articulated what the students were learning, and at the same time opened doors for new thoughts and ideas for all who read it. The map featured what The St. Michael School values and teaches. We would be glad to send you a PDF of the summary map seen in the thumbnail below.

We invite you to think about composing curriculum maps in new ways to reach a public audience beyond your schools whenever you have the chance. This was the first time we have created a map in this way for a special purpose. In addition to engaging faculty in the shared practice of improving teaching and learning, maps that are designed for a wider audience provide a way to feature and advocate for exemplary student work where young people play an active role in engaging their communities in purposeful, creative initiatives.

21st Century School Design

Among the exciting possibilities in education today is this one: the design of schools can change to better support the 21st C. pedagogy and the development of 21st C. skills.  Over the past year, Ashley has had the opportunity to work with one of the great educators in North America, Dean Ena Shelley, and one of the most famous architects in the world, Gyo Obata.  Together, they are transforming an old school to one that will be an inspiration for the future.  This is what Ashley has to say about this exciting process. Ena Shelley is the Dean of the College of Education at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN.  Among her many accolades, she was named Educator of the Year in Indiana.  A year ago, Ena shared her vision of transforming an old school building on the edge of campus, circa 1930, into the new home for her College of Education.  Ena told me that she wanted the building to represent transformational education...innovation and best practice, to enhance the beautiful facade of the old and create a vision for the future.

Cadwell Collaborative and HOK have just delivered to Butler University the schematic design. Among the many patterns that we have articulated in our design, I'd like to highlight three of the broadest ideas, ideas that may be applicable to your own school, in large or small ways (in the end I'll describe three small examples):

• transparent interconnectedness
• sustainability
• interconnectedness with community

Transparent interconnectedness School buildings need to be formed in ways that academic disciplines are distinct AND integrated in spaces that are flexible, transparent, and of varying sizes.  To manifest the transparent interconnectedness even more clearly hallways become galleries for expressions of student/faculty research, places that communicate the learning stories, the dynamic history and the values of the community.

With the College of Education at Butler, our floor plan template was a classic 20th C. school design: a long, centered, double loaded hallway on each floor, with uniform classrooms along each side (with each grade or academic discipline siloed therein).

To change this floor plan we gutted the building back to its essential concrete post frame, and created a gradation of spaces, rooms of varying sizes (large studio-lab-project rooms, medium sized seminar rooms and conference rooms, and small, more private, meeting rooms) all with significant transparency (interior window walls and glass doors).  We then further integrated the rooms with hallway galleries, a meandering hallway of varying widths, designed for displays of student work.  The hallway also offers inviting nooks and crannies for small group gatherings.  As an added feature, we created a faculty collaborative studio, with clusters of work stations gathered around meeting areas.

Sustainability School buildings can be living laboratories for sustainable built environments (carbon neutral with visible and monitored mechanical and renewable energy systems).  School buildings can embrace the natural elements that enhance human productivity: natural light, clean air and even temperatures. The College of Education building will incorporate many of the most advanced systems available today as well as maximize the benefits of passive solar and active water cycling.  Furthermore, the ground level studio/lab will be equipped with a computer monitoring system that will allow students to engage in authentic research on building sustainability issues.

Community To make schools an integral part of their community, school buildings can be open to their immediate surroundings.  The building should signal WELCOME to the community from the entry courtyard and front steps and glass atrium entry.  The building can foster social interaction in comfortable hallways and interior piazzas, and outdoor rooms and gardens.  The details of the building can manifest excellence in their aesthetic beauty.

In the College of Education at Butler University we have included all of these elements. The three renderings included here are of the new atrium and entry tower on the south side of the renovated old school building.

The new College of Education at Butler University will be a beacon for 21st C. school design and 21st C. education pedagogy.  In addition to the exciting possibilities the building will fulfill for the college program, it will also add an eastern hub for campus life as well as an inviting intersection with the surrounding neighborhood and extended community.

For me, working with Ena Shelley and Gyo Obata on this project has been a dream come true.  My hope is that this success will lead to other exciting school design projects.  For one thing, old schools like Butler's are ubiquitous, and each one of them could be renovated in a similarly dynamic way.  For another, all new schools could incorporate the design patterns we have developed.

Furthermore, these same design patterns can be used in incremental renovations of areas of schools or even in one room at a time.  Here are three simple examples:

1. Insert interior windows or window walls between the classrooms and hallways.
2. Install a solar panel on site (on roof or on grounds) and link monitoring of electricity to the science classroom.
3. Transform the walls in the entry to galleries of the best student work.

To see some prime examples of these architectural remodeling patterns in place, come to St. Louis.  Consider attending our Site Seminar April 19th and 20th, 2012, Myth Busters: Challenge Assumptions and Learn for the Future.  To register contact Ashley.