The role of a caring adult

Another coherent collection of related thoughts from the Education Writers Association seminar I attended last week in San Diego. At the first opportunity when we did our first high school visit, I was paired with Cindy Flores, a Grade 9 student at the School of International Business at the Kearney High Educational Complex.
Flores attended a larger middle school before applying for and choosing to attend the SIB at Kearney. The program interested her, and an older sibling attends one of the other schools at the Kearney campus. A reminder Kearney was a 2,000+ student composite high school now broken into four small schools. Each school has its own principal and its own dedicated staff who teach only within their school.
An important question for me to ask was how Flores was finding the social environment at SIB. In covering small-school reviews in Ontario, the importance of the peer group and the intimacy of knowing every peer in your grade cohort was frequently mentioned as a benefit of these 'small by nature' schools. I was curious as to how SIB students might see this given the vast array of middle schools these students are sourced from. The school isn't a 'zone' or neighbourhood school, meaning little to no opportunity to attend with the larger age-group cohort you may have started elementary school with.
Two months into her school year, Flores confirmed she didn't really know that many other people in her grade level. This despite there only being approximately 100 students in Grade 9 and the fact in her four courses this semester she would have an opportunity to be in at least one course with most of the students in her cohort (although I will note she was taking a Grade 10 French course).
The connection she had made, however, was with her advisory. At one point in the SIB tour we were ushered into a room full of students and the principal left so we could speak freely. Each of the four (including Flores) spoke very highly of the advisory and how this adult was the person keeping in touch, encouraging them to apply to bursaries and scholarships and doing the requisite followup if grades or attendance started to slip. The advisory was backed up by the principal, who demonstrated a knowledge of knowing every student's name.
Moving to Linlcoln High School later that day we were able to witness some of that same interaction. Lincoln's setup was more of a hybrid, where 'small learning communities' are the basis of each of the school's four campuses within a campus, led by two principals, two vice-principals and an executive principal. Joe Wiseman, vice-principal of the Science and Engineering Center, led the tour with two students, Xavier McGregor and Enrique Garcia. Again, we heard about this caring adult(s) making connections with students. Wiseman certainly knew and was keeping tabs on where everyone was going and supposed to be.

From EWA San Diego 2009

I specifically asked Wiseman whether he saw himself as an instructional leader, role-modeling and guiding teachers, or as that person connecting with students. He answered he saw his role as both and intertwined, that in providing instructional leadership to his teachers, he was connecting with students and vice-versa.
These visits allowed some important connections to concepts discussed in panels-- including one not so explicitly stated but that I've pulled out of the larger narrative: the importance of a caring adult to a student's success.
"How do we ensure every student is known and cared about?" Education Trust's Karin Chenoweth said in a Sunday panel titled, 'What big districts can learn from small schools.' "Who is hired to teach and assigned to which classes? How are teachers supervised?"
This is a concept I believe -- although the only person who disagreed during the entire seminar was Michael Klonsky -- can be picked up and implemented in any high school regardless of size with the right leadership in place and the right staff working in that team.
Further, though they're not directly comparable, an advisory isn't really that different from a student success teacher, mandated in 2005 and in place as part of Ontario's student success strategy since then. They're caring adults specifically tasked to connect with high school students who are at-risk of not successfully completing the first years of high school. In many schools, they're supplemented by guidance and vice-principals who take on many of the roles we saw on display at the schools we visited in the seminar.
Most importantly for my point in this post, they're in place at every high school in Ontario, regardless of size.

Inspiring reporter quote

I was reviewing my notes from the Education Writers Association seminar last week as I frame some additional posts and tripped across this quote from Michael Klonsky of the Small Schools Workshop and Center for Innovative Schools.

"If you become a connoisseur of schools and education, you'll know a good teacher and a good school when you see one."

OK, I may have massaged the quote a little bit from the mess that is my notes from that day, but you get the general idea.

Small high schools -- Lincoln and High Tech High

Here's a slideshow of some of the photos I nabbed at the last two schools we visited in San Diego. I kept the camera in the bag at Kearney for some reason.

Small by design v. small by nature

One of my first awakenings at the Education Writers' Association small-high schools seminar earlier this week was a key difference for us to remember in Ontario. You can be a small school by design, or you can be a small school by nature.
All of the high schools -- a mix of public and public-charter -- we visited during the seminar were small by design. Meaning the district or the charter board purposely planned out the administrative, instructional and in two cases, physical design of the school to be small.
Look at Kearney High Educational Complex-- formerly a composite high school with approximately 2,000 students. It was closed and reorganized into four 'small' schools of 400 or so students. It includes the Construction Tech Academy (this site was loading very slowly...), the School of Digital Media and Design, the School of International Business and the School of Science, Connections and Technology. All schools have project-based (or, "experiential" as we might call it in Ontario) learning, advisories for students and other small-school concepts.
Similarly, at High Tech High, the first school and campus were purposely designed to have no more than 400-500 students, including the project-based learning and administrative and teacher organization to bring small-school concepts into play. These were replicated on the same campus as the first school with the High Tech High International and High Tech High Media Arts schools.
All of these schools are different from many of our small schools in Ontario, which are 'small by nature.' Our schools are small by nature mainly due to two factors:

1. These are schools that, by geographic, financial or other circumstance, were built small. These are the campuses that physically were never meant to accommodate more than 400-600 students from the moment the foundation was poured and the walls started to rise. Other than this physical characteristic, there's nothing else that inherently exists in these schools from the small-school model.
   
2. The other 'small by nature' school is the one that regardless of what physical size it was built to accommodate, has a small population due to the demographic changes of the past decade or so. Population shifts (from established to newer neighbourhoods, or through urban renewal) and our declining birth and fertility rates have created these 'small' schools.

So when, in accommodation reviews I've covered, or ones I've posted about here, advocates trot out the 'small schools' card and throw the small-school movement out as a reason why their 'small by nature' school should continue without changes, we need to be aware they're throwing dust into our eyes. For the most part, the small-school benefits have happened in these schools by circumstance, not through planned implementation. Some of the small-school concepts -- those not in place across district boards or the province (more on this in a subsequent post) -- used in the schools we visited in San Diego don't exist in 'small by nature' schools. Why? They're composite public high schools with small populations, not really 'small schools.'
We need to remain cognizant of that difference -- small by design v. small by nature. Each produces different schools and very different environments.

Small-high school seminar

So the small-high school seminar I attended this week ended Tuesday afternoon and my brain is swimming in the things I've witnessed and discussed since Sunday. I will be going through my copious notes and drafting some posts to put up here as a result of attending this conference, as I doubt I would be given the space to write about the past three days in print.
As a sneak peek, I'd like to give you an idea of what we did and where we went here in sunny San Diego, thanks to the Education Writers Association and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-- one of the main movers and shakers in the small-school movement in the U.S.

• Sunday was all about panels-- we heard perspectives from New York, Chicago and San Diego / L.A. from experts and researchers on how small high schools have been setup and what it is about them that works. We had some divergent opinions amongst our various panelists that I'll get into in subsequent posts.
• Monday we travelled to Kearney High School campus, a public school in the San Diego Unified School District. The high school is one of three formerly "large" schools whose campuses were modified and now contains four "small schools" within the same physical space, a campus that houses approximately 2,000 students. We spent time in the School of International Business and the Construction Tech Academy.
• Monday afternoon, we travelled to Lincoln High School, a large urban high school which closed for five years and then was re-opened four school years ago. It remains one large 2,400-student school administratively, but contains for small "learning community" campuses. All Grade 9s enter a social justice program, and then in Grade 10 attend one of three other campuses-- science and technology, arts or public safety.
• Tuesday, we spent the morning and early afternoon at High Tech High, a publicly funded charter school located on former naval lands. The school has a mix of public and private-foundation funding, and contains three "small" high schools-- the original High Tech High, High Tech High International and High Tech High Media Arts. The campus we visited also contains a middle and elementary school campus.

For future purposes, the terminology here of "small" refers to schools of between 400-600 students per campus / administrative school division. We didn't actually visit a school campus where there was one standalone facility with 400-600 students, or, even, fewer than 400 students.
More on these schools and the sessions in the coming days as I review my notes and think of how to frame some posts. I did take some photos and even one video, which I'll embed as appropriate.