ISA’s annual Summer Institute continues to be a tremendous success. ISA convenes its partner schools each year to support the development of new and existing college preparatory programs; strengthen classroom instruction, guidance, and leadership through stimulating professional development opportunities; and nurture the growing collegial network of ISA educators and programs in accordance with ISA’s principles. This summer, now in its fifth year, over 600 teachers, coaches, counselors, principals, and assistant principals from 43 small schools and small learning communities gathered at Summer Institute to focus on how to best serve its 10,000 students in New York State, New Jersey and Georgia.
The ISA Summer Institute offers three distinct strands: a curriculum development strand where teachers, counselors and administrators meet separately to address unique needs; a team development time allocated to school/SLC development; and a thematic workshop strand. During curriculum development sessions, teachers create inquiry-based curriculum and strengthened their pedagogical content knowledge. Session offerings included “Engaging Students in Inquiry Science,” “What is Inquiry in Mathematics?” “Poetry as Inquiry,” and “Designing Inquiry Curriculum for World History.” Administrators met as a network to examine school leadership issues and worked with nationally renowned educator Richard Elmore on developing an instructional framework. Counselors developed their distributed counseling programs to assure all students are supported to succeed in school and are on a path to college. Meeting in role-alike sessions, teachers, school leaders and counselors shared knowledge about key practices and effective strategies to create schools that address students’ socio-emotional and learning needs so that all students achieve success.
School teams met individually to develop their school program. During this time, faculties got to know each other and created organizational policies and structures in preparation for the coming year.
Finally, ISA offered over 30 stand-alone workshops to choose from on exemplary instructional, organizational and guidance practices, such as Socratic Seminar: Students as Critical Speakers, Listeners, and Writers; Building a Master Schedule, Peer Mediation, Improving and Sustaining an Effective Advisory Program; Art and Architecture in Math and Science; Case Conferencing: A Systematic Approach to Understanding Individual Students, and Creating a Schoolwide Vision, Vocabulary and Practice of Instruction—ISA Rubrics, and Research and Data: Analyzing Student Data to Drive Instruction. Schools and small learning communities can follow up on these topics during the year.
This year featured speakers were renowned educators Michelle Fine and Richard Elmore.
We celebrated our school partners’ efforts to strengthen their practice so that all students have an opportunity to engage in challenging, college preparatory content and think about meaningful, real-world problems that are relevant to their lives. We are inspired by the dedication of our school partners to create small, high-performing learning communities devoted to preparing underserved youth for college and a future of opportunity and choice, and look forward with great enthusiasm to continuing to work with our growing network of small high schools and small learning communities to better educate our underserved youngsters. Together, we will make a difference.
Richard Elmore is a Professor of Education at Harvard University and a Senior Research Fellow with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement. He is co-director of a CPRE research project on school accountability; a member of the faculty of the Public Education Leadership Project, an executive education program for leaders in large school districts, jointly run by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration; and co-director of the Connecticut Superintendents' Network, a community of practice for superintendents engaged in the improvement of instruction, sponsored by the Connecticut Center for School Change.
This year, he is launching the Cambridge Leadership Network, a community of practice for principals and district administrators engaged in instructional improvement in the public schools of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He holds a bachelors degree in political science from Whitman College, a masters degree in political science from the Claremont Graduate School, and a doctorate in educational policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is co-editor of Who Chooses, Who Loses? Culture, Institutions, and the Unequal Effects of School Choice (1996) and The Governance of Curriculum. Other publications include, Restructuring in the Classroom (1996), “Getting to Scale with Good Educational Practice” (Harvard Educational Review, 1996), “Improvement in Community School District #2, New York City" (National Commission on Teaching & America's Future and CPRE, 1997). His most recent publications are “When Accountability Knocks, Will Anyone Answer?” (CPRE, 1999), Building a New Structure for School Leadership (Shanker Institute, 2000), Bridging the Gap Between Standards and Achievement (Shanker Institute, 2002) and School Reform from the Inside Out: Policy, Practice, and Performance. (Harvard Education Press, 2004).
Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY, led the keynote address at this year’s ISA Summer Institute. She urged ISA educators to continue the tradition of student success in small schools that provide all students with a rigorous, college-preparatory education. Dr. Fine places ISA educators’ work within an historical context of the small school movement.
“You are the people who give young people an ethical, political chance for the future, but you are not the first to do so,” said Fine. “For children from elite families, there have always been small schools. It’s how they stay elite. And so, about 25 years ago, Debbie Meier, Jackie Ancess and many others imagined that for all kids. In the beginning, groups of educators created small schools within big schools, and teachers in the forefront created inquiry learning.
Most importantly, Dr. Fine compelled ISA educators to challenge their students. She asked us to share a vision of high expectations for students and provide students with challenging, high quality and in-depth learning opportunities—
“Kids don’t appreciate ‘friendly’ or easy curriculum. They need to be challenged—not by amount, but by quality and depth. Don’t rob your students of the joy of discovery of learning. You’ll bore them to death. Teachers are bored to death, too. So instead of choosing American History from the Pilgrims to the Civil War, give them a book with depth to read. Focus on The Founding Fathers. There’s depth in biography, discovering who they were through their thoughts and philosophy.”
By working together as a community of professionals with high expectations for students and rigorous learning opportunities, Fine said, we can achieve successful student outcomes including higher attendance, graduation, and college persistence rates.
“Across New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, and LA, we were seeing good indicators—higher attendance, students more likely to come back after failing the 9 grade. But why do they come back? Because inside SMALL is the capacity to revise—classes and biographies. Engagement is higher in small schools. There are fewer discipline problems, fewer drop outs. You create context from crisis. The pregnancy rate is lower, graduation rates are higher. Arrest rates are lower, and college persistence rates are higher… much higher.
And Dr. Fine cautioned us. The work is hard; societal problems confronting us are larger still . How do we provide challenging curriculum within the context of daunting societal issues? …Personalization is paramount, so that failure is not an option. Dr. Fine describes the importance of crearing caring environments so no child falls through the cracks while maintaining a rigorous college preparatory curriculum:
“I love small schools, the successes are so wonderful, but the disappointments are so profound. What do you do with young males who aren’t quite ready to be students? We all know what not to do but we weren’t sure what TO do – about violence, about academic issues….
“Small-school kids know how to trust adults for help…Ask students in small schools who they can turn to, they’ll say they trust cops, social workers, and teachers. It’s a gift to help them grow back that ability to trust. However, hugs is not the same as “calculus [rigor].”
In closing, Dr. Fine describes small schools/SCLs’ focus on academic achievement that prepares students for productive futures. “Small schools provide the space for delicious conversations, serious conversations about teaching and learning. Remember,” she said, “Small Schools are Weapons of Mass Instruction.”
Dr. Fine is author of “Beyond Silenced Voices,” “Off White: Essays on Race, Power and Resistance,” and co-author of the soon-to-be-released “Hyphenated Selves: Muslim American Youth Negotiating Their Identities” among other works, Dr. Fine has an impressive and diversified background in education. She has been awarded the First Annual Morton Deutch Award, Teachers College, Columbia University, 2005, and Honorary Doctoral Degree in Education and Social Justice from Bank Street College, May 2002.
Leadership Network with GH and David Allen on Development of ISA Rubrics
David Allen, Senior Research Associate at NCREST, explained how the newly developed rubrics responded to ISA coaches’ expressed need for a clearer articulation of ISA’s Seven Principles and tools to put them into practice in the schools and small learning communities with which they work. Allen described the three purposes for the rubrics: to give everyone involved a clear sense how the principles look in practice; to give practitioners a self-assessment tool—not for teacher evaluation, but to give schools a better idea of where they are in implementing the principles; and, finally, as a planning tool, to help coaches and practitioners identify steps they can take to achieve a deeper implementation of the principles.
Gerry House said that the goal for leaders in ISA schools and SLCs is to create a culture in which teachers flourish so that their students can flourish. “If we don’t model our expectations for students, how can we expect teachers to carry through? We are challenged to do something never done before. If we can change the life opportunities for students, then let’s do it.” According to Dr. House, it will required clearly formulated actions to achieve those expectations for students, and that is where the rubrics can play a major role. Foundations and donors are concerned with results Her concern is to give ISA schools and teachers the opportunity to demonstrate outcomes that reflect our belief in the ISA principles and their power to support student success. “We will have successful outcomes when we improve the intellectual quality of teachers’ and students’ work in every school, in every classroom, every day.” |
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