From yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer:
High school feels different in the big white mansion at the edge of the Navy Yard - no desks in rows. No 47-minute class periods. No warnings to remove the hat, put the cellphone away, take the exam seriously.The curriculum?
Instead, small groups of students are designing their own workshop space. They're drawing up more efficient bus routes for the Philadelphia School District. Their teachers act as mentors, sounding boards, not lecturers.
The premise? American high schools are broken.
...a challenging curriculum built on student interests through hands-on projects. It means fostering strong relationships that form the underpinnings of everything."No desks in rows"; teachers who are "mentors, not lecturers"; "hands-on projects"--why does "innovative" classroom boilerplate, ubiquitous in our "model" schools, continue to be front page news?
There may be no Algebra 2 or English 4 at the workshop, but students learn the essential skills they need from those courses - solving simultaneous equations, interpreting complicated texts.
The current school of the week is the Sustainability Workshop, an alternative senior-year program inspired by a West Philadelphia after-school program whose students "have been building hybrid cars and winning important competitions for more than a decade" and whose members "want to turn the workshop into a full-fledged school... by 2013." Currently, 28 students attend, selected based on their attendance and behavior records. Their academic skills, one teacher says, "are all over the map."
Naturally, the school has attracted all sorts of premature attention--well before any efficacy results could possibly surface:
Three months in, the school has garnered national buzz and attracted more than $500,000 in private funding from the Barra Foundation, the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster, and others.Says Andrew Zwicker of the Princeton Physics Plasma Laboratory and "associate director of education and workforce development for the innovation cluster": "It is so clearly the future of education. Or at least it should be."
Deep thinkers are already gushing over the workshop.
Before jumping to these apparently foregone conclusions, the founders and the funders should first seek out reliable data on whether it's more effective to replace the seqential math pedagogy that is still in use by the many countries whose high schoolers outperform ours with an ad hoc "just in time" approach to advanced topics like simultaneous equations. And by reliable, I mean data that takes into account selection biases--of the sort you might find when 28 self-selected and behaviorally screened applicants opt against their typically terrible local high schools in favor of a brand new, well-funded program with a much higher (and more highly qualified) teacher to student ratio. The persistence of traditional math taught badly, as Barry Garelick has pointed out, doesn't mean we should give up on trying to teach it properly.