Rethinking the High School Experience

Conference Summary

2005-12-01T16:12:00.000-06:00

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Conference Overview

2005-10-13T23:41:00.000-05:00

NOTE: This site is a time-based chronicle of the event. It captures the ideas and activities in notation form. All text is to be read as such, not as a word-for-word dictation.

NORFOLK, NE | October 12-13, 2005. Several of the ESU's in Northern Nebraska (ESU#1, #2, #7, #8 and #17) along with the Nebraska Department of Education kicked off an initiative to engage educators in a process to re-think the high school experience.

Just shy of 100 people representing 19 school districts convened the first conference of a two to three year process. The participants in this workshop represented teachers, administrators, counselors, several colleges, the ESU's and the state department of education.

ABOVE: Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman addresses educators.

During the first day of the conference participants explored many aspects of the high school experience - both the current experience and some possible options for what the high school experience might be in the future. In that exploration participants explored elements of a vision and manifesto for change, different models for what the experience could be, and a process for engaging other people in the dialog as well as managing change over time.

During the second day participants identified nine components for a vision for the high school experience of the future. Each school district then identified what they were already doing in these nine key areas - and developed plans for specific areas they wanted to focus on.

The nine components of the vision are:

A sense of purpose
Personalized learning
A vision for what 'it' looks like when it's done
Innovative assessment
Relationships with students
Broader responsibility
Connected learning (integrated, interdisciplinary, relevant learning)
Teacher as facilitator
Learning Communities

We used Blogger for web-publishing and Flickr for photo uploading to the web; both are free services. Facilitation and documentation by Innovation Labs LLC.

NEXT: Introduction to Setting Some Context >>

Round 12: Final Comments

2005-10-13T16:23:00.000-05:00

We know what we want to do, but we don’t know if we’re going to get in trouble for these ideas. We’ve given up some learning in order to do some teaching.

I wonder if we’ve developed enough sense of urgency. We’re fortunate to have a governor who has a wife that helps. We can’t compare ourselves to Iowa. There’s our sense of urgency. We have to reeducate him and people who think that way.

It’s people who are trying to relocate to here for business opportunities.

They’re the ones who will have the hiring processes.

A conference such as this confirms for me that what I’m doing is great. When I’m sitting by colleagues who have a grade by each student for every day, I feel a little guilty and that I have to explain myself. So it’s nice to be here.

The networking opportunity here is wonderful. I don’t know if this has been done before and it’s very valuable.

Since we lost the teachers’ convention we lost the ability to do this. It used to be too big.

We thought about having a statewide conference like this once a year. We haven’t emphasized it a lot but you’re making a 2 to 3 year commitment. It will take some time to sprout and it will need to be nurtured. It might also be helpful for the ESUs to have their own meetings like this.

We will be different tomorrow morning.

When I saw the 19 presentations, I saw nothing that would negatively effect our assessments. Nothing here will lower our test scores. If we do all of these things, there is nothing that will affect their ability to find a verb in a sentence.

In most of our conferences, we usually hear what other people think we should do. We’re not very reflective as a community. We’ve done a lot of thinking here.

If the students see the teachers and be in classrooms that are innovative, the students will be more innovative too.

If you get a staff member who is innovative and give them a pat on the back, that ripples out. Put it out in the paper and get recognition for this. It’s an important part of keeping it going. In terms of the conferences, people don’t come just for dialogue. How do you get people to show up without a well-known speaker?

We had 100 people show up here just with an invitation. We had 3 people from as many districts as we could with as many kinds that touch different parts of the system.

The invitation came from people who were a part of the conversation. This applied to me personally and that is what brought me to this. It doesn’t matter what the leadership is at the principal level. If we make changes that are good they are sustainable even without us.

What is your take on the direction of what we can do?

I have thought about this systemic change in education for many years. The way we do our work, we don’t tell people what to do. Our job is to figure out how to ask you the right questions so you come up with the answers you need. The 9 areas you came up with are all leveragable to make a difference. You’ve started the ball rolling and that’s the most important thing. If you can continue the conversation with your students and your staff, that will be the most valuable thing you can do. You need to make it okay to have those conversations.

Do not spend an inordinate amount of time to get everybody on board. If some people see that if they resist and nothing changes, some people will resist just for that. You want to do some level of this wherever you have influence. You want to do this as an experiment wherever you can and see how it goes. Growing up sucks. Take charge of the time you have. Pay attention to what you want to learn. Don’t be too timid.

If someone wants to work on purpose I have something that might helpful.

Learning is more important than anything. We have the opportunity to model what learning means. We can have curiosity, enthusiasm and really going for being a person who inspires others to learn. It’s a personal thing. We need to ask ourselves if we’re okay with not knowing, with trying things without knowing whether they’ll work or not.

No one had any doubt that we could get our staff to buy into the ideas we had. Trusting our kids to do what they can is something that seems to be in us.

As an assignment if you would go back to the students you interviewed and share your experience here and see where that conversation goes.

I would like to say that I’m very grateful to Rhonda for making this happen.

Round 11: ESU Plans

2005-10-13T16:20:00.000-05:00

Context: The ESU groups met and discussed what kind of support the districts wanted as they moved forward. There was no report out of their work but their walls are shown below.

Round 10: District Plans

2005-10-13T15:57:00.000-05:00

This is about you now moving into your district areas and take what you’ve just come up with in the areas of passion.

There are 19 different districts here. Each of you have a place to work here. This is where trust comes into play. You want to work in parallel so that you can get a lot more done.

See district plans (in order of report out):

Next: ESU Clusters>>

ESUs, Higher Learning, and State

2005-10-13T15:44:00.000-05:00

ESUs, Higher Learning, and State. We've heard that you're going to plan what to do next. When you figure out what you need from us, we'd like to hear from the districts.
We need to start planning as a group. We need to figure out what we’re going to do for the people who are here. We’re going to meet as a team and divide and conquer. I heard personal learning plans and need for help. We want a blog for ourselves and take advantage of what InnovationLabs has started for us. We want to thank InnovationLabs for helping us with this in getting started.

We want to add to that and thank all of you for coming. Don’t be afraid to ask. If you need a waiver for something, just ask. You are way ahead of the rest of the state. The commissioner loves to come to this part of the state. He’d love to work with you. We’ll look for money and trying to help with some funding opportunities if we can.

Round 10: District Plan: Wahoo

2005-10-13T15:42:00.000-05:00

Round 10: District Plan: Columbus

2005-10-13T15:41:00.000-05:00

Columbus. We want to implement a block schedule and tried to align the nine points with this. We felt we were hitting on most of the points. With the change if it’s done correctly, you’re able to train your teachers and have more flexibility with their schedules. We put together a timeline. We don’t have enough time to communicate with our kids. We’re going to change that by having longer times with the kids. We found that SSR was a very good aspect of our day. We’re going to use it next year so that we can all transition into personal learning plans. We hope to move from the block scheduling into the personal learning plans.

Round 10: District Plan: Wakefield

2005-10-13T15:39:00.000-05:00

Wakefield. We chose to focus on developing personalization not only among the students but also among the staff and faculty. With the new information we will look at our new demographics and the needs of our students.

We thought we could open up a whole new area of staff development. We will be having a lot more conversations.

Round 10: District Plan: Emerson Hubbard

2005-10-13T15:37:00.000-05:00

Emerson Hubbard. We want to develop more relationships and want to beef up our advisory groups.

We’d like to turn it into our personal educational plan. We’d like to meet more and have more student reflection.

We’ve been delegating and telling them what to do but we’d like to have more input from them.

Round 10: District Plan: Wayne

2005-10-13T15:37:00.000-05:00

Wayne. We decided to go with small steps at first. We already have advisory groups that only meet once or twice a year. We’d like to get reconnected with those kids. We’d like to start meeting monthly. We need a committee to get together to come up with topics. We’d like to bring people in from the community.

We also chose innovative assessment. We want to get the staff resources so they could do this. We want to target getting it to them by November and then in the next semester try something new. We’ll have the results given to our principal and see where to go next.

Round 10: District Plan: South Sioux City

2005-10-13T15:37:00.000-05:00

South Sioux City. We had a lot of things that other people have said. We will have Student Teacher Academic Research Time (START). We will help them for both academic as well as other practical things. We have 40 minutes built into this and we might as well take advantage of the existing schedule.

Round 10: District Plan: Pender

2005-10-13T15:36:00.000-05:00

Pender. We decided on the PEP also. This affects so many other areas. We’re counting on our ESU to help us.

We would like to have help in communicating with our staff.

We’d like to have the staff set priorities. We could set up our mentor program in January. We’d like to have parent teacher conference and have something in place then the staff can meet with those parents. In April or May, we want to see what it could like in the coming year.

Round 10: District Plan: Fremont

2005-10-13T15:36:00.000-05:00

Fremont. We’ve already done some things with our conferences. We’ve had an advisor-advisee situation in place but it’s not quite where we want it to be. We’ll need some staff development to understand the process. We want to focus on students and think we can hit all three parts of that student gradient.
The tools we will use is the connection with the adults and upgrading our technology program as well as concept based thematic learning. We need to include revisiting our schedule. We want to get counselors involved.

Round 10: District Plan: Logan View

2005-10-13T15:35:00.000-05:00

Logan View. We want to implement an advisory period with our learning communities. We listed our brainstorming for these topics, such as teambuilding, social issues and current events. We’d like to present this to the staff and get their input. We want to find out what other schools are doing.

Next spring we’d work on the staff development. We’d like to implement this by next year and evaluate on a quarterly basis to make sure we’re on the right track. We want to involve the students, parents and the community.

Round 10: District Plan: Lakeview

2005-10-13T15:34:00.000-05:00

Lakeview. We’re going to take something back to talk to our staff. We have a home room right now which is not structured. We’d like to take advantage of some of that time and take advantage of the student-advisor relationship.

We’d like to set up coffees for the parents. We also want to have all of our teachers do some classroom innovations, such as having them be facilitators instead of lecturers. I’ve already gotten good support from our administrator. We will also celebrate our teachers for just trying, regardless of whether the experiment is successful or not.

Round 10: District Plan: Boone Central

2005-10-13T15:33:00.000-05:00

Boone Central. We want to start researching and get the ideas of the staff and the students. We’ve already started on building relationships. We already have some positive contact between teachers and relationships. We’ll ask the teachers for their ideas of building better relationships and we can improve the parent involvement.

Facilitated learning was another hot topic. We want to determine the best practices and try pilot programs so that other teachers can see what works.

Round 10: District Plan: Howells

2005-10-13T15:32:00.000-05:00

Howells. We want to target our areas of action. We want to be interdisciplinary and relevant. We want to do innovative assessment. We’re hoping our staff is willing to be collaborative. We look to performance-based and portfolio-based assessments. Some scholarships are based on class rank and we want to be able to answer this.

This is a work in progress and we hope to meet our timelines.

Round 10: District Plan: Leigh

2005-10-13T15:31:00.000-05:00

Leigh. We talked about some of the things we were doing which are pretty good but we didn’t feel comfortable coming up with plans without the staff.

We’re going to get the input from them and mark it on our sheet here.

From there we will begin our process and look at data. It’s a work in progress for us and see what our staff does with it.

Round 10: District Plan: West Boyd

2005-10-13T15:30:00.000-05:00

West Boyd. We want to have a personal learning plan. In a small school we have the luxury of every teacher knowing every student in the school. We want to make sure the members of the community are involved and the relationships with that are improved.

With the facilitated learning we have an exciting opportunity for teaching of being not just lecturers but facilitators. With staff development we hope to get everyone to buy in to the idea.

We want to focus on the PEPs and we need to integrate it with our entire staff. We want to get the staff comfortable with the programs.

Round 10: District Plan: Elkhorn Valley

2005-10-13T15:29:00.000-05:00

Elkhorn Valley. We’re focused on learning communities. On Fridays we have an early dismissal to work on things and usually we don’t have that much to work on. Now we do. We’ll have staff communication about best practices. This way we can talk to our staff about how to handle various things. We’ll have an advisory team.

We’ll develop peer-mentor relationships. We want to build relationships and develop a committee to look at our school setting. We want to include a meeting with our kids.

Round 10: District Plan: Madison

2005-10-13T15:28:00.000-05:00

Madison. We were generic and didn’t pick the top 3.

We’re going to talk to our staff and take them through a mini-version of this whole process. We want to take them through learning groups and communities.

We’ll try to get this done in the next couple months. We’ll schedule a day in November. We’ll develop 5 or 6 learning teams and have them do some research projects.

Round 10: District Plan: Norfolk

2005-10-13T15:27:00.000-05:00

Norfolk. We picked 3 of the 9. We want all our teachers to interview the students.

We can do some of the kinds of process we did here and we want to talk about all kids.

We have an advisor program that we have once a week. We used to have the every day home room so we will consider that but also we want to have mentors and consider having the students choose them.

Round 10: District Plan: Valentine

2005-10-13T15:26:00.000-05:00

Valentine. We looked at all nine areas and highlighted a couple we thought we could put into effect right away. The bottom third can definitely use some help but maybe the top third kids are not being challenged enough. I have a couple of daughters who wish they would have gotten more out of high school to be better prepared for college.

We have home room in our schools and we find it helps with the teacher-student relationship. It’s a great place to do some housekeeping. If a kid has a concern they get to air it there.

In the individual personal learning, we look at the needs of our students. I’m going to go home and interview a lot of my students. I’ll ask them what would make them more excited about school. We need more communication. Sometimes we get so busy with going from chapter to chapter that we don’t take enough time to see what’s working. We have school improvement programs and maybe we could have a survey to find out from everyone what would make it more exciting.

We tried to come up with our mission statement Literacy is important. Our kids need to be able to function in society. They’ll end up as criminals or on welfare. We need to prepare this bottom third to be good citizens.

Our assessment innovation still needs focus. I don’t like grades so I hope we can get away from that.

Round 10: District Plan: Seward

2005-10-13T15:25:00.000-05:00

Seward. We’re going to have a discussion with staff about this meeting within our learning team groups. We want to define what a student should know when they graduate. We want to have all the constituents involved. We will have learning teams as an ongoing effort.

In the future we’re going to look at personal learning plans within the next 18 months. We’re in a block schedule period right now. We have a debate about using the time within that.

We talked about how to use time differently in the classrooms. If you can get kids to learn on their own, that creates more time.