After an early morning flight to Seattle we had two stops on the agenda: Tacoma Schools and Microsoft.
Tacoma Schools
At Tacoma Schools we visited Josh Garcia and Shaun Taylor. Tacoma made some ‘radical’ changes to the way they approach education and student enrolments and as a result are now recognized as an innovative school.
Tacoma have set a high bar for their students, all students are enrolled into high level (AP or IB) subjects. Most schools have an opt-in system, where parents and students need to opt into higher level subjects. By changing this to an opt-out system, you send the students the message to challenge themselves and the message that they are capable of achieving at that level. The result has been that students have stepped up and results have started to improve, with very few opting out of the challenge. The graduation rate in 2010 was 55% and has risen to 78% over a four-year period.
When selecting the subjects for the students, they had discussions with students and parents to discover each student’s interest and passion and enroll them in appropriate classes. I suspect this helps with the improved results, and it is a model I have always encouraged, particularly at the senior level where I teach.
To ensure all schools in the district are on par they created a very strict rubric, with 15 standards per subject. Each grade (such as A, B C etc) has learning targets and a student must achieve all targets in order to achieve that result.
Tacoma also negotiated with higher education to set an agreed benchmark for entry. So if students achieve a particular score or higher they have guaranteed acceptance if they choose to apply.
In terms of their student management and learning systems, they have developed frameworks that provide increased transparency for teachers, parents and students. This allows people to see exactly what is going on with the school as a whole as well as each individual student. This improved transparency provides a basis on which people can build trust in a system and a school. Nothing is hidden.
We asked Josh and Shaun, if you were to start a school from scratch using this new approach, what would be the three most important things to put in place:
- Agree on what success is and be able to measure it (eg. The entry result for acceptance to higher education)
- Have a clearly articulated accordion engagement/decision making process
- Report results in a continuous (and I think it was also implied, frequent) manner
Microsoft
Our tour of Microsoft was guided by an Australian gentleman by the name of Mark. Microsoft has approximately 140,000 staff, of which 5000 are based at the Redmond Campus. The Redmond Campus is absolutely enormous, so much so that it is basically it’s own town, with a postal service and shuttles to move people from building to building. The people on campus consume 2 million gallons of coffee annually!
At Microsoft we were given a tour of the Microsoft Envisioning Centre, while we weren’t allowed to take any photos, we found that if you went to their website you can see basically our exact tour online.
We got to see demonstrated a vision for future technology as it may apply to the workplace and home.
The major themes that influence their designs are:
- Connecting people
- Enhancing our intuition
- Natural flow
The demonstration had a big focus on collaboration and increased communication. Their ideas are much more centered on being always on, always connected and I guess that would imply always available. It was also leaning more towards voice and video remote collaboration and communication, rather than text or email. I also loved the idea of a ’shared whiteboard’ where both parties can contribute notes, pictures, links and so on, with it syncing in real time. No need to a disruption of workflow to send information backwards and forwards.
I felt that the ideas were fantastic but over the last 13 years I have essentially seen the exact same ideas communicated in the same way, but with slightly more modern videos. The demonstration provided to us showed amazing possibilities, but it felt much too pre-recorded. I would have more faith in the products if I was able to interact with it and determine that it was a genuine functional product and not simply a pre-recorded showcase of ideas.
At a more practical level, in the current technological and educational climate, I felt this linked back to some of what the AltSchool were doing. Partnering technologists with teachers to design software and hardware to allow the educator access to the appropriate information at the appropriate time, in a time efficient and user intuitive way that integrates seamlessly with a natural workflow.
Observations of the day
Transparency of process, procedures and results is very important for student and school success. This is something I have always believed strongly, so I felt it was nice to hear it echoed by others.
Setting students a high bar and having the belief that they can achieve that level has an impact on student self-belief and success. By going into a model where they have the chance of taking an easy path, they will take it and avoid difficult tasks. So by making the easy road the harder option to pick, you force them to have a go. In this US system of celebrating failure as well as success, it really encourages students to try their best. You will never achieve a high result if you never attempt something challenging.
There is a need for greater, more seamless, integration of technology into a natural workflow.
CatComputerTeacher 