Summary of my visit to the MET school in Providence Rhode Island
April 6, 2009

http://www.themetschool.org/

I started my day meeting with Dennis Littky. You can find lots of good information about him here: http://www.bigpicture.org/dennis/

For professional development, they do a variety of activities. They have an April conference which lasts three days and has educators from around the United States. They are willing to send people to us to share their knowledge – and Dennis requires that students travel as well, as they have important information that must be art of the sharing
They will also set up special experiences on site: for example they have special program they have set up for Dutch principals — they send 50 for a week to try and implement new changes their country
he also has a whole new plan with his “big picture company” too not just deploy out their expertise to K-12 schools across the country, but he believes he needs to also change colleges and therefore it is planning on opening a new college based on this model called Outward Bound.
He made a point of saying that although high Tech high does wonderful things, their audience is very different. He is proud that 70% of his population are free school lunch, normally 88% of the students drop out in traditional schools, but he has almost 100% graduation rate as well is than 86% college graduation rate. By contrast, he explained that at Rhode Island College (RIC), only 8% of African-American students that enter as freshmen graduate — and this is the students they selected! Another example: only 9% of all community college students in Rhode Island graduate.
He was curious about my area of interest with educational technology and we talked a bit about the role of using technology including things like social tools to support learning. He commented that one of his goals is to hire a person, perhaps out of MIT, who would help teachers and students look at technology as emergent tools.

He also talked a bit about conversations with clay Christensen, in particular his disagreement with him about “disrupting class”. Dennis does not believe that online learning will be as disruptive force in education as clay does.

one of the people I need to get in touch with his Jill Olson — both Dennis and Nancy mentioned her as a point of contact for their big picture schools Project.

So what is the model that Dennis has implemented here at the MET?
Essentially, students spend two days a week in the community working with a mentor doing real work that they have chosen. The school has hundreds of mentor programs that students can choose from, so whether they’re interested in education, law, engineering, science, whatever they can find a project to work within.
(of course, it’s interesting that this comes up in time for me when I’m very interested in apprenticeship learning as a powerful vehicle — for both students and teachers. The notion that Dennis has that we first started with students interest get them working and excited about something that may choose — ownership! — then when they are working with a their advisors, they are much more open and motivated to succeed)
the other three days, they spend on campus in groups of 15 called advisories. One adult advisor starts with the students at ninth-grade meets with them over the course of their four years at the school. The adviser with the support of other specials and volunteers helps develop and shape the learning experience for students so that they work on the five core learning objectives and are part of the math student experience:
— empirical reasoning ( thinking like a scientist)
— analytical reasoning (thinking like a mathematician)
— oral communication (effective writing and oral communication)
–social reasoning? (Thinking like a historian/anthropologist/sociologist)
— personal qualities (habits of mind and personal character)
Dennis was frank, funny, quick minded, confident and most importantly dead on about both the problems in education and his approach to redesigning schools.

After leaving, I met with Nancy his co-director of the school and we spoke for an hour about my questions.
she explained that new teachers and new students have a two-week summer orientation schedule when they go over from the ground up for philosophy and structure of an education at the school. I was very interested in how they do professional development and she explains that there are variety of meetings that happen weekly and monthly for the different parts of the school — advisers, specials, support staff, etc. Advisers meet weekly to go over best practice they also have weekly staff meetings to business of the school. They have regular grade level meetings monthly. They also have monthly staff development where they look at the schools learning plan and continue to work with it. They also have a topic of professional interest — for instance this month was intervention — and meets on this topic as well. For instance they would look at student data and look through different lenses and it to see how to improve their understanding of what students are producing and how best to judge it.

Two weeks before school starts all staff meet for professional development to reconnect, and get ready for the new school year.
The importance of mentoring new advisors is critical. that trend of advisers go out with anonymous advisors to look at depth how they work with mentors in the community
Nancy also talked about how they support veteran teachers and they work on a variety of models for this including shadowing other veterans, visiting other schools, and going up to businesses to reinvigorate their thinking about how mentors work in the community. Nancy mentioned that she will be going to the match school in Boston to look at how they do math tutoring which they find to be an innovative program. So all of their staff consider (sharpening the song) a critical part of their job.
Example, she has four rookies this year at ninth-grade — so they receive specialized training in the summer to help them get ready. Even for the veteran and advisers that are going back to ninth-grade, they take time to reflect on what works and what needs to improve etc.
For Nancy I talked about bringing new teachers on board the question came up about where their experience for teachers in traditional schools was a strength or hindrance and she did mention that they look for the ability for individuals to unlearn what they know so that they can succeed at the school. She did mention that some of their best people have come from nontraditional jobs, but because of the state requirement for certification for teachers, more and more of their hiring teachers and less likely to hire professionals from other fields because of the certification problem. One thing she did mention, was they look for generalists — she mentioned that elementary teachers are generalists by nature and therefore already understand this. They do consider putting different content matter experts in buildings for example, math, science and language arts and his cohort advisors.
I asked about retention of teachers — she said that that has not been a problem, as much as the percolation up of advisers into more administrative roles. For instance there are 12 12th grade advisers in this year, next year two are going into new roles at the school and two were going outside of the school to other jobs (some in the partner schools).
She also talked about how after one or two cycles of advising, some advisers begin to experiment with different models within their organization — a specific example was a teacher who is interested in combining ninth and 11th grade students together (something like 7/9 graders and 8/11 graders) to see how the multiage nature of this would drive student work.
I asked a question about evaluating advisor performance, and she mentioned criteria like maintaining relationships with mentors in their organizations, observation of the way they work their advisories, the important skill of organization and coach-ability. She spent some time talking about how important both organization and multitasking is for advisers. She also talked about the importance of helping people understand the importance of organizations, their commitment to this program, and how to make sure they feel attended to through this process.
Dennis and Nancy are moving forward with expanding this model, both throughout the state of Rhode Island, and nationwide. They formed a group called “the big picture schools” — right now 65 schools are involved. She mentioned Jill Olson is someone who could get names of other contacts within the schools, as they try and refer request for visits to these outside schools that may be closer to the original request these.
Although not all the schools adopt all of the practice of the original MET school, the basic criteria are there — still out two days a week to work in the community, still believing that you plan learning “one student at a time”
advisers are expected to go out at least once a month to make sure that the student work at a mentor site is progressing well.
They have a position — internship coordinator — who mentors the internship, planned celebrations, sends cards, gift certificates
there is also a partnership person who reaches out to organizations to develop mentors — there is also a database person that tracks mentors and make sure that they stay in the flow
mentors find the experience powerful for their organizations, and the vast majority come back for more students after one set of graduate

that’s all for this post — it’s still more to come:
lunch with some of the teachers
a tour by Alicia
some sitdown time with some of the students
in participation in a student exhibition as part of their judging panel
— I’ll try to get this post tomorrow