The Met Part 2

this is the second part of my visit to the Metropolitan school in Providence Rhode Island.
The earlier notes are published in the blog under part one…

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

Nancy brought me to one of the building lunchroom’s — I should explain that there are four main buildings on campus and Senate each of the four corners of the property beaches labeled liberty, justice, unity when I can’t remember the fourth of a speech building holds something on the order of eight advisories — two for each grade level.
So I have lunch in one of these buildings with some teachers. we talked about the challenge of the environment — some of the teachers were advisers, a few were LTIs which I think students with learning something integrators — in a sense they’re specialists that help shepherd the process and actress resources for students and advisers. one of the teachers I spoke to, Dennis, was very willing to share the challenge is that his experience has — he had been a traditional teacher in Florida — green biology was his degree work, and he had been teaching Marine science, biology, and environmental science in Florida.
He came up to Rhode Island he was looking for a new environment to teach — and so had to transition to this new paradigm. We talked a bit about the challenge and he was very positive about the adjustment and in going from teaching a single subject, to being a generalist in his advisory role. (This was his second year at the school). The agreed with many of the things that Nancy had told me about the need for organization, the chaos of day-to-day learning (it’s messy), and the truly wonderful pleasure of seeing every student in your advisory being engaged in real work.
If I remember more, I’ll add here about my lunch conversations… I didn’t take notes here because I was eating and talking at the same time
after lunch, I joined the tour with a group of about 15 students from Keene State College in New Hampshire — liberal arts majors they look so young, they look like the students!
The tour was led by a senior — Alicia and we looked at the different buildings and campus including the media Center and the wellness Center. she was another example of a great, highly engaged students. Her brother goes to a more traditional school and I asked her about how that difference plays out and she admitted theft there are days of very different.
One of the interesting parts of the tour, was the media Center which is pretty much managed by a single individual — Brian Mills — he is a daunting task of managing performance space, and their media Center which includes a studio, editing equipment, audio equipment, etc. He clearly has a lot of work — even though he doesn’t have an advisory he works long days and nights to maintain all the resources needed (will see an example of that at the two o’clock exhibition that we attended)

after the tour we were able to sit down with two students — hope and allysa so that we could ask them about their experiences at school. Hope was a senior who had spent the last three years at the New England aquarium working as a exhibit guide, a behind the scenes exhibit curator, and in the medical area working with animals. Her goal was veterinary science. I think she also may have been interested in marine biology as a secondary topic.
Alyssa was new to the school (three months) — she had spent the last couple of years volunteering at a therapeutic writing center — this was before she came to the school. The reason her parents applied her, was the opportunity for her to more fully be involved in the writing Center is a part of her curriculum — and it was clear she was highly motivated by her commitment and her love of working at the center. She admitted that they had become so dependent on her during her internship at if she wanted to switch to a different internship he would probably affect their program adversely. If one of the questions we asked him the students was anything that they would like to see that the program doesn’t have, and a couple of students venture that they’d like a little more rigor in their mathematics and science. I remember in talking to Dennis about Clay Christensen and it struck me that the possibility of using well-designed online learning modules might well fill in some of this gap that falls outside of their internship and advisory experiences in school
what was striking about all the students that we spoke to was their sense of commitment, ownership,

I next attended an exhibition of work from an 11th grade student (Angie). there were about 20 people in the room that she presented her work to and she had about 1 1/2 hours to do this. The group included students, other teachers, her parents, and some members from the community including her mentor. Essentially, at the end of each stage of learning, the students present an exhibition — this was her third quarter exhibition of learning. And this was the highlight of her work
so the highlights of exhibitions — how did the student meet the goals in their learning plan?
How could a student go deeper?
We were give in a form to comment on the quality of the presentation on evidence of learning
there were five A’s that we were asked to comment on:
authenticity
active learning
academic rigor
adult relationships
assessment

for her learning plan, she started by talking about her 75 page autobiography that is due for all students when they graduate. At this point, she has 30 pages completed to date (keep in mind this is due for her in a year and a half.)
She she did a facing history Project and she talked about how she had worked at speaking at a conference regional CES (? This is what my notes say the conference was called) with her mentor, who is a college professor.
In working with her mentor, she worked with teacher development programs, and looked at how she created a product for looking at under served children in the community
for quantitative reasoning she did comparisons of To student teacher is then look numerically at why one was a better candidate than another
for reading she gave examples of some of the books she had read the power of ideas, one person at a time learning goals,

There was a lot of conversation about how they prepare students for college. In particular, they made a point of talking about how they worked on creating a great profile that was more in lines that colleges want to see. Essentially they wanted to get this right.

Back to Angie -in her mentorship she worked with the principal read the evaluations, talk to students, use the observation tools for teacher professional growth. She looked at their reflections, their notes, is very powerful — she was able to see how people write in improving what they do.
Her goal is to do more administrative professional development for teachers after college.
Then, she showed us her project-the video archive of exhibition work from the MET
the purpose was to help newer teachers see what a good quality project looks like. Also, it’s possible to use in class with incoming students and with professional development to help both students and teachers develop a more refined sense of what an exhibition should look like. (Mark’s note to himself — got to read Alfie Cohen’s work on homework)
for her video project need to see the artifacts in the documents to understand what’s happening.
to accomplish this project, she taught herself Final Cut Pro in the use of all the equipment (cameras, microphones, audio interface, etc.) — impressive! She also had to spend many hours entity, as she did to camera shots to show both with the student is doing and a larger view of how the audience plays a role in the exhibition.
All in all a wonderful example of powerful and directed exhibition of quality work that wrapped around self designed and implemented projects that are real and effective.

I have also posted some pdf of school documents here:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *