What can our school do about unexcused absences? How do I know if my child is making enough progress? How much should teachers have to work outside the school day? Putting questions at the heart of curriculum, instruction, and school governance opens up the change process to fresh design solutions. The Right Question Project has worked for the past decade
8-day rotational schedule alternating long-block days and short-block days. Croton-Harmon High School in Croton-on-Hudson, New York adopted this schedule as a first move toward longer blocks, to give teachers and students time to practice the skills and strategies of teaching and learning in longer periods. Each cycle accommodates a session of the Student-Faculty Congress, one advisory group meeting, a daily
All 350 students at the International High School in Long Island City, New York are recent immigrants with very limited English, but the rich and coherent interdisciplinary curriculum they follow here treats this multilingual population as an asset, not a drawback. In heterogeneous groups, taking interdisciplinary courses organized around themes such as “Motion” and “Origins,” students maintain and develop proficiency
Because well designed schools respect and reflect the strengths of the communities they serve, CES believes, school design teams must research the answers to such questions as these: What priorities does the parent community have for this school? What are this community’s demographic trends? What role might teachers’ unions play in the school redesign? What other schools serve this community?
Students take four courses each semester for about 90 minutes a day; teachers teach three courses per semester. Some blocks are split into two 45-minute periods for lunch or short electives. Similar schedules are used at Noble High School (Berwick, ME); Coral Springs (FL) High School; and Reynoldsburg (OH) High School. Semester 1 Semester 2 P E R I O
Many Essential schools use the advisory group structure as a way of increasing the personal connection among students and between students and the teaching staff. At New Mission High School in Boston, where “advisory” opens and closes every day, students begin the morning meetings with a ten-minute ritual that Essential school teachers often use themselves to build professional community. At
In order for adolescents to achieve at high levels, their schools must first be designed to promote personalization and depth of understanding, the Coalition asserts. Without the following “non-negotiable” features, the national office recently wrote, a school has “very little chance” of promoting high student achievement: The students must be well known. The student-to-teacher ratio must not exceed 20:1 in
From what schools teach to how they allocate time and people, their design should emerge from local priorities and build on what we know about student learning. Drawing from their common principles, Essential schools are posing the most fundamental questions about how schools should look. “It was easy,” Einstein is said to have quipped when explaining how he came up
Extended teacher planning blocks in a 4 x 4 semester; half day on a 4-day cycle. Teachers with Block 4 assigned for planning have no free block on Day 1, but have a half-day free on Day 4. This works best if no extra duties are assigned during lunch, at least on Day 1 (Reprinted from R.L. Canady, Block Scheduling,
A working group of the CES National Congress, made up of representatives from schools and Centers, has since 1998 collaborated on drafting a set of specific descriptions (or “indicators”) into “benchmarks” that outline what the work of the Coalition “looks like.” A number of Centers and schools are currently pilot testing the benchmarks to help focus school practices on improving
In a recent survey of 178 principals in urban high schools undertaking major change efforts, lack of time, energy, and money were identified as the key implementation problems. On average, teachers devoted 70 days of time to implementing a project, while “the more successful schools used 50 days a year of external assistance for training, coaching, and capacity building.” The
In a High-Stakes Testing Environment, Performance-Based Assessment Gains Respect Essential schools around New York took alarm when their state commissioner of education recently required all high school students to pass before graduation five rigorous, curriculum-specific exams previously given only for the “Regents diploma.” Such one-time, high-stakes tests do an injustice, Essential school leaders argued, to schools valuing depth of learning
Common Principle 4: Teaching and learning should be personalized to the maximum feasible extent. a. A schedule that supports small learning communities by reducing student-teacher ratio (80:1, 20:1) b. Schedules and programs that are organized to accommodate personalized learning (i.e. advisors, school within a school, and house system) c. Professional development and support system encourage personalization through the provision of
For more information on the programs referred to in this issue, contact the following people: ADELPHI ACADEMY Gregory Borman, Coordinator 8515 Ridge Boulevard Brooklyn, NY 11209 (718) 238-3308 BRONXVILLE HIGH SCHOOL Judith Duffy, Coordinator Pondfield Road Bronxille, NY 10708 (914) 337-5600 CENTRAL PARK EAST SECONDARY SCHOOL Deborah Meier, Principal 1573 Madison Avenue New York, NY 100029 (212) 860-8935 LINCOLN HIGH
Intensive foreign language acquisition using the “4 by 4” semester block schedule. This shows how a student could experience a semester-long language immersion (perhaps including a foreign exchange) after taking an introductory language course the semester before. (Both schedules on page 2 reprinted from R. L. Canady, Block Scheduling, with permission.) Blocks Fall Semester Spring Semester Block 1 (90 min.)
Schools look far different these days than they did in the 1980s, when Horace first began to chart the effects of the Coalition’s Common Principles. In her farewell issue, the editor reflects on several fundamental shifts. I didn’t know much about education reform when I wrote my first issue of Horace, in autumn 1988. I was a working journalist with
Imagine you have a week to accomplish a series of specific tasks, Bob McCarthy likes to say to the people who come to the scheduling workshops at the Coalition of Essential Schools, where he is Director for Schools. You’re going to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and discuss it with a few friends; you’re going to repair
Six-period Day on Monday and Friday and four 80-minute blocks on Tuesday through Thursday. Classes meet four days out of every five. At Fairdale High School in Jefferson County, Kentucky, teachers see all their students every Monday and Friday, during which they introduce and review the work they will do during longer blocks on two out of the three midweek
About three years ago, several parents met in an Oak-land, California church to share their concerns about their children in one of that city’s overcrowded, year-round multi-track elementary schools. Aided by Oakland Community Organizations (OCO), a faith-based, nonprofit community organizing group, their concerns and actions spread to other members of their parish. OCO widened the discussion to include many other
The habit of inquiry is critical to school design teams as they analyze how various structures and practices affect student learning and school functioning. Whether in devising new designs or assessing current designs, they must: Identify a problem area to investigate. (For example, “Fifty percent of our high school students are reading below grade level.”) Study the problem to determine
Ever since e-mail made its appearance in the late 1980s, Essential school teachers across the country have shared a lively dialogue about their professional concerns. Reprinted here with permission are two excerpts from Christelle Estrada, a teacher from Pasadena, California who is spending this year in Utah, and Peggy Silva, who teaches at an Essential school in New Hampshire. Accountability
Schools seeking help with issues of school design can find help through the Coalition of Essential Schools in a variety of ways: The new CES School Benchmarks spell out detailed “indicators” for how the Ten Common Principles play out in school structures and practices. To obtain the latest working copy, contact Adam Tucker by email at atucker@essentialschools.org, or telephone 510-433-1451
The Essential school designs that follow represent just a few of the wide array that characterizes the Coalition. For more examples, visit the CES Web site (www.essentialschools.org) or call the national office ( 510-433-1451 510-433-1451 ) or a regional CES Center. Breaking large schools into several small schools. Two formerly enormous city high schools, reborn as the Julia Richman and James
Three 100-minute classes a day on alternating days year-long. This “extended schedule” at Gig Harbor High School near Tacoma, Washington also includes a 30 minute period four times a week for advisory teams and/or sustained silent reading (SSR). Teachers have 100 minutes of planning time every other day, and an extra half hour at the end of the day Friday,
Several Coalition high schools use some variation of this schedule, (which resembles a “Copernican schedule”) with three 95- to 100-minute blocks each day in two semesters. An additional 50- to 57-minute block is used for teacher planning or elective courses. Robeson High School, Chicago. Three subjects per semester; three 100-minute classes a day, plus lunch. Teachers get half-hour morning prep