While smaller may be the preference for students, teachers, and parents, some big schools are finding ways to drive individualization and achievement on a large scale. When small is not an option, these big schools are finding ways to teach the whole child.
After decades of decline, class sizes are on the rise, a trend that could continue as long as the economic outlook remains bleak. The prospect of higher-enrollment schools brings a wave of concerns—impersonal, assembly-line education; students falling through the cracks; and uneven or negative school culture. But, despite the challenges, large schools can implement a whole child education approach.
Reinventing the Lunch Hour
For principal Jacqueline Newton, the biggest challenge to whole child education at Iroquois Ridge High School in Oakville, Ontario, was activating student voice and sustaining parent engagement. Ethnically, half the student population is white; the other half comes from all over the world, often the children of international businesspeople relocated to Toronto. There are no set elementary schools feeding into "the Ridge," making both curricular and cultural continuity a challenge.
"How do you build a sense of belonging and a team mind-set with 1,300 students from different backgrounds?" Newton asks. One response took shape in the single shared lunch hour. During lunch hour, students can meet with their clubs, study groups, or tutors. Once a month, the Ridge Council meets. The Ridge Council includes student representatives from each of more than 30 clubs and ensures that the actions and activities of those clubs are coordinated and purposeful. The council is so effective, it now manages all the allotted funds from the school's extracurricular activities budget.
Easing Transitions
Continuing their efforts toward inclusion, Ridge staff chose to focus on the work of social scientist Jon Douglas Willms, whose research showed that the most stress in a child's life happens in the transition from 8th to 9th grade. "So," says Newton, "we work hard to hook those kids in the first two weeks of September, and then stay on them throughout the year."
The Ridge's 9th grade transition program pairs freshmen with seniors who mentor them throughout the year not just in academics, but socially, too. Parents are part of the process as well. The Ridge holds monthly parenting workshops on how to support kids now that they're in high school.
Newton says she also put her best teachers in the 9th grade. "If you [work hard with] kids in grade 9, they'll be stronger in grades 10, 11, and 12." The Ridge's support programs continue into the sophomore year, and by students' junior and senior years, they are training and planning to mentor underclassmen.
Newton tells students at the Ridge, "you commit to not only your learning, but to helping others learn. Over the years, you're going to become a leader." Newton's own style as principal is to lead from behind, getting students to be a part of everything, take ownership, and make meaningful decisions about how the school community operates. She regularly hosts "open mikes" where students discuss what's working and what isn't. Iroquois Ridge recently won the Governor's Award for student voice.
Bigger Can Get Better
Massachusetts' largest public high school is Brockton High School, with about 4,100 students. Brockton has an academic turnaround story that defies stereotypes, and it is featured, along with several other large high schools, in How High Schools Become Exemplary: Ways that Leadership Raises Achievement and Narrows Gaps by Improving Instruction in 15 Public High Schools, by Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson. At a fall 2010 forum, Ferguson distilled this report into common steps these high schools took toward becoming exemplary.
First, key people accepted responsibility to lead change. Following the release of Brockton's dismal 1999 state test scores, a core group of teachers organized their colleagues around a back-to-basics focus, integrating reading and writing lessons into all subject areas. Additionally, academic tracking was dissolved, and a college-going culture was reinforced daily.
Ferguson identifies this as the next step: a mission that focuses on a few key ideas and priorities that stakeholders can understand and embrace. This step has been critical elsewhere as well.
2011 ASCD Annual Conference presenter Heather Zavadsky's book, Bringing School Reform to Scale: Five Award-Winning Urban Districts, lists clear, shared, and concise goals as a common factor among five districts recently honored by the Broad Foundation for demonstrating the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement while reducing achievement gaps among poor and minority students.
"Rather than continually changing goals, these districts [Long Beach Unified, Garden Grove Unified, Norfolk, Boston, and Aldine Independent] stick to them, drilling down and refining them each year to ensure that all students, teachers and schools are able to move in that direction," Zavadsky writes.
As part of the teacher-led turnaround effort at Brockton, every educator in the building—including guidance counselors— was trained to use a central rubric of what good writing looks like and to develop writing lessons encouraging students to think methodically. Ferguson says schools that become exemplary share this third action step—they design strategies and tools for broadly inclusive adult learning.
Zavadsky says that schools in Broad Prize-winning districts clearly defined what students needed to know and be able to do from one grade to the next.
Define, Refine, Repeat
Brockton's work requires developing and constantly refining quality standards for judging teacher and student work. Each exemplary school Ferguson studied skillfully implemented and monitored plans and strategies, attending persistently to achieving and maintaining quality.
Similarly, Zavadsky discovered that staff at Broad Prize-winning districts regularly used data to evaluate whether initiatives were actually improving student achievement. At Aldine Independent School District in Harris County, Texas, use of data to individualize instruction is two-pronged: first, to identify student strengths and weaknesses, and then to match student weaknesses to teachers who are particularly adept at teaching that skill or topic.
As early as 2001, Brockton students began posting noticeable gains on state tests. In 2009 and 2010, Brockton's diverse group of students outperformed 90 percent of Massachusetts's 350 high schools on state exams. Further, Ferguson says his work shows that "whether you're a low achiever or a high achiever coming into [Brockton] in 9th grade, you're going to learn more here than almost any place else in the state." It's also notable that Brockton was able to make huge academic gains while retaining its rich music, drama, and athletics programming, as well as scores of student clubs.
Although change might be more manageable at smaller schools, researchers found that being small is not required for changing school culture. Nor must a restructuring initiative come from the top down and involve dismissing staff. School restructuring at Brockton was grassroots—led by a group of unionized teachers—and only one teacher resistant to the turnaround effort was dismissed, after due process.
Wando's Schools-Within-a-School
Teacher leadership also plays a major role in the success of another big school, Wando High, in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. Wando is the largest high school in the state, serving a socioeconomically diverse 3,300 students. At Wando, teacher leadership shines under the direction of 2010 MetLife/NASSP National High School Principal of the Year Lucy Beckham, and within the cozier confines of its smaller learning communities—a 9th grade academy and four career academies.
Beckham says her staff figured on career academies because, "No matter what a child does in life, [he's] going to have to work somewhere." Essentially, Beckham says, "We're scheduling five schools in one master schedule—if you're in our school of arts and humanities, then you're in classes with other kids in that school."
Students at Wando choose among 250-plus course selections. Extracurricular activities like clubs, teams, sports, band, and ROTC also connect kids to Wando. In addition, each student meets with his or her faculty advisor every two weeks, and an administrator-and-counselor pair shepherds each student through all aspects of school. As one of the highest-performing high schools in South Carolina, Wando has received the Palmetto Gold Award (a distinction awarded by the South Carolina Board of Education) for the past nine years, and 90 percent of the 2010 graduating class enrolled in either a two- or four-year college.
Parent and community volunteers are a big factor in Wando's success. Likewise, the award-winning districts Zavadsky studied seek and build relationships with anyone who has a stake in student success—parents, community organizations, and local businesses. Norfolk Public Schools, for example, values community engagement so much they included it as a performance indicator in the district's accountability system.
Big Needs, Bigger Opportunities
Schools face incredible challenges, and for many, ensuring each child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged might seem too tall an order to bring to scale. However, there are strong examples of schools and districts that successfully apply whole child tenets.
Washington State's South Kitsap School District Superintendent Dave LaRose says, despite a devastating $13 million budget cut, his district has not cut or reduced a single co- or extracurricular arts or athletics program. In fact, South Kitsap has created more opportunities for students to succeed, through added online learning options, expanded arts opportunities at the elementary level, and increased partnerships with higher education to offer college credits, career and technical certifications, and dual credit coursework.
A big school can make a big difference by drawing on its larger community as a resource—by strengthening parent and community partnerships, activating student voice and interest, and empowering teacher leaders.