What Dreams May Come: A Sneak Peek into Anastasis Academy November 11, 2011

It’s a pretty incredible thing to see dreams come to fruition.

For me it started with an obsession and passion for creating rich learning environments where every student was recognized as an individual. In that first post I wrote:

“I have a dreams of education. I have dreams of the way that schools should look. I have dreams of kids who find their passions. I have dreams of schools as rich learning centers.”

I had dreams of stripping the “vanilla” away so that passions could emerge.

Dreams of ditching that boxed curriculum that we call an education and watching the factory model fade into the rear-view mirror.

Dreams of ending the practice of viewing teachers (and students) as expendables.

I had dreams of schools that were beautiful, that were designed with students in mind.

Dreams that education would stop looking so much like the McRib.

Dreams of breaking free of the box, of valuing students and teachers,  of using the right tools, of a school where a student’s inner da Vinci can break through, of a school that customizes learning.

I shared dreams of more fabulous failures.

The dreams started trickling into reality in March of this year (2011).  In March I started getting some hints that these dreams weren’t really all that far-fetched.  By May I had officially started a school.  In August we opened the doors to Anastasis Academy with our first 50 students in 1st through 8th grade and had hired a dream team of 5 truly incredible teachers to lead them.  In four short months we went from dreams to reality.

At Anastasis Academy, we lease space from a church building throughout the week.  We have our own wing with classrooms, a playground, a gym and a kitchen.  All of our furniture is on wheels.  This makes it easy to adjust space daily based on needs, it is also a necessity since we use shared space.  Twice a week we move all of our belongings across the hall into a storage room (if I’m honest, this is the part we could do without!).  We can’t complain about the space.  It is pretty incredible!

You will notice that we don’t have rows of desks.  No teacher’s desk either.  We have space that kids can move in. Corners to hide in, stages to act on, floors to spread out on, cars to read in.  We are learning how to learn together, learning how to respect other children’s space and needs, learning how to discipline ourselves when we need to, learning how to work collaboratively, we are learning to be the best us.

You won’t see a worksheet at Anastasis. We use iPads.  That isn’t to say that we ONLY use iPads, in fact, you’ll often see us building, cutting, pasting, writing on a whiteboard/chalkboard and even paper.  We do a lot of blogging, a lot of reflecting, a lot of Evernotting, a lot of cinematography, a lot of discussing.

Every morning we start with a 15 minute walk outside together…as a community.  We invite parents and siblings to be a part of our morning walk. Occasionally we have the dogs join in on the fun.  After the walk we come inside as a whole-school for a time of devotions. Again, this is a time for us to build community, to foster the culture we want for our school.  Families are invited to join us every morning.  We always have at least one family and, many times, multiples.  We pray with each other and for each other. We have hard conversations and funny conversations. We think together and challenge each other.

Matthew West joining us for devotions!

Our inquiry block is a time for hands-on transdisciplinary learning.  This is my VERY favorite time to walk through classrooms.  It is incredible to see the joy in discovery.  It is incredible to have a second grade student with dyslexia discover an app to make stop motion animations, teach himself how to use it and proceed to stand up before 7th and 8th grade students to explain how stop motion works.  I wish I could bring you all through the building during this time.  Every time we have a visitor the students pause long enough to describe what they are doing, the learning that is happening. I often have to pick my jaw up off the floor. These kids are amazing.

We have no curriculum. At all. Zip. What did we do instead? We hired the very BEST teachers we could find.  We gave them a base level of skills that we wanted students to have- an outline if you will.  We used the Common Core Standards as our baseline.  We don’t use the standards like most schools do. We use them to make sure that our students have the building blocks and foundations of learning in place.  And then we let our students and teachers GO. The standards are not a weight we are tied to, they are the underpinnings that make it possible for us to soar and take our learning anywhere.  When you look at the Common Core standards they are pretty underwhelming.  I’m glad they are! They provide us with just enough momentum to propel us forward and then off we go on a journey of learning!  We also have our big inquiry questions in place.  From there, we go where the learning takes us, bunny trails and all.  It is pretty fantastic.  Today one of our primary students came out to see me and said, “Look at this boat I found in this new library book. Can I try to make it?”  My answer: “Absolutely! What materials do we need?”  Together we made a list of all the materials I needed to pull together for him.  Tomorrow he will build that boat he is fascinated with and find out if it works the way he has planned.  That is learning!  Tell me what boxed curriculum allows time for that to happen? None. That is why we don’t have it.

In the afternoons we have more “content” area subjects (i.e. math and language arts).  In the primary grades this means students building the skills they need to support their inquiry.  In the intermediate grades this means honing those skills for better communication and more thorough inquiry.  Again, we don’t work from a boxed curriculum. We find the lessons, approaches, and materials that work for the individual student.  Sometimes this means working with manipulatives, sometimes it means exploring measurement outside, and sometimes it means using an app.  It changes daily based on the needs of the students.

We have mixed age level classrooms.  We do this for a lot of reasons.  Most importantly, it is good for older and younger students to work together and learn from each other; it is vital that a child be able to work at their developmental level and progress as they are ready to; and it deepens inquiry when students with different perspectives work together.

Once every five weeks we invite the parents to join us for Parent University.  This is a time for us to help parents understand this new way to do school.  Detox, if you will.  It is a time for us to show parents what best practices in education look like, why grades aren’t all they are cracked up to be, why play is important.  It is a time for us to think and laugh together. It is a time to get questions answered.

Also every five weeks, we hold a “Meeting of the Minds”.  This is a parent/teacher/student conference where we all get together and set our road map for the next 5 weeks.  Students write goals with the help of their teacher. They have ownership over what they have done the last 5 weeks and tell mom and dad what they have planned for upcoming 5 weeks.

Every Friday we have a learning excursion or an opportunity for an “Anastasis Serves”.  Learning excursions are field trips all over the place that help students start to recognize that learning doesn’t just happen when we are at school.  Learning happens everywhere we are and, if we are paying attention, all the time.  Anastasis Serves is a time for our students to give back to the global community.  Sometimes this is a door-to-door scavenger hunt for donations, sometimes this is learning about orphans around the world, or packaging cookies and letters to send to our troops.

We don’t do grades, we do assessment all day every day while we learn.  We don’t do homework, we pursue our families and passions at home.  We don’t do worksheets, we do interesting (sometimes frustrating) work. We don’t do boxed curriculum, we do on-demand learning.

We do mistakes. We do community. We do collaboration. We do messy. We do play. We do fun. We do technology. We do learning.

How do we do all this? We have a 12 to 1 student teacher ratio (or less).  We have incredible students, parents and teachers.  We have stinking smart board members who are invested in our success and trust our judgement calls.  We set our tuition at $8,000 (per pupil spending in our district) to show that even though we are private, this can be done in the public schools.  We started with nothing…well almost nothing, we had dreams.  There was no capital raised, no fund-raisers, no huge donation. We started the beginning of the year at $0 and put blood, sweat and tears into it.

This is not to say that we have it all figured out, that all of our students are perfect, that all of our staff or families are perfect. We are perfectly imperfect as every school is. We have days when the kids are BOUNCING off the walls, we have disagreements, tired teachers, stressed parents, a founder who has occasional melt downs (that would be me), students who need extra love and support, tight budgets, parents who demand different, scuffles, sniffles and band-aids…lots of band-aids.  There is nowhere else I would rather be. No other group of people I would rather work with. No other students whose germs I would rather share. This is my dream.

There are moments throughout the day when I am stopped in my tracks by the realization-this is my dream.

Incomplete thoughts October 19, 2010

This video caused one of those hunches I was talking about in my post When Hunches Collide.  I saw this video last Thursday and immediately typed out a blog post but didn’t publish it because it somehow felt incomplete.  I thought I would give myself a day to let my ideas percolate a little more, but each time I came back to it I was left with the same incomplete feeling.  (I may very well need therapy to undo the lie that I learned in school: things that are incomplete are not worth turning in.)  I have watched this video 7 or 8 times now and each time I watch it, I notice  something different.  I think I believe if I keep watching it, this incomplete thought will reveal itself… it doesn’t hurt that each time I watch the video I feel like I am witnessing genius unfold. Those RSA animate guys know how to create!

In the video, Robinson talks about divergent thinking, the ability to come up with multiple solutions or answers to any problem.  He notes that there is a divergent thinking test which measures divergent thinking ability; at a certain level, one can even be considered a divergent thinking genius.  Robinson describes a linear test that was done with kindergarten students that followed them through the age of 15.  In kindergarten 98% of the students tested at the  genius level.  The percentage of students that test at the genius level drops steadily as the students get older.  Aside from getting older, formal education is the one thing these students had in common.  Robinson conjectures that we all have this capacity for genius level divergent thinking.  What happens in education?  We are taught that there is one correct answer and one way to arrive at that answer.  You see this all the time with kids and math.  They come home to complete a homework assignment and have an absolute come apart when they can’t remember the way they were shown how to complete the problem.  A parent steps in to help solve the problem, even arriving at the correct answer (as verified in the back of the book), but the child isn’t satiated.  Cue whiny voice and copious amounts of tears: “That isn’t the way that my teacher showed me how to do it *sniff* and we have to show our work the way we were taught or we don’t get credit.”  Not only are kids taught there is only one answer, they are also taught that there is only one acceptable “right” way to arrive at that answer.  Why has education been reduced to this?  I believe it is because that kind of education fits nicely and neatly into a box;  we can give a scantron bubble test to validate our methods.  Robinson notes that this one-right-answer approach is in the gene pool of education.  We want to  have the best education in the world and we try to answer that call by creating false measures to validate our feelings that we have the best education.  Forgive me for the metaphor, but it is like the dog that returns to its own vomit.  Divergent thinking is killed, creativity is stifled but test scores are high.  We want it all laid out nicely on paper: how many are we graduating, how many are going on to higher education?  But do high test scores really equate to better educated individuals?  Of course not.  High standardized test scores reveal students who can take tests.

Robinson’s mention of genes is what really caught my attention.  I have been thinking a lot about what genes currently make up education as we know it, and what genes make up learning.  In fact I wrote about the beginning of an idea here and asked for your help here.  Pandora (the radio station) works based on a set of “genes” or attributes that make up music.  It is called the Music Genome Project, modeled after the scientific research Human Genome Project.  The Human Genome project sets out to identify the sequence of chemical pairs that makeup DNA and then map them based on their location within the DNA and their function.  I’m not really a scientist (I just play one on my blog), but my understanding is that if we had a mastery of the individual genes, we could begin to isolate them and have a better shot of ending genetic diseases.  My thought is this, if we could map out the genes of education (read: learning) we could isolate the “diseased” genes in the current education gene pool and transform them accordingly.  If we could map out the learning genes, we could tailor learning to meet the needs of every student, Pandora style.  Right now education is ignoring all of the hundreds (thousands?) of genes that make up learning and focusing on two: logical mathematical and reading.  There is nothing wrong with these two genes.  They are important genes.  But we can’t ignore all the other attributes of learning.

And this is where my thought lies incomplete.  Is it possible to take on this kind of project?  Learning is incredibly complex and multifaceted…but then again so is music and DNA.  I don’t think it is an impossible task and yet I’m not sure what to do with it either.  I’m not sure that we can really transform education until we have the ability to truly customize it.  Until we can customize education, it will end up falling into a new set of standards.  They may be an improvement on the standard but they will still be missing something vitally important: the ability to meet the complexity of individuals.  Please understand, I am not recommending that students learn only those subjects they are interested in. I believe students can be interested in every subject if it is approached uniquely to meet their learning needs.  I use history as an example: in school I would rather have teeth pulled than sit through a history class and read through a textbook.  You can imagine my surprise when I got out of school and discovered that I really enjoy history, as it turns out what I don’t enjoy is textbooks. Learning has to be customized, it has to take into account the individual.  I believe mapping the genes of learning could bring us one step closer to realizing a customizable education.  So, I invite you to help me complete this thought.  Comment with your hunches, pass on your ideas and maybe those hunches will begin to collide into big, actionable ideas.

(Great advice from @mikemcsharry that helped me finally push publish “an imperfect idea launched will always beat perfection delayed indefinitely.” Thanks Mike!)

Intelligence is bigger than a number July 15, 2010

I’m currently reading (and really enjoying) Sir Ken Robinson’s The Element.  If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it as a summer read.  It is full of insight and thought but is an easy summer read.  I want to share some pieces of the book that are standing out to me and share some of my thoughts and responses as I read it.   Blogging helps me internalize what I am reading and continues the conversation beyond my thoughts and the pages in the book.

• We have come to accept that intelligence comes with a number.  In the age of standardized tests, IQ numbers, and the “vanilla education” we have been lured to believe that intelligence is directly tied to a number.  Robinson points out just how wrong this is.  We have boiled education down to discovering how intelligent students are.  Instead of asking how intelligent are you?, a better question would be: how are you intelligent?

• Current education is born out of existentialism, the idea that knowledge is what can be proved through logical reasoning and evidence.  The problem with existentialism was the question of where to begin this process without taking anything for granted that might be logically questionable.   As a result, Descartes came to the conclusion that the only thing that he could take for granted was his own existence.  “I think, therefore I am.”  The Industrial Revolution was a natural outcome of this kind of enlightenment thinking.  Schooling as we know it was also established at this time, in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Schools were built on the idea that intelligence can be quantified.

• Robinson goes on to describe how the IQ test was created by Binet.  Binet didn’t create the test for the way it came to be used, he sought to help those with learning disabilities get the help they needed.  The use of the test changed in 1916 when Lewis Terman, of Stanford, took Binet’s test and developed the Stanford Binet Test.  Terman was part of the eugenics movement that sought to weed out entire sectors of the population, assuming that criminality, feeble-mindedness, and pauperism were genetic and possible to identify through intelligence testing.  The movement succeeded in lobbying for the passage of involuntary sterilization laws in 30 states.  If you were found to have a particularly low IQ, it was decided that you could not have children.  Obviously, these laws were eventually repealed.

• Carl Bringham is the creator of the SAT test we use as a college entrance exam today.  Bringham also claimed to be a part of the eugenics movement.  5 years after creating the test, Bringham disowned it rejecting eugenics along with it.  Bringham may have disowned the SAT, but colleges and universities didn’t follow suit.   The SAT focuses on two intelligences: linguistic and mathematical.  Elitism in education is still alive and well because we refuse to consider intelligence in a broader sense.  We insist on standardizing education and making it a game of have and have-nots.  We insist on defining it in a limited scope using numbers as our guidelines.  Intelligence isn’t as finite as we have been led to believe.

• Howard Gardner talks about our multiple intelligences.  These intelligences include: linguistic, mathematical, musical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intra-personal.  Currently in education we focus on two of these.  All aspects of human intelligence should be nurtured and celebrated.  To down-play intelligence outside of mathematical and linguistic is to do a disservice to the child and the world.  Everyone has different strengths and aptitudes to offer the world.  I wonder how many of these we are missing out on by forcing everyone to focus on developing only two intelligences?  We are missing out on a rich fabric of humanity.  When we work at out own abilities and nurture out individual strengths, the world becomes a more complete place to be.

• Teachers know that no child is a single intellectual score on a linear scale.  There are complexities there.  Yet we continue to use that score to determine the worth of a student, a teacher, a school.  Even children who score the same in standardized testing are vastly different and unique in their make-up.  They have their own passions, dreams, goals, and interests.  It makes me wonder if what separates the haves from the have-nots is not money at all.  Perhaps the biggest separating force is in the narrow definition of intelligence.  Maybe the difference in options has more to do with a series of tests that determines a child’s future than it does with money.

I am 3 chapters into The Element but I find myself stopping often and jotting down notes and digging deeper in an attempt to understand why education is in the place that it is.  What do you think? Am I jumping to conclusions too hastily?