New High School Charter Options in Kent and Wilmington

At the June meeting on June 20th, the Delaware State Board of Education approved three new charter high schools—one in Kent County (First State Military Academy) and two in the city of Wilmington (The Delaware Met and Design-Lab High School). All three schools aim to fill a gap in existing choice options and two will replicate deeper learning models, school designs that focus on deepening content knowledge and understanding, providing real-world learning experiences, and helping students develop 21st century skills.

First State Military Academy will be a charter high school in Kent County, a region that has few existing charter school options. Modeled after the Delaware Military Academy, it will center its school culture on the Junior ROTC program while utilizing the New Tech school model for curriculum and instruction, a design whose implementation as an academy at Seaford High has been much lauded. The school will open with 200 students in 9th and 10th grade in the fall of 2014, expanding to 500 students by 2017.

The Delaware Met will be a charter high school in the city of Wilmington, a region full of charter schools but with few high school options. Modeled after the internationally acclaimed school in Rhode Island, The Delaware Met will be replicating the Big Picture Learning school model, an instructional design that makes heavy use of internship and experiential learning. The school will open with 264 students in 9th and 10th grade in the fall of 2014, expanding to 528 student by 2016.

Design-Lab High School will be a charter high school in the city of Wilmington. Modeled after similar schools in Philadelphia, the school will have an emphasis on STEMD (Science, Technology, Engineering, Media and Design) and will focus on developing students into innovators by encouraging their creativity, using project-based learning instruction and performance tasks for assessment. The school will open with 240 students in 9th and 10th grade in the fall of 2014, expanding to 560 students by 2018.

A fourth charter school, Pike Creek Charter Middle School, was denied approval. At the same meeting, the State Board approved several expansions—MOT Academy to grades 9-12, Academy of Dover to grade 5, and Kuumba Academy to grades 6-8. More information on the schools can be found in the applications online.

Schools Showcase Innovative Instruction

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend the Alliance of Model Schools’ Spring Dinner, and I was quite impressed by the innovative classroom projects and lessons that the teachers shared.

The dinner was a celebration of a year of hard work, innovation, and success. The program was jam-packed with content, featuring remarks by Ashley Biden, Associate Director of the Delaware Center for Justice, but the highlight of the evening was definitely the showcase of teacher projects, winners of the first annual Project Based Learning Competition.

Honorees included projects throughout the state by students of all ranges and subjects. In one classroom students used their knowledge about economics to create educational and promotional materials that are actually in use at Sussex County Federal Credit Union. In another, students at Penn High learned about human trafficking and conducted their own research to write letters to government officials and create a campaign against the practice.

My favorite submission, though, was from a Teach For America teacher educating 4- and 5-year olds at the Latin American Community Center. She incorporated science, social studies, and writing into a unit on grass. At one point students went exploring around the city of Wilmington, and after noticing how few public “green” areas there were, urged their teacher to let them write letters to the city council requesting more public parks. I can’t wait to see what these students do later in life!

I would have loved to have been a student in any one of these classes, and it sounds like there will be opportunities for more students to do so in upcoming years. At the dinner, Innovative Schools announced the second round of the Innovative School Model Initiative grant competition, which provides funding for schools or organizations looking to replicate deeper learning models. With more and more classrooms and schools teaching like this, it almost makes me wish I was a student again!

 

The Alliance of Model Schools is a consortium of schools that utilize deeper learning models, instructional designs that focus on deepening content knowledge and understanding, providing real-world learning experiences, and helping students develop 21st century skills. It is an initiative of Innovative Schools, a school support organization that focuses its efforts primarily in-state.

Peer Mentors Inspire at William Penn

We all know that mentoring works—having role models to look up to helps students feel supported and safe. Senator Carper was actually a mentor for a student at the school where I previously taught, and I saw firsthand the positive effect the relationship had.

The Princeton Center for Leadership Training has taken this concept and implemented with a slight twist, with a program called the Peer Group Connection (PGC). Juniors and seniors are trained to serve as mentors for small groups of freshmen, meeting with them weekly to support them and to develop leadership and teamwork skills. In March, I had the opportunity to visit Colonial School District’s William Penn High, our state’s largest high school, and the first in Delaware to implement the program, which was just implemented this fall.

I was blown away.

At first I was skeptical of the program. After all, the mentors are still in high school themselves—would they have the perspective and experience needed to guide students just a few years younger? As I observed, though, I quickly came around. Everyone I talked to, from the freshmen to the staff, agreed that not only were students good mentors, but because they shared the same experiences, in many ways they were better able to relate. Listening to the mentors share about their experiences, it was clear that not only did they care deeply for their mentees, but by serving as role models, they accordingly held themselves to a higher standard and were more motivated to be accomplished, both academically and personally.

And it turns out that this result is supported by data—lots of it. A randomized study of low-income students in an urban high school found that freshmen who participated in PGC graduated at a rate 10 percentage points higher than their peers, a result corroborated by a number of similar studies on the impact of peer-led mentoring and leadership training.

Even more exciting than the success at Penn High is the fact that PGC is currently in the process of applying for a federal grant to expand its impact in Delaware to three more high schools (if you’re interested you should contact Margo Ross, managing director of communications and development).

I’m not the only one who has been struck by their success: PGC has recently been featured nationally, on NBC’s Today Show. And if you’re still not convinced, check out this video Penn students put together describing PGC in their own words:

IB Impressed with International Baccalaureate

As the focus on raising rigor intensifies, more and more schools in Delaware have become interested in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. Recently, I had the opportunity to visit several IB schools in Maryland and see what all the fuss was about.

When I first heard about the program in college it sounded to me like the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) courses. There was a big test you took at the end class. Success on the test resulted in advanced placement or college credit. The abbreviation was even two letters, just like AP. It sounded like the only difference was the fact that IB was international. However, people involved in the program were always adamant that the comparison was too limited. Indeed, everyone I have ever met who has taken or been involved in IB has been a strong advocate for the program, citing its broad impact. Last week I finally understood what they were talking about.

I am a fan of AP courses—they are a great way to raise the rigor to which high school students are exposed. The IB program though, is more than just coursework; it is about redesigning the very way students learn and engage with content and each other. At the high school level it includes a curriculum, but the program extends through middle and elementary school as a layer that builds upon what is already taught in the school. Built upon a constructivist foundation, IB asks students to own their education, pushing them to understand the why and how of what they are learning and be able to apply their knowledge, continuing their development through engaged inquiry.

This idea is certainly not unique to IB, but it was present in a systematic and fundamental way in all three of the schools I visited. Class after class, I saw students in charge of their own learning, leading discussion and asking and answering questions of each other. 7th graders shared about the importance of understanding their own learning styles and the interconnectedness of science and the arts while teachers share their philosophy of “answering questions with another question.”

The proof is in the pudding. Presenters cited research that suggested that students in IB programs not only perform better academically, but show significant differences from their peers in the “intangibles” that allow them to be more apt to succeed in colleges and careers.

It’s no wonder then, that educators in Delaware are taking notice. The program, originally thought of as only suitable for elite private schools, has sprung up in schools across the state, and many more districts are considering implementing the model. It is indicative of the shift from setting rigor to the level we think students can handle to looking instead at the level where our students should be and helping them rise to meet that bar. It is a simple but profound distinction that is happening not just in IB schools, but in schools throughout Delaware, and our students have shown they are capable of rising to the challenge.