I recently had the opportunity to travel to Chicago with my colleague, Kim Childress, and my principal to tour Intrinsic Schools, a charter high school that is reimaging the work of education. A really well done review of the school - with pictures that help to bring the experience alive - is available
here. Check it out for a deep dive in the vision, values, norms, and systems of the building. For those without the time to dig into the article, here's my own CliffsNotes version:
Intrinsic was born in 2013 with the vision of creating a personalized, technology-rich learning environment that would truly break the mold of school innovation. At Intrinsic, math and ELA classes are taught for 90-minutes each day in pods, which may accommodate as many as 60 students served by three teachers (typically two core subject teachers and one special education teacher). The teachers share an equal role in planning and instruction - with collaborative planning time built into every day - so it's never obvious which students have a disability and which do not. The pods - which, aesthetically, look nothing like a school - include (ordered from more to less teacher-directed practice) "the Board", "the Ocean", "the Shade", and "the Coastline". Respectively, these spaces allow for large group direct instruction, teacher-led small group discussion, structured group work/projects, and independent work on Chromebooks. Students transition between different stations according to particular classroom norms and systems established and explicitly taught by teachers in each pod, with students usually moving through three of the four stations on any given day. The rotation of stations - and how students travel among them - is determined through a wealth of diagnostic data, that helps the school group students based on academic need. Students remain in these groups for a semester, in general, before groups may be reassigned based on performance. This allows for a highly-differentiated experience for students and eases some of the burden of differentiating every classroom practice for teachers. Instead, a teacher might differentiate the direct instruction piece in three different ways, but will not be responsible for any other part of the lesson (since those are taken on by the other teachers in the room). This model is not used for social studies or science classrooms; instead, those classes meet in more traditional classroom spaces with the "normal" student-to-teacher ratio.
Okay, that's the context. Now, a few takeaways:
(1) Social Studies in a Blended Space: As a social studies teacher, I've been struggling quite a bit to locate high-quality instructional content to use in a blended environment. To the extent that these resources exist, most are either developmentally inappropriate or intolerably boring. While I didn't find a panacea at Intrinsic, I did have the opportunity to chat with a social studies teacher to learn about their social studies blended learning practices, which was refreshing and rewarding.
(2) Collaboration: One of the many strengths of Intrinsic was its schedule, which afforded tremendous opportunities for vertically aligning curriculum and engaging in collaborative planning. Collaboration is a norm of the building - both for students and for teachers. The effects are palpable: lessons were fluid, transitions were seamless, and expectations were uniformly high. As we build out our own models of blended learning, I suspect ongoing collaboration will be essential to our collective success.
(3) Removing the Barriers: As a school built on access to technology, Intrinsic works incredibly hard to sustain fully functioning wi-fi access. Indeed, it treats access problems with the precision of a surgeon. For instance, the building's IT coordinator noted that this year teachers were "experiencing connectivity problems in the first five minutes of the day, as everyone was logging in." Within a day or two, he had identified and implemented a solution, remarking that "we don't have time to waste." It is this incredible attention to detail, he said, that has allowed the model to flourish.
(4) Culture, Culture, Culture... did I mention culture?: For me, the most important takeaway from the trip was that a prerequisite to an effective rollout of blended learning is establishing an incredibly strong school culture and climate. The experiences of Intrinsic are particularly illustrative here since their opening was anything but smooth. According to the assistant principal, in year one as many as 80 percent of the students made little to no academic progress because of the permissive school culture. Students were rarely held accountable for their actions and, consequently, used their devices and their time in all of the wrong ways. Recognizing these problems, Intrinsic's administration directed their energy and attention at establishing and maintaining high behavioral expectations in year two. The results were obvious: during my visit, I didn't see a single cell phone in the building (students caught with their phone receive a 3 hour detention) and witnessed students RUNNING to their desks so they didn't earn a demerit (4 of those in a 2-week period will also earn one a 3 hour detention). The consequences for the instructional environment were obvious: students were genuinely on-task all of the time. As I observed students along "the Coastline", I saw all of them accessing their personalized learning path, tracking their progress, and working diligently without any self-induced distractions. Students at "the Board" were deeply engaged in the content - not because it was particularly engaging, because it wasn't - but because there was a real culture of achievement in the building. While the rules were strict, the environment was not stifling. In fact, it was quite the opposite: intellectually alive, supportive, and focused on success. As one student told me, "while I sometimes do hate the rules, I also know they're there to help us achieve. It's cool to be a nerd at this school."
"Cool to be a nerd." I think that says it all.
