If she doesn’t zoom out, a chemistry teacher might tell herself that her purpose is to teach chemistry. If, instead, she decides that her purpose is to give the young a lifelong relationship to the organic world, new possibilities emerge.

from The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker

HTH Approach to Scale

HTH expanded its influence by hosting thousands of visitors each year. Certainly the quality of student work on display, the sophistication and worldliness of the students, and the innovative products produced make an impression.

And yet visiting educators tended to pose questions to teachers and directors that seemed to be always beside the point: What do you tell parents about test scores? What about the standards? What about math?

These folks were so accustomed to working the wrong problems that they didn’t know what else to ask.

So, we’d point out details only the trained eye would notice: that adults and students adhere to basically the same dress code, that there are no bells or PA systems, that teachers don’t stand while students sit, that the fundamental premises of every interaction are that community members treat one another kindly and respectfully, and that every voice matters and deserves to be heard.

Visitors had difficulty grasping the fundamental fact that the pressure on students and teachers did not come from the union or the board of education (for the most part). Instead, liberating constraints were imposed by the real world: the number of hours in the day, the available tools to produce work of value, the desire to dazzle an audience with what you’ve created.

To illustrate the degree of freedom these authentic constraints imposed, consider the question we asked when designing projects: it’s you and a colleague and fifty students for three or four months: what do you want to do with them that you’ll all remember in twenty or thirty years?#

This is the question we hoped educators would ask themselves after a visit, but it’s a radical one, and takes a certain kind of skill set and temperament to even entertain, never mind operationalize.

So there’s another limit on HTH’s ability to scale: the number of people who can and want to operate with the courage required under such authentic constraints, especially with the incentive structures currently in place for educators, is not large.

Scaling with Building Blocks

HTH occupies a crucial niche in an innovative ecosystem, something even California’s State Superintendent Tom Torlakson, more gentleman-technocratic than radical, recognized at the January 2018 HTH Statewide Benefit Charter renewal hearing. 

Another niche would exists for organizations that empower teachers to design significant learning experiences, but that provide increased scaffolding and accountability. Such an organization must thread the needle indeed; the scaffolding can’t be overly restrictive, or it will poison the well.

Avenues: The World School’s curricular scaffolding and accountability system coheres around the World Elements, a flexible and evolving set of outcomes that constitutes the “intended” curriculum.

Avenues teachers design projects and units of study, the “enacted” curriculum, that allow students to achieve the outcomes through participating in learning experiences and the creation of meaningful products.*

Compared to the Common Core standards, the US’s analogous attempt at an intended curriculum, the Elements are both fewer in number and phrased more generally, granting teachers more latitude for design and creativity. For one example, look at an eighth grade reading common core standard next to an Avenues outcome:

Reading: Literature: Grade 8: Key Ideas and Details:CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.1	Avenues World Element: Reading: 8th Grade, Selected Outcome
Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.	Summarize the main ideas in high school-level texts from a variety of disciplines.

Although these two standards aren’t completely analogous, you can certainly imagine how the common core one narrows the possible approaches a teacher can take to teaching it, while the element outcome deliberately avoids the words (“cite,” “explicitly,” “inferences”) that teachers sometimes use as cover to defend less engaging work for students. In the case of the Avenues outcome, the teacher’s responsibility is to more precisely identify what constitutes effective summary in the context of the project, and to design multiple ways for students to demonstrate proficiency.

Designing with outcomes still requires from teachers considerable courage–to take students on bold learning journeys–as well as finesse–to build skills and knowledge along the way. And if this isn’t difficult enough, whenever teachers believe they’ve figured everything out, they’ll need to change. As mentioned in the previous post, constant innovation is requisite for quality education, and highly problematic for scaling.

So how might Avenues, or any school working this niche, navigate this tension?

Continually iterating on approaches to reaching flexible learning outcomes via authentic work with students will likely require:

• identifying models of excellence at the local and specific level
• maximizing opportunities for iteration, and establishing these as consistent rhythms
• spreading effective design tools and practices

Education does not to the same degree enjoy the network effect that enables software, such as social media platforms, to scale and to exploit scale. Facebook can tell us the answer to this question: to how many people can I instantaneously virtue signal, or share my ennui?

But the question of what will be remembered in twenty, or thirty years? Software can’t answer that: viable responses will only arise through sustained dialogue among striving humans.@

________________________________________________

*Avenues is in most ways an opposite of HTH. Instead of publicly-funded, it is for-pay and for-profit. Instead of serving a diverse and majority economically disadvantaged student body by design, Avenues mostly serves students with staggering financial resources, and provides aid and scholarships to a smaller number of deserving kids. And, importantly: instead of remaining small by design, Avenues is built to scale, with plans for schools in the world’s major cities.

#This is a truly optional footnote: a few of us used to refer to the this period, when we had the great fortune to be asking one another that question, as “that matchless time”–a phrase William Faulkner deployed to describe the period from 1929-1942, when he wrote four masterpieces and basically earned his Nobel Prize.

Just before he wrote these stunning books, Faulkner’s beloved had married a rich lawyer, and William had proven himself incapable of holding a job or achieving literary greatness. But working in this crucible of personal turmoil, ruminating on the American South’s ruinous ongoing history, he became his most present self, with heartbreak, poverty, and desperation fueling his march toward greatness and immortality.

@Humans who should be in possession of the outlaw spirit, because only a true outlaw can honestly ask herself that question. This is another tension: asking such ambitious questions puts pressure on leaders and requires a unique skill set, something I’ll be writing about in more detail soon.