Edutopia - October/November 2008 - (Page 25)

eturning from a 6-mile hike through Pinnacles National Monument, in central California, students from San Francisco’s Downtown High School want only to crawl into their tents and take a nap. Not so fast. First, they have to form groups and formulate written answers to an assigned question: If you were aliens landing on Planet Pinnacles, would you recommend inhabiting this land? Louie Bustos, a high school senior with his San Francisco Giants baseball cap tilted precisely to one side, shares his group’s decision against colonizing. “It lacks our basic necessity for living,” he says. There’s very little water, Bustos elaborates, so “bringing people to this dry, desolate planet would be futile.” Daniel Carter’s group disagrees, identifying resources such as vegetation, insects, birds, and animals. “The sweet aroma of maple blows through the valley below,” Carter reads. “Everything looks promising for further research on Planet Pinnacles.” These students are clearly engaged in learning. Not long ago, they were ready to drop out of school. Firmly on the path leading away from graduation, Bustos, Carter, and their hiking companions made a sharp U-turn, by way of Downtown High School, toward success. Downtown is a continuation high school in southeast San Francisco that educates students whose truancy, lack of credits, early parenthood, behavior, or prior incarceration have put them at risk for dropping out. The student population is predominantly African American and Latino, two ethnic groups that have tended to fall below their peers in achievement rankings, both nationally and locally. “The school is designed to serve the most at-risk, most disenfranchised students in the district, those who haven’t been successful in other schools,” says Catherine Salvin, a longtime Downtown teacher and a member of the school’s leadership team. The school’s approach to reengaging students in learning has an important twist: Downtown’s curriculum is entirely project based. Its alternative format allows students to choose a thematic, integrated pathway of subjects each semester, ⇒nd connections among these subjects in real-world settings, and, hopefully, discover their passions along the way. R Today, California’s at-risk youth ⇒t into many categories; the latest ⇒gures show that some 71,000 students attend 519 continuation schools around the state. Continuation school graduates, who receive a regular diploma, are held to the same core academic requirements as other high school students and must also pass the California High School Exit Exam. The schools vary in structure, size (from 30 to 650 students), and, says Fisher, quality. Some districts are known to use continuation schools as dumping grounds, but the schools also can be places to implement reform, and those that do so often deliver more than a diploma. They can have a lasting impact on students’ lives. Downtown’s history features both extremes. In the mid-1990s, Salvin says, “it was like a bad Hollywood movie about high school,” with weekly ⇒ghts, chaotic passing periods, and rampant absenteeism. In 1998, the staff formed research committees, visited schools around the state, and developed pilot programs in the search for an alternative model for their school. Teachers created schoolwide projects, gave students a choice in scheduling classes, and used minimum days to teach high-interest thematic courses, such as African arts, poetry, even ⇒shing. “We were experimenting,” explains Salvin, “and seeing if kids would come.” The school’s faculty and leadership team settled on a new school design and reopened in fall 1999 with a project-based structure. Ten years in, that structure still holds, built around six core tenets of project-learning curriculum: integration, challenging academics, real-world focus, experiential study, applied learning, and authentic assessment. Students choose one of seven semester-long pathways, or projects—such as Get Out & Learn (GO&L) and Starstruck—with one or two instructors teaching all the subjects and partnering with outside agencies. “We’re engaging kids who are marginal,” says Edward Cavanaugh, an instructor in the GO&L pathway. “They failed the system, or the system failed them. To make them repeat it seems counterproductive.” Stars in Their Eyes Downtown’s structure works well for student Zach Jefferson. “You’re almost like a robot at a traditional high school,” he says. “Here, you actually have a choice about what you want to learn.” There’s power in curriculum integration, adds Starstruck student Daniel Carter. “They might mix astronomy up with math. I’m getting my math credits while doing astronomy, which is the thing that I like, right?” That power is ampli⇒ed when it provides an entree into rigorous academics. Carter Wide-Open Classroom: Opposite: Students gather after a hike to discuss what they saw. Left: Teacher Catherine Salvin describes the physiology of bats. Right: A rock staircase leads students to a lake. Roots in Revolution California introduced continuation schools in 1919 to give young people in rural areas the ⇓exibility to work in agriculture while attending high school. “It was a compassionate and revolutionary idea,” says Dennis Fisher, a consultant in the state Department of Education’s Education Options Of⇒ce. EDUTOPIA.ORG EDUTOPIA 25 http://www.EDUTOPIA.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Edutopia - October/November 2008

Edutopia - October/November 2008 Contents UpFront Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of Class Cool Schools Design: Lessons from the Mall The Bucks Start Here Go Global: Virgil Rocks Big Ideas: Powerful Learning Mapping Their Futures Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Suze Orman

Edutopia - October/November 2008

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