Edutopia - October/November 2008 - (Page 27)

points to other work—binary math, novel reading (Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower), and essay writing—that relates to the class theme. He adds that teacher Anne Marie Grace also conducts daily warm-ups with articles about new planets, the International Space Station, and citizen astronauts. Ed Cavanaugh grounds the GO&L project in experiential learning. “The classroom is wherever we meet,” he says. “There are no ⇒eld trips; we’re just learning somewhere else.” This group meets regularly at San Francisco’s Aquatic Park, where the students build and sail boats they’ve created using historic local designs. “Lots of lightbulbs go on when you hand them a tape measure,” says Cavanaugh. “It’s real—because if they do it wrong, they waste material.” GO&L students read books like Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and go on eleven-day backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada and the Ventana Wilderness, after studying wilderness ⇒rst aid, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, nutrition, mapping and compassing, and plant identi⇒cation. Such opportunities let kids apply classroom learning. After oohing and ahhing over a night sky undisturbed by city lights on the Pinnacles camping trip, the students spontaneously lie on the ground and start asking questions about stars, satellites, and constellations. Bustos tells his peers, “A lot of these stars are so far away, a lot of them don’t exist anymore; it’s just the light still traveling to us. It’s like looking into the past.” That strikes a chord with Zach Jefferson. “Just think, we’re here, and all that is there, and some stars don’t even exist, and we’re still looking at them. I just think, daaaaammnn,” he says. “You feel left out.” Jefferson had never been to a state or national park, gone camping, or studied the environment before he joined Downtown, but now he speaks at length about Redwood National Park and logging issues in northern California. He addresses the human causes of local wildlife endangerment, too—information he gained while doing local habitat-restoration work. This city kid plans to continue camping after he graduates, and last summer he got a job working with a San Francisco environmental-justice organization, one of the outside groups that partner with his program at Downtown. He says, “I’m much more aware of my city now.” Seriously behind in credits, Daniel Carter came to Downtown in his junior year. (Full disclosure: We never crossed paths, but Carter attended a school where this writer once taught). In Starstruck, something clicked. “I came in thinking, ‘I’m going to learn some stuff about stars,’ and it turns out I really got into it,” he says. “Just think about the galaxies and planets out there we don’t know about; there could be other life out there that we don’t know about.” Four months ago, Carter set up a telescope in his back yard to look for the North Star, Orion’s Belt, and meteor showers. When he showed his mom all the craters on the Moon, she had to look twice to believe what she was seeing. Bumps in the Road Though new to Downtown, Principal Mark Alvarado advocates for the project-based structure and sees the results. As an assistant principal at a comprehensive school in the same district, Alvarado spent two years disciplining one student, he recalls, who was “among the top ten most challenging students I’ve ever worked with.” This past June, he saw her graduate from Downtown. “She’s an entirely different human being,” he says. “I think there’s a psychological effect. Downtown’s the end of the road, and students are doing work successfully that’s outside their comfort zones. Some of the achievements, you just can’t quantify.” Data about continuation schools is hard to gather because of the small and ⇓uctuating student populations. (Downtown, for example, has a capacity for 275 students and sees up to 400 students annually.) Downtown, which keeps its own records, creates internal assessments using the same rubrics across all projects TURNAROUND TEEN Watch former truant Louie Bustos find (see “How To: Design Assessments his passion for astronomy at for Project Learning,” page 29). Staff edutopia.org/downtown-slide-show members celebrate the students who graduate each year—consistently double and triple the number that graduated before project learning was adopted—especially when other district schools have been unsuccessful with the same students. “This school is the achievement gap personi⇒ed,” says Catherine Salvin. “Each student who earns a diploma from this school is a student who wouldn’t otherwise earn one. Graduating 60 to 95 kids a year is no small thing.” Not to suggest that everything is rosy at Downtown. Salvin frets about the kids who never get hooked, and Alvarado wants better data to ⇒nd out where students are academically. He wonders, “Within that group, are the kids problem solvers? Outside the Box: Left: Home base for one ﬁeld trip is this campground at central California’s Pinnacles National Monument. Right: Students in the Wilderness Arts and Literacy Collaborative created these baskets and ceramics. EDUTOPIA.ORG EDUTOPIA 27 http://www.edutopia.org/downtown-slide-show 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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