A crowd of mostly parents of school-aged children gathered last week at Schofield Elementary School for a screening of Most Likely to Succeed, the latest “it” education documentary comparing today’s current system of education that divides students by age, ability, and subject matter with a more progressive, project-based model used at High Tech High in San Diego. The crowd of about 50, themselves looking rather like the Most Likely to Succeed types, gathered in the gym, curious to learn more about the direction education could take.
The movie, named by Education Week as “among the best edu-documentaries ever produced,” kicked off the Sundance Film Festival last December, has been making the rounds all over the country, and has landed in Wellesley for now (see the schedule and get ticket information here). In fact, all Wellesley faculty will see this film on their professional development day the Monday after Thanksgiving (known as the long weekend to you and me).
The film starts out by painting a bleak picture for college graduates, saying that they are in the unique and unenviable position of entering a workforce that first needed fewer people due to a massive shift in technology that devalued muscle power, and now needs fewer people as technology takes care of even skilled tasks. On the muscle power side of things, there’s no call for a guy to move a ton of canned goods from one end of the warehouse to the other when on the storage floors of today, robots can manage just fine. On the skilled side, computers are taking over jobs that once were considered the domain of humans, such as technical writing. According to Most Likely to Succeed, in today’s job market, mental power and creativity count. So it stands to reason that our current education model, developed to give birth to a literate population, and then later to create good factory workers, is outmoded.
One of the film’s talking heads says, “It used to be that you could graduate from high school and get a perfectly average job, purchase a perfectly average home, have a perfectly average life, and have a perfectly average funeral. Now, that high school diploma will not guarantee you any of that. And neither will a college diploma.”
Sobering, unless you are a mover and shaker such as Larry Rosenstock, CEO and founding principal of High Tech High, who has set out to prove that if teachers are given total intellectual freedom and students are taught to work together and talk to each other rather than constantly look to the teacher every step of the way, the result will be creative learners who have the critical thinking skills to thrive in the modern workforce. Teachers at the school are on a one-year contract, no chance of tenure, because it doesn’t exist. In exchange for that level of career instability, they teach to their passions and run their classrooms as they see fit. Students, 50% of whom come from low income families, get in through a lottery system.
When schools use the current model of education, High Tech High teachers say that curiosity has to be flat-out shut down. The Advanced Placement (AP) History course (which is not taught at the school) was used as a prime example. There’s so much material to get through in that course, the movie claims that some AP History teachers tell students that there’s just not time for questions and discussion, that they must plow ever onward in each class to get through the subject matter so that they can score a 4 or a 5 on the AP exam, so that they can get into a good college.
A class like that just wouldn’t fly at High Tech High. Teachers, who readily acknowledge that they cover only 40% – 60% of the content that other schools do, say that depth of knowledge, not breadth, is what’s important. To that end, a good score on an AP exam simply isn’t a priority at the school. The High Tech High philosophy that all students learn in different ways and that hands-on learning is more effective than rote memorization and “learning” to achieve on a test, only to soon after forget material that was supposedly mastered.
High Tech High families are told not to expect classic feedback in the form of test grades or student mastery of state capitals or the rules of grammar, something that can rattle parents who are wondering where the content is, exactly, and where’s the proof that their kids are learning. Not in quizzes and tests. There are none. Not through letter grades on essays. There’s lots of writing in the curriculum, but it doesn’t get graded. One parent, stressing about her child’s preparedness for the SATs says, “I don’t want him to have any doors closed.”
Doors are opened at the school to the entire community once a term, the only time anything close to the idea of “testing” happens there. At that time, families, friends, and community members are invited to see the students’ work, which is largely project-based work and collaborative, as in many of today’s workplaces. The idea is that preparation for the way the workforce operates now should be taught and experienced by students now, in their classrooms, every day.
Watching the students collaborate and plan and get results was what the movie was all about. It generally profiled students who were comfortable and experienced with the way the school worked, and they came across as mature, thoughtful, seekers of knowledge. But are these “typical” kids? I mean, could garden-variety kids (as in mine) work like this?
Well, yes, we can count High Tech High students as garden-variety kids, and because their plot is fertilized properly, they grow in their environment. It’s tempting to look at the High Tech High kids as some sort of West Coast miracles, but the truth is, like kids everywhere, they are real students with real challenges. They procrastinate. They laugh during the serious part of the play during dress rehearsal, frustrating the director. And I even caught a little adolescent eye rolling that snuck through the editing process when a student would get a little too intense, a little too earnest, or revealed him or herself as a bit too much of a true believer to be cool.
I expected them to triumph on exhibition night, and most did, but there was a group that tanked. The viewer could see that it was utterly predictable that this would be this group’s fate, and it was utterly frustrating that no one swooped in there to save that group from itself and its feckless leader. But that’s not how things work there. There is no adult rescue operation swooping in. (((It was a really tough lesson for the entire group, and the viewers, when the group’s project flat out didn’t work on the big night, mostly because the team leader procrastinated, dug in his heels, made excessive changes too close to deadline, and was in denial about how bad off things were, right up until he was faced with the hard truth: the group project didn’t work. ))It made me wonder how the teachers could let one kid be so instrumental in the failure of the project. Why didn’t they step in and say, you know, I think you need to step back from this and try so-and-so’s ideas?
As a parent in town, I doubt I would jump ship from our Wellesley schools even if High Tech High showed up in charter school form in a nearby town. Things seem just group-y and collaborative enough around here already. I have bought into our current system financially and emotionally, and it’s a system I have counted on to make my kids ready for college level work. As far as beyond goes, well…I admit, I’m more like one of those not-quite-all-in families they interviewed who took on more of a first things first attitude. First, let’s get through high school, THEN we can think about all that outside world collaborative stuff.
High Tech High would prefer that I look around a bit more and realize that, as the late poet Maya Angelou notes, “…nobody, but nobody, can make it out here alone.” They believe their way of looking at education is more real-world: Get kids thinking together, working together, and making mistakes together, and there’s nothing they won’t be ready for, in high school, and college, and beyond. In the world according to High Tech High, they are teaching their students to grow into citizens who will be out there in the mix, thinking critically and creatively, and getting things done together.
How sad that educationalists still believe in learning styles when even the United Nations states they do not exist and the greatest myth in education is believed by 97% of teachers! Please read the neuroscientific evidence and understand we have all evolved to learn the same way, read John Hattie’s book and move on with what works best in education.
The movie seems to have set forth a strict dichotomy between the “old-fashioned” way and the High Tech High project based learning way. I wonder if it’s really that cut and dry, and if education needs to be so heavily tilted in one direction versus another.
I’ve surprised at how much of the film’s argument is based on generalizations and oversimplifications. To start with the notion that we in 21st century America are still practicing on a model we inherited from the 19th century is ridiculous. Schools and teachers have been evolving right along with the world and, in fact, in many instances have been evolving ahead of the world for more than a century. Our schools of education–the good ones at least–have for the longest time trained teachers to be creative thinkers who understand the importance of project-based learning, that rote memorization has little educational value (except where committing certain things to memory is necessary to form a foundation for further learning), that there is great value in peer collaboration and the skills one acquires by practicing it, that there are many learning styles and that each student has his/her own to some degree, etc. The suggestion that AP courses discourage discussion and critical thinking is absurd; in fact, those of us who teach AP as it should be know that the reality is exactly the opposite. Likewise, the idea that our schools are stuck in some time warp is just silly. The school where I teach is light years ahead of the high school I attended in the 1970s on every level–of course it is! Moreover, the notion, so persistent in the film, that teachers should incorporate project-based learning and peer collaboration into their classroom environments is nothing new, and the suggestion that it is shows just how naive those who made and praise this film as visionary actually are. Sure, there are schools and teachers who are behind the curve–and there are many reasons for their being so–and many may benefit from seeing the film. But if more critics of education would spend more time in classrooms–which are diverse nationwide in their practices if nothing else–they would realize that there is no American educational system or model that we can either praise or criticize. Rather, we probably have thousands of schools that could serve as success stories all across our country and, therefore, models for others to emulate. We don’t have an “educational system” in crisis; there is no “educational system,” and there is no “crisis.” Instead, we have some failing schools, attended by kids from lower middle income or poor families, children who live in households where English isn’t spoken, or where substance and/or other forms of abuse are present. Whatever failures we have witnessed in our nation’s schools in recent decades, they are not the failures of any particular pedagogy; rather they are the consequences of the larger social problems we face. The sooner we realize that educational failures are social failures (each causing the other) and do something about it, the better positioned our children will be to take on the challenges of this, their century..
Totally agree. Also a teacher and you are correct!