Pilot Project Status Update

At our department meeting yesterday, Kristin and I gave everyone a quick update on our work and our aspirations. We've got a lot of balls in the air —a lot of plates spinning on dowels? a lot of pans on the fire? a lot of taxis running out of our dispatch hub? a lot of metaphors for this particular situation?—but we focused on three areas: the changes we're making to assignments to foster authenticity in the work; the changes we're making to class structure in order to foster intellectual exchange; and the broader reforms we're looking at for the school as a whole.

To keep things fresh, I used Prezi and excerpted bits and pieces from our blogs and from of my students' blogs. The kids' blogs show a brief intellectual exchange between students developing their own paper topics for J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories. For me, this is a quintessential example of a way to take a useful, time-tested, traditional assignment—the analytical paper—and give it greater authenticity by having kids develop their own topics through intellectual exchange with other students. Harry takes his ideas, which are still a bit unformed, and compares them to Emily's. Her thinking sparks him in a new direction, and he develops an idea that goes quite a bit deeper. Emily, meanwhile, is engaging in the same process with Bridget's thoughts, and the chain continues on beyond the little window I've given you here.

Then, we moved on to some thoughts about broader reform sparked by our visit to the Ross School. We're still engaging in the tough questions about integrating project-based learning and assessment while not losing the strengths we already have. If you work from the assumption that the kids' curricular year is already packed to the gills with useful stuff, it becomes quite a challenge to decide what can be streamlined or cut in favor of something new and potentially better. The better you're doing, the less easy it is to pick something to cut or to find more time for something innovative.