February+2016

Nelson Mac: About time, lucky kids.
It'd be fun to write a brief article here all about leap years and [|leap seconds], but I think I'll pass. This extra February evening affords me the time to write a few things about all of the innovative work going on over at [|Nelson McIntyre Collegiate], as they get ready to launch into a completely new way of approaching high school.

Most of the people who read my stuff are likely familiar with the notions of [|project based learning] (PBL), [|self-paced learning] (SPL), and the current drive to recreate secondary education using models that forego artificial divisions between subjects and arbitrary divisions of time. The recent film [|Most Likely To Succeed] is all about these issues. Imagine a school where you choose your work, make a plan, get support and guidance from teachers and students, and then go about making it happen. No class to class shuffle, no bells, and no glorified tricks of learning to prove some sort of competency. Schools that diverge from the traditional class/subject/bell segments take on many forms, and they are becoming common enough that they are finding their rightful place inside public school systems.

Schools like this have been around for a while. The [|KIPP schools], [|High Tech High] and [|MET schools] all employ forms of schooling that blow up traditional notions of high school that were invented over 120 years ago by the [|Committee of Ten]. The goals of these new, innovative schools are manifold; some seek deeper student engagement with the material, others seek a more thorough development of the whole person, and some recognize that 110 hours in an English classroom and an exam is a brutally arbitrary measure of language competency. No matter what the goals, the common theme is that traditional high schools just do not make sense anymore; not in a world of customization, personalization, and the fine-tuning of individual competencies and engagement. While traditional schools were designed to educate people into uniform cohorts that could all demonstrate the same basic skills, these newly designed schools educate people to be vastly different from one another, and yet also capable of powerful collaboration together.

The new initiative at Nelson McIntyre will turn it into a new kind of high school. In my role on the design team for planning the new school I worked with a number of other thoughtful, caring, and serious teachers to figure out what a new model of schooling could look like for Nelson McIntyre and the students who will begin attending there in September of 2016. We knew that simply adopting somebody's model and applying it here would not work. We looked at the schools I mentioned above, and also at several others as well. The school admin team and representatives from the board office conducted site visits to a few schools that seemed to be doing good work in powerful ways. After all of that data collection, we collaborated to design a school that reflected the needs of the local community and drew upon the advantage of location as well. Nelson McIntyre is the closest high school to [|the Forks], and if students are to learn in context, then the Forks provides a myriad of opportunities for students to powerfully express and explore their own learning and connections to their community.

If you want to know what Winnipeg values in any generation, all you have to do is take a close look at the Forks. In ancient times, the first peoples gathered at the Forks, and there is a [|6,000 year trail of human involvement at the site]. During the fur trade, both the [|HBC and NWC set up shop at the Forks]. When Winnipeg was all about railways, then the Forks became a rail yard, complete with [|Union Station, designed by the same outfit that built Grand Central Station in NYC]. The rail yard gave way to a multi-use [|commercial and cultural district] in the consumer culture of the 1980s. Now, with an ever-growing awareness of human rights in Canadian culture, it should be no surprise that the [|Canadian Museum of Human Rights] has come into being at the Forks. As a teacher, I am excited by the prospect of a [|School growing up at the Forks]; it signals to me that Winnipeg values education in a new way. Not just schooling, but authentic, engrossing and active learning that is supported publicly by the broader community.

Having an opportunity to be a grade nine kid involved in projects at the Forks that lead to high school credits is a win for the student, a win for Nelson McIntyre, and a win for the Forks as well. But designing a new school is much more than setting up a series of recurring field trips. Doing school in a new way means re-thinking what we value, what we want out of students by the time they graduate, and making sure that there's a steak to go along with all of that sizzle. Young people need to know math, science, language, history and culture. They need to have enough ability to sort out good information from better information, especially in our technological society. Finally, when they graduate and become young adults, we want them to be the kinds of people that we'd consider to be good neighbors, since that is exactly who they will become.

Most people still consider high school a four-year trek toward job readiness, and that is certainly the mantra of the private sector. Indeed, job-readiness is a worthwhile goal, but the [|economy is less predictable now than in previous decades], and training workers for factory jobs and white collar work that can be done more easily (and cheaply) by [|robots] and [|artificial intelligence] really seems like a bad waste of tax money. Even the [|Conference Board of Canada is calling for young people to be more creative, collaborative, able to engage in complex tasks in small groups and invent one-off solutions that require applied creativity, determination, and grit.] The new way of learning at Nelson McIntyre Collegiate will tackle these sorts of challenges more directly and effectively than a 120 year old model of glorified cubicle learning. Old high schools segment time, segment subjects, parse it all out, administer exams, and hope for the best. That old model used to be ok. It worked, and you know, I kind of like antiques. However, imagine employing 120 year old management models in business, or in economics. Antiquated ways of educating the public do little to serve the common good as we head into uncertain futures.

Schools are due for a re-design, and that has very little to do with actual bricks and mortar. If we can use the tools we have to create new ways to learn that better prepare all of us for [|life in 2020 and beyond], then bring it on. The [|Propel program at Nelson McIntyre] this year has served as a good testing ground for practicing some of the ideas that will be folded into the new model used next year. In the past couple of days Nelson McIntyre Collegiate has seen some good press from the [|CBC] and the [|Winnipeg Free Press]. The plan to move forward is creative, it is customized for the school, to needs of the community, it is well supported by the school board, and came together after a great deal of thought. This is a good news story for sure, and I'm happy that I got to play a part in helping to design this new way of learning.

For those who still want more, here are a few links that show some of the different ways that schools are changing. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and none of them follow traditional high school design principles. [|Bishop Carroll in Calgary] [|Aspire in California and Tennessee] [|Carpe Diem in Arizona] [|Summit Public Schools in Washington] [|School of Environmental Studies in Minnesota] In all of these schools, all of these changes are designed on purpose. I do not agree with all of the ways that all of these schools are changing, but people are finding reasonable and dramatic ways to innovate education. Schools are designed by people, they are constructed, and as such they can also be deconstructed. Doing things the way they've always been done only works in times where things do not change. We live in changing times, and we need educational design to reflect our current and projected realities. At Nelson McIntyre the changes to educational programming, the delivery of education, and the ways of learning represent a measured and customized model for the school. To wrap it up in four words: about time, lucky kids.