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Successful secondary schools such as those featured in the companion volume to this idea book emphasize authenticity in learning activities. Students have the opportunity to ask questions and study topics they think are important, and they are allowed to influence the pace and direction of their own learning. Teachers frame tasks to have some connection to the world beyond the classroom, making them more than academic exercises. Although these schools hold themselves accountable to conventional curriculum standards, such as those mandated by the state or district, they take very seriously the goal of preparing students to apply knowledge and skills in real-life situations. Their repertoires of authentic tasks include both the familiar and the innovative:
Authentic work has features associated with adult work, but not usually with the work students do in school: It allows for collaboration with peers and teachers and for the flexible use of time.
Studying the features of successful secondary schools led Newmann and Wehlage (1993) to identify five qualities that characterize effective and authentic instruction:
Academically challenging programs can stimulate learning among all students, including those at risk of academic failure. Recent research in cognitive psychology, supported by observations in schools, shows that students learn not by passively absorbing information, but by integrating the new ideas they encounter into their existing knowledge and skills. This understanding of the complexity of the learning process suggests that remedial programs based on the notion that students must master basic skills before they can make sense of advanced knowledge underestimate what students are capable of doing. Instead, remedial programs may postpone more challenging and interesting work for too long. Indeed, by depriving students of a meaningful and motivating context for their work, such programs prompt students' lack of engagement in their schoolwork and frequently result in limited achievement.
Educators are developing new models of intervention that start with what children know and expose them to explicit applications of higher-order thinking traditionally offered only to advanced learners. In a challenging academic curriculum for low achieving students, lessons cede priority to understanding and meaning--for example, by helping students write ideas that an audience familiar to them would care to know and by reasoning mathematically about issues that involve them. In particular, teaching basic skills and concepts in the context of their normal use, rather than in a stream of isolated drills, gives students a framework for synthesizing new material--and remembering it.
Content standards being developed by the states and national subject matter organizations reflect this shift in conceptions of how students learn and how curriculum ought to be structured. The curriculum standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, for example, call for increasing emphasis on mathematical reasoning and communications and for balancing emphasis on computational skills with other appropriate concerns. Likewise, California's curriculum frameworks embed basic skill development in complex applications; for example, its English/Language Arts framework places significant works of literature at the core of instruction, providing students with opportunities to use a range of thinking processes while they analyze substantively compelling text.
Ted Sizer, founder of the Coalition, describes the role of essential questions this way: "We must think first of intellectual coherence for the students. What are the most important matters with which they should engage? How can these be put forward provocatively to engage their minds and attention?" Essential questions engage attention and underscore the importance of the learning to be undertaken. As they pursue answers to essential questions, students develop skills in research, analysis, and synthesis, constructing their own knowledge. An increasing body of evidence from Coalition schools indicates that probing deeply to learn about a topic of interest in a coherent fashion will lead students to become efficient learners who are critical consumers and thoughtful users of new information.
Is experiential learning or service learning as effective as conventional classroom arrangements in developing students' academic competency? Research suggests that community service and other experiential learning programs can and often do have positive effects on the intellectual and social/psychological development of participants. One evaluation of the Experience Based Career Education (EBCE) program sponsored by the National Institute of Education found that EBCE students, who spent as much as 80 percent of a full school year in work settings, scored as well on standardized tests as did comparable full-time students in classrooms. A meta-analysis of 80 external evaluations found that EBCE students gained more than non-EBCE students on tests of academic knowledge (Hamilton, 1986). Student gains in social development and attitude toward school may also justify an investment in experiential learning, at least for some students. One study reports that among the effects of experiential learning programs are a heightened sense of personal and social responsibility, more positive attitudes toward adults and others, more active exploration of careers, enhanced self-esteem, and more complex patterns of thought (Conrad & Hedin, 1991).
Several schools profiled in the companion volume to this idea book have taken this approach. They offer schools-within-schools or whole-school options focused on various occupational areas. Motivated to persist in academics by their career interest, some students pursuing a vocational program have opted at the last minute to go to college and found themselves fully prepared academically because of effectively integrated programs. Others have found entry-level jobs or apprenticeships and gone directly to work, and some in the college-bound cohort develop skills they can apply in part-time work while they pursue their college degrees.
Often high schools that are working to integrate academic and occupational studies profit from partnerships with local community colleges and other two-year institutions of higher education. Many students can benefit from enrolling at these schools while they are still in high school. Community colleges and other two-year institutions offer a range of courses that allow students to pursue their career interests in greater depth and provide them with the college level preparation valued by employers. Because of the open enrollment policy of many community colleges and their general commitment to working with students who are often overlooked by other colleges and universities, these schools are naturally suited to supplementing the work of high schools serving at-risk students.
At the middle school level, students are just learning how to make responsible choices as young adults; they are generally too young to commit to a particular occupational or academic focus. However, they are interested in learning about choices and eager to explore possibilities. Some middle school programs organize curriculum around students' potential career interests and organize programs to allow students to explore options.
Of all the school practices shaping students' experience with the curriculum, perhaps none has been critiqued as severely as tracking. Intended to make teaching simpler and learning more efficient, tracking as it is usually practiced has had negative impacts on the school opportunities and outcomes of many students. In general, researchers have found that students assigned to general or vocational tracks are exposed to less demanding academic curricula than students assigned to college preparatory tracks. In the lower tracks, students participate in lessons that are more often basic skills-oriented, segmented, and simplified; these learning opportunities seldom elicit the kinds of critical thinking and sustained engagement demanded by more complex academic work. Furthermore, in the lower tracks, teachers tend to manage their classrooms differently, demanding conformity to external rules rather than appealing to students' internal motivations and the intrinsic rewards of learning, as they tend to do with higher-track students. This "hidden curriculum" may be even more limiting for lower track students than the explicit course content.
Most reviews of tracking question its benefits for student achievement. Current research indicates that low-track students perform poorly in school in part because they simply do not have opportunities to learn what high-track students learn. Evidence suggests that in many cases heterogeneous classes covering rigorous content using effective teaching strategies produce learning gains for low-achieving students at no cost to the gains of higher-achieving students.
Despite the fact that traditional tracking systems often deprive low-achieving students of adequate opportunities to learn, some forms of homogeneous grouping arrangements are useful in certain contexts, if the system by which students are grouped remains flexible and temporary. One study found that grouping by achievement can be beneficial if:
Unfortunately, few middle, junior high, and high school tracking systems are this flexible or specific. They more often segregate students for all or most of the day into groups defined by "general ability" or achievement rather than by skill in a specific subject, and they are relatively difficult to change. In addition, because poor and minority students often perform poorly on standardized tests for reasons associated with socioeconomic status and home language, secondary school tracking arrangements often result in segregated classes.
Schools have sought to reduce the influence of tracking on students' opportunity to learn and to increase access to challenging academic content for all students in a variety of ways. Some have dismantled tracking systems that were too rigid to serve all students well. Some provide individualized instruction that assumes diversity of ability and interest. Others have attempted to improve opportunities for all students by raising the quality of their lower tracks, eliminating their general track, and integrating vocational and academic curricula. Because no one grouping arrangement will best serve all students all of the time, most successful secondary schools are experimenting with a combination of approaches that raise academic expectations for all students.
In eliminating tracks, schools often move away from a highly sequenced curriculum organized around particular disciplines toward a curriculum organized around themes to be explored through various disciplinary approaches. Teachers adopt instructional strategies that accommodate multiple approaches to learning and depend less on students' similarities in prior achievement and more on their diverse resources. For example, many schools implement cooperative learning, an approach that, when properly used, engages small, heterogeneous groups of students in structured tasks that stimulate individual achievement as well as social skills and integration. In addition to searching for new instructional practices, teachers also explore new assessment strategies that can document student progress at all ability levels. It is often difficult to implement new teaching strategies to support heterogeneous grouping in classrooms enrolling large numbers of students; for teachers struggling with class sizes 30 or more, heterogeneous grouping presents an additional challenge. As a result, large amounts of training and staff development are necessary if these efforts are to be successful.
Several schools profiled in the companion volume to this idea book have adopted heterogeneous grouping strategies and eliminated or avoided tracking completely. In Alternative Middle Years, for example, all classes are grouped heterogeneously, with students of different achievement levels and grade levels sharing each course (except in mathematics, where classes follow a more rigid scope and sequence). Teachers make extensive use of cooperative learning and an array of hands-on learning activities to adapt to the various ages, prior achievement levels, and resources of their students. In the Urban Collaborative Accelerated Program in Providence, Rhode Island, designed for students one or more grades behind their age-mates, instruction is highly individualized. Teachers provide students with opportunities to proceed as quickly as they choose, and they develop competence and master course objectives at rates that permit many to catch up academically. At City Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota, classes with fewer than ten students allow for a similar kind of individualized instruction, accommodating diversity and promoting more efficient study.
Some high schools have improved the substantive content of all programs, regardless of their academic or occupational focus, to ensure that all students are academically challenged. Other schools have eliminated the general track--where the absence of focus too often leads to mediocre experiences--and replaced it with thematic and/or vocational programs that produce better achievement outcomes. Upgrading the quality of vocational programs by infusing them with the relevant content of college preparatory courses and providing more specific, technical courses has also improved educational quality in secondary schools.
The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) reports that many of the schools in their consortium of restructuring schools--High Schools That Work--have replaced general mathematics, general science, and low-level English with more rigorous courses directly related to students' ambitions for work and future studies. Some schools require all students to study algebra and geometry and take two laboratory science courses from the college preparatory curriculum. Many SREB sites have eliminated general, business, and consumer mathematics, and some have done away with pre-algebra as well. According to the SREB, more rigorous course-taking has been associated with higher NAEP scores (Bottoms, Presson, & Johnson, 1992).
Fairdale and other schools like it have not eliminated their vocational education programs to provide the same curriculum to all students; instead, Fairdale began remodeling its general track mathematics courses to deliver the same academic content that college-bound students receive while preserving a program that supports students' career goals. SREB argues that all students can master the essentials of a college preparatory curriculum: the difference should not be in what is taught, but in how it is taught.
Many students who initially declare themselves noncollege bound are inspired to consider further schooling when high schools combine college preparatory and vocational studies. At the eight SREB pilot sites making the greatest gains in achievement and the most progress in integrating academic and vocational education, 54 percent of the students completing vocational programs of study in 1990 planned to continue their studies after high school, compared with 39 percent in 1988, before the schools became part of the SREB program (Bottoms et al., 1992).
Evaluations of the first implementation of the Algebra Project in Cambridge, Massachusetts, demonstrated that poor and minority students--those traditionally most likely to languish in general or remedial mathematics tracks--can succeed in learning higher-level mathematics. All the program participants scored well enough on the district mathematics placement test to enter the college preparatory mathematics sequence in the ninth grade, some going directly into honors algebra and geometry. The project has expanded to about 110 schools in 29 communities across the country, serving more than 45,000 students, predominantly poor and minority.
Schools that have succeeded in raising the academic achievement of disadvantaged students, like the schools profiled in the companion volume to this idea book, have shown that it is possible to enable all students to succeed with a more rigorous, authentic curriculum. Changes in curriculum that have lasting impact on student learning, however, usually require significant changes in the organization of schools as well. In the following section, we turn to a discussion of organizational changes that support increased student learning.
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[Adapting Organizations to Increase Learning]