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The Big Picture: Education Is Everyone's Business

By
Dennis Littky, Samantha Grabelle 

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About

What is the purpose of education? What kind of people do we want our children to grow up to be? How can we design schools so that students will acquire the skills they′ll need to live fulfilled and productive lives?

Table of contents

Foreword: On Being Bold by Deborah Meier

Preface

Acknowledgments

Opening Thought

The Real Goals of Education

Kids, Schools, and the Bigger Picture

About the authors

Dennis Littky is director and cofounder of the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (“The Met”), in Providence, Rhode Island, and codirector and cofounder of The Big Picture Company, a non-profit education reform organization that creates and supports small, personalized, public high schools that work in tandem with their communities.

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Samantha Grabelle is Dennis Littky's assistant at The Big Picture Company and The Met. She earned a B.A. with honors in multicultural education from Brown University and a master's degree in social work with a concentration in community organizing from the University of Connecticut School of Social Work, where she was named the Connecticut National Association of Social Workers' Social Work Student of the Year.

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Book details

Product No.
104438
ISBN
978-0-87120-971-9
Release Date
September 2004
Page Count
230
Member Book
Yes

Topics in this book

Policy

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  • Chapter Preview

    One Student at a Time

    “I am more interested in school now because school is more interested in me.”~ A Met student

    In 2002, Eliot Levine wrote a book about The Met called One Kid at a Time. That title is the crux of the Met philosophy. It has always been my philosophy. Another way of putting it is treating everyone alike differently. From the way we design curricula and standards to the way we design schools, we must think of the individual and what he or she needs and wants from education. I cannot state this more strongly: This is the only way schools will really work and the only way every kid will be offered the education he or she deserves. Our kids are being mistreated and abandoned by their schools, and too many are literally dying as a result. We have to save them, one kid at a time.

    Too many of our kids are falling through the cracks, getting lost without anyone even noticing they're missing. We were 10 weeks into our first semester at The Met when Julio got a letter from one of the other local public schools informing him that he had failed gym and would have to report to the principal's office with his parents. Julio had never even enrolled at that school—how in the world did he fail gym? That same year, another of our kids got a letter from another local school warning her that she was in danger of failing a class. Again, she was not even enrolled at that school, and yet somehow, miraculously, she was still passing a class there! This just illustrates how too many of our public schools don't know their kids well enough to even know if the kids are registered or not, let alone what their interests are, what skills they need, or how best to help them learn.

    One size never fits all. One size fits one.~ Tom Peters

    What we need is not just smaller schools and realistic education goals, but authentic relationships between educators and kids. What we need are truly personalized schools. A truly personalized school is ultimately flexible: student groupings, schedules, curriculum, activities, and assessment tools are all created to be appropriate to the students and the situations at hand. In a personalized school, the teachers' primary concern is educating their students, not getting through a certain body of subject matter. And in doing this, their primary concern becomes the individual students themselves.

    No matter how hard schools try, a one-size-fits-all approach to education will always be hit or miss. Can you imagine walking into a medical office and being shuffled off to a room with 20 or 30 other people who have the same complaint or disease, and then watching as the doctor discusses the treatment that all of you will receive before sending everyone out the door with carbon copy prescriptions? Of course not! Doctors see one patient at a time. It's the only way they can really help each person. It's the only way that makes sense.

    I want to attend The Met school because the school I am currently attending is not a good learning environment for me. The teachers at my school don't understand me and my ways of learning.~ From an 8th grader's Met application essay

    Schools that are serious about fulfilling every student's promise must develop structures and relationships that nurture the strengths and energies of each student. Truly personalized learning requires reorganizing schools to start with the student, not the subjects or classes. A school that tries to take personalized education to its full potential is equally concerned with what knowledge students acquire as with how the individual students use and apply that knowledge. The priority at such a school is to know students and their families well enough to ensure that every learning experience excites the students to learn more. There are many great small, personalized schools that do all of this. What I'm saying is, they need to take the idea of personalized learning to the next step: to where every student has a completely different curriculum, based on who he or she is right now and who he or she wants to become.

    Central to the idea of treating everyone alike differently is understanding that there cannot be a uniform curriculum for every student in the country—or for every student in a single school or classroom, for that matter. Force-feeding kids a rigidly defined body of knowledge is in total opposition to what we know about learning. Everything I know about kids tells me that there is no content that's right for every kid. Photosynthesis or iambic pentameter may be very important to you, but they aren't to me, at least not right now.

    On the larger scale, by following a philosophy of one student at a time, a school is creating an atmosphere where kids worry more about failing themselves than they do about competing with others. It is making a place where everyone can create and get into a lot of different things and where everyone is developing as an individual. The school is acknowledging (as we did at Thayer, when we put it at the front and center of our school's mission) that its goal is for “all our students to choose a place in life, rather than being forced into one.”

    This kind of school is also able to create an environment where diversity is truly respected and celebrated. There's a lot of lip service paid to diversity, but when you approach education one student at a time, you are forced to recognize, and work with, each child's individual background, native language, gender, abilities, family situation, and whatever else plays a role in their life as a learner. I love this quote, which is from Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander's The Art of Possibility:Michelangelo is often quoted as having said that inside every block of stone or marble dwells a beautiful statue; one need only remove the excess material to reveal the work of art within. If we were to apply this visionary concept to education, it would be pointless to compare one child to another. Instead, all the energy would be focused on chipping away at the stone, getting rid of whatever is in the way of each child's developing skills, mastery, and self-expression. 1

    * * *

    Does running a school one kid at a time mean putting less time into the creation of an interdependent community? Some may wonder about this, and I agree that it's an important philosophical and practical concern. Attention must be paid to balancing each student's sense that he or she is an individual<EMPH TYPE="3">anda member of a community. To this end, the school must work hard at creating an environment that respects the individual but at the same time expects him or her to be a part of the community and respectful of it, too. The United States struggles with this as a nation, and we struggle with it every day at The Met. But even when it's a struggle, I believe we are closer than most schools to realizing this balance because we recognize that it's a much more important goal than practicing for standardized tests or rewriting our discipline code.

    And, of course, The Met is closer to achieving this balance because we are a small school. When you only have 110 kids, educating one kid at a time and building a strong sense of community both come easier. Because small schools also mean smaller faculties, it's easier to find that healthy balance between building a community of educators and providing professional development “one staff member at a time.” At The Met, we approach professional development the same way we build our kids' learning plans. Everyone has their own plan, and we look for things that the group as a whole needs. It is a much more natural approach than the one most schools are taking. We give our people what they need at the time that they need it and in an ongoing way. Principals watch teachers, talk to them about their strengths and weaknesses, give them ideas, and help brainstorm solutions. When only one teacher is struggling with an issue, the other teachers aren't forced to sit through a three-hour training session on it.

    In theory, sending teachers to teaming workshops or bringing in experts to lecture on adolescent development is good. But in practice, it doesn't connect for each teacher. It's just another example of an inadequate, one-size-fits-all approach. We must begin to think of teachers (and principals) as learners, too, and approach their learning needs one at a time. School must be a growing place for everyone. If the teachers are learning and growing, then the students will be, too.

    Approaching education and the design of a school from a one kid at a time perspective is a big change from the traditional way of doing things, and it means looking at all the major and minor components of schooling through a new lens. It is possible to treat everyone alike differently, even when it comes to some of education's most complex tasks: designing curriculum and handling discipline.

    Curriculum

    Don't depend on the curriculum: there never was a course in insight.~ John Ciardi 2

    Obviously, this whole book is about curriculum development in the broadest sense of the word. If your true focus is teaching and learning, then everything you do—from setting up the rules of the school, to training principals, to working with parents—is “developing the curriculum.” Here, I just want to highlight three points that best demonstrate how starting with a philosophy of one student at a time changes the lens you use when you approach curriculum development.

    First, all students' educational programs should be designed by the people who know them best: their parents, their teachers, and themselves. Parents have got to be involved from the start—right when we first start talking about designing their kids' curriculum. They have as much expertise about their own kids as we have about educating. In two of my former schools, some of my more radical ideas came under attack from parents and others in the community, so getting parents involved in the intensive way we do at The Met was, in a way, a selfish gesture. Of course, I'm partly joking here, but it's true that they can't yell at me about what they themselves have developed and decided is right for their own kids.

    Education people always say parents are their kids' first teachers. So part of our role when thinking about what to teach is to really listen to the parents when they say this is what my kid does at home; this is how my kid responds; this is what gets my kid excited about learning; my kid's only had one good year at school and this is why; and so on. It's about respecting the parent in the same way you have to respect the kid, who, even though he's only 15, really does have an idea about who he is and what he needs. (And if he says he doesn't have an idea, we know we just have to look and listen harder.)

    Some may see this goal—creating the best curriculum for each individual kid—as making the job of the teacher even more taxing. In fact, having the flexibility to do whatever you can to make school work for each individual kid makes it a much more natural job. Teachers are free to be creative in the way they solve problems and work with each individual student. They are not confined by a rigid, abstract curriculum that doesn't have anything to do with the very real kids in front of them. In this way, being an “advisor” to each individual kid is a much more natural role than being the “teacher” of a classroom of diverse students.

    Second, we've got to teach students skills<EMPH TYPE="3">andknowledge. Probably the most important skills kids should learn are how to find more knowledge and how to actually get things done. I see so many college students who have no idea how to approach a project because they have never been taught how to actually do things, like make a professional phone call, or network or plan a rally. Plus, in this age of computers and technology, the amount of information out there increases every second, and teaching a limited body of knowledge is no longer as practical as it once was. Motivating students to want knowledge and teaching the skills they need to get knowledge have become so much more important. We've all heard the saying that it's better to teach someone how to fish than to just give him a fish. Why can't we understand that it is better to teach students the skills they will need to find the information themselves than it is to just hand them a list of facts (or presidents or elements) to memorize? Why do we just keep giving them another fish, day after day? What miracle are we hoping will happen when they are 18 or 22 that will give them the real skills they need to be successful in life?

    Third, we've got to use and celebrate the real world around us. Here's another quote I love, from the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore: “We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him grammar.”

    When we first started The Met, there was criticism that our curriculum was “too random.” To me, this is ridiculous. Textbooks are random. A history textbook will leap from one war to the next to the next in a matter of pages. A biology book will spend three paragraphs on the digestive system and then switch completely over to the nervous system. And textbook publishers say kids have to finish the biology book before they can read the chemistry book because that is the “right order” to learn things. Who gave them so much authority? By the way, did you know that in the United States only four publishers (Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson) control 70 percent of the textbook market?<FOOTNOTE><NO>3</NO>The Center for Education Reform. “The Textbook Conundrum.” Washington, DC: Author (May 2001): 1. Available:http://www.edreform.com/_upload/textbook.pdf or by writing to The Center for Education Reform, Suite 204, 1001 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036.</FOOTNOTE> If that's not heading toward a “national curriculum”—the exact opposite of teaching one kid at a time—then I don't know what is.

    One thing I want to point out here is that even if the textbooks teachers rely on are put together in an order that makes chronological or even developmental sense, that order is still an external one. The order we should be paying attention to is the one inside the kid. So if Marcus is into poetry right now, he shouldn't have to read Hemingway because that's what the 10th grade curriculum requires. He should be reading and writing poetry now because that's the right order for him! Traditional curriculum development looks at all the information we have and determines what needs to go inside each kid. Instead, we need to look at what's already inside the kid and use it to figure out how to help him learn more.

    One of my staff once told me how she wasn't allowed to follow her interests and write a paper on the Vietnam War in high school because they were still on the Revolutionary War in their textbook. I, in turn, told her one of my favorite Met kid stories. Daniel knew I had been to Southeast Asia and would always ask me questions about Vietnam. One day, I asked him why he was so interested, and he told me that since he was 10 years old, he had been trying to get his dad to talk about the war. Daniel's father was a veteran who was so affected by his experience in Vietnam that he would not speak to his family about it at all. Then Daniel started doing research and writing about his father's war. His dad finally opened his drawer and showed his son his medals.

    There's more: As part of his “curriculum” at The Met, Daniel took a college training course for teachers on how to teach the Vietnam War. He got an internship helping another local Vietnam veteran build a memorial. By the time Daniel's senior project came around, he had opened up the conversation with his father so much that the two of them worked together to raise enough money for them both to fly to Vietnam. Daniel was 18 then, the same age his father was when he had flown there the first time. Together, they toured the country and learned about the war and its effects on the land and the people. They both kept journals. When they returned, father and son went around and gave speeches about their experience. Daniel even developed a Web site to help other kids talk to their parents about the war. As of this writing, Daniel is a senior in college, preparing to graduate with a degree in history and return to The Met as an advisor.

    We “allowed” Daniel to study the Vietnam War at that moment, in that way, because that was the “prescribed” curriculum he needed at that time. Again, there is no one body of content that is right for every kid.

    This story also speaks to another piece of learning that formal curriculum development rarely addresses: the importance of getting outside your own environment to make learning real. The curriculum has got to include experiences that lift kids' heads way up and take them out of their textbooks, their classrooms, their towns, even their countries, if possible. In 1996, one of our Met students—a quiet, inner-city kid from a poor family—went on an Outdoor Leadership trip to New Hampshire, and it changed his life. When he came home, he sat on his bed with his mom and talked to her about the experience for two hours, the longest he had ever spoken to her about school. She said it was the best thing that ever happened to her. Another kid on that trip had a similar experience and described it this way: “I was like a clam, all closed up, and then the clam just opens and out I come, like a flower blooming.” And then there was Sonya, a really tough kid who had never seen school as all that important, but had expressed some interest in the history of African Americans. The Met was able to send her on a “Freedom Ride” with a civil rights activist from a local college. Sonya was the youngest person to join this professor and his students on a trip through the South to visit the most important sites of the civil rights era, including the Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four girls were killed by a bomb; the Birmingham park where demonstrators were assaulted by police using fire hoses and dogs; and the Montgomery bus stop where Rosa Parks was arrested. When Sonya came back, it blew me away to hear one of the most significant things she took away from this experience. She said, “I used to come in late to school, didn't really care about it. But when I learned that people died for my right to go to school, I look at it so differently now.”

    At The Met, we seek out whatever resources we can—and there are tons out there—to help students bring their personalized curricula to life. We consider day outings, overnight trips, and (especially) full-immersion travel experiences, like Sonya's and Daniel's, to be essential to this kind of learning. Through parents' support, students' own fund raising, scholarships, or by bringing them along with us on our own trips to conferences, other Big Picture Schools, and so on, we try to ensure that each of our students has at least one real travel experience while they are at The Met. The next few pages show excerpts from Met students' journals and reports describing their unique adventures. They are fantastic. They describe curricula that could never come from a textbook. They show what learning should be like for every kid.

    Figure

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    Discipline

    I . . . began to understand how to use conflict and contradictions to promote learning.~ Myles Horton

    I'm calling this section “Discipline” because that's the school word, but it's not a word I like. When you look up discipline in Webster's, the first word in the definition is “training.” What we know as discipline in education today doesn't “train” kids to do anything but feel disciplined. Personally, I don't think we should even use the word in schools, and I would love to turn around the whole way people think about it.

    I also don't like the way we use the word “punishment,” because that's the wrong word, too. I know that most of us think discipline is doling out punishment and consequences. But I believe it's got to be about doing what's right to help the kid and the community. When a kid gets in the way of others' learning and hurts the community in some way, we have to intervene with the same goal we have in doing anything else in the school. The goal of an educator is to keep kids learning and growing, and so you do whatever you can to help the kid, and all the kids, continue to learn and grow. Yes, sometimes this may look like punishment or consequences, but punishment is never the point. The point is not even justice, but instead doing whatever is necessary to help the kid grow, protect the community, and preserve the culture so that that kid and all the others will go on growing. I can't say it enough. If you start with these thoughts in mind, and approach problems with learning as the goal, not discipline and punishment, then you are helping to create a personalized school where “one kid at a time” is possible.

    When I talked about school atmosphere in Chapter 3, I pushed the idea that you cannot make rules based on the exception. Dewey said the same thing back in 1938: “Exceptions rarely prove a rule or give a clew [sic] to what the rule should be.” 4 This is the first step to changing the way we look at discipline in school.

    One of the first things I did at Thayer was initiate a long process where the kids rewrote all the school's rules. Every kid was involved. It's amazing, but kids always come up with more rules than their teachers would. After you limit them to the stuff that's really important, you see that they pretty much want the same things we adults want: no fighting, no drugs, respect each other, respect the school, and so on. I guarantee that if you let the kids write the rules (and ask them to keep them clear and simple), not only will you get the rules you wanted in the first place, but the kids will be umpteen times more likely to follow them because they are their rules. This, of course, also relates to treating kids with respect and dignity. What you dole out is what you get back. It's so important to remember that a school needs rules for the same reason drivers need traffic lights: so everyone can move ahead safely and smoothly without obstacles getting in the way.

    Once you've got the rules about which behaviors are desired and which are not allowed, and the rules are consistent and simple, of course you have to follow them. But when a situation warrants a student feeling the consequences of his or her actions, it's critical that you don't automatically jump to the old standards: detention, suspension, or expulsion. The consequences of a student's actions must make sense—just as they do in the natural world and (usually) do in the adult world. If you're going to give a kid a three-day suspension for fighting, then it needs to be clear that three days is how long you feel the school and the kid need to recover from the incident. Or if you're going to punish a kid for being disrespectful, then you have got to do it in a respectful way.

    Good educators think of how to make the punishment match the problem, or how to make the punishment more productive through things like assigning community service rather than suspension. But I'm saying you have to look even deeper at the problem and the solution. The job is to both figure out how to help the kid solve his or her problem and how to make sure the kid and the entire school community keep on learning and growing. So if you put a kid out of the room because he's not taking anything seriously, then your motives should be to help that kid grow by teaching him what's serious and what's not, and to help the community get back to work.

    A few years ago, one of The Met's advisories spent an hour and a half helping one of their classmates understand why the fight he'd started earlier in the day was putting the whole school in danger. Afterward, that kid wrote me a note saying how worthwhile the discussion had been and how he'd gone to each student who saw the fight, apologized for his behavior, and explained to them that he was really “not like that.”

    The culture of the school said fighting is not cool, but it also said owning up to your actions and talking it out is cool. This kid's punishment not only had meaning, but also enabled him to go even further: to communicating his feelings about the crime and the punishment in a positive way. What would he, or I, or the school have gained if I had chosen to suspend him for two weeks instead? Or, as schools with zero-tolerance policies now do, if I had expelled him and denied him any further learning at all? It's not about the punishment a kid gets, but the effect that punishment has and the learning that happens as a result.

    Too often, educators use discipline methods to avoid dealing with real problems. Detention as a school policy is an example of an easy solution to a problem—totally disregarding why the problem occurred in the first place. The philosophy of one student at a time forces you to look at problems in relation to the student, the current situation, and the family. It is disturbing to me to see the ways administrators mete out punishments without finding out more information. In fact, it is professionally and humanely unsound, and totally disrespectful to the students.

    For example, detention policies are notoriously useless. Yet educators keep using them and wondering why the same kids come back to the detention room every week. And when students don't show up to detention, what happens to them? They get suspended. Ridiculous.

    In contrast, the philosophy of one kid at a time would suggest that the teacher or principal first ask why the kid is late or keeps bothering the other students or whatever the problem is. Then maybe it makes sense to bring the kid's family in to help everyone get a better understanding of the problem. Then the student, family, and teacher could agree on a unique solution that they all think will help solve the problem.

    A student's misbehavior has to be viewed not as a behavior that needs to be punished, but rather as a behavior that needs to be changed. The idea is to help a student be involved in changing his behavior, not just to punish him or try to change the behavior for him. In most cases, I really don't think you have to “teach kids a lesson.” (Just getting caught is really lesson enough.) You just have to think about what's next.

    Maybe once every three years, I get freaked out by a really serious offense. In every other case, I know punishment is an option, but it's only one of a dozen, and it's never my first instinct. Usually, I just ask, “Why'd you do that?” In traditional schools, we tend to look for the neatest, quickest solutions, but changing behavior is a messy business, and we really have to commit to trying to solve each problem in a way that respects the student and his or her family. We have to commit to getting to know each child individually. No personalized school can work without this effort. 5

    At one of my schools, I had a physical education teacher who was making kids stay after school for refusing to change clothes for gym. When I found out, I asked the teacher to talk with each kid and ask why he wasn't changing. The answers were enlightening and gave way to very different solutions for each student. One boy admitted he was embarrassed about his skinny legs and couldn't afford sweat pants. The solution? We bought him a pair of $9.95 sweat pants. The boy never missed another gym class. Another boy didn't want to take his clothes off in front of the other kids. The solution? He just wore gym clothes under his jeans when he came to school. He also never missed another class.

    Sometimes you need a really creative solution. Steven had dropped out of his previous school and was on his third try at 9th grade. He was getting to school two or three hours late every day. Rather than just give him detention or some other meaningless punishment, we tried to help him change his sleep habits. When that didn't work, we asked more questions and learned that his mother left the house two hours before Steven needed to get up for school. So we tried calling him to wake him up. That didn't work either. Finally, we decided that Steven would get up at the same time his mom did, and she would drop him off at my house on her way to work. I was already up at that time to start my t'ai chi and do my run. Steven and I worked out together every morning after that, and then drove into school together. He was never late again. In fact, he later quit his band because he was frustrated that other members couldn't get to practice on time!

    You could consider this an extreme example, but it's not extreme in the sense that it just fit. Steven's mom was a part of the plan, and I was already into that routine. No principal can do something like this for every kid, but he or she can do it in the situations when it works for everyone involved. He or she can be creative and use available resources to help the student. So this example may sound extreme, but it was really just finding a solution that made sense, fit the situation, and changed the behavior rather than punished it.

    * * *

    When it comes to discipline, another thing that has to happen is that the principal and teachers must look at each behavior problem as not just the student's problem, but also as a problem of the environment. They have to ask themselves, what is it about the school that is contributing to the student getting into trouble? For example, we all know that in the classes that kids enjoy, there are few or no behavior problems. And we know that kids enjoy a class when they're involved. If they're doing a project on something they're interested in, something that's realworld related and has real-world consequences, then they don't tend to pass notes or ask to go to the bathroom 10 times. You have to look at the environment. If kids are interested in what they're doing, they won't need to come up with distractions or find something they'd rather be doing.

    Making the learning interesting is just as basic to working with kids as making the learning—and the discipline—their own. The results of pushing the usual external discipline can be seen in many classrooms: The students are sitting quietly and looking respectful, yet when the teacher turns away, they start making vulgar hand signals or looking at other students' test answers. At The Met, we try to help students develop their own discipline. We believe if the student has self-discipline, then, with effort, he or she can do anything well at any time.

    Once, some students from another school were visiting us at The Met. At the end of the day, we debriefed with them. One girl, who had been sitting with a group of students working on projects, said she kept looking for a secret camera because everyone was working so hard. Someone must have been watching, she said. Of course, there was no camera. The work was interesting to the students, so self-discipline came easily.

    At The Met, we find out what the student is interested in and then help her set her own goals and standards around learning more about that interest. Our graduates who have gone off to college come back and tell us they are way ahead of other kids because they know how to organize their time and do their work without a lot of direction. That is the result of self-discipline. Our students develop it because, as many say, they have to. Personalizing education means not only personalizing the support each student receives, but also greatly increasing the amount of responsibility each student has for his or her own learning.

    So now I'm in charge of my own learning, and I love it. Sometimes there are bumps in the road, but I manage to overcome them, whether it's by meeting with my advisor or taking things one at a time. We are allowed to learn at our own paces, and that's what makes the school successful (along with other things). This school is set up in an unusual way, but it is cool.~ Excerpt from a Met student's essay, required as part of the Gateway into the 11th grade

    Questions to Further This Conversation . . .

    Printed by for personal use only

    One Student at a Time

    “I am more interested in school now because school is more interested in me.”~ A Met student

    In 2002, Eliot Levine wrote a book about The Met called One Kid at a Time. That title is the crux of the Met philosophy. It has always been my philosophy. Another way of putting it is treating everyone alike differently. From the way we design curricula and standards to the way we design schools, we must think of the individual and what he or she needs and wants from education. I cannot state this more strongly: This is the only way schools will really work and the only way every kid will be offered the education he or she deserves. Our kids are being mistreated and abandoned by their schools, and too many are literally dying as a result. We have to save them, one kid at a time.

    Too many of our kids are falling through the cracks, getting lost without anyone even noticing they're missing. We were 10 weeks into our first semester at The Met when Julio got a letter from one of the other local public schools informing him that he had failed gym and would have to report to the principal's office with his parents. Julio had never even enrolled at that school—how in the world did he fail gym? That same year, another of our kids got a letter from another local school warning her that she was in danger of failing a class. Again, she was not even enrolled at that school, and yet somehow, miraculously, she was still passing a class there! This just illustrates how too many of our public schools don't know their kids well enough to even know if the kids are registered or not, let alone what their interests are, what skills they need, or how best to help them learn.

    One size never fits all. One size fits one.~ Tom Peters

    What we need is not just smaller schools and realistic education goals, but authentic relationships between educators and kids. What we need are truly personalized schools. A truly personalized school is ultimately flexible: student groupings, schedules, curriculum, activities, and assessment tools are all created to be appropriate to the students and the situations at hand. In a personalized school, the teachers' primary concern is educating their students, not getting through a certain body of subject matter. And in doing this, their primary concern becomes the individual students themselves.

    No matter how hard schools try, a one-size-fits-all approach to education will always be hit or miss. Can you imagine walking into a medical office and being shuffled off to a room with 20 or 30 other people who have the same complaint or disease, and then watching as the doctor discusses the treatment that all of you will receive before sending everyone out the door with carbon copy prescriptions? Of course not! Doctors see one patient at a time. It's the only way they can really help each person. It's the only way that makes sense.

    I want to attend The Met school because the school I am currently attending is not a good learning environment for me. The teachers at my school don't understand me and my ways of learning.~ From an 8th grader's Met application essay

    Schools that are serious about fulfilling every student's promise must develop structures and relationships that nurture the strengths and energies of each student. Truly personalized learning requires reorganizing schools to start with the student, not the subjects or classes. A school that tries to take personalized education to its full potential is equally concerned with what knowledge students acquire as with how the individual students use and apply that knowledge. The priority at such a school is to know students and their families well enough to ensure that every learning experience excites the students to learn more. There are many great small, personalized schools that do all of this. What I'm saying is, they need to take the idea of personalized learning to the next step: to where every student has a completely different curriculum, based on who he or she is right now and who he or she wants to become.

    Central to the idea of treating everyone alike differently is understanding that there cannot be a uniform curriculum for every student in the country—or for every student in a single school or classroom, for that matter. Force-feeding kids a rigidly defined body of knowledge is in total opposition to what we know about learning. Everything I know about kids tells me that there is no content that's right for every kid. Photosynthesis or iambic pentameter may be very important to you, but they aren't to me, at least not right now.

    On the larger scale, by following a philosophy of one student at a time, a school is creating an atmosphere where kids worry more about failing themselves than they do about competing with others. It is making a place where everyone can create and get into a lot of different things and where everyone is developing as an individual. The school is acknowledging (as we did at Thayer, when we put it at the front and center of our school's mission) that its goal is for “all our students to choose a place in life, rather than being forced into one.”

    This kind of school is also able to create an environment where diversity is truly respected and celebrated. There's a lot of lip service paid to diversity, but when you approach education one student at a time, you are forced to recognize, and work with, each child's individual background, native language, gender, abilities, family situation, and whatever else plays a role in their life as a learner. I love this quote, which is from Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander's The Art of Possibility:Michelangelo is often quoted as having said that inside every block of stone or marble dwells a beautiful statue; one need only remove the excess material to reveal the work of art within. If we were to apply this visionary concept to education, it would be pointless to compare one child to another. Instead, all the energy would be focused on chipping away at the stone, getting rid of whatever is in the way of each child's developing skills, mastery, and self-expression. 1

    * * *

    Does running a school one kid at a time mean putting less time into the creation of an interdependent community? Some may wonder about this, and I agree that it's an important philosophical and practical concern. Attention must be paid to balancing each student's sense that he or she is an individual<EMPH TYPE="3">anda member of a community. To this end, the school must work hard at creating an environment that respects the individual but at the same time expects him or her to be a part of the community and respectful of it, too. The United States struggles with this as a nation, and we struggle with it every day at The Met. But even when it's a struggle, I believe we are closer than most schools to realizing this balance because we recognize that it's a much more important goal than practicing for standardized tests or rewriting our discipline code.

    And, of course, The Met is closer to achieving this balance because we are a small school. When you only have 110 kids, educating one kid at a time and building a strong sense of community both come easier. Because small schools also mean smaller faculties, it's easier to find that healthy balance between building a community of educators and providing professional development “one staff member at a time.” At The Met, we approach professional development the same way we build our kids' learning plans. Everyone has their own plan, and we look for things that the group as a whole needs. It is a much more natural approach than the one most schools are taking. We give our people what they need at the time that they need it and in an ongoing way. Principals watch teachers, talk to them about their strengths and weaknesses, give them ideas, and help brainstorm solutions. When only one teacher is struggling with an issue, the other teachers aren't forced to sit through a three-hour training session on it.

    In theory, sending teachers to teaming workshops or bringing in experts to lecture on adolescent development is good. But in practice, it doesn't connect for each teacher. It's just another example of an inadequate, one-size-fits-all approach. We must begin to think of teachers (and principals) as learners, too, and approach their learning needs one at a time. School must be a growing place for everyone. If the teachers are learning and growing, then the students will be, too.

    Approaching education and the design of a school from a one kid at a time perspective is a big change from the traditional way of doing things, and it means looking at all the major and minor components of schooling through a new lens. It is possible to treat everyone alike differently, even when it comes to some of education's most complex tasks: designing curriculum and handling discipline.

    Curriculum

    Don't depend on the curriculum: there never was a course in insight.~ John Ciardi 2

    Obviously, this whole book is about curriculum development in the broadest sense of the word. If your true focus is teaching and learning, then everything you do—from setting up the rules of the school, to training principals, to working with parents—is “developing the curriculum.” Here, I just want to highlight three points that best demonstrate how starting with a philosophy of one student at a time changes the lens you use when you approach curriculum development.

    First, all students' educational programs should be designed by the people who know them best: their parents, their teachers, and themselves. Parents have got to be involved from the start—right when we first start talking about designing their kids' curriculum. They have as much expertise about their own kids as we have about educating. In two of my former schools, some of my more radical ideas came under attack from parents and others in the community, so getting parents involved in the intensive way we do at The Met was, in a way, a selfish gesture. Of course, I'm partly joking here, but it's true that they can't yell at me about what they themselves have developed and decided is right for their own kids.

    Education people always say parents are their kids' first teachers. So part of our role when thinking about what to teach is to really listen to the parents when they say this is what my kid does at home; this is how my kid responds; this is what gets my kid excited about learning; my kid's only had one good year at school and this is why; and so on. It's about respecting the parent in the same way you have to respect the kid, who, even though he's only 15, really does have an idea about who he is and what he needs. (And if he says he doesn't have an idea, we know we just have to look and listen harder.)

    Some may see this goal—creating the best curriculum for each individual kid—as making the job of the teacher even more taxing. In fact, having the flexibility to do whatever you can to make school work for each individual kid makes it a much more natural job. Teachers are free to be creative in the way they solve problems and work with each individual student. They are not confined by a rigid, abstract curriculum that doesn't have anything to do with the very real kids in front of them. In this way, being an “advisor” to each individual kid is a much more natural role than being the “teacher” of a classroom of diverse students.

    Second, we've got to teach students skills<EMPH TYPE="3">andknowledge. Probably the most important skills kids should learn are how to find more knowledge and how to actually get things done. I see so many college students who have no idea how to approach a project because they have never been taught how to actually do things, like make a professional phone call, or network or plan a rally. Plus, in this age of computers and technology, the amount of information out there increases every second, and teaching a limited body of knowledge is no longer as practical as it once was. Motivating students to want knowledge and teaching the skills they need to get knowledge have become so much more important. We've all heard the saying that it's better to teach someone how to fish than to just give him a fish. Why can't we understand that it is better to teach students the skills they will need to find the information themselves than it is to just hand them a list of facts (or presidents or elements) to memorize? Why do we just keep giving them another fish, day after day? What miracle are we hoping will happen when they are 18 or 22 that will give them the real skills they need to be successful in life?

    Third, we've got to use and celebrate the real world around us. Here's another quote I love, from the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore: “We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him grammar.”

    When we first started The Met, there was criticism that our curriculum was “too random.” To me, this is ridiculous. Textbooks are random. A history textbook will leap from one war to the next to the next in a matter of pages. A biology book will spend three paragraphs on the digestive system and then switch completely over to the nervous system. And textbook publishers say kids have to finish the biology book before they can read the chemistry book because that is the “right order” to learn things. Who gave them so much authority? By the way, did you know that in the United States only four publishers (Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson) control 70 percent of the textbook market?<FOOTNOTE><NO>3</NO>The Center for Education Reform. “The Textbook Conundrum.” Washington, DC: Author (May 2001): 1. Available:http://www.edreform.com/_upload/textbook.pdf or by writing to The Center for Education Reform, Suite 204, 1001 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036.</FOOTNOTE> If that's not heading toward a “national curriculum”—the exact opposite of teaching one kid at a time—then I don't know what is.

    One thing I want to point out here is that even if the textbooks teachers rely on are put together in an order that makes chronological or even developmental sense, that order is still an external one. The order we should be paying attention to is the one inside the kid. So if Marcus is into poetry right now, he shouldn't have to read Hemingway because that's what the 10th grade curriculum requires. He should be reading and writing poetry now because that's the right order for him! Traditional curriculum development looks at all the information we have and determines what needs to go inside each kid. Instead, we need to look at what's already inside the kid and use it to figure out how to help him learn more.

    One of my staff once told me how she wasn't allowed to follow her interests and write a paper on the Vietnam War in high school because they were still on the Revolutionary War in their textbook. I, in turn, told her one of my favorite Met kid stories. Daniel knew I had been to Southeast Asia and would always ask me questions about Vietnam. One day, I asked him why he was so interested, and he told me that since he was 10 years old, he had been trying to get his dad to talk about the war. Daniel's father was a veteran who was so affected by his experience in Vietnam that he would not speak to his family about it at all. Then Daniel started doing research and writing about his father's war. His dad finally opened his drawer and showed his son his medals.

    There's more: As part of his “curriculum” at The Met, Daniel took a college training course for teachers on how to teach the Vietnam War. He got an internship helping another local Vietnam veteran build a memorial. By the time Daniel's senior project came around, he had opened up the conversation with his father so much that the two of them worked together to raise enough money for them both to fly to Vietnam. Daniel was 18 then, the same age his father was when he had flown there the first time. Together, they toured the country and learned about the war and its effects on the land and the people. They both kept journals. When they returned, father and son went around and gave speeches about their experience. Daniel even developed a Web site to help other kids talk to their parents about the war. As of this writing, Daniel is a senior in college, preparing to graduate with a degree in history and return to The Met as an advisor.

    We “allowed” Daniel to study the Vietnam War at that moment, in that way, because that was the “prescribed” curriculum he needed at that time. Again, there is no one body of content that is right for every kid.

    This story also speaks to another piece of learning that formal curriculum development rarely addresses: the importance of getting outside your own environment to make learning real. The curriculum has got to include experiences that lift kids' heads way up and take them out of their textbooks, their classrooms, their towns, even their countries, if possible. In 1996, one of our Met students—a quiet, inner-city kid from a poor family—went on an Outdoor Leadership trip to New Hampshire, and it changed his life. When he came home, he sat on his bed with his mom and talked to her about the experience for two hours, the longest he had ever spoken to her about school. She said it was the best thing that ever happened to her. Another kid on that trip had a similar experience and described it this way: “I was like a clam, all closed up, and then the clam just opens and out I come, like a flower blooming.” And then there was Sonya, a really tough kid who had never seen school as all that important, but had expressed some interest in the history of African Americans. The Met was able to send her on a “Freedom Ride” with a civil rights activist from a local college. Sonya was the youngest person to join this professor and his students on a trip through the South to visit the most important sites of the civil rights era, including the Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four girls were killed by a bomb; the Birmingham park where demonstrators were assaulted by police using fire hoses and dogs; and the Montgomery bus stop where Rosa Parks was arrested. When Sonya came back, it blew me away to hear one of the most significant things she took away from this experience. She said, “I used to come in late to school, didn't really care about it. But when I learned that people died for my right to go to school, I look at it so differently now.”

    At The Met, we seek out whatever resources we can—and there are tons out there—to help students bring their personalized curricula to life. We consider day outings, overnight trips, and (especially) full-immersion travel experiences, like Sonya's and Daniel's, to be essential to this kind of learning. Through parents' support, students' own fund raising, scholarships, or by bringing them along with us on our own trips to conferences, other Big Picture Schools, and so on, we try to ensure that each of our students has at least one real travel experience while they are at The Met. The next few pages show excerpts from Met students' journals and reports describing their unique adventures. They are fantastic. They describe curricula that could never come from a textbook. They show what learning should be like for every kid.

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    Discipline

    I . . . began to understand how to use conflict and contradictions to promote learning.~ Myles Horton

    I'm calling this section “Discipline” because that's the school word, but it's not a word I like. When you look up discipline in Webster's, the first word in the definition is “training.” What we know as discipline in education today doesn't “train” kids to do anything but feel disciplined. Personally, I don't think we should even use the word in schools, and I would love to turn around the whole way people think about it.

    I also don't like the way we use the word “punishment,” because that's the wrong word, too. I know that most of us think discipline is doling out punishment and consequences. But I believe it's got to be about doing what's right to help the kid and the community. When a kid gets in the way of others' learning and hurts the community in some way, we have to intervene with the same goal we have in doing anything else in the school. The goal of an educator is to keep kids learning and growing, and so you do whatever you can to help the kid, and all the kids, continue to learn and grow. Yes, sometimes this may look like punishment or consequences, but punishment is never the point. The point is not even justice, but instead doing whatever is necessary to help the kid grow, protect the community, and preserve the culture so that that kid and all the others will go on growing. I can't say it enough. If you start with these thoughts in mind, and approach problems with learning as the goal, not discipline and punishment, then you are helping to create a personalized school where “one kid at a time” is possible.

    When I talked about school atmosphere in Chapter 3, I pushed the idea that you cannot make rules based on the exception. Dewey said the same thing back in 1938: “Exceptions rarely prove a rule or give a clew [sic] to what the rule should be.” 4 This is the first step to changing the way we look at discipline in school.

    One of the first things I did at Thayer was initiate a long process where the kids rewrote all the school's rules. Every kid was involved. It's amazing, but kids always come up with more rules than their teachers would. After you limit them to the stuff that's really important, you see that they pretty much want the same things we adults want: no fighting, no drugs, respect each other, respect the school, and so on. I guarantee that if you let the kids write the rules (and ask them to keep them clear and simple), not only will you get the rules you wanted in the first place, but the kids will be umpteen times more likely to follow them because they are their rules. This, of course, also relates to treating kids with respect and dignity. What you dole out is what you get back. It's so important to remember that a school needs rules for the same reason drivers need traffic lights: so everyone can move ahead safely and smoothly without obstacles getting in the way.

    Once you've got the rules about which behaviors are desired and which are not allowed, and the rules are consistent and simple, of course you have to follow them. But when a situation warrants a student feeling the consequences of his or her actions, it's critical that you don't automatically jump to the old standards: detention, suspension, or expulsion. The consequences of a student's actions must make sense—just as they do in the natural world and (usually) do in the adult world. If you're going to give a kid a three-day suspension for fighting, then it needs to be clear that three days is how long you feel the school and the kid need to recover from the incident. Or if you're going to punish a kid for being disrespectful, then you have got to do it in a respectful way.

    Good educators think of how to make the punishment match the problem, or how to make the punishment more productive through things like assigning community service rather than suspension. But I'm saying you have to look even deeper at the problem and the solution. The job is to both figure out how to help the kid solve his or her problem and how to make sure the kid and the entire school community keep on learning and growing. So if you put a kid out of the room because he's not taking anything seriously, then your motives should be to help that kid grow by teaching him what's serious and what's not, and to help the community get back to work.

    A few years ago, one of The Met's advisories spent an hour and a half helping one of their classmates understand why the fight he'd started earlier in the day was putting the whole school in danger. Afterward, that kid wrote me a note saying how worthwhile the discussion had been and how he'd gone to each student who saw the fight, apologized for his behavior, and explained to them that he was really “not like that.”

    The culture of the school said fighting is not cool, but it also said owning up to your actions and talking it out is cool. This kid's punishment not only had meaning, but also enabled him to go even further: to communicating his feelings about the crime and the punishment in a positive way. What would he, or I, or the school have gained if I had chosen to suspend him for two weeks instead? Or, as schools with zero-tolerance policies now do, if I had expelled him and denied him any further learning at all? It's not about the punishment a kid gets, but the effect that punishment has and the learning that happens as a result.

    Too often, educators use discipline methods to avoid dealing with real problems. Detention as a school policy is an example of an easy solution to a problem—totally disregarding why the problem occurred in the first place. The philosophy of one student at a time forces you to look at problems in relation to the student, the current situation, and the family. It is disturbing to me to see the ways administrators mete out punishments without finding out more information. In fact, it is professionally and humanely unsound, and totally disrespectful to the students.

    For example, detention policies are notoriously useless. Yet educators keep using them and wondering why the same kids come back to the detention room every week. And when students don't show up to detention, what happens to them? They get suspended. Ridiculous.

    In contrast, the philosophy of one kid at a time would suggest that the teacher or principal first ask why the kid is late or keeps bothering the other students or whatever the problem is. Then maybe it makes sense to bring the kid's family in to help everyone get a better understanding of the problem. Then the student, family, and teacher could agree on a unique solution that they all think will help solve the problem.

    A student's misbehavior has to be viewed not as a behavior that needs to be punished, but rather as a behavior that needs to be changed. The idea is to help a student be involved in changing his behavior, not just to punish him or try to change the behavior for him. In most cases, I really don't think you have to “teach kids a lesson.” (Just getting caught is really lesson enough.) You just have to think about what's next.

    Maybe once every three years, I get freaked out by a really serious offense. In every other case, I know punishment is an option, but it's only one of a dozen, and it's never my first instinct. Usually, I just ask, “Why'd you do that?” In traditional schools, we tend to look for the neatest, quickest solutions, but changing behavior is a messy business, and we really have to commit to trying to solve each problem in a way that respects the student and his or her family. We have to commit to getting to know each child individually. No personalized school can work without this effort. 5

    At one of my schools, I had a physical education teacher who was making kids stay after school for refusing to change clothes for gym. When I found out, I asked the teacher to talk with each kid and ask why he wasn't changing. The answers were enlightening and gave way to very different solutions for each student. One boy admitted he was embarrassed about his skinny legs and couldn't afford sweat pants. The solution? We bought him a pair of $9.95 sweat pants. The boy never missed another gym class. Another boy didn't want to take his clothes off in front of the other kids. The solution? He just wore gym clothes under his jeans when he came to school. He also never missed another class.

    Sometimes you need a really creative solution. Steven had dropped out of his previous school and was on his third try at 9th grade. He was getting to school two or three hours late every day. Rather than just give him detention or some other meaningless punishment, we tried to help him change his sleep habits. When that didn't work, we asked more questions and learned that his mother left the house two hours before Steven needed to get up for school. So we tried calling him to wake him up. That didn't work either. Finally, we decided that Steven would get up at the same time his mom did, and she would drop him off at my house on her way to work. I was already up at that time to start my t'ai chi and do my run. Steven and I worked out together every morning after that, and then drove into school together. He was never late again. In fact, he later quit his band because he was frustrated that other members couldn't get to practice on time!

    You could consider this an extreme example, but it's not extreme in the sense that it just fit. Steven's mom was a part of the plan, and I was already into that routine. No principal can do something like this for every kid, but he or she can do it in the situations when it works for everyone involved. He or she can be creative and use available resources to help the student. So this example may sound extreme, but it was really just finding a solution that made sense, fit the situation, and changed the behavior rather than punished it.

    * * *

    When it comes to discipline, another thing that has to happen is that the principal and teachers must look at each behavior problem as not just the student's problem, but also as a problem of the environment. They have to ask themselves, what is it about the school that is contributing to the student getting into trouble? For example, we all know that in the classes that kids enjoy, there are few or no behavior problems. And we know that kids enjoy a class when they're involved. If they're doing a project on something they're interested in, something that's realworld related and has real-world consequences, then they don't tend to pass notes or ask to go to the bathroom 10 times. You have to look at the environment. If kids are interested in what they're doing, they won't need to come up with distractions or find something they'd rather be doing.

    Making the learning interesting is just as basic to working with kids as making the learning—and the discipline—their own. The results of pushing the usual external discipline can be seen in many classrooms: The students are sitting quietly and looking respectful, yet when the teacher turns away, they start making vulgar hand signals or looking at other students' test answers. At The Met, we try to help students develop their own discipline. We believe if the student has self-discipline, then, with effort, he or she can do anything well at any time.

    Once, some students from another school were visiting us at The Met. At the end of the day, we debriefed with them. One girl, who had been sitting with a group of students working on projects, said she kept looking for a secret camera because everyone was working so hard. Someone must have been watching, she said. Of course, there was no camera. The work was interesting to the students, so self-discipline came easily.

    At The Met, we find out what the student is interested in and then help her set her own goals and standards around learning more about that interest. Our graduates who have gone off to college come back and tell us they are way ahead of other kids because they know how to organize their time and do their work without a lot of direction. That is the result of self-discipline. Our students develop it because, as many say, they have to. Personalizing education means not only personalizing the support each student receives, but also greatly increasing the amount of responsibility each student has for his or her own learning.

    So now I'm in charge of my own learning, and I love it. Sometimes there are bumps in the road, but I manage to overcome them, whether it's by meeting with my advisor or taking things one at a time. We are allowed to learn at our own paces, and that's what makes the school successful (along with other things). This school is set up in an unusual way, but it is cool.~ Excerpt from a Met student's essay, required as part of the Gateway into the 11th grade

    Questions to Further This Conversation . . .

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