Our urban students deserve more...

Model Secondary Schools Project

You have to believe the students and teachers are capable of much higher performance than we are seeing today - that the innate abilities are there, but the existing culture and habits of “school” fails to draw them out.  That belief, driving vision, persistence and willingness to change the nature of the relationships, changes everything.

What We Do

Today, the Model Secondary Schools Project provides consulting services and technical support to schools and districts working to significantly improve student performance.  We work from a few core beliefs:

Today’s students, no matter their history, family conditions, prior performance or current attitude, have the capacity to think deeply, act on their values, explore new zones of knowledge, and play well with others.

Today’s teachers, administrators and support staff have a deeper well of experience and knowledge than ever before but are constrained by a variety of social and educational traditions that effectively neutralize their heartfelt intentions as educators.  (Much more so than financial or regulatory constraints.)

Schools can make much better use of existing and developing information and communications tools so they are gathering information, discussing options professionally and making instructional and strategic decisions by analyzing valid data.

Changing schools must be a transparent, collaborative process that engages representative stakeholders from all areas of the community.

Educational change performed in isolation that brings improved results in a single classroom is powerful for individual students and teachers, but it is unlikely to produce long term results.   Our focus is on working for the long term.

Inconsistency in our efforts to change schools – resulting in an impatient change of strategies every year or two – is likely only to yield at best incremental improvements.  Incremental improvement in the educational options and opportunities we offer our students will do little to address the underlying social justice issues facing us today, let alone offer all our students a valuable education.

Briefly

We live in the Seattle area but work where ever we find a deep commitment to significantly and rapidly improving educational outcomes for urban students.  We are currently involved in a large project with the Rochester City School District, restructuring two urban high schools as seven small autonomous high schools and have committed to facilitating design and development of two new small high schools.  We continue to provide technical assistance to the small high schools in Boston and Detroit.

Where We Work

Working from both the top down and the bottom up is a core part of our strategy.  Three process related goals are the focus of a multi-year commitment:

Envisioning Success,

Capacity Building,

Clearing the Path for Opportunity and Innovation.

 

Forming strong relationships and understanding at all levels in a collaborative process is often time consuming, but results in involvement of multiple stakeholders.   In designing schools we work with stakeholder based school development teams using a process that parallels Appreciative Inquiry.  For us, this means building on a team’s existing knowledge and expectations through a six phase process:

· Imagine – what would such a school be like – what evidence might you find of the attributes of a successful school

· Envision – what would be the core purpose of such a school (Vision) and how would you create it  (Mission)

· Aerial View – initiate the detail work – what baseline changes would we need to make in our expectations, operations and instruction.  Prepare a concept proposal.

· Road Map – This will take time and effort – create an action plan for the coming year showing how you will engage the whole staff, the students, the parents and your community partners in this effort.  What intentional actions will you take to build the school culture and environment where this can take place.

· Build – implement the action plan, continue to build support for and awareness of the effort. Actively engage students, staff and community in development of school culture based on high expectations, respect & responsibility.

· Revisit – annually engage a stakeholder team in evaluating progress then revisiting and extending the action plan.

 

 

For this effort to succeed we will need to accomplish the following along the way:

· Break out of the cycle of change and change again

· Engage multiple stakeholders in a locally designed solution

· Give teams autonomy to make complex decisions and to take the required actions for follow-through

· Expand the capacity for leadership that is visionary, supportive and thoughtful

· Engage staff in professional grade involvement in planning and delivering instruction tuned to the needs and goals of students

· Establish a school culture based on high expectations, trust and mutual respect

· Build on the will to reach this far.

 

How We Work