Necessity is the Mother of Invention or 5 Ways Traditional Schools Can Try to Improve

Somewhere along the way I saw a sign stating: “Necessity is the Mother of Invention.”

Few schools follow this type of advice. Instead, most campuses double down on tried and not so true strategies like improved teaching, better principals, stronger curriculum, high stakes testing, and the list goes on and on. The traditional school system is stuck in a rut trying to improve on strategies that, over the last 50 years, haven’t really helped schools en masse meet rising expectations. Sure, there are individual schools and districts that have demonstrated excellence over those years, but most schools and districts still haven’t met their potential because they are unwilling to create new and different on a large scale.

Since most campuses and districts are unable to invent a learning system that will help kids, all kids, become smarter and stronger, here are five suggestions on what districts could do, beginning this fall, to help kids learn at deeper levels:

• Schools could create reading academies for kids who are reading two or more grade levels behind their peers. Especially on the secondary level, young learners can’t handle the amount of content thrown at them by their teachers on a daily basis because many of those young learners don’t possess reading skills commensurate with school expectations. If they can’t handle the content with acceptable reading skills, more than likely they fail. If they fail too much, more than likely they drop out. Here’s an idea – why don’t we let kids attend reading academies until they “catch up” on their reading skills? Once they catch up, those students could return to their original schedules. I bet more of those kids would be successful understanding the secondary American curriculum if they possessed stronger reading skills. These reading academies could be fun places where kids learned to read by using resources interesting and relevant to them.

• One day a week, a district could offer “community-based learning,” where students could choose from a list of community partners and businesses working in areas of interest to the student. I know private schools (Cristo Rey, a national Catholic system emphasizing corporate work study) and smaller traditional districts (Lindsay (CA) Unified School District) who offer this type of learning to kids, but nothing seems to be happening on a grand scale.

• I’ve talked a lot about how important relationships are when it comes to learning. Still, the traditional districts assign students to teachers through computer-generated schedules and class lists. Traditional students are asked to fill out a course selection sheet in the spring so that those classes can be assigned for the fall. What if kids were able to request their own teachers? And what if those teachers weren’t currently part of the school district staff? How might this change the relationship game between the adult learning leader and the young learners they are asked to serve? More popular teachers could be assigned paraprofessionals to help with increased numbers of students. Less popular teachers would be placed on a one-year improvement plan and offered professional training to improve their relationship-building skills. Skeptics might say kids will just choose adults who are popular for all the wrong reasons – they grade easy, they don’t have high expectations, or they are just nice people. This might happen, but I guess I just have more trust in a young learner’s ability to determine who an excellent learning leader is and who is not.

• Districts could partner with other learning organizations (non-profits, after school, charters) that perform important tasks better than that school district, like reading improvement, special education services, or social/emotional learning to name a few. Too many traditional districts feel like they need to “own” all their workforce instead of partnering with groups who have proven they can do the work better than the school districts. Again, some of these partnerships happen on a small scale, but larger, more impactful relationships need to be established moving forward.

• Students who have been struggling with traditional school could be invited to participate in a special action research project. This research project would be based on a learning plan being created for these struggling students. Learning coaches for this action research project could be recruited from the on-staff teacher group, with coaches assigned to young learners using the same formula elementary classrooms are staffed within the participating district. Time would be allocated based on the individual learner’s plan, not by the school’s master schedule. At the end of the year, success could be assessed by how these learning plan participants compared to traditional students in such indicators as attendance, discipline, engagement, grades, and, most importantly, standardized test scores.

If they are going to survive, school districts need to take some risks and create new projects based on action research, where learners are invited to participate in programs that will be compared to more traditional ways schools have operated. If those newly created inventions are found to be more effective in terms of young people’s learning, then isn’t it the moral and ethical duty for traditional schools and districts to change to those improved practices?

Til tomorrow. SVB