Back in the 1990’s, I attended a school principal’s conference in Denver, Colorado. It was your typical leadership meeting, complete with keynote speakers and breakout sessions. As I perused the conference agenda, I decided to walk into a 45-minute breakout led by Dennis Littky. Littky and his partner Elliot Washor had just launched The Met, a Providence, Rhode Island-based learning organization invented to attract young learners who were not doing well inside the traditional system.
Once Littky started to share his philosophy about what kids needed and how The Met was designed to meet those needs – all of them – I noticed some of the audience starting to walk out on the presentation. In fact, toward the end of the session, traditional school principals were yelling and screaming at Littky for “ruining public education” and “cheating kids without them knowing it.”
It was at that moment I fell in love with Dennis Littky, his learning approach, and the learning opportunities he became associated with across the country.
Littky shares a story about the first day of The Met. He and Elliot Washor were in a room with around 30 high school-aged kids who had either been kicked out of Providence public schools or stopped attending. Littky asked these kids one question: “What do you want to learn today?” Littky said that around 20 of the 30 had an answer, and that was the start of The Met. What about the kids who didn’t have an answer. Littky said either he or Elliot would sit with these kids through the day until they came up with something they wanted to learn. It took about 7 to 10 days for the rest of the kids to come up with a individualized learning plan.
The Met was different from traditional schools in that Littky and Washor emphasized the importance of the work world far greater than the Providence school district did at the time. In fact, The Met started with personalized work interests, and then filled in the rest of the time with reading, writing, and problem-solving activities.
Just this week, The 74 online highlighted the work internships at The Met, where, according to the title of the article, “Where High School is a Matter of ‘Trial and Error’.” The article begins,
“After weeks working side-by-side in a tiny nut-free bakery, Susan Lagasse and her young apprentices reached what was perhaps their most fraught lesson: the scourge of cake crumbs in buttercream frosting.”
“’Once you have a little crumb, it spreads throughout the entire cake,’ said Lagasse. ‘It’s like a disease.’”
“The apprentice, 17-year-old Caroline Bonga, nodded in agreement. For the past several weeks, she’d been spending a lot of her time on crumb control at Lagasse’s bakery, Awesome Sweets, covering naked cakes with a base layer of frosting prior to decoration.”
“Across the small table sat Lillian John, who gently guided the conversation back to a key question: How can we end this internship with a bang?”
“John is an advisor at The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, a legendary public high school universally known as The Met. For more than a quarter of a century, Met advisers have been sitting in on meetings like these, transforming work-focused internships and student-driven exhibitions into a coherent education for some of the state’s neediest students.”
“Originally houed in space shared with the University of Rhode Island, in 2002 The Met opened in its current configuration in the Upper South Side, Providence’s poorest neighborhood. Build on the site of abandoned housing, next to a former hospital, the school sits on a wide-open swath of green with four small schools, each in a corner of campus.”
“The size is intentional: Each school houses fewer than 150 students, in core groups of 14 to 18, led by a single advisor like John who guides them from freshman to senior year.”
“It’s an unusual arrangement that leads to something rare in high school: long-term, trusting relations between kids and adults that bear fruit in ways most schools never aspire to, said Met Co-Director Nancy Diaz.”
“School should be small, she said, their relationships loving and caring. ‘That’s what we do.’”
“In fact, the only subject routinely taught in a traditional classroom is math, and that’s via a designated specialist. Virtually everything else a student needs to learn, according to The Met, comes from projects, individualized assignments from advisers and, most notably, internships in the real world, like Bonga’s at the nut-free bakery.”
…
“Co-founder Littky said one key to the school is that it puts students in proximity with adults. ‘They’re not just hanging with 15-year-olds or 18-year-olds’ all day, he said, so they learn professional behaviors that will stay with them for years. ‘It’s way beyond, in my mind, any other skills they get.’”
…
“Littky noted that the late Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, father of the concept of ‘flow’ in work and play, has written that the way one becomes an adult thinker is to study something – anything – deeply.”
“In schools, Littky said, the way most adults think about rigor is all wrong: It’s about output, not input. A math teacher who fails most of h is students is ‘rigorous,’ he said, much more so than the science teacher who inspires all of his students to become scientists.”
“Washor, LIttky’s co-founder, likes to talk about ‘vigor rather than rigor’ – ‘rigor,’ he jokes, is Latin for ‘dead and stiff.”
Sadly, The Met’s umbrella non-profit Big Picture Learning has struggled replicating The Met in other places. The number of Big Picture Learning schools, and the number of young learners served, just aren’t enough to cause anyone to get excited about the scalability of the model. That’s’ too bad because The Met has clearly made a difference with a population of Providence young learner who struggled inside traditional schools.
I saw Dennis LIttky several years ago at a convention in San Diego. When I reminded him of the Denver breakout session, and how he was seen as a heretic by the traditional school community that day, Littky just looked at me and laughed.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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