Schools Without Failure

Type this into google and you'll get several thousand hits. I went to an all-day workshop, or more accurately, a presentation yesterday about this topic.

It was a guy probably ten years younger than me explaining his school's approach to improving passing/graduation rates. It reminded me of the optimistic innovations I was involved with back in the early 90s. Ultimately, the lack of seniority of myself and some other teachers in our team destroyed a program as we were bumped by senior teachers who didn't care about the program.

I moved on and focused on theatre/drama and later turned down an opportunity to go back to a program I'd spent three years and $25 thousand in grant money helping to build. I never really looked back or regretted it; the program was dead a year or two later. The folks who'd built it were mostly gone and the others didn't want to put in the extra work needed to really establish it.

It was fun at the time, though. The kids in our pilot classes loved our integrated studies program. We started with two classes of grade 8s, and kept them together for English, Socials, Science, Math and Computer studies. The following year we added a Drama/P.E block as well. We took kids of all types, not just high achievers like some programs, or "at risk" ones like others. Our test and satisfaction survey results with parents, students and staff were better than both the "regular" program and the french immersion program.

I went to other districts to give workshops about our program, about using Drama to teach Social Studies, and how to adapt time tables to improve learning. We had groups from as far as Arizona come to visit and see our program. We were videotaped for a ministry of education production (it's weird to be wandering over to help a kid in a computer class while a bright spotlight, camera and boom microphone follows you) which I still have a copy of somewhere--I should post a clip of a much younger me with moustache and one of those narrow, square-bottomed wool ties that scream 80s now, just for a laugh.

I got to go to conferences in places like Phoenix and Tahoe to meet some of the big names in educational innovation and get their advice on what we should do next.

Then it ended. After I got bumped to a different school I joined a district working group on innovation, and later did some contract work and gave workshops on curriculum and such, but I found that I was losing interest in trying to push against the intertia of the whole system and instead I wanted to do the best things I could for my own students in my own classroom.

Meanwhile, the province moved more and more to the right, ditching most of the initiatives of the early 90s and instead focusing more and more on standardized testing and returning to the "basics" as they are fondly (but often inaccurately) remembered by rednecks everywhere.

So I was reluctant to go to this workshop yesterday. Been there, tried it, I thought. That said, I was pleasantly surprised. This was not some egotistical prophet trying to sell his book, but rather a very committed, sincere teacher working at a school that's trying to do things differently.

No "zeros", don't mark homework, no penalizing for late work. It felt like my teacher's soul rebelled at the very idea of such things, but when you worked through what he means by that, and how they are actually making kids be more accountable, there are many very good points that made me pause.

Perhaps we older dogs should stop and glance at the tricks a little more before we dismiss them. Maybe I'll try to explain it more at some point if anyone's interested.