The Dean Answers The Big Questions
By Emma Parrill
When I started at The Graham School as a freshman, I didn’t know much about experiential or how the school worked. But as the years went on, I learned and I became comfortable with the Pillars and the learning targets, but coming into my senior year, all of that has changed. We no longer have Pillars and the teachers have to use certain vocabulary approved by the Experiential Learning model. Prior to Wednesday, September 30th, I didn’t know much about the EL model, only that it closely resembled the way TGS had been run for the past fifteen years. So, when I interviewed Evan in his office, I was able to get all of the facts about the new way things are run and why the staff decided to make these changes. What follows is the full interview:
Q: For the readers that aren’t 100% sure what these changes are, can you detail them for us? How is EL different?
E.R.: Sure, I mean, a lot of the changes are semantics. Just exchanging one name for another, you know. We are now partnered with what is known as Expeditionary Learning, which is a... it's a national organization that believes in experiential learning outside of the classroom. It philosophically aligns with us pretty darn perfectly. And had we known about EL when we opened this school fifteen, almost sixteen, years ago, we probably would have opened it as an EL school. We've opened our elementary and middle schools with EL. And basically what it is, it's an organization that promotes the best practices in the classroom. And, you know, so some of the changes that you're going to be seeing this year... Advisory is called Crew instead of, well, advisory, and the premise behind that is that it takes a crew to move things forward, we aren't passengers, everyone needs to be an active participant in their own education. So that's an example of a semantics change. Experientially, there are some shifts that are happening at the ninth and tenth grade level. They're still going out and gaining those experiences, but they're tied much more closely to an academic curriculum as well so that we can kind of pull out the experiences that the younger grades are having and make them much more intentional, and hopefully scaffold them for the junior and senior years so that they have a better understanding of what a good mentorship and a good partnership and site is so that they can get the most out of the experience. It's also for us to make sure they have the good, solid academic foundation that we need them to for junior and senior year, and then moving on to post-high school and college. It's still Graham, you know. It's still as wonderfully safe as before, but I think it's going to be more intentional, and I think we're going to ask more of our students and our staff than we have in the past.
Q: You mentioned that you opened the lower grade schools with EL. When you opened these schools, why didn't you make the change to Graham as well?
E.R.: Because Graham...we weren't at the right place for that. And we wanted to see how EL operated. We felt good enough about that organization to open our schools with it, but we wanted to, you know...Graham had already been established, we already had an identity and we continue to, and so I think we began a dating process, so to speak, with EL for high school. We were ready to make the commitment in the other areas, but I think we wanted to see how we would be able to kind of combine their program and ours to make sure that we didn't lose our identity, didn't lose being Graham, didn't lose our experiential program, and didn't, you know, forget out roots and where we came from. And I think after seven years of kind of dating with EL, we, I think, are at a good point where we can make sure we don't lose that identity or our founding principles. We are, again, right in line with EL. It was a matter of us feeling like we were at the right spot for it and prepared to do it.
Q: What inspired you, and the staff, to go ahead and make this change?
E.R.: I think it was, again, over the last years we've been sending staff members to professional development that's run by Expeditionary Learning. And, again, throughout the years people just come back jazzed each time that they go to one. It's about best practices about a lot of the things we do here already, but there are little nuances that tweak what we do and hopefully make it a little bit better. So, I think what eventually led us to it last year was just an overwhelming support from the staff to make that commitment, because they saw that it was philosophically in tune with what we already had, but that it would make our school, you know, more intentional and help support professional development-wise what we wanted to do in the classroom. And that's really one of things that's awesome about this organization is the professional development. That's the big boon as far as being able to send our staff members to other schools to see how they, you know, operate and run their classrooms or organize their curriculum, and that also going to national conferences with specific things in mind. It's important for us as professionals to push ourselves and keep abreast of the best practices so that we can implement them here.
Q: What do you think the benefits of this will be for the whole school in the coming years? What do you think will be better than what has been?
E.R.: Sure, yeah. My hope, and my belief, is that it will lead to more sustained growth for our students over the four years, if they start from freshman year on. Growth in character areas, growth in academic areas, growth socially, and growth also in thinking about what they can do within their communities. And, again, it gets back to that word intentional. The more intentionally we set up experiences and opportunities for students to learn and don't just count on them happening haphazardly, we can ensure we provide the best educational opportunities for our students. We have a staff, that I think, is second to none. They work their tails off and are incredibly ambitious, driven, and compassionate, and so giving them the tools that a lot of people are starving for to just better their craft is gonna be a pretty powerful thing. And so, again, in the next couple of years, I continue to see us growing in intentionality and support and in opportunity for our students and our staff, and that's the important thing for me. It is a holistic approach, it's not just about one area or one group of stakeholders. I think this partnership is going to benefit the school and the community, which I think is pretty awesome.
Q: Were there specific problems with the previous way things were that prompted the changes?
E.R.: It wasn't necessarily a prompt. It's more of just a... Over the course of several years the dynamics of the school have changed, demographics have changed, the SIZE of the school, I mean we started with 75 students and now we have 270 students! So, it's a little bit different. And I think we needed some systems and structures to shift and change as well to be able to provide, again, students the best opportunity for growth in all of those areas I mentioned. But I think, too, when you look at you know, our state report card, for example, it's not great. We do not score well on a lot of the data points that the state pulls out from the school in order to rate them. And we've improved over the course of the last five years, but not at a level that is acceptable to me, and I don't think the staff, either. And so, really, what we are hoping is that the professional development that we're getting, and the tools and best practices that we're going to be able to implement in our classrooms will then, hopefully, translate into learning opportunities that are going to allow our students more opportunity to learn and demonstrate that learning, and I think that's another key aspect. We know that we do a good job, but what we struggle with sometimes is being able to show outside of our community what that looks like. And so, to the state, when they pull our test scores, they're not good. Our social emotional scores and character growth are great, but that's not what they're looking for, and we need to make sure we're doing a great job across the board.
Q: Now that the school is working with EL, what smaller changes are we going to see aside from the obvious ones?
E.R.: My hope, and I think the staff's, is to have less downtime, I guess, in classes or experientially. We're trying to maximize all of the opportunities and all of the time that we have with the students, and that they are...the students are engaged as much as possible. I hope that the students also find, and continue to find this a community that they want to be a part of and feel strongly about. And, as such, attendance rates will hopefully go up in commitment to classes and their own education, and their self-direction will increase. We really want the Habits of Learning to be a lens in which students and staff look at themselves and how they're doing professionally and personally. You know, as far as differences you're going to see on a daily basis, again, I hope it's just very specific...let me think about that... I guess I hope that daily routines in classrooms will feel familiar, so that when one classroom goes over a learning target and then you go to the next one and go over a learning target, people are familiar and comfortable with what learning targets are so they can take more control over their education. That's what we really want, is for students to really own what they're doing and not have it as teacher directed. That's the ultimate goal, so hopefully people start getting used to some of the routines and protocols happening in classes. We really want to instill good habits of learning, because they're not just for school, they're for outside as well.
Q: What changes were implemented by EL, and what changes were implemented by the staff to improve the learning experience?
E.R.: I'll start with EL changes. A couple of changes that were made with EL were us defining the Habits of Learning, for example, that's a big one. We've had our pillars before, we've had our self directed learning when we first opened the school. But we've never really had those included in our curriculum so that they were taught and brought into the classroom. Learning targets is another thing that's really prominent in all EL schools and that's just being very clear in what's being taught in classrooms so that students know what they're being evaluated on and what they're expected to learn. It's not fun to be in a classroom and not know what the expectation is! And so just really just trying to be clear what our expectations are in classes, outside of classes, and experientially, too. So those are two big, big, things. Protocols within classes, you know you'll see a lot more of those that are hopefully going to, again, increase student engagement from the bell-to-bell schedule a little bit better. To flip that to what the school has changed, again not based on EL, but that we needed to shift. The experiential shift was not an EL shift, that's a school shift for the ninth and tenth grade. That was done because of the lack of growth in student performance, especially in ninth and tenth grade with students passing their classes, or doing well on state tests. We didn't feel like we were scaffolding and supporting our students well enough three days a week with classes their first and second year. We wanted to create better habits in the classroom, so having classes five days a week for those two grades is something we thought would support them in creating a foundation academically. We also felt like we've been trying for a decade plus to combine our academics with our experiential program, and so that's another impedance that the foundations and connections year will be a little more intentional, and then from that we pulled from EL the expeditionary model, which is creating a class and having the fieldwork attached to the class. They've got a lot of models for how that's done, and so we've kind of attached some expeditionary learning opportunities specifically for the tenth grade level. The foundations level is very similar to how it has been, but again, we wanted the students back five days a week for some of their core classes. That's the biggest change overall, but that was an internal change, not one that EL made.
