This week, I will explore what is arguably the most
important word in our mission statement, “engaged.” At first blush, engaged may seem like a word
that is so obviously connected with schools that is seems somewhat
meaningless. For us at CSCS, it has a tremendous
amount of meaning and has driven us to do things very differently.
In the process of creating CSCS, we did a lot of research
and spent a lot of time and energy studying the work of others who had come
before us. One of the researchers who
had a significant impact on our learning and therefore the development of the
school was Phil Schlechty. Dr. Schlechty
had spent a lot of time studying schools and from this, he described different
levels of participation that he saw in schools.
The categories he developed were as follows:
Strategic compliance:
This is participation in which the student does what is expected in
order to get a reward they want. For
example, many students work to get good grades because they believe it will
help them get in to a good college.
Ritualistic compliance:
This is when a student does what it is expected because it is the path
of least resistance. This is the case
when a student does their homework in order to ensure that the teacher or their
parents won’t bug them.
Retreatism: This is
when a student either physically (skipping class, complaining of illness in
order to stay home) or mentally (sitting quietly in the back of class and
hoping no one notices) removes themselves from the learning experience.
Rebellion: This one
is pretty easy for us all to recognize.
This is when a student behaves in a way that not only pulls them out of
the learning experience, but also asks others to join in the resistance to what
is being asked.
Engagement: This is
when a student is motivated to keep working at something even when it becomes
challenging. According to Schlechty,
when students are engaged, they are motivated to complete the work because it
is personally meaningful to them, not because of some reward they will receive
when they complete it. We often use
examples of playing a challenging video game and training for an athletic,
musical or theatrical performance to help students understand what engagement
really feels like.
Schlechty argued (and the research and our experiences
backed this up) that learning really only occurs when students are
engaged. Unfortunately, what Schlechty
found was that the design of most schools worked against engagement and at best
was designed for compliance. He also
found that many of the tools that were being used to measure the level of
engagement were in fact, measuring compliance (i.e, did students bring the
required materials to class, did they answer questions being asked by the
teacher, did they complete their homework).
Because this so resonated with
our lived experience and because we as veteran educators, students, parents,
and community partners had seen the damage a system designed for compliance was
doing to the students who were “playing the game,” to those who were fighting
against it, and to those who were simply trying to survive it, we took this challenge
very seriously. Resisting the
temptation to revert to compliance measures became a driving force behind our
decision making.
This hasn’t been without significant challenge. When you put a group of unique individuals
together in a system, having some level of compliance is important to keeping
everyone safe and to helping the system work effectively. There is a very real, very pragmatic reason
why schools are organized around compliance systems. And yet, we knew if we wanted to create a
school committed to deep learning, we had to start by looking at what people
needed to be truly engaged and we had to trust that when they were truly
engaged, they would work together to create effective systems to ensure safety
and systemic effectiveness.
This is where our three pillars: personalized, place based,
and democratic, come in. While the three
are most powerful and most effective in the spaces where they overlap, I will
discuss each separately in order to capture the essence of each of them. We start with personalization from the moment
we begin our interactions with a prospective student and family. Questions like “What do you really love
doing and learning more about?” “What
are you really good at?” “What makes you
happy?” “What is a new challenge you
would like to take on?” form the basis
of initial discussions with students and families. Often, these discussions seem strange coming
from educators as unfortunately, for many students and their families, school
has not been driven by these questions.
In most traditional settings, the standards and prescribe scope and
sequence drive the instructional system and teachers and students do their best
to find places to fit the student’s interests and passions in. In our system, we strive to start with the
student and we have found that in doing that, learning about and engaging in
things that are new, different, or challenging naturally follows and students have
the skills and dispositions they need to not just comply with expectations to
learn about a breadth of topics but to actually engage.
Place-based refers to a deep commitment to connecting
learning to the real history, problems, and opportunities that surround
everyone all of the time and offer rich opportunities for both learning and the
creation of meaningful knowledge and work in the places that matter the most to
us. While schools have been seen as a
center of learning, there has often been a significant disconnect between the
learning that was happening in schools and the learning that was taking place
in the communities surrounding the schools.
At CSCS, we seek to “take down the walls” between our school and the
community and help students develop a deep sense of the learning that takes
place everywhere. By inviting the
community into our school and spending a significant amount of time in the community,
students develop an appreciation of the challenges and opportunities in their
communities and an understanding of how they can play a significant role in
solving problems and creating new opportunities in their communities. These authentic experiences are the best
material for helping students develop the skills they will need for long term
success because without strong communication, collaboration, and problem
solving skills, they are not able to contribute meaningfully.
Finally, our commitment to democratic education honors that
everyone engages more if they feel a sense of power and agency. Because the schools that most of our students
have experienced have been designed for compliance, the voice and agency
afforded to students was often afforded to only a few students and even for
them, was afforded with the constraints of doing what adults in the system
expected. We seek first to give students
meaningful voice in decisions about what seminars will be offered, what our
schedule will look like, and where we should be focusing our school improvement
efforts. From here, we work to help
students develop the skills they need to play a meaningful role in decision
making in our school and in other settings.
Ultimately, we seek to create opportunities for leadership for all
students in our school so they have the opportunity to practice these skills in
context and develop a deeper understanding of how to work most effectively with
others and how to ensure your voice is heard while honoring the voices of
others and the needs of the community.
Over the course of these initial years, we have learned that
a shift in education that really focuses on engagement is a very significant
one. Because it is so different, we have
had to get much better at understanding and communicating what it looks like
when students are becoming more engaged.
We continue to work on capturing this story and would love your
perspective on what you have seen in CSCS students that demonstrates true
engagement. We have also learned that it
works! Students want to learn. Students who have found very little reason to
strive for traditional success measures in school are enthusiastically talking
about and sharing their learning, and students who were very good at meeting
all of the traditional metrics of success are finding the freedom to really
learn in a system that emphasizes engagement.
Thanks for being a part of our journey and sharing your
perspective!
Namaste!