Tag: Deborah Meier

(Extra)Ordinary People

Posted on | by Sam

There’s an anecdote the Calhoun School’s Steve Nelson likes to share when he speaks to teachers and parents about the purpose of education. “We should think of our children as wildflower seeds in an unmarked package,” he says. “We can’t know what will emerge. All we can do is plant them in fertile soil, give them plenty of water and sunlight, and wait patiently to see the uniqueness of their beauty.”

At a time when too many students are still being planted in highly cultivated gardens – trimmed and pruned to resemble each other closely – it is incumbent upon all of us to stand on the side of the unmarked package. And at a time when we stray further and further from our democratic roots – from Chicago to DC – it is essential we heed the words of Mission Hill founder Deborah Meier, who reminds us that “democracy rests on having respect for the judgment of ordinary people.”

These two visions – of a school filled with unmarked seeds, and a democracy fueled by ordinary citizens – come together in the tenth and final chapter of A Year at Mission Hill. We see a montage of children in various states of joy. We hear teachers sing the words of poet Kahlil Gibran at their school’s graduation ceremony (“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”). And we watch principal Ayla Gavins tell her staff she will refuse to administer new testing requirements under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.

As Mission Hill plans for the challenges of a new school year, we should pay attention to the principles its principal is willing to risk her career to protect: Trust and transparency. Experience. Variation. Autonomy. And, as she puts it, “celebrating the humanness in all of us, and trying to build on human potential and not stifle it.”

Some will have watched this series and concluded that schools like Mission Hill are little more than inspiring one-offs, with a singular vision of schooling that can never be scaled. Yet there are already hundreds of schools – from the Expeditionary Learning network to the New York Performance Standards Consortium – that assess their students similarly (and a handful of states that are following suit). There are already thousands of teachers with the ability, given the right supports and surroundings, to be just as masterful as the ones we’ve observed at Mission Hill. And there are already streamlined structures in place, from the pilot school model in Boston to the statewide funding system in Vermont, that are empowering public schools to be more innovative, inclusive, and effective.

To be fair, it makes sense that people are searching for the best way to scale the ideas in a school like Mission Hill. After all, the more children that can have experiences like the ones we’ve watched over the course of this series, the better off our society will be. But the best way to spread ideas in a democracy is not by scaling up, like McDonald’s, buy by scaling across, like farmers markets. In the first example, the goal is to make everything so uniform that walking into any store anywhere in the world should feel – and taste – exactly the same. In the second, the goal is to create a forum for people to access what will make them healthier, and to come together in a spirit of community. As a result, every farmers market shares certain common design principles. And each one also demonstrates the myriad variations in how those principles can get applied.

A Year at Mission Hill is a visual testament to the pedagogical power of the second approach. It’s a place that treats the learning process the same way a skilled gardener would nurture a package of wildflowers: by preparing the soil, planting the seeds, and waiting for the unique beauty to emerge. And it’s a place that reminds us that when you invest deeply in the capacity of ordinary adults to do their jobs well, they are capable of extraordinary things.

“The freedom of teachers to make decisions about their classrooms and their lives is essential, “ Meier adds. “The whole point of an education is to help you learn how to exercise judgment – and you can’t do that if the expert adults in your school are not allowed to exercise theirs.”

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

Mission (Upon a) Hill

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Mission (Upon a) Hill

Here at the Mission Hill School, nestled amidst the labyrinthine side streets of Boston and alongside the usual din of sounds that fill a school’s hallways, an unusual revolution is taking place.

It’s happening in the 2nd and 3rd grade, where lead teacher Jenerra Williams doesn’t formally call her class to “order,” opting instead to spend the first 30 minutes of the day greeting children as they arrive, trusting them to begin their morning tasks without prodding, and checking in with each student to ensure everyone is ready to learn that day – intellectually, socially, and emotionally.

It’s happening in the main office, where principal Ayla Gavins’s desk sits in an open airy space that feels more welcoming than foreboding – the type of place you’d actually like to be sent.

It’s happening throughout the building, where no child asks if he can go to the bathroom and no student is forced to stay in her seat, because all such choices are understood by adults as learning opportunities for children to acquire the vital lifelong skills of self-awareness and self-regulation.

And it’s happening throughout the network of Boston’s public pilot schools, which receive greater freedom and flexibility to create more empowered, engaging, and independent learning environments in the hope that they can, over time, light an instructive path forward for all of the city’s schools. Add up those ingredients, and you’ll find Mission Hill’s particular “special sauce”, as well as a general recipe for transformational learning the rest of us can follow in our efforts to create more places like it.

Mission Hill’s path of transformation began in 1994, when Boston Mayor Thomas Menino joined forces with the city’s schools and teacher union to create a subset of “pilot schools” that were explicitly created to serve as useful catalysts of eventual district-wide urban reforms. Since its founding, the school has always seen its purpose as being far greater than merely guaranteeing academic growth, or ensuring that its graduates are “college and career-ready.” Instead, as school founder Deborah Meier put it, the task of Mission Hill mirrors the task of public education – “to help parents raise youngsters who will maintain and nurture the best habits of a democratic society.” And democracy, Meier says, “requires citizens with the capacity to step into the shoes of others, even those we most dislike, to sift and weigh alternatives, and to listen respectfully to different viewpoints with the possibility in mind that we each have something to learn from each other.”

Because of its broader orientation, Mission Hill is not organized primarily around what children will know, but who they will become. Its teachers are not just evaluated by how well their students perform in traditional academic subjects, but also by how skillfully their students can navigate “the interdisciplinary stuff of ordinary life.” And all members of the community are not allowed to sit back passively and criticize school decisions; they must actively participate in the ongoing co-creation of the school, its rules, and its path forward. “Everything I do is visible,” Gavins explained one recent afternoon, while two young boys played with toy dinosaurs on a green shag rug near her desk.  “So there are no secrets.  There is no hiding, and no backroom deals.  Everyone knows what my work is, and because that’s the expectation of everyone here that everyone’s work is public, everyone here is expected to defend their work, that’s also true for me.”

Williams, who has spent her entire professional career at Mission Hill, agrees. “The most wonderful aspect of our culture here is the freedom we all feel. We all share our curriculum.  We get feedback and support each other, and yet because we all have the freedom to do what we think is best means we all also have the freedom to fail.  So we learn as we go, just like the kids.”

All of these ingredients are on display each day in Mission Hill’s classrooms. The school’s student body is extremely diverse in every way imaginable – ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, learning style, etc. – a reflection of its commitment to create a fully inclusive learning environment. The physical spaces are designed to awaken individual interests and curiosities – an easel with paint and paintbrushes over here, an actual buzzing beehive over there. The curriculum integrates arts and academics and explores issues thematically, across all subjects. The school’s five habits of mind are prominently placed in each classroom to remind both young and old of what they are working toward each day. And throughout the school one finds explicit reminders of the things that link people to each other, such as the colorful CONNECTIONS wall in Jenerra’s classroom, where each student’s picture is framed alongside a list of his or her personal hopes and dreams – and where visible lines of green string connect portraits whenever one person’s answers match another’s.

Currently, the national climate for school reform is not aligned to reinforce Mission Hill’s emphasis on the democratic mission of public education, or on its efforts to explicitly identify the core habits – as opposed to the core knowledge – of the ideal graduate. But that may be changing. Indeed, recent insights and convergences in the fields of cognitive science and organizational behavior confirm that what schools like Mission Hill are doing isn’t just one community’s belief in the value of “soft” skills; it’s also a sound strategy based on the latest hard science about how people learn.

“When we get right down to it,” explains neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni in his 2008 book Mirroring People, “what do we human beings do all day long? We read the world, especially the people we encounter.” Until recently, scientists were at a loss to explain how, or even why, we do this. But now, scientists have located the process in a set of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These cells, Iacoboni reports, are what help us recognize and understand the deepest motives and needs of our fellow human beings. They are, in short, the source of our capacity to think and act as empathetic members of a democracy, and the most vital part of ourselves to be cultivated and nourished. And their discovery is why scientists like Iacoboni “believe this work will force us to rethink radically the deepest aspects of our social relations and our very selves.”

Amen, Dr. Iacoboni – and we may not be as far behind as you think. The next time you’re in Boston, spend a day at Mission Hill.