On a recent school visit, I was listening to the director of digital literacy when my guide, the admissions director, exclaimed, "Shut the front door, twice!" Cleaning up the vernacular, her expression of surprise about the school's innovative approaches was exactly what I was thinking since I arrived at The Barstow School in Kansas City, Missouri. Third-graders doing sophisticated video production was just one of the stunners I witnessed at Barstow.
I visit lots of schools, as you all know. The week I visited Barstow was an especially busy one, with prior stops in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. I learn something, more often than not encouraging, at every school stop. But I have to be honest: I was not expecting to learn so much in a midsize Midwestern city. Steve Bellis, head of The Pembroke Hill School, where I visited after Barstow, sees this reaction all the time: "Parents moving here are always surprised at the quality of our school — partly because we are very good, and partly because their expectations of Kansas City are so low."
Both schools are well worth the attention of the independent school community. Barstow is the oldest independent school west of the Mississippi, founded in 1884, and today one of the most inventive. At NAIS, we research, write, speak — and perhaps harangue — about the challenges and opportunities facing independent schools. Times are changing fast — and will change even faster for our students 10 and 20 years down the road. Our schools need to assess what this all means for them and their students, and adapt, perhaps even transform, accordingly. Barstow is attempting to do this across the board — while remaining true to founder Mary Barstow's original mission, "to promote sound scholarship and to give symmetrical development to mind, body and character."
This nation is becoming rapidly more diverse, and young people are the most diverse age cohort by far. A third of Barstow's students are of non-European ancestry. The PK-12 student body of about 750 includes representatives from 30 countries. The Kansas City metropolitan area is not nearly as diverse as this school. Independent schools have widely embraced global education in some form or another. The world is flat, as Thomas Friedman famously described the growing interdependence of nations. Barstow brings the world to its campus and takes Barstow to the world. Head of School Shane Foster, a native of Australia, led the opening of two Barstow satellite campuses in China, one in Shanghai and one in Ningbo. Barstow teachers travel to China to work with Chinese students there. Students travel from China to spend time at Barstow. Most creatively, students in both countries work together online through the Hybrid Learning Consortium (HLC).
The HLC includes 15 independent schools from the United States, Europe, Australia, and the Far East. Spawned and led by Barstow, the HLC is a more open-ended approach to online learning than the norm — in public or independent schools. Students choose courses from a catalog of standard and elective courses. Teachers in consortium schools provide the instruction. But the format of courses is unusually variable. The mix of asynchronous and synchronous instruction is up to the instructor. Synchronous time can take the form of one-on-one tutorials, small group discussion with or without instructor, or whole group meetings. The idea is to promote rigor by employing high-quality teachers and innovation by leaving course formats open. This also means that scheduling is flexible, almost infinitely so. Students do not have to follow a weekly syllabus. Individual pacing and pathways are more commonplace. Much online learning today mimics traditional class formats. HLC is inventing new formats, taking advantage of what online technology makes possible.
Barstow's older students are well-prepared for the freedom. At Barstow, technology is ubiquitous from kindergarten and up, and the school has a long history of 1:1 usage school-wide and BYOD in the upper school. I was impressed with how well teachers and students understood technology and used it as a tool. It was not the point of the curriculum or instruction. It was employed because it helped students and teachers succeed. Teachers clearly trusted students to learn via technology, on their own, and not just in online classes. The school supported the practice by eliminating the stacks in its upper school library and creating the COVE — or Center Of Visionary Education — where students were obviously working and not lounging.
Barstow is as attentive to the "what" of learning as it is to the "how." Through the core curriculum, which is explicitly integrated across traditional subjects, as well as through the HLC, the school is reconsidering what students in this century need to know and be able to do. The digital literacy director is a former PBS video producer, and has expanded the school's visual arts curriculum to include video and film. Students produce a daily — technically sophisticated — news broadcast. Students from the primary years forward take courses in video production, including the "nonlinear" techniques that, indeed, third-graders are mastering.
I have seen wonderful examples of the activities that I saw at Barstow while visiting other independent schools. But I have rarely seen the range of fully realized innovation, all aimed at preparing students, and the school, for the fundamental changes this century is bringing. Families are taking notice. Enrollment, in a fairly static local economy, has grown by nearly 100 students in the last seven years.
Pembroke Hill is also flourishing. While it may not have pursued experiments as striking as those at Barstow, it has made smart moves to increase its enrollment and position itself for the future. Pembroke Hill and Barstow are both on the state line between Kansas and Missouri. On the Kansas side of the line are some of the very best public schools in the nation, with abundant advanced high school offerings, impressive facilities, smallish class sizes, strong teachers, and competitive college lists. Both schools draw from both states and absolutely must have more to offer than the fine public schools.
Whereas Barstow offers innovation grounded in traditional values, Pembroke Hill provides a rigorous contemporary version of a progressive school true to the school's roots. I hate to use superlatives, but I have never seen kindergarten and first-grade classes as practical and engaging as those at Pembroke Hill. The classroom environments are remarkably resourced, to reach kids in every possible way. Moving up in grades, the curriculum is thematically integrated — a result of the collaborative faculty. Lower school students study Spanish every day. The arts are a mainstay through high school. The culture is caring, while promoting vital student virtues of independence and responsibility, from PK through high school graduation.
Many attributes that I saw at Pembroke Hill are found in other independent schools. One feature is less common: Pembroke Hill has minimized its tuition increases for many years, keeping the school affordable for middle-class families in this modest Midwestern city. According to Steve Bellis, Pembroke Hill now charges in the lowest quartile, on a cost-of-living adjusted basis, of all schools in the national INDEX group of similarly sized schools. Today, when many schools are finding enrollment harder to secure, Pembroke Hill has grown to capacity with nearly 1,200 students. That bodes well for a future of slow student growth and normal economic progress. Shut the front door, twice!