Savannah heads up the hill to the nearby public elementary school, where she spends the morning with fourth-graders during their literacy block. Tony and Alex also volunteer in public school classrooms, helping lead small-group mathematics instruction with kindergarteners, many of whom are new to town. Misa spends a part of her day in our Engineering Lab designing an interactive globe from which we can quickly learn information about the world, while Josh works in our BioScience Lab to improve dental implant solutions. Juniors Jacob, Andy, Cole, Ari, Alessandro, and Maya all head to the recording studio in our weCreate Center—a well-equipped studio for creativity, collaboration, and innovation—to write lyrics, compose, and record music, with the goal of recording albums. Alexandra, Peter, and Nancy are deeply invested in research projects exploring gender bias in schools, the formation of stars, and the challenges multinational corporations face. Dana works at an internship at a thriving local female-owned bakery, helping plan the business’s expansion to a nearby city.
How can these students find the time to design and implement these initiatives in addition to their academic, artistic, and athletic commitments? We spent six years designing, piloting, and evaluating a new program we call ScholarShift®: a combination of traditional classroom-based instruction, blended learning, an exploratory parallel curriculum, and self-designed learning experiences (see “What Is ScholarShift?”). Now, when students find something that sparks their interest or inspires them to look in a new direction, we are committed to letting them explore. Sometimes that means coaching and mentoring them. Sometimes it means getting out of their way.
What Is ScholarShift®?
Using the flexibility of our blended course model, students complete a parallel curriculum in addition to their academic courses. The parallel curriculum comprises a series of six ScholarShift® Modules. These mini-courses, facilitated by faculty, staff, and guest lecturers, cover a diverse set of engaging interdisciplinary topics and introduce students to new skills and concepts they don’t normally have the chance to learn from their core classes.
The ScholarShift® curriculum is designed to inspire our juniors to develop their own learning experience for their senior year. Seniors complete a Senior Initiative, a yearlong, self-designed educational experience, in addition to their academic courses. The modules juniors choose through the parallel curriculum should inspire a spark so that, by senior year, they will want to extend their learning through internships in the local community, creative and innovative endeavors in our weCreate Center, significant service learning opportunities, critical inquiry and research into issues of personal and academic interest, deeper exploration of a module experience, and/or other opportunities that allow them to explore their passions.
Our Blended Approach
Making these changes in our school means that the classroom routine for teachers and students is also anything but typical. Students need time and a flexible academic workweek to commit to these types of initiatives. At our school, juniors and seniors no longer attend classes in the traditional model. Instead of moving from class to class, five days a week all year, courses for our oldest students are in a blended model (see “Why Blended Classes?”). Two days a week look fairly traditional, with students and teachers in classrooms learning together. Three days a week, however, students have a choice to opt-in or opt-out of the traditional classroom experience.
In this model, teachers strive to build classes that integrate the best of the traditional classroom-based approach with a mix of online components, thoughtfully prepared activities and assessments that do not require everyone to be in the same place at the same time, and customized small-group or individual tutorials and lessons. This means when our teachers arrive on Monday morning, they are no longer delivering information; instead, they are coaching their students to be independent learners, curious citizens, and self-advocates.
Why Blended Classes?
At Shattuck-St. Mary’s:
Blended classes provide new opportunities for individualized/differentiated instruction for students, combining the best of classroom instruction with the power of online learning and technology.
- Teachers can use twice-weekly course meeting time for activities such as discussions, guided practice with concepts, and hands-on projects, and use online components for information delivery.
- Teachers can differentiate through one-on-one sessions, student-led study groups, and online components.
- Blended classes meet the needs of all kinds of students, given that students can adjust for their individual strengths and weaknesses in different disciplines. Students can adjust the pace and time commitment, depending on their comfort and competency. Students who need more time in an area can seek out their teachers for additional support; students who want enrichment can move quickly through course material and seek enrichment opportunities in disciplines of interest under the mentorship of their teachers or focus on other disciplines that are more difficult for them.
Blended learning is truly a college preparatory model.
- The leap from a fully structured 12th grade year to a first-year schedule in college is significant, and the traditional high school schedule does not provide a transition that gradually prepares students for this leap.
- In blended courses, students prepare for the college model of classes while still within the structure of a boarding school. Students are expected to engage during class and independently manage work during the rest of the week, with the ongoing support of their teachers.
- Students learn how best to manage their time on days that are less structured, but with the same daily access to faculty they have always had.
- Advisers are on active duty, overseeing progress and letting go over time.
- Students are ready for the new challenges of college through increased independence in 11th and 12th grade.
Blended classes open up the weekly high school schedule to allow students to explore and develop new areas of academic interest and collaborate with peers as part of their whole academic experience.
- Students have time to delve into established interests, explore new areas of interest, and to share passions, talents, and work with others.
- Students have time and increased opportunities to give back to the community.
- Students use work days for internships in the town of Faribault or other towns and cities; participate in extended community service commitments; focus on independent research projects, including scientific research; or work in the weCreate Center, developing innovative products, solving complex problems collaboratively, or exploring and developing their skills in a variety of multimedia studios.
Blended classes facilitate the development of 21st century skills, which our students will need to succeed in the world ahead.
- We do not know what the world will look like 10 years from now, when our students are beginning their careers. Our responsibility remains to facilitate their development into successful and happy adults, which means we need to adapt the academic experience to the preparation they need.
- Blended classes provide increased opportunities for collaborative problem-solving; creativity and innovation; and digital, media, and technical literacy.
- Blended classes enhance our long-established commitment to the development of critical thinking and critical reading skills, strong oral and written communication, and strong mathematics skills.
- The increased independence helps students develop the resilience and adaptability necessary to succeed in an ever-changing world, where new careers and jobs emerge faster than schools and colleges can adapt.
— Courtney Cavellier
Innovation like this, even change in general, can be scary, particularly in schools. Students and families tend to focus on the demands of the college process and collecting the right numbers and letters on their transcript; sometimes in this process, deep learning, self-reflection, and student initiative can get lost. Teachers tend to favor academic approaches they feel comfortable with even when they see the world changing around them; overhauling curriculum and developing new pedagogy can be overwhelming. Independent school administrators tend to want to maintain what seems to be working in their schools so admissions is not negatively impacted by change; this fear can hinder a school’s progress.
Yet a willingness to reflect, evaluate, and change our educational approach is crucial for schools. How else can we ensure that the education we provide is the education our students need today to prepare for the world they will enter as young adults?
Balancing Vision with Challenges
Seven years ago, we had a vision for a new kind of student experience that required us to look deeply at how we used the days, weeks, and months we had with them. We wanted our students to be able to engage in student-initiated learning. We wanted them to explore passions if they had them, and identify and develop new interests if they didn’t already have them. We wanted more opportunities for creativity, innovation, and collaboration in our school experience, but we did not want all the change to come by way of asking our teachers to change everything they were doing. We also wanted students to stretch themselves, and we believed this was critical for true “college prep.” We wanted them to practice being college students and working adults while they were still in our school, with all the support an independent school provides: engaged teachers, active advisors, guidance teams, dedicated coaches, and dorm parents.This vision grew into the basic sketch of our ScholarShift® program. But we had a problem that hindered our vision. The problem was time and the academic schedule. We had big ideas for our school, but not big blocks of time. Like many schools, we assembled a scheduling committee, tasked with finding meaningful blocks of times for students to do creative and innovative work. Like many schools, we looked at Saturday classes, block schedules, shortening classes, dropping a period from our school day, and many other ways of creating more flexibility in the schedule. We tried to chop up the week more to scrape together every minute we could to create time. We piloted half-day Fridays with structured programming and without structured programming. We obsessed about total minutes of classes, calling schools around the country to try to see how many minutes everyone else had.
In the end, none of these options gave us the flexibility we believed we needed. They didn’t get us to our vision. It just felt like we were cramming more in. We decided if we wanted to open up the academic week for our students, we needed a much more innovative solution.
Finding Flexibility
This shift in thinking led us to the realization that the weekly academic schedule as we knew it had to go. We couldn’t maintain the traditional “cells and bells” model if we wanted to augment our educational program with meaningful, engaging learning experiences outside the established curriculum. We did not want to undo everything, however. We wanted a model that maintained the best of the traditional academic approach and invited in the best that innovative models offered.So we started small. We looked to early-adopter teachers and forward-thinking students and families who wanted to participate in our first pilot of blended classes. For two years, we tested and refined our new class model. Then we looked for student pioneers to participate in a two-year pilot, supported by an Edward E. Ford grant, in which all academic classes were in the blended model so that they had flexibility three days a week to design yearlong initiatives that tap into their current passions and interests, develop skills in new areas, and encourage them to engage in the world around them.
Over time, we began to understand how impactful blended learning could be for our students in and of itself. In addition to granting us the flexibility we searched for, we saw our students better positioned to develop the 21st century skills necessary for success in the world. “At my old school,” says Sidney, a new junior at our school, “I depended on my teachers and my parents to keep me on track and motivated to do my work, but being in this kind of schedule has forced me to break my old habits of procrastination and dependent learning.” In addition to facilitating the development of this kind of independence and initiative in students, our teachers had increased flexibility to differentiate the educational experience for the variety of learners in their classes.
We also came to believe our blended approach better prepares our graduates to bridge the gap between high school and college. Ricky Wang, a 2015 graduate now at Vassar College, told us that taking blended classes made her more confident trying new ideas when something didn’t work and more comfortable taking advantage of the opportunities at her university. Now at Northwestern University, Iliana Alvarez volunteered at a local free health clinic in our town, served on the board of our local library, and developed a medical device to treat diabetic peripheral neuropathy during her time at our school. “I feel like I was able to develop myself as a person more than I would have been able to had I not been part of this curriculum,” she says. “I am lucky enough to say that I was able to explore things that make me happy, things that I chose for myself and were not assigned by teachers. I feel empowered, because, despite my young age, I have gained insight and experience in the real world and can proudly say I have made a difference in the community and contributed to the improvement of Faribault.”
Assessing Progress
Today, all of our juniors and seniors are engaging in blended classes and our ScholarShift® experience. Our juniors, the first class that will graduate with the full experience, are moving through our parallel curriculum of nearly 100 module choices. Students have explored and grappled with local politics, the definition of race, and human rights in the United States and abroad. They have learned about themselves through the study of personality assessments, the practice of yoga, personal reflection and writing, and the development of their own financial fitness. Others have made trips to the Twin Cities to capture the urban experience in video and audio and then learned to edit their work into a finished product.Although this undertaking seemed daunting at first, we have been met with support and affirmation every step of the way. Families see that the world is changing and look to us to respond with an educational approach that prepares their children for the world beyond high school. And these changes in the junior and senior years have encouraged changes in our earlier grades. Our ninth- and tenth-graders are all enrolled in a term-long or yearlong blended class to practice the model. Our middle school intentionally prioritizes service learning and team-building, and the academic program includes capstone-like projects that require research, presentation, and multimedia skills. All of our students use the same online tools in their classes and have opportunities to explore the weCreate Center so that they are well prepared for the expectations at the upper school. We continue to explore ways to bring more ScholarShift® elements to our younger students.
Students are ready for us to ask more of them. Our responsibility now is to reflect on our work as teachers and administrators, look at the complex changing world around us, and constantly ask the question: “How can we do better by these young people?” And then we must act, even when it challenges what we think we have been doing right for years. It’s time to transition our high school educational experience to one that prioritizes the development of initiative, independence, innovation, and intellectual curiosity in our students, and our schools must be willing to lead this shift.